“To be a force for good in gaming – this is a little bit of redemption.” Humble Games boss Alan Patmore on his mission

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The Humble Bundle store, where charities benefit from the sale of affordable collections of games, has been a staple of the PC scene since its launch by Jeff Rosen and John Graham in 2010. It’s evolved since then, of course. The pair sold to Ziff Davis in 2017, for example, and then in 2020, Humble Games was launched, making the outfit a bona fide games publisher.

New Executive Vice President and General Manager Alan Patmore is behind the latter move. He joined the company with big ideas in 2019, just before the pandemic. A veteran of games development, he’s had 20 years of experience, with senior roles at Surreal Software, Double Fine and Zynga. But whether it’s the types of games on offer today, or its charitable mission, Humble seems a far cry from the free-to-play Zynga days. Was this a deliberate gear shift?

PCGamesInsider.biz grabbed some one-on-one time with Alan Patmore last month at Gamescom in Germany and quizzed him on the journey he, and Humble, is on.

PCGamesInsider.biz: Please tell us a little bit about you and your background. You’ve had a long relationship with games...Alan Patmore: I originally started in gaming back in 1995. I founded the company Surreal Software, which was best-known for the PC game Drakan. Then there was the Suffering franchise, which we worked with Midway on. Midway purchased Surreal in 2004. We worked with them on some other games – a sequel for Suffering, and a game called This Is Vegas, which never saw the light of day [laughs]. And then, when Midway went bankrupt, they sold a bunch of the assets to Warner Bros.

I decided to move on and try something new. So I got hooked up with Tim Schafer at Double Fine, and I was VP of Product Development for Tim when they had just come off