Just before Laser Dog Games released Catchee on iOS and Android, it shared a wonderful video of the game design process. Sadly – and we’ll get to this – the gist of the video was that the studio might be about to go bankrupt. But yes, we’ll get to that.
What stood out at the time, aside from the looming financial threat, was the way the team worked. Laser Dog is two people, Simon Renshaw and Rob Allison. Since 2013 they’ve been making astonishingly brisk and playable arcade games, generally for smartphones. Two people made all these games? How? Watch the video and you sense a partnership where the individuals are starting to blend a bit. Who does what? It’s hard to tell.
“Well that’s nice, and great that it comes across, cause it’s true.” Who said that? Simon or Rob? Fittingly I can’t tell you that either. Due to everyone being busy – we’ll get to this – I had to interview Laser Dog over a Google Doc. And very quickly it became impossible to tell the duo apart. So for most of the time I was talking to the Laser Dog hivemind. I suspect it would have felt like this over Skype anyway, tbh. These games are clearly made by people who finish each others’ sentences.
