Studio Profile
After student success and a viral hit, this developer-turnedpublisher is building for the future
After student success and a viral hit, Coffee Stain Studios is building for the future
Luck, the old saying goes, is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. So while Coffee Stain Studios’ breakthrough came early, it would be wrong to think of it as simply good fortune. Formed by nine students from Skövde – a small town whose university’s comparatively large game development programme attracts students from all across Sweden – the studio’s first game was conceived while they were all in their second year, and launched less than six months after the company was founded. “Basically, half of us graduated and half didn’t,” CEO Anton Westbergh laughs.
It’s easy to understand why they were so ready to drop out. Sanctum, a firstperson shooter/tower defence hybrid, started life as a mod for Unreal Tournament. The group entered it into Epic’s Make Something Unreal contest, and though it didn’t win anything, the praise they received gave them the confidence to continue working on it. After preparation came opportunity: impressed by the students’ evident talent, Epic contacted the young team and asked if they would like to make Sanctum into a demo for the Unreal Development Kit. Naturally, they were floored. “We got super-excited,” co-founder and studio manager Johannes Aspeby says. “I mean, we were students in game school being contacted by Epic. So we immediately jumped on board.” A mod became a demo, and by April 2011, Sanctum had made its debut on Steam.
Having seized its opportunity, the studio was keen to capitalise on Sanctum’s success. Console versions were one option, and Coffee Stain began talking to publishers about the possibility of a port. But Sanctum’s rapid development had left the studio with unused ideas – and, co-founder and CEO Anton Westbergh concedes, room for improvement. A sequel was a better idea, and so, a little over two years from the original, Sanctum 2 launched on PC – and, courtesy of Reverb Publishing, consoles.
By the time Coffee Stain released the final DLC for Sanctum 2, the creative well for that universe had run dry. It was time for something new. And so the studio invited pitches from all staff for its next project. Having gathered a series of ideas, everyone split into groups, before pitching the ideas to the rest of the studio. “As I recall, we had almost 100 game ideas during that process,” Westbergh says. “And as we’re a very democratic team, it took a lot of time and a lot of discussion.”
One idea in particular stood out from the rest. But the studio resisted it for a while; after all, it hadn’t secured the most votes. Still, there was something about it; something that convinced the studio’s founders not to just ignore it. “We said: screw it, let’s just take two weeks now,” Aspeby says. “Forget about Sanctum, let’s turn this thing into a prolonged game jam where everybody at the office can just do whatever they want. No planning whatsoever. And then let’s start with the ‘real’ game, so to speak, after that.”
It was a fruitful fortnight. The jokey prototype that emerged was a physics-based thirdperson sandbox in which players were invited to play as rampaging goat, tasked with causing as much damage as possible. It was the brainchild of designer Armin Ibrisagic, who, Westbergh says, “spent a lot of time on YouTube and what was happening on the Internet”. (Ibrisagic has since left the company and is clearly sticking to what he knows: the recently-announced Just Die Already is about violent pensioners causing mayhem.) It was just silly and entertaining enough to be a viral success, the studio reckoned, though the alpha footage it released on YouTube was uploaded more in hope than expectation. “It got a lot of traction instantly,” Westbergh says. “When we returned to the office the morning after the first video, it had kind of blown up.” Its overnight views were more than the studio’s previous trailers combined, Aspeby adds. “That was the moment where we realised that this wasn’t just an internal game jam any more. We actually had something here that could sell.”
Within two days, the footage had topped a million views. By now, specialist press had
“WE REALISED THAT THIS WASN’T JUST AN INTERNAL GAME JAM ANY MORE. WE HAD SOMETHING HERE THAT COULD SELL”
begun to talk about Goat Simulator. It was even covered by agriculture magazine Modern Farmer. With its rough edges adding to its humour, Coffee Stain decided to crack on and release it as quickly as possible – essentially, before the Internet lost interest. When the game launched on April Fools’ Day 2014, it was messy, silly and buggy, albeit deliberately so. Yet while reviews were mixed, the studio had taken the joke reasonably seriously, stuffing its open world with secrets, references and dozens of little discoveries besides. Coffee Stain’s development costs were recouped within minutes of its Steam launch; several updates, expansions and crosspromotions duly followed. Six months on, Goat Simulator had shifted more than 2.5 million copies across PC, consoles and mobile platforms. In revenue terms, it made more than six times the amount that Sanctum or its sequel had earned. And the ‘real’ game? Did the studio ever go back to that? “Nope,” Aspeby deadpans, and everyone laughs.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Goat Simulator transformed Coffee Stain Studios, though its shift into publishing actually began just a month after its launch. The idea, in fact, had been mooted for a while – “mainly driven by the thought of just being able to make more cool things happen,” Westbergh says.
“And to help out,” Aspeby interjects. Recalling how Epic had given it a helping hand, the studio wanted to pay it forward. When it started talking to Gone North Games (now majority-owned by the company and since renamed Coffee Stain North), the studio’s founders recognised something of themselves;