STUDIO PROFILE
WADJET EYE GAMES
How Dave Gilbert found his niche, and turned a passion for point-and-click into a career
By Lewis Packwood
Over the past decade and a half, Wadjet Eye has carved out a cosy niche as a purveyor of point-andclick adventures, including the fivegame Blackwell series and the supernaturalthemed Unavowed. It’s a relatively tiny market, but one filled with dedicated fans, and founder Dave Gilbert has kept the company going by deliberately keeping it small. Indeed, for much of the studio’s early history, he was the sole full-time employee.
“For a couple of years, I had a full-time designer on staff, and that was a little stressful,” he explains. “Not because of him – he’s great – but having to earn enough to pay another fulltime salary to someone was very stressful. The more people I pay, the more I have to make sure the games earn. And I think that has also been a major key to how we’ve lasted so long: our overhead is very low. We keep our expenses very small.” That includes working from his home in New York, or in cafés, an arrangement that Gilbert says he prefers: “Sometimes, once in a while, I rent an office. And then, three months later, I’m sick of it.”
That itinerant approach to work is something that goes back to Gilbert’s origins as a game maker. Before founding Wadjet Eye, he studied broadcasting at university in the late 1990s, followed by a short stint working at CNN – an experience he hated. “I just wasn’t really cut out for that kind of work environment where everything was just so busy all the time. So I left that before I could get burnt out, and just started doing office gigs while trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.” For three years in the early 2000s he worked a white-collar job in New York City’s Garment District, all the while growing increasingly dissatisfied. “There was no real future in what I was doing,” he says. “I had a friend who had taught English in Korea. And I thought, well, maybe I could do that for a year.” But on his return in 2006, he still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. His apartment was still being rented out, so he moved back in with his parents.