Tiger Style was founded in 2008, at the beginning of the indie games revolution, by Randy Smith and David Kalina, games industry veterans who left safe, reliable jobs to strike out on their own and pursue their values in business and game design. Tiger Style's mission is to contribute to the advancement of the interactive medium by bringing sophisticated, innovative interactions to a wide and willing audience.
Tiger Style is committed to making "games without guns," highly interactive, engaging experiences that don't rely on violent conflict resolution. It's not that we hate violence in entertainment. We avoid violence in our games in order to push ourselves into new frontiers. Violence is a thoroughly explored subject of game design, and we believe advancing the medium relies on creating new ways to represent a wider variety of topics.
Tiger Style is best known for these award-winning games.
Waking Mars (2012)
A "hard sci-fi" action-adventure platformer in which you
play a jetpacking scientist
who explores a network of caves on Mars, cultivates
ecosystems of alien lifeforms,
and determines the fate of the red planet.
Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (2009)
A mobile-only hit from 2009 which, beloved as it may be,
will feel like a mere prototype after you play the
fully-featured,
dense, wide, deep, multi-platform Spider: Rite of the
Shrouded Moon.
Tiger Style made this game in the early days of the App
Store
in part to help demonstrate that mobile games could support
high quality, richer, more personal
experiences.
David Kalina
David was raised in the wilds of suburban Long Island by a family of Siberian
Forest cats. It was from these fuzzy hypoallergenic beasts that David acquired the ancient art of
video game programming. David survived over a decade locked away in the corporate game mines
while working on the AI in games like Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Deus Ex: Invisible War, Thief:
Deadly Shadows, and other ominous-sounding titles that were never released unto the public. Upon
winning his freedom by successfully writing an A* pathfinder, David teamed up with Randy Smith to
form Tiger Style in early 2009. Together, David and Randy invented new forms of gameplay in the
award-winning indie games Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor and Waking Mars. You can blame David
for any bugs you find in the software.
Randy Smith
Randy Smith started working in games in 1997 as a
designer and level builder on Thief: The Dark
Project at legendary design studio Looking Glass
in Cambridge, MA. (Remember the Return
to Cathedral mission?) He was a designer on
Thief II: The Metal Age and the Director of
Thief: Deadly Shadows at ION Storm Austin.
Randy consulted with Arkane Studios and Ubisoft
Montreal (among others) before settling back down
to be lead designer on an Electronic Arts collaboration
with Steven Spielberg in Los Angeles. He was a
columnist with Edge magazine for many years,
writing about video games as an art form and the
advancement of the medium, presaging many trends
of the indie revolution that soon followed. After the 2008 recession, he put all of his money in a bag and
walked barefoot back to his homeland of Vermont,
from which he collaborated with David Kalina and the
Spider team on Tiger Style's first game, 2009's Spider:
The Secret of Bryce Manor, only ever seeing anyone
else on the team in person just once. He now enjoys
living in Austin, Texas, with humans and other mammals.
The talented team of
Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon
consists of
Row 1 (top row) from left: Adrian Lopez-Mobilia, Damien DiFede, Bobby Arlauskas, Maya Kramer
Row 2 from left: Jef Drawbaugh, Randy Smith, David Kalina, Randy O'Connor
Row 3 from left: Jason Rosenstock, Terri Brosius, Nathan Black, Mallika Sundaramurthy
Row 4 from left: Thomas Shahan, Amanda Williams, Mario Vazquez, Zach Hall
Row 5 from left: Rick Tossavainen, Brennan Hornburg, Ethan Frederick Greene, Scott Barber
BACK TO SPIDER: RITE OF THE SHROUDED MOON