HIALEAH, FLA. — Armando Ramirez-Perez has never exactly been absent from Rage Room Games. His name is on the company, he has had a hand in much of what it has released, and people who have followed its projects for long enough probably know who he is. But until recently, actually seeing much of Ramirez-Perez himself was another story.
That distinction has become a little harder to make this year. The 17-year-old founder has been attaching himself more openly to his work, speaking more publicly and branching into things that don't necessarily leave him sitting behind a game project or company account. It's a shift happening at roughly the same time as one inside Rage Room itself, which dropped its former Shutout Studios identity in August and has spent the weeks since trying to establish what comes next under a new name.
There has been plenty to keep Ramirez-Perez occupied. Rage Room has continued work on its games, including FORESTER, whose second trailer was released this month, while also stretching into music with Rage Room Records. Ramirez-Perez has been involved there as more than an executive. He records music himself as “mando” and has recently worked on material with ESCOTO, making the line between the person running the company and one of the people creating under it considerably less clean than it used to be.
It would be easy to frame all of this as some calculated attempt at becoming the face of Rage Room. It doesn't really look like one.
Ramirez-Perez still spends plenty of time doing the profoundly unglamorous parts of running something: websites, internal systems, project decisions and the endless small problems that come with trying to get anything released. He also happens to be a high school senior in Hialeah. A late night spent working on Rage Room can still be followed several hours later by a regular school day, an odd overlap that makes the usual image of a company founder fit him somewhat poorly.
What has changed is his willingness to keep himself separate from all of it. His music puts his voice on the finished product quite literally, and his public presence has become more personal than the carefully neutral tone companies usually expect from the people attached to them. Ramirez-Perez has opinions, jokes around, talks about music constantly and doesn't appear particularly worried about sanding all of that down to resemble the LinkedIn version of a founder.
That may ultimately suit Rage Room better anyway. The company itself has never been especially traditional. It grew out of online game development, changed identities while still young and now has projects moving through gaming, music and other media at the same time. A founder who only appears for polished announcements would almost feel stranger.
None of this means Ramirez-Perez has abandoned the place where he started. He is still very much the person behind the scenes. There are just fewer reasons now for him to stay there.