Interviews

Talking to the TIGA Awards winners: Fireproof Games

On becoming 'fat, smug and entitled' devs

Talking to the TIGA Awards winners: Fireproof Games
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| The Room

Earlier in November, UK trade association TIGA hosted its inaugural game awards in Bath as part of the ExPlay 2012 conference.

Having spoken to scores of nominees in the run up to the big night, we decided to catch up with a few of the lucky winners, with Fireproof Games next up.

We spoke to commercial director Barry Meade to find out how the studio feels about Fireproof Games picking up the best game design trophy for The Room.

How do you feel about winning these TIGA awards? Barry Meade: We're very happy, our freelance group Fireproof Studios won Best Service Provider 2012 award, and Fireproof Games won Best Games Design 2012 award for The Room!

It doesn't really get much better than that to be honest - unless TIGA wanted to give us two or three trophies per win so we can compete with TheChineseRoom who swept the boards with the fab Dear Esther.

Being in the same company and treated as equals with those guys and others, we really felt like pigs-in-the proverbial - the fact we came away with two amazing awards just made it all sing.

What impact do you think these awards will have on your studio?

We'll, we're ordering our first trophy cabinet which is a nice change in office furniture.

Honestly though, we've been plugging away helping other developers games for four years, so it's great to get these gentle signs from the universe that trying to make our own games too is a good decision, ultimately it makes our transition into doing our own stuff that much more confident.

Plus there's the ego thing: you know of course that we aspire to one day becoming fat, smug and entitled developers and hope that these awards will go some way towards achieving that worthy goal.

How did you enjoy the award ceremony? Were you out late at the afterparty?

It was a great night - we had a full table of ten Fireproofers, we chatted to a few lovely folk and got to meet you guys at Pocket Gamer too, and all in that amazing venue, a truly gorgeous building.

So the answer is definitely yes we enjoyed the awards - in fact our livers testified that we over-enjoyed the awards, and it was witnessed buy our drinks bill at the end of the night.

Unfortunately, some of us missed the after party as they had to go back to Guildford at midnight but another group of us stayed behind and took up the slack on the bar tab.

We did the usual after-party thing: tried to look cool while actually not being able to stand, and being network-tastic while barely able to speak.

Everyone we met was great, seriously nice people and it was very relaxed. We had a great laugh all told and were very glad we stayed.

Where you you be putting your trophy?

Well guests to our office need to know just how awesome we are, so the first idea was that we could hang the awards from a string and balance them over the door so that they smash visitors in the face.

But I was voted down on that one by un-hipsters who don't get how 'in' scarification is, so instead we have a shiny new table/cabinet thingy ordered and both awards will get pride of place on that.

Really though, we're super pleased to have them - all the signs indicate that 2013 is going to be a good year for Fireproof and these TIGA awards are some actual physical evidence that we're not insane to read it that way.

We want to thank all involved, especially Nisha Valand, in organising it and for giving us a chance to take part - we certainly hope to compete next year too.

Thanks to Barry for his time.
James Nouch
James Nouch
PocketGamer.biz's news editor 2012-2013