Bari Silvestre

Bari Silvestre (Renante Silvestre) is a Filipino independent game developer best known as the one-person studio Keybol Games, maker of the puzzle-platformer Pretentious Game, which in 2014 became the first game by a Filipino developer released on Steam.

Before making games for a living, Silvestre worked as a factory worker in South Korea, as GameIndustry.ph has described. In 2010 he discovered FlashGameLicense (now FGL), a marketplace where developers could sell browser games to sponsors, and decided to leave Korea and return to the Philippines to make games full time. He founded Keybol as a one-man studio, and within its first year he released his first game as a full-time developer, the browser adventure Belial: Chapter 1.

His breakout came in 2012 with Pretentious Game, a short puzzle-platformer about two lovers whose levels double as a story about a relationship. It spread widely online and made him one of the best-known indie developers in the Philippines. Mobile versions and sequels followed, and he partnered with French publisher BulkyPix for a Windows release on Steam on May 21, 2014. The launch was rocky: upload errors meant buyers got empty folders, and the game was not playable until June 22, 2014. Silvestre has spoken about keeping full creative control while working with publishers.

He went on to make games such as Rody Fight and Kill the Plumber, a parody platformer where the player controls the enemies. His best-reviewed later game, Tower Fortress, is a retro roguelite tower-climbing shooter published by the British studio Nitrome and released on iOS and Android in November 2017; it was later updated with new modes.

Silvestre matters because he showed a generation of Filipino developers that one person working from the Philippines could reach a global audience, and his Steam release opened a door for the country's indie scene.