Efecto Studios S.A.S. is based in Bogota, Colombia, and was officially founded in February 2011, but its story starts almost a decade earlier. Its roots lie in Immersion Games, established in 2002 and described as the first video game studio in Colombia, whose team worked on the physics-showcase shooter CellFactor and the cooperative brawler Monster Madness. When Immersion wound down, its people re-formed as Efecto around 2010 to 2011 under chief executive and co-founder Eivar Rojas Castro, with William Ocampo also named as a co-founder. The studio's largest engagement to date was a work-for-hire co-production with Studio Wildcard on ARK: Survival Evolved that ran from 2014 to 2018 and touched a remarkable share of the finished game: level design, biome design and world building, props and weapons, character and creature animation, the in-game structure building system that lets tribes raise everything from thatch huts to metal fortresses, weather systems and the user interface. Colombian press at the time reported that a team of 17 Colombians built the original island map to Wildcard's specifications, and the studio's involvement continued through the Early Access build and the Scorched Earth and Aberration expansions.
Efecto has since grown into a studio of more than 40 people and has stepped out from behind other companies' names with its own intellectual property, Decoherence, released on Apple Arcade. For players, the studio's ARK work is the part they have spent thousands of hours inside, whether they know it or not: the biomes of the island, the animation of the creatures they tame and the building system at the heart of every base were shaped in Bogota. The PJ's Games collection for Efecto Studios carries ARK: Survival Evolved for PC on Steam.
