Welcome to VA Game Labs

VA Game Labs is the games focussed sister company of Vector Anomaly . We're an independent games developer founded in 2006 by two ex-Microsoft Research employees who simply wanted to make a greater impact in the games industry. But, as "yet another freshly-formed independent games company ", what makes us different?

Well, to us the difference can be summarised in one crucial word: “innovation”.

To us, "innovation" has a very clear and significant meaning which seems somewhat at odds with the way the word proliferates within the games industry these days. A 2006 version of a 2005 game derived from a 2004 sequel to an 2003 follow-on with different colour weapons/cars/planes/hair doesn’t really cut it as "novel" to our minds. That’s certainly not to say there is no merit in such progressive development, but declaring an iterative improvement of an existing game feature to be an innovation somewhat devalues the meaning of the word.

So, where is the spring of genuine innovation to be found? Well, we spent several years working on games technology at Microsoft's Cambridge research laboratory in the UK, where we’d formed our own specialist group dedicated to bringing advanced "machine learning" technology into mainstream video games, with some considerable success [more detail]. Our mission now is to channel the fresh perspectives afforded by this cutting edge research experience into the genuinely innovative video entertainment concepts of the future. And we don't want to do this just because it sounds clever or cool — we simply want to make games that are more interesting, more original, and a lot more fun to play.