STUDIO PROFILE
STUDIO FIZBIN
From card tricks to juice shops: telling stories with one of Germany’s premier indies
By Jon Bailes
Fizbin loves telling stories. The studio’s name itself is inspired by one, about a card trick called the ‘Fizbin drop’ – so difficult, legend has it, that magicians might break their hands performing it. Since it set up in 2011, the German studio has spun plenty of its own yarns, with five commercial releases, including three this year (Minute Of Islands, Say No! More and Lost At Sea), that offer a diverse mix of character studies and satire. It’s a range that reflects the company’s commitments beyond game development – and the backgrounds of its three founders.
The first story they told together, though, was quite traditional: The Inner World, a point-andclick adventure born when the trio met as students at an inter-university workshop. Game director Sebastian Hollstein and Mareike Ottrand (a fellow co-founder who remains a company shareholder, but now works as a professor of Illustration and Games in Hamburg) were both studying at Ludwigsburg Film Academy. The workshop introduced them to coder Alexander Pieper from the University Of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten, who is now the studio’s technical director. “The idea was to bring together people studying interactive media with people studying computer science,” he says. It worked.
Combining their skills in art, game design and programming, the trio built a prototype for The Inner World during their studies and began to collaborate professionally on freelance projects.“Actually,” Hollstein tells us, “we founded the company the same day we had our final exam.” They established Fizbin right there in Ludwigsburg, and immediately focused on creating a sustainable business.
“We wanted to make a living out of it,” Hollstein says, “so it wasn’t just like ‘OK, let’s make an indie game.’” Without initial capital to finance The Inner World, they continued doing contract work until they secured 100,000 of state funding – then quickly realised that wouldn’t stretch far. “When we planned the game during our studies, we said it would have 50 screens,” Hollstein says. “Then we calculated what we can do with that funding if we pay ourselves and other people and realised we had to reduce it by half.”