Pet Games
Deer Park company finds its niche in casual games
 
Tom Sowa
The Spokesman-Review, Staff Writer
May 19, 2008
 
Two decades ago when he was a young teen, John Swiderski submitted a computer game he developed to a magazine. The form he needed to use asked the name of his company.

He looked at the pet hamster in a cage near his computer and decided, yeah, my company is Mean Hamster Software.

Swiderski, 33, still runs that same aptly named company, but it's no longer a one-person operation. He's grown the company to 12 workers, making Mean Hamster Software one of the area's thriving software development firms.

His latest product, the casual game Pet Shop Hop, became one of the most popular downloads on several Web sites, including PlayFirst.com and Yahoo Games. It's been downloaded more than 330,000 times. Close to 10,000 people have paid $20 to play the full version of the game, with PlayFirst sharing a portion of royalties with Mean Hamster. 

PlayFirst, the San Francisco publisher of dozens of successful casual online games, asked Swiderski to produce a second game for them. The Mean Hamster team is expected to finish the next game within eight months.

Game development is what Swiderski likes doing. Four years ago he was working in a tiny corner office in Deer Park when he gathered the courage to visit the other big game developer in town, Cyan Worlds. He told them he could do something no one else had tried, converting the massive and multimedia-rich games of Myst and Riven into a handheld version for phones or personal assistants like the Palm.
 
When they were released in 2005, those efforts became best sellers. They also convinced Swiderski that he had a future in game development.