Hello, my name is Jeremy, and yesterday was my first day at Thinglefin. Well, perhaps a bit of a lie. With my friend and partner Toby, I’ve been working on getting Thinglefin off the ground for more than a year, on and off, over various weekends and late evenings. Developing the technology behind Thinglefin’s first project has been my primary hobby, but only recently did I come to believe it could actually be the thing I do for a living. So in some ways, today was nothing new. But it is new - today was a celebration of breaking free from the confines of the publishers and cubes, and working on an exciting new project that’s only bounded by my abilities and vision. It’s only starting to sink in.

A little about me: I’m the co-founder and chief engineer here at the ‘Fin. I’ve been working in 3d graphics and games for about 9 years now professionally, and been aspiring to it for many years before that. It all stemmed from a moment in 1990, when a friend brought over a copy of Ultima 6, one of the first games to feature a huge continuous open-ended world, with fleshed out characters who did more than just stand in one place and give you the same tiny piece of dialog over and over. My immediate thought was “what if you could make a game where every character in the world was played by a different person, all interacting and contributing to the game’s story?” At the time I lacked the tools and experience to realize this vision, or to even realize the difficulty and scope of what I imagined. Between then and now, many multiplayer online games have arrived, all telling us a little something more about what it is that draws people into these virtual worlds, and what pushes them away.

And now, after being involved with several such projects, it’s time for me to apply the lessons learned in a way that’s only possibe in a small nimble company without a conservative publisher looming over you, and without the momentum and inertia that comes with having a 80 person team all working on different parts of an immense design. Speaking of, I have a tasklist to attend to…