A close-knit group of high-school friends from Belgrade, Serbia reunited a few years after college in search of something more. What resulted was no ordinary engineering job, but a team that would go on to create film, games and music relevant to current issues in a changing world.
Demagog Studio began informally in 2013, and is led by Igor Simic, an award-winning filmmaker and contemporary artist who returned to Belgrade after studying film and philosophy at Columbia University in New York.
Naming their team after a leader who exploits ignorance among the common people (a demagogue), it’s no surprise that the studio’s games express a deeper political or social meaning. Their first game was Crisis Expert, an infinite runner made in light of the financial crisis. You play the role of a shopping cart, driving on an economics graph with the goal of maximizing profits. A year later they launched Children’s Play, a satirical game themed around child labor.
“We thought of these early games more as experiments because none of us had ever made a game before,” says Simic. In 2017, Demagog became an official company and they decided to take their experiment to the next level by creating an art project that spans several mediums, including mobile games, videos and music.