Games from the Caribbean of Costa Rica
A composer and a visual artist, both from Limón, started making games for fun in 2019 — in a city where the creative industry wasn't supposed to exist yet. By 2022 they were winning international awards in Rio de Janeiro. By 2025 they had made history with the Costa Rican cinema center. And the team they built along the way — across Costa Rica, Mexico, and North Macedonia — first found each other in the same rooms where the awards were won. This is how that happened.
Most studio origin stories begin at a pitch competition or a corporate accelerator. T3AMPO Studio's begins somewhere more elemental: two young people from Limón, growing up with the Atlantic at their backs, music in their hands, and games on their screens — not as a career plan, but as a native language.
One was drawn to sound — to the way music and audio design don't just accompany an experience but construct it emotionally from the ground up. The other to image: to color, space, and the visual grammar of how games communicate before a single word appears on screen. A composer and a visual artist. Two disciplines that, in most professional contexts, meet only at the end of a project. In T3AMPO, they were the founding axis from day one.
Limón — not background, but premise
Limón is the Caribbean province of Costa Rica — a stretch of coastline, jungle, and port infrastructure that has shaped the country's economy for over a century without receiving nearly as much of its cultural attention. For generations, the most reliable paths to professional life in Limón ran through the port and through agriculture. Steady work. Real work. The kind of work that built families and communities. But the creative economy — the industries that turn imagination into IP, culture into software, art into a scalable product — that was largely absent. Not because the talent wasn't there. Because the infrastructure, the investment, and the institutional imagination to see it hadn't arrived yet.
What Limón was known for building
Port operations · Banana and agricultural export · Carnival and calypso culture · A community built on physical labor and deep roots
What T3AMPO is building now
Original game IP · A sustainable creative tech industry · Cross-disciplinary collaboration · A new generation of Caribbean makers
That gap — between what a place is known for and what its people are capable of — is exactly the kind of space where something new gets built. T3AMPO Studio didn't emerge despite Limón's limitations. It emerged because of them. Because when the conventional paths don't lead where you want to go, you build your own.
2019 — it started at a Game Jam
Before there was a studio, there were game jams. Starting in 2019, the two co-founders entered competitions — those compressed creative sprints where you build something from nothing over a weekend, under constraints you didn't choose, with collaborators you're still figuring out. Game jams are where you find out who you are as a maker under pressure. They found out quickly.
Different careers. Different universities. Different disciplines that turned out to produce, when combined, something neither could make alone. The collaborations grew. A team formed — four people drawn from across the Limón region: Limón city, Guápiles, Siquirres, Talamanca. Each one bringing a different craft, a different perspective, a different piece of what the studio needed to become.
In 2021, T3AMPO Studio was officially founded in Limón. What started as games made for the pure joy of making them had revealed something larger — a set of possibilities none of them had fully anticipated when they first pressed start at a game jam two years earlier.
From fun to frontier
The shift happened gradually, then all at once. The mechanics they were building for entertainment turned out to be the same mechanics that could train behaviors, optimize processes, simulate complex systems, tell stories with a depth and interactivity no other medium can match. Gamification. Immersive and interactive experiences. Narrative design. Simulation. VR and AR. AI-driven systems. These weren't separate industries to pivot toward — they were extensions of the same creative capability T3AMPO had been building since 2019.
Alongside the technical expansion came a broader cultural vision: to build a sustainable local industry grounded in original intellectual property — one where music, visual art, code, and narrative are treated as equally essential, where value is generated and retained within the regional creative economy, and where the success of one studio actively creates conditions for others to grow.
Rio de Janeiro — the world said hello
In 2022, T3AMPO traveled to the Game Jam Plus World Finals in Rio de Janeiro. They came back with two awards — Best Game about Color, and Best Sound Design. The trophies mattered. But what mattered more was the room.
Standing among developers from across the world — people building games under radically different conditions, constraints, and cultural contexts — the team recognized something. They were not observers of a global indie scene. They were part of it. They came home with a network, an external validation, and a certainty that what they were building on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica had an audience well beyond it.
Two people they met in that room — Isabel, producer and CEO of Pink Bear Games (Mexico), and Daniela, marketing director and CEO of Smart Start Media (North Macedonia) — are now part of the MIX IT! Revolutions core team. The competition that first validated the studio also introduced the people who would help build what comes next. Some things don't need explaining. They just need to be seen.
The cinema center — a door nobody had opened before
The moment that changes the story
No game had ever won a production fund from the Costa Rican cinema center. Not because games weren't being made — but because no studio had yet made the argument that a game deserved to be seen the way cinema is seen: as a cultural artifact. A story a society decides it needs to tell.
T3AMPO made that argument. MIX IT! won the Fauno fund — becoming the first game in history to receive it.
That decision quietly changed what is possible for game development in Costa Rica. It established that a game built on the Caribbean coast, rooted in Caribbean culture, staffed by talent from Caribbean towns, could earn the same category of recognition as a film. And that the studio that proved it came from Limón — a city not historically known for this kind of thing. That's precisely what makes it matter.
The fund enabled the next phase. The team expanded — and looked homeward deliberately. New QA talent from Limón and Guápiles joined the project. The soundtrack was built with Caribbean musicians whose artistic roots run through the same culture the founders grew up in. The result is a game that doesn't just come from the Caribbean coast. It sounds like it. It moves like it. The aesthetic is not a reference or a tribute — it's the real thing.
A studio that builds other studios
T3AMPO has never treated its growth as a zero-sum proposition. New studios — like Solar Blaze — have emerged in their orbit, supported rather than competed with. Events have been promoted. The regional ecosystem of game development and creative tech has grown denser around them. More is planned.
This is the longer vision made concrete: not to be the one studio that made it out of Limón, but to make Limón — and the Caribbean coast more broadly — a place from which an entire industry grows. Original IP. Service chains. Interdisciplinary collaboration. A creative economy that generates and retains value locally, and projects it globally.
What's next — a teaser from Puerto Viejo
Coming soon from T3AMPO Studio
Cabin in the Wata
Game Jam Plus Finalist · A love letter to Puerto Viejo
Fifty kilometers south of Limón, where the road hugs the coast and the jungle meets the reef, sits Puerto Viejo de Talamanca — a beach town the T3AMPO founders have escaped to since childhood. A place of lofi mornings, calypso afternoons, and the particular peace that comes from a town that has always known how to exist beautifully on its own terms.
Cabin in the Wata is a game born from that place. A raccoon, a fishing rod, a cabin by the water, and a soundtrack built from lofi calypso and reggae. It is slow, deliberate, and deeply Caribbean — a celebration of Puerto Viejo's beach town culture, its nature, and the legendary Walter Ferguson: the Panamanian-Costa Rican musician whose calypso compositions are among the most important cultural artifacts the Caribbean coast has ever produced.
The game was a Game Jam Plus Finalist. Its full story is coming. For now: it exists, it is beautiful, and it sounds exactly like the place it comes from.
We never left
Limón behind.
We brought it forward.
T3AMPO Studio is not a story about two talented people who escaped a small Caribbean city and made something global. It is a story about what happens when you refuse to see your origin as something to escape — when you treat where you come from as creative infrastructure rather than creative limitation.
The sea on the way to school. The music that was always already there. The games that started as play and became, over time, a platform for something much larger. That is still the foundation. Everything else — the awards, the international team, the cinema center milestone, the studios they're helping build — is what that foundation looks like when you build on it seriously, and for long enough.
And there is considerably more still to come.
