STRANGE SCAFFOLD

How to embrace the weird while keeping the culture and games focused on people

- RUTH CASSIDY

Between supernatural neo-noir shooter El Paso, Elsewhere, satirically self-explanatory point-and-click An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs, and sinister motel-set adventure game CLICKOLDING, the Strange Scaffold back catalogue is remarkably diverse.

And yet the studio remains prolific: despite many of its games being weird, idiosyncratic and potentially tough to market, Strange Scaffold nevertheless develops and releases multiple titles each year.

“It didn’t start with anything so grand as the idea of starting a studio or a label,” creative director Xalavier Nelson Jr recalls. “The traditional structure and narrative of what a studio can be, and who gets to build a studio, were still something that I fully believed were entirely out of my reach.”

The conventional studio system was “valid”, Nelson Jr says, in the sense that it could produce compelling, high-quality games, but it wasn’t something he felt able to replicate. The inspiration for an alternative mode of videogame production only came to him in 2019, when he was approached by the New York University Game Center.

“They have an event that they do every year called No Quarter,” Nelson Jr explains, “which is where they talk to some of the most interesting developers in the space and say, ‘We’re going to give you $5,000. Make whatever you want – it just has to be ready to present to the public by October’. That resulted in the very first version of An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs.”

Through No Quarter, Nelson Jr met designer Tom Vinita. “We went from him teaching me Unity, where we would exchange code for the game via Twitter DMs to, ‘You know what? We should probably just be working on the same project’,” Nelson Jr says. Over time, the pair pulled together more and more people, not only to build An Airport For Aliens, but also to make footholds for future projects.