My next startup: BlueLine Game Studios!

I have two big changes to announce!

The first is that I’ve recently founded my next company: BlueLine Game Studios. It’s been a long time coming and I was really looking forward to the chance to work with Geoff Brown again. After the marathon in September – with all of the extra time from not training anymore – it only took a few days before my restlessness had me thinking over all of the things I’d been studying about Indie Gaming for the last several years.

It seems almost inevitable that I would start a gaming company someday and it was a no-brainer that Geoff would be the first man to pull on-board if I could get him. At this point, urologist I just didn’t have anymore excuses to delay it. I jumped in and contacted the developers of the best boardgames I could find (mostly Mensa Select winners) to discuss licensing. Much to my surprise they were all very responsive, price seemed eager to work together, and moved fast. Before I knew it, we had a licensing deal signed to bring one of the most awesome boardgames ever to Xbox 360!

Since then, we signed a deal with another boardgame (to be announced soon ;)). They were seriously the #1 and #2 boardgames that I wanted to make for Xbox 360!

Things have been going quite well. …and fast! Which brings me to my second big change:

Starting Dec. 12th, I’ll be cutting back to 3 days per week at Wikia. I’ve been working on LyricWiki since early 2006. A few months after Wikia acquired LyricWiki, they pulled me in to head up LyricWiki work again and help with development in general. It’s been a great couple of years in which I’ve met some amazing people, but it’s time for me to sew some other seeds also. Furthermore, Wikia is in a great spot and can certainly survive without my fulltime attention ;). Just this morning I noticed that according to Quantcast, Wikia is the 40th biggest site/group-of-sites on the internet (in terms of monthly US uniques). That’s awesome. When I joined, most people I met didn’t know the name Wikia. Two years later we’re starting to become a household name and we have more traffic than MySpace! It’s certainly been an exciting ride so-far.

Better yet, since I’m not even leaving (just cutting back) I can do my part to continue to help Wikia grow to its next big milestones.

I’m looking forward to the adventures in store with this new arrangement and am happy to be back “in the startup arena”*.

If you think this sounds intriguing at all, please follow BlueLine Games on twitter, facebook, google+, it’s blog, or signup to be notified when Hive for Xbox 360 goes live!


* Wikia is so profitable & has so many employees that it’s hard to call it a startup. So much job security… ugh! ;)

LyricWiki mobile app – Android and iPhone

Download for free from the Apple App Store
Download for free from the Android Market

I’m pleased to announce that the LyricWiki iPhone app has finally hit the App Store!

If you have an Android device, visit you can grab the LyricWiki Android app which made it out first.

Now that the iOS version is complete, here we cover most smartphone users in the US. It’s been a long road (including the month-long submission process through Apple), but this version feels pretty solid.

Homescreen of LyricWiki Android app

Here’s what it’s got so far:

  • Auto-complete
  • Discographies for artists, grouped by album
  • iTunes Top 9 images on main screen
  • Over 1,500,000 lyrics with more added every day
  • Fully licensed: royalties are paid to publishers
  • Powered by a wiki community – constantly updated!
  • These lyrics have had 5 years of review and editing from hundreds of thousands of users! This is the single most accurate lyrics collection anywhere.

I’d also like to give a shout-out to all of the beta-testers and other users who have given feedback about the app… it’s extremely helpful to know what the community wants out of the app. Thank you!

Obviously, it’s never “done” & we’ll keep improving it as we go. If you have any feedback on the app, please let me know in the comments!

Another cool thing about the app is that, thanks to the help of a number of awesome translators, the app is available in these languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Czech, Dutch, Interlingua, Luxembourgish, Telugu, Macedonian, Breton, and Malay!