FROM MEME


MACHINE TO MOBILE: 21 YEARS OF MINICLIP


Before YouTube, before even MySpace and the subsequent onset of social media, there was Miniclip, the ground zero for meme culture that together with Newgrounds inspired a punk-like attitude to game development. Richie Shoemaker picks up the story from president and co-founder Rob Small as the company celebrates a 21-year journey from Flash to mobile


W


hen you started Miniclip, was there any thought of surviving - let alone thriving - over the next 20-plus years?


The idea of Miniclip came to me shortly after I had graduated from university in the late 90s. The internet was an incredibly exciting new frontier, and I wanted to take a risk by creating my own dot-com business. As a recent graduate with a substantial amount of student


debt, I needed to come up with a business plan that didn’t require significant financial investment. Together with my business partner, Tihan Presbie, we started researching the possibilities of creating an internet company that would focus on the hit-driven category of entertainment.


58 | MCV/DEVELOP July 2022 One of our overriding principles was to make sure our


product was highly accessible and had global appeal, so we decided to make everything free. This was a huge risk at the time as we had no clear revenue model and 100% of revenue in the games market in 2000 was driven by console and PC sales. One of the first titles we created was called Dancing Bush


and starred US president, George Bush, disco dancing in a nightclub. Filmed in Tihan’s apartment, with Tihan acting as the body


double, we created the game in a week and shared it with 30 of our friends and family. To our disappointment nobody even acknowledged we had sent them anything. About two weeks later though, our IT team called us and told us our servers had gone


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