On June 21, 2017, Blasphemous became Kickstarter’s most successful Spanish video game after raising over $333,000. The story and success of The Game Kitchen started with something other than Blasphemous; it goes back a few years.
Part of The Game Kitchen team met in Seville in the early 2000s and soon found out about their shared love for video games. After some unsuccessful attempts, the team developed Rotor’scope: The Secret of the Endless Energy, a match 3 that won an award in the Dream Build Play contest organized by Microsoft. The game was released in 2010 on Xbox 360 and the Xbox Live Indie Games platform, and it barely sold a few thousand units, forcing the team to focus on work-for-hire and pivoting to serious games.
A couple of years later, in 2012, the financial crisis impacted the team, which found that many of its clients had run out of funds to commission new work from them. The video game industry had begun a shift towards independent development, with the emergence of tools such as Steam Greenlight or the release of documentaries such as Indie Game: The Movie, which highlighted recent success stories such as Braid, Fez, or Super Meat Boy. Considering those two ideas, the studio decided to develop a new game of its own: The Last Door.
The Last Door, a pixel art Lovecraftian point & click horror adventure, was financed via several crowdfunding campaigns. The studio needed to split the game into several episodes to afford the development of each one. Eventually, The Last Door spanned over two seasons and was released between 2014 and 2016 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.
The Game Kitchen decided to return to pixel art for its next project, although changing its genre and setting. The studio shifted from a point & click adventure to a metroidvania with a twist, as its art style took references from religious baroque art and Andalusian culture. The studio wanted to gather the small community it had created during The Last Door to fund its next game through crowdfunding. The result, Blasphemous, was an instant success on Kickstarter: the game reached its funding goal within 24 hours, and raising more than 300,000 euros helped the studio sign a publishing deal with Team17.
Blasphemous is a 2D metroidvania in which players control the Penitent, the sole survivor of a massacre living in a world stricken by a curse. To break it, he must explore a non-linear world full of secrets, face formidable enemies while mastering different attacks, upgrade his characters’ abilities, and defeat powerful final bosses.
In September 2019, Blasphemous became one of PC and consoles’ most successful Spanish video game releases. Team17 announced that the game had sold over one million copies, boasted an 82 Metascore on Xbox One, and got the Best Game of the Year award at the Spanish Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Awards. Its success story prompted The Game Kitchen and Team17 to announce a sequel, Blasphemous 2, conceived to make a bigger, prettier, and more polished game whose Metascore score surpassed its predecessor.
Recently, we interviewed Mauricio García, CEO of The Game Kitchen, for more details on the story of the Andalusian studio and Blasphemous 2. Watch it now, and remember to subscribe for more exciting content on the Spanish games industry!
Activity funded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport.
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