Andrew Gowers’ ‘Brighter Shores’ gets closer to release

Fen Research has announced the upcoming release of Brighter Shores on Steam.

The publisher was founded by Andrew Gower, who created the MMORPG game RuneScape during his time at Cambridge University.

Andrew co-founded Jagex in 1999, and the Cambridge Science Park games giant went on to build an empire out of RuneScape, which has a player base of almost 19m, with 180,000 daily players.

The Gower brothers - Paul Gower was also a Jagex co-founder - were on The Sunday Times Rich List in 2007, ranked as the 654th richest entrepreneurs in the UK, worth £196m. In 2008. The Daily Telegraph listed them as the UK's eleventh richest young entrepreneurs.

Andrew Gower left Jagex in 2010. What subsequently happened is open to interpretation, but the brothers no longer had any input after selling their stake. Jagex has subsequently been passed from one investment fund to the next - bought by Carlyle for £900m in 2021, it was sold to current owners CVC for £910m in 2024.

That same year - 2010 - Andrew Gower set up Fen Research, which is based at St John’s Innovation Centre.

Brighter Shores, which goes live on Steam later this year (Q3), is an all-new MMORPG adventure described as “an enchanting point-and-click style RPG with hundreds of hours of gameplay, set in a land of magic and mysteries, with a huge number of professions to try, and something new to find around every corner.”

The new game, allegedly ten years in the making, will be initially released on PC and Mac, with a free-to-start model.