Secret Mode skips RFP as sibling studio Blackbird Interactive scales Escape the Backrooms to 4 million players
Summary
Fancy's solo-built Escape the Backrooms stalled on console porting by mid-2025.
Publisher Secret Mode enlisted sibling studio Blackbird Interactive via shared investor Emona Capital.
Secret Mode skipped the typical RFP process to launch this engagement immediately.
The game reached 4 million players by July 2026 across PC and consoles.
01
Shared investor let partners skip RFP bidding
Secret Mode is a UK publisher behind Chained Together and Still Wakes the Deep.
Blackbird Interactive, a 200-staff co-dev studio, is Secret Mode's sibling firm via Emona Capital.
That relationship let the two skip the standard RFP vendor-selection process.
Project Minotaur began in September 2025 with just two staff.
The team grew to six engineers and designers within one month.
02
Code handoff forced reverse-engineering of a solo codebase
Blackbird inherited Fancy's codebase without an automated build pipeline or technical documentation.
Engineers had to reverse-engineer his exact mix of plugins, SDKs, and Unreal Engine 4 branches.
Secret Mode's own testing later found the Xbox and PS5 builds lacked certified peer-to-peer networking.
Blackbird's engineers had solved an identical networking problem years earlier on Minecraft Legends.
"What makes a good partnership isn't measured by how smoothly the project is going, but how partners respond when things go wrong."
03
Delayed launch synced with Backrooms film release
Secret Mode delayed the PS5 and Xbox launch to add crossplay and Game Pass.
That delay synced the console release with A24's Backrooms film release.
Escape the Backrooms launched on PS5 and Xbox May 28, one day before the film.
Steam concurrent players peaked at 48,000 at 1.0 launch, three times the prior record.
04
Results extended the engagement into a long-term partnership
Switch 2 launch on July 7 pushed total players past 4 million in one month.
Escape the Backrooms became the most-downloaded PS5 title in North America and Europe that June.
Secret Mode signed a new contract keeping Blackbird on the project for the foreseeable future.
Blackbird's team is doubling in size as Secret Mode builds its own internal studio.
What this means
For Publishers & Developers: Audit build pipelines and documentation of solo-dev acquisitions before committing to console dates.
For Investors & VC: Price in-portfolio co-dev capacity as a time-to-market premium when valuing holding-group publishers.
For Service Vendors: Pitch holding-company investors directly to become the default co-dev partner across their portfolios.
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