Description

Mutant Entertainment Studios is an independent video game studio focusing on niche games

History

Located in sunny Chico California, Mutant Entertainment Studios was founded in 2006 by Clarke Steinback, Kate Stoddard and Jeff Underwood with the goal of producing niche market games featuring deep and compelling game play.

After finishing The Campaign of 1863 Kate exited the company, while Clarke and Jeff continued on. In late 2016 the dev team was expanded and work began on the second title Questr, the companies first PC/Steam title.

Immediately upon release of Questr the studio began work on the satire game I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling, which proved to be a moderate success. After taking a few short weeks of time to rest and regroup, work then began on Astro Joust

After completing Astro Joust several pitches and prototypes were considered until the studio was issued a challenge by several Twitter followers to lampoon the state of the Steam Store. After some quick prototypes development on Steamulator began and after a few short months the game was released in January of 2019. At this point the studio felt ready to attempt something larger and more grand in scope and the concept for Shadow of the Leviathan (SotL) was pitched internally. Due to the larger scope and visual quality necessary the team was expanded once again.

At the same time that production began on SotL, negotiations began in order to assist our friends at Golden Ghost Productions in the publication of their game Knighty Night. Knighty Night was released in June 2019. The Shadow of the Leviathan Kickstarter was launched shortly thereafter and was unsuccessful. After a short post-mortem on the Kickstarter campaign it was determined that SotL should be refocused down to it's initial concept, fishing for giant monsters. After a short time brainstorming SotL was officially reborn as Kaiju Fishing and a period of pre-production and prototyping began.

As updates/expansions for I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling continued for several years the team decided to finalize active support/development in order to focus on Kaiju Fishing. However the wacky nature of the Game Development Industry once again collided with the sarcastic nature of the dev team when 2K Games released the trailer for NBA 2K which contained in-game footage of actual Slot Machines, and ICBING 2(k) was pitched. After a whirlwind development cycle of approximately 3 months of part time development, ICBING 2(k) was released.

After several more months of dedicated and hard work the Pre-Alpha Demo for Kaiju Fishing was accepted into the Steam Summer Festival and was released on June 16th 2020.

Projects

• Kaiju Fishing
• I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling 2(k)
• Knighty Night
• Shadow of the Leviathan
• Steamulator
• Astro Joust
• I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling
• Questr
• The Campaign of 1863