Philly Game Forge now wants other makers to work there, too

Join the Philly Game Forge and become coworkers with the creatures behind one of the first indie games on PlayStation4, a wildly popular Facebook game and the coolest selfie booth ever.
The two-year-old Old City shared office space originally launched with the mission of helping to grow the local game community. Now they’re opening up membership to makers of all types, but the mission is still the same, said Will Stallwood of game studio Cipher Prime.
“The way I see it, the more creative and talented people we have here, the more amazing things will get made,” he wrote in an email.

Will Stallwood of Cipher Prime. (Photo by Juliana Reyes)

We’ve been talking about this for a long time and it actually stems from Dev Night. Dev Night isn’t just for developers, it’s for anyone creative, especially those people we now call “makers.” When we look at that, it makes a whole lot of sense that the Forge should be open to anyone who creates things.

He continued:

The other truth here, is that Forge probably won’t fit for everyone. This is a space that takes the work of entertainment and fun very seriously. Those are the sort of people I want to be surrounded with.
Our recent Art Show was also an eye-opening experience for us. The act of creation and collaboration was just spectacular and it seems like it might be just a bit silly to only have one form of creator in our space, especially when you look at how many disciplines it takes to make a game in the first place.
At the end of the day, we just want the Forge to be an awesome space to work for creative people. The original mission statement of Cipher Prime was to, “Make Cool Shit”…we’d like to share that with as many people as possible =)

It also, of course, makes business sense. Other shared spaces in the city have taken similar routes, starting with a core niche community and then expanding outward, whether intentional or not.