Two Point Studios has spent the last decade building a simulation empire from a small English town. Founded by former Lionhead developers and published by Sega, the studio launched Two Point Hospital in 2018, followed by Two Point Campus in 2022 and Two Point Museum last year. With roughly 40 staff, the team has also produced numerous DLC packs. To mark the 10th anniversary, studio director Gary Carr and COO Jo Koehler sat down with us at UKIE's For One Night Only event to discuss where the franchise has been and where it's headed.
Two Point Studios at 10: A British success story?
Asked whether the studio can now be called a British success story, Carr replied: "God, that sounds so conceited, doesn't it? To say [we’re] a success story. I think we're on a journey that is hopefully to success. I'm certainly proud of what we've achieved over the last 10 years. I can't believe it's been 10 years. It feels like last week we got together and started unpacking computers and setting up."
Koehler added: "It’s been going pretty good, I'd say. As Gary said, we're really proud of the team. We want to remain humble and don't want to take anything for granted, and we don't take it for granted. It's really hard making games, and it is always hard. We learn from what we've done over time, and each game we hope to be better than the last game. Yeah, we're grateful to be here."
Endless ideas for Two Point games
With a franchise built on quirky settings, fans are quick to suggest new directions. Koehler said the biggest request is a shopping mall game, particularly from players in China. "We get lots of suggestions. It's not really mad, but the biggest suggestion we get is a shopping mall. I see that a lot. We're quite big in China, and the Chinese players seem to really, really want a shopping mall game. And Ben, the technical director, he's really keen to do a car service station game, which we probably won't do."
Carr added that the shopping mall idea is "cool" but "weirdly popular" given that "retail is dying, and shopping malls are quite retro." He noted that hotels are also a popular request. "We don't tend to go for the extraordinary ideas," he explained. "Traditionally, you wouldn't think hospitals, schools and museums are really 'out there' ideas, because it's good to take something quite ordinary and then explode it into something extraordinary. So that's kind of our template, but that's not to say we won't change in the future."
Ambitious DLC and the road ahead
On the growing ambition of DLC packs, Carr said: "We're making our DLCs more ambitious every time. We did initially start very simply, and perhaps add a few more levels to an existing game. We'd maybe change the region, but not really add any new features. Now we insist on putting brand new gameplay systems in there every time, and they could all, I think, stand alone if we wanted to do them as a standalone game. But I really like where we're going with Museum. I like the journey it's going on, because a museum is basically just a place to display and celebrate something. I quite like us having an ambitious DLC that lives within the base game."
Koehler added: "The beauty of Two Point County is there's endless possibilities. We can do anything, and as Gary said, we're trying to push more gameplay and meaningful gameplay into the DLC packs. And yeah, wait till you see the next one."
Keeping the humour natural
The humour of Two Point games is a defining feature, but Koehler says it isn't forced. "I think we try not to be too intentional about being funny. We don't try to be funny. We just are funny. So we always make sure it's grounded in reality, and there's plenty of ordinary, and then that's offset with the extraordinary. The humour comes from everyone. It's not just a single person or a single writer. It's the writing and design team, but also the artists, the animation, the audio, and it kind of always comes together in a bit of a magical way, I think."
Carr agreed: "I think the humour comes from the early days of making sin games, when there wasn't a lot of oversight or censorship. So this was just devs doing what devs do, having fun with an idea, and what we're careful about is not becoming too, sort of, knowing about the humour. If you try to be funny, you're generally not going to be funny, so we let things just play out. We're not going, 'what's going to be the funny part of this?' It's often an animator that will just do this wonderful little nonsense animation, or there might be puns there, but we don't actually use as many puns as we used to. Even we're getting tired of puns sometimes. Well, it was quite funny in Two Point Hospital, I thought, because amusing names for illnesses do work well with puns, but we just let things flow, and it seems to come out naturally with the team."
A native approach to consoles
Since Two Point Campus launched day-and-date across PC and consoles, the studio has seen benefits in reaching a wider audience. Koehler said: "We love all of our players. We were so excited to go onto console and get controller support as well, and it's super rare for sim games to have good controller support, so we're super proud of that, and we worked very, very hard on it. We do have more PC gamers still and Steam is our lead platform, but we have a huge amount of players on consoles, and they buy DLC, and they play the game, and for a long time as well. We're really excited to be, well, we think we're one of the best sim games on console."
Carr recalled that Two Point Hospital initially launched on PC only because the team consisted of just 14 people at the time. "When we went onto console, we spent 18 months developing the control scheme. We wanted to go native. We didn't want to port it. We wanted to make it feel like it was native to the platform, and that's given us good groundwork to take that forward, and now we do launch all our games pretty much… There are some exceptions because there was a new generation of Switch, which from a timing point of view meant we couldn't launch with that because it was not released. But by and large, we do aim to come out on every major platform at the same time."
The future is Two Point County
As for whether the studio will ever move beyond the Two Point universe, Carr was clear: "I can't imagine anything at the moment that's outside of Two Point County. We are Two Point County. It's kind of like, this is going to sound really pretentious… It's like if you'd come up with The Simpsons, would you want to leave Springfield? So for us, we're just mapping Two Point County with every game we make, and where that goes."
He added: "As you said earlier, we've kind of gone to space, but where else could we go? Bottom of the ocean. There's so many things we can do with that world that I'm quite excited about that, and I'm not wanting to leave it at the moment. It feels like there's loads we haven't explored with Two Point County, but never say never. We're kind of parodying the world, right? Two Point County isn't a county, really, because you can go to our version of the Bahamas. You can go to our version of the North Pole, our version of space. The world's pretty big. We always used to call it our tea-towel map of the world. I think Two Point County is a really exciting place to make games. For the moment, maybe into the next decade, we're still happy to be in Two Point County, for sure."
