Hero Interactive, we did a lot of really successful things overall.
We got about 500 million plays,
made 35 games on our own IP which is really braggable to this day.
It was really fun getting to work on a large number of diverse projects and
we had a lot of successes, and we had some failures.
Hero Interactive isn't around today as it was back then, even though it's still
technically around, and you can still go play our games on herointeractive.com.
But there's a lot I got out of it and a lot I learned, and
I hope that you learned some.
How Hero Interactive got started.
Hero Interactive got started before I even thought about Hero Interactive.
Basically I love games, and I knew that I wanted to do video games.
But back when I went into college around 2001, when
I was first getting ready to go into it, there was a lot of scandal going around.
There was a number of studios in the industry that
are having a lot of work-life balance issues and that kind of scared me.
And so I decided to go into computer science.
And computer science gave me a lot of background stuff and
different areas I could go into, and I worked as a software consultant for
a small company that did a lot of consulting work for small businesses.
That was really great, because I worked on a lot of accounting software, and
I also got to see a lot of companies get founded and see how they kind of grew, and
so that gave me a lot of confidence to go and form my own company.
At first I didn't really think about it.
It just kind of fell into it.
After school I started just consulting work and doing web work
kind of then turned into finding contracts for Flash games.
And as I started just getting more contract work,
I just needed a company to get better organized and set things up financially.
So It just kind of came together.
And forming a business kind of made sense.
The process involved buying a lot of books and
just reading a lot of books, trying to get into it.
A lot of what Hero Interactive was was just me kind of stumbling through it.
And overall, that worked okay, but there are a lot of advantages,
things that I'm really glad now to work in some bigger companies that actually have
some best practices that I can learn from other people who have done things.
So, that's nice.
Hero Interactive in the beginning was brutal.
Through no fault of mine, my clients lost clients, so
that eventually results in lost work.
I broke my left hand in a freak racquetball accident.
So for a month, I was typing in a cast, one-handed.
I'd have a bounced check from a client and that could be a month's worth of money.
I remember for three months or two months, I made negative $200.
And so it was really rough, and so,
there were definitely times where I thought about getting out of it and
not keep going with it, and it was almost just a four month company.
But I decided to look into a plan B and that was look for
a job and also while looking into plan B, I looked for a plan C.
And plan C was looking into this new this business model that was
coming out where people who are making little Flash games could get them
sponsored by a big web portal.
And basically the portal would pay to put their advertisements and
links in the game that redirect traffic back to that website.
And so your goal of your game was to get it stolen by other people who would just
take your game and steal it off your website and put it on their website and
spread it around virally on the Internet as far as it could go and
get the most plays.
And that resulted in the most traffic being driven back to your sponsors,
so it was going to be an interesting business model, and
that was just growing around 2006 and 2007.
So I looked into that.
And after a mediocre start, eventually I made Bubble Tanks and
that exploded huge and turned into a massive, massive thing and
really kickstarted Hero Interactive as it is known today and
kickstarted those 35 games my own IP.
Hero Interactive had successes and it had some failures.
Success wise, we released over 35 of our own games.
Like I said, most of those can be played herointeractive.com, on the website.
Many were insanely popular games.
They garnered hundreds of millions of plays.
And it was really fun.