LEAGUE OF GEEKS

How a cancelled project for Take-Two led the Armello dev to redouble its efforts

- ALEX SPENCER

There aren’t many studios that, more than a decade after their founding, have only one game to their name. At least, not many you could consider a success. But when League Of Geeks’ founders quit their jobs to chase a dream, a single project was all they really had in mind. “We never came together to build a studio – we came together to build a game,” director and co-founder Trent Kusters tells us. “And we always knew that, once the game shipped, then we would go, ‘All right, do we want to actually start a studio?’”

There was no guarantee, then, that they’d ever release a second game. And in the years since, there have been at least two moments when it truly looked like they might not. The most recent of those moments involves the cancellation of an “eight-figure” project with Take-Two’s Private Division, but the first came much earlier – around the time of the studio’s one (and, to date, only) game launch.

Kusters met fellow co-founders Blake Mizzi and Ty Carey while working at Australia’s Torus Games – “at one point the most prolific independent developer in the world,” Kusters says. If you’ve never heard of Torus, it’s because the studio specialises in white-labelled games made “cheaply and quickly on every platform at once,” Kusters says, sometimes “in a matter of weeks”. Working on the internal pitching team, the trio would pull together proposals, “often late at night”, with that same haste.