IPhone Hipsters save starving family

How do you pull you and your family out of the funk of the economic recession? For Ethan Nicholas, it was simple: He spent six weeks' worth of nights and early mornings writing a video game for the iPhone.

All it took was a great idea and some programming savvy -- all typed out on the living room couch -- for Nicholas to create iShoot, a top-selling iPhone app that was a best-seller for weeks and has now earned the man more than $700,000 -- more than enough to rescue his family from financial ruin, which looked likely after Nicholas saw medical bills pile up.

iShoot, a simple game involving tanks shooting at each other, sells for $2.99 on the iPhone app store, but Nicholas seems to have hit on the best idea for juicing sales by creating a free version of the game, iShoot Lite, clearly designed to entice players into upgrading to the full version of the game.

After the runaway success of the game, Nicholas is now pouring his full efforts into developing additional games for the popular handset. He also quit his job as a programmer for Sun and has started his own development company.

Of course, with 15,000 apps on sale for the iPhone and many thousands more rejected by the company, for every Ethan Nicholas there must be hundreds of aspiring programmers who haven't found much success on the platform. I love to hear success stories like Nicholas's but I also worry about the ideas they give to other people who'd love to replicate his triumph. If you're hoping to follow in his footsteps, remember: Nicholas quit his job after the game became a runaway hit, not the day he came up with the idea.

You also just never know when the magic will happen -- and in a business like this, lightning rarely strikes twice. (Just ask the guys who used to spend up to $100,000 developing games for pre-iPhone cell phones. The vast majority of those never recouped their production costs, much less made enough profit to merit continued investment in the business.)

Of course, that's all unlikely to stop people from trying: A quick search for "tank game" reveals about 20 titles alone on the iPhone app store already.

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Th3Branded0ne said:

gotta have plenty of creative ideas to keep up with that market.

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Vampire_Hunter_Bob said:

Personally I only wish I had thought of ripping off the game that ripped off Worms first.

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Vampire_Hunter_Bob said:

He blatantly ripped off a game that is a rip off of another game. I'm glad he made his money, but he ripped off another game. http://www.blitwise.com/ptanks.html POCKET TANKS! I couldn't remember what it was called.

Edit: Now that I'm remembering Pocket Tanks wasn't really a rip off of Worms, it's more like a a boring version of worms.

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Vampire_Hunter_Bob said:

Edit: Now that I'm remembering Pocket Tanks wasn't really a rip off of Worms, it's more like a a boring version of worms.

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