Introducing Change Makers Game Studios

Change Makers Game Studios is new, but the idea has been around since the early 2000s.

I’ve been a game developer for most of my career, starting my first job as a game programmer less than a year out of high school. Creating games has always been exciting for me, as it combines both computer programming and creativity. Plus, the end result is interactive, immersive and fun – the polar opposite of the other career path which was open to me at the time, which would have had me working on an incredibly dull spreadsheet application at a soulless fossil fuel corporation.

For a couple of years I happily chugged away on a number of game titles published by companies such as Nintendo, Sierra and Microsoft, completely immersed in the work and oblivious to the world outside. But it wasn’t long before I noticed how polluted Earth is and saw poor treatment of many animal species. The devastation weighed heavily on me, and I couldn’t continue to sit there in my bubble when the world needed saving.

Games to save the world

That’s when the idea of Steer Madness was born. I wanted to take my skills as a game developer and combine it with activism to create a game where the player actively makes the world a better place. Okay, it’s just a virtual world, but the lessons are real and what players learn can affect what they do in reality.

In my spare time I developed and refined the concept of a game where a walking, talking, bicycle-riding cow goes on various missions to save animals. Progress was slow but it was taking shape into something with real potential. Several months in, I decided it was time to focus entirely on building the game, so I quit my job and started what might have been the world’s first vegan gaming company, Veggie Games Inc. (founded in Canada in 2004).

With the help of a full-time artist, some art school interns, and a few friends who volunteered to crawl into a tiny pillow-lined box to do voice acting, the original version of Steer Madness was completed and released in December 2004.

People who played the original version of Steer Madness were thrilled with the game, but sadly it had limited success because it was ahead of its time. There were very few vegans around in the early 2000s, and not many people had computers powerful enough for gaming. So unfortunately Veggie Games wasn’t sustainable and was disbanded. But the idea of some day relaunching Steer Madness was always on my mind.

Re-making Steer Madness for mobile

Nearly 20 years later, with veganism on the rise and gaining mainstream acceptance, it felt like the time had come. The game didn’t age well, however. The graphics were blocky and low resolution, and the amount of work that would be involved in updating the entire open city environment to modern graphics standards was well beyond what I could do by myself. It also didn’t play well on mobile, so a complete redesign was needed. Over the course of several months, Steer Madness was rebuilt from the ground up into the iconic vegan video game that it is today.

In Steer Madness, players learn about vegan food and compassion towards animals, all while using environmentally friendly transport. It’s impossible to measure exactly how much influence the game has had on the world, but from the feedback I’ve received it seems to have made a real difference.

Download Steer Madness here!

An Earth-friendly game studio

After the positive response from the latest version of Steer Madness, I knew I wanted to go a step further and create a game studio dedicated to creating quality games that help spread animal- and Earth-friendly messages far and wide.

With the new start it felt like it was time for a new name as well. The idea was to create a name which represented the desire to change the world for the better, but at the same time wasn’t so obvious that it would scare off mainstream folks (the people who need to hear our messages the most).

And so, Change Makers Game Studios was born.

“We make games that make a difference”

Change Makers Game Studios has been established as a non-profit, and is supported by donations, grants and sponsors.

As such, we are able to offer our games as completely free-to-play. This means there’s no paywall preventing people from learning important and potentially life-saving lessons.

With Change Makers Game Studios, our aim is to build games that:

• Promote a kinder world for all species;

• Entertain players young and old;

• Inspire people to take action towards a better world.

You can learn more about our plans here.

If you would like to support our mission to bring quality games advocating for animals and the environment to more screens, please consider donating here.