Mike Bithell Is Making a Tiny Vampire Immersive Sim After Rough 2025 Layoffs
After laying off most of his studio last year, Mike Bithell is back to a three-person team building Vampirium 1997, a minimalist top-down immersive sim set in a 1990s where Dracula rules England.
A Bad Year, Then a Weird Prototype
By August 2025, Mike Bithell had made some of the hardest calls of his career. Bithell Games, the studio he built from a one-person bedroom project into a mid-size developer, laid off the majority of its full-time staff, with 11 jobs made redundant. He described the team simply as “fucking awesome” and “the best people I’ve ever worked with,” he told GamesIndustry.biz.
The road to that point is not hard to trace. Bithell rose to prominence in the early indie wave with Thomas Was Alone in 2012, then Volume in 2015, and a run of compact narrative games under the Bithell Shorts label. The studio then pivoted toward licensed properties, starting with John Wick Hex in 2019. That one worked. According to estimates from Video Game Insights, John Wick Hex sold nearly 450,000 units across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox. The follow-ups did not. VGI estimates that Tron: Catalyst, released in 2025, sold only around 16,000 units across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox. Tron: Identity, the 2023 predecessor, fared even worse on the data that exists, with just under 9,000 Steam units tracked. Both games were also released on Switch, where sales figures are not available.
With numbers like that behind a growing headcount, something had to give.
Coding as Coping
In the months after the layoffs, Bithell found his way back to making things the only way that made sense to him. “It was a little while before I got started again,” he told GamesIndustry.biz. “But I distract myself by coding, and that weirdly ended up being something interesting.”
That something is Vampirium 1997. The premise: Dracula is the King of England, the year is an alternate 1990s, and you play as one of his assassins. Bithell notes that the overlap with Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula novels is coincidental. He says he was not aware of Newman’s work when the concept took shape.
The game grew out of a decision to finally learn Godot after years on Unity. Bithell started building prototypes just to understand the engine, and a couple of months in, one of them started becoming something real. “I needed a project just from a ‘keeping myself sane’ point of view,” he said.
Bithell Games is now three people: Bithell, business partner Alexander Sliwinski, and one marketing staffer.
Scope That Actually Fits
Vampirium 1997 sits in the immersive sim genre, but it is not trying to compete with Thief, Deus Ex, or Dishonored. The game takes a minimalist, top-down approach, which Bithell has described using the term “im-slim,” a nod to the idea of a scaled-down version of the genre’s ambitions.
That framing speaks to something Bithell seems to want the broader industry to hear. “Across the industry, we don’t think enough about how we match the scope to what we’re making,” he said, as quoted in the GamesIndustry.biz feature. After chasing licensed deals with major entertainment corporations and watching a talented team get scattered, he is now working on a game that is, by design, the opposite of all that.
“It is nice to have complete control,” he said, describing the freedom to make something that feels personal and to talk about it without corporate sign-off at every turn. “I’m really enjoying that aspect of it.”
The contrast with Tron seems to be exactly the point. Working within the absolutely reasonable concerns of major corporations, as Bithell put it with dry precision, is a very different creative experience from spinning up a weird vampire sandbox on a new engine because the alternative was staring at the ceiling.
Whether Vampirium 1997 can turn a hobbyist coping mechanism into a viable next chapter for a studio of three is still an open question. Bithell says he genuinely believes in what he is building. “I want to go wherever this game takes me,” he said. “I genuinely think there’s awesome potential.”
For a developer who made his name on small, strange, precise games before spending years doing the opposite, that sounds less like a pitch and more like a homecoming.
What is Vampirium 1997?
Vampirium 1997 is a minimalist, top-down immersive sim from Bithell Games in which the player is an assassin working for Dracula, who rules England in an alternate 1990s. It is being built in Godot by a three-person team.
Why did Bithell Games downsize in 2025?
Bithell Games laid off the majority of its full-time staff in August 2025, making 11 roles redundant. The studio had struggled commercially with its Disney-licensed Tron titles, with Tron: Catalyst estimated to have sold around 16,000 units across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox, and Tron: Identity selling just under 9,000 units on Steam alone, according to Video Game Insights.
How many people work at Bithell Games now?
Following the 2025 layoffs, Bithell Games is down to three people: Mike Bithell, business partner Alexander Sliwinski, and a marketing person.
What engine is Vampirium 1997 being made in?
Vampirium 1997 is being developed in Godot. Mike Bithell decided to learn the engine after years of working with Unity, using prototype-building as his way to get familiar with it.