A student project, a graduation and a deal with Sony, 2006.

thatgamecompany began in a university programme. Wikipedia says the company, whose legal name is Thatgamecompany, Inc. and which styles itself in lowercase as thatgamecompany, was founded on 15 May 2006 by Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago, then students at the University of Southern California. It says the business was organised as Thatgamecompany, LLC from 2006 until 2012, when it took its present corporate form, and that it is based in Santa Monica, California, with Chen as president and creative director.

The idea for the studio formed a few months before it existed. Wikipedia says that in late 2005 Chen and Santiago were in the final year of their master’s degrees in the Interactive Media Program at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, and had just released Cloud, a student game made with several classmates. The group treated it as an experiment to see whether a game could express something different from what games had expressed before, and how much public interest there was in that kind of work. The response encouraged the two to set up their own company so that they could keep making games built around feelings rather than around game mechanics once they left university.

Distribution shaped the plan. Wikipedia says the founders saw the growth of digital downloads as a way to make games without the financial exposure of boxed retail releases, which they believed would otherwise mean working for other companies to build up funds. The company was founded as the two finished their degrees, and it soon signed a deal with Sony Computer Entertainment, which had been impressed by Flow, a Flash game Chen made as part of his master’s thesis. Under that agreement thatgamecompany was contracted to produce three games for the upcoming PlayStation Network download service, and it received startup funding and space at Sony’s offices in Los Angeles.

The founding team was small. Wikipedia lists Chen, Santiago, the designer Nick Clark, who had worked with Chen on Flow, and the lead engineer John Edwards. Santiago served as president and as producer of the company’s games. Chen, although a co-founder, initially worked at Maxis on the game Spore before returning full-time to serve as creative director.

Flow, Flower, Journey and the end of a contract.

The Sony contract set the rhythm until 2012. Wikipedia says the PlayStation 3 version of Flow was released on 22 February 2007, after the team had hoped to finish it for the launch of the PlayStation Network the previous November. Its follow-up, Flower, in which the player steers the wind carrying a petal, came out on 12 February 2009, and after that release the studio moved out of Sony’s offices into its own building in Los Angeles. The third game under the agreement, Journey, was released on 13 March 2012, with Robin Hunicke as producer, so that Santiago could concentrate on her role as president.

The completion of the contract brought a change at the top. Gamasutra reported on 29 March 2012 that Santiago, co-founder and president, was leaving the studio as it began work on a new game, and that she described the departure as entirely amicable. The report recalled that she had co-founded thatgamecompany six years earlier with Chen, and that the two had worked together as USC students on Cloud, launching the company on a shared aim of finding new forms of expression through games. The studio’s statement borrowed the imagery of Journey, saying that after the hard struggle behind its three games, “awaiting at the mountaintop are new enlightenments and new sets of milestones for our life.”

Independence from a single platform holder followed. Wikipedia says that with the Sony contract complete the company raised venture funding so it could develop for several platforms without a publisher, and began work on Sky: Children of the Light, a free-to-play multiplayer adventure. It says Sky was released on iOS on 18 July 2019, on Android in April 2020, on Nintendo Switch in June 2021, on PlayStation 4 in December 2022 and on Windows in April 2024, and that the studio has focused on supporting it since its launch.

Santa Monica remains the base. GamesIndustry.biz reported on 18 March 2020 that the company planned a second office in the San Francisco Bay Area, as an extension of its Santa Monica headquarters, to work on technology and platform development and on running Sky. Chen told the publication, “We can’t really convince everyone to move to Los Angeles.” Wikipedia says the plan was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It adds that in March 2022 the company announced new outside investment and that the Pixar co-founder Edwin Catmull had become an advisor, and that Chen described its fifth game as “like a theme park”.

A lowercase wordmark and a method built on feelings.

A game studio’s identity usually reaches players before the game does. The company logo appears in a short boot screen or animated ident in the seconds while software loads, then again on boxes, store pages, trailers and the credits. Because those seconds repeat every time someone starts a game, the ident tends to be brief, legible on a phone or a television, and quiet enough that it does not compete with the title that follows. Publishers add a second layer: one publishing name may sit in front of games from several development studios, each with its own look, so the publisher’s mark has to work beside very different artwork.

Much of the visible branding, though, belongs to the games rather than the company. Characters, mascots and title logos carry the recognition, and the studio name may appear underneath them in small type. Some companies let a recurring character stand in for the studio; others are known chiefly through a consistent visual style shared across their games. Ownership changes leave marks too: when a studio or its parent is bought, the new owner’s branding may appear beside the studio’s own, and when a studio becomes independent, the parent’s mark drops away. For designers, the practical point is that a studio identity is a set of placements — a boot screen, a store icon, a credit line, a website — and each needs a version of the mark that works at its size and in its moment.

A name written small and games planned around a feeling.

The clearest part of the identity is typographic. Wikipedia gives the registered name as Thatgamecompany, Inc. but says the company is stylised as thatgamecompany, one run-on word in lowercase.

The working method is part of the brand story as well. Wikipedia says that when the company designs a game it begins by deciding which emotions it wants the player to feel, rather than starting from mechanics or genre, and that Santiago described the aim as pushing the boundaries of games as a communicative medium for a wide range of people. It says Chen has stated that the studio is not opposed to action games but does not plan large blockbuster titles, because he believes the financial pressure would stifle new ideas. The same article says Chen changed Flower’s design when early testers felt it promoted green energy, preferring that the games evoke feelings rather than carry an overt message.

The three Sony-era titles share a visual grammar of open space with little or no text. Wikipedia describes Flow as a game about a microorganism drifting through two-dimensional planes, based on Chen’s USC research into dynamic difficulty, Flower as a game with no text or dialogue in which the player blows petals across fields, and Journey as a desert crossing in which a robed figure heads toward a distant mountain and may meet one other online player at a time, without speech. Sky, the fourth game, is described there as a spiritual successor to all of them.

For a design guide, thatgamecompany shows how a studio can let a lowercase name and a consistent emotional tone do the work of a loud logo; compare Annapurna Interactive, a Los Angeles games publisher, and Double Fine Productions, a San Francisco studio with a very different temperament. For this guide we use dune gold, scarf rust and dusk blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep thatgamecompany’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.