Jordan Thomas, director of BioShock 2, played Path of Exile for over 7,000 hours while working on co-op horror game The Blackout Club: 'I was essentially awake all the time'

Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like "How tidy is your desktop?" and "What game will you never uninstall?"

Jordan Thomas grew up during the shareware era of PC gaming, fed a steady diet of free game demos by his father. "This is embarrassing in a way, but the first one I remember connecting to enough to do drawings at school—and it's so immature—but it's old Commander Keen," he says. "It was a quick segue from that into Wolfenstein and Quake. So weirdly, Commander Keen was a gateway drug into darker games that would then become my focus for a very long time."

Indeed, Thomas' debut in the games industry was dark in the most literal sense, as he was hired by Ion Storm Austin to work on Thief: Deadly Shadows. …