PHL Gets Game

PHL Gets Game

Three Westphal alumni are co-owners of PHL Collective, one of Philadelphia’s relatively few (so far!) professional video game studios.

Work is plenty of fun and games for Bren King, Brian Gitlin and Ryan Reed. The 29-year-old digital media grads are co-owners of Philadelphia-based PHL Collective, which in six years has released nine games. PHL Collective’s popular titles include the hockey/soccer/pinball hybrid “ClusterPuck 99” for Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC, and “We Bare Bears: Food Truck Rush” for the Cartoon Network’s location-based VR initiative.

“A good game needs to be simple and engaging,” says King, the company’s art director. “You need to have something that you can explain to someone in a few sentences and have them pop in and play. Something that almost anyone of any generation can grab a controller and play.”

“We’re firm believers in iterative development,” adds Reed, the lead environment artist. “Taking a simple concept and further developing it over time leads to a better experience than trying to design and anticipate everything at the beginning.”

The Drexel alums worked closely together throughout college, then helped form the company shortly after their 2013 graduation, with Nick Madonna, Terry DiFeliciantonio and Vincent Erhard. From its original six employees it has grown to more than 20, expanding not only in size, but also in the complexity of its projects. In the early days, PHL Collective focused on mobile games. For the past four years, it’s been developing in the console and virtual-reality space.

“All of our VR games are local multiplayer,” says Gitlin, a programmer project lead. “They’re location-based arcade games so you actually have to go to a family fun center or something like that to play them. You can have three people in the same space playing together and having a good time with each other.”

That’s often the scene at the studio, where the trio constantly play early iterations of games they’re building together.

“We don’t plan complex moments like we’re going to have this crazy cinematic experience,” Gitlin says. “We’re always just thinking of simple game ideas then playing them a lot together then figuring out what it needs.”

Among the biggest challenges in the business, Reed says, is trying to get people’s eyes on their games in an increasingly crowded marketplace. They’ve had success doing that at trade shows around the country, including PAX South in San Antonio where their booth attracted such a large number of players and spectators that security had to break up the crowd.

“Once the game that you’ve been working on for so long is out there, seeing people have positive reactions to it fills you with a lot of joy,” King says. During their travels they’ve met industry leaders like Chris Charla, the ID@Xbox director, and Tim Schafer, CEO of Double Fine Productions.

“It’s really neat getting to talk to these people who we’ve heard about for so long and have them treat us as equals,” Gitlin says. “They’re asking us what we’re doing, how long we’ve been in business. They’ll say, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize that Philadelphia had a gaming scene.’ We’re like, ‘We’re trying to start it.’” —Mike Unger