Time Extension: How did SNEG start as a company?
Shchuiko: I’ve been working in games for quite some years, [going back to the late 2000s/early 2010s]. It was an era where Steam was obviously around but retail was still kind of a thing (though diminishing to an extent). So you could witness a lot of games being released physically and then just disappearing because nobody would bother to put them out on digital storefronts. Then around the same time, I ended up signing a publishing distribution deal for one of the classic games developed in Russia while working at another company.
The game was called Eador and it was supposed to be released on Steam and some other storefronts, so the creator [Alexey Bokulev] was looking for possible distribution options. That is when I first came across a storefront called GOG.com. I started talking to them and slowly this kind of thing came to me that there was something [special] about these classic games. I met somebody who was already doing something for them, and I signed a deal. Then long story short, I started working for GOG and spent the next seven or seven and a half years looking for old games and old content.
That’s kind of how it started and continued for quite some time, but then, you know, as you work at a big corporation, eventually you’re no longer doing just the thing you started with. It becomes more about things like corporate development, bigger deals, bigger objectives, and suddenly you’re not doing anything about the classic games – something that you were particularly interested in at the very beginning. but the funny story is that it wasn’t us who started the company; it was my wife (who is also in gaming).
She was pregnant with our son and she was like, ‘I’m a little bit bored and I’m about to jump into maternity leave, let me do some side projects.’ So she found the developer of a game that was not available anywhere. She signed a publishing deal. She figured out a team that could fix it and the game was released. That was all happening in front of me. So at some point, I decided you know, I just want to do the same thing. So I joined.
