FableQuest

In October 2020, mid-pandemic, a public servant in Quebec with a young family left his job and its pension plan to make a hockey game with two lifelong friends. Six years later, that game hit 1.0: Tape to Tape, from their studio Excellent Rectangle (@Tape2Tape_Game). Picture NHL 94's fast up-and-down-the-ice hockey, then add a roguelite campaign. You build a team out of benchwarmers and unique hires, bribe the referees when you need to, and when a run ends you start over with a few new unlocks. Your rivals include cheating referees, princesses who fart a lot, and golfers. The man who left is Hugo Julien, the studio's artist and lead designer. The friends are Jean-Nicolas Fortin, who programs, and Mathieu Fortin, who makes the music and sound. As Quebec outlet Pèse sur start tells it, they were convinced they were wasting their talent in boring jobs. At first, only Hugo jumped. Jean-Nicolas told marketing writer Chris Zukowski: "Mathieu and I kept our day job but Hugo started working full time on TTT in October 2020." Keeping costs low kept the risk down for their investor. They knew exactly what they were chasing. "We all grew up playing it day and night," Jean-Nicolas said of NHL 94, "and there is no spiritual successor of any kind." Hugo told PC Gamer the idea got serious after a friend sent them a 2016 PC Gamer article arguing that "the PC needs a hockey game." They were new to the games industry, and the first steps showed it. Their early Kickstarter demo had no roguelite parts yet, and players stayed a median of 16 minutes. Jean-Nicolas admitted they "massively underestimated" how many people would play on keyboard, and the build didn't support it. So they rebuilt the demo, roguelite and all. At Steam Next Fest in February 2023, it landed on more than 27,000 wishlists. Around then they also paid one high-profile streamer to play. "He really didn't seem to enjoy the game that much," Jean-Nicolas said. "We felt like it was such a waste of money." Northernlion, on the other hand, loved it, Game World Observer wrote, and kept coming back to it. Early Access opened in May 2023, and players showed up. Then it went quiet. In September 2023, after what they called "quite a wait," the team apologized for the lack of updates and communication: "You deserve better from the Tape to Tape team." They pointed to "life events" and a deeper problem. The game's structure "was so limited that nothing more could be added." So they stepped back and rebuilt the systems underneath. Through all of it, the Early Access version kept finding players, enough for the studio to hire, Pèse sur start reports. In 2025 they paused updates to the main game to rebuild the campaign, and the remake grew into an overhaul of the whole game. They wrote that they were "truly enjoying the process of working on a project we love, without the pressure of rushing it out." The new campaign opened as a public beta in October 2025. In January 2026 they admitted it was too difficult, especially on the lower settings: "We know this is frustrating. We hear you." This October, with the finish line in sight, the team wrote that they had been living together in a cottage for almost a month, crunching to finish. Every day they opened a pack of hockey cards to determine their horoscope. Version 1.0 arrived on October 23 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox and Switch, with 19 squads that each change the rules. One brings back older hockey physics. Another removes wrist shots. A day later, after looking at the first 24 hours of player data, they saw that many players had unlocked only one or two extra squads after hours of play. So they opened three more to everyone, including a 16-Bit Squad with blue ice and retro sound effects. Hugo's hope for the release is the simplest part of the whole story. He told Pèse sur start he hopes, with all his heart, that people share the game by playing it together on their couch, like they used to. As a small team making a co-op game ourselves, that's the line we'd pin above our own desks. Four controllers, one couch, and a referee who can be bought. Six years for that.