Gumshoe Announced
Posted by Bagel on Friday, January 31 2003

January 31st. The next big name in the games industry is one of the most unusual. Hiding Buffalo is the company created by the winners of the 2002 Dare to be Digital competition. Now the company is looking for a publisher for their award winning title, Gumshoe.

Gumshoe is a highly unusual game. Eschewing the fantasy and Sci-Fi conventions of the industry, Gumshoe is set in 1930's America and is the gaming equivalent of classic film noir.

Gumshoe is an adventure game in which the player takes the role of a down-at-heel private detective taking jobs from a variety of clients. The team have already approached a number of the country's leading crime authors with a view to creating a wide range of different 'cases' for the player to solve.

The concept for the game along with a working prototype were created as Hiding Buffalo's entry in the 2002 Dare to be Digital competition, which challenges groups of students to create a new and original piece of digital content. Entries are judged by a panel of industry experts on their originality and commercial potential. Gumshoe was chosen by a majority of the judges thanks to it's unusual concept, naturalistic dialogue system and innovative gameplay and episodic approach.

The challenge for the team was to move from the initial concept through to working prototype in under ten weeks. "The Dare to be Digital experience matures a team very rapidly," says Torfi Gunnarsson, the Products Director of Hiding Buffalo. "Working to extremely tight deadlines makes everyone realise the pressures which are faced daily by companies throughout the games industry."

However the team found that the constraints offered by the schedule actually made the end result more satisfying. "Because we knew from the outset that we had a very short time to create the game, it ensured that we focused on the important topics," say Iwan Roberts, Hiding Buffalo's Marketing Director. "Rather than wasting time on wish lists, we had to work very hard to make the core of the game as solid and playable as possible. We ended up with something which is a lot more cohesive - and fun - then we would have had if we tried to incorporate every idea we had during development."

Jim Woods, Managing Director of GameOps and former development director of DMA Design, mentored Hiding Buffalo during the competition and while the company was formed. He has a great deal of admiration for the team and their approach to development. "I've worked with a huge number of teams over the past fifteen years and I have rarely come across a team with as much discipline and self-control as Hiding Buffalo," he says. "Even the most experienced teams can fall prey to feature-creep and sprawling development times. Hiding Buffalo recognised they had a very tight schedule and worked efficiently within their timeframe to create a very solid game."

Gumshoe is being developed for PC and current generation platforms such as PlayStation 2 and X-Box. Publishers interested in finding out more about the game or the company should contact 07905 596610. More information can be found at www.hidingbuffalo.co.uk
ENDS.