How two university students shook up the British game industry with a refreshing blend of ambition and sustainability

BY JEN SIMPKINS

Founded 2005

Employees 268

Key staff Dave Bailey (co-founder), Paul Croft (co-founder)

URL mediatonic.com

Selected softography Bejeweled, Amateur Surgeon, Hatoful Boyfriend, Murder By Numbers

Current projects Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout

As the story often goes, it started with two friends in the pub, and “some drinking was involved,” Paul Croft says. He and fellow Brunel University student Dave Bailey were studying for degrees in programming and computer graphics, and were trading project ideas. Croft had been making Flash games for fun since the tender age of 15, and popular browser game site Miniclip had recently opened its now-substantial coffers to him. “Well,” he laughs, “they gave me £600 for my first game, which I thought was more money than I’d ever get in the world.” Why not continue to tap the source of these unlimited riches, and officially start a business?

They figured they could align their efforts to build a company with their coursework and, after a bit of poking about, managed to rustle up a tiny office in a science park at the back of the university, “so that we would have a proper address,” Bailey says. “But basically, we ran the business from our student house, and I would just run out of lectures when the phone rang.”

Thanks to Croft’s contacts and the ongoing dot-com boom, this happened often. They were quickly working with some huge companies, who needed them to do the (then arcane) job of creating and installing things for people to do on their websites. “EA had a massive portal called Pogo,” Bailey recalls, “which had all these puzzle games, and things not a million miles away from Miniclip.” EA was using free demos that required a download to play, and then a payment to upgrade to the full version. “But they felt the barrier was quite high to go through all of that to buy a game. And so our idea was, ‘What if we take your games, and push them out onto the Internet, and then people could try them out without downloading anything? And then they’ll maybe come back to your website.’”