STUDIO PROFILE
TARSIER STUDIOS
How the Little Nightmares developer learned to make its strange dreams a reality
By Jon Bailes
The story of Tarsier’s beginnings could so easily have ended up a cautionary tale, a warning about learning to walk before you can run. Armed with an inspired concept, a group of nine students aimed high, without truly understanding the industry they were stepping into, or how to deliver on their promise. But while that first project never came to fruition, it would lead to a relationship that allowed the Swedish studio to make its name in secondparty development, until eventually it was ready to return to ideas of its own. Now, with a string of eclectic releases under its belt, Tarsier has no cause to curse that stumbling start.
One of the founding group of nine was Andreas Johnsson, who remains the company’s CEO. He began his career as a coder during the late-’90s web boom, but his head was turned by new university courses popping up around Sweden that focused on digital art and games. “I was tired of just doing webpages for banks and football teams,” he tells us. “So I jumped off that and started studying game development in Karlshamn.” It was here that he and the rest of the crew met, and their break came with a game design contest where they got to pitch an idea to a panel of industry veterans. They won with platform-puzzle game Tio (Swedish for ‘ten’), and were awarded the prize of an incubator programme that provided resources to take the concept forward – albeit not financial ones. “There was no budget,” Johnsson recalls. “The only thing we got was office space.”
It did help them create a prototype, though, with which they managed to grab the attention of various publishers before scraping together funds for a trip to E3 in 2005. “In the hotel, we stayed like four or more people to a room, just to keep the cost down,” Johnsson says. By now, Tio had become City Of Metronome, and the Tarsier founders were fully booked with meetings for the duration of their trip – even if, Johnsson admits, they had little clue what they were doing. “I remember this one Swedish guy,” he says, “he leaned in and talked to me after the pitch and said, ‘OK, if you really want to make this happen, double the budget’. The budget, I think, was three million euros. After that meeting, we pitched it at six million.”