Joel DeYoung knows all about jumping into the deep end.
By age 10, he was already programming. By 22, he’d finished graduate school with a master’s degree focused on computer graphics. By the time he first worked on a video game, The Simpsons: Road Rage for Radical Entertainment, he was leading the team.
“I look back on it now and think how naĂŻve we were about how much of the game we were trying to get done in the amount of time we had and how little experience I had in the technical aspects of making a game,” he said. “But we just did it. And we made a very successful game.”
After nearly nine years at Radical, DeYoung decided to pursue a long-held entrepreneurial dream. Along with some former colleagues, DeYoung launched Hothead Games, a digitally focused video game company, in 2006.
The company kicked off by partnering with the Seattle-based creators of a web comic called Penny Arcade to produce a game version. The company has followed it up with a range of games, including its original creation, DeathSpank. Since launch, Hothead has grown to 50 employees from five and achieved over $10 million in total revenue.
DeYoung counts his technical skills and his people skills as key attributes that have driven company success. He said he’s convinced that only people that are having fun can make fun games – so he works to create that environment for his staff.
“It is, at the end of the day, software development – so sometimes there’s hard-to-resolve bugs, sometimes there’s crunch times where we’ve got to work extra hard to get stuff done,” he said. “But I try to help people keep perspective: we’re not curing cancer here, we’re making video games.” •
