Blind Squirrel Games 15-Year Retrospective Series

Part 1: The Spark: Where It All Began (2010-2013)

In 2010, Brad Hendricks lost his job and bought a house in the same week. Most people might have panicked. Brad? He started a game studio with no office, no staff, and no name. Today, that studio is Blind Squirrel Games (BSG), a development powerhouse known for its technical excellence, development know-how, and get-it-done spirit.

In this first chapter of our five-part 15-year retrospective, I sat down with BSG founder/CEO Brad Hendricks and COO Matthew Fawcett to look back at the company's first two years, from surprise growth and living-room meetings to their first big break with multiple XCOM and BioShock titles. This is a story of improvisation, persistence, late-night bug squashing, a little bit of air-conditioning trauma, and the sheer determination that turned this video game startup into one of the most trusted names in game development.

“I found the team.”

Brad Hendricks didn’t set out to become a studio head. At the time, he was in business development at a game engine company when a coworker gave him a heads-up that layoffs were imminent. He had just bought a house.

“She asked me if I could get out of the mortgage,” Brad said. “That’s when I realized I needed to find something fast.”

As luck would have it, Brad received a call from a colleague at 2K Games looking for engineers with Unreal experience. Brad didn’t have a studio or a team, but he didn’t hesitate. It was one of those life moments that splits everything into before and after.

“I told him, ‘I’ve got a team,’” Brad said. “He asked, ‘What’s the name of the studio?’ And I said, ‘I haven’t figured that out yet—but it’s going to be my studio.’”

That gamble paid off. Brad recruited a few trusted engineers, created a company, and within weeks, Blind Squirrel Games was under contract. “I just knew I couldn’t sit around and wait for something to happen. I had to move, fast,” he said.

Their first job was sending engineers to Germany to support the multiplayer component of Spec Ops: The Line. The company had a project and a name, but little else.

And just like that, Blind Squirrel Games was born.

No Salary, No Sleep, No Problem

In those early days, Brad paid everyone but himself. He and his wife, Beth, lived in a modest 900-square-foot home. “Beth supported us on her flight attendant salary,” Brad said. “And then she got pregnant. It was a rough stretch.”

He remembers late nights assembling PCs on the floor of his living room and working seven days a week. “There was a lot of duct tape and willpower. I didn’t really stop to think if it was sustainable—I just kept moving forward.”

But momentum builds quickly when you deliver. By the end of year one, BSG had grown from four to 14 engineers, all primarily supporting 2K projects. Their reputation was spreading inside the publisher.

“2K Games kept coming back to us,” Brad said. “We’d solve problems quickly and without drama. That was gold in those days.”

A New Hire and a New Challenge

About a year in, Brad recruited Matthew Fawcett, who had just wrapped a project at inXile Entertainment. The opportunity? A high-concept narrative puzzle game developed in partnership with a new creative studio and backed by a major platform holder.

“The pitch was really compelling,” Matthew said. “It was a unique game with a bold concept, and Brad believed it could be something special. He told me, ‘This one could really turn heads.’”

Matthew joined as lead programmer and brought several trusted developers with him. “We’d just shipped a game together and knew how to work fast and clean. That made onboarding quick and helped stabilize the project.”

The game was eventually cancelled, but the experience was a key inflection point for BSG. It validated their ability to collaborate across companies, navigate evolving client expectations, and rapidly scale into a development team.

“It showed us we could handle more than just ports and patches,” Matthew said. “We could help build ambitious games…at least until the publisher changed their mind.”

On Porting, Patching, and Putting Out Fires

However, the bulk of BSG’s early work wasn’t flashy; it was gritty. Porting disc-based games to digital-only platforms, fixing multiplayer bugs, adding localization support, and optimizing pipelines. All under deadline.

“We were constantly in firefighting mode,” Matthew said. “The studios we worked with would call us in for the last three to six months of a project—exactly when everything’s breaking. So that last-minute pressure? That was our normal.”

Brad remembers the quick project cadence. “We didn’t get time to rest between milestones. It was like, you fix one ship as it’s sinking, then jump onto the next.”

But the trade-off was invaluable hands-on experience. “It was rapid-fire exposure,” Matthew said. “We learned how Irrational worked on BioShock, how Firaxis approached XCOM, how Gearbox handled Borderlands. It was like a masterclass in game development, just extremely compressed.”

“We’d walk away from each project smarter and more confident,” Brad added. “We were building a toolbox without even realizing it.”

The First Office: Loud, Hot, and Somehow Functional

Blind Squirrel’s first office wasn’t glamorous. It was a narrow two-story space in an industrial park with a roll-up garage door and unreliable air conditioning. It had one bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and too many people.

“We had 14 engineers crammed into a space for eight,” Brad recalled. “The AC upstairs barely worked. I bought these giant industrial fans used on movie sets. They were so loud we all had to wear headphones.”

“If you turned them up to full blast,” Matthew added, “they’d knock monitors off desks. So we stuck with the lowest setting. The room still felt like a sauna by mid-afternoon.”

Despite the uncomfortable conditions, the team remained focused. “Everyone was heads-down, doing the work,” Matthew said. “We were all in. The energy was real.”

In addition to leading the company, Brad was also its entire operations staff. “I did HR, accounting, payroll, IT—I even plunged the toilet every day,” he said. “One of the engineers clogged it like clockwork. That was my life.”

He also built every development machine in the office. “We couldn’t afford IT support, so I just figured it out.”

Brad now says he waited too long to bring in help. “I should’ve offloaded sooner. But I didn’t know how to let go at that point. I felt responsible for everything.”

Expanding Beyond 2K: Hello, Disney

While 2K was their primary client for years, the first major non-2K partnership came with Disney. Brad secured a contract to assist on Disney Infinity. BSG impressed their team so much that they were asked to handle the Windows 8 port—a project that required modernizing the entire graphics rendering pipeline from DirectX9 to DirectX11.

“It was a huge technical challenge,” Matthew said. “Not a flashy release, but incredibly important under the hood. It set the stage for Disney’s next-gen console efforts.”

The successful delivery of that port became a stepping stone to more complex projects with new clients. The successful handoff marked BSG’s evolution from firefighting contractor to trusted engineering partner across the industry. “Once people saw what we could do, we weren’t just “the engineering guys” anymore,” Brad said. “We were real collaborators.”

Favorite Fanboy Moment? Easy: XCOM

“I grew up loving XCOM,” Matthew said. “So when Firaxis showed us the real reboot—not the shooter—the real turn-based strategy game, I was blown away. I got to build the jetpack logic, the alien zombie transformations…it was surreal.”

He paused, then added: “That was the first moment I thought, ‘I can’t believe I get to do this for a living.’ That was a ‘pinch me’ moment.”

Brad also recalls the moment they were first looped into the XCOM project. “They brought us in to help polish the final months. It was intense, but that trust? It meant everything.”

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Fifteen years later, Blind Squirrel is unrecognizable from those early days, but its core DNA remains the same: say yes, show up, and build something better than what anyone expected.

“I never thought I’d still be here,” Matthew said. “And I definitely didn’t think we’d have four offices around the world.”

“If I knew then what I know now?” Brad laughed. “I would certainly have made different choices. But I’m glad I didn’t know. I just knocked over the rock in front of me and kept everyone moving forward.”

Next Time: Part 2 – Building the Nest

As other key leaders step into place, Blind Squirrel enters a new era of stability and strategic growth. In this next phase, the studio formalizes its production pipeline, scales its teams with intention, and lays the groundwork for developing original IP.

Discover how BSG transformed early momentum into a foundation built for the long haul in Part 2 – Building the Nest. Available soon.