The tired question has been raised for decades — are games art? When will games become art? Are they art yet? It is our conviction that until the game developer is prepared to take the kinds of risks and stands taken by artists, who treasure their honest truth higher than the comfort of a corporate pay check doled out by one who hates them — one who observes them with the clinical disgust of a vulture — this medium will be limited to little more than a cynical consumerist tool. There is no work that doesn't reflect the perversion of dignity of its maker.

Such a game, designed by executives and executed by an alienated and exhausted workforce, produces a work that ultimately leaves you, the player, impoverished: poorer for time, poorer for attention, poorer for money. When the deceitful mathematics of profit are brushed aside and the refund window has passed, the modern corporate-produced videogame is simply yet another device for converting the working man's time into venture capitalist money.

Streaming services and their wearisome procession of sequels, the absurd recycling of remakes and remasters of yesterday's games, has turned mainstream digital storefronts into cemeteries of culture, whose only redeeming comfort is that when they soon perish, they will vanish without a trace and will not litter the earth with our shame. As players as much as artists, we are bored to death.

We want to engage in the struggle to do the opposite. To create an interactive artistic experience that leaves you walking away feeling not as if some vague thing had been stolen from within you, but instead leave you germinating with an idea that sets your blood on fire, an explosion of the horizon of possibility. Either we will succeed at that mission, or you will hardly walk away any poorer than us. Should we fail, it will not be for greed.

(Should we fail, it will be due to incompetence, megalomaniacal ambition, delusional expectations, or any number of reasons ranging from betrayal and ceremonial mass-suicide to tears in the fabric of reality and just plain old bad luck. But it won't be due to greed.)

There is one thing about us that makes us a formidable force. It is our skill at survival, of walking along the edge of dignified life, skirting the edge of bankruptcy with the squatters and the rejects, dragging ourselves out of glass-littered gutters where the bourgeois virgins who administrate their battles from office desks and private industry calls don't dare to go.

Our strength is that we care about each other harder than we could ever fear hardship. This is what enables us to take risks, to be true mercenaries of the soul. If it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society, then our mission is to inoculate, to entice discontent until the patient has expelled his toxins of cynicism and resignation.

Once the sickness of our world begins to recede within you and you begin to finally get better, like meeting your face after years of searching in the home clarity of the washbasin, they will say: "Your idea of doing things is wrong." When you persist at recovery and realize you refuse to be drawn back into illness, that you actually quite like sanity and the light, they will say "*You* are wrong." You can never accept their party line, for in a minute they will get you to compromise your ideals, and in the next hour they will get you to compromise yourself. When you've been spent, emptied so of all that used to give you strength and make you admirable, you will be discarded, useless to the master to whom you have subjugated yourself.

In the words of the poet Kranjčević: you will die your death when you start to doubt your own ideals.

Like all converts, we are zealots. Incendiaries, we carry a hidden seed of renaissance, and we shall cover any stretch of scorched land to plant it beyond the reach of the battlefield.

We are preparing a conflagration, an end to mourning, an end to the poison fog of demoralization and the apathy tears of the mentally imprisoned. With charred fingers, we are here to give you something to hope for. We are here to give you someone to believe in.

This studio is our action, our movement towards reclamation of our selves, a first flagpost driven into territories altered beyond recognition. An adaptation to the landscape. A return of life.

Summer Eternal is the school break morning that stretches viscous like a hair of honey, luxurious enough to nourish you across decades, to form all notions of sunlight and safety and mornings forever, a gift from your child self to the old that you chase your whole life and can never quite recreate. Summer Eternal is the long glory of the golden season, Solar Maximum, sun-spot on a nuclear furnace, the stretching molten oblivion that will slowly engulf the Earth, the impending heat apocalypse of our world, ever yet longer by the year.

Summer Eternal is a war machine waging war at the machine. Summer Eternal is the last hearth, the burning roof that keeps the children from the dark. Summer Eternal is what we'll make of it, and what it will make of us.

Come outside with us tomorrow. You don't have to set your alarm.