FICTIORAMA STUDIOS

How a team with true family values got a taste for dark futures, voyeurism and conspiracy theories

- ALEX SPENCER

So, how did you meet?’ It’s one of the most common questions when interviewing any creative partnership. In the case of Fictiorama’s three founders, though, there’s not really much mystery to it. Luis Oliván met Alberto Oliván when the latter was born; Mario Oliván completed the trio a few years later. They are, in case this is not completely obvious, brothers. “When we were kids and teenagers, we loved to play text adventure games together, and then point-and-click games,” Luis says. In those early days, at home in Madrid, they dabbled with DIY software 3D Construction Kit and in making simple animated shorts in EA’s Cartooners, but nothing serious came of it, and eventually life got in the way, as it does.

“We stopped playing together as we grew older,” Luis says. “But the seed was there.” Well buried, perhaps, given that it would take more than two decades to sprout, but it remained at the back of the brothers’ minds. Even as they pursued disparate careers – Luis in TV production, Mario as a programmer, Alberto in academia studying art and narrative – they kept finding themselves drawn to collaborations. In 2010, Luis and Mario worked together on TCoder, an app for journalists that could sync written notes with timecodes on an audio recording, while Mario and Alberto have been playing in alt-rock band Kovalski since 2007. “We started making music long before we started making videogames,” Alberto says. “In fact, that we