Who needs a publisher, anyway? “I mean, who does physical any more?”

As a composer, Filippo Beck Peccoz worked closely with the German studio Mimimi Games – known for titles like Desperados 3 and Shadow Gambit – until its closure in 2023. Beyond that, he has created music for a wide range of indie games, including Tavern Talk by Gentle Troll Entertainment and Innkeep by Boot Disk Games.

But it’s rare – in fact almost unprecedented – to see a composer switch seats to become a game director. Yet this is exactly what Beck Peccoz has done, setting up the studio Cobalt Lane to work on the psychological thriller Imprinted, in which the player pokes around an ancient operating system to piece together fragments of music left behind by a mysterious Italian musician.

His move emphasises how game development can be open to almost anyone, as well as how different perspectives can result in welcome new stories. It’s also indicative of the huge rise in self-published games in recent years. Here, he tells GamesIndustry.biz how he made the jump into the director’s chair with help from German government funding – as well as why he hasn’t sought after a publisher.

What’s your background?

I studied at Berkeley College of Music a long time ago now, 15 years or more. And I always wanted to go into game audio. My dream was always combining my love for music with my love for games. And since Berkeley didn’t have anything regarding game music back then, I started film scoring there, because it was the closest thing to game audio.

How did you get into the games industry, then?

I went back to Munich, and I knew no one, but the Global Game Jam came to save the day, so to speak. I met all the founders of Mimimi Games during a Global Game Jam in 2010, and I’ve worked on their games ever since.

Why did you want to work in games rather than film or TV?

I think it’s really due to my past. My brother is 10 years older and my sister’s eight years older, so that means that when I arrived, we had games already. My brother had an Atari ST of all things, and there was a NES. My passion for games came before my passion for music.

I think scoring is basically telling a story from a very privileged angle, and being able to do it for an interactive medium is just irresistible to me.

In terms of transitioning from composing to game development, it must be a steep learning curve. Do you have much coding or game design experience?

No, not at all. I feel like I was able to learn a lot standing by the sidelines, working very closely with people, especially with Mimimi and Gentle Troll. That really helped.

Seeing this whole process of what it means to make a game, all the ups and downs, all the unexpected moves that somebody pulls on you which you can’t predict – be it an algorithm or the release of another game – what it means also to bring in people from outside… you just learn a lot. But you learn it from a very comfortable space, because you’re just making the music.

If somebody tells you, ‘We had to recut the trailer’, you just say, ‘Well, okay, I’m going to do the music again’, and that’s your part. But then you start asking some questions. What happened? Why? And of course, you have this beginner’s arrogance of saying, ‘Well, couldn’t you have known that before, why does it have to be last minute?’ And then you realize there’s so many reasons why this happens. And now that I’m making a game, I understand even more.

What’s your role on Imprinted?

I see myself as a creative director. So basically I decided to hold the vision together and be the person who just needs to give a direction in terms of narrative. I’m writing most of the story as well, together with my old friend Martin Hamberger from Mimimi.

What’s the pitch for Imprinted?

It’s a ghost story about creativity. You are an audio engineer called Vincent who is assigned a new job, and you restore some broken cassette recordings by an Italian musician who has vanished. There are quite a lot of conspiracy theories around her: she’s this ambient experimental musician who disappeared.

As soon as you start digitally restoring her tapes, you realize something is happening to you as the protagonist and to your OS. That’s the main fantasy, I would say, and there’s a dash of looking into somebody’s life by playing on their computer. You have a lot of old photos, you have incomplete songs.

The engineer has a hidden passion for making music himself, and as he learns more about this musician, he gets desperately inspired to fall into a rabbit hole of dark creativity. It’s almost an obsessive falling into what he always wanted to do. And this is something that we explore through the player making music themselves with these recovered snippets and Vincent’s own ideas, combining them into something that ultimately gets deeper and deeper into a spiral of madness.

You’ve said that the movie Ring was an inspiration. What other influences are there?

David Lynch is someone I’ve always admired, the way that he could create a state almost like you’re in a nightmare, but it hasn’t begun yet. This liminal state: you’re at the edge of something tipping, but it’s not quite there.

And of course, in terms of the interface itself, the fact that it’s playing on a computer, we’ve got Her Story and The Operator. And very personally for me, I remember playing Roberta Williams’ Phantasmagoria as a kid. I was way too young to play that kind of game. And that was such an inspiration, the idea of not just seeing the protagonist using a computer, but this whole complete shift of it being an interface inside your computer.

Do you think that coming from a composing background, you’re able to bring a unique perspective to game design?

I see it from the perspective of making a very subjective kind of game. I guess what I’m trying to do is really put my whole life into this, my past. It’s about an Italian musician, and we basically shoot on location in places where I come from. I’m Italian, and we went with my cousin, who’s a filmmaker, to this house where another cousin of mine lives. It’s the perfect location, we didn’t have to set up anything, because it’s a house breathing old magazines and history. But it’s also my own mum’s family history.

If you’re writing a short story or novel, you’re kind of expected to talk about your own experience. It could be a historical novel, but still there’s something of your life seeping in. Approaching [the game] a bit like a novelist would, to me, feels like a fresh approach.

It’s no secret that the games industry is going through a tough time at the moment, so how have you secured funding for the game?

I got funded by the state of Bavaria, actually. Their program of games funding started around 2010, and they doubled the funds for this year, and that’s been a great help. Of course, I put some of my own savings into making the company. But the big funding came from the state of Bavaria.

I’m hoping that we will be able to secure more funding for the production in the next round. So you have a concept phase, where you start fleshing out an idea, you have a prototype phase that we are finishing up now, and then there’s the production phase. And I just hope that they will say the prototype is good enough that ‘here’s the rest of your money.’

Felix Falk from Game was recently talking about how Germany has increased federal funding for video games to €125 million this year. Would Imprinted have been possible without that kind of government support?

I would say I wouldn’t be in this place at all. So I’m very grateful that the funding program exists. I’m grateful that [it allows] more experimental games, because let’s face it, Imprinted is a niche game. It’s not something that you just throw out there and people will buy it, and everybody will love it.

Would it be fair to say that you wouldn’t have even started if it wasn’t for that government grant?

I think I would’ve started it by myself, because the pull was just too much to resist. But I certainly would have looked for some kind of funding of this sort.

We had help from funding on many titles that I worked for, made music for, and so on. I think [the government has done] a great job at sponsoring and helping new developers make this jump – because it’s quite a jump in the dark.

And that’s also why I’m keeping my work going as a freelancer in parallel. I didn’t tell everybody, ‘OK, bye, I am a game developer now’ – I also diligently meet my deadlines and make music for these other games, because it’s a high-risk thing.

Have you approached publishers? And if you have, what did they say?

Very, very few, honestly. I would like to self-publish. Not because of a general aversion [to publishers] or anything, I just think that being able to make this game that I have as quickly as possible, as efficiently as possible, and then see what happens with the tools that we have now with self-publishing, it just feels more right to me than having a publisher.

It seems that more and more people are wanting to self-publish, and the tools are there to do it now. But I’m wondering whether there are things that a publisher could do that right now you are having to learn yourself, or perhaps you don’t even realize you have to do?

I think dealing with physical releases must be such a pain. But it’s so different right now. I mean, who does physical any more? But five, six, seven, ten years ago, having a publisher who dealt with that, that was really [good] value.

For the rest, I’m not quite sure. I don’t want to sound arrogant at all, because I know they’re doing a lot of stuff. But I think it also depends on how much budget you have on the marketing side, for instance. I’m sure having a publisher who has a team with a lot of social media capabilities, that will be amazing. But I wonder how many publishers really have those teams ready and the amount of people that you need to really make a difference in social media for a game nowadays.

I think maybe for a certain budget range, maybe it makes less sense to have a publisher nowadays, because you just ignore this kind of middleman. I’m coming off as super anti-publisher, but the truth is, I never had a publisher myself for my company, so I couldn’t say.

Speaking with Gentle Troll and others who are self-publishing their games now, I feel that’s the way to go. But it is more of a gut-feel situation, which is a bit crazy maybe for somebody who has to lead a company, but at the same time, maybe I just need to listen to my gut more.

You don’t have a publisher, but you’ve brought in Double Jump to do marketing, haven’t you?

Yes, exactly. And I feel with them, there’s a very clear plan on what beats to get, on what is more important than other things.

I suppose that by hiring a marketing agency, it’s more of a transactional thing, right? As in, ‘I’m paying you to promote my game, what have you done to earn your money?’ Whereas perhaps that would be more nebulous in a publisher situation.

Yeah, I think also they wouldn’t feel as compelled in telling you, ‘OK, we did this, we did that’. Or you wouldn’t feel, let’s say, the leverage to say, ‘How did we get these wishlists? What is working here? What is not working? What should we ramp up on?’ I feel like these are the questions that I should ask all the time. And if I had a publisher who gives me money to make the game, I wouldn’t feel as comfortable asking all these questions.

Perhaps you’d feel more indebted?

In a way. It’s not a nice word, leverage, but of course, you’re their client. Maybe I’m just a freelancer in this mentality. Just the terms are clear, and we know what we want, and how we get to it.

Imprinted is based around cassette tapes and old operating systems, and we’re seeing a resurgence of interest in this kind of thing now, as the younger generation in particular rejects the connected nature of modern technology and goes back to things like vinyl and MP3 players.

Yeah, very young people having iPods and all that. But also, I think that we’re operating inside a genre that is already more known than we think, but we don’t have a name for it yet. Let’s call it ‘fake OS’, ‘desktop simulation’, or ‘OS immersion’. There’s a lot of ideas there, and I think there’s a very clear audience for these types of games, because they just really suck you in.

Yes, you mentioned Sam Barlow’s Her Story earlier, and there’s also Hypnospace Outlaw, which is wonderful. They’re quite compelling.

They indulge in this vision completely, and they make no compromise, and I think that’s what makes it so memorable.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.