Straylight Studios

» see straylight-studios.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Straylight Studios was put into voluntary liquidation by its shareholders in March 2009, almost exactly five years after it started. The Otago Daily Times covered it: the company had shut its operations roughly a fortnight before the liquidation was formalized, and at least twenty creditors were expected to come up short. That is all the public record holds about the ending, and the New Zealand register will not give up a day to go with it.

It had begun in March 2004 in a flat in Northeast Valley, which is the student end of Dunedin, founded by University of Otago graduates with Timothy Nixon as chief executive. Early on it sat inside the Upstart Business Incubator, then moved into the Centre for Innovation, a research facility on the university campus. In 2007 it took premises in the Dunedin central business district, and a studio that small moving into town is the signal that things are going well.

The output was small and it got noticed anyway. StarTag won the TUANZ Entertainment Award in 2005, and The Kitchen was a finalist at the Computerworld Excellence Awards in the innovation category. Two games across five years, one award won and one shortlisting.

Dunedin in 2004 sat at the far end of every axis I had. My own connection had only recently stopped being a modem, and New Zealand's games sector at that point was a handful of companies selling mostly to people they could drive to. Neither of this studio's two games ever had a distribution path that would have put it in front of me.

~ the case file ~

~ meaningful play ~

Nixon coined a term for what the studio was for, and then spent years defending it. Meaningful play described games that borrowed from serious games and from casual games at the same time, aiming for something entertaining and worthwhile without claiming to be educational, which is the distinction the whole definition turns on. Educational games of that era had a reputation problem that was entirely earned. Early in 2008 he started a blog at meaningfulplay.com to argue the case publicly and push the idea of game technology as a learning tool. The studio went into liquidation about a year later.

~ the second studio ~

Nixon started again almost immediately, in the same city. Runaway Play came out of Dunedin around 2009 or 2010, depending on which account you take, initially as the games division of Natural History New Zealand, a documentary house, which few mobile studios can claim as a parent. Its games were built around the natural world: Flutter put you in charge of butterflies, Splash did the same for the ocean. It began self-publishing in 2015, passed its tenth anniversary in 2019, and won the largest CODE funding grant given to a New Zealand developer in 2021.

Nixon eventually left for Los Angeles to be creative director at thatgamecompany, and Zoe Hobson took over as chief executive. The doctrine survived the company that first carried it: gentle games, built on a real subject, meant for people who are not gamers. In 2009 Straylight went broke holding it. The second attempt, five minutes down the road, ran for more than a decade.

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