Meet Lee Ciasullo

It all started during the mid-seventies like a lot of things did in those days. There was a lot of rain, and short public service films on the TV were like little horror movies; I've never owned a kite for fear of exploding.

I grew up in Stourbridge in the West Midlands, which during that period was a good place for the music scene and had a nice arty vibe. It was before shell suits and Lynx Africa.

My introduction to video games was through my older brother, who received an Atari one Christmas, and we proceeded to marvel at the twisty knob controllers and out-of-this-world graphics in games like Space Invaders, Pong and Frogger. This was in the old days when there was one TV in the house, and we'd have to wait for a window of opportunity to commandeer it (usually after Grandstand) and get a blissful couple of hours staring at our 8-bit Gods.

I was always interested in art and always had some talent for it. I followed art as my preferred option throughout school and even on to college in the early nineties. Then some life happened, and the world of faceless, thankless work consumed my mortal form. Art became a hobby with the occasional commission here and there.

As gaming evolved, I realised that I was drawn less to the flashy action games and more to the wit and smart stories of Aventure Games. I was lucky enough to (co)own an Atari ST and Amiga in the late 80s and early nineties and found myself captivated by games like Future Wars, The Secret of Monkey Island and the utterly game-changing brilliance of Beneath a Steel Sky.

Thanks to my mother's influence, I've also always been a fan of the Detective genre in books, films and later-day games. Not as good as guessing 'whodunnit' like mom was, but then she was always, secretly, the smartest person in any room.

Anyway, fast forward to not so long ago.

My buddy Ryan and I decided that what the world really needed was a new game studio run by a computer programming graduate and a self-taught artist/animator. We talked about it off and on for some years, but this time, we did something about it. And hey-ho, Boxblue Studios was born.

The big idea? Well, to bring the sum of our collective ideas, sarcasm and general disdain for the 9-5 to the genres of point & click and detective games while having fun and drinking all the rum.

And this is what happened next.