Meet the developers of a video game that burns 600 calories

In the early days of the Covid-19 lockdown, when people were still stocking up on hand sanitizer and stores were struggling to stock their shelves, business partners Cam Brookhouse, Martin Tweedie and Lorenzo Spreafico holed up in a living room , trying to build a gaming platform. with everything they could find on Amazon.

“We locked ourselves in my living room with a sewing machine and a 3D printer and learned the game code,” Brookhouse recalled. “We thought, ‘there’s some kind of climbing harness that I think you could cut in half and attach to something else.’

Together, the MacGyver trio created what would become an early prototype extinction – the world’s first gaming platform built specifically for fitness. At the same time, a different platform of home programs exploded around the world.

Peloton Interactive Inc (PTON)best known for its stationary bikes and accompanying distance spin classes, saw its stock price quadruple in 2020. By 2021, shares were as high as $156, and the Peloton brand had become a global success. Clients looked forward to workout series themed to the music of pop stars like Beyonce and Taylor Swift, while Peloton instructors became celebrities in their own right.

It was a complete coincidence that while Peloton (and COVID-19) was taking the world by storm, Brookhouse, Tweedie and Spreafico were developing their own platform at home. Quell was not developed in response to the pandemic or the home training boom. Rather, the founders began looking to fill a gap in the market even before the lockdowns began.

The trio were keen gamers – Brookhouse, the CEO, and Tweedie, the CTO, bonded as students at the University of Oxford, partly over their love of video games. After graduating from college, the friends noticed that many people their age struggled to exercise consistently once the organized sports of their teens fell by the wayside.

“I was a competitive swimmer, gymnast, diver, boxed, hurdled, you name it,” Brookhouse said. “I love, love, absolutely love exercise, especially team sports.”

What he found he didn’t love as much, however, was what the team at Quell refers to as “default fitness”—the memory exercises that keep people coming back to the gym. During their research, the team found that many people had positive memories of exercise in childhood, but that those experiences did not carry over to gym sessions in adulthood.

The trio saw video games as a way to bring back the joy people experience when playing games and sports while fitting into the schedules and habits of busy adults.

“I played every fitness game on the market” in the months leading up to the pandemic, Brookhouse explained. “Most of them were just not very good at fitness and not very good at games.”

Enter Quell – an addictive video game that promises to burn 600 calories in an hour through a series of fighting moves.

The Quell controllers are “a set of motion trackers that we built from the ground up because there was nothing else that would allow us to do what we wanted to do,” Tweedie explains. “We also included a third sensor, which is worn around the chest as part of the belt to allow us to track the movements of the whole body.”

The platform debuted this summer with promising sales, and the company continues to develop new games designed specifically for the platform. But Quell’s premiere comes at a difficult time in the home fitness industry.

The pandemic-era boom that led to Peloton’s meteoric rise was (perhaps inevitably) followed by a crash as the world opened up again. By early 2022, Peloton had laid off nearly 3,000 employees, and a few months later, the company cut the cost of purchasing its bikes. In August 2024, Peloton shares were trading at less than $4, down from their peak of more than $150.

At the same time, other home fitness platforms are also experiencing a steep decline. In March, BowFlex filed for bankruptcy — blaming the “post-pandemic environment and lingering macroeconomic headwinds.” A month later, privately held exercise equipment retailer American Home Fitness also filed for bankruptcy.

“After COVID, there was a real decline in home exercise,” Charles Bullock, an attorney representing American Home Fitness in the lawsuit, told Crain’s Detroit Business in April.

However, Quell’s founders remain optimistic about the future of their product and home fitness in general.

“You see these companies like Peloton, which is a fantastic product and a fantastic business, being excoriated in the press because performance has gone down,” Brookhouse said. “Of course he went down. You had a massive knock-on effect.”

“We started this before the pandemic, because it was a problem before the pandemic. It’s a very innate thing about our current fitness market and the options available,” he continued.

“Fun (exercise) is locked behind massive barriers and easy-to-access workouts are boring. And I think that’s just as true today as it was, you know, before all this craziness happened.”