Conversing with Guildford’s Mojiworks on the meteoric rise of chat games

Mojiworks’ Ready Chef Go could well be the biggest game you’ve never heard of. The cooperative cooking game - think Overcooked with Bitmoji chefs and you’re not a million miles away - launched in December last year, and by the end of its first month players had served over half a billion in-game orders. That number is now much higher, and still climbing. For the Guildford-based studio, however, it’s no great surprise. You may not know the name, but you’ll know the platforms it works with: iMessage, Facebook Instant Games and, in the case of Ready Chef Go, Snapchat.

Established by former Lionhead alumni Matthew Wiggins and Alan Harding in late 2016, Mojiworks has been at the vanguard of chat games since its inception. The pair had moved into mobile games after leaving the Fable creator, and sensed a prime opportunity to attract new players on messaging platforms. “They founded the company with the philosophy of not just treating those platforms like a new distribution opportunity for existing mobile games, but for really trying to put social play at the core of those game ideas,” senior designer Kate Killick tells us. “That’s been the guiding philosophy that’s taken us through the various platforms we’ve worked on.”