Virtual

WHEN EVERYONE HAS ACCESS TO EVERYTHING, WHERE DO WE FIT IN?

While Facebook has been making multi-billion dollar deals in the VR space and Nintendo and Niantic have showcased the compulsive power of AR (at least over the few weeks Pokémon Go was all the rage) there’s been a quiet revolution in the gaming world. With the technology needed to create games, apps and experiences becoming ever more widely available, indie developers have deepened the artistry of the medium — and managed to make a splash while doing so.

From immersive narrative experiences such as Her Story to no-win thought experiments like That Dragon, Cancer, indie developers have been finding ways to push the boundaries of video games as we’ve come to know them. Still, others are returning to the playful co-op roots that made us all rally around consoles in the first place. Overcooked, from Ghost Town Games falls firmly into the latter category.

The cooperative cooking game set the world ablaze when it bowed deep in the summer of 2016 and has since won such a following that the announcement of Overcooked 2 is expected to be a part of Nintendo’s E3 presentation next week.

Here comes this part where I explain why you should care. Ghost Town Games built and launched Overcooked as a two-person team. Two people with vision and dedication competed against industry giants and won huge engagement. Why? Because they took skill and tenacity and made something incredible.

Technology and tools have democratized the ability to do amazing work. While one side of the coin says that all of this access means more competition for makers such as ourselves, we’d be wise to consider this as nothing more or less than the opportunity of a lifetime. Once upon a time custom video, web apps and interactive elements may have been the wheelhouse of massive agencies. No more. Now, it’s all as open to us as the next guy, and our only true limits are our creativity and our willingness to try (even when we might fail).

I can’t say that the future of content at CSG lies unequivocally in our embrace of these emerging technologies — we may find that our wheelhouse exists elsewhere — but it is clear that all this change is nothing if not an opportunity to do more.