The name Bob Mortimer might not mean much to those who haven’t lived in the UK, but he’s a huge deal in the world of British comedy.
He’s one of the country’s top comedians, having starred in the double act Reeves and Mortimer, and he recently won the UK version of Amazon’s Last One Laughing game show. He’s also – as revealed at Gamescom Opening Night Live 2026 – a voice performer in the upcoming game Murals from developer Dlala Studios.
Mortimer’s involvement began when company founder Aj Grand-Scrutton and lead writer Kelsy Abbott wrote a character that was a “rip-off” of the comedian. Then they wondered whether they could actually get the real thing.
“One day I was sitting at my desk, and thought: ‘What’s the harm in just asking?’,” Grand-Scrutton tells GamesIndustry.biz at Gamescom. “So I rung up Mark [Landers] at Side, and I just said, ‘Hey dude, is there any chance we could reach out to Bob Mortimer’s people?’ And he went, ‘Oh yeah, hold on Aj mate, I’ll get back to you’. And in a couple of hours he called me back, and he was like, we’ve found his agent and manager, they like the idea, they’re interested. Bob wants to see a script.”
All they had was a “bunch of gags” at that point, so Grand-Scrutton and Abbott stayed up all night writing a two-to-three-page script, then waited for Bob’s verdict. The Dlala founder says it was “the longest 48 hours” of his life.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my God, why did we think we could write Bob Mortimer-style comedy and show it to Bob Mortimer?'” he recalls. “Kelsy’s losing her mind as well, she’s like, ‘How arrogant are we? We’ve just tried to be Bob to Bob.’ And then they came back, and they were like: ‘He loves it. He’d love to be a part of this’.”
Later down the line, Grand-Scrutton was in London for a recording session with Mortimer – Dlala always directs its voiceover work.
“I’m not going to say we directed him, because he didn’t need it: Everything that came out of his mouth was perfect,” the studio founder laughs. “Honestly, the Bob Mortimer you see on television, he’s even a hundred times nicer and funnier than that in person.”
Earned trust
Securing a celebrity of Mortimer’s calibre is a far cry from Dlala’s rather humble roots. Founded in 2012 by Grand-Scrutton and Craig Thomas – who had met at Jagex – the outfit initially operated out of Grand-Scrutton’s garage in Witham, Essex. Now the company is 43 staff strong and is based in an office around the corner from where Grand-Scrutton grew up.
Since those early days, the studio has made a name for itself working on other companies’ IP. In 2020, the company released Battletoads, based on the iconic Rare franchise, before launching Disney Illusion Island three years later.
“Obviously Battletoads and Illusion Island were these two great IPs, but we’ve never done a traditional license deal,” Grand-Scrutton says. “We have always been directly contracted or recruited by the IP holders.”
The Battletoads deal came about after a period where Dlala was doing work-for-hire; one project the company was working on was Sea of Thieves. A combination of earned trust and persistence helped the studio land the IP.
“With Battletoads, Microsoft let Rare have a lot of autonomy with that IP back in the day,” Grand-Scrutton explains. “We helped out on Sea of Thieves. Dlala was about 12 people at the time, and for the six months before Sea of Thieves came out, the whole of Dlala was helping Rare get that finished. And I think that earned trust.
“I met [former Rare studio head] Craig Duncan in the year we formed, 2012, and every year, I sent him multiple pitches for Battletoads, trying to wear him down. It wasn’t until 2016 that he said we should do this, and we still didn’t get it over the line until 2018. That was a real kismet of stuff; we proved ourselves with Sea of Thieves and Game Pass needed portfolio pieces. And once that came out, it showed the quality of what we could do and deliver end to end.”
That, in turn, led to a deal with Disney for Illusion Island – which marked Dlala’s second deal with the firm, after an initial project didn’t work out. “I did a rather honest GI.biz interview that I shouldn’t have done, where I mentioned we had a Disney game in 2015 that got cancelled in 2016, and I thought we’d never work with them ever again,” recalls Grand-Scrutton.
“It was kind of like high school boyfriend and girlfriend meeting up after 20 years”
“After Battletoads came out, we were looking at what we could do next, and I said as a joke: ‘Oh, why don’t we give Disney a call?’ and we all went ‘Oh ha ha’. Then we all went: ‘Oh, why don’t we give Disney a call?’ So we spoke. It was kind of like high school boyfriend and girlfriend meeting up after 20 years: this is how I’ve changed, this is how you’ve changed. And we said on that call: ‘Should we give it another go? Should we try and do a game together?'”
Grand-Scrutton says when it comes to deal negotiations, Dlala isn’t about making aggressive pitches with promises of giant profits. “Our pitch has always been like, we love this IP, and we could do something cool with it. Hopefully it’s a success if we work together.'”
Going it alone
After securing those IP deals with Rare and Disney, you’d think that Dlala’s next move might be another licensed property. But instead the studio has made a bet on making its own IP. “We were presented with a real opportunity where we had a little bit of money ourselves in the bank so we could afford to pay for half of the development,” the Dlala boss explains. “We found a wonderful family office in Canada that was looking to invest in something. And we’d learned a lot working with Disney. We worked on Illusion Island for, it was like five years including the DLC we had people on that project, and we loved it. It’s literally a highlight of my entire life.”
“We kind of just said, why don’t we take all these learnings, all this stuff we’ve done, all these tools we’ve made over the last decade, and do something that Dlala owns? This is our IP, this is something we can publish. We can’t blame anyone for the failure if we’re perfectly in charge. And we decided to just take the jump and gamble on it.”
Murals is a combat game, explains design director Grant Allen, “but it’s a combat game where it’s easy to pick up, easy to play, but has depth to it. And on top of that, we took a lot of inspiration from rogue-likes [in terms of items] for augmenting that combat. But in our game, because it’s linear, they’re persistent. So you build up this huge catalogue of what we call Eeries, which you’re able to switch in and out.” He describes these trinkets as being like a chemistry set, where different Eeries can add different attributes to weapons. And of course, there’s Magic Dave, Bob Mortimer’s character, who’s in charge of the Vending Machine of Delights.
Worth the risk
Work for hire obviously comes with some risks; Dlala had to make staff reductions back in 2016 after that initial Disney deal went south. But Grand-Scrutton acknowledges that doing your own IP is “massively” risky.
“We’ve always been quite a sensible studio in the sense that you will never ever find royalties in our finance spreadsheets in terms of projections,” he says. “As far as we’re concerned, our games will make zero, because I’m not going to bet people’s jobs on the success of the title that I’m in charge of. We have bet the house on this original, but we’ve secured the team outside of it, so there’s no risk to the team if this game doesn’t do well, except for we’d all be devastated. So we’re putting everything into this. We have sunk every penny into making this game the best it could possibly be.”
Dlala has opted to self-publish Murals, and has hired Marcus Purvis, head of publishing, to handle this side of the business. Purvis is no stranger to the studio, having previously met Grand-Scrutton and co when they were part of Microsoft’s Lift London incubator program.
“Last year, Aj was talking to me about the game and showing me,” Purvis says. “It looked incredible. He was saying the opportunity is there and we want to publish this and can I be a part of that? It’s a no-brainer. We’re doing it ourselves, and we’re learning along the way. The beauty of doing it ourselves is that we can make decisions very quickly, and we love to do that.
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One example of the freedom and agility self-publishing affords is the decision to do a limited-edition comic book that ties into Murals. “We met someone who made comic books,” explains Grand-Scrutton. “We had a conversation, and about nine weeks later we’d written it, started the art, and then suddenly we had a comic book,” he says. “We can’t really do that if someone else is in charge of the budget.
“And something like the comic, there’s no return on investment. And I think that is the thing that we get [from] self-publishing over working with publisher, is that publishers have to be driven by how successful the game’s going to be. And a lot of that is the ROI, what’s going to come back. For us, we’ve got focus… We’ve got amazing partners in China, and Marcus is making sure we’re ticking all the boxes to make the money. But then we go, ‘Should we waste a few grand and do something really cool, like making a comic book?'”
In many ways, despite lacking a license, Murals is a continuation of what Dlala is best at. “What we’re really known for, I think, is how we combine our gameplay with our aesthetics,” says Grand-Scrutton, noting the studio’s focus on hand-drawn art and combat. “And then it’s our humour, whether you find it funny or not.”
He’s aware that comedy can be subjective, and that relatively few games have done it well. But at least they have the best in the business on board. “To be able to just say we’ve got Bob Mortimer is a massive bonus for us.”