Vuélvete ilimitado con Magzter GOLD

Vuélvete ilimitado con Magzter GOLD

Obtenga acceso ilimitado a más de 9000 revistas, periódicos e historias Premium por solo

$149.99
 
$74.99/Año

Intentar ORO - Gratis

ENDNIGHT GAMES

Edge UK

|

August 2023

How The Forest gave a tiny studio an outsized success

- SAB ASTLEY

ENDNIGHT GAMES

The most successful studio no one’s heard of? That’s certainly how it feels at Endnight Games, project director Rod Green and senior programmer Friso Kristiansen joke, as they talk about the unusual spot in the industry their studio occupies. Founded by former VFX artists, Endnight made its debut in 2014 with survival horror The Forest, which went on to sell over five million copies. Its recently released sequel, Sons Of The Forest, sold two million in just 24 hours.

It might surprise you, then, to discover that the studio is made up of just 17 people – and when it made The Forest, on a budget of just $125,000, it was even fewer. And Kristiansen doesn’t expect to see it grow much further following the release of Sons. “The problem is that more people ends up meaning more overhead and slowing down and more meetings and all that,” he says. “Because we don’t have managers, we don’t have producers. It really is just us sitting in the office talking to each other and doing our morning calls and drawing stuff up on a whiteboard.”

For Green, whose CV includes stints at Atari, BioWare and Intel, this flat team structure and intimate size was part of what tempted him to join Endnight in the first place: “Game development for me is always about solving problems and all that kind of stuff. At Endnight, we like to try new things and just see how it goes – and big studios can just get so stifled, creativity-wise,” he explains.

Kristiansen was working at Relic Entertainment, as a senior programmer on

Edge UK

Esta historia es de la edición August 2023 de Edge UK.

Suscríbete a Magzter GOLD para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9000 revistas y periódicos.

¿Ya eres suscriptor?

MÁS HISTORIAS DE Edge UK

Edge UK

Titanfall 2

The rise and Titanic fall of the live-service game that wasn't

time to read

6 mins

September 2025

Edge UK

Edge UK

Rematch

Rocket League without the wheels — what will they think of next?

time to read

4 mins

September 2025

Edge UK

Splitgate 2

The edges have been softened, and it threatens to fade into the omnipresent haze of live-service shooters

time to read

4 mins

September 2025

Edge UK

Edge UK

STALKER 2: HEART OF CHORNOBYL

How GSC defied closure, the pandemic and an invasion to realise its most ambitious project

time to read

8 mins

September 2025

Edge UK

Edge UK

DIGITAL ECLIPSE

The California company with an expert eye for repackaging game history

time to read

7 mins

September 2025

Edge UK

Edge UK

Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour

Like us, we imagine that your first goal on setting up a new console is not to sit and read about its features but to play with them. And yet the first exhibit we land on in Welcome Tour is a series of information boards explaining the ins and outs of Switch 2’s new mouse control, followed by a quiz in which we regurgitate the information just fed to us.

time to read

2 mins

September 2025

Edge UK

Mario Kart World

Has the Mushroom Kingdom ever made sense as a coherent world? Certainly that's never been the priority of Nintendo's designers over the previous decades, laying its foundations over various series, genres and generations. So it's a joyous surprise to drive from one end of World's incarnation and discover how natural it all feels to have this place, these places, presented as a single landmass.

time to read

6 mins

September 2025

Edge UK

Edge UK

Hitman: World Of Assassination

When your job is bumping off terrible people with too much money and power, you'll never be short of work.

time to read

2 mins

September 2025

Edge UK

The Alters

Sometimes your life changes in a moment, and as much as you want to pause time and retrace your steps, the world moves on into the following hours and days, and takes you with it. This is the world builder Jan Dolski finds himself in when he is the only survivor of a crash on a mission to find the world-changing element rapidium. It's his job now to operate the mobile base and return to Earth — and hopefully finish the mission, too. There is no time to lose: come sunrise, the intense radiation will mean game over.

time to read

4 mins

September 2025

Edge UK

Edge UK

Date Everything!

Perhaps this is what Marx meant when he talked about the commodity fetish. Date Everything is a game in which you more or less do as the title says. A mysterious benefactor grants you glasses that transform every object in your house, from the microwave to the smoke alarm, into a sort of human being. Then you get to know them and influence them to like, love or hate you. There is an overarching plot, detailing the motives of your benefactor, but you'll spend most of your time talking to objects (and solving a few puzzles in the explorable house).

time to read

1 mins

September 2025