Award winning Czech Republic-based Amanita Design’s games give off an amazingly tranquil vibe. This studio’s games are serene, atmospheric and capture the imagination with thoughtful story lines rather than with sophomoric gratuitous gory violence. This collective understands that doing what you love should remain everyone’s ultimate goal. They know profits tend to follow passion and judging from the popularity of Amanita Design’s games on iPad, Android, PC, Mac, iPhone, etc., their formula seems accurate. Hats off to the individuals at Amanita for showing us that doing what you love and maintaining integrity is still an option.
See the interview below.
“The artistic style and atmosphere of our titles are influenced by a long tradition of animators from the Czech …”
Please give us a brief history of Amanita Design? What is Amanita’s company philosophy/culture/mantra?
Amanita Design was established back in 2003 by Jakub Dvorský and the studio’s first game was Samorost, Jakub’s diploma thesis. Since then Amanita released Samorost 2 (2005), Machinarium (2009) and Botanicula (2012). Today, Amanita has 16 members working on 3 new titles (Samorost 3 and 2 yet unannounced games). Our company philosophy could be: “Let’s make games we love to play”.
Jakub Dvorsky
Samorost 1
Samorost 2
Machinarium
Botanicula
What is the ultimate goal for Amanita Design, the company? Does Amanita want to always remain independent or will you explore other more commercial/public ways to grow?
Our ultimate goal is to keep developing games which we enjoy playing ourselves and definitely we want to stay a fully independent small company.
Your games developed so far touch on very real human emotions, how did this approach come about?
Our games are very peaceful compared to the majority of games on the market. There is no violence, lots of jokes, simple storylines and when combined with beautiful settings and music, it creates a pleasing atmosphere full of positive emotions – exactly the way we feel as a team.
The atmospheres and environments created in your games (especially Botanicula, Samorost and The Quest For Rest) are very organic and natural, what inspires this methodology?
Environments of these games are inspired by our love to nature and its inhabitants. Each of these games uses unique visual styles to transform the beauty of nature into digital playgrounds.
