WAVE Game Studios

In the last year, WAVE Game Studios has been troubling the wallets of Dreamcast owners with high-quality physical releases of games such as Intrepid Izzy, Postal and Shadow Gangs, and has even produced the first Dreamcast demo disc in 20 years for Sega Powered magazine. We spoke to Daniel Crocker, who runs the publisher with his brother Nick, to find out more about its rapid ascent.

How did you and Nick come to form WAVE Game Studios?

We started off in the homebrew scene in engine. So the indie scene was always something that we were aware of and any time a new release would come out, we would grab it because [it was] something for our beloved system. But the modern incarnation of WAVE started in about 2015, and we started purely as a distributor of games. We would basically contact indie developers and say, “Hey, can we help sell your games to retro game shops?” The pandemic is when we really started to put some time into this, and I suppose it’s like with a lot of people, we just had a lot of excess time. And we fall back to, “When we were kids, what did we want to do?” And the answer is we wanted to be involved in the games industry in some way. We know a lot of developers and we know a lot of store owners, so we thought, “Why don’t we just turn that up to 11?”