Kempt Ltd (2003-2015)

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 work we became known for

Most of our early client work was Flash games. At first they were tiny. I think the first budget I was ever given was £1,000, and I built the whole thing on my own. But the work scaled quickly.

The next important step was a licensing deal with Miniclip for one of our self-published games, The Kung Fu Statesman, a political satire title taking the mickey out of the Labour government of the time. After that came our first really significant client win: a project for Sony Electronics called The Armchair Games. It was an opportunistic attempt to capitalise on the Olympics, essentially a Flash-based riff on Daley Thompson’s Decathlon reimagined for the living room, with events like the Adbreak Toilet Dash and the Pizza Delivery Chuck and Catch. That one went on to attract tens of millions of visitors.

From there, that kind of work became our bread and butter. Branded games, advergames, promotional games, portal titles, and the occasional wonderfully odd commission. One of my personal favourites was Celebrity Pedigree, which involved breeding dogs with celebrities’ heads and seeing what bizarre mutations emerged. It was gloriously stupid, exactly the sort of idea the Flash era was unusually good at supporting, and I’d still love to bring it back to life one day.

Alongside all that, we also built a number of large websites, including a games portal for Red Bull which felt genuinely cutting edge at the time. It was backed by WordPress, but with a much more ambitious front end than people tended to expect then – heavily driven by modern CSS and JavaScript, highly accessible, visually polished, and backed by a very healthy budget. That kind of work sat slightly outside the Flash games story, but it came from the same place: a reputation for building things that were commercially sharp, technically capable, and more inventive than clients were used to getting.

The biggest Flash project

The biggest single Flash game project we ever delivered was for Pepsi. Our share of the budget alone was just over a quarter of a million pounds, as part of a wider sponsorship and distribution partnership with a major website, so I would expect the total campaign budget was probably measured in the millions.

The remarkable part was the schedule. We were given about nine weeks to deliver roughly a quarter of a million pounds’ worth of work at a point when the studio only had around eight staff. I dealt with that by reinforcing the internal team with four freelancers, two of whom I already knew and trusted, then breaking the delivery down into five discrete game projects plus a separate infrastructure project. My internal team took responsibility for two of the games and the infrastructure, while the remaining three were distributed to friendly studios I’d built relationships with over the years, including 4T2, Kerb and Matmi.

It wasn’t entirely plain sailing. One of the games had to be substantially rewritten towards the end of the project. But I had anticipated that something would go wrong and had deliberately built contingency into the schedule. Between that contingency, the diligence of the team, and in particular the work of Max Hyde – who joined us as a freelancer on that project and then continued working with me for more than a decade afterwards – we hit the deadline, launched successfully, and the campaign went on to become one of the biggest things we ever made. From memory, it attracted more than 200 million unique visitors over the course of its run.

The biggest mobile project

Our biggest mobile game project, however, was Red Bull Kart Fighter. We produced three iterations – Kart Fighter 1, Kart Fighter 2 and Kart Fighter 3 – and across the series the total budget was measured in the millions. The games were hugely successful, reaching number one around the world, including in both the UK and the US, and collectively attracting more than 50 million installs.

Across the series, that amounts to around 1 billion minutes of attention, or nearly 2,000 years of cumulative engagement, roughly the same span of time since the fall of the Roman Empire. To put that into context, if you tried to buy an equivalent volume of 30-second video attention on YouTube, you would be looking at something in the region of $19 million worth of media. And because Red Bull Kart Fighter 3 generated enough revenue to cover the production costs of the entire trilogy, Red Bull effectively reached that audience at no net cost.

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.

Playing the games

Due to the brutal destruction of Flash by Adobe, Apple’s regular alterations to iOS, and the impact of GDPR, a lot of the games we built are no longer available to play and live only in the memories of the hundreds of millions of people who played them – and on my archive disk, where I still have a full backup.

Thankfully though, there is hope that they will live again due to the efforts of the wonderful people behind projects like Flashpoint Archive – a downloadable application which allows you to browse and run old games – and Ruffle, an open-source Flash Player emulator that runs in modern browsers. The latter doesn’t support all games yet, largely because recreating the original Flash runtime is an ongoing process and compatibility with some ActionScript 3-era games and APIs is still incomplete. But the team are making great progress so, hopefully, I’ll be able to dust off all the old SWFs again soon.

In the meantime, I’m updating my gameography with links to titles that I find. Do feel free to send me links if you find others.

Internal projects

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

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, and 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.

Here’s a closing section in the same mode as the rest of the page, based on your Chris page. (kemptand.co)

Consulting, mentoring and recent work

After Dead Five closed in early 2022, I returned to consulting, which in some ways felt less like a reinvention than a return to first principles. Over the years I had ended up doing far more than making games. I’d spent a long time helping teams make better decisions, structure projects more sensibly, spot commercial opportunities earlier, and avoid the kinds of operational mistakes that quietly kill otherwise good businesses. Once I stepped back from running a studio full time, it made sense to lean into that directly.

Over the last five or six years that work has ranged across product strategy, production, commercial planning and mentoring, mostly within games, media and digital products. Some of it has been hands-on delivery, some of it has been advisory, and some of it has been closer to teaching. The common thread has been helping people see the system more clearly: where the friction really is, where the leverage is, and what needs to change to make progress.

That has included work with studios, scale-ups and established businesses, building on the same mix of product, commercial and operational thinking that shaped Kempt in the first place. In practical terms, that usually means some combination of product direction, market positioning, team structure, process improvement, monetisation, and leadership support. Sometimes the problem is strategic. Sometimes it is organisational. Quite often it is simply that a team is too deep in the work to see what is actually slowing them down.

Alongside that, mentoring has become a more important part of what I do. Some of that is formal, some informal, but the principle is the same. I have made enough mistakes over the years to have a fairly good sense of which ones are avoidable, and I get a lot of satisfaction from helping other people shortcut parts of that journey. Not by pretending there is one right way to build a company or a career, but by helping them think more clearly about trade-offs, incentives, timing and risk. That work matters to me for the same reason the studio always did. I like helping good people do better work.