STUDIO PROFILE
TEYON
How big ambitions led to small realities – and tie-ins with film’s most celebrated cyborgs
By Jon Bailes
When you’re young, reality needn’t interfere with your dreams. So it was for Mateusz Makowiec and Michał Tatka when they met at school in 1999 and began making games together, at the age of 15. Their first project of substance – working with another friend, Mariusz Sajak – was an RTS. “We thought we could compete with Age Of Empires, just the three of us,” Makowiec recalls. But reality soon bit. “After two years, we realised we had like five per cent of Age Of Empires,” Tatka says, “and it’s really not possible to compete with big studios.” It’s a realisation that, in many ways, has defined the story of Teyon ever since.
The studio was founded in Krakow in 2006 by Tatka (CEO), Makowiec (COO), Sajak (VP) and two other friends, after the first game they shipped together – the Bomberman-inspired Powrót Bombera – found modest success in Poland, shifting 60,000 copies. From there, the team decided that 3D was the way forward, and built their own engine, to support a new dream of creating Quake Arena-style online shooters, beginning with 2007’s Burn. “Technically it was amazing,” Tatka says. “The engine was actually quite complex.” As a game, though?
“It wasn’t bad,” Makowiec says, somewhat diplomatically. “It was what we were able to achieve back then. It showed us where we were.”
At the time, Poland’s development scene was embryonic, and would-be game makers had to learn the rules from scratch. “We didn’t have experience of working at another company, because it was next to impossible to work at a games company,” Makowiec recalls. “There was no Unity. Unreal was super-expensive. You had to create your own engine.” Teyon’s founders were all still very young, too, with no business backgrounds to speak of, and when it came to the manner of distribution, Tatka says, “We made all the mistakes we could.”