SMALL FRY

How OVERCOOKED’s tiny team took over our living rooms

- Jeremy Peel

Like all British fairy tales, the story of Overcooked begins at Cambridge Wizard School. Or at least that’s what Ghost Town Games programmer Oli DeVine calls it, with a knowing wink to the absurdity of the ancient UK education system. Officially known as Cambridge University, it taught him two things: first, that he didn’t want to be an academic. And second, that local co-op wasn’t dead.

“University can be quite an isolating experience,” DeVine says. “The thing that got me through it was having people round and playing videogames in my room, or going home and playing with my brothers.”

At the time, the games industry had largely turned its back on shared screen experiences, necessitating complex setups with multiple consoles and TVs connected via LAN. “That was such a pain in the butt,” DeVine remembers, “but you’d still do that, because the experience of being in the same space was so much better.”

DeVine stayed in Cambridge to work at Frontier, where he met his future creative partner, Phil Duncan. Today, Frontier is best known for its own evolving games, Elite Dangerous and Planet Coaster. But back then, it subsisted mainly on one-off projects that varied wildly in size.