How Did I Get Here?

I thought this would be the best way to introduce myself and my company. My name is Jason Gardner and I am the founder of Minority Report Labs. This game company rose from the ashes of my prior experience breaking in to the mobile gaming world. In order to understand where I’m going I’ll tell you about where I came from. (cliche I know lol).

In 2010 an associate approached me with the idea of creating a game. Now he had no idea how to create a game, much less what type of game to create. I was interested mainly because I had stopped playing console games years ago. Nothing against a console game but I don’t have the time to sit down in front of a tv and play a game for hours. Not the way I’d go about spending my free time. At the time I was a corporate lawyer and I didn’t have much free time to begin with. However I did have a lot of time commuting to and from work. The hour or so from home to work was often spent on my phone. So once he said lets make a game I thought, hey I’m always on my phone, so why not.

Now I don’t want this to seem as a random desire. I’d always love to create things, and honestly some of my best memories as a kid revolved around games. Super Mario 64 and Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 (for playstation) are my two all time favorite games. I’d always thought that whoever got to make games for a living had the easiest life imaginable. (BOY was I wrong)

With the App Store growing exponentially I figured this would be a great opportunity to hopefully switch careers and be able to make games for a living. I mean honestly it sounded like the best thing in the world. So while working at my law firm I started to brainstorm an idea for a game. At the time everyone was playing Temple Run. It was highly addictive yet rather simple. Running games were my type of game. As my dad would say “do what you know.” I knew running games, I knew there was a market (Temple Runs success) and I knew I would really love making the game (well I knew I’d love playing the game).

So now that I had the type of game down, I decided I needed to work on a theme. I’m from the Bronx NY and I am the quintessential New Yorker. So I said how cool would it be to have a game where you run down the streets of NYC. I mean the tourist industry is huge here and who wouldn’t want to run the streets of NYC right? This was before Subway Surfers really blew up btw.

So now I know I wanted to do an endless runner and I wanted it based in NYC. Okay great, now I needed a developer, designer and most importantly MONEY. For money I turned to some friends who I thought would also be interested in making a game and more importantly making money. Because let’s be honest most people enter business with the intent on making money. So I was able to get three friends on top of having the associate who introduced the idea to me. Now that I had some people who had some money, my next step was to get a quote. That’s where the fun began.