Craddock - Shovel Knight

Nine-year-old Jimmy Woods was the envy of every kid who developed a case of Nintendo thumb in the 1990s. Taciturn and introverted, Jimmy was one of the protagonists of The Wizard , a feature film in which the plucky gamer perseveres over childhood trauma to earn a spot in the finals of Video Armageddon, a video game tournament with a prize pot of $50,000. Moreover, he and his co-stars were among the first westerners outside of Nintendo to play Super Mario Bros. 3 , the next installment in Nintendos bestselling series of platform games for its NES console.

To adults, The Wizard was a glorified commercial for Nintendo games. To seven-year-old Sean Velasco, the film was mind-blowing.

I was always into games, and always into Nintendo, from the outset, Velasco said, citing Super Mario Bros. , Super Mario Bros. 2 , and Zelda II as early favorites. I was right in time for the marketing of The Wizard .

Nintendo . Parents pronounced the word slowly and carefully, as if creeping through a Super Mario Bros. 3 airship infested with Bob-ombs and cannonballs. Founded in 1889 as a manufacturer of playing cards, Nintendo transitioned to video games in the mid-1970s after president Hiroshi Yamauchi took notice of Space Invaders s popularity in Japan. The companys first few arcade titles failed to gain traction, but Nintendo struck gold with Donkey Kong , a platform game designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, a young college grad who had grown up dreaming of becoming a toymaker. In July 1983, Nintendo launched the Family Computer, more commonly called the Famicom, an 8-bit console that played games on cartridges and went on to sell 2.5 million units in Japan by the end of 1984. Nintendo rebranded the Famicom as the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, in the United States, where it made waves when it premiered in New York City in 1985.

By 1990, 30 percent of Americans owned a Nintendo Entertainment System, and young Velasco was right there among them, tearing through titles like Super Mario Bros. 2 and Zelda II .

I was planted in front of the NES for a lot of that time, Velasco said.

Velascos passion for cartoons and video games set him on a creative path. He enrolled at Cogswell Polytechnical College in 2002 and experimented with various artistic pursuits until he found one that fit. Initially I wanted to be an animator or a character designer, until I understood that being a game designer was a job, he recalled. That was actually something people did: putting the game mechanics and game world together.

Cogswell was the perfect environment in which Velasco could map out his future. At the time he joined, only 400 students studied there, affording each student plenty of one-on-one access to instructors. Velasco sailed through his curriculum, benefiting more from working on side projects with fellow students than he did from sitting in classrooms. We had a game development club, and we would haul our giant CRT monitors out of our houses and bring them to the school every week to put together games in our spare time, he remembered. I think that prepared me for making games, especially the way I do now, which is in a smaller environment working closely with a group of people.

After graduating in 2004, Velasco and three of his friends parlayed their side projects into a startup called Happy Fun Team. They targeted mobile phones, but the days of tablets and smartphones being on par with game consoles were still years away. Motorola ruled the mobile roost with its Razr line of phones, boasting screens that measured 2.2 inches and displayed 144 colors at once. We only made one game, Velasco said. It was an Adventures of Lolo -style game that had the Nightmare Before Christmas license. I still think it was a pretty cool little game, but after that we couldnt find any work. We were just out of school and didnt know what we were doing.

While Happy Fun Teams game sold poorly, creating it gave Velasco invaluable experience. In November 2006 he landed a job at WayForward Technologies, a small studio based in southern California. WayForward was founded in 1990 by Voldi Way, a wunderkind who had founded his first company, which developed software for sheet metal fabrication, at age fourteen. When he started WayForward, Way hedged his bets. Rather than going all-in creating original games, he focused on developing licensed software based on established characters such as Godzilla and SpongeBob SquarePants.

The company grew steadily over the next twelve years, juggling licensed titles as well as edutainment software such as The Land Before Time: Pre-School Adventure and Casper: Animated Activity Center targeted at schools. Each release performed well enough to strengthen the companys bonds with license holders, who in turn gave them more contacts. More contacts brought in more money to hire developers, who formed teams to handle more projects. At last, in 2002, WayForward released Shantae , a 2D platformer in which players controlled a geniethe studios first original game.