Mattia Traverso

Mattia started experimenting with Flash in 2009 when he realised that Santa Claus would not bring him the imaginary games he had asked for. To his surprise, in 2011 he became a finalist at the Independent Games Festival with “One and One Story”, a platform game about love that uses game mechanics to tell a story. After founding his own company in the Netherlands, in 2016 he released the experimental puzzle game FRU, the Xbox One exclusive with the highest “Metascore” of 2016. FRU gets a 9.5 score from the well-known portal Destructoid and maintains an 84 score on Metacritic to date. His journey led him to Ovosonico, where he took on the role of Lead Designer on “Last Day of June”, a narrative title in collaboration with Steven Wilson and 505Games, and winner of the Italian Game Awards in 2017. Polygon’s Colin Campbell calls Last Day of June “one of the five games that brought me to tears”. In 2019, he was a co-author and director of Secret Oops!, one of the only Italian games to appear on the Apple Arcade subscription service, developed by MixedBag. In addition to game development, Mattia is a regular speaker and attendee at GDC, Gamescom, and Codemotion, and has appeared in Sole 24 Ore, Business Insider, VICE, Engadget, and generally the videogame press.