Deck Nine Games

Deck Nine Games is an independent American video game developer based in Westminster, Colorado, specializing in narrative-driven adventures, branching interactive storytelling, and cinematic co-development. Its work combines narrative design with character animation, performance capture, engineering, and audio production to create games built around dialogue, player choices, and character relationships.

Founded in Boulder in April 1997 by programmer Mark Lyons and artist Scott Atkins, the company originally operated as Idol Minds. Both founders had worked at Sony Interactive Studios America in San Diego. During its early years, the studio developed games across multiple generations of PlayStation hardware through a longstanding relationship with Sony Computer Entertainment. Its output ranged from snowboarding and party games to action-adventure titles and the physics-driven PlayStation Network release Pain.

The company began developing its proprietary StoryForge narrative toolset in 2014 and publicly relaunched as Deck Nine Games in May 2017. This transition marked a focus on premium narrative adventures and a publishing partnership with Square Enix for Life Is Strange: Before the Storm. Subsequent work includes Life Is Strange: True Colors, the Life Is Strange Remastered Collection, Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, and Life Is Strange: Reunion. The studio also collaborated with Telltale Games on The Expanse: A Telltale Series.

Development and cinematic production

Deck Nine offers full-cycle game development, from pre-production through release, alongside cinematic co-development for third-party projects. Its capabilities cover branching scripts and dialogue systems, technical art, rigging, character animation, world-building, sound design, porting, and remastering. In-house motion capture and audio facilities support its performance-led production work, while its development capabilities include Unreal Engine and Unity across multiple platforms.

The studio's narrative projects have received industry recognition. Life Is Strange: Before the Storm won Game of the Year and Most Significant Impact at the Games for Change Awards. Life Is Strange: True Colors received Best Storytelling at the Golden Joystick Awards and Games for Impact at The Game Awards.