The Studio Behind the Reels

From a bookshop loft to 120,000 players

Promo Game UK began in the autumn of 2019, in a damp loft above an antiquarian bookshop on Mare Street. Co-founders Eleanor Whitcombe (a former arcade-cabinet artist) and Marcus Pemberton (an engineer with a soft spot for vintage fruit machines) wanted to build something that captured the warmth of a Saturday afternoon in a British seaside arcade — minus the pound coins.

Six years later, that two-person experiment has grown into a 42-strong studio shipping themed slot adventures to over 120,000 social players across the United Kingdom. We've kept the bookshop loft as our motion-capture room — partly for nostalgia, mostly because the wonky floorboards make brilliant percussion when we record reel sounds.

What we make

Every game we ship is a free-to-play virtual slot. Credits are entirely fictional, jackpots are bragging rights, and our paytables are tuned for the dopamine of a great near-miss rather than the lure of a payout. Our titles are built in-house by mixed teams of designers, illustrators, animators, audio engineers and storytellers.

The craft

We obsess over the small things — the precise weight of a reel-stop, the curve of a winning-line glow, the brass-bell flourish that lands a quarter-second after a triple. We prototype every animation in a real arcade cabinet (yes, really) before it ships to the browser.

Our promise

Joy first, never stakes. We will never introduce real-money wagering, paid loot mechanics or anything that turns a delightful spin into a financial decision. Our safer-play resources sit one click from every page, and our team are trained quarterly on responsible-design principles.