It feels like a ball of Silly Putty in my hand. This thought – that one day, I’ll be working for myself, with a group of good friends, on a project that we’re all excited about. I squeeze it, and it resists. The cold, hard mass feels solid. But the longer I hold it in my hand, the warmer it gets. Softer, more pliable. I squeeze it, and it forms to the shape of my hand. I roll the ball around, feeling it – the texture of my own skin embedded in its surface. It feels warm now, familiar. I squeeze, and it seems through my fingers. Not as though it’s getting away, but rather, like it’s becoming part of me.

I put the ball in my mouth, and it turns to liquid. I roll it around, and it tastes like … nothing. Slowly, it takes on a flavor – a dull savory sensation, complex, like something that’s been developing for a long while. It’s barely there, on the tip of my tongue, but I can just almost taste it, and it’s good.

There’s something, obviously – the risk, for one, that makes me hesitate. There’s the fact that I know Ei-Nyung wants stability, and is resistant to this sort of risk. Not unjustly so, and it’s important to her, so I respect that. Hell, it’s not like I didn’t see the impact entrepreneurship had on my parents’ relationship over the last few years. Still, every day I’m at work, it feels like I’m painting by numbers, and every day, it gets easier, less challenging, and less interesting. It’s not even that the project I’m working on isn’t good. I think it could be quite novel – it’ll certainly be an oddball game. But the fundamental fact of it all is that I’d have done it totally, totally differently. And basically, as long as I’m working for someone else, whether it’s EA, and their marketing-driven development, or it’s my current employer, beholden to the client’s desires, I’m never really going to make something I’m genuinely *passionate* about, in part because it’s unlikely that my desires will match with some arbitrary client’s, and in part because frankly, it’s hard to get passionate about making someone else rich. off a creative endeavor that you *know* you’re responsible for bringing greatness to.

The prevailing wisdom is that Edison was right, it’s 1% inspiration and 99$ perspiration. And that’s true – a good idea is only the first step in the process. But a lot of people interpret that saying (in the game industry in particular) that it’s the process of development uber alles, and that the idea is arbitrary – anyone can have an idea, after all.

But that’s not the case at all. Yes, it’s the process of development that’ll separate a good studio from a great one. But after what, three years in development, one thing has become really, really clear to me. There are a *LOT* of absolutely terrible ideas out there that get millions of dollars put into them. And sometimes, you can in fact polish a turd. But I know enough that between me, and a couple of my friends, we have genuinely good ideas. Great ideas. Creative, passionate, interesting, innovative ideas, and now, we even have the process experience to back it up. We’ve individually worked to *put* those various ideas into place, to get them into shipped games that have gone to the market, and been successes in their own right. And contrary to that, I’ve worked with a couple designers who are the exact opposite – so utterly devoid of creative thought, inspiration, passion, or any sense of originality that they might as well be replaced by a herd of robot monkeys. So, there’s a difference between good and bad. I’d even say that I know the difference between competant and extraordinary. That’s not to say that *(* am in that 99th percentile yet. But I’m definitely fighting to get there, and I think I’m finding that I have the capacity, I just lack the experience of developing a concept from scratch on my own terms.

Again, that sounds pretty egomanical, and maybe it is. But I’ve pursued greatness before, and found myself lacking. I’ll never be a great swimmer, for instance, no matter how hard I tried. I’ll never be a great artist, though I spent thousands of hours drawing through high school and college. I just didn’t have it in me – I could *feel* myself hitting the limit of my ability. Maybe with focused, guided effort, I could have become better, but I’d never be great. With game design, it’s not to say I’m that good *yet*, but I’ve been running at a full sprint for the last few years, and I haven’t even seen the wall yet.

And I feel that way about a good number of my friends.

Getting those people together, getting them to realize that the time is *now* and that it’ll be worth the investment, and that we can do it with minimal risk…

Well, maybe that’s the 99%.