STUDIO PROFILE
THE GAME KITCHEN
How a small group of friends brought beautiful nightmares to life with their blood, sweat and tears
By Niall O’Donoghue
Back in March, an unusual unboxing video was uploaded to YouTube. It showed developers from The Game Kitchen rooting through mysterious packages that had arrived at their various homes. Inside, they discovered framed plaques congratulating them on Blasphemous, the Seville-based studio’s second game, selling its millionth copy. With some emotional reactions, the video is a touching celebration of an impressive milestone – but the journey to that million was anything but easy.
CEO and producer Mauricio García started programming aged six. He remembers using a microcomputer his parents bought him. After school, García joined a consultancy company as a developer, where he met Enrique Cabeza. They both hated it. “I did a lot of website development, application development… basically a lot of boring shit,” García laughs. The pair really wanted to make videogames, but it was hard to picture game development as a realistic job in southern Spain at the time. However, García started making games under the banner Nivel21 Entertainment in 2005 alongside Cabeza and a small, fluctuating group of developers. “It was very, very hardcore programming back then, so we advanced very slowly, little by little,” García says. “Even though we had a lot of cancelled projects and failures, we just kept doing it.”
Game designer Enrique Colinet was involved back in the group’s demoscene days. However, he was kicked out after replicating a football game, which Nivel21 was creating using XNA, in Valve’s Source engine; suffice it to say, their relationship didn’t end well. However, when Colinet joined Madrid’s Pyro Studios, the now-defunct studio known for the Commandos series, he saw an opportunity to make it up to García and recommended him for an interview. García joined and spent a year and a half working on Cops, an unreleased triple-A title for PS3. “I was suddenly in a working studio, learning a lot from a lot of very experienced programmers,” he remembers. “I was able to ramp up my game massively.”