Nitrome

Nitrome (pronounced NIGHT-rome) is a small flash game development studio based in London, England. Nitrome was founded by Mat Annal and Heather Stancliffe but has now grown to have 10 employees, helping with game development. Due to the small team and creativity of the group, new flash games are released on regular basis (usually about two a month). The main income for the company is through advertising and licensing their games to larger flash game websites.

Nitrome was originally mobile phone games' developer but now focuses on browser based games.

All of their flash games are available to play on Nitrome.com.

Early Days
Nitrome started up in 2004 and was founded by Heather Stancliffe and Mat Annal. The office at the time was the size of a bedroom. About 11 months after Nitrome was founded, a conversation about Mobile Phone Games stemmed up between Heather and Mat. Heather didn't think it was such a good idea. After much persuasion, a Mobile Phone game went into production. Nitrome launched there site on April 5th 2005. There Mobile Phone Game Four Play was the only Mobile Phone Game released, Chick Flick; the first game in development was abandoned, and another game was left unfinished. Mat's brother, Jon joined the Nitrome team on May 20th 2005. Nitrome left the Cellphone Game business, and entered the Browser Flash Games business.

Flash Games
Nitrome made a few advergames in 2005 before making there own games. Nitrome remade there site and released there first game Hot Air in 2005. Although they didn't make much money off it, they ported Chick Flick and released it on there site in 2006, adding or removing features. Nitrome released several other game being sponsored by Miniclip, and also hired testers at first but stopped. Games took a long time to make at that time. Nitrome hired more people the in 2007 and took less time to make games. Nitrome made sequels to some of there games, and during that year MTV Arcade sponsored a few games. They released skins so players could personalize the site, and released more the next year.

Modern Days
With more people hired in 2008, this allowed Nitrome to make even more games in less time. Nitrome's games also had a story; Nitrome released several popular games in 2008. Nitrome released sequels in 2009 for games released the same year. Ice Breaker released in January 2009 was hugely popular and spawned two sequels. Twin Shot also gained popularity, and gaining a sequel. Nitrome also tested out MochiCoins in Twin Shot 2. MochiCoins allowed players to buy coins and spend the coins on extra content in Twin Shot 2, or other MochiCoin games. Nitrome tried MochiCoins out on B.C. Bow Contest, but did not implement the software into any future games. In the end of December, Nitrome announced they would be on Facebook.

Nitrome made more great games in 2010, but in the summer, between July and September, Nitrome experienced a problem which prevented blog posts to be posted, and during this time no games were released for two months, the second longest Nitrome has ever went without a game release. During the two month drought, Nitrome worked on making Super Feed Me, but after noticing a drop in there revenue, they returned to making flash games. A short time after this drought, Nitrome moved to central London. Nitrome released games in 2011 believed to have been "ported" from the Nitrome Enjoyment System. Nitrome in April began to post a blog post on ever Weekday until the end of May. After this, Nitrome went back to there usual routine of posting only when there is Fan or New content, except they began posting a weekly Friday update informing fans of content that may or will be posted or released in the coming week.

Location
Nitrome was formerly located at the Old Fire House up until July or August 2010. They then moved to the Davina House, then to their own building.

Staff
Nitrome has several staff which work on parts of games.

Artwork

 * Mat Annal
 * Jay D Smith
 * Jon Annal
 * Markus Heinel
 * Stefan Ahlin
 * Simon Hunter

Game Ideas

 * Mat Annal

Music

 * Lee Nicklen
 * Dave Cowen

Programming
*Probably Left.
 * Heather Stancliffe *
 * Chris Burt-Brown
 * Aaron Steed
 * Carl Trelfa
 * Andrew Gardner*
 * Stuart Small*
 * Ignats Zuk
 * John Kennedy
 * Stefan Ahlin

Links

 * Early 2006 Nitrome Website
 * 2005 Website
 * Nitrome on Twitter
 * Website

Trivia

 * A lot of Nitrome's Game Names are based of puns and insults, Four Play, Chick Flick, Square Meal, Headcase, Knuckleheads, Small Fry, and Numbskull for example.