Supermassive Games

The UK studio on a mission to live up to its name.

- Nathan Brown

W’ve seen fuller trophy cabinets than this. They’ve been more prominently displayed than this one, too, which sits at the back of the main development floor at Supermassive’s Guildford HQ. There’s no shame in it: the studio has been in business for only eight years, during which time it has worked largely in niches. Yet standing alone, gleaming on the middle shelf, is a BAFTA, and a coveted one at that: the 2015 award for Best Original Property, awarded to Supermassive’s breakout hit, the teen slasher Until Dawn.

“It’s such a difficult thing to do,” managing director Pete Samuels tells us. “It always has been, in our industry, to create something from scratch. It’s opened some doors for us, for sure.” After eight years in which it has worked so closely with Sony that it has often felt like a first party studio, Supermassive is striking out alone, working on multiple platforms and with other publishers. It’s betting heavily on VR, working on a range of new hardware with unfamiliar tech, changing its day-to-day operations in order to accommodate its new way of working. There might not be much in that trophy cabinet, but what’s inside matters a tremendous amount, and has transformed the studio that won it.