FURY'S ROAD

When Raw Fury was founded in Stockholm a decade ago, it was as an “un-publisher”.

- BY JULIAN BENSON

It would “treat people like people”, would be “for happiness over profit”, and would respect videogames as “art”, granting them the same status as other, more established media. This particular approach, it said, would tip the balance more in favour of developers, allowing them to “find success, be happy, and stay independent”. It has broken some old rules along the way – not least when it revealed the specifics of its publishing deals publicly, for anyone to scrutinise – while releasing a succession of hits including the Kingdom series, Sable, Norco, Cassette Beasts and, most recently, the sublime Blue Prince. As the company arrives at its tenth anniversary, we meet with its leaders to ask if Raw Fury has delivered on its big promises.

On April 21, 2015, Jónas Antonsson and two fellow Paradox alums – Gordon Van Dyke and David Martinez – revealed Raw Fury. In the announcement, they called it “a new breed of publisher for boutique and indie games”. More than that, they said they were in the business of “un-publishing – in the sense of trying to dismantle how publishing traditionally works, in favour of actually being there for the developers”.

In the decade since, they’ve published an eclectic portfolio of games, jumping between genres and styles. Their first game, Kingdom, was a sidescrolling minimalist RTS in which you play as a monarch expanding their settlement and fighting off nightly raids by squat ghouls in masks. Their second title was ’90s-style point-and-click mystery Kathy Rain, filled with clever puzzles and a twist-laden plot. Also finding a home in the catalogue is open-world sci-fi explorer Sable, citybuilding toybox Townscaper, the Pokémon-like Cassette Beasts, and an adventure game set in the surreal world of Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories. But a varied portfolio does not a dismantling of traditional videogame publishing make.