Madison levels up

You don’t really see it until it’s all in one place.

That was certainly the case in mid-October, when more than 400 game developers from Madison and the Midwest converged at the second edition of M+Dev, the game developers’ conference held annually here. As the assembled masses networked and swapped personal stories, it was hard not to feel — and impossible not to see — an ongoing sense of critical mass.

Despite obstacles, Madison’s game development scene has been inching in that direction for most of the last decade.

“I always describe it as active and growing,” says Jennifer Javornik, vice president of the education-centric Filament Games and past executive director of the Wisconsin Games Alliance, one of the main organizers of M+Dev. “We have this interesting dichotomy going in Madison. Our numbers aren’t as big as some of the coastal hubs, but our people make some of the biggest games in the industry. Plus, everyone seems to be hiring and growing.”

She’s certainly not wrong. Ties to AAA game titles/franchises like Fortnite, Call of Duty and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) are only one piece of the eyebrow-raising proof.

Beyond some of the longtime scene staples — we’re talking high-profile veteran studios like Raven Software, Human Head Studios and mobile-game developer Perblue — Madison is now home to a surprising number of indie developers, maker spaces and networking events that are helping to keep the scene’s momentum humming.

For your visual edification, we’ve collected an iterative encyclopedia/atlas of game-development connections, both past and present, going on right here in Madison. After all, as some wiseass wrote just a few paragraphs ago, you don’t really see it until it’s all in one place.

Madison’s videogame connections — from A to Z

A

Acme Nerd Games

An up-and-comer in the biz-to-biz game space, this Mount Horeb shop, founded by Mary Romolino, developed Houston, We Have Spinach, a game that teaches kids about nutrition by asking them to collect and use different types of food to fuel a rocket They’ve also formed a local partnership with UW Health to develop a game that touts careers in health care and with United Way of Dane County to create a sim game (Dane Changers) that asks players to manage and spend resources to improve the community.

Aurasync Studios

This studio was founded by former Raven software developer Brian Pelletier, who teamed up with local comic-book artist Jeffrey Moy to create Chortopia, an iOS app aimed at kids that unlocks content in a fantasy world when the kids complete real-world household chores.

Arch Virtual

Jon and Kandy Brouchoud’s studio is all about using virtual reality tech to create training sims and, better still, VR pre-construction tours of ongoing projects using Oculus Rift technology. Locally, they created one for the Spark Building on East Washington Avenue that opened this year — the one that houses The Sylvee and Starting Block, Arch Virtual’s home base.

B

Bump Studios

One of Starting Block’s original tenants, Randy Amundson’s startup studio is hard at work on Lemuria, a top-down, Diablo-style game for PC. The studio just released its first demos of the game in October.

C

Call of Duty

One of gaming’s biggest and longest-running shooter franchises has a strong and long-running Madison tie: Raven Software has assisted on a huge list of COD games (COD Ghosts, Infinite Warfare, a remastered Call of Duty Modern Warfare and much more). Meanwhile, Lost Boys Studios has partnered with Raven on Call of Duty Online.

Creative Kingdoms

If you and your kids have ever wielded a wand in MagiQuest at the Great Wolf Lodge in Wisconsin Dells, you’ve played Creative Kingdoms’ greatest contribution to the Wisconsin gaming community.

D

Doom

Gaming lore has it that John Romero, one of this legendary first-person shooter’s main developers, worked on the game with John Carmack in Madison in the early 1990s. Romero spoke at the final Games, Learning & Society conference in Madison in 2016.

E

Epic Games

Yes, it’s true: The studio responsible for Fortnite, the biggest game sensation of 2018, has a studio in Madison, It’s a small, under-the-radar technical studio headed by former Raven Software developer Gil Gribb.

F

Fantasy Flight Interactive

A new development studio launched last year, headed up by longtime Madison developer Tim Gerritsen, whose resume includes Human Head Studios, the former Big Rooster Games, and a stint at Boston’s Irrational Games (Bioshock Infinite.) The studio’s working on an interactive version of Fantasy Flight’s Lord of the Rings collectible card game. In fact, it just went early access for PC on Steam.

FemDev

A group of Madison-based female game developers that meets quarterly to discuss projects and promote the role of women in game development. Founded by Human Head Studios’ community manager Katherine Stull.

Field Day Lab

A UW-based game development effort that partners with teachers to create online learning games and citizen science apps. Their biggest title to date is Jo Wilder and the Capitol Case, a game about unraveling local history.

Filament Games

National leaders in the educational games space. Their latest project found them partnering with Oculus on Breaking Boundaries in Science, a VR game that celebrates the lives of female scientists, including Marie Curie and Grace Hopper. It features voice work from Jane Goodall.

Flippfly Games

Founded by brothers Aaron and Forest San Filippo, this studio is best known for its endless runner Race the Sun — a game that’s found success on every game platform known to humankind. The brothers also released the puzzle game Evergarden earlier this year.

Fuller Game Production

Keith Fuller was once a design manager and producer with Raven Software. Now he helms his own consulting organization, working with heavy hitters like Infinity Ward, Volition and Gearbox Software to coach leadership and teamwork.

G

Games, Learning & Society (GLS)

Founded by former UW-Madison professors Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkuehler, this defunct academic-based group focused its groundbreaking research on the ways games are shaping education and culture. GLS hosted an annual conference in Madison that ran for seven years, ending in 2016, after Squire and Steinkuehler left the UW for University of California-Irvine.

Gear Learning

The studio of full-time game designers and developers is housed within the UW-Madison’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Over its lifetime, director Michael Beall’s team has produced a stack of learning and research-based games, including Virulent, a game in which you play s a virus attempting to replicate itself, and Econauts, a game about the impacts of humans on lake ecosystems. Gear Learning also collaborates with and serves as a hands-on resource for campus researchers, outreach groups and external partners.

Gerritsen, Tim

One of the original founders of Human Head Studios, Gerritsen has used his decades of industry experience to become one of the key faces and voices of the Madison scene. He’s currently the studio head at Fantasy Flight Interactive, a new studio charged with developing a digital version of the Lord of the Rings collectible card game

H

High Iron Studios

Waunakee-based High Iron is all about the Player vs. Player space: Their upcoming PC/Mac arena combat game Slingwitch is about managing resources and casting spells.

Human Head Studios

Birthed when a group of seven ex-Raven Software employees broke off to form their own studio, Human Head is the scene’s biggest stayin’ alive survivor, still kicking it as a standalone studio 20 years after inception. They’ve had success on the PC platform (the original Rune, Minimum), the console space (2007’s Prey) and iOS (Lost Within). The studio’s latest games, a PC-based sequel to /remake of Rune, is expected in 2019.

I

Indie Arcade

This quarterly gathering features the works of local independent game developers and is typically held at Robinia Courtyard. Originally organized by Human Head developer Justin Terry, the event’s future is currently in limbo, as Terry recently moved away from Madison.

L

Local Route Labs

This game dev studio is best known as the creator of Disc Golf Unchained, a mobile app that lets users virtually sling it, even in the deepest depths of winter.

Lost Boys Interactive

One of Madison’s up-and-coming full-service development studios is all about partnering with other studios on big projects, ranging from Call of Duty Online (with Raven Software) to Square Enix’s recent The Quiet Man and Human Head’s upcoming reboot of Rune. The team features experts in critical dev skills like 3D modelling, animation and texturing.

M

MadMarker Studios

Motion capture is an essential part of most modern AAA game titles, and MadMarker, the only independently owned mo-cap studio in the Midwest, provides it — to everyone from Human Head Studios to Volition Games.

M+DEV

This Madison-based Midwest regional game development conference just wrapped up its second year in October. More than 400 established and would-be game developers came together to network and talk issues, from marketing strategies to gender diversity.

N

Nunn, Jessica

Madison-based Nunn is the Director of live operations for High Fidelity, a West Coast-based startup that offers live, real time social VR to its customers.

P

PerBlue Games

CEO Justin Beck’s mobile-game focused studio is perhaps best known for its first game, the augmented reality game Parallel Kingdoms. But it also scored headlines in 2016 for selling the rights to Dragonsoul, a mobile role-playing game, to a Japanese company for an eye-popping $35 million. Earlier this year, Perblue announced a partnership with Disney Studios to develop games in the mobile space.

Play, Make, Learn Conference

Born from a collective that included GLS, Filament Games and the Wisconsin Collaborative Education Research Network, this two-year old annual conference focuses on the intersections between game design and education.

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG)

Bluehole, the Korean-based developer of one of the biggest multiplayer arena shooters in the industry, opened a studio in Madison last year.

R

Raffel, Brian and Steve

Brian is the face of Raven Software and his brother, Steve, is the company’s behind-the-scenes big thinker. Together, they head Madison’s longest-tenured game development studio.

Raven Software

Founded in 1990 by brothers Brian and Steve Raffel as a PC development shop, Raven is the biggest developer on the Madison scene and the second-largest studio in the stable of Activision, Raven’s parent company and publisher. Raven is the shop that proved video games could be developed in Wisconsin, and its pedigree — everything from original games (Heretic and Singularty) to licensed (X-Men, Star Trek and Marvel Ultimate Alliance), and work on the Call of Duty franchise — is immense.

S

Sector 67

This makerspace on Corry Street provides collaborative options and resources for all sorts of creative types — including game developers.

Starting Block

This startup space in the Spark Building occupies several floors, and is designed with game development studio tenants in mind. Bump Studios is the first. The Wisconsin Games Alliance is a development partner.

Sky Ship Studios

Game-dev vets, Eric Francksen and Shawn Sharp pilot this Sky Ship, a studio that’s just released a digital PC/iOS version of the macabre card game Gloom.

Squire, Kurt and Steinkuehler, Constance

The former UW education professors co-founded the Games, Learning & Society group at the UW. Steinkuehler served as Barack Obama’s games czar before she and Squire headed west in 2017 to join the staff at the University of California-Irvine.

Subnautica

The animation director of the popular PC underwater survival game Subnautica lives and works right here in Madison. He’s Colin Knueppel, one of the founders of Sky Ship Studios.

T

Tumbleseed

One of the quirkiest indie offerings on the Nintendo Switch was developed by a team that included UW-Madison graduate Benedict Fritz.

P

Prune

The zen-swiping app Time magazine dubbed 2015’s game of the year was developed by Joel McDonald, who was living in Madison at the time it was released.

U

UW-Madison

In October 2018, UW-Madison's departments of Curriculum and Instruction and Art and Computer Sciences began offering a game design certificate, and almost 1,000 students are enrolled in games-related classes. The university still nurses long-term plans to support a game development degree, but the timeline’s unclear.

W

Wisconsin Games Alliance (WGA)

Formerly the Madison Games Alliance, this nonprofit recently rebranded to encompass the entire state. Its mission involves linking game developers and promoting Madison as a Midwestern game development hub. WGA’s signature event is M+DEV, now in its second year.

Z

Zoombinis

Game designers with UW-Madison's Gear Learning designed and contributed quests to this award-winning, puzzle-solving app, in which players try to guide a group of cartoony blue critters to a new home.

Editor's note: This article was corrected to reflect that UW-Madison has offered a game design certificate since October 2018. The print version indicated it was a game development certificate, and that it had been offered for several years. We also added an entry for Gear Learning, which is housed within UW-Madison's Wisconsin Center for Education Research, and adjusted the entry for Zoombinis.