My Selected Projects » ZapSpot Games


Project Summary


ZapSpot was a startup software company devoted to creating fun and easy-to-play computer games that were completely free via advertising and product sponsorships. It developed a software distribution platform that was very similar to Macromedia's Central product though it predated it by nearly five years in the market.

ZapSpot's proprietary game engine was highly abstracted from the host OS (in this case Windows) and featured various capabilities that made it easy to build a wide variety of games quickly. In fact, each ZapSpot game title was planned, designed, coded, and tested in just two weeks using a very small team that usually involved a single game designer, graphic artist, programmer, and play tester who were all working on several titles in parallel. In addition, each ZapSpot game typically weighed-in under 900KB, which enabled them to be easily shared with friends via email using dial-up Internet connections and contributed greatly to their viral popularity. Nearly 20 years after the company folded, people still remember and play them!

During its short lifespan, ZapSpot accumulated some very impressive stats:


Image of the ZapSpot Shell interface
Image of the ZapSpot interface showing the available game titles



Status


Sadly, ZapSpot folded in late 2000 / early 2001 due to the dot com crash.

My Contributions (as Creative Lead / Program Manager)




NOTE: If you can find and run these games, typing "credits" at the title screen will show you the names of all of the people who were involved in making them.