STUDIO PROFILE

How to navigate huge change, from TV adaptations to angering a superpower

By Alexander Chatziioannou

Change, whether invited or incurred, has been the defining theme of Red Candle Games’ first decade of existence. From an uncertain start, the Taipei-based studio became a household name within its home country, apparently solid ground that was ripped from beneath it by the ire of a neighbouring superpower. Then, having made its name as a developer of narrative horror, it returned to the spotlight with a hardcore Metroidvania action game. It’s a seemingly disproportionate number of seismic shifts for a modest indie developer that has been in existence for a relatively short amount of time.

Then again, the studio itself was founded amid change – for the Taiwanese game industry, and for Red Candle’s six co-founders, all of whom had to make life-upending decisions. Many of them left jobs at a bigger studio to form their own, while Vincent Yang quit a stable job in banking. “We were not some fresh graduates that hadn’t stepped into the real world,” Yang says. “We’d been working for three or four years already – I joined the team when I was 30. Some of us were married, some of us had kids, so it really was a huge gamble, basically, for everyone. But then, not to say that we were sitting on a goldmine, but it felt like: if we don’t do it now, are we going to regret it a few years down the road?”

That opportunity had started with Coffee Yao, who had been working on a prototype of the game that would become Detention (“which looked nothing like the end result,” according to Yang). Primarily a visual artist, Yao would need collaborators to see the project through on any reasonable timescale. He showcased it at a local meet for indie developers (“Back then it was really small, a sort of help group,” Yang says) where it caught the eye of brothers Henry and Light Wang, who saw the potential in combining Taiwanese culture and history with horror elements.