Follow your dreams?

From Computer Times, 3rd March 04

(gooooooo linus!)

Game boy advances


Growing up in small-town America, where his father was posted for a job in the early 1990s, Linus Tan would sit for hours at public computer terminals in supermarkets.

There, the nine-year-old taught himself programming with help from the files of old DOS computers.

When he returned to Singapore at age 12, he wrote simple programs that would make the computer recite spelling and dictation passages for his younger sister.

Now, at 19, the final-year student at Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP) already owns Praxis Studios, a start-up that markets computer games he develops.

One of his games, a management simulation called iBusiness, is being used by students at a local university.

Now, the budding tech-nopreneur is planning to publish and distribute the second game online. A real-time strategy offering, Teridian Shadow made its debut at a prestigious international conference in France. The game is written in C ++.

His efforts earned him the IT Youth Award at the Singapore Computer Society's annual IT Leader Awards last week.

Instead of opting for a place in junior college, the former student of Raffles Institution chose NYP which offers a diploma in IT with a game development module.

The flexible course structure at NYP gave him room to pursue his game development projects. At the same time, he gained business acumen and exceptional money sense by liaising with game industry experts.

Stepping out

While most game deve-lopers look for external publishers to market their games, Mr Tan wants to publish and distribute Teri-dian Shadow on his own.

His rationale: External publishers may pump in the funds to market your title. But no matter how popular the game becomes, the developer gets only three per cent of the royalties. 'If I publish the game on my own, the royalties are all mine.'

Although he plans to grow his company, the youth has set his sights on his first love - game creation.

'In Singapore, most good programmers are promoted to managerial posts, in which they don't do programming at all,' said Mr Tan. 'There is no maturity in some of the programs because much of the coding is done by fresh graduates.'

So Mr Tan wants to remain in the programming world for as long as possible. 'For a young company, software development is the key. Once you get that right, the rest will follow.'