
While we foresaw the rise of chess streaming and its overall popularity bump, we couldn’t dream of announcing the game the same year as all of the big fighting game franchises come out with bombastic new projects and a firm commitment to creating a new golden age for the genre. I think we have something truly unexpected that players are resonating strongly with we’ve seen these kinds of chess-mixed-with-whatever-else before, but the fact that we’re committing so strongly to authenticity in the mix of genres seems to be eliciting a lot of excitement, both in the chess and fighting game fan communities.Īnd let’s be honest, we kind of got pretty lucky with the timing on this. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve read retweets of our ads saying, "Finally, Chess 2", "What the fuck is this?!" or "Finally, someone brought back Archon!". The game development challenge we had wasn't in its design but in the execution of two perfectly balanced competitive games mashed up into one!ĪNTOINE BORDELEAU: The response we’ve seen is truly incredible. Once Queen's Gambit came out and competitive chess came back to the forefront on YouTube and Twitch, we knew we had to act on our idea.Ĭhess is the ultimate strategy game, and although fighting games are more on the execution side, there's a ton of strategy there too. With Chess, there are over 600 million people in the world who already know the rules so this is already a big plus! I was a big fan of Archon and MK Deception growing up, which were already tactical chess-like games, and this is an idea that we had on the back burner since around 2015. ManaVoid is working on both Checkmate Showdown and Roots of Yggdrasil at the moment.ĬHRISTOPHER CHANCEY: One of the biggest challenges in game design is coming up with mechanics, systems, and rules that are coherent and easily tutorialized so that players can get into a game and start developing their mastery and autonomy as fast as possible. We’ve also launched Purple is Royal, a spin-off company that handles everything marketing-related for our titles. As one of the founding members of the Indie Asylum, our studio is all about collaboration, making inspiring (and sometimes wacky!) games in a fundamentally human way. The studio aims to blend known genres and styles into brand-new experiences that will feel both familiar and refreshing to players.
#Chess checkmate game Pc#
We shipped Epic Manager in 2017 and proceeded to launch Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan on PC and consoles in 2021. ManaVoid Entertainment was founded in 2014 and grew from a 3-employee startup in a basement to a 40+ strong creative powerhouse working on multiple projects in parallel in that short time.


One of the founders – and game director on Checkmate Showdown – Mathias Theys actually is a competitive Mortal Kombat player, so it’s in the very DNA of the studio to build out tight, precise combat that stays approachable to newcomers to the fighting genre. The studio was built around one idea: to make top-notch indie fighting games. Both are members of the Indie Asylum, an incubator/accelerator hub for indies that we founded in 2017.īadRez Games is one of the most recent studios to have joined the collective, and we’ve been working together on Checkmate Showdown ever since they came in. ANTOINE BORDELEAU: Checkmate Showdown is actually a collaboration between two Montreal-based indie studios – ManaVoid Entertainment and BadRez Games.
