In 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Crista Castro and Bryan Singh were moved to think about what they really wanted from their lives. An animation director and programmer respectively, the couple had worked on other people’s cartoons and video games at big studios for years, but both had nursed ambitions to make something of their own. They had collaborated on weekend projects here and there, but felt if they really wanted to make a game together, they’d have to quit their jobs. So in 2021, galvanised by lockdown-induced introspection, that’s what they did, forming a husband-and-wife development team under the name Cozy Game Pals. And just to raise the stakes further, they became parents at around the same time.
They gave themselves two years. At the end of it, in 2023, they had made something: a short game called Fear the Spotlight, a 90s-inspired horror adventure that looks like a lost PlayStation classic and feels like a teen ghost movie. They released it on Steam, to a very positive reception from the few people who played it – but they didn’t know how to market it, and it didn’t sell much. “We were like, OK, I guess that was it,” Bryan tells me. “Let’s go find jobs again. And then Blumhouse showed up.”
