Mike Bithell

Bithell independently developed an early version of the Thomas Was Alone video game in 2010 while working for Blitz Games, where he was a junior designer, and later a level designer on games such as Tak and the Guardians of Gross, Invincible Tiger: The Legend of Han Tao, iCarly (video_game) and Dead to Rights: Retribution, from 2007 to 2011. He developed the prototype game in 24 hours and released it for free online through the Kongregate website, receiving 100,000 'plays' in the first week. He joined Bossa Studios in February 2011, working to expand the flash-based Thomas to a full title and learning how to use the Unity engine in his time there. The full game was released on 30 June 2012 and went on to sell over a million copies, winning a BAFTA at the 9th British Academy Games Awards in the "Best Performer" category (for narrator Danny Wallace) and receiving a further two nominations ("Best Original Music" and "Best Story"). He left Bossa in January 2013 to "concentrate on indie development". He has since worked on a Robin Hood-based stealth game named Volume, which was released on 18 August 2015 for Windows, OS X, and PlayStation 4 and Vita platforms. In 2016, Bithell released EarthShape, a virtual reality game for Google Daydream. Bithell collaborated with composer Russell Shaw and animator Tim Borelli on the project. The game featured voice acting from British comedian Sue Perkins. In August 2017, Bithell released a new game Subsurface Circular, a first of what he calls "Bithell Shorts" that are designed as short, focused narrative games. In May 2018, Bithell released another short titled Quarantine Circular.