We celebrate our seventh anniversary as a studio this month, and we've enjoyed a bit of fanfare around the milestone. Here's a roundup of Brunette Games in the news as we reflect on how far we've come.

Cover This

Our team landed on the cover of the Community News, a newspaper that itself has been in business more than a hundred years. As reporter Wendy Todd points out in her lede, while women make up 46 percent of video-game players, they represent only 16 percent of executives in the industry. So our founder's place in the industry was not without its hard-won aspects, though Lisa Brunette herself cites Brunette Games' status as a small business as her number one challenge: "Increasingly, the world is built to work against us, with rules and regulations often favoring large corporations at the expense of mom-and-pop shops like Brunette Games."

Fun Fact: Community News is Brunette Games team member Sara Hardin's former employer; she penned stories on beekeepers and veterans for this well-loved paper before joining us as a writer/designer.

In the Pocket

Our story was picked up by PocketGamer.biz, which highlighted Brunette Games' status as a niche storytelling studio, a key aspect of our success: 

For a diverse, female-led studio like Brunette Games, this anniversary will not only be an achievement in itself but also symbolic of how a specialist studio can maintain its place in the mobile gaming industry. While many may think that a studio has to be all things at once, being able to focus on providing critical narrative support has helped their games consistently chart across top 20s.

We couldn't agree more.

Stairs to the Top

CEO Lisa Brunette was a guest on the GameDevStairs Podcast, a free philanthropic community whose mission is to help people start their careers in game development. They outreach especially to those affected by the current war in Ukraine, connecting 2000+ subscribers in their Telegram channel from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and elsewhere. Here's the hourlong interview with Sergey Gres of GameDevStairs:

It was an honor for us to help out GameDevStairs, which offers such an important service to the game community.

The 7-Year Itch

It's said in US culture that a relationship can suffer from the "seven-year itch," as the couple might feel tempted to stray from their mission together when they cross that milestone. As  for us, we're fully committed to our focus on great game storytelling. We added voice acting to our suite of offerings back in 2019, and we're exploring some new services you might see on our menu in the year ahead. We're very proud of our accomplishments, which include:

• We have credits for the narrative in 36 games, many of them top-performing, genre-defining hits, including Merge Mansion, Lily's Garden, and Matchington Mansion. Our clients' games consistently rank in the top 20 in the app store charts and are played by billions.
• Our expertise spans casual mobile genres: hidden object, match-3, slots, merge, jigsaw, and others. We also have extensive experience on deep interactive novels with branching dialogue, including the first mystery novel published in the Choices app. We've recently expanded into subscription-based games as well, with Netflix and Apple projects currently underway, and we've worked on some mid-core projects, including one NFT/blockchain title.
• Our clients include large, well-established studios such as Jam City and Metacore, as well as talented up-and-comers like Trollgames and ZiMAD. We've worked on some of the best IPs in the world: M&M'S, Family Guy, Disney Frozen.

We've weathered incredible change over our seven years in business, and we've witnessed great creativity and innovation in our clients' projects as well. We look forward to what lies ahead. Here's to another seven years!

Cammie Middleton has lent her talented voice to our clients' games since 2019, and her impressive credits include Jam City/Netflix's Wild Things and Super Gaming's Jane Austen Solitaire: Pride & Prejudice. She's also a jazz and blues vocalist, a stand-up comedian, and an actor for both stage and screen. Cammie and our founder Lisa Brunette go waaaaay back, the two of them having met in the 1990s through their work as volunteers for an environmental group. Cammie was kind enough to share her thoughts on work, laughter, and a unique get-rich-quick scheme (involving duck-sized horses)!

What do you enjoy most about being a voice actor?

It is one of the few professions where I can legally do my job while wearing pajamas and no makeup. That's just heaven!

What's your favorite thing about doing VO for games?

There's something intimate about doing VO for video games. The player and the characters become one. They have this relationship that becomes embedded in the game itself. You kind of leave a part of yourself––or a piece of you gets to live––inside the game. Forever. It's pretty neat!

What's your VO "dream role"?

I would love to be the voice of God... Morgan can't do it forever!

How do you like to spend your personal time?

I like to spend my personal time laughing. I don't care where or how, but laughter keeps me young and happy. It reflects in my heart, my work, and onto others around me.

Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 25 duck-sized horses?

Oh my! 25 duck- sized horses! But I would fight them with laughter. Really? How cute is that? I know I would definitely be rich, because every little kid would want to have their own duck-sized horse! Giddy up, Quackers!

What's your favorite movie or TV show? Why?

My new favorite movie is Everything Everywhere All At Once. It's like someone cracked my brain open, recorded my thoughts, and turned it into a soundtrack. Filmmaking at its best!

Among the Brunette Games team, Andy Mack is admired for his uncanny ability to voice humans, dogs, and everything in between. He's one part of our roster of incredible voice actors, and he agreed to let us pick his brain on voice acting, his own pup, and more.

What do you enjoy most about being a voice actor?

I enjoy the variety of being a VO actor the most. Instead of soul-crushing cubicle work, I get to be a cowboy bandit and then a medieval wizard and then an annoying robot sidekick—so the diversity of roles in a given day keeps me laughing!

What's your favorite thing about doing VO for games?

My favorite thing about doing VO for games is feeding my inner child who still wants to play games all day. I don't have much time to play games anymore, but I'm still connected to them through work, so there's still a great connection to that sense of wonder.

What's your VO "dream role"?

My dream role would either be for a Final Fantasy entry (Final Fantasy X is still my favorite game of all time) or a Disney-related game since I grew up with the company and am a former cast member.

What's a surprising/interesting fact about you?

I was obsessed with the movie Rad (1986) as a kid and started racing BMX when I was eight years old. I raced multiple times a week and even qualified for Nationals!

Do you have any pets?

I sure do have a pet. He's a wonderful old basset hound/pug mix named Kenny Powers. Here's his recent Halloween picture where he is clearly ashamed of his parents...

What's your favorite movie or TV show? Why?

I mentioned Rad earlier, and it's tied with Back to the Future for my favorite movie. However, my favorite TV show is It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. "The Nightman Cometh" and "High School Reunion" episodes are two of the funniest things I've ever seen, and the characters are such narcissistic psychopaths—in the best way possible. Plus, who doesn't want/need a little Danny DeVito in their lives?