STUDIO PROFILE
UPPERCUT GAMES
From XCOM to Stadia: the ongoing battle to break free – and break even
By Alex Spencer
When Andrew James, Ryan Lancaster and Ed Orman walked away from their jobs at 2K Australia, they had spent the previous seven years making the same game. Forming Uppercut Games in 2011, with just eight months’ worth of money to fund their debut, they were determined to go the opposite way. And they did: by the time that former project eventually released in 2013, as The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, Uppercut already had three releases under its belt and was approaching its first major pivot. A somewhat breakneck change of pace, perhaps, but it’s not hard to see why this might have appealed.
“We talk about XCOM like it’s our PTSD,” Orman says, his manner suggesting he’s only half joking. By the time the trio left 2K, the project had already existed as “five distinguishably different games”. Orman rattles through them all from memory: “XCOM was Brothers In Arms. Then it was Call Of Duty-ish. Then asymmetric multiplayer – that was the best version. Then it was narrative-heavy, rebellionfocused, post-invasion setting. And then the beginnings of what The Bureau became: that 1950s, FBI, almost noir thing.” These games were all developed to various degrees of completion. “And then we chucked ’em.”
“That was gruelling,” Orman says. “When you make games, you want people to play them. Love it or hate it, you want to get the response.” During this period, the three spent “an awful lot of tea breaks” idly throwing around ideas for what they might make if they ever broke out on their own. The growing world of mobile games came up often, Lancaster says, but “it would have [required] a complete relearning process”. Until, that is, the arrival of Infinity Blade in late 2010.