Elgin-based Hunted Cow proves it's outstanding in its field

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is set to hit the big screen this month in the latest instalment from Legendary Entertainment’s MonsterVerse, and will be followed in the weeks thereafter by a new video game based on the film. Development of the game has been entrusted for the past two years to Hunted Cow, Scotland’s most northerly games studio employing 42 people in the coastal town of Elgin.

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With an established track record in massive multiplayer and strategy titles, Hunted Cow remains independently owned by its founding directors Andrew Mulholland and Glenn Murphy. Latest annual revenues came in at £2.8 million and there are ambitions for further growth off the back of Godzilla x Kong: Titan Chasers.

“We are certainly hoping it is going to let us further expand the team and create more of those skilled job opportunities in the north-east of Scotland,” says chief creative officer Louisa Gallie, who joined the business in 2007 as its ninth employee.

“This is the biggest the team has ever been, this is the most high-profile game we have ever worked on, and it is absolutely the biggest and most complex mobile title that we have ever worked on.”

Founded in 2003 by its two directors, who met while students at Abertay University, Hunted Cow is based in Mulholland’s hometown in Moray. According to Gallie, being well off the beaten path for games studios has both advantages and drawbacks.

“The location definitely makes it kind of difficult to attract more senior people, because most of the local senior people who work in the games industry are already employed by us,” she says. “But we have had really great success with hiring juniors and graduates and training them up. And for some of our staff it’s a bonus. We’ve had a number of people who say they don’t like city life and they’d love to be able to move somewhere more rural, in the countryside, and still be able to work in games, so for some it’s a positive.”

Louisa Gallie (Image: Hunted Cow)

Gallie spent much of her youth growing up in Elgin when the family wasn’t based elsewhere with her father in the RAF. She became interested in digital art at a young age and got “seriously” into games as a teenager, and went to Abertay in Dundee in 2003 to study games art.

“Turns out when I got there, I hated 3D and I hated animation,” she says with a chuckle. “I did not get along with them at all, but I learned there was a potential career in what I had always done, which was illustration.”

During her studies she focused on concept art – designing the characters, environments and props that are then handed over to the 3D team to animate. After graduating she moved back home with her parents in Elgin to look for a job “fully expecting” that at a minimum she would have to move back to Dundee, if not further south, to secure employment.

“I had been applying for roles and I really was at the point where I was just Googling games companies in the UK to find places I hadn’t applied to, and Hunted Cow popped up and it said they were in Elgin, and I thought no, that must be Elgin, Illinois,” she says. “But no, they were on the high street above Specsavers, a 15-minute walk from my front door.”

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They didn’t have any job openings listed at the time but she sent in a note along with her portfolio to say she would be interested in any future opportunities. To her pleasant surprise, she was asked to come in the next day and was offered a position.

She initially worked as an artist on the website for Eldevin, an award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game released in November 2013: “We are still incredibly proud of it but it didn’t have the commercial success that we really needed it to have,” Gallie says.

From there the company went on to build what would become Operation: New Earth, a sci-fi multiplayer strategy game and a first of its type for mobile from Hunted Cow. It had considerably more financial success and led to a deal with Games Workshop to create a digital version of their medieval fantasy board game Warhammer. By the time it was released in May 2019, Gallie had been promoted to chief creative officer.

“That game effectively proved we could take an IP and make a successful game,” she says.

New York-based Tilting Point, Hunted Cow’s publisher since Operation: New Earth, set up a meeting with Legendary at the GDC 2019 games developers’ conference in San Francisco to discuss the possibility of the Scottish studio taking on another project based on an even bigger IP franchise. After some fits and starts – including a hiatus during the initial phase of Covid – Hunted Cow was commissioned in January 2022 to produce what would become Godzilla x Kong: Titan Chasers.

“It was an IP we really felt we couldn’t turn down,” Gallie says. “It was such a huge opportunity, and such an exciting license to work on. It’s very successful and for us it sounded so much fun. We have a lot of people in the office who are big fans of the films, and MonsterVerse in general.”

Available for pre-order, the game is expected to be released in May on Apple Store and Google Play, with a PC version coming out later this year. It will include a single-player campaign mode as well as the multi-player option in which participants build outposts and collect characters before going on to compete for resources, fight monsters and form alliances with others to take on the biggest monsters of all.

Gallie says development has been a balancing act to ensure the game is cohesive and, above all, fun to play.

“There are two sides of it,” she explains. “When you are working with an established IP, an existing fan base comes with it. World-building comes with it, an existing art style, and certain rules come with it, so a certain amount of legwork is already done for you creatively and there is a security in terms of there is a proven and existing audience.

“Financially, the pie is split more ways, but of course the idea is that it’s a much, much bigger pie you’re working on. The other side of the coin is when you’re working on your own IP, of course, you have complete financial and creative control over that, but it’s a riskier proposition.”

She adds that Legendary have been “great” to work with: “There are areas where we get lots of freedom to come up with our own ideas, and our own monsters and characters. We have kind of our own sandbox in their world that we get to play in and, honestly, it’s just been a delight.”