Trism and The Dream Job
Nov 25th, 2008 by Carlos
Check out this story from CNN on Steve Demeter, the guy behind the iPhone game Trism. Turns out he built the phone in his spare time and after the game became a smash hit (to the tune of $250,000), he decided he’d had enough and that he was quitting his bank job to develop games full time.
How sweet is that? I think that’s the dream for any aspiring whatever that does what he/she loves on the side. For example, I would love to just write and make a living off of that. Blogging, even, would be something I’d be open to. And that’s why The Writer’s Coin is here. Do I expect it to happen any time soon? No. But when you read stories like this it reminds you why you do what you do. Steve Demeter wanted to create a game, he did, and now that’s his new job. I like to write, so I do, and I would eventually like to do that all of the time (although I MUST put in a little note here about the prospect of sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper for the WHOLE day is a little nauseating).
Read the whole article and you’ll see another similarity to blogging: more and more people are crowding into the iPhone game-developing space. No doubt motivated by stories like this one. Most of these people probably have dollar signs in their eyes, but very few will actually see this kind of success. In the hey-day of blogging it was the same thing: a couple people made a lot of money at it and after a little while even postal carriers had blogs of their own (no knock on postal carriers, my analogy machine is still waking up right now).
ANYWAY, the other thing this story reminds me of is of my own phone application. I was supposed to flesh this out weeks ago and do one of two things: hire someone out to build it or learn Java and do it myself. I downloaded some Java tools and quickly realized the scope of what I was attempting. It’s not gonna happen—not with all the whining I already do about not writing enough (and recently, not reading enough). Mine was intended for the Android operating system, which is only on the G1 right now. You can’t charge anything for these apps until next year, so I didn’t even have a business plan for it.
In the end, my phone-application idea was just another one of those ideas you think about a lot and ultimately discard. How do you know which ones to really go after and which ones to let go of, though? I’m still trying to figure it out.
Now this post is getting long and meandery and pondery, and that’s kind of annoying. I was originally going to write about how important characters are in writing and in movies, but I got distracted and annoyed. Whenever this site starts feeling like a job, I throw a tantrum and just start writing about whatever. Probably not the best thing for readers, but that’s the way it is. It’s the cool thing about having your own site—I can do whatever I want and no one can tell me what to do. But will I add more readers/subscribers/fans? Probably not.
OK I’m done.
