This post originally appeared on the old site on February 1, 2005.
There is a newspaper article about the guy who created Snood: The Dude Behind Snood. (Note: the link to the story no longer works because the people who run newspapers are idiots).
It's a fascinating article and shows precisely how shareware success is often achieved. In fact, one could take this article, change some of the details around, change the name of the game from Snood to Pretty Good Solitaire, and it would be about me. The similarities are astounding.
Nearly a decade after Dave Dobson designed it, Snood -- rhymes with "rude" -- is keeping millions of people from what they really ought to be doing.
Yep, that sounds familiar.
Dobson designed the game with the goofy little monster faces for his wife in 1996, when he was in grad school at the University of Michigan and she was teaching high school.
Change 1996 to 1994-1995, change grad school to teaching community college. That is what I was doing when I started Pretty Good Solitaire, and my wife was the very first player.
On a lark, he offered it on the Internet as shareware, and figured if a few people bought it for $10 apiece, he and Christina could go out for a nice dinner.
Ditto, although the internet hadn't really taken off yet when I started. Change internet to AOL and Compuserve, but the dinner was the same. No expectations of making lots of money like everybody has today, just putting out a fun game and hoping to get a few dinners out of it.
Snood, once estimated to be the most-played computer game behind the games installed in new computers when they come out of the box, has made him a wealthy man.
Pretty Good Solitaire was on that list of most installed games too, although a bit below Snood.
He describes the evolution of Snood into a cult attraction as a series of "random events," and refers to his fame as the game's creator as "third-rate celebrity."
He's got me there. I can't claim anything above fourth-rate.
Dobson wanted to design a game in a new computer language he was trying to learn and decided to create one that would appeal to his wife...
Again, astoundingly similar. I originally started writing games just to get experience working with Visual Basic.
"And nuns," says Dobson with a perplexed laugh. "For a while we were getting lots of nuns."
Wow, we got lots of nuns too. And priests, and doctors, and lawyers. Makes you wonder what they are all up to, doesn't it?
Though Young teaches computer-game design and says he has students who view a shot at the $10 billion-a-year industry as their dream job, he believes it is unlikely any of them will replicate Dobson's homemade success.
"His case, I think, is getting increasingly rare," Young says. "To build games these days that are really competitive. ... You really need millions of dollars in budget, a publisher that can get the games on the shelves. It's becoming like making a movie. You have to go to the big studios."
All you need is a fun game.
His business partner says more than 30 million copies have been installed since it was introduced, or about 10,000 per day.
I long ago lost track of the cumulative total of Pretty Good Solitaire, but these numbers sound pretty close.
As further enticement for freeloaders to pay, Dobson wrote a couple dozen four-line poems, which appear while Snoods dance in a circle at the end of each unpaid game. The poems, the gentlest form of chastisement, are metered to the rhythm of old Burma Shave signs.
One poem reads: "Dave's kids need clothes, Dave's kids need food, Dave's kids need haircuts -- Please register Snood!"
Wow, I did the same thing! Except not poetry. My "Meow! Please feed me!" messages in the trial version where our cats ask for payment have been extraordinarily successful.
Grogin figures Snood has an indefinite life span, as long as Dobson continues to update it.
Yep, the classics never die.
The article has been Slashdotted, with the predictable idiot Slashdot comments.
I agree that it's ludicrous for a newspaper to not maintain their old articles at the same URL.
Did you ever get redirects working from your old articles when you moved the blog?
Posted by: jimbo | February 03, 2006 at 02:15 AM
From Slashdot I found a link to Costikyan's article "Why Snood Gets No Respect" http://www.costik.com/weblog/2003_01_01_blogchive.html
Interesting quote:
****But I, at least, will be looking out for the next great Snood. Games are weird, and you never know. . . And until then, when I have a few minutes to kill, I'll be trying to better my score at Journey level.****
Of course, Snood is a puzzle game. From what I've been reading on his blog, he thinks puzzle games get enough coverage from the portals and so don't need to be part of his links. The whole article is about how Snood and Tetris don't get the respect they deserve. Is it just me, or have things changed that much in the past few years that they now get "enough" respect?
Posted by: GBGames | February 03, 2006 at 10:25 AM