He is best known for experimental indie games, notably Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, both of which won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize alongside other awards.

His father was a handyman, which gave Pope access to a well-stocked array of parts and tools that led to an interest in mechanical engineering.

He found that the reality of what constituted the field was less desirable than what he wanted, but did take strong interest in the computer programming side of his coursework.

[2] Pope collaborated with other video game modders, including working on an officially-sanctioned Quake mod by Sony Pictures to promote Anaconda.

[3] Pope and another set of modders decided to form their own studio, Ratloop, releasing the total Quake conversion mod Malice in 1997.

It was successful enough to be picked up by Activision for retail distribution, and gave Ratloop sufficient funds to try a number of experimental games, something which had interested Pope.

[3] However, none of these were published, and facing competition from other studios, particularly from Eastern Europe, that could make games at substantially lower prices, Ratloop became dormant.

[2] While at Realtime, he was part of the team that developed the game Re-mission, a 2006 shooter whose goal was to encourage children with cancer to take their chemotherapy medication.

[2] On its release in 2018, it received similar high praise as Papers, Please, and has been nominated for and won several awards from the Game Developers Choice, IGF, Peabody, and D.I.C.E.

They met while both working at Realtime and continued their relationship while Pope was at Naughty Dog and Ishizaka was at nearby 2K Games.