Hello, Gamer
After a year of working in the shadows on a new game, at my new startup, I'm excited to share news about what’s going on here.
My name is Patrick Wyatt. I've been a gamer my whole life, and a game-developer for almost as long. I started making games in the eighth grade using my school's Commodore PET computers.
I’ve developed some games you may have played, including Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft and Guild Wars. If you’ve played any of them, you'll know that I, along with other members of their development teams, have a true love of building multiplayer games that shows through when they’re played online. We obsess over the details to ensure that the gameplay is fun, especially so when you’re playing with others. And so it should come as no surprise that I’m building another multiplayer game even now.
I'm joined in my adventure by a friend and frequent accomplice, Jamie Stormbreaker. This is our fourth company working together, and our first as co-founders. I'm overjoyed to be working with someone I trust and respect based on our experiences making games together.
As I mentioned, our company is One More Game, named after the sentiment often expressed late into the night or early morning, when you insist to your friends that there’s time to play just one more game before going to bed to get some rest before midterms or heading to work. We aspire to create games that are so much fun to play that you just won't want to stop -- but hopefully you will get some rest before that important test or big presentation for the boss, yeah?
While we haven't been vocal about our game development efforts, we apparently generated enough attention to garner the interest of Andrew Chen and Jonathan Lai from Andreessen Horowitz, or "a16z". If you're not familiar with the world of finance, a16z is one of the most-successful and best-known Venture Capital firms in the world. Marc Andreessen, one of the founders, is famous for co-authoring the first widely used web browser. It’s hard to imagine that life existed before web browsers, isn’t it?
While we weren't actively seeking investment at the time, Andrew and Jon encouraged us to share our vision with them (“vision” -- that's the finance-industry term for bullpucky). And they were apparently impressed enough to invest in our company.
Several game industry luminaries chose to invest in One More Game alongside a16z, including Mike Morhaime, co-founder and former CEO of Blizzard Entertainment; Kevin Lin, co-founder of Twitch; Kristian Segerstråle, CEO of Super Evil Megacorp and co-founder of Glu Mobile & Playfish; Jason Yeh, a founding member of the publishing team for Riot Games; and Chris Lee, co-founder of En Masse Entertainment and Head of Interactive Games at Netflix. We’re excited to have such experienced folks participate in our adventure!
Since you didn’t get to sit in on our scintillating presentation to investors, let me share text from the first slide of our pitch deck so you'll have some insight into why all these heavy-hitters might have invested:
Investor: Why should I invest in your game company?
OMG: Well, making multiplayer games has all the software development risks of creating online services, and all the content-creation risks of the media business, so... umm… uh... I guess it's less risky than betting on horse races?
Investors: Take my money!!
So yeah, I guess on that note, I'd like to thank all of our investors for their support! Right?!?
We're not out to make a big splash yet as we have more months of work ahead developing our first game, but we hope you'll send us your happy thoughts as we endeavor to build something you and your friends enjoy playing online, together.
In the meantime, we're continuing the subterranean work -- hiring team members, designing game systems, writing code, creating art, and, of course, making T-shirts.
If you'd like to stay informed, we'll post updates about our efforts here on OneMoreGame.com, You can also sign up for our mailing list so you won't miss a beat, and -- just for the record -- we won't sell your email or other personal information to anyone because we'd like to earn your trust as reputable game creators. We may be playful at times, but we're damn serious about our respect for players.
Until next time, happy gaming!
=Pat
