ENDNIGHT GAMES

How The Forest gave a tiny studio an outsized success

- SAB ASTLEY

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.