Why do we do what we do?

Awhile back (nearly a year ago, actually), I wrote bit called “Militant Optimism” — all about how crazy you had to be in order to start a company from scratch, particularly in the Great Recession. Since I blathered about this, 70,000 apps have been added to the app store, and two of them belong to us: FaceFighter and Zombie Pizza.

As app purchaser “Kid Geek” comments on the app store:

Kid Geek — thanks. Really.

I am incredibly proud of both of our games: they’re creative, addictive to play and damn funny. The sound alone cracks me up — right now I can hear plaintive grunting of zombies and the faux Italian accent of Chef Zomboni as O’Connor struggles with Zombie Pizza in a vain attempt to beat my recently acquired high score.

(Editor’s note: Ulm’s high score dominance lasted less than 15 minutes).

Chef Zomboni — he of the “faux Italian accent”

Making games is a hard dollar — it mixes all the riskiest aspects of entertainment development (will people like your game concept) with all the riskiest aspects of software development (will the software actually run). Doing innovative games with your own IP is frankly, pretty nutty. Competing with 25,000 other games on a very crowded app store for a 2 bucks a pop probably puts you right into Arkham Asylum territory.

So why do it?

Because we can’t help ourselves.

Because we are compelled to drag something personal and new into the world that’s not a pop commodity. Because of Kid Geek and all the potential Kid Geeks out there.

A quick tour of our Secret Worldwide Headquarters reveals quotes that we have bolted to the wall from our heroes: John Lennon, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Jack Kirby, George Lucas, Chuck Jones, Steven Spielberg, Hunter Thompson, Robert Heinlein, Phillip K. Dick and a dozen others including Abraham Lincoln, George Patton and Winston Churchill. We put these quotes on the wall before we had developed a single game — to give us mojo through the tough times of second guessing, indifference and doubt that plagues all creative endeavors.

one of several quotes decorating Appy’s Secret Worldwide Headquarters

Okay, so how again did these giants of commerce, industry and entertainment inspire us to make Zombie Pizza, exactly? And should they be angry? Look, don’t get too literal, okay? It’s not about the what, it’s about the why. At heart, we are class clowns trying like hell to find the joke that will “kill” our audience. We obsessively mold our material, and practice our lines, kneading the doughy mass of game design into shape, then baking it just long enough. We mix metaphors like crazy until the thing is just right because we really want the joke to WORK, damnit. We kill ourselves to make 2 dollar games not because they will save lives or “put a ding in the universe,” but because it MATTERS that much to US. Paying off the joke and getting the belly laugh is what we live for.

But its tough to make a living this way. It’s infinitely easier to create something from a template or market something which already has a profile in a crowded and distracted world.

But all is not lost — because the Kid Geeks out there are multiplying fast!

Here’s a slide from Morgan Stanley showing how each new computing cycle has grown ten times larger than the one before it. The big red “Mobile Consumer” one is where all of this stuff is headed.

Being in the belly of the App Store as it has grown from a tadpole into a dragon we see first hand both the pressures and the joys of this evolution in action.

Sooner than anyone thinks possible, the millions of smart phones will be turning into hundreds of millions of App Phones. Not only are these new gadgets disrupting existing businesses, they are disrupting the audience itself, changing they way they live, work and play.

That’s a lot of Kid Geeks.

And they’re going to be looking for one giant pile of laughs!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 12:45 pm and is filed under company culture. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.