STUDIO PROFILE
WHITE PAPER GAMES
Ten years of ambition, mistakes, and learning from them
BY ALEX SPENCER
White Paper Games’ first release, Ether One, was all about the unreliability of memory. So there is perhaps irony in asking the team to take us back over a decade, when the studio’s original members were studying at Preston’s University Of Central Lancashire. As Pete Bottomley and James Burton reminisce, one event in particular stands out from the hazy mists of memory: a talk given by The Chinese Room’s Dan Pinchbeck.
Bottomley acknowledges the influence of Dear Esther, The Chinese Room’s own debut, on Ether One. After all, both are short firstperson narrative games – ‘walking sims’, to use the pejorative – set in the kind of low-key British location then rarely seen in games, and both explore topics of grief and memory. This isn’t the event’s only significance, though: it was also the first time Bottomley and Burton met. So, can they remember what words they exchanged? “‘Oh, here’s your ticket,’” Bottomley recalls. “I didn’t see him for the rest of the day, and didn’t talk to him again for maybe a couple of years.”
Not quite the equivalent of that ’76 Sex Pistols Manchester gig, then – but important groundwork was laid that day. Bottomley cites the example set by Pinchbeck as an influence on the decision, when he and fellow co-founder Benjamin Hill completed their game design Masters in 2011, not to pursue opportunities in existing studios but to “do our own thing”. They began work on their first game after graduation and, by the time White Paper Games was established in 2012, had assembled a team of five, all connected through their working and living situations at UCLan. (Bottomley and Burton now teach at the university one day a week.)
“In hindsight, it probably sounds like a scary move,” Bottomley says of the studio’s founding. The students had done stints at studios, but “none of us had ever shipped a commercial game”.