One of our favourite ever games, the wonderful indie 2D platformer Owlboy, launched on this day in 2016. Dammit, man, where did 10 years disappear off to?!? Regardless, the Norwegian indie team D-Pad Studios is celebrating the anniversary today with a big old Twitch stream.
Plus, and with much excitement, they’re launching an updated version of Owlboy on Steam. It’ll include in-game tweaks to improve the overall performance for years to come. Lovely! What a way to mark this exceptional, charming, and glorious time of it.
10 Years of Hooting in Owlboy
D-Pad Studio has done this on an annual basis. Every year on 1st November some of the team get together to do a Twitch livestream and celebrate with fans, headed up by Simon Stafsnes Andersen (co-founder, art director, and creator of the game). J-Remi Madsen is the other co-founder and works as a game designer and programmer.
Simon Stafsnes Andersen was inspired as a kid by games such as the legendary Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988) and the Tanooki Suit powerup from that game. But this was one long and arduous dev story, as video game development is a hellish complex process that demands total attention.
Apparently, in humble Norway (somewhere we’ve always wanted to visit), the D-Pad Studio team is now a living legend. A commemorative feature launched today by GAMER.NO’s Mikkjell Lønning in They sacrificed everything and experienced for Owlboy:
“With a few small assignments here and there, D-Pad covered their living expenses, and they could spend money on the bus and cinema instead.
They also knew that any part-time jobs would decimate the game’s progress. Because the word impatient can hardly describe how Simon felt about the pace of development on Owlboy.
The 2011 deadline came and went. Then came the next one – and the next one.
I remember what Simon said would happen if Owlboy wasn’t finished in 2013. He was going to kill us all. I hope you can afford a coffin, I replied, Henrik said in a previous interview.”
It was a very personal journey the co-founders went through, dealing with family deaths alongside the game’s development, alongside Andersen’s mental health struggles with depression.
Development began in 2007. The Nintendo Wii was out at the time and the indie game scene was in its infancy, but Andersen committed to creating a retro-styled 2D game (a novel concept at the time, now the indie scene is awash with it all).
Pretty much seven years, then, to create the game. And it launched as an exclusive on the PC (Windows) on 1st November, 2016. Here’s the original trailer!
We did a check of our blogging history and, boy, did we launch ourselves onto this one. Four days after Owlboy’s launch our review hit the shelves. We played the Steam version first in a pretty short review (our content skills have gone up a few notches since then).
It eventually got its console exclusive launched on the Nintendo Switch on 13th February 2018. A PS4 and Xbox One launch followed on 10th April 2018. Critical acclaim followed. Look at these reviews:
- Destructoid: 10/10
- Game Informer: 9/10
- GameSpot: 9/10
- Hardcore Gamer: 5/5
- IGN: 9.3/10 (IGN’s weird rating system… why not 9.4?)
- Nintendo Life: 9/10
- The Telegraph (of all the bloody places): 5/5
It’s a flat out 10/10 from us, too, as one of our favourite indie games and video games of all time. A charming, melancholic story of the mute Otus (the Owlboy) where the worlds of the land and sky are separated by a catastrophic event.
What follows is a brilliant platformer that appears high up on our list of best modern 2D platform games.
The lush art style, so reminiscent of Studio Ghibli films, is matched by the glorious score (more on that further below). There’s always something surprising happening, and the attention to detail is exquisite, but the dashes of absurdist humour really make this a total triumph.
And the good news? D-Pad Studio’s legacy content updates launch TODAY, so you can now get your hands on a new and improved version of Owlboy for the years ahead. Glorious.
And Once Again… Owlboy Has a Magnificent Soundtrack
Yeah, we’ve gone on about this plenty enough before. American composer Johnathan Geer’s beautiful Owlboy score is quite the marvel.
The Strato piece is our absolute favourite.
We had no issues putting it near the top of our favourite indie game soundtracks of all time. Very orchestral in its flourishes and deeply emotive, it sweeps along with an uncanny capacity to bring every single region to life. It really breathes atmosphere into the game and makes the story what it is.
Geer is still working away, as a solo artist, and across other games, but we think his work on Owlboy surely has to be his career defining moment.
