thatgamecompany

thatgamecompany was founded in 2006 by Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago, two graduates of the University of Southern California's interactive media program. Chen's student work, including a flash game called Flow about an organism evolving through the depths, argued that games could evoke feeling and flow-state calm rather than just challenge. The pair secured a three-game deal with Sony to explore exactly that thesis on PlayStation.

Their first release, a console version of flOw (2007), was a soothing, wordless experience of drifting and growing. Flower (2009) followed, casting the player as the wind guiding petals across dreamlike landscapes, a meditation on nature and urban life with no text and no fail state. Then came Journey (2012), the studio's masterpiece: a wordless pilgrimage across a shimmering desert toward a distant mountain, in which players could silently, anonymously encounter one another and travel together without chat or names. Its emotional power, luminous art, and Austin Wintory's Grammy-nominated score made it a landmark, sweeping awards and becoming a common reference point in arguments that games are art.

The development of Journey nearly broke the company; it ran over budget and over schedule, and the studio restructured afterward, taking outside investment to survive and pursue independence from a single publisher. Its next project, Sky: Children of the Light (2019), reimagined Journey's ethos of anonymous kindness as a persistent, free-to-play social world spanning phones, consoles, and beyond, built to reach a mass audience and sustain the studio long-term. Sky drew tens of millions of players and became thatgamecompany's commercial engine.

Throughout, Chen has kept the studio focused on a narrow, unusual mission: designing for emotion, wonder, and human connection rather than conventional mechanics or violence. thatgamecompany remains independent and active today, still small relative to its influence, and still widely credited with expanding the emotional vocabulary of the entire medium.