About Skyless Games
Skyless Game Studios leverages the power of video games to support and empower social, educational, and philanthropic causes. We partner with experts on an important cause, then work with them to make a great game with a purpose. Our flagship product is a training game that teaches skills and techniques to corruption investigators.
In today’s ever-connected world, engaging an audience can be a real challenge for many organizations. This is especially true for philanthropic, educational, and other social causes. Without a way to capture and hold people’s attention, many great causes fade out before being able to make substantial change. This is why we created Skyless Games: to use fun and engaging video games to help give a voice to the people trying to change the world.
The Skyless Mission
Skyless Games’ mission statement is simple: to use video games to empower social causes to create positive change. This single sentence embodies the ideals that drive us everyday at Skyless: pushing for positive change in today’s world and using video games as a medium to do so. Our mission is on our minds with every decision we make: who to work with, how to design a game, what our message is, what’s for lunch (well, maybe not the last one). And it is with this simple mission in mind that we aim to build Skyless into an increasingly valuable resource for social causes around the world.
The History of Skyless Games
We formed Skyless Game Studios on June 10th, 2012 in a conference room in Drexel’s Baiada Center, an entrepreneurship incubator run by the university. We had recently finished working on a small app and were trying to figure out what to do next. Our idea: combine philanthropy and video games. After a little research we realized that we weren’t the first to think of this; but in large part the “serious games” currently available were small and could barely be called games. So we set out to make Project Empathy, a game that would explore the psychology of violent extremism and radicalization, through a rich story set in an immersive world. However, we quickly came to the realization that we didn’t have the resources to complete such an ambitious project.
It was on January 25th, 2013, while we were puzzling over how to make Project Empathy a reality, that we were introduced to Jack Smith and Tom Lasich from Repatriation Group International. They wanted to work with us to build a video game about corruption. Although it would mean that our pet project would have to take a back seat, we all quickly realized the potential of working together. We immediately began designing this game, now called Follow the Money; and by April 1st we brought on a team of co-op students and began creating the game.
The rest, as they say, is history. Since we began working on Follow the Money, we have presented the game to a variety of audiences including the Games for Change festival, the United Nations Convention Against Corruption conference in Panama, and a NATO Building Integrity conference. The response has been universal: “why hasn’t anyone done this yet.” And so we look forward with great anticipation to being able to release Follow the Money; and to hopefully being able to make an impact in the world of corruption.