33 Games

33 Games owns a catalogue of classic game IP and is reissuing it for the people who grew up with it — as physical, collectible products rather than downloads. The first releases centre on Zool and Astro Burn. They came to me for the whole build: a store that could carry several distinct game brands under one roof, put the products front and centre, and convert visitors arriving cold from social media. Most of that audience is on a phone, so the phone is where the design had to win.

Each game IP gets its own page — its own look, its own story — so Zool doesn’t feel like Astro Burn, and neither feels like a template. Those pages do one job: introduce the world and send people into the shop. The shop itself is a single, focused purchase funnel. To keep momentum, companion products — the matching vinyl, the card set — can be added to the basket in one tap, with no page reload and no detour to a separate product page. The customer never loses their place.

I designed the buying journey for mobile first and scaled it up to desktop, rather than the other way round. On a phone the priority is a clear path from “I want this” to “it’s in my basket” with as little friction as possible — no forced pop-ups, no fiddly steps, nothing between the customer and the thing they came for.

The store runs on LiteSpeed with full-page caching, a Redis object cache for the database, and Bunny CDN serving images and video. Cached pages come back in a fraction of a second. The heavy assets — like a soundtrack video — sit on dedicated CDN storage, so they can be as rich as the brand wants without ever slowing the shop down.

We built behind a holding page with a countdown, and gave the team private preview access so they could see the real site before anyone else. When the date came, it launched on schedule — migrated cleanly, with redirects in place, so nothing broke and nothing leaked early.

A store is only as good as the number of people who find it, so the build went in search-ready and AI-ready from the start: clean, crawlable URLs, fast Core Web Vitals, and structured data through RankMath — so search engines, and the AI systems that increasingly answer for them, can read exactly what each page is. That groundwork is the hard part to retrofit, and it’s in place.

The next phase of our work together is the active side: technical SEO to build rankings for the games and products, and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) so that when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews about a Zool reissue or a game-soundtrack vinyl, 33 Games is the answer that comes back. The brands with the clearest, best-structured content are the ones that get cited — which is exactly what the foundation is built for.

The work didn’t stop at the storefront. I set 33 Games up on Microsoft 365 for their business email, and built out SharePoint on two fronts: a shared home for the internal team’s files and day-to-day collaboration, and an organised library of press and marketing assets — logos, key art and release materials — so there’s one reliable source to draw from rather than files scattered across inboxes.

I also create and send their email marketing — the campaigns that bring people back to the store around releases and announcements. Having one person handle the store, the email platform and the campaigns means it all joins up: a release on the site and the email that drives people to it are built together, not handed between agencies.