He added, “Next we thought about how to build a game around that control scheme. It felt like a neat way to control a character, an innovative control scheme.” “We built out this prototype inside of that last game, Max Adventure, as an alternate way to control the character, and while it didn’t really work with that specific game, it gave us some ideas. “As we started playing around with it, we zeroed in on using the swipe up to jump the character, swipe down for a slide, and swipe left or right to turn the character 90 degrees, as he’s always walking around,” Shepherd said. The idea for the first Temple Run came after the company created a title called Max Adventure. Whether we’re starving or we’ve gotten rich, we still want to do the same thing. We’re just a group of people who are passionate about making games. We could have tried to grow the team into 150 people and do all sorts of things and eventually try to sell the company for a zillion dollars. We could go so many directions with the success we’ve had. “We always identified, and still do identify, with the indie spirit and the indie movement,” Shepherd said. It’s a cool time here at Imangi,” Shepherd said. “We’re still grounded in the experience of wanting to be really creative and innovative and prototyping and messing around with what will ultimately become our next great product as well.
It was made in an apartment over five months, and the company still wants to stay true to those indie roots. Temple Run, built by Shepherd and Luckyanova with freelance artist Kiril Tchangov, was Imangi’s tenth mobile game. At the same time, we’ve gotten back to our roots and started prototyping a lot of new game ideas.” But we’ve gotten to the point where we can continue doing these regular updates to Temple Run and building on that franchise.
These days we’re 11 people, still a really tiny team. We opened up a studio and started hiring people about a year ago. “At the same time, we wanted to bring some of that new game development back into our lives…. “We decided we wanted to keep working on Temple Run and keep our fans engaged and keep doing more with that intellectual property and continue to build Temple Run into a franchise that’ll be around for the long term,” Shepherd said. Raleigh, N.C.-based Imangi has remained a small startup, with just 11 employees.
But Shepherd and his wife, Natalia Luckyanova, don’t want to turn their company in to a giant empire with hundreds of employees. The huge number of downloads translate into a lot of money for a small company. We have arcade machines and apparel and plush toys and board games. We started this worldwide licensing and merchandise program. We worked with Disney twice, doing Temple Run Brave and Temple Run Oz. Over the past three years, we’ve spent a lot of effort on Temple Run. “It’s kind of crazy….It’s changed so many things for us. “It snuck up on us a bit,” said Keith Shepherd, cofounder of Imangi Studios, in an interview with GamesBeat. Join gaming leaders live this October 25-26 in San Francisco to examine the next big opportunities within the gaming industry.