That way it could spend less time making mistakes when it came time to deploy a project. Squad needed a 3-D modeler to help design its installations virtually. Every new client, from Sony to Samsung to Nissan, was anxious to work with the company because it could get the one thing global brands needed more than anything else in Mexico - eyeballs. Squad turned a street into a living music video for Coca-Cola, a 10-story building into a touch screen for Hewlett-Packard. Formed in 2009, its signature touch relied on cutting edge technology like projection mapping and motion sensing.

It's a marketing company that specializes in installation pieces, capstone events to larger advertising campaigns.īy 2010 each event that Squad hosted was big and getting bigger. What makes his situation even stranger is that Squad isn't a game design company. Unlike many independent game developers, Falanghe doesn't work for himself. The same mix of playfulness and hard-core simulation that garnered the attention of the world's leading space agency has helped KSP become one of the most popular games on PC - and one of the first games after Minecraft to show that the risky 'early access' model can work at scale.Īnd the game might never have gotten off the ground if lead developer Felipe Falanghe hadn't woken up one morning, called his boss and tried to quit his job. It's their most daring mission in a half century, and they've asked the small team of eight developers headquartered in Mexico City to help promote that mission through their game. NASA hopes to land humans on an asteroid by 2025. Soon the Kerbals will embark on the next phase of space exploration, more than a decade before their real-life human analogues.

And this year they will begin to work together. These past few months the team at KSP and the team at NASA have developed a professional, although distant, relationship. KSP has even earned the respect of NASA - many of its employees play it regularly. Beneath its childish surface lies a complex physics system churning through mathematical calculations so expertly, real rocket scientists would blush to see it. Since the day it was released, less than three years ago, KSP has grown to be so much more.

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