How a Marketing Company Created Kerbal Space Program

[00:00:08]Kerbal Space Program, the highly successful  spaceflight simulation game, has one of the most unlikely development stories in gaming. It wasn’t  made by a traditional studio with a big budget or a carefully mapped-out plan for success. In fact,  it didn’t even come from a game company at all.

[00:00:24]It started inside a marketing company in Mexico,  where one overworked employee was about to quit, until his bosses made him a promise  that would change his life forever.

[00:00:34]Long before Kerbal Space Program  became a beloved space sandbox, Felipe Falanghe was someone who loved tinkering  and creating 3D models on his computer. He studied game design in Brazil, but after college he  moved to Mexico to be with his girlfriend, now his wife. That complicated things  professionally. Game jobs were already hard to find in Latin America, so after  graduating, Felipe wasn't in a position to be picky. He was simply hoping to find  something even remotely game-adjacent.

[00:01:03]That eventually led him to a company called  Squad. Before Squad became known for games, it was a marketing company founded in Mexico in  2009. The company built elaborate promotional installations for major brands like Coca-Cola,  Sony, Samsung and Nissan, and by 2010 it was already growing quickly. Squad needed someone  who could create 3D models of those installations in advance so the team could avoid expensive  mistakes once it was time to build them for real.

[00:01:30]Felipe was a good fit. Back in college, he had  become obsessed with the racing game Test Drive Unlimited and wanted a Logitech driving wheel  with a proper gearbox. But because imported electronics were so expensive in Brazil, it was  completely out of reach for a student. So instead, he built his own gearbox out of a USB number pad  and old joystick parts. That kind of hands-on problem solving suddenly became very relevant  during his interview at Squad, because the company wasn't just looking for someone who could model  things on a computer. Since they wanted to keep the team small, they also needed someone who  could help physically build the installations.

[00:02:05]The conversation quickly shifted away from 3D  software and toward something much more practical: how good Felipe was with a soldering iron. The  founders were impressed and hired him on the spot.

[00:02:16]Felipe’s first assignment at Squad was to  design an installation for a Sony marketing campaign. But once the 3D model was finished,  he suddenly had to leave his computer behind and help build the installation on site. That  part of the job had never been made clear to him during the interview. As time went  on, Felipe found himself helping assemble increasingly elaborate marketing stunts  under increasingly stressful conditions.

[00:02:39]As Squad kept growing, the pressure  only got worse. The projects got bigger, the deadlines got tighter and the work became  more physically demanding than Felipe ever expected when he took the job. At one point,  he had to help install a 100-pound projector on top of a structure around 25 feet high. It  was the kind of work where one mistake could be disastrous. What made things worse was that  Squad wasn't really growing much as a team.

[00:03:04]The workload kept increasing, but new hires  were rare, in order to keep costs down.

[00:03:09]Before we move on, I’d like to  talk about this video’s sponsor: the REDMAGIC Astra 2 Gaming Tablet. The tablet  will be available to purchase in late August, but thanks to REDMAGIC, I’ve been able to use  it for the past few weeks. Full disclosure, I have the model with 12GB of RAM  and 256GB of internal storage.

[00:03:28]Now, I could talk all about the  flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, the next-level cooling system featuring  liquid cooling and large-area vapor chamber, or the long lasting battery with fast charging,  but the two things that impressed me far more than I was expecting were the build quality and  the screen. The Astra 2 features a 9.06-inch OLED display with a 185Hz refresh rate, and it  genuinely looks fantastic. Colors really pop, blacks are deep, and the contrast makes playing  games and watching videos look amazing. The high refresh rate and haptic feedback also makes  everything feel fast, smooth, and responsive.

[00:04:06]It’s on the smaller side for a tablet,  but I actually prefer that. Compared to my larger tablet, this one feels much more  pleasant to hold for longer gaming sessions, and overall it has a very premium, solid  feel, something that also took me by surprise.

[00:04:20]Since the Astra 2 runs on Android, it’s been  a great way to play less demanding Steam games on the go. I’ve used it a lot for indie  games, and of course I also had to try Kerbal Space Program. It all looks and runs  great, and I can easily connect a controller, or keyboard and mouse, and even mirror  the screen to a monitor or TV with ease.

[00:04:40]By October 2010, Felipe had had enough. When he  called to resign, co-founder Adrian Goya picked up the phone. "I just wanted to let you know  that I'm not going to come in. I quit. It's too much. Thank you. But no thank you." But Squad  couldn't really afford to lose him. So Adrian tried to keep him from walking away by making a  very unusual promise: "You can't quit. Take the day off. Go to the park. Walk. And then we will  talk. And then you can make your video game."

[00:05:10]As strange as that promise sounded, it wasn't  completely out of character for Squad. The company's founders, Adrian Goya and Ezequiel  Ayarza, were never passionate about marketing in the first place. Even while building flashy  campaigns for big clients, they were already looking for a way out of that world. One of the  promises they made to employees was that, someday, they'd listen to one of their bigger creative  ideas. And if that idea made good business sense, they were willing to seriously consider helping  bring it to life. Felipe had already made it clear that he wanted to make games. The  official pitch just hadn't happened yet.

[00:05:44]Squad still needed him to finish the projects  he had already started, so they proposed a deal. Felipe would help the company get  through the work already on the schedule, and after that, he could properly pitch  his game idea. And whatever the idea was, they'd give him six months to build a prototype.  For Felipe, who had spent years carrying this idea around in his head, it was the opportunity he had  been waiting for. And when he finally pitched it, the concept was simple: a game about little  green astronauts launching themselves into space.

[00:06:15]In January 2011, Kerbal Space Program officially  entered production. The very first prototype was made in Unity and was incredibly barebones. There  were no controls, no camera work and no real game to speak of yet. It was simply a rough test to  prove the concept was possible: a rocket on a flat green surface, under a default Unity skybox,  with a few static values making it rise into the air before its joints snapped apart. It was crude,  but it was enough to show that the idea had life.

[00:06:45]The original spark for the game goes all the  way back to Felipe’s childhood fascination with fireworks and bottle rockets. As a kid,  he would make little foil figures he called Kerbals and launch them into the air. He was  also deeply inspired by NASA from a young age, which helped shape his desire to create a game  centered around space travel. “I look up to NASA as one of the pinnacles of human achievement.  It's not just an American space program. It's an inspiration for all mankind.” Years later,  that admiration would come full circle when NASA approached the team to collaborate on a  very unique project, but more on that later.

[00:07:22]Felipe originally pitched the  project as something much smaller, even suggesting it could be made in  Flash. Early on, he imagined a 2D game, then a sort of 2.5D compromise using 3D assets.  But as he worked on the prototype, his curiosity got the better of him. He started wondering what  would happen if he simply removed that restriction and let the rocket move freely in 3D space.  Once he tried it, it was too fun to go back.

[00:07:47]That same improvisational energy shaped the rest  of the game’s development. From the beginning, Felipe didn't approach Kerbal Space Program  as a polished, fully mapped-out commercial product. The team was small, the budget  was limited and this was their first game project. So instead of disappearing for years  and trying to emerge with a finished game, they built it in public. The plan was to work  in short sprints and let players help shape what the game would become. Their immediate goal  was simply to create a functioning sandbox where people could build whatever spacecraft they wanted  and try to fly it. Everything else - missions, management systems, planets and  moons to explore - would come later.

[00:08:27]After production began, Felipe still didn't fully  trust that it would last. He worked with a fear in the back of his mind that someone might walk in at  any moment, tell him the experiment was over and send him back to regular client work. That fear  also pushed Felipe to keep the project small in the beginning and try and release something fast  that could convince Squad to keep working on it.

[00:08:47]In July 2011, Felipe and the team released  the first public version of the game. Squad's best-case prediction had been around 900 downloads  in four weeks. Instead, KSP passed 5,000 downloads in less than two weeks, and that was only  the beginning. As word spread, the response snowballed so quickly that Squad's small server  started buckling under the pressure, forcing the team to scramble for mirrors, new hosting and  emergency fixes just to keep the game online.

[00:09:16]Felipe later wrote on the game’s official blog  that KSP reached 50,000 downloads in just 13 days. Then, only 24 days after the first public  announcement, the game hit 100,000 downloads.

[00:09:29]What had started as a risky internal  experiment was suddenly turning into something far bigger than anyone at Squad had  imagined. The response was so enthusiastic that players almost immediately began asking if  they could help fund development. At first, Squad hadn’t even planned on charging for  the game, but the interest was obviously there. Therefore, the company embraced that  support through donations and pre-orders, giving fans a direct way to help  Kerbal Space Program keep growing.

[00:09:55]Part of what made Kerbal Space Program spread  so quickly was how instantly different it felt. On the surface, it’s a game about  building rockets and sending tiny green astronauts into space. However, behind that  playful setup is something very ambitious: a physics-driven sandbox built around  real rocketry and realistic physics.

[00:10:14]Players have to think about thrust, weight,  staging, orbital mechanics, and much more.

[00:10:20]Early on, Felipe had to solve problems most game  developers never even have to think about. KSP needed gravity to pull spaceships toward the  center of a planet, rather than just straight down like in most games. But as soon as the team  started pushing the game to those larger scales, they ran into floating-point precision issues  - the kind of problem that appears when a game tries to simulate enormous distances and the math  underneath it starts falling apart. At first, even something as basic as creating a planet-sized  world was a struggle. Early versions of Kerbin, the Kerbals’ home planet, were  essentially just giant spheres.

[00:10:55]Turning that into a nice looking planet  that supported stable orbits and didn’t completely break the engine became one of  the team’s biggest technical headaches.

[00:11:04]Over time, players and developers became familiar  with a bug they nicknamed the Kraken - a bizarre phenomenon where ships would start shaking  themselves apart for seemingly no reason, as if some invisible force was tearing them to  pieces. In reality, it was the math underneath the physics simulation giving way under the pressure  of all that scale. Eventually, Felipe and the team found a workaround by changing what spaceships  were measured against as they moved. Rather than treating the entire universe as one fixed space,  the game would shift its frame of reference when needed, effectively moving the universe around  the ship so the simulation could remain stable.

[00:11:40]Felipe had never come up through  a normal game industry pipeline, so a lot of the basic production side of  development had to be learned while the game was growing. He learned why Git was  better than SVN, why branches mattered, why small testing teams mattered, why  a proper deployment pipeline mattered, and why hand-packaging zip files for  every build was a terrible long-term plan.

[00:12:02]For all the complicated physics and  orbital mechanics under the hood, the team never wanted the game to feel cold  or overly technical. Their design decision to add the little green astronauts gave the  whole thing personality and just enough silliness to make failure feel funny instead  of discouraging. Their terrified expressions, their cheerful stupidity and the way they could  turn a catastrophic launch into a joke helped balance out the realism of the simulation. That  was a big reason KSP clicked with so many people.

[00:12:31]As the audience kept growing, so did the scope  of the game. Felipe and the team kept revisiting old systems, refining them and layering in new  features through constant updates. One of the biggest long-term goals was Career Mode, which  would add more structure on top of the sandbox by introducing things like astronaut hiring,  budgets, contracts and reputation. In other words, Kerbal Space Program was slowly turning into  a game about running an actual space program.

[00:12:58]To make that growing space program  feel believable, the team did far more research than you might expect. Their goal  was never total realism at the expense of fun, but they also didn't want the  game to feel like fake science.

[00:13:11]So whenever a new system came up, the team dug  into it properly by reading reference books, browsing physics forums and teaching themselves  complex aerospace concepts well enough to turn them into gameplay. At one point, Felipe  even had to give himself a crash course in control systems and PID controllers just to  build the game's Stability Assistance System.

[00:13:31]Before long, that balance between authenticity  and fun started attracting attention from far beyond the game's own community. By 2013, Kerbal  Space Program had grown enough that even NASA had taken notice of what Squad was building.  The agency eventually collaborated with the team on a mission pack based on its Asteroid  Redirect Mission, allowing players to tackle a Kerbal version of a real-world NASA concept. It  was a clear sign that KSP had become genuinely effective at turning difficult spaceflight  ideas into something playful and understandable.

[00:14:04]That’s precisely why the game resonated with  people inside NASA itself. Doug Ellison, a visualization producer at NASA, praised  Kerbal Space Program for making orbital mechanics feel approachable through gameplay. "I  knew KSP was something special when I watched a young kid — probably less than 8 years old  — playing KSP and using words like apogee, perigee, prograde, retrograde, delta-v;  the lexicon of orbital mechanics.

[00:14:31]To the layperson orbital mechanics is a  counter-intuitive world of energy, thrust, velocity, altitude that this kid — just by playing  Kerbal — had managed to get his head around."

[00:14:42]The game also got a major break at exactly  the right time. According to Felipe, Kerbal Space Program which was still not finished  yet, was about to launch on Steam in 2013 as just a normal title on the platform. However, at the  last second, Valve stopped it from releasing after controversy around another unfinished  game on Steam became a big story. Instead, KSP became one of the first games to be released  as a Steam Early Access title. Looking back, Felipe believed that mattered a lot.  At that time the game was still rough, and without that early access framing, he thought  it might have been rejected by a wider audience.

[00:15:18]The relationship with the community was key  to the game's further development. Felipe described it almost like a symbiosis. Squad kept  shipping updates, but players were often running ahead of them - surfacing new ideas, suggesting  improvements and eventually building mods that added features before the official game did. That  created a very unusual development dynamic. The team had to constantly think about what was worth  turning into an official feature, what was better left to mods and how to support a player base that  was helping push the game forward in real time.

[00:15:49]As Kerbal Space Program kept evolving, so  did the scale of what Squad was willing to invest in it. The success of the game’s  Steam Early Access release gave Squad room to expand the development team. According  to Squad’s founders, the game had become a significant part of the company’s income,  the lifeboat they had been looking for.

[00:16:07]Kerbal Space Program's biggest impact may have  been on the people playing it at home. Once the full version of the game was released  in 2015 and sometime later for consoles, the team started receiving more and more heartfelt  messages of appreciation. “We have people saying that KSP inspired them to change their majors  to aerospace or some other related field. It's happened more than once, and it's just incredible.  And I think that for us we're just experiencing a very small version of what NASA does on a  much larger scale for humanity as a whole.”

[00:16:39]Unfortunately, for Felipe, the story of Kerbal  Space Program didn’t end as a clean success story. Even after the game had become a huge hit,  life inside Squad didn’t slow down. The pressure, urgency and stress that had defined the company’s  marketing work never truly went away. According to Felipe, even when KSP had already more than  proven itself commercially, the studio still operated in a constant state of emergency. There  was no real sense of relief, no moment where the team could step back and enjoy what they had  built. Instead, the strain just kept building.

[00:17:13]What made it worse is that Felipe didn’t feel like  Squad truly understood what it had. In his view, the company had stumbled into one of the  biggest game development success stories in Latin America and still failed to build  a healthy future around it. He says the core team loved the project deeply, but the working  conditions never really improved, and there was no meaningful push toward letting that team grow  into a proper long-term studio. By 2016, Felipe left Squad. It was the most difficult decision  of his life, because Kerbal Space Program was no longer just a job or even a passion project  to him. It had become part of his identity.

[00:17:51]Felipe made it clear his decision to leave wasn’t  just about burnout. He felt increasingly sidelined at the company he had helped transform, and he  believed Squad’s leadership wanted to reduce him to just another employee rather than the person  who had originated the project. Other team members were unhappy too, and several eventually walked  away as well. As the team was crumbling away, Squad kept releasing content updates, until the  whole team eventually joined Intercept Games, the studio that began working on Kerbal  Space Program 2 in 2020. In 2023, Kerbal Space Program 2 was released  on Steam as an Early Access title.

[00:18:28]Knowing what was going on behind the scenes,  it’s easier to understand why the sequel was riddled with performance issues, bugs and a severe  lack of meaningful content despite its 50-dollar price tag. As a result, the game received lots of  negative reviews from the same people that once adored Kerbal Space Program. Needless to say, it  was painful for Felipe to watch the collapse of something that could have become much greater.  In 2024, the studio’s parent company, Take-Two Interactive, decided to shut down the studio and  end all development on Kerbal Space Program 2. The game is still being sold on Steam in Early Access,  where the store page warns that it has gone more than 23 months without a developer update and that  the roadmap shown there may no longer be current.

[00:19:12]Felipe has since found his way back to the  same dream through a different path. He is now involved with Kitten Space Agency, a  new spiritual successor to Kerbal Space Program. The Story of Kerbal Space Program  is far from perfect, but it tells a messy, very human story about a developer who got one  unlikely chance to build the game he had been dreaming about for years. That gamble  inspired players, earned the respect of NASA and changed how millions of people think  about rockets, orbits and space exploration.

[00:19:44]Before I end the video I wanted to let you know  that I’ve been selling merch for a while now and I just added a new design to my shop. If you’ve  seen the video about Pokémon Gold and Silver, you probably know what it's referencing.  It was made by a talented friend of mine, Morgan Rooswinkel, and I really love  the design. You can get it on a t-shirt, hoodie and mouse pad. And while you’re at  it, check out the other stuff available, like a placeholder t-shirt you can wear while  your real t-shirt is in the wash. Or a nice notepad to write down all your game dev ideas.  Also, check out Morgan’s Instagram page in the description to see her other work. Alright that  was it, thanks for watching the video, cheers!