Thomas W.P. Slatin

Back in the early to mid 90’s, my best friend and I would stay up all night trying to come up with new and creative ways to write our own computer software and games.  I was the creative one, who came up with all the ideas, and my best friend at the time was the technical one that excelled at writing computer code.

At the time, we were trying to start our own home-based business right out of my parents place so that right after high school, we could go directly into business for ourselves.  It was a dream we shared, that, like the weed my friend consumed on a regular basis, eventually all went up in smoke.

We created custom computer applications that we hoped to market somehow, either as shareware, or traditional software.  Unfortunately, as time would tell, since we didn’t yet have the Internet yet, and all of our software was written for Windows 3.1, we were headed straight for disaster.  We created, in all, approximately 25 different applications and games.

The most memorable game we created was one that featured a gigantic ape on top of the Empire State Building.  We had just watched the television premiere of Godzilla, and I came up with the idea of making a simple 2-D game out of it.  The game was simple, and was comprised of square gray buildings with black square windows.  There was a gigantic ape who held onto the side of The Empire State Building who didn’t move, with the exception of his head (he turned his head back and forth to look).  Flying around the ape were simple biplanes who shot at him.  The objective of the game was simple; the player had to control the ape using the arrow keys and space bar to throw bananas at the planes and knock them out of the sky before time ran out.  It was a simple game with an even simpler concept that was completed by staying up all night and writing code.  By morning, the game was complete and ready to be marketed.

However, there were problems.  First of all, the Internet hadn’t been invented yet, and distribution required us to send copies of the game on 3.5″ disks in envelopes via snail-mail.  A handful of copies went out as shareware, and we never made a single dime off of the demo.  And second, game developers all around the world were using the latest technology at the time to build games that were much better than ours.

My friend eventually bailed, and I went on my own developing both educational and data-intensive software.  My first release was an interactive periodic table of the elements that had the power to render 2-dimensional animated examples of the different elements.  The application took me a month to create and was eventually submitted to BBS systems all over the United States.  Again, I didn’t make a single dime off of the application because it was shareware, and during the 90’s, nobody bothered to support independent programmers.

During my senior year in high school, I abandoned the idea of making a living doing computer programming, and turned to writing custom software for the Internet.  At the time, people laughed at me and said that the Internet was just a novelty and wouldn’t go anywhere.  They laughed when I created my first website and said that 3,000 hits in its first month was no great accomplishment at all.  My father predicted that I’d never make a single dime off the Internet and that I should go back to writing shareware.

They were wrong.  I became successful at doing web sites, and in my college years, took on a few clients on a part-time or freelance basis.  It is something that, as of this year, has turned into an actual business.  One that makes a little bit of money, and helps me get by (just barely, but there’s room for growth).

After three long years of college, I lost touch with my friend.  He chose a life of drinking and drugs and slowly drifted away.  I haven’t heard or seen him since, though sometimes wonder what we might have accomplished back in the mid 90’s, if the odds were in our favor and we were able to become successful at such an early age.

Posted under Writing