Dinosaur Polo Club and the big task of creating Mini games
Some games impress by their simplicity, and make a long lasting impact on the industry as a result. Mini Metro is one such game.
It's now been ten years since the first steps of the indie hit, with developer Dinosaur Polo Club celebrating the anniversary next month with a big crossover update between Mini Metro and its similarly successful successor, Mini Motorways.
This is a big milestone for Dinosaur Polo Club co-founders, brothers Peter and Robert Curry. Celebrating ten years of Mini Metro was important to them because it's the "seed that formed the studio," as Robert puts it.
Conceptualised during 2013's Ludum Dare game jam, Mini Metro has been consistently updated over the past ten years; a journey that has seen the title go from Steam Early Access in 2014 to Apple Arcade in 2021, with several platform launches and six million copies sold in between.
The initial team comprised the Curry brothers doing programming and design, soon joined by Jamie Churchman handling art, and Rich 'Disasterpeace' Vreeland to head audio.
"It was the four of us who worked through to the Steam release [in 2015] and then the AppStore release [in 2016]," Robert recalls. "It was in late 2016 that we sort of saw how sustainable this success was going to be. So that was the point at which we made the decision to have a studio around this game.
"We didn't even set out to form a studio, that wasn't the goal, but it was like, okay, we now have this sustained success, we want a studio to sort of help us with it. Because I remember at the time we just couldn't respond to all the emails. And we were like: we got to hire someone just to answer the emails!"
The brothers say they were quite "financially conservative" at the time so it took the
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