Post 15: Inspirations to Succeed

One of my passions in life is to be a computer programmer. In the field of computer programming, like any area, there are those who made it big - Bill Gates with Microsoft, Steve Jobs with Apple, Linus Torvalds with  Linux, etc. Then there are the smaller ones who don't get as much recognition. I've encountered a couple of these in the past year. They really inspire me to get serious again about programming.

Blue Frog Gaming (http://www.bluefroggaming.com) is a small Ohio-based company with about 15 members. They don't make fancy games like World of Warcraft or Halo. Instead, they write browser games, and most of their creations are Facebook applications. I play two of their games: "Starfleet Commander", which is their cash cow; and "Hockey Tycoon", which is sort of a sports game. Consider this. They have something like 5 or 6 games in the Tycoon series, and each one is identical to the other except the interface is tailored to fit the sport it's designed after, be it hockey, baseball, soccer, etc. Then there is "Samurai Warrior", which is like the Tycoon games but with the style of samurai combat. These are instant-action, button clicking games. Facebook applications. Free to play, people only give them money for in-game credits that expedite game play. And they make money off of this!

Now their biggest success is "Starfleet Commander". Again, free-to-play, Facebook application that can also be played from its own website. You only spend money if you want in-game credits to temporarily boost game play. Despite the simplicity of the game, there are somewhere around fifty thousand people playing this game, probably more. And this game is raking in the dough. They have made enough to hire 15 people! They are essentially doing something that I could do! For a college essay I decided to ask their CEO some questions about the company and he happily obliged. They started off as three friends with an idea and are now a successful company.

Another interesting example is Markus Persson, aka Notch. He is the writer of "Minecraft" (http://www.minecraft.net), a sandbox game written in Java where one uses the surrounding world to build things while fighting off enemy monsters. On December 20, it will go into beta meaning it will be in the phase before completion. This game is not yet finished and the code hasn't been optimized... and he has made over 5 million dollars! Enough to start his own company (Mojang Specifications) with five people including himself. 

Can you imagine being one of these people? Making millions for relatively simple games, or even incomplete ones? The field of computer programming is one full of possibility. I'm into programming because, when I made my first webpage using HTML, it amazed me how a few lines of sort-of-English code could do so much. It's also a lucrative field of expertise and one I want to make a career out of. Who knows? I could make a game or a suite of games and it could be like these - major successes with lots of people who play them and sources of revenue in the thousands or millions. Such simple things, yet they are big hits. This is what inspires me to be a programmer.