STUDIO PROFILE

How two developers built their own universe across 15 games and a movie

By Alex Spencer

Connected universes have been taking over the pop-cultural landscape for the past decade but, early teases of Remedy’s effort aside, the concept has yet to reach videogames. Part of the reason, no doubt, is that games are slow-moving behemoths even by cinematic standards, making it all but impossible to corral multiple projects. The solution, then, is simple: you just make 15 of the things, plus a short film and a graphic novel, in the space of six years. This is exactly what Maarten Looise and Robin Ras have done with Rusty Lake –a name that can variously mean the studio they founded together, the games it produces, and the setting they all share.

The decision to build their own universe was, at least in part, a pragmatic one. The pair come from a background making Flash games, which goes some way to explaining the pace of releases – Looise estimates that he’d released 50 games on portals such as Newgrounds and Kongregate before starting the studio. Meanwhile, Ras was learning to run portal sites of his own as a hobby, alongside studying for his law degree.

They met in the early 2010s, and began collaborating on news-based parody games, seizing on headlines as varied as Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks and Prince Harry’s naked sprint through a Las Vegas hotel. The resulting games were very simple, turned around in a matter of days to catch the limelight. “Those games went viral quite often,” Ras says. “They became a hit in the news, and it led a lot of visitors to our portal websites.” But interest would quickly tail off and after making 15 games in this style, “we got to a point where we wanted to create our own games,” Ras says. “Something that didn’t depend on the temporary hype.”