STUDIO PROFILE

FAILBETTER GAMES

The industry’s finest sustainable storyteller shifts towards ‘fireside menace’

By Jeremy Peel

When he was seven years old, Failbetter CEO Adam Myers had only one ambition: to become a self-sufficient farmer. He grew vegetables and collected books about how to preserve fruits through the winter. “In a fit of extreme short-sightedness, I planted six courgette plants,” he recalls. “I didn’t realise that each of them would produce three or four courgettes a day and that I might be called upon by my parents to help eat them.” Although he won a local vegetable-growing competition, with the home freezer now half full of the cylindrical green gourds, Myers decided he actually detested courgettes. The farming dream was dead and has yet to return. “I quite like making videogames,” he says of his current passions.

And so, while Failbetter’s next game, a rural life sim called Mandrake, draws on various experiences of living in the British countryside, the studio also harvests inspirations – and game development talent – from a wider array of backgrounds. Since we previously profiled Failbetter, in E329, the team has gone entirely remote, having closed down its London offices during the pandemic, with employees scattered across a variety of both rural and urban locations. “We sent everybody home,” Myers says. “And then, maybe a couple of months later, we polled the team: ‘Do you actually want to come back to the office?’ There was a consensus that people weren’t keen on it any more.” The concept of remote work was not new to Failbetter, whose art director Paul Arendt and narrative director Chris Gardiner already lived outside of the UK capital. “For years and years beforehand they would just come in occasionally,” Myers says, “so all of our processes were set up to cope with people not being in the office all the time.” We meet in the Leicestershire village that Gardiner has called home for decades; he leads us on a whistle-stop tour of spots of obscure historical intrigue, including a bridge built in the 17th century after a rector fell from his horse while trying to ford the river. He points out the stream where locals release flocks of yellow rubber ducks for the Boxing Day derby. Farther down the path lies an ancient, spired church, home to gargoyles, homemade jams, nesting falcons and a number of imposing tombs where effigies of dukes have lain on marble pillows for centuries. One grave is ornamented with the sculptures of two tiny children carrying skulls – young heirs whose deaths led to a rash of witchcraft-related hangings in the area.