Archetypal is a company built from the experience gained operating a studio for over 11 years; shipping games, developing groundbreaking IP and executing as a co-dev studio helping clients create innovative games and interactive media.
After over two years exploring on-chain games Archetypal is being incubated to experiment with multiple chains and frameworks (MUD/EVM, Dojo/Starknet, ArgusWE/Celestia so far) and explore the frontiers of how creative communities collaborate and expand leveraging the affordances these emerging technologies offer and to build excellent fully on-chain games (FoCG).
What light makes our team exceptional?
Modding from day dot - our core has over a decade making tools for players to extend IP and introduce their own ideas. We have collectively many years of experience building modular and composable systems, player editors, UGC tooling, accessible and well documented modding APIs.
Longevity in the industry - over 15 years making games professionally.
We have opinions - We know and love art, we have impressive backgrounds in, games, digital media, fine art and film outside and we are now applying this to the realm of collaboration.
We have a strong sense of taste - what we build is what we want to be the future.
What is our Mission?
Creating and supporting #RealBigThings .
Making, empowering, and enabling ideas bigger than the originators themselves.
To build content and infra to empower, up-skill, and co-ordinate users with ideas and help them explore the "endless UGC machine".
“We explore the forefront of how creative communities collaborate”.
Why do we love AW/FOCG?
We are at a point when academic thinking is crossing paths with open/accessible tooling coming online, and an artistic creative community coalescing. It reminds us of the build up to what is now lovingly classed as the Golden Era of Indie games in 2008-2012, the Jesper Juuls, XNA framework/Unity, Indie wave, and Xbox Live Arcade/Steam Greenlight that made a golden era for artful, diverse, and profitable indie games back 15-20 years ago, that took the whole independent scene commercial. There is lots of thinking and building still to be done, (not least how to create town squares and distribution pipelines for markets to form around) but we are in a great moment, the academic and tool maturation moment ahead of a Cambrian explosion of creativity and commerciality in perfect alignment.
For more information on this you can catch Rich's talk at Modular Summit