Unlike other Latin cities like Buenos Aires, Lima or Santiago, Montevideo has a slow pace. It's a city with old buildings everywhere and displays in the streets that still advertise PlayStation 2 games. It's difficult to think that a game studio would be a couple of blocks from the town's center, on the second floor of one of the busiest streets. Inside the studio, it has a cozy atmosphere, with the team of 15 sharing the same space: programmers, artists and game designers are all mixed up in a room with large tables and a kitchenette at the back of the room. But it wasn't always like this.

The studio began at Azofra's place, with just the three of them at that time. It was a small room with a computer and a couple of chairs, half the space of the meeting room they have now. If you go to that room today, you'll see the marks the chairs left on the floor. At that time, tower defense games were very popular, but they had simple graphics and mechanics. The team liked this tug-of-war style of strategy and decided to make its own version by mixing up all the elements they loved in the games they played when they were kids. "We wanted the players to feel they were inside a battle," says Sande. The team members chose a medieval theme because they had seen a lot of references to knights and wizards in books, comics and movies — and because all three were veteran Dungeons and Dragons players.

In Kingdom Rush, players must defend their base from enemy hordes of goblins, wargs, yetis and countless other creatures. Unlike other games in the tower defense genre, players need to be very active during each battle, using their powers and upgrading their towers.

Sande was in charge of the art, and he proposed a cartoonish look with a lot of detail on the animations and effects during the battles. The result is towers disintegrating your foes with purple rays and golems coming out from the skies. Azofra also talks about certain elements of humor in the game, like references to pop culture and Easter eggs. Kingdom Rush had everything it needed to be a hit.

Even so, the team wasn’t confident the game was going to have the appeal it needed — they hadn’t received any feedback while making it. And the three of them had run out of money, didn’t have any more savings, didn't have a sponsor and didn't have the strength to face a failure. Their friends and relatives didn’t understand well what they were doing and they had invested a lot of time in the same project. Then they realized that if their game didn’t succeed it could be the end of the studio.

But they got it right. Players loved the game and in the first days after launch they made it to Kongregate's top spots. It was a phenomenon they never expected while they were isolated inside a room working and designing each level while joking about new enemies. Since then, users have played it more than 15 million times and the game has remained one of the best-rated titles on the portal. The team was safe.

A few months after the success of the Kingdom Rush Flash version, companies like Warner Bros. and LucasArts offered Ironhide work-for-hire contracts. The team of three, who grew up watching Star Wars movies and loved The Lord of the Rings, suddenly had the opportunity to make games for these iconic franchises.

For many studios it was a dream come true, but Ironhide declined so they could continue working on Kingdom Rush. The trio realized that many studios do this kind of work to get the money and the experience to create their own games, and Ironhide was already doing this. For them, it would have been like taking a step backwards.

Their next goal would be mobile. "We always thought on porting the game to mobile devices," says Azofra. After the release of the game, Realini, who was in charge of programming, bought an iPad to experiment with it and saw that it was the perfect platform for the genre because players could interact directly with the elements of the map. The team closed a new deal with its previous publisher, Armor Games, that allowed it to start working on the mobile version immediately. Realini learned how to code for that platform, and after four months, they had it done. Kingdom Rush for iOS was released at the end of 2011 and its success — getting to the top of the App Store charts in several countries, including the United States, with more than 100 million downloads worldwide — enabled the next phase of the studio.