Buy local video games

Years ago, Willie Stevenson worked in the film and TV business for
Salter Street Productions. He was a producer on the popular fantasy
series Lexx. Eventually, the compromises of that world started to get
to him.

“I always wanted to get into this sector,” he says, but wondered if
it was a viable thing, an independent videogame company in Halifax. His
wife and business partner Colleen Shannahan did some research and spoke
with a few consultants and other indie gaming companies, discovering
that it was doable. Along with two computer science grads they created
Silverback Productions, until last year run out of their Dartmouth
home. Now, with their hip Charles Street office and 14 employees, not
counting local freelancers and suppliers—in the fields of
programming, distribution, sound recording, music and more—the
company is planning to go huge.

Silverback’s flagship game is called Ben and Kranky. It’s an
adventure-based, non-violent story for kids, about a dog who has to
rescue his boy, full of magic and artifacts in a gorgeously rendered
environment. It’s expected to debut in the coming months, depending on
the interest of what Stevenson calls “big American fish” who are
interested in partnering up with Silverback. Also on deck is a game
Silverback is developing with the help of First Nations communities
across Canada, called Project White Calf, expected to hit the PC/ Xbox
market at an indeterminate point in the future.

Available right now is Mr Jones’ Graveyard Shift, the company’s
first casual game—an easy to download, easy to learn, rapidly
addictive genre of gaming aimed at women—which, at the time of
this writing, is the 10th most popular time management game on the
enormously popular bigfishgames.com.

“We have this great distributor,” Gogii Games, out of Moncton, “who
gives us crazy market penetration around the world, but we can’t sell
it ourselves,” says Stevenson, explaining the intricacies of video game
regulation. “If you want a half-a-million people playing your game,
you’re not going to do it yourself.”

Silverback’s loft-style office space is full of wide Mac monitors
and dedicated designers, creating environments that will be explored by
gamers internationally. Silverback joins a community of Halifax-area
digital animators, game and web specialists which has really taken off
over the past few years. There’ve been a few key changes in that
time.

“Bandwidth,” explains Stevenson, “And people’s trust of e-commerce.
Three years ago if you wanted to be anybody, you could do your thing
online and have a tiny percentage. Now we can create our own mojo and
slowly build it up. And we have an excellent team, mostly Dal
graduates, computer science. Those guys are really good, like a little
ninja squad.”

Stevenson, originally from Ottawa, needs no prompting to sing the
praises of Nova Scotia and why he and his wife chose to set up shop
here, starting with the good people at Nova Scotia Business Inc., who
helped secure tax credits for the gaming industry, as well as
networking opportunities with other local software businesses.

“I find most governmental organizations built around this stuff to
be useless, but NSBI has been really effective. First of all they
solicited all of us, little game companies like this, to get a
roundtable together and say, ‘What can you guys do for each other?’
That’s how we met TeamSpace,” a Burnside-based web development company
now working with Silverback. “It’s not like TV where everyone is
fighting for the Telefilm dollar and networks are forced to buy
Canadian shows…there’s demand. NSBI, for instance, sent us to San
Francisco to a major trade show. A very good taxpayer investment. With
that we made sales.”

And what of being physically located here in Halifax? What does that
do for Silverback?

“You’ve got awesome brains and creativity. Colleen and I can just
come up with ideas and we don’t need to go anywhere else. People all
over the world are buying that game and they don’t care where it’s
from. But you’re watching TV and you click through the channels and go
‘Canadian show.’ It looks it. It just wasn’t fun” working in that
business. “Whereas in this industry, there are no borders.”

This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2009.