About Us

FACTSHEET

Developer:
Oh, a Rock! Studios
Based in Ithaca, NY

Founding date:
March 24, 2014

Head Boy:
Paul Franzen

Press/business contact
paul AT oharock DOT com

Website:
oharock.com

Social:
Facebook
Twitter
Podcast
Discord

RELEASES:
The Lost Oregon City Gold
Too Many Santas!
Internet Court
Cat President 2: Purrlitical Revolution
The Pizza Delivery Boy Who Saved the World
The Francy Droo & Friends Collection
The Awkward Steve Duology

Cat President: A More Purrfect Union
The Beard in the Mirror

DESCRIPTION

Oh, a Rock! Studios is a small indie games studio that makes funny, weird, and sincere adventure games, visual novels, and live-action FMV games.

HISTORY

Our studio was founded by the wife-and-husband team of Lizo Medina-Gray and Paul Franzen, two life-long adventure game fans with wildly different design principles, even from a young age (she’s a Sierra fangirl, and he’s a LucasArts fanboy). They got their start making up interactive text adventure games through AOL Instant Messenger—one person would IM the other, saying something like “You wake up in the middle of the night to see a strange woman hovering over your bed. What do you do?”, and the other person would type out responses and try to “win” the game, without getting themselves killed in some spectacularly unlikely fashion.

These early games formed the basis for Oh, a Rock!’s first major project, the point-and-click adventure game The Beard in the Mirror.

As Lizo’s focus turned more toward the academic side of gaming, Paul started reaching out to some of his close friends to expand the scope of the studio to include not just point-and-clickers, but visual novels and FMV games, too. He’s since partnered with writer/YouTuber Michael “Arglefumph” Gray on a number of titles, including Cat President: A More Purrfect Union, which Kotaku described as “an actual PC video game.” Together, Michael and Paul also host a podcast on indie game development called “Oh, a Podcast!”.

Our games have been showcased at conventions such as WordPlay and RetroGameCon, and even exhibited inside the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which our moms were very impressed by. Our latest title is The Lost Oregon City Gold, a hybrid visual novel/adventure game about a dad and his two young daughters exploring the end of the Oregon Trail to solve an old family mystery.

Trailers


SCREENSHOTS

PRESS RELEASES

INTERVIEWS

  • “Oh, A Special Guest! named Paul Franzen” – Super Mega Crash Bros. Turbo (9/13/2021)
  • “Oh, a Rock! Studios – Goofy, with a Lot of Heart” – Yin Indie (6/20/2021)
  • “Awkward Steve at the Smithsonian – Paul Franzen Interview” – GameCola (11/06/2017)
  • “This Awkward FMV Game Will Be Shown at the Smithsonian” – Waypoint (7/21/2017)
  • “Building an in-game hint hotline for The Beard In The Mirror” – Gamasutra (1/27/2017)
  • “Interview with Paul Franzen” – FMV World (12/16/2015)
  • “Mixing suspense, absurdity and FMV in A Stranger Comes Calling” – Gamasutra (10/12/2015)
presskit() by Rami Ismail (Vlambeer) – also thanks to these fine folks