YACHT CLUB GAMES

With Shovel Knight finally finished, its maker turns its hand to publishing, and more

- Alex Wiltshire

Shovel Knight wasn’t meant to take seven years to complete. But then again, Yacht Club Games has never worked to much of a plan. This Los Angeles-based indie developer has instead bobbed along in the rushing flow of its first game’s success, taking opportunities where it’s found them, seeing its characters featured as Amiibos and in Smash Bros, and becoming a publisher and a franchise holder. “I feel we’re like the people trading a paper clip right up to a car and then the house,” says co-founder Sean Valasco.

After all, Yacht Club built all this on a game that evokes the simplicity of the golden age of NES platformers. Shovel Knight was meant to be finished in September 2013, six months after the end of its Kickstarter campaign. But even before it was actually playable, and before most of the game had even been conceived and designed, Shovel Knight had taken on a life of its own.

Yacht Club Games emerged from WayForward, the Los Angeles-based developer famous for the Shantae series and other snappy 2D action games. There, Valasco, programmer and designer David D’Angelo and three other developers had become friends as they worked on licensed titles like BloodRayne: Betrayal and Double Dragon Neon. But as a work-for-hire and publisher-beholden company, WayForward had a tendency to break up its development teams, shifting members between projects as they waxed and waned, and as it signed new deals with partners. “We wanted to stay together,” says D’Angelo. “We realised that we clicked and if we could make something else, it’d be way better.”