Giant white marble figures rise from the sea, perform a brief symbolic dance, and walk back under.
A one-person studio making a weird art-game on factory-automation foundations. No name yet. No trailer. Just a shape, and a feeling we are building toward.
Signature surreal image (e.g. the mass of rubber ducks). Supply a wide cinematic render; final treatment is full-bleed.
Fig. 00 — Working still. Subject to disappearance.
A factory for feelings you would rather not have.
It is an art-game built on factory-automation foundations — belts, machines, optimization, the quiet satisfaction of a system that finally runs.
Underneath the tidy logistics is the thing the logistics are trying not to look at: pollution, a warming world, the slow industrial undoing of something that was alive. The game uses absurdity as a protective lens — comedy held up to genuine bleakness so you can keep looking without flinching or drowning. Warm, not nihilistic. Funny, but about something.
- Status — In development
- Announcement — Not yet
- Working title — No name yet
- Foundations — Factory automation
- Target window — [FILL: TBA]
No store page. No trailer. No screenshots worth showing yet. When there is something real, it appears here and on YouTube — not before.
The marble-giants render. Portrait crop — the one image allowed to be genuinely strange.
One person. Several lifetimes. Finally in the same room.
I got my first home computer in 1984 and quickly learned to make it obey. In 1987, at eleven, I finished a game and tried to publish it. It did not work out — the first of many useful failures.
I went to the University of Jyväskylä to study a combination of mathematics and computing, and somewhere around 1995 I understood that what I actually wanted was art. I taught myself 2D and 3D graphics and how to make music on synthesizers; later I published a collection of poetry. Then I graduated in 1999 and did the sensible thing — a long, capable career in software, data, and AI.
In 2025 I finally admitted the obvious: that by making my own games I could put the two halves of myself in the same room — the engineer and the artist, the kid and the professional. I left the day job and started Ape Matrix Labs, a one-person studio in Helsinki, to pursue the creative dreams I had been postponing since I was eleven.
Teemu Lähteenmäki — founder, Ape Matrix Labs
- Founder — Teemu Lähteenmäki
- Founded — 2025, Helsinki
- Background — software, data, AI, art
- First game attempt — 1987, age 11
Devlog
Irregular dispatches. Most lead somewhere — usually a new video.
First contact at Gamescom
We are in Cologne for business matchmaking. If you scanned a card to get here: hello, and welcome. [FILL: booth or meeting details.]
The channel opens
First video is up — [FILL: what it shows]. More to follow as there is more to show.
Ape Matrix Labs begins
The studio is founded in Helsinki. One person, one machine, and an extremely long to-do list. After thirty-odd years of detour, the creative work starts in earnest.