Talespinners is celebrating its fourth birthday this month and we’ve been incredibly busy over the last year!
Michelle Clough is now a Partner
We invited editor and writer Michelle Clough to work more closely with the team last year as an Associate, and as of this month she is now a full Partner and co-owner of our co-operative company with the others, which is excellent news! While Michelle has worked on all sorts of projects for us, her particular interest is in romance and sexuality in games – check out her talks on the subject in the GDC Vault. A few words from Michelle:
Thank you for this amazing opportunity! It’s an honor and a privilege to be part of such a wonderful co-op of talented, compassionate writers. Looking forward to seeing what the future holds!
With the addition of Michelle, with Chris’s move further west in Canada, and Ian’s move to Stockholm, we new cover a whole range of time zones! Talespinners never sleeps! It also means our breakfast meetings are now also our lunch meetings or evening meals…
Disco at the BAFTAs
Cash was on the writing team for Disco Elysium, helping out Studio ZA/UM, and we’re extremely pleased that it won the BAFTA for Best Narrative this year (along with several other BAFTA awards).
Four years!
In May 2016 this started as a two-person company in Cardiff, South Wales. Ian collated data over this weekend and discovered that, over the company’s 4-year history:
- We’ve worked on 94 different projects
- We’ve worked with 77 clients in 24 different countries. We think we’ve covered all the continents now apart from Antarctica – we have clients as far afield as Japan, Egypt, Bahrain, Australia, and India. So if anyone knows any penguins who’re struggling with game story, point them our way!
- While the majority of our work over the four years has been on console, PC, mobile, and VR projects, we’ve also worked on: interactive audio, web content, videos, prop-making, promotional trailers, TV documentaries, TV game shows, live events, physical PR campaigns, and a movie!
- Again, while the majority of our work has been writing, narrative design, story consultancy, and voice direction, we’ve also run workshops, recorded voice-over, filmed teasers, created physical props, prototyped games, coded gameplay and narrative systems, given lectures, and helped to run competitions!
Of course, lots of these projects haven’t been announced yet. But we can’t wait for you to see them!
Talespinners in the time of lockdown
Of course, Covid-19 has had huge impact on people’s personal and social lives. Here at Talespinners we consider ourselves very lucky. We all already work from home, and almost all our work for clients is remote, so from a work point of view not much has changed for us. While, of course, the situation has brought new challenges for us all in our day-to-day lives, our work gives us a good foundation. Likewise, much of the rest of the games industry seems to be carrying on with a bit of adjustment. So, for the time being, we can continue to take part in creating stories – and they might give people something to escape to, at least for a little while.
