We Happy Few of his father three weeks before "Contrast" shipped. During this time, he had reflected on his state of life, and came up with ideas for "We Happy Few" in his emotional distress, particularly the idea of a society fixated on drugs and masks. Provost presented this to his creative team, who saw the possibilities of expanding on this. Narrative director Alex Epstein considered the idea similar to "Prozac Nation", and where in current times, there is a prescription drug for every conceivable malady. The title of the game comes from the St Crispin's Day Speech from "Henry V": Narratively, the
We Happy Few of these supporters backed at levels to participate in the game's alpha-version testing alongside Compulsion's dedicated play-testing team of five, but Compulsion found this did not provide them enough feedback to know which way to take the narrative elements within the randomly generated world. Instead, Compulsion opted to open the game to an early access release in a playable state on various storefronts for Microsoft Windows and on the Xbox One Xbox Game Preview program starting on 26 July 2016 as to be able to gain much more feedback. Part of their choice to use early access was to provide