Studio 404 Games is a small, independent roleplaying game company featuring exciting adventures of space, magic, and more.

Our Crew

The Bureau considers any records of GM Brett before 1993 to be falsified. He exhibits the patterns of a nocturnal carnivore, hiding from daylight due to a strong allergic reaction and preferring dark colors. The subject's first entry in our records involved membership in New England Role-playing Organization (NERO) and eventually other Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) games, which he continues to this day. Around 2001, he was instrumental in the founding of the Massachusetts Local 404 chapter of the Powergamers Union and quickly rose to the leadership position. This union chapter quickly went underground until recent years when they started publicly playtesting for Fantasy Flight Games.

This field agent would continue to advise a "wait and see" approach with GM Brett. He remains harmless, though his potential of gaining too much control of the media is a concern.

On a personal note, this will be my last entry for the Bureau. I am retiring due to the loss of my uncle, who has left me his entire estate.

What happens when you blend a mind for mathematics and physics with a passion for reading and writing? You get someone like GM Kimber. She graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and worked as an engineer for six years. In recent years, she switched careers to technical writing and started a Master’s Degree program at Northeastern University in Technical Communications focusing on User Experience Design, to be completed in 2020.

But the whole time, what she really wanted to be was a knight befriending dragons and saving villages, or a sailor on a tall ship sailing the seas, and has spent more than two decades living out those imagined adventures through an avid gaming hobby—video games, tabletopping, and LARPing. In her free time, she explores space and time with GM Brett and their daughter. Adventure Found here!

Phil Maiewski is a veteran gamemaster whose experience goes all the way back to running "red box D&D" in the summer of '88. Since then, he has seemingly never had a time where he wasn't running at least one campaign—and at many points several concurrent ones. After 32 years of writing and running games for his friends and family, "GM Phil" finally broke into freelance game writing with two products in production and more on the way.

Recently, GM Phil had a burning desire to share a campaign setting he'd been working on for several years with the public. Gathering together a motley band of heroes and ne'er do-wells, they formed Studio 404 Games to facilitate its production and distribution. Time will tell what other happy havoc this group inflicts upon the world at large.

GM Alex, a New England native, was bitten by a radioactive comic book while narrowly escaping the Saturday afternoon UHF-fueled rampage of dueling Kaiju. His mind slipping into worlds of ink and paper, it wasn't long before Alex stepped into gaming. During recess in 1986, using hodge-podge rules that his friend learned from his older brother, he forever altered his destiny away from meaningful pursuits like architecture, telephone sanitizing, or chinchilla breeding.

Alex eventually managed to secure steady employment recovering artifacts that belonged in a museum for a local college history department. On one such adventure, he met GM Phil and GM Brett. Due to a case of mistaken identities, hostile water balloons were exchanged. The three of them quickly realized that fighting Super Powered Criminals together in the big city while trying to make 11pm print deadlines wasn’t their idea of a good time—it was their idea of a great time!

When GM Alex pretended to grow up, so did his gaming tastes. Now he alternates his time between being “that player” at the table and running games for his friends. He is a veteran LARPer with SCA experience and a library of defunct game systems covered in handwritten notes to "improve" the game, or "correct" the backstory.

GM Alex spends his time juggling two Kaiju that refer to him as “Dad,” running a business with his wife, and writing ideas for adventures that make his fellow GM’s eyes widen with terror—or awe. Alex isn’t sure which emotion they are conveying; he hasn’t asked yet, and he’s not about to ask now. Life is all about surprises, right?

Darren West Freelance Writer, Proofreader, Painter, Professional GM (RPG and Fiction)

Darren West is a demifluid dude, an award-winning adventure freelance writer, and miniature painter. A lifelong gamer and professional GM—Iron DM and Iron Gauntlet winner—he has roleplaying game roots in Dungeons & Dragons, Genesys, Savage Worlds, Silhouette CORE, and Star Wars, as well as a cornucopia of other game systems. With forty years of storytelling experience, Darren’s passion for writing is influenced by a diverse set of authors too numerous to list. Outside his writing career, he is also a software quality assurance manager, motorcycle enthusiast, shenanigator, poet, and rabid RPG fan.

Darren found a passion in Fantasy Flight Games and Edge Studio narrative dice systems, particularly drawn to how the games granted greater player agency, allowing for variations of collaborative storytelling. He nourished that passion by becoming a freelance playtester, game developer, and proofreader, later writing and developing one of the initial launch modules for the Genesys Foundry: Haedra’s Shard—an adventure that won Best Adventure at The Forge Awards 2020. Since then, he has been a major contributor to the Genesys RPG community, collaborating on numerous projects. Darren West’s work—under the nom de plume Darth Zorg—can be found on drivethrurpg.com.

Having a love for all things Studio 404, we initially scooped him up as a mercenary for hire then later adding him to our motley band of heroes and ne'er-do-wells.