Some game developers have built their companies from a breadth of game titles, others specialise in one genre to build their expertise in a very specific area. Then there are those who pick a niche, scurry away to a corner of the industry somewhere and build a franchise around doing that one thing but doing it very well. Firefly Studios is such a developer, which has found that its passion for a very specific type of game – namely one about castles – has enabled it to not only survive some of the hardest changes in the industry, but to grow as a developer.
itself is a name that means a lot to a certain type of gamer. If you were a strategy game fan in the Noughties, then in all likelihood you were playing on the PC and have probably given a whirl. “This had been about computer game number 30 for me,” says Simon Bradbury, one of the three founders of Firefly alongside Eric Oullette and David Lester. “I’d been making little tiddly ones since the mid-Eighties, like soccer managers and things like that when essentially you’d make them all in two months.” But the main experience around which Firefly Studios formed was that of the economic strategy games which Simon had been the main programmer on. “We definitely felt confident because we’d come off the back of a string of successful strategy titles and then went on to do the whole brand carried on. For us, we knew that was a winning formula, the question was how do we turn that into a company.”
