East Side Games
Sure, the indie video game developer isn't technically on Vancouver's east side anymore, having recently outgrown its Gastown digs. (Its new Cambie Street HQ sits across from City Hall and houses about 85 employees.) But East Side Games is still committed to its scrappy image as an outside-the-box publisher.
That's how you get titles like Trailer Park Boys: Greasy Money
and It's Always Sunny: The Gang Goes Mobile.
Co-founder and CEO Josh Nilson also hasn't forgotten much about his past. Having grown up of Métis descent in Willow River, a community of about 150 half an hour northeast of Prince George, he didn't exactly follow a well-trodden path to becoming a Vancouver executive.
“One of the challenges in Canada about being an Indigenous person is that you don't talk about where you're from. You kind of relate to your European ancestry and go through school and your life that way,” Nilson says. “And now that
I'm in my 40s, it's just a thing where we have a business and built this profitable B.C. company and we want to celebrate our culture as well.”
Last October, East Side Games was a major sponsor of Toronto's Imaginenative, the world's largest Indigenous film and interactive media festival. The company has also created initiatives to help Indigenous youth get involved in the gaming industry and continues to participate in organizations and events focused on supporting the Downtown Eastside's underprivileged, like Crabtree
Corner Community Resource Centre and Presents of Peace.
Nilson and his team are now developing a few games that will showcase Indigenous stories, but he admits it calls for something of a process. “The Vancouver Canucks shouldn't just put an f–ing totem pole on their jersey and say, Here you go; how do you like that? But maybe if they got local artists to do something, it's different.”