Studio HIVE: Creating Beautiful Games in Bangkok

Skan Srisuwan and Kan Supabanpot

With clients such as Square Enix, Lucas Arts, Namco Bandai, Top Cow, and Stan Lee’s POW Entertainment, Studio HIVE is Thailand’s number one art outsourcing studio for concept art, comic book illustrations, and images for various branches of entertainment. Close to celebrating the company’s second year of existence, founders Skan Srisuwan and Kan Supabanpot have gathered an impressive track record of clients. Their next goal is to do the same with videogames with their first big game project being based on the well-known Ong Bak movie license.

Busy bees in Bangkok

Srisuwan and Supabanpot have been best friends for years and have always shared a passion for games and the industry that creates them. “We always knew we’d end up working together to create something beautiful,” Supabanpot admits. Before the dynamic duo founded Studio HIVE, Srisuwan was still working at another art studio, where he developed illustrations and designed for Square Enix’s game Front Mission Evolved. Supabanpot was busy founding the ThaiGamerNetwork to work with and support foreign game publishers and distributors in their efforts to promote video games in Thailand, and (because of the heavy piracy rates) stimulated the purchase of legal game copies.

When Srisuwan’s previous job encountered some changes, the event signaled the duo to start working together. They set up the company in 2010 and left for the Tokyo Game Show a couple of months later to talk to some of the biggest names in the game industry. Carrying a thesis project of some game design students that they had just hired, the duo bumped into the likes of gaming legend Hideo Kojima. Supabanpot notes:

We purposefully didn’t talk too much business with them, admits. But the Tokyo Game Show proved to us that meeting these high profile people isn’t that hard at all.

Thanks to the thesis project that the young group of developers had made before being hired by Studio HIVE, Srisuwan and Supabanpot were able to acquire a deal to develop the video game for the next installment of Ong Bak movie franchise, which is planned to be released sometime in 2013. At that time, Studio HIVE’s own art team was also hard at work to finish a new project for a graphic novel called Romeo & Juliet: The War from 1821 Comics and Marvel legend Stan Lee.

Supabanpot explains:

Our livelihood as the supplier of quality artwork and illustrations is providing us with a very profitable and stable source of revenue. That income isn’t wasted and is directly put back into our company in order to move forward and adapt.

Those revenue streams are also currently financing the finalization of their Ong Bak project, which a team of more than ten has been working on tirelessly since October of last year. The game is already in its final phase of being extensively polished.