PORTLAND, ORE. —
DAVID BIRKBECK/GETTY IMAGES
Until they moved into their office on the
ground floor of a former factory in an
industrial zone known as Produce Row, the
four founding members of a startup video
game developer suffered a gnawing sense
that they were a company in name only.
They had all previously worked
together in a decked-out loft
space on the downtown side of
the Willamette River, in a hipster-yuppie enclave rife with fair
trade espresso bars and artisanal
chocolatiers. But their former
company, a game studio, was purchased by a California firm, rolled
into a giant Japanese gaming conglomerate, and then shut down.
It was early 2012, and they were
all suddenly jobless. So the group
hatched a plan to start their own
company: ClutchPlay LLC.
During the first year, they
worked from their homes. The
lack of office space complicated
operations and undermined their
sense that they were really doing
what they were ostensibly doing:
building a business.
The team used Skype to finetune designs for new games and
pursue fixes to problems. But
without being able to point to
the screen and physically indi-