Eight-year-old Joe remembers fighting over who got to be the Helicopter in Silkworm on Amiga with his best friend. And then losing in a glorious cacophony of co-op play.

Joe ran the 3-million DAU hit Restaurant City at Playfish. He was a founding employee at Space Ape Games. He led the teams behind Samurai Siege and Rival Kingdoms. He designed the co-op events that made those games into monsters.  Joe was on the leadership team that grew Space Ape to over 100 staff, and the successful partnership with Supercell.

Joe brings this experience of growing studios and games to to 2UP. He can't wait to get the magic of co-op into the hands of as many humans as possible.

When Joe and his wife clocked the infamous Spaghetti Monster on “Overcooked”, he popped it into his diary under the title of: “best day of our marriage”.  To be clear, he started counting after their wedding day.

1988: Nine-year-old Tim sketches the design for a multiplayer, networked point-and-click adventure at his family's kitchen table.

Tim never did get that phone call from LucasArts. But he has gone on to ship over a dozen games, including, yes, two point-and-click adventures. He co-founded acclaimed mobile studio Launching Pad Games, and created the killer app for Magic Leap, in collaboration with Weta Workshop.

Tim and his wife practise "Minecraft-based parenting", where their four children learn potty training, talking, and Minecraft in a flexible order.

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Games were scarce in Luke’s childhood home, so he built his own using Q-BASIC. His first text adventure was gleefully deadly. He was hooked.

Luke remains fascinated by crafting tiny worlds and bringing them to life. Starting out as a programmer, he soon switched focus to design. He has since built a career as a design generalist and leader shipping titles like Adventure Xpress and Into the Dead 2.

Co-op is a mantra for Luke, in work and play, so he’s pumped to put this into practice every day at 2UP Games.

Steffi's game development career started around age ten, when her dad taught her how to make simple BASIC programs on the C64. Her first (never finished, of course) text adventure centred on avoiding the teachers in the school building while skipping lessons.

After several years of free-to-play development experience at Gameforge and Flaregames in Germany, then freelancer and cloud architect for several gaming companies, karma made her move across the world to Wellington, NZ to be a backend developer at Magic Leap.

Now, between being a mobile indie on her own, she supports 2UP (which includes the only person she knows that has more played hours on Plants vs Zombies) with backend dev and Dev-Ops.

From the seaside salt-air haze of Windang Australia, fed on a typical 80s/90s cultural diet of pulpy comics, VHS and Saturday morning cartoons, connector pens and garbage pail kids stickers, Ross’ artistic pursuits emerged.

Gaming was a large part of his formative years too. Earthworm Jim, Monkey Island and Worms stand out in his memory, but apple juice-fuelled Bubble Bobble marathons with his cousin David, overheating the console and laughing like morons is where his journey into co-op games began.

He launched his profession working as an illustrator with comics and magazines, shirt designs and children’s books, and as the world outside called he spent a decade working in London. Between hanging out in pubs he worked for web and mobile game studios Mind Candy, Bossa, Gumbug and Voodoo.

Ross is now based in Sydney, and when he’s not working on games he’s found making comics, crate digging for vinyl records and hunting desperately for the best dumplings in the world.

The first game Anna remembers playing was Spyro the Dragon. It's what sparked her interest in art and games with bright colours and expressive, over the top characters.

"I wanted to create the same feeling I found in those characters. As much as I love gaming, I find myself analyzing how the animation is made in everything I see and wanting to mimic that."

Her co-op experience started with various split-screen multiplayer games, MMOs and more: World of Warcraft, Animal Crossing, Pokémon, Lego Star Wars, Halo and Dark Souls. Co-op games were how Anna and her fiancé Amanda made it through Covid, as they lived in separate hemispheres!

She started freelance animation a few years after university, and with a couple of gigs under her belt, soon found her way to 2UP. Making the leap, she finally ditched retail and entered the expressive, colourful world of mobile games.

Weber likes singing and making creative things. He's also been making games after graduated from uni. His goal at 2UP Games? Keep lagginess away.

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A fullstack engineer who can solve any problem, Weber has previously worked at ARA Journeys, Honeyvision and Scarlett City Studios.

Phil grew up playing RPGs, MMOs and couch co-op on the N64, and is excited to bring co-op experiences to mobile.



Phil has almost a decade of experience in mobile games industry, working across many genres and over 10 shipped titles. He has touched upon all aspects of game development including gameplay, UI/UX and game design.



Phil has also been working on a passion project in the form of a mobile RPG. You can see his work at https://www.renbaikun.com/.

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Meet James, the playful and passionate game enthusiast. Since his earliest encounters with video games, running floppy disks in DOS prompt and uncovering gems like 'Commander Keen,' 'Crystal Caves,' and 'Paganitzu,' James has been captivated by the magic of interactive experiences.

What began as a fascination gradually evolved into a deep interest in game development, surpassing his role as a player. As a true generalist, James embraces all facets of game development, recognising that the finest games emerge from a harmonious blend of art, technology, and commerce.

With a background in graphic design and a wealth of experience as a digital media educator and freelance interactive developer for museums, James made his foray into the games industry as a UX designer. However, his versatile skill set has propelled him through various roles, spanning the realms of art, game design, and product management.

For James, problem solving is a joy and collaboration is key. He firmly believes that great teams are the catalysts for crafting extraordinary games. At 2UP Games, James brings his infectious enthusiasm, diverse expertise, and love for collaborative problem solving to create captivating and immersive gaming experiences.

Calum grew up with an N64, Gameboy Color, and DOS & Windows 3.1, and his experiences with these devices ignited and shaped his passion for capturing the artistic expression and wondrously vivid experiences only possible through game creation.

Calum has always had an especially sweet spot for strategy games, with healthy doses of nostalgia for the Ages of Empires and Red Alert series, although Banjo-Kazooie and more recent games like Frostpunk and Disco Elysium are equally beloved. Calum loves all genres and platforms of games; anything that presents elegant design decisions, respects the player’s time, and exudes the love put into it by its creators.

This love combined with his later-found loves of technology & programming, and human-centric design & empathic team processes led Calum to the technical-lead-type roles he now finds himself in.

Before joining 2UP, Calum founded tiny indie studio Cardboard Keep in 2013, joined Immutable as Lead Game Developer in 2018, and worked with Amplitude Studios as a Lead & Expert Programmer throughout 2022.

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