. More than a victory lap for the French Canadian branch, this recent festival perch offered another testament to the benefits of public investment in a still-nascent artistic discipline.
Since 2009, the Montreal Interactive Studio has supported more than 150 projects. With an annual budget of at least $1 million devoted to original productions, and yearly remit of two to three finished titles, the publicly funded outfit has played an outsized role in nourishing the local talents who, in turn, have shaped the wider industry.
“Each project is an exploration that carries elements into each subsequent one,” Tremblay explains. “It’s like a prototype lab. We’ll finished a work, but we don’t stop pushing, [because] a completed project can be reapplied, and the talents behind them that can go and take that work to parallel industries.”