Solo Mission

Sean left EA in 2006, due to personal circumstances and a desire to get back to making games without first presenting a lengthy design document that nobody would read. "It was pretty scary, you know? But I didn't like what I was doing any more with EA. There was always this push to be a producer, or a 'superproducer' I think someone called it. I thought 'what planet are these guys on? I just want to create games.' And that's exactly what I'm doing now."

He now designs and programmes original games in flash, hosted on his own website and on flash gaming sites around the world. Zombie Wars, the fifth and latest in his isometric, weapons-and-blood Boxhead series (objective: "Kill as many zombies as you can in different ways.") currently resides on more than 10,000 different hosting sites and gets an average of 65,000 visits per day. And if the Boxhead design model sounded somewhat familiar, that's because it is; "I think [Boxhead] is Syndicate. I think all the games I've done have been Syndicate. Looking back at it I think 'well it worked then, I'm going to use it now,' with a few tweaks and adjustments for flash. It's the same code-base really."

Naturally those similarities also extend to the in-game gore. "[Boxhead] has loads of blood in it. You paint the map red," Sean says happily "people love spurting blood everywhere."

"I've had a couple of emails about that, one of them was from a Christian Unity Group. I just sent them back a nice letter saying 'that's the game, blood's real and we do bleed when we're shot.' What can they do? They can't do anything. If they put me on the BBC news, it'll just make the game bigger and even more people will play it."

While such a thing could provide a temporary spike in publicity, the main revenue models for flash gaming rely on steadier sources of income. The first is sponsorship - all of Sean's Boxhead titles are sponsored by an exterior flash gaming portal. They pay to have their logo featured in the game in the hope that when a player tires of Boxhead, they will move on to different flash games at the sponsoring site. It works too; Sean tells me that there's around a 55% followthrough rate.

Money can also be made through microtransactions, such as on the iPhone where single dollar purchases for small applications can easily add up, and through sub-licensing of the intellectual property. A 32 player version of Boxhead is currently in development thanks to the latter. Then of course there are advertising opportunities - and in some cases companies pay for exactly the opposite, to ensure that the game features no ads at all.

Despite the popularity of online flash gaming however, coverage on mainstream games-media sites is relatively sparse. "It's a bit like the film magazines not featuring stuff from YouTube," says Sean "the comparison is similar to that."

"But if you watch the flash business now, you're about to see a massive turn. A lot of the big players EA ... Eidos are already there ... a lot of them are going to start producing free, distributable games. This is where the real professionals get it and write some really good games. Especially EA's back catalogue, if they plan it well and push the retro games like Command and Conquer onto the flash market they will have a massive hit on their hands."

He thinks the market for these titles will extend beyond nostalgic players who experienced them first hand and could easily reach a new audience, "Cannon Fodder [by Sensible Software] for instance - get it in flash. They'll have a success on their hands, because the kids have never seen it, it's a brand new game to them."

"The bottom line with flash games is if the core gameplay isn't good, you aren't going to get your hits. If it's rubbish no-one is going to look at it. It's not like in the commercial business where you can somehow get a metacritic rating of 80% when the game is really worth 30% and still sell it for $50."

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