New Year’s Day 2023 marked the tenth anniversary of Mike Bithell realising he could quit his day job and start developing games independently. Thomas Was Alone had launched the previous June, but it wasn’t until January 1, 2013 that it passed the sales milestone he’d decided would allow him to follow his dream. A decade on, Bithell Games is currently working with on its seventh game, Tron: Identity, a choice-driven visual-novel adventure due to launch from Disney later this year. It’s a project informed, in some way, by just about every game in the studio’s catalogue to date. “I’m an established sellout now,” Bithell laughs, “whereas with John Wick Hex it was a surprise to everyone.”
You’ve been doing this now for just over ten years. Did you have any grand plans when you were starting out?
I’d been working for six years in the industry as a designer for other people. So I was pretty pragmatic. The thing I remember doing was I basically [set myself] three goals. If it makes any money at all, then I’ll take my girlfriend for a nice dinner. If it makes a decent amount of money, I’ll buy an iPad, because back then that was the thing that I really wanted. And then if it makes, like, impossible-toimagine money, we’ll go for a holiday – to Disney World, ironically, of all places. Those were the tiers. But itIt wasn’t like an
