How a Hollywood studio became the most exciting force in games

By Alex Spencer

Neon White’s levels are incredibly short, between ten seconds and a minute long, encouraging players to revisit them repeatedly, whittling down their completion time as they work out the perfect path

Storyteller’s puzzles, if they can be described as such, can be solved in multiple ways. As long as your chosen combination of elements fits the provided title, the game will give it the green light.

wo Edge 9s in the space a year is good going for any publisher. But with the very first two games it published? That might just be unprecedented. The one-two punch of Gorogoa and What Remains Of Edith Finch immediately established Annapurna Interactive as more than just the side project of a Hollywood studio, and led to it finishing runner-up for Publisher Of The Year in the 2017 Edge Awards, the very first year it was eligible. (It lost out to Nintendo – no cause for shame, in the year of Breath Of The Wild and Super Mario Odyssey.)

Looking back now, though, it’s clear that Annapurna was just getting started. In 2019, the publisher managed to one-up itself, landing a full hat-trick of 9s with Outer Wilds, Telling Lies and Sayonara Wild Hearts, which took the top three spots in our Game Of The Year list. And while it hasn’t managed anything quite so spectacular since, the publisher has kept its streak going, with a selection of (mostly) great games that just keeps growing.

That was underlined this summer when, a few weeks clear of all the E3 noise –a piece of timing that seems both canny and characteristically off-beat – Annapurna held its first showcase event. In the space of half an hour, it rattled through seven forthcoming titles, plus four developers with which Annapurna has partnered, before closing with a “wilfully cryptic” tease for an expansion to one of our favourite games of the past decade.

It’s a lineup to rival any in the big publisher broadcasts of the prior month, and indicative of where Annapurna stands today. With August’s Twelve Minutes (p112), the publisher has released its 16th game in less than five years, with another ten titles currently slated for release. That’s without counting the assorted ports and rereleases it has handled (a list that includes yet more of our favourites) or its unrevealed collaborations with these newly announced partners.

“None of us expected things to move as quickly as they did, but we also haven’t changed our approach,” says Annapurna Interactive president Nathan Gary. “We have grown naturally and in a way that works for us.” Which is not to say that growth has been slow. The publisher’s headcount has tripled since it was founded, to 15 people, and last year it opened an in-house development studio to make games of its own.

That expansion has not only increased the number of games in Annapurna’s portfolio, but widened the scope of what they cover. A couple of years ago we might have been able to pin down what to expect from an Annapurna game: arty, story-led, the kind of thing you’d share with friends who aren’t necessarily into playing games – the equivalent, perhaps, of the prestige pictures put out by its parent company. The showcase highlights that this is no longer the case.