












The Story of
UMAMI TIGER
Starting at a young age, Matthias Linda found himself captivated with the stories and worlds he would come across in video games. Inspired by classic Japanese role-playing games, such as the “Final Fantasy” series, the “Suikoden” games, “Chrono Trigger” and “Xenogears,” he felt the spark to develop a game of his own. And so began his path towards game development, which would lead him to create his dream game, Chained Echoes.
Linda initially began development on Chained Echoes as a hobby back in 2015. As is the usual tale for start-up developers, development was mostly done alongside his full-time job, and mainly on weekends, which was often interrupted by “creative breaks” (i.e., a fancy way of saying he was binge-watching anime for inspiration).
While many aspects of the game were developed solo by Linda, audio was an area of the project that he found himself stumped on. Thus, in 2018, he enlisted the help of composer extraordinaire Eddie Marianukroh for the music and sound design. After the successful Kickstarter campaign in 2019, Linda was finally able to transition to working full-time on the project. And to make sure that the game actually made it out the door, the Deck13 Spotlight team, led by the notorious Michael Hoss, handled the publishing for the game.
After seven years of development, Chained Echoes was released on December 8, 2022. Its release was met with critical acclaim, reaching top ten best games of 2022 on OpenCritic, as well as gaining numerous awards, and even winning the “Best German Game” award at the Deutscher Computerspielpreis 2023 (German Computer Game Awards 2023).
Chained Echoes’ success has been a triumphant start for Matthias Linda’s game development career, paving the way for him to open his game development studio, Umami Tiger. It will be from here that he continues his journey to create even more games that he hopes many will come to cherish.