We were one of the original tenants of the Wessex House business centre when it was set up ten years ago.
We started Io Productions with five people making games for personal computers, and grew until we were about 12 on the third floor.
That was going reasonably well when in 2000 we started doing work with Nokia on WAP mobile phones.
At that point we felt that other technologies had increased in power over the years and felt this was an opportunity to get into the mobile side of things.
It was then that we switched the emphasis of the company to mobile and renamed it Iomo.
We moved up to the fourth floor at Wessex House and started to develop games for all the phones on the market.
We worked with all the big operators worldwide – Vodafone, Orange, T Mobile – and became very well known in that area of the market place.
We won awards for the Best Mobile Games Development Studio in both 2003 and 2004 and all the exposure we got then led to us being bought out by Infospace, a Nasdaq American company, for $15m in December 2004.
Around the same time we moved offices in Wessex House again, carried on growing and, at our peak, were getting on for 40 people. We continued to operate from Wessex House handling the European side of Infospace.
But in July last year they decided to get out of the mobile market and sold off all the mobile side of their business to focus purely on Internet search.
At that time we did a deal to buy back the assets of the team here and at that point FinBlade was created.
Games we have developed include a BMW racer game for Hands-On Mobile, a film quiz, Tomb Raider, Tiger Woods Golf and Monopoly.
And we have had a number of occasions when we have been responsible for developing five of the listed top ten games for mobiles.
In particular, FinBlade are now working heavily with the Apple iPhone.
Initially my passion was about making games. I went to university and did computer science. I then did a summer job working for a games company and have been in it ever since.
I’m originally from north London but moved to Eastleigh in 1992 because my wife’s family was from this area.
The initial focus when we started the company was just to make games but the company grew because we were successful. The opportunities came by and we just had to grab them.
When we started, Wessex House gave us the ability to get a small office with a month’s notice either way and those sort of things make a big difference when you are starting out.
We have 18 employees now – programmers, designers, artists and testers – plus a second company called Metismo that makes the tools that are used to make games.
The technology company employs five people and we work together on a lot of projects.
I still enjoy the industry – it’s exciting and it is changing very fast. A lot of my friends also work for companies in the industry and if I wasn’t in this line of work life would be less interesting.
It’s just great when all the time the guys are coming up with ideas.
