A Labor Of Love

“If I knew back in 2017... how hard it is going to be, I might have had second thoughts about if we actually want to tie ourselves to [it] for the next 9, 10 years,” Weappy Studio co-founder Ilya Yanovich tells me as he reflects on the effort poured into the team’s next game, The Eternal Life of Goldman. “But that’s how creativity works. You are afraid. You don’t know if you can do that. And then you just do it some way or another.”

For the better part of a decade, the team at Weappy has lovingly toiled on The Eternal Life of Goldman, a gorgeously animated 2D platformer starring an elderly, cane-wielding adventurer exploring a fantastical world. For a studio best known for serious strategy games like the This is the Police series and Rebel Cops, tackling a whimsical platformer steeped in European folklore, brought to life using old-school animation techniques, is far from its wheelhouse. So much so that Weappy has worked on the game for nearly its entire existence. But for Yanovich and his team, the artistic challenge was worth the effort.