Who Starts a Game Studio in 2025?

Someone seized by an idea that won't leave him alone.

Sear has been a game in my head for more than 20 years. It seemed like an easy enough concept - racing to a specific song, a licensed song, where the level and the mechanics and essentially everything about the game changes according to the music - and I thought for sure someone would make it. I mean, I could try to make it. I had plenty of technical background and obviously a ton of ideas for the game. But I wasn't a studio, I had no money, I sucked at art, and someone else would do it better anyway. So I waited. And waited. And waited.

Designers nibbled around the edges of the idea. The rhythm genre exploded, and that was cool - but it wasn't Sear. Music-based "racing" games came along, and they were cool - but they weren't Sear. I had a particular vision and for whatever reason, a game matching that vision wasn't getting made.

The whole time, the idea wouldn't leave me alone. Now and then I'd hear a song that would just beg to be a Sear level. I'd see these magnificent gameplay snippets in my head, experience the thrill of playing them. Something like a music video in game form - not a rhythm game where you're tied to the minutiae of every single beat, but a racing game first and foremost set to awesome music where the two were intricately tied together: the race began with the song, it changed with the song, it ended when the song ended. It was the song.

And eventually I began to realize why no one was making it. I was certain other people had had the idea; I'm not hubristic enough to think otherwise. But there were serious design challenges to its implementation. Say the level changed with the music - what happened to the racers? You've got people in first, second, third place extending up to, say, 12th... they need to keep their places when the level changes, right? But if they need to keep their places, the level can't change too much, or "place" won't even mean anything. And a good pop or techno song is usually at least three minutes long - that's on the long side for an arcade-style racing game level, and some of the songs I had in mind were even longer, like six minutes or more. And how would multiplayer even work? How could the game communicate cool musical ideas via changes to the level when every player in the game would be at a different location in the level, seeing something different? And the level would end when the song ended, meaning it had to be a fixed time duration, not a fixed physical distance like a typical racer - how do you do that? What does "first place" mean in a race that spans three minutes rather than 10 kilometers? Is it better to switch to a points-based system then? And if you do that, is it even still a racing game?

I didn't know the answers to these questions. All I had were the incredibly cool gameplay snippets in my head. But despite the daunting design challenges, those gameplay snippets wouldn't leave me alone. My brain kept chewing on the idea, batting it around, coming at it from every angle.

In 2024 I took a solo cross-country road trip to visit an old friend. 15 hours alone in the car, listening to music. 15 hours, essentially, playing Sear. And it sounds like a cliche, but it's true:

On that trip, it all came together.

How to make the levels work. How to align them in a timed duration with the coolest damn songs I could find, while still preserving traditional 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place racing. How to keep the racing exciting and intense at every stage of the song, no matter how far ahead or behind you were and no matter how long the song was. And that was all great, but then my brain kept going - beyond the mechanics of the game and on to the mechanics of getting it made.

I could try for Kickstarter - Sear is an awesome idea, in my humble opinion, and surely some other people would see it that way - but it's not an idea easily explained in words. It is an audio/visual idea. It has to be shown, not described. Any Kickstarter that launched with just a bunch of design art would be DOA.

But I'd been working my whole life and unlike the guy I'd been in my 20's, I had some money to invest in this idea now. Not enough to make a whole game, probably, especially given the costs of licensing music, but enough to hire some artists, some developers, even hopefully someone who knew more about marketing than I did. Enough, in short, to get a prototype done: what I would learn later is often called a "vertical slice."

I couldn't make the whole game, but I could license a song or two, dive into the development engine options, figure out if what I wanted to do was doable, and take the biggest risk of my life.

It was around this time the studio name came to me as well. 2025 is arguably an insane time to try to start a game studio. The market is flooded. Everyone's backlog is a mile long. There are hundreds of new layoffs every day. AI is a shadow over everything that threatens/promises to completely transform the industry overnight without warning.

For a studio from a nobody like me to have any chance of success in an environment like today's, it would have to have a really good idea, a unique idea, something people haven't seen before that brings something new to the conversation.

Temerity Games is that studio.

Sear is that idea.

And I can't wait to share it with you.