A two week prototype became the number 1 game on e the app store. I still don’t exactly know how it happened. At the start of that year, 2015, I had to release all the people hired for Simple Machine, except for 2, Alec Dawson and Artem Silantyev. That Holiday was unusally somber as I sold all my music instruments, videos game library, and uneccesary furniture so I could make final paychecks and throw a little holiday cheer to the people who had made Simple Machine so special and so fun. After that party, I told Alec and Artem that we had 3 months to make Simple Machine solid, or it was time to close shop. I set out to make a checkers game and ended up with Smove, which is still one of the most popular games I’ve released.

Smove put us back in business by hitting over 2 million downloads in 4 weeks, but as is the way of mobile games, it would not last very long. That summer I was messing with a small prototype called Pop the Lock and had mentioned to my Apple contact that I’d be releasing it in August. I had just returned from vacation that week when I was not super excited about the release, but along came Thursday and Alec asked, “Hey are we releasing Pop the Lock today?” Which I replied, “Nah, let’s just focus on the updates we’re prepping.” Interesting plan, until my Apple contact sent an email asking if the game was releasing because they loved it! Uhhhh. Quickly logs into the developer console, sees version 1.0 ready to release. One quick click of the mouse and we’re off to the races.

Within a week Pop the Lock hit the #1 spot on the Apple App Store and collectively was downloaded over 30 million times Between the App Store and Google Play. A short time later, Baytek approached me with a proprosal to turn it into an arcade cabinet which would see it featured in Dave and Busters, cruise ships, and arcades around the country.