What is STARKADE?

STARKADE didn’t start as a project. It started in 1987, in a small town in Nova Scotia, with me and my childhood best friend Mike Field, a Grade 5 scribbler, and a shared obsession with larger-than-life characters.

We were deep into World Wrestling Federation, action figures, and arcade games. But instead of just copying what we loved, we started building our own universe. We created rival wrestling federations, complete with championships, feuds, and ongoing storylines. Matches weren’t decided by imagination alone — we rolled dice. Winners, losers, titles, and grudges all came down to numbers and chance. In hindsight, it was the first system I ever designed.

As we got older, the characters grew up too. We redrew them years later, aging them, changing their designs, evolving them. At some point my parents handed me a plain folder to help clean my room. That folder accidentally became an archive. Without it, early versions of characters like Blasted Harry, Scrap Metal, and Cold-Blooded Joe would be gone.

Those characters never really left my head.

Between 2010 and 2020, while I was building Signalnoise and working professionally, I’d quietly revisit them. Late nights. Small tweaks. New colors. The wrestlers slowly became something else — super-powered fighters — but the DNA was still pure 1987.

STARKADE really leveled up once it stopped being just me. Naomi helped turn it into a real IP. Lucas took my old dice-rolling logic and turned it into a proper tabletop game. John helped build the lore — the Magna Prime, the Arena, the consequences behind the spectacle.

Today, STARKADE is a living universe built from decades of obsession, iteration, and care. It’s still rooted in that childhood scribbler — just grown up, sharpened, and finally ready to be shared.