Airlock Games co-founders Brock Feldman and Justin Fischer have been collectively laid off 11 times. “Clearly, these ‘stable’ companies are not stable,” Fischer told us, in an upcoming episode of the FRVR Podcast. “And we’re not having fun doing that, and it’s not providing security, and we think there is a better way to approach this.”

Rewind to May 30, 2025 and Multiversus, a platform fighter that lasted just a year, was shut down. Both Feldman and Fischer were, once again, made redundant. However, despite the challenges and disappointment, the duo realised they shared similar frustrations – and ambitions.

“Brock and I worked very closely in Multiversus,” said Fischer. “The virtue of the challenges of that project is that Brock and I got to see each other in a challenging environment and see that we actually had a very similar approach to that, how we thought things should go. You truly get to know a person under pressure, so we got to see each other.

“We had been talking about, you know, looking at the industry, looking at the layoffs and just like ‘this doesn’t make sense’. Watching the sort of consternation at big companies from the inside, not just Warner Bros., but at other companies we’ve worked at and seeing decisions being made that didn’t make sense to us, and was like you know what, what does make sense here?”

You truly get to know a person under pressure, so we got to see each other.

Airlock Games founder, Justin Fischer

He continued: “And then they announced Player First Games shut down. We were getting laid off. At the time I wasn’t even in my home. I’d be chased out by the giant Eaten Canyon fire that put right by my house. So, I think we were both just kind of at a point where we were like, ‘why are we doing this to ourselves?’ Like, this is not this industry, the AAA space does not make sense right now.”

Airlock Games was born, and so too was their first game, What The Stars Forgot, a retro-styled sci-fi sim that blends horror with resource management – navigating a spaceshift on a deadly mission, while your team gets decimated one by one. The team revealed that while Alien is an obvious inspiration, they actually leaned more into HP Lovecraft when deciding how to make the player feel terror – and opted for pixel art over hyper realism. Fischer explained the contrast between the art style and the fact that ‘horrific s***’ can happen was instantly appealing.

“A part of it was like what can we do visually? We can do pixel art, both kind of skill set-wise and also just scope-wise, pixel art was a good fit. We liked the idea of contrasting cute pixel art with just horrific s*** happening. We like that juxtaposition.” He continued: “HP Lovecraft is not a jump scare, it’s very much messing with your head, so that felt more exciting to us.”

When asked if there will be monsters that players will actually see, or if the game focused purely on psychological horror, Feldman said: ” As you got further and further, we want the game to be four stops. The first stop is dealing with the stress of things as they are, and then start to introduce supernatural, like weird things, with the second one a little bit more overt, and then probably I don’t know if it goes full Event Horizon, but, you know, it’s clear that there’s something messing with everyone by the fourth one.”

Fischer explained that this smaller focus comes after the last three games they worked on were “free-to-play games” with “massive content pipelines”, including a scrapped Kingdom Hearts ARPG by the studio behind Disney Infinity. For Airlock Games, the team isn’t diving into that style of game development, instead focusing on singular experiences that the team can (hopefully) bring out on an annual basis.

What The Stars Forgot currently has a demo on Steam and is penned for March 2026.