While I know a lot of people in the game industry, there are still lots of famous people that I have never met. And since I’ve been meeting people in games for more than 30 years, you get an idea of how big the game industry has become.
So it was a pleasure to hang out for a bit for the first time with Amanda White and Jon Gibson, the cofounders of iam8bit. You can think of them as friends of indies, sometimes helping unknown game devs sell millions of copies to gamers. We knew a lot of the same people, which made me think that the game industry is a small world after all.
I caught up with them during a quiet moment at the Summer Game Fest: Play Days, an event where game devs behind some big and small games get a chance to meet with the press in Los Angeles after Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest show. iam8bit has done Play Days for four years in a row in downtown L.A. iam8bit also produces Day of the Devs, which has been running for 13 years, and iam8bit itself is 20 years old.
What they’ve built is a way for Los Angeles to capture some of the joy of E3 again. Except they’ve built a non-E3. We had an event during that week. So did Xbox, IGN, and a bunch of other companies — some with virtual shows. But at this year’s fest, iam8bit’s Play Days felt like the center of all of it.
In this story, I’ll take you all inside that place, as the public has missed out on this kind of experience with the absence of E3.
iam8bit?
If you’re not sure what else iam8bit does, that’s understandable, as it does a lot of things that go under the radar. The company is a producer of physical editions of top-tier games for gamers who still like their games in a physical disc format. It has published collector’s editions for Cuphead, Outer Wilds, and The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, and the company even earned a Grammy nomination for Best Recording Package for its Gravity Falls 2xLP vinyl. This summer, it has some mystery bundles.
It’s also an indie game publisher, as iam8bit Presents is the publishing division that partners with indie game devs. It specializes in working with game devs to publish creative and unique titles for PC, console and mobile with a focus on storytelling and community.
iam8bit Presents has published titles such as the chart-topping puzzle adventure Escape Academy, which has seen more than four million players, and Simpler Times.
Escape Academy and Escape Academy 2: Back to School
The Escape Academy game happened because Gibson picked up a random phone call. It was a game developer who wanted to show them a game. It turned out it was Wyatt Bushnell, co-creator of Escape Academy. He apologized for the cold call and show it. At that point, iam8bit wasn’t publishing games. But after seeing it, Gibson called White and said they should talk more about it. They signed a deal to publish it.
“He had this escape room experience and we had this escape room experience,” Gibson said. “It was a really natural evolution.”
At the Summer Game Fest this month, I saw demos of upcoming iam8bit titles include Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School (co-developed by Wyatt Bushnell, the son of Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell) and the slice of life pixel RPG Petal Runner.
Summer Game Fest: Play Days is an invite-only multi-title preview event designed exclusively for media and content creators that started in 2022, and has continued to grow each year.
Held throughout a campus-like setting with multiple venues, the event functions as a behind-closed-doors showcase where publishers and partners present upcoming games, host interviews, provide interactive story opportunities, and much more. It’s all that we have left of the random meetings and comradeship of the old E3, which shut down in 2023 after the pandemic ravaged crowds and Keighley’s show triumphed.
iam8bit also runs Day of the Devs, a non-profit with the mission to celebrate the creativity, diversity and magic of video games. For the last 13 years, Day of the Devs has given a voice to emerging or underrepresented talent with platforms that connect players with developers and their games. Day of the Devs takes on the form of virtual and physical events – all completely free, with no costs to either developers or attendees.
Day of the Devs has shone a spotlight on hundreds of games, hosted tens of thousands of people at in-person events, and reached out to millions of viewers through virtual showcases.
Play Days
The first Play Days event was held before a virtual audience, with speakers going to a sound stage. But the plan was always to do a physical show, White said.
“In the fourth year, we’re really coasting along, it’s certainly become a moment for the industry like we always hoped it would be,” Gibson said.
“Geoff [Keighley] starts off an experience for folks who are coming to town for Summer Game Fest. It gives them the highlights, and then they can come here and get hands-on experiential moments,” Gibson said.
Each year, the hands-on previews at Play Days keep growing, Gibson said.
“The live show can introduce something and then we can translate that into a hands-on experience in the next several days. So every year we see more and more of that, where something debuts and then suddenly the press can go play it. Sometimes people don’t even know what they’re going to play,” Gibson said. “And then they get to play a surprise game.”
Play Days takes place in the City Market Social Center, a renovated warehouse with 20,000 square feet of space in downtown Los Angeles. It’s more modern than the rest of the neighborhood, and so I thought of it as an island of niceness you didn’t know was there. But it’s a cheaper space with some real Los Angeles history behind it.
“When COVID happened, conventions and gatherings went away,” Gibson said. “And this was our opportunity to rebuild a new vision for what an event could be. We realized we didn’t have to stick to any conventions at all, and we could just rethink what we thought was great. Talking with Geoff among ourselves, we just wanted a more relaxing, comfy, vibey experience, where after three days of playing games, you’re not exhausted. You have good food, fresh air and no lines.”
I asked if they felt they were outgrowing the space yet.
“I think it’s a good size. We actually have several spaces that we haven’t activated yet, including an additional 9,000 square foot space right across 12th Street,” White said. “So our vision includes expanding the campus beyond where we are now, and continuing this feeling of something like South X Southwest, through the history of the campus.”
In fact, there was a very interesting company nearby that I secretly visited while at Play Days.
“All the buildings, whether beleaguered or not — they have a history. A hundred years ago, this was a produce distribution center. So all of these buildings were restaurants. Grocery stores would come to get all their stuff for the greater L.A. area,” Gibson said. “There’s basements underneath all these venues too. There’s, like, lots of secret spaces, way more space than you think.”
The space is big enough with multiple buildings where each publisher can add their own personality to the space. When I went into some of the dark rooms, it could be pretty creepy to see a horror game — reminding me of the ghosts of E3.
For decades, Gibson said, “We’ve been in gaming this entire time, but everyone kept asking us when we were going to start our own publishing label. We didn’t really know what our voice was as a publisher. There’s a lot of other publishers out there. We certainly know what our taste is. In 2020, with Ori and the Will of the Wisps, we struck a collaboration with Moon Studios and Microsoft to publish that on Switch, and that propelled us into understanding just what we could do as a publisher and what kind of games we could support.”
Escape Academy from Coin Crew Games was another hit that fulfilled some of the iam8bit taste.
“You can see that we’re really into nostalgic but also tactile things that feel like experiences with real artistry involved. We like small teams. We have manageable dev teams, not hundreds of people. Maybe a dozen people or us. Petal Runner is a good example of a team of two people making a game,” Gibson said.
The developers of Petal Runner approached iam8bit after a few years of development and asked if they would do physical merchandise for the game. The iam8bit team came back and asked to fund and publish the game.
“It will be five years when it comes out,” Gibson said.
White said, “And it will have that emotional resonance of nostalgia.”
Gibson and White liked Escape Academy right away because it was tactile and because they had also designed several escape rooms themselves.
“We did a rich medieval escape experience years ago. We did an Alita: Battle Angel experience. So we like building things, and they really captured the essence of that with Escape Academy, because they also met designing real-world escape rooms,” Gibson said. “So for us, it’s about digital meeting IRL, in a way.”
Besides escape rooms, they also like pets, like cats, dogs and hermit crabs, White said.
Origins
Gibson was a journalist about 25 years ago, writing about TV. Early on, at 15, he started writing about games. At his first E3, he had to make a fake ID because he was under 18. White came from film. They met on a hike near Griffith Observatory — a non-gamey way.
“I grew up with games. I got the Atari, 2600 when it came out. I’m older than him. I grew up going to arcades, putting quarters on the machines. But professionally, my career centered a little bit more around entertainment generally than game production. But when John and I met, it was kind of a natural fit. For whatever reason it works,” White said.
I asked them what iam8bit means.
“For me, it almost means, like this idea that we’re all built from the same fundamental building blocks as humans, and there’s unity, or there is a continuum across all of us, as diverse as we might be,” White said. “There’s something fundamental that we all share, and that’s the kind of thing that we as a company and a brand try to tap into. We try to grab onto that and bring people something that makes them feel joy or excitement or nerd out about whatever it is, and it’s pretty simple. You can break it down.”
Cozy games in a crazy world
I remarked, “Games can bring people together, even though 20 miles away, we have some riots going on. It’s a crazy world still.”
Even with the war happening between Russia and Ukraine, games held everyone together. iam8bit saw a 300% surge in sales on its website because people wanted to have the “comfort of games, like something arriving on the doorstep.”
Gibson added, “It really does speak to games being a healing factor for a lot of folks and community. You see it. People just hanging out in games. People don’t want to meet at bars anymore. They want to meet in the middle of field in Big Walk and have a conversation and solve some puzzles.”
I noted that I had written a lot of stories about games about peace over the years. There was an Israeli team with a Palestinian on it. They made a mobile game where you could team up with other people, and then at the end of the game session, you would find out from what countries they were from.
“That’s amazing,” White said.
“Then they could find out that maybe they played together with somebody that they would never be able to talk to,” I said.
“I think there’s something nice too about games, like Simpler Times 2XLP as a game that we published,” Gibson said. “It’s similar to a short hike. It’s just games. You don’t need to feel the pressure or stress of scores or timers. They’re just like little experiences where you can find peace for yourself, a quiet place to hang out for that day.”
During the summer game fest, they enjoyed seeing the joy created by the puppet game, called Felt It Boxing, where Muppet-like characters fought each other. It was a simple game with puppets, but it was built in Unreal Engine.
“It’s just so cool that games have come that far,” Gibson said.
The state of gaming — a small industry still
I noted a lot of people are concerned about the state of the game industry and whether it will keep growing.
“It’s like music and movies too. People talk about the state of the movie industry in L.A., but it doesn’t mean movies aren’t getting made,” Gibson said. “Music never stops getting made. And talking about size of teams, you can make a game as a solo developer, or you can make a game with 1,000 people. That’s a pretty great threshold for things just existing.”
White said Day of the Devs serves as a great way for iam8bit to meet new emerging and exciting game developers. Even with hundreds of thousands of developers, it’s still a small industry, Gibson said.
“We want to find homes for people who make games. We’ve recommended several games to Blumhouse because we’re great friends with Zach Wood, the president,” Gibson said. “He’s recommended games to us. It’s really just a small bucket of people.”
I noted I had interviewed Johnny Galvatron about his game, The Artful Escape, and how it took his small team six years to make their first game. Now his Beethoven & Dinosaur studio was back at the Annapurna room where he showed me Mixtape, this time made in two years.
White and Gibson had seen that earlier game as well, and they talked with Annapurna about that one too — and it found its home.
“We wanted to make something different because being stuck in a stuffy convention center for a weekend is no fun,” Gibson said. “It’s also not as loud.”
Of all the things that iam8bit does for indie game devs and game journalists and creators, I have to say that the one thing I appreciate among the din of games and the arcade-like experience of Play Days is … the couches. It’s where I can sit with the game devs, hear about their journey, and play their games in comfort.
For that, to White and Gibson of iam8bit, I say, “Thank you.”