Steve Gaynor
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| Fullbright (2014–present) | |
| Private | |
| Industry | Video game industry |
| Founded | March 2012 |
| Founder |
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| Headquarters | Portland, Oregon, U.S. |
| Products | Gone Home |
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Number of employees
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8 (2016) |
| Website | fullbrig |
Fullbright is an American indie video game developer based in Portland, Oregon best known for their video game Gone Home. Before forming Fullbright, three of the staff worked together at 2K Marin in San Francisco on Minerva's Den, the single-player expansion to BioShock 2. During the development of Gone Home, the team worked and lived together in the same house. After its release, one team member left to found a new studio, Dim Bulb Games. Fullbright's next game, Tacoma, was released in August 2017.
The Fullbright Company was formed by Steve Gaynor, Johnnemann Nordhagen, and Karla Zimonja in March 2012. Kate Craig, an environment artist, joined the Company full-time in August 2012. They had previously worked together at other video game developers but "were attracted to the artistic liberty and self-management of a small game studio", with the freedoms of working without rigid schedules and relationships. They live and work together in a northeast Portland, Oregon, house known as the Fullbright House. (Craig, the 3D artist, works remotely from Vancouver.) Craig likened the group to "being in a band" due to their closeness partially necessitated by lack of money, such as in sharing flights and lodging.
Steve Gaynor attended Portland State and dabbled in several arts fields before using level design to enter the games industry. He made levels for first-person shooter video game F.E.A.R. on his own, and entered Sony in San Francisco as a games tester in 2006. His experience with F.E.A.R. levels brought him to Houston's TimeGate Studios, at work on the low-pressure F.E.A.R. expansion Perseus Mandate. He joined 2K Marin in 2008 after receiving encouragement from the BioShock 2 creative director to apply. Gaynor was the lead designer on the game's single-player expansion Minerva's Den in 2010. The Minerva team was small, and included Zimonja and Nordhagen. Zimonja was their 2D artist and collaborated on the game's story with Gaynor, though she saw herself more as an editor than a writer. Gaynor left 2K for Irrational Games in 2011 to work on BioShock Infinite. Though the two wanted to collaborate, they were now split between Boston and San Francisco, where Zimonja continued at 2K on The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. Unsatisfied with big budget work, Gaynor and his wife moved to Portland, where they both wanted to live, and Gaynor sought to make a "personal game, one with an intimate narrative" without soliciting outside money or growing larger than a small team. As Gaynor and Zimonja lacked computer programming expertise, they reached out to Nordhagen, who had recently sent an "existentially introspective" tweet about his career. Together, they formed The Fullbright Company.
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