Company

History

The story of O2 Games begins a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away….OK, maybe not). My brother (Greg) and I (Rob) grew up in a time where tabletop games, Paper and Dice RPG’s and CCG’s were in their prime. Unfortunately we grew up without a lot of money, and while our parents always provided for us we never had the money needed to really get invested into these games. What we did have a lot of however was imagination and index cards. So as the other kids in our town were bringing in Magic ™ Cards, and Deciphers Star Wars ™ cards we would watch them play and then go home and build our own cards on index cards. Or on the rare occasion when someone would give us handfuls of their unwanted commons.

We had a second problem however, we did not have enough of the right cards to play the games correctly. But that didn’t stop us, we wrote our own rules to the games. Rules that would let us play with the cards that we actually had. (I remember well a game that was certainly a precursor to Aethersteel which used Star Wars, LOTR, and Pokemon cards all in one game). But a funny thing happened, as we introduced our new rules to the local kids our home brew rules for their games began to take over in popularity.

 

Our adventures into Paper and Dice RPGs began with a monthly Star Wars choose your own adventure subscription. For just $5/mo you got a book each month and unlike traditional choose your own adventures you had to roll dice to see which path you had to take. We were instantly hooked and looked for ways to expand this concept. After watching a group of older children play ‘Whitewolf” we began work on our own RPG. I shouldn’t be surprised now but for years I ran a home written Star Wars Campaign that was so popular I was running three separate campaigns at once and had people on a wait list to join in. We didn’t stop there though, we branched into other P&D’s of our own creation, a few of which we still hope to someday release for real.

 

 

When it came to tabletop mini games we ran into the same issue yet again. It was extremely expensive to become invested into these games. Even more so than card or P&D games. So we did what had always worked for us. Purchased Army men and painted them, then wrote our own rules set.

 

 

There was actually a time in college where the local Games Workshops store actually stocked a few bags of the generic brand Army men because there was a constant stream of people interested in joining into the “WWII Campaign”.

As the years went by we created and ran more games than either of us can remember. To this day we often will be cleaning out an old closet and find piles of cards, rule books, campaign guides, all for games we didn’t even remember making.

 

 

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The Story of Aethersteel

Fast forward a few years and I went to visit Greg in college for a long weekend. We got to talking about the games we had previously made and how we just didn’t feel that the real versions ever really met what we were looking for. So we decided to play a mental challenge. Could we in the course of one 4 day weekend develop an entire game universe, system, and rule set for a new game. To this day it is a running joke because after nine years of development it still isn’t finished but over that long weekend we put together the first concepts of Aethersteel. By the end of that trip the first generation of cards had been developed, and you bet we did it the way we always had:

 

As we continued to work on the game it began to take shape and everything began to improve:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even the Unit cards improved drastically:

 

 

 

 

 

 

So here we sit, after nine years of development. After hundreds of hours of working and play testing we are ready to release Aethersteel to the world. But Aethersteel is only one of a dozen games we have in development. While it may be our most ambitious, we are just getting started.

-Rob Ortiz
O2 Games, Lead Product Manager

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 Company Goals

At O2 games, our goal is captivate our players. We understand that a game should be easy enough to learn in a day, but deep enough to take a lifetime to master. We know that you want to feel an integral part of the world, and feel invested into it. We understand this because like you, we are gamers too.

To that end we have spent even more time than we needed to, making sure everything was ready. We have a fantastically rich lore to the universe that you can check out on either our Universe page or the Wiki. Hundreds of characters ready to greet you in the world of Aethersteel. We also have twelve races that are designed and many of them ready for release. We have literally hundreds of Aeon cards in design and dozens of additional units that we are testing. We want to create communities of players and even have some ideas for ways to bring the playing community together around the globe.

Our goals are simple, to produce a great, fun game. Rich in lore, full of new opportunities, and made to the highest quality that we can produce. Because frankly, we as gamers deserve nothing less.