Celebrating and reflecting on fifteen years of Simogo
Simogo is perhaps a darling among indie game lovers. Most widely known for titles like Sayonara Wild Hearts and 2024’s Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, each one of their games is wildly different from the last. Often revolving around a single gameplay mechanic explored to its fullest. The studio is celebrating its fifteenth anniversary this year, with the release of Simogo Legacy Collection, of which you can read our preview here, but also a book published by Lost in Cult: “Heartbeats, Dreams and Laser Eyes: 15 Years of Simogo”. We reached out to Simon Flesser, co-founder of Simogo and wanted to chat about their celebration, the upcoming Legacy Collection and how to stay innovative as an indie studio in an ever changing games industry.
Willem Hilhorst (WH): Before we get started I'd love to know more about the current state of Simogo. Can you tell us a little bit about how big the studio is and what your guiding principle is for projects?
Simon Flesser (SF): Formally Simogo is just me and Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck. But we have a number of people we have worked with for many years, including our full time programmer Magnus Jensen, who worked on this collection. Freelancers who have worked on this and a lot of our other projects are composer and audio expert Daniel Olsén and graphic designer Åsa Wallander. And on the individual games there are of course more collaborators. You can check our site www.simogo.com for everyone that we work with. We also share their project stories on the site, so take a look!
WH: In 15 years I'm quite sure that you've seen the industry change a lot. Starting Simogo during the height of the mobile games market and slowly transitioning to more elaborate games for PC and Console. In your opinion, what has helped you run Simogo as a continuous studio?
SF: Stubbornness and a will to keep on trying new things all the time.
WH: If you were to ask me, Simogo's games are defined by focusing on concepts that have a single gameplay idea and expanding on that with different scenarios. From the limited interactions with puzzles in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes to Beat Sneak Bandit's Rhythm gameplay. Does that interpretation reflect the working process for Simogo when developing games?
SF: Maybe! It’s difficult to tell from the inside. In the end, we just make the games and projects we feel like making.
WH: You've announced the Simogo Legacy Collection last month as part of the 15th anniversary. How long has this collection been in the works?
SF: We’ve talked for maybe ten years or so about making this collection, but there has never been time or there have always been other projects that were calling for our attention. We finally started work on the collection in January this year.
WH: I presume that the main goal was to preserve and keep the games from Simogo relevant with the Legacy Collection, but I'm still incredibly curious as to what was the driving force behind this collection for your team?
SF: As you say, the main idea was to preserve the games. As we get older, you start to think about your legacy more, I suppose, and we think this is the best thing we could do so that when we are eventually gone, maybe people will know that there was once a small studio in the south of Sweden called Simogo.
WH: How hard was it to open up these projects again and get them working on a Nintendo Switch? Were there any surprising when trying to access these (outdated) files, projects or plugins?
SF: It is more difficult than I think most people would guess. Without getting too technical, part of the difficulty is that a lot of these games were “based” on each other. We developed and used the same tech and once you collect these games side by side, they will get confused by each other as they are calling on the same functions.
Another big difficulty was to be able to switch between resolutions and aspect ratios on the fly. The games were only ever designed to start in their preferred resolution and then never change. So there was a lot of manual labour and checks that needed to be fixed to achieve this!
Then of course there were a lot of design issues that needed to be solved, related to being able to play the games without a touchscreen.
WH:Was there an emotional response to re-experiencing these games after ten, perhaps fifteen years? How does it feel as a creator to be reunited with your work?
SF: Both good and bad! It’s a lot like looking at photos of yourself when you were young, which you can imagine is not always positive! It’s easy to feel embarrassed, but you also feel proud of what you were able to achieve.
WH:What was the reaction from team members that weren't part of Simogo when these games were originally released?
SF: Most of them are old friends and are familiar with the games, but getting to know them technically and reexamine them from the inside must have been interesting. As a side note. Daniel is probably one of the best SPL-T players in the world, with over 600 splits!
WH: I adore the presentation and style you've chosen for this collection, resembling a mobile storefront, but with straightforward information about the controls and context of the game's creation. Was that interface something that came naturally with this project? Or was it something you stumbled upon along the way?
SF: Thank you! First we had imagined it being something closer to the menus of the NES and SNES mini with big icons, but as we got to work on the different display modes with a visible tablet frame, the idea of an “OS” quickly naturally transformed into its current state.
WH: Translating the interactions with a mobile device to a console takes a lot of work. Both the in the way controls play a part, such as device rotation, touch interfaces and other features of a mobile device, but perhaps also in the way we use phones and tablets differently from game systems. What was key for you in making the controls work? And were there things that you weren't able to get working properly on Switch (2)?
SF: Our discussions over the years had always been centered around trying to remake or “consolify” these games. But as we decided to actually start making the collection, we knew that the intention should be to keep the experience as close as possible to the originals. With this in mind, we came up with a cursor as the main way to interact with the games, either through sticks, motion or mouse. An early decision was to not make custom solutions for each games individual interactions, which led us to both being able to let players rotate the screens manually to switch between portrait and landscape (and also mimic gyro when not available), and the inclusion of a second cursor, so we would be able to mimic multi-touch.
WH: Do you and Gordon have a favorite game in this collection? SF: My favourite is and has always been SPL-T. It’s a game I can keep on playing forever, and be fascinated by myself. Gordon’s favourite is DEVICE 6, because he feels that it challenges what games are, and can be.
WH: You went a step beyond and even released playable prototypes for some of the included games and even unreleased titles. I adored the Mysterious December Machine. This is still pretty unheard of in the larger games industry. What was your thinking behind this move and how challenging was it to get these prototypes working?
SF:To be honest the most difficult thing was to find the early prototypes! We simply wanted the collection to paint the fullest possible picture of Simogo, and be able to gather all extra material in one place for long-time followers of the studio.
WH: You've chosen to publish this collection yourselves, even though Annapurna Interactive was part of the publishing for Sayonara Wild Hearts and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Was this because you wanted to keep this project under your control? Or was there no publishing interest to (re)release your older work?
SF: It felt like the most natural thing, as the originals were also self-published. We never considered pitching it to any publisher.
WH: There are so many developers that got their start making games for mobile, Adobe Flash and other software formats that have made these games inaccessible for decades. What is the value for Simogo as a studio to return to these works and keep them available for the future? SF: The biggest values are that people who were not able to play them before now can, and that they are less likely to disappear when they are on new platforms.
WH: Did you take inspiration from cultural institutions, such as archives, museums or exhibits? Especially in how the games are contextualized within the broader history of Simogo as a studio?
SF: Adding dates to everything, to put them in an historical context was important to us, but I am not sure I would say that we were directly inspired by museums or archives.
WH: Do you have any advice or encouragement for other studios looking at what you're trying to achieve with Simogo Legacy Collection and may be considering something similar on their own?
SF: Try to resist the temptation to fix any blemishes or polish up the games, and focus on making the most true to the original experience!
WH: Finally, any word on what we might be able to expect in the next fifteen years from Simogo? Do you want to grow the studio? Or return to another of your series now that people are more familiar with them?
SF: No, we do not want to grow! If I knew what the next 15 years held, it wouldn’t be fun. The joy is to see where the journey might take us.
