STUDIO PROFILE : MEDIATONIC

How two university students shook up the British game industry with a refreshing blend of ambition and sustainability

- JEN SIMPKINS

As the story often goes, it started with two friends in the pub, and “some drinking was involved,” Paul Croft says. He and fellow Brunel University student Dave Bailey were studying for degrees in programming and computer graphics and were trading project ideas. Croft had been making Flash games for fun since the tender age of 15, and popular browser game site Miniclip had recently opened its now-substantial coffers to him. “Well,” he laughs, “they gave me £600 for my first game, which I thought was more money than I’d ever get in the world.” Why not continue to tap the source of these unlimited riches, and officially start a business?

They figured they could align their efforts to build a company with their coursework and, after a bit of poking about, managed to rustle up a tiny office in a science park at the back of the university, “so that we would have a proper address,” Bailey says. “But basically, we ran the business from our student house, and I would just run out of lectures when the phone rang.”