How indie studio Accidental Queens emerged from a game jam

French developer Accidental Queens’s debut title A Normal Lost Phone was its first indie success, selling 100,000 copies and earning accolades from critics. But cofounder Elizabeth Maler says that they didn’t set out to form a game studio nor did they expect that so many people would receive A Normal Lost Phone so warmly. Rather, it emerged organically during the 2016 Global Game Jam, which is a yearly international hackathon event where participants gather to make games in 48 hours.

“[Co-founder Diane Landais and I] arrived and met some other people during the weekend and created A Normal Lost Phone with four people who didn’t know each other before,” Maler said in a conversation with GamesBeat. “That was really cool. Everyone left to go back to their home cities, because we all came from different cities. ‘That’s it, we made a cool game together, bye.’ After that we decided we’d spend just a few hours to improve the prototype and put it online. We did, and then it was a big success.”