» FAQ
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Total estimated sales of all Pickford Bros' games: 6,451,068 |
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Number of games in all territories the Pickford Bros have been involved in:
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Average estimated sales per released game: 41,090 |
Other Zee-3 zones:
The Pickford Brothers
John Pickford and Ste Pickford celebrate 23 years of original video game development!
Welcome to the website of John Pickford and Ste Pickford - The Pickford Brothers!
Veterans of the mainstream video game development industry, John Pickford and Ste Pickford switched to 'indie' game development in 2004. The brothers now hand make their own games - self-funding the development of new, original video games as 'bedroom coders' - which are sold and distributed by their online publisher Zee-3. The Pickford Brothers website is used showcase new game developments, and to fully document and preserve the brothers' past work where possible.
In addition to developing original new games themselves, the brothers also work as freelance design consultants for established video game development studios, recently working on new concepts and titles heading for the PS3, PSP, DS and Wii.
"We've been making and designing video games professionally for all of our working life, in fact, we both did our first paid work and had our first games published while still at high school.
In some ways it almost feels like we're cursed to make video games as we keep on making them even when they aren't earning us any money!."
"Rather than sticking to one genre, or rewriting the same game over and over again for our whole careers, like most* of the really famous
and successful game developers, we stupidly spent the last 20 odd years creating examples of almost every type of video game imaginable;
text adventures,
arcade games,
military simulators,
sports simulators,
platform games,
space shoot-em-ups,
space exploration games,
death-matches,
RPG adventures,
action adventures,
action games,
scrolling beat-em-ups,
coin-ops,
coin-op conversions,
movie licensed games,
cartoon character games,
educational games,
creative tools,
puzzle games,
tactics games,
classic games,
games which fall between existing genres altogether,
we even wrote a game in an afternoon,
but most of all we've created a hell of a lot of original games**, and that's something we're quite proud of."
"Originality has become a bit of a dirty word in the modern video game industry. Familiarity, recognition, and most importantly risk reduction,
are the watchwords of this era of franchises, licenses and sequels. Faced with the ever increasing difficulty of getting
our original game ideas commissioned, let alone published, we had a choice; (a) get a job working on the latest incremental franchise update for one of the big publishers or devcos,
or (b) we could carry on making our own games regardless, accepting that publishers won't fund small teams making original games."
"We choose option (b) and we set up Zee-3 to publish our new games online. We just hope that enough people actually want to play and (most importantly!) buy the games we create
for us to be able to pay the bills, otherwise its option (c) - get a real job!"
* Miyamoto excepted, of course.
** We've never actually completed a driving game (although we got two to playable demo stage), or an FPS, but who knows... we've got a few years left in us yet...
The Pickford Brothers
Updated: 9th April 2007
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All material on this website copyright © 2004 - 2008 Zee-3, unless marked otherwise. Zee-3 and the Zee-3 logo are trademarks of Zee-3. Zee-3 is a trading name of Zee 3 Limited.
The Pickford Brothers website copyright © 2004 - 2008 The Pickford Brothers. The Pickford Brothers and the Pickford Bros logo are trademarks of the Pickford Brothers. Licensed to Zee-3.