Chris Remo

Chris Remo is an American video game designer, composer, writer, podcaster, and former journalist.
As a journalist, he cofounded the original Idle Thumbs website as well as its flagship podcast, and served as Editor-in-Chief of Shacknews and Editor at Large for Gamasutra.
He composed the music for Thirty Flights of Loving, Gone Home, Spacebase DF-9 and Firewatch. He co-wrote The Cave with Ron Gilbert at Double Fine Productions. In early 2014, he left Double Fine to join his Idle Thumbs co-hosts Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman at Campo Santo, where he contributed to the studio's narrative adventure game Firewatch as a game and story designer, composer, and audio director.

Career

Chris Remo began his career as a video game journalist, writing for Adventure Gamers. He co-founded Idle Thumbs, a video game culture website, with colleagues from Adventure Gamers and The International House of Mojo in 2004. As a professional journalist, he was Editor-in-Chief of Shacknews and later Gamasutra, becoming Editor at Large. After Idle Thumbs went dark in 2007, Remo revived it as a podcast in late 2008 with other Thumbs writers Nick Breckon and Jake Rodkin. While podcasting for Idle Thumbs, he composed and performed "Space Asshole", a satirical song about the protagonist of Red Faction: Guerrilla, which went viral.
He left his position at Gamasutra in 2010 to work as a community manager and producer for Boston-based Irrational Games, ending the first run of the Idle Thumbs podcast at the same time. The show's then-final episode was recorded live at the 2010 Penny Arcade Expo.
In early 2012, Remo returned to San Francisco to start a crowdfunded campaign on Kickstarter to revive the Idle Thumbs podcast with then-co-hosts Rodkin and Sean Vanaman. As part of the Kickstarter campaign, Remo composed the soundtrack for Blendo Games' Thirty Flights of Loving, a video game that would be released to backers of the campaign.
He also took a job in a multi-faceted role at Double Fine Productions, where he contributed to various games, including as a composer and game designer for Spacebase DF-9, an Amnesia Fortnight project, and as co-writer of The Cave alongside Ron Gilbert.
Remo composed the soundtrack to Gone Home, a game written by former Idle Thumbs co-host Steve Gaynor, and co-wrote Rogue One: X-Wing VR Mission for Star Wars Battlefront, developed by Criterion Games.
As a member of independent game studio Campo Santo, Remo was a game and story designer, composer, and audio director of the BAFTA-winning narrative adventure Firewatch, and has spoken about the game’s design at numerous game development conferences around the world.
In 2018, Campo Santo was acquired by Seattle-area game developer Valve.

Works

2005 Psychonauts, tester
2009 Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter Wii, composer
2012 Unbearable: Or How They Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bear, composer, writer
2012 Thirty Flights of Loving, composer
2012 Spacebase DF-9 composer, designer
2013 The Cave, co-writer
2013 Gone Home, composer
2013 Captain Bubblenaut, composer
2014 Spacebase DF-9, composer
2015 Wheels of Aurelia, dialogue support
2016 Firewatch, game and story designer, composer, audio director
2016 Star Wars Battlefront – Rogue One: X-Wing VR Mission, writer
2020 Dota Underlords
2020 Half-Life: Alyx
2022 Saturnalia, writer
2024 Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, senior game designer
TBA In the Valley of Gods, game and story designer, composer