STAR POWER

How a Hollywood studio became the most exciting force in games

-  Alex Spencer

Two Edge 9s in the space a year is good going for any publisher. But with the very first two games it published? That might just be unprecedented. The one-two punch of Gorogoa and What Remains Of Edith Finch immediately established Annapurna Interactive as more than just the side project of a Hollywood studio, and led to it finishing runner-up for Publisher Of The Year in the 2017 Edge Awards, the very first year it was eligible. (It lost out to Nintendo – no cause for shame, in the year of Breath Of The Wild and Super Mario Odyssey.)

Looking back now, though, it’s clear that Annapurna was just getting started. In 2019, the publisher managed to one-up itself, landing a full hat-trick of 9s with Outer Wilds, Telling Lies and Sayonara Wild Hearts, which took the top three spots in our Game Of The Year list. And while it hasn’t managed anything quite so spectacular since, the publisher has kept its streak going, with a selection of (mostly) great games that just keeps growing.

That was underlined this summer when, a few weeks clear of all the E3 noise – a piece of timing that seems both canny and characteristically off-beat – Annapurna held its first showcase event. In the space of half an hour, it rattled through seven forthcoming titles, plus four developers with which Annapurna has partnered, before closing with a “wilfully cryptic” tease for an expansion to one of our favourite games of the past decade.

It’s a lineup to rival any in the big publisher broadcasts of the prior month, and indicative of where Annapurna stands today. With August’s