By today's standards (circa 2013) Kot-in-Action Creative Artel can be construed as a garage indie game developer, which consists of a single individual who brings together a team talented people to make projects come to life.
WIKI says: "Artel is a general term for various cooperative associations that existed in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union."
It also states: "Artel of Artists was a cooperative association (artel) and a commune of democratically-minded artists headed by Ivan Kramskoi. It was established in 1863 after some of its future organisers had been expelled from the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts because of the "revolt of fourteen". In rebellion against the Academy's annual competition, the students refused to paint an exam picture on the given topic."
These words reflect our aspirations and who we are. Not (yet) bound by the chains of any superseding entity, we make games we would like to play ourselves. While keeping up with trends, we don't think that incorporating those trends into our games is necessarily a good thing. Being game developers who are rooted in Quake® and Doom 3® modding, we aim at creating games that are true to the roots of early action games, yet not strangers to modern elements that make the whole gaming experience more enjoyable.
The company was created around 2008 by Alexander "motorsep" Zubov and housed in a remote corner of the USA - Del Rio, TX. Its first commercial game is titled "Steel Storm", which originally was planned as an episodic series. The first instalment of the game, titled "Steel Storm: Episode 1" was released in September of 2010 as a shareware game. The game became fairly popular, reaching 310,000+ downloads worldwide, taking a spot in the Top 100 of the Indie of the Year 2010 competition and IndieDB Video Spotlight - September 2010.
On May 11th of 2011, Kot-in-Action Creative Artel released the continuation of the series, titled "Steel Storm: Burning Retribution", which was released simultaneously on Steam, Desura and Ubuntu Software Center and has received overall positive reviews.
Currently we are working on a project, codename "Steel Storm 2", which is a single player first person action adventure game for PC.
Copyright © Kot-in-Action Creative Artel. All rights reserved. Steel Storm, Kot-in-Action logos are trademarks of Kot-in-Action Creative Artel in the United States of America and elsewhere. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.