Former TT Games boss has launched a new studio to work on a Peter Pan game
Second Star Games will eventually move onto working on other IP
A former head at Lego game developer TT Games has set up a new studio to work on a game based on Peter Pan.
Tom Stone was part of Lego Interactive’s senior management team, but when the company stepped out of video games Stone and his colleague Jonathan Smith formed Giant Interactive, a publisher with the exclusive Lego game licence.
At the time Traveller’s Tales was working on the first Lego Star Wars game, and when that was a success Traveller’s Tales acquired Giant Interactive and formed TT Games, where Stone became managing director. After that, Stone continued to work on Lego games for nearly 18 years until he left in 2020 to become the chair of Powerwash Simulator studio FuturLab.
Stone left FuturLab in 2024 and earlier this year co-founded Second Star Games, following a conversation with media agency The Blair Partnership and Great Ormond Street Hospital. As reported by GamesIndustry.biz, the studio has been set up to create a game based on Peter Pan, partly to earn money for the hospital.
While the IP is now in the public domain, author JM Barrie granted the rights to Great Ormond Street Hospital, and a 1988 Act ensured that it still receives royalties from any commercial use in the UK even though the copyright has now expired.
The studio – which is named after the directions to Neverland, where you have to take the “second star to the right and straight on ’til morning” – includes some of Stone’s former TT Games colleagues, including lead game designer Andrew Holt, art director Nicola Daly and head of engineering Chris Stanforth.
Stone told GamesIndustry.biz that despite a Polygon report from 2022 suggesting TT Games’ workforce suffered from extensive crunch and pressure, his new team has to accept that working on this new game will still be hard.
“We’re currently a team of 18 full-time employees,” he explained. “Everyone’s the same. We’re all in this boat together. Everyone knows each other. We don’t want an HR department. Everyone is there to support one another in building this game together.
“It’s going to be tough and challenging because we’re setting ourselves incredibly high goals. We had a meeting last week in the studio, where we agreed on a particular design feature, which is going to be very, very challenging to achieve.
“If we are not going to do stuff like that, what’s the point of doing it? If we aren’t going to break through and make this game truly memorable, then why bother? Everyone is on board. Everyone knows we are going to set ourselves some really, really high bar challenges, and everyone wants to do it.”
According to Stone, while the studio is named after a Peter Pan reference, the plan is to move on to other IPs in the future.
