About Us
Our mission is to connect the world through a shared love of story by creating unique and groundbreaking interactive experiences that can be played anywhere.
Studio
GoldFire Studios was founded by James Simpson in 2008 as an indie game studio in Oklahoma City. We got our start pushing the boundaries of the web with cutting-edge browser-based massively multiplayer games. Our focus remains connecting people around the world through gaming experiences that can be enjoyed anywhere. We have a passion for creating unique, groundbreaking interactive stories that players can both experience and make their own.
Values
Story First
By always using a story first mentality, we strive to elevate games as both the ultimate art form and the ultimate storytelling medium.
One Community
We connect the world through great experiences by making our community an extension of our team and by practicing player-focused development.
Curious
We have an unending thirst for honing our craft and taking risks with new ideas, which is how we push boundaries and inspire the same curiosity in our players.
Open Collaboration
The best experiences are created through collective sharing of ideas, which is why mutual respect and openness to feedback are vital to our process.
Freedom to Focus
Creating groundbreaking experiences requires distraction-free focus and prioritizing realistic goals that allow for meaningful daily progress.
Juicy
Transformative work is created by focusing on the little details that others might miss—that’s what separates the good from the great.
Team
James Simpson
Founder, Director & Developer
Benji Kay
Game Developer
Phillip Park
Concept Artist
Alejandro Moralo
3D Artist
Rafael Mogas
3D Artist
History
Arctic Awakening Story Trailer
As progress on Arctic Awakening continued, we revealed our first story trailer during the "not-E3" version of the Future Games Show, where over half a million gamers watched live from around the world.
June 11, 2022
Arctic Awakening Revealed
Our newest and first single player game, Arctic Awakening, was revealed at the Future Games Show. An episodic narrative adventure set in the unforgiving Arctic. Your plane crashed in a storm, leaving only your AI drone for company as you journey to find your co-pilot and uncover the dark mysteries buried beneath the ice.
March 25, 2021
Going Rmote
Partly due to the pandemic and partly due to an increasingly geographically diversified team, we closed our long-time office in downtown Oklahoma City and went fully remote.
October 1, 2020
New Website/Branding
With a renewed focus on storytelling in our games, we built a brand new website to better illustrate who we've become in the 12 years since our founding. An enhanced blog and newsletter are part of our renewed efforts to connect with our community.
June 9, 2020
CasinoRPG Hotels Expansion
When you think about Vegas, you don't just think about the casinos. You also think about the big, glamorous hotels! So, hotels were a natural extension to the gameplay of CasinoRPG that had gone through various stages of development over the years before finally being released.
August 27, 2019
Exocraft Released on Mobile
Exocraft was always developed as a fully cross-platform experience. Our goal from day one was to enable the same action-packed experience on browsers, PCs, tablets and mobile phones. It wasn't feasible for us to do this all at once, so this date marked the culmination of that vision.
June 5, 2019
Exocraft Released on Steam
After a year of beta testing on the web, our sci-fi action-strategy game was finally released for PC/Mac on Steam. We received widespread coverage in news outlets such as Rock Paper Shotgun and introduced the MMO to an entirely new audience on desktop.
March 12, 2019
Exocraft Released on Web
After nearly a year of development and several months of closed beta testing, Exocraft was released for the web. The initial response was overwhelming with tens of thousands of players signing up in the first few days, garnering praise on YouTube, Twitch and IO game forums for its visually stunning and innovative approach to the genre.
February 27, 2018
CasinoRPG Released on Steam
After going through the final round of Steam Greenlight submissions before that system was replaced, CasinoRPG rounded the bases and was released on Steam. The launch was well received as CasinoRPG remained at the top of the "new and trending" list for its entire first week of launch, helping to introduce an entirely new audience to the game.
January 16, 2018
CasinoRPG Released on Mobile
The plan was always for CasinoRPG to be a fully cross-platform game, which was one of the reasons for developing with HTML5. However, mobile browsers still had their limitations, so releasing an official app for iOS and Android was the logical next step for the game's evolution.
December 8, 2017
GoldFire 2.0 launched
A lot was learned over the first five years of the GoldFire Network, and all of that was rolled into the total rewrite for GoldFire 2.0. What started as a simple platform with basic chat and accounts expanded into a full social network tightly integrated with our games and included mobile support, live updating everywhere, private chat, forums, social feeds, leaderboards, game switcher, ntofications, profiles, item shop and much more.
February 20, 2017
howler.js 2.0 Released
What started as a simple audio solution for CasinoRPG, turned into the web's most widely used audio framework -- used by the likes of Google, Disney, Lego, NASA, DC, EA, Ubisoft, Paramount, Warner Bros, Universal and thousands of other websites and apps. Because of this, a multi-year rewrite ensued and culminated in the 2.0 release that offered expanded capabilities, a pluggable architecture and simplified core for a more bug-free and streamlined experience.
July 19, 2016
Third Office
After going a year with fully remote work, we found the perfect spot to get back into some office space in the second tallest tower in downtown Oklahoma City. For the first time, we had the opportunity to design our space and also enjoy the view from the 22nd floor.
October 13, 2015
Heartland Gaming Expo
Always looking for ways to support the Oklahoma gaming scene, we of course agreed to show CasinoRPG at the annual Heartland Gaming Expo in Tulsa, OK. We were thrilled to be honored with the first place prize for indie games at the show.
April 12, 2015
CasinoRPG Released on Web
Nearly a year after the Kickstarter beta began, CasinoRPG finally released to the public on the web and Windows Store. A three-person team operating on a $20k Kickstarter budget managed to released a full MMORPG in just over a year -- a fact that we were very proud of, but there was still more work to be done!
April 16, 2014
Second Office
In an interview with the Daily Oklahoman newspaper just months earlier, we had dreamed of moving out of our "closet" office and finally having a window to the outside world. Well, this second office had six windows and more than doubled our space for the next stage of our journey.
May 22, 2013
Founded OKGD
We have always been passionate about growing game development in Oklahoma. So, after we garnered so much community support for our Kickstarter, we decided to give back by founding the first game development meetup in the state, which continues to meet every month in downtown Oklahoma City.
March 28, 2013
CasinoRPG Kickstarter
Building such an ambitious game as CasinoRPG was going to take a community effort. So, we reached out to our local and online communities to help fund the development of this MMORPG that merged role-playing, tycoon, city-building and casino games. We successfully reached our funding goal of $20k with just three hours to spare!
February 3, 2013
howler.js Open-Sourced
We were rather early to the game in terms of building large-scale HTML5 games, and as such, the game framework we were using didn't yet support audio. So, a weekend project to fix that turned into howler.js. Little did we know that howler.js would become the standard in web audio libraries in the years to come.
January 28, 2013
VentureSpur Accelerator
With the success of Y Combinator in San Francisco, new startup accelerators were popping up all over the place. The first in Oklahoma City was VentureSpur, and we were selected in their first batch, which helped us double the team from one to two! We began early development of CasinoRPG during this three month program.
August 6, 2012
First Office
Until this point, James had always been either working from home, from the library or out of a co-working space. GoldFire Studios finally had an actual office space, and even though it more resembled a closet than an office, it was a big next step for the small indie studio.
June 1, 2012
GoldFire Network Released
The vision of the studio was to enhance the community elements around truly social aspects. With this in mind, the GoldFire Network was released in order to merge our games together and offer new social capabilities such as chat, forums, friending and more.
March 5, 2012
BC Wars Released
The next major game release after PokerRPG was a prehistoric MMORPG centered around cavemen and dinosaurs. Again, a mixture of text and 2D graphics, this game allowed you to become a legend through time as you battled dinosaurs, built up your cave, joined a tribe and explored the vast reaches of Pangea. Another resounding success for the one-person studio, reaching tens of thousands of players in just the first week of launch.
December 27, 2009
GoldFire Studios Founded
GoldFire Studios had technically been in operation for years, though it wasn't an actual incorporated business until this date. This is the point where James' hobby project took its next step towards the game studio you see today.
June 9, 2008
PokerRPG Released
After a year of beta testing, this prequel to CasinoRPG was released on the web. Using cutting-edge (at the time) web technology, a fully browser-based poker game was wrapped with a largely text-based role-playing experience where you could work your way up from your parent's basement to being the top dog of the poker universe.
July 2, 2007
NexGen Wars Released
A weekend project turned into a global phenomenon with the release of the newest game consoles at the time: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii. It was featured #1 on Digg (these were pre-Reddit times) and saw over 1 million unique visitors on the day of the Nintendo Wii launch, being cited in thousands of news sources worldwide. Using historical data and statistical extrapolation, NexGen Wars showed estimates for the live sales of each of the consoles, helping to fuel the fanboy wars as the live counters could be found in the signatures of virtually every video game forum on the web.
July 6, 2006
Eternal Kingdoms Released
The development of Eternal Kingdoms was funded through the sale of Venetopia. This was a strategy game centered around medieval and fantasy warfare. It was similar to Age of Empires, but largey text-based and massively multiplayer. It went on to be acquired by Bored.com and helped to fund future projects.
February 26, 2005
Venetopia Released
James began his online gaming adventures with a game called NeoPets, so it was only natural that the first large-scale game he woulld go on to build would be heavily influenced by that pioneer of browser games. Venetopia was an online fantasy pet game that weaved a story through its 2D and text-based world. Raise your pet, play the mini-games and climb the leaderboards.
May 9, 2003
Apex Web Gaming Released
There weren't app stores or sophisticated searching tools to find new games back in 2003, so Apex Web Gaming was created as one of the largest directories, news sources and top game lists for multiplayer online games (mostly focussed on browser games).
April 18, 2003