Kempt Ltd (2003-15)

I set Kempt up in early 2003 after a meeting that made something very clear. I could no longer work for someone who didn’t value me. I resigned almost immediately and decided to build a company that would learn from the mistakes I’d been watching up close.

At the start, Kempt was meant to be a broad creative and production studio: web, print, video, whatever we could do well. But somewhere around 2007, after building and releasing roughly 50 Flash games, the truth became unavoidable. We weren’t an agency. We were a game studio.

The ideas that shaped the culture

Kempt was founded on a set of beliefs that later became our culture:

• It should be possible to enjoy work and make decent money at the same time.
• A great team is like a great band: mutual respect, shared rhythm, and genuine friendship.
• Credit matters – for good work and good ideas.
• Niche appeal is powerful. The people who like you really like you, and it quickly filters out the people who don’t.

The Magnificent Stunts

In late 2013 I hit a wall. Ten years doing the same kind of work felt like too much, and I wanted to bet on our own IP. We built a series of games set in a shared world of characters called The Magnificent Stunts, which I pitched as an investment opportunity on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den.

By the time the episode aired, three games were already out. The broadcast drove hundreds of thousands of installs, and the final instalment, Stunt Wheels, launched on iOS in May 2015. It stayed live in the App Store until late 2024.

Despite the apparent success, we were scuppered by a small mistake: a bug in the ad-serving code meant we didn’t earn anywhere near what we should have when we finally got traction. Hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of effort was thrown away for the sake of a five-minute check. I have never forgotten that lesson, and I have never let a team make that mistake again.

Burke & Best and beyond

Bruised and battered, we returned to work-for-hire for a while. In spring 2015 the studio was acquired by a larger group and rebranded as Burke & Best. Kempt continued to exist as a vehicle to support our games (you can still play a few), but for all practical purposes it marked the end of our studio’s journey.

After that I kept building games – first at Burke & Best, and later at another studio I co-founded, Dead Five, with some of my old teammates in December 2019. Dead Five shared some of Kempt’s sensibilities, but with more punk ambition, and it was designed to take advantage of what felt to me like obvious opportunities in hypercasual games.

Other Kempt projects

Alongside client games (and the odd website), we also built a few entrepreneurial side projects:

• MemeCounter.com (2007) – a Flash game and viral tracking system that pre-dated Google Analytics and was used by major brands including Pepsi, Red Bull and Lego, as well as the BBC.
• KillerViral.com (2004) – our early viral games portal, featuring client work, our own games, and even competitors’ titles. It attracted hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors and raised tens of thousands for AIDS-awareness charities.
• TinyMania.com – a second portal celebrating stupidly simple games, including 45 micro-games, a playable compilation called TinyTrials, and another 21 client projects published under that label.

The work

A lot of the work above is no longer available to play in its original form, but you can find more in my Gameography, plus gameplay footage on my YouTube channel.

Update: some of the old games are playable again thanks to the teams behind Flash preservation projects like Flashpoint Archive and Ruffle.