At his first studio, Failbetter Games, Alexis Kennedy created the Fallen London franchise, beginning with the Fallen London browser game – a dark literary fantasy of life in a subterranean metropolis, which has now been running continuously for over ten years, with well over a million users.

At Failbetter, Alexis led development on a string of award-winning narrative games, in the Fallen London universe and for partners like Random House, BioWare, the BBC and Channel 4 – and a browser-based interactive story platform called StoryNexus. 

Alexis’ final project at Failbetter was Sunless Sea, a game of loneliness, exploration and survival set on a night-bound archipelago in the Fallen London world, on which he served as creative director and lead writer. Sunless Sea was a critical and commercial success that sold almost half a million copies in the first year.

After growing Failbetter from a bedroom startup to a multi-million pound business, he left the studio after seven years to focus more directly on on experimental creative work. He took a ronin year to do guest-writing gigs for big names like BioWare, Telltale and Paradox, learning from very different approaches by very different studios; and then founded Weather Factory, a boutique studio specialising in narrative experiments, with Lottie Bevan.

Weather Factory won the Best Microstudio award at the Develop Star Awards in 2019.