Meet The Heads Behind The Giant
Stephan and Matthew Hanewinckel are two twins from a small town in Oregon with an unhealthy obsession with video games and anything geek culture!
When my brother and I were very young, our parents busted out the NES and had us join them in playing Mario. Little did they know, that would be the spark that would ignite our passion for video games. Ever since then, we’ve built a large collection of game systems and video games and sunk countless hours into playing them.
Everywhere we went we always seemed to have a video game of some sort in our hands, much to our parents dismay (lol sorry mom and dad). I cant even count how many homework assignments my brother and I sped through so we could rush over and plug some more hours into Max Payne 2, Mortal Kombat, Dead Space, or whatever game we were glued to at the time.
Eventually, we picked up other delightful hobbies such as Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering, comic books, fantasy novels, dirt biking, and even some dabbling in the original Game Maker. Although we always seemed to gravitate back to our game systems, usually spending weeks of our time invested in some cool game.
When we graduated high school (yes, we did do that) we spent several years trying to figure out just what we really wanted to do with our lives, working day jobs in the meantime.
Finally, we decided that all we really wanted to do was create a video game company.
Unfortunately, our first couple attempts didn’t work out well. We tried working with friends but didn’t see eye to eye when it came to the games and ended up having difficulties trying to figure out how we were even going to make a game that was compelling. Eventually, we decided that we wanted the company to just be the two of us and started on an idea we came up with during a conversation with our cousin Ronald back when we were kids.
That game ended up being none other than Circus Interstellar.
We now aim to make our dream game company shine and have begun putting a lot of extra love and effort into it, and we hope you’ll enjoy what we have to dish out!
– Matthew and Stephan Hanewinckel; co-founders of Ettinsoft LLC
