The gaming industry is now bigger than it has ever been. Blockbuster AAA titles are toiled over for years by teams of several hundred employees, and once released, they take in hundreds of millions within days or even hours. To leave that world behind and go independent takes a certain amount of bold confidence, and Karla Zimonja and the team at The Fullbright Company were not afraid of taking the challenge.
“We were just at points in our lives where it made sense to take a big risk. Steve [Gaynor, lead designer and writer at Fullbright] called us up and was just like, ‘Well, you guys wanna take the jump?’, and we all had situations in our personal lives where we were like, ‘Yeah, let’s go,’” Zimonja, Fullbright’s 2D artist and story adviser, said in a Skype interview, adding “we were all willing to take a jump and had confidence in each other.”
The three initial risk-takers were Zimonja, Gaynor and Johnnemann Nordhagen, all of whom had worked together at 2K Marin, most notably on the acclaimed DLC for BioShock 2 entitled ‘Minerva’s Den’ (Kate Craig soon joined them, handling environmental art). Having put that experience behind her, Zimonja is proud of the result but disappointed with the limiting nature of the AAA space.
“‘Minerva’s Den’ was a really good experience. That was my high water mark for years,” she said. “But there’s a lot of things you can’t do in AAA. There’s a lot of things that are very difficult to make happen. We just wanted to do something [that] we couldn’t do there.”
Zimonja was eager to point out the many benefits of working in the independent sphere. “You have hugely more freedom to do unconventional things,” she said, “story-wise, you can make experimental games about being a cyber-queen or something, you can do that. You’re going to have a really hard time being super weird and avant-garde in the AAA space.”
“I worked on a whole bunch of things with this game, and it’s way more satisfying to do that than to just be like, ‘Well, I made the textures for 4 out of the 6 guns and most of the armour,’ it’s like, thats cool, I guess. [laughs] With Gone Home, I did every single note, all the packaging, helped out with some models, casting, voice recording, video editing…all kinds of stuff. It’s much more interesting to be able to do a variety of work.”
Zimonja, 36, has been in this industry for a while, but it was never the goal to be here. She received a degree in animation from the Rhode Island School of Design, worked on some TV shows (like Dr. Katz) and commercials, ultimately feeling dissatisfied, and by chance started working in games.
“This was back in the day when it was maybe easier to move around career-wise,” she said, “and it wasn’t quite like it is now where it’s harder to get your foot in the door. Then I got into the possibilities of working on games rather than other kinds of entertainment, especially commercials, because, sheesh.”
“I grew to love it and I feel like I’ve gotten to do some cool things in games, which is nice,” she continued, “which is probably more than I would’ve gotten to do if I had been stuck in the mainstream animation industry. Games have a lot of freedom.”
To wit, Gone Home – Fullbright’s first game, released in August – appears at first to be a creepy horror game taking place in a haunted house, but ends up being a sweet, nuanced story about a teen lesbian romance in 1995, when Riot Grrrl was in full force.
The use of certain horror elements (and the presentation of these elements in the game’s marketing) was purely intentional to throw players off course. “We needed those [horror] tropes to set the scene and keep you uneasy. We used it as a tool to keep the player’s expectations in line,” she said, “something seemingly freaky appears and immediately there’s an explanation.”
“There’s a certain amount of scariness that you’re going to have in an empty house,” she added, “then once we have that we can use it to remind you that real-life situations can seem scary but have a logical explanation and/or can seem scary but the emotional truths are the real, important thing.”
The choice of setting was also distinctly purposeful. “The area [in Oregon] in that time period [was] rife with cool feminist movements and Riot Grrrl is a big, visible aspect of that, so we figured it would be an awesome character trait to have our main characters be into that,” she said, “and it’s almost probable when you consider really rebellious teens in that time period, in this location, ground zero for Riot Grrrl.”
She said despite growing up in the 90s, she was mostly isolated from the feminist movements of the era. “It’s mostly in retrospect that that’s meaningful. I was in a small town in Massachusetts, so there was not a lot of that kind of thing present,” she said, “but I knew about it thanks to stuff like Sassy [a feminist magazine] and a couple of other cool publications. It’s mostly imagining how it would’ve been to have been engaged in that.”
However, Zimonja is very aware of the rampant sexism in the gaming industry today. “In my AAA life, there has not been a whole lot of super upfront, in your face sexism,” she said, “but the pay difference is real, the amount of authority and amount of times you get consulted versus guys with the same role is significantly different. I have never worked at a AAA company that is more than maybe 7%, 10% female. It’s preposterous.”
“I noticed this when I was talking to a college student at GDC,” she went on, “and there were booth babes around and I made a comment about it, like, “Yup, they sure are doing a great job respecting us!” and the student was like, “I don’t know, whatever, I can not pay attention to it”, and I was like, you shouldn’t have to ignore this and deal with the weird marginalization that comes with it.”
Gone Home, with its focus on feminism and female characters, stands out in a male-dominated gaming marketplace, and Zimonja 
holds this as a sincere point of pride.
“It was really good to be able to do something that really reflected our values and to actually be progressive and allowed to have multiple female characters,” she said. “We pass the Bechdel test [which measures gender bias in media]. It’s really good to be a counter example in that regard, because it’s nice to show people that it won’t make the world explode if you behave better.”
Going independent may have been a risk, but on top of telling the story they wanted to tell, Gone Home has so far sold well over 50,000 copies, and Zimonja feels gratified.
“It’s very different from working on a AAA game. That’s not nearly as much yours, the team is so much bigger, so you share it with so many people,” she said. “It’s a strange situation, it’s hard to believe the praise is about us. It’s a very weird thing, it mostly just feels like people being very sweet.”
After switching between careers and going through the corporate machine of the gaming industry, Zimonja is content to challenge it from an independent standpoint.
“The space is narrowing,” she said, “so if you want to do something different, you have to leave.”
Buy Gone Home here.
– Jake
Arbitrary Analysis 