PITTSBURGH — In 2015, James Deighan began fulfilling his childhood dream and co-founded Pittsburgh-based video game development and publishing company Mega Cat Studios with COO Nick Mann and Creative Director Zack Manko. Alongside a small team, they began producing games on cartridges for retro consoles, including the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis, before growing to develop for modern systems and employ hundreds around the globe. In recent years, Mega Cat, whose office is located in Polish Hill, has gained international recognition, as it’s been tapped to develop spin-offs for some of the video game industry’s hottest titles and IPs, including “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and, recently, “God of War.”
Why did you initially want to develop games for older systems, and how has that influenced your studio’s path?
We started off making really small, cartridge-based games for fun in my house. It ended up being this unexpectedly amazing recruitment tool because the people that come to us and want to make a Sega Genesis game or NES game or Game Boy game, when they see that they could actually fulfill that dream, it ends up being some of the best talent acquisition we can get. The truth is most people join the industry because they want to make cool games. They don’t join the games industry because they want to do quality assurance on an app. Nothing against that, it’s just that the dream from when 10-year-old James wanted to work on a game, it wasn’t that. Inside of every nerd there’s a child nerd that’s dreaming.
Click here to read more about Deighan from the Pittsburgh Business Times.
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