Next Big Thing

My five years at GarageGames have been a blast. It's time to hit the big red button and reboot the ol' career.

Obligatory retrospective: I first came to GarageGames as a fresh-faced eighteen year old intern. I lived in a spare bedroom, and wrote docs and code. I came back to work full time six months later. (One of the scariest and most rewarding decisions I ever made was leaving college to work at GG.) I lived in Jeff's garage for a while before I got an apartment. There were about ten of us - it felt a lot like a family. We had a wild and crazy community full of talented people. In the subsequent five years that family grew to include a ton of new faces. We shipped engines, made games, dealt with good times and bad times, and changed the games industry, at least a little bit.

A guy couldn't ask for a better introduction to the games industry!

Now it's time to move on. GG is an awesome company, and it's going to keep going places. InstantAction has huge potential, and Torque is getting some needed engineering love.

But the things I want to do don't match up anymore. I'm ready for a change of pace. And the company has plenty of smart and talented people - I don't need to be there for GG to do well. That's a very liberating feeling.

There's some great potential in Flash and in the mobile space; things are finally getting good enough to make cool products. It would be fun to make some small-scale games on my own terms. I'm excited to immerse myself in some new environments and technologies.

I'll still be around. I'll be speaking at the Austin GDC on networking, and also on Flash technology. I'm starting work on a book; we'll see if it makes it or not. And when the Next Big Thing rolls around... you'll probably hear from me then, too. :)

If you see me around, say hi! You can also track my personal blog or my twitter feed. My e-mail is ben.garney AT gmail (you know the rest).

Thanks for everything, and I wish you the best. It's been a pleasure to be a part of this community and work with a unique group of people.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Pulpolux!!!