From Brawl Stars and Clash Royale to MISFITZ: Why We Left Supercell

The honest version of our founding story involves a cramped co-working space in the Poblenou district, a whiteboard we bought from IKEA that kept falling off the wall, and a three-week argument about whether "MISFITZ" was a terrible name. (Frank still thinks the Z is too much. He's outvoted.)

What We Loved About Supercell and King

The Antihero Studios founders left Supercell and King not because those companies were bad, but because the games were in maintenance mode. Brice spent seven years on Clash Royale, Frank shaped Brawl Stars meta and monetization, and Andre built infrastructure serving billions of Candy Crush sessions. They left creation-hungry, not dissatisfied.

I need to start here, because every "why we left" story skips this part, and skipping it makes the rest dishonest. Supercell was extraordinary. I spent seven years there, most of them on Clash Royale, and I mean it when I say it was the best professional experience of my life. The cell structure gives you real autonomy. The people are brilliant and humble in a way that's rare at companies that successful. I learned more about game design in my first year there than in the previous decade.

Frank felt the same about Brawl Stars. The team had built something that genuinely surprised people. A Supercell game that wasn't a strategy game. That took conviction, and the people who shipped it deserved every bit of its success. Andre, at King, respected the technical rigor deeply. Candy Crush at scale is one of the hardest engineering problems in gaming and the team that maintains it is world-class.

We didn't leave because those places were bad. We left because we wanted to create something new and risky to push the boundaries of social play on mobile.

The Frustration: Why Brawl Stars Developers Wanted Something New

Mobile gaming had become an optimization industry where every pitch required a comparable hit. Frank Yan kept a document called "The Graveyard" of killed Brawl Stars ideas, while Andre Parodi described working at King as being the best mechanic in the world but only allowed to work on one car. The economics of live-service games punish novelty at scale.

Here's what we didn't say in polite conversation. Mobile gaming had become an optimization industry. The craft was still there. The ambition wasn't. Every pitch meeting at every major studio asked the same question: "What's the comparable?" Meaning: what existing hit does this look like? If the answer was "nothing," the conversation ended. Not because the people in the room lacked imagination, but because the economics of live-service games punish novelty. When your current game makes a billion dollars a year, anything new is a distraction.

Frank had a doc on his laptop he called "The Graveyard." Ideas he'd pitched that got killed for being too far from what Brawl Stars was. Some of them were bad. He'll admit that. But some of them were the kind of ideas that make you lean forward in your chair, and they died because the context couldn't support them. Andre described the same thing at King differently: he said it felt like being the best mechanic in the world, but only being allowed to work on one car.

I don't think any of us planned to leave. It happened the way these things happen. A conversation becomes a recurring conversation becomes a question you can't stop asking: what if we actually did this?

Starting an Indie Game Studio in Barcelona

Antihero Studios chose Barcelona over Helsinki to escape the gravitational pull of Supercell's home city. Brice found a co-working space in the Poblenou district and started working on the concept, later joined by Frank and Andre as they spent weeks arguing about what kind of game to make before landing on extraction.

People always assume we moved to Barcelona for the weather or the lifestyle, which, fine, yes, January in Helsinki is genuinely bleak. But the real reason was simpler: we needed to not be in Helsinki. Helsinki is Supercell's city. Every restaurant, every bar, every game industry event is a reminder of the thing you just left. We needed a place that didn't come with that gravity.

Barcelona had a growing game dev scene, strong technical talent from across Europe, and a cost of living that wouldn't burn through our savings before we had a prototype. I found a co-working space in Poblenou and started to work. Frank and Andre joined soon after. The three of us plus the IKEA whiteboard.

The first two weeks were exhilarating. The next two were terrifying. When you leave a structure that told you what to work on every day and suddenly the answer is "anything," the freedom is paralyzing. We spent days arguing about what kind of game to make. Frank wanted something competitive. Andre wanted something technically ambitious. I wanted something that looked and felt like nothing else on mobile. The only thing we agreed on was that we didn't want to make a game we'd already made.

The Tarkov Sessions: How We Found the Extraction Shooter Genre

The MISFITZ concept crystallized when Frank Yan was betrayed by a cooperating stranger 50 meters from extraction in Escape from Tarkov. He turned to his co-founders and said "This, but on a phone, in five minutes." That night, the Antihero Studios team sketched the core loop, ran infrastructure math, and designed the visual language that would become MISFITZ.

The breakthrough came from playing games together, not designing them. We'd been prototyping ideas during the day and playing extraction shooters at night. Tarkov, Hunt: Showdown, early ARC Raiders builds. One evening Frank was in a Tarkov raid. He'd found valuable loot, encountered another player, and they did that awkward dance where you both have your guns up and you're trying to figure out if this is a fight or a truce. They ended up cooperating. Cleared a building together. Split the loot. Then Frank's teammate shot him in the back 50 meters from extract.

He took off his headset, turned to us, and said: "This. But on a phone. In five minutes."

That was the moment. It wasn't a strategic analysis or a market report. It was the three of us playing together and having a strong gut feeling about today's market and where it's heading. We felt that the extraction genre was a complicated one to crack for mobile, but with a never-seen-before social depth for a shooter. We loved it and decided to take on this challenge. The rest of that night was the most productive three hours of our lives. Frank at the whiteboard (it fell off the wall twice), sketching the core loop. Andre doing back-of-napkin math on whether you could run a real-time session with this many concurrent players on mobile infrastructure. Me filling pages with the visual language: neon, darkness, rebellion, culture. By 4am we had something that looked like a game. By 6am we had a name.

The MISFITZ Name Fight

The name MISFITZ survived a three-week internal debate at Antihero Studios. Brice proposed it, Frank Yan objected to the Z as gimmicky, and Andre Parodi stayed neutral. Of 40 alternatives, none captured the game's identity as outsiders breaking rules in a conformist world. The Z stayed, and Frank still brings it up monthly.

MISFITZ was my idea and Frank hated it immediately. "The Z is gimmicky." "People will misspell it." "It sounds like a children's cartoon." Andre, as usual, stayed neutral until it mattered. We had a list of 40 other names. None of them stuck. We kept coming back to MISFITZ because it captured the thing we were actually making: a game about outsiders, about people who don't fit the mold, breaking rules in a world that wants them to conform. The Z stayed. Frank still brings it up at least once a month.

Six Months to a Mobile Extraction Shooter Prototype

Antihero Studios built a playable MISFITZ prototype in six months with top-down perspective, auto-aim controls, 5-to-10-minute runs, and the temporary alliance mechanic that became the game's defining feature. The first playtests confirmed the core loop worked when betrayed players immediately re-queued, proving the emotional investment was high enough to sustain the game.

We had a playable prototype in six months. Top-down perspective, because it works on mobile and gives you awareness of your surroundings. Auto-aim, because touch controls shouldn't fight the player. Five-to-ten minute runs, because that's how people actually use their phones. And the mechanic that changed everything: temporary alliances.

Frank had been adamant about this from the whiteboard session. You can team up with any player you encounter. Share loot. Watch each other's backs. But the alliance is voluntary and temporary. At any moment, someone can betray. The game never tells you who to trust. You have to decide, every time, with real stakes.

The first time we watched playtesters use that system, the room went quiet. Two strangers teaming up, fighting together, laughing in the voice chat. Then extraction opens. One of them stops. Turns. Takes everything. The other player screaming into the mic. And then, ten seconds later, queuing up for another run. That was the moment we knew the game worked. Not because of the betrayal. Because of the re-queue. Because the player who got betrayed wanted to go again immediately. The emotional investment was that high.

The Bigger Bet: Building a Gaming Brand, Not Just a Game

Antihero Studios is building a gaming lifestyle brand inspired by A24, Liquid Death, and Corteiz, not just a game company. The studio wants to be one of the rare names in mobile gaming that players actively identify with, where the brand itself drives organic growth through cultural relevance rather than paid acquisition alone.

MISFITZ is the game. But Antihero Studios is the thing I care about most. We believe there's a massive opportunity to build a gaming brand that people actually want to belong to. Not a logo on a loading screen. A brand with the cultural weight of A24 or Liquid Death or Corteiz. Something players identify with, not just play. Almost nobody in mobile gaming has done this. The studios hide behind their products. We want the studio itself to matter.

That's why the website looks the way it does. That's why the voice sounds the way it sounds. That's why we're writing these posts instead of just shipping patch notes. Every touchpoint is a brand decision. We believe that if you build something people want to be part of, growth takes care of itself. Not because you ignore distribution, but because organic reach compounds in ways paid acquisition never will.

Where Antihero Studios Is Now: From Ex-Supercell to 13 People

Antihero Studios has grown to 13 people in Barcelona, working toward the MISFITZ global launch. The team is focused on new maps, new characters, better onboarding, and tighter balance after a pre-alpha that exceeded all expectations with 70,000 players and 50-minute average daily playtime.

The team is 13 people now. The apartment office is long gone, replaced by a real space with a whiteboard that's actually mounted properly. The pre-alpha went better than we had any right to expect. You can read about that here.

We're deep in the work now, the real work, the part where you take something that people liked in rough form and make it genuinely great. New maps, new characters, better onboarding, tighter balance. The bones are right. Now we're building the house.

Sometimes I walk through the office after everyone's left and I look at the screens with builds running, the character art pinned to the walls, the Discord analytics on someone's monitor. And I think about that dinner in Helsinki. Three people complaining about an industry they loved, drawing on napkins, half-joking about starting something. If you'd told me then that we'd be here now, I'd have believed you. Because this was always the only thing that made sense.

If you want to see how we're thinking about the game itself, the first dev diary goes deeper on why mobile extraction. And if you want to try MISFITZ, the playtest is open.

Last updated: April 8, 2026