Alexis Kennedy is a writer, game designer and entrepreneur who’s founded two successful game development studios, and has been making innovative, evocative narrative video games for over a decade At his first studio, Failbetter Games, he created the Fallen London franchise, beginning with the Fallen London browser game – a dark literary fantasy of life in a subterranean metropolis, which has now been running continuously for over ten years, with well over a million users. At Failbetter, Alexis led development on a string of award-winning narrative games, in the Fallen London universe and for partners like Random House, BioWare, the BBC and Channel 4 – and a browser-based interactive story platform called StoryNexus. Alexis’ final project at Failbetter was Sunless Sea, a game of loneliness, exploration and survival set on a night-bound archipelago in the Fallen London world, on which he served as creative director and lead writer. Sunless Sea was a critical and commercial success that sold almost half a million copies in the first year. After growing Failbetter from a bedroom startup to a multi-million pound business, he left the studio after seven years to focus more directly on on experimental creative work. He took a ronin year to do guest-writing gigs for big names like BioWare, Telltale and Paradox, learning from very different approaches by very different studios; and then founded Weather Factory, a boutique studio specialising in narrative experiments, with Lottie Bevan. Weather Factory won the Best Microstudio award at the Develop Star Awards in 2019. Weather Factory’s debut game was Cultist Simulator, a unique and intricate game of occult discovery described by press, variously, as ‘brilliantly written’, ‘deeply engrossing’, and ‘significant’. Cultist Simulator won several awards and was nominated for two BAFTAs. Weather Factory’s next announced game is BOOK OF HOURS, a combat-free role-playing game set in an occult library. Alexis speaks internationally on narrative, on game design, and on their overlaps.