Snapshot Games is a Bulgarian

video game developer A video game developer is a broad term for a software developer specializing in video game development – the process and related disciplines of creating video games. A game developer can range from one person who undertakes all tasks to a large ...

headquartered in

Sofia Sofia ( ; bg, София, Sofiya, ) is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria. It is situated in the Sofia Valley at the foot of the Vitosha mountain in the western parts of the country. The city is built west of the Iskar river, and ha ...

. Snapshot Games was founded in 2013 by

Julian Gollop Julian Gollop is a British computer game designer and producer specialising in strategy games, who has founded and led Mythos Games, Codo Technologies and Snapshot Games. He is known best as the "man who gave birth to the '' X-COM'' franchise." ...

and David Kaye. Gollop is recognized for creating the '' X-COM'' video game franchise in the 1990s with '' X-COM: UFO Defense'' and '' X-COM: Apocalypse''. Gollop also is the

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

of Snapshot Games. In addition to Gollop, the company includes about eight developers who are industry veterans with years of previous experience working for Ubisoft Sofia,

Crytek Black Sea Creative Assembly Sofia (formerly Black Sea Studios and Crytek Black Sea) is a Bulgarian video game developer based in Sofia. It was founded in May 2001 by Vesselin Handjiev. In July 2008, the company was acquired by Crytek, which then sold it ...

, and other Bulgaria studios.

History

On November 12, 2013, Snapshot Games was founded as a

privately held corporation A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in the respective listed markets, but rather the company's stock is ...

in the state of

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

of the United States. However, it is based in Bulgaria where its

, lives and where video game development costs are about one-third of what they would be for a similar

studio A studio is an artist or worker's workroom. This can be for the purpose of acting, architecture, painting, pottery (ceramics), sculpture, origami, woodworking, scrapbooking, photography, graphic design, filmmaking, animation, industrial design ...

in the United States. In April 2014, Snapshot Games launched a

Kickstarter Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...

to crowdfund the development of its first video game, ''

Chaos Reborn ''Chaos Reborn'' is a turn-based tactical role-playing game developed by Snapshot Games and was part funded through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in April 2014. Following an early access release in December 2014, the full game was released ...

''. The effort was successful, generating over $210,000. The game was made available through the Early Access program of

Steam Steam is a substance containing water in the gas phase, and sometimes also an aerosol of liquid water droplets, or air. This may occur due to evaporation or due to boiling, where heat is applied until water reaches the enthalpy of vaporization ...

on December 9, 2014 before it was released officially on October 26, 2015. The game received a score of 86/100 on review aggregation website

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

. ''

PC Gamer ''PC Gamer'' is a magazine and website founded in the United Kingdom in 1993 devoted to PC gaming and published monthly by Future plc. The magazine has several regional editions, with the UK and US editions becoming the best selling PC games ma ...

'' awarded it a score of 87%, saying "A true wizard’s wheeze, and a fine return for one of gaming’s oldest tactical classics." The game also was nominated for a

Golden Joystick Award The Golden Joystick Awards, also known as the People's Gaming Awards, is a video game award ceremony; it awards the best video games of the year, as voted for originally by the British general public, but is now a global event that can be voted ...

in the 2015 Best Indie Game category but lost to ''

Kerbal Space Program ''Kerbal Space Program'' (''KSP'') is a space flight simulation video game developed by Mexican developer Squad for Microsoft Windows, macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system de ...

''. Julian Gollop teased the development of a new video game, '' Phoenix Point'', on

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

on March 18, 2016. For the next year, Snapshot Games worked on designing and producing the game. After investing $450,000 into this first year of development, the company launched a

Fig The fig is the edible fruit of ''Ficus carica'', a species of small tree in the flowering plant family Moraceae. Native to the Mediterranean and western Asia, it has been cultivated since ancient times and is now widely grown throughout the world ...

crowdfunding campaign in April 2017 to obtain the $500,000 they budgeted to complete the game. The future of Snapshot relied on the success of the campaign. "There is no Plan B," Gollop said to the press at the time. The campaign was successful, raising more than $765,000 from over 10,300 different contributors. Snapshot Games has committed to release '' Phoenix Point'' in 2019. In November 2020, Embracer Group announced that they acquired the company through

Saber Interactive Saber Interactive Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher founded in 2001 with headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Saber was acquired by Embracer Group in February 2020, making the studio a direct subsidiary. The company ...

, which will be the parent company.

Video games

References

External links

* {{Embracer Group 2013 establishments in California 2020 mergers and acquisitions Companies based in Sofia Indie game developers Saber Interactive Video game companies established in 2013 Video game companies of Bulgaria Video game development companies