Dungeon-based puzzle app 10000000 (said "ten million") is an unlikely autobiographical game. So unlikely, in fact, the developer doesn't even realise how autobiographical it is.

The App Store gaming scene is increasingly the domain of high-gloss, swollen-budget productions made by big name brands with impeccable gaming pedigrees. 10000000 is -- let's be frank -- an ugly little game made by one guy in his spare time. If there's a globalised, 21st century version of the American dream, Luca Redwood is proof of it, making it big with an app he coded from scratch. At this point, the £1.49 game with no marketing budget and no recognised brand attached has broken the top 50 App Store games in 25 countries.

With a pregnant wife and a full-time job making humdrum finance software, Luca Redwood fit 10000000 into the margins wherever and whenever he could over the past year -- late nights, weekend mornings. "It made every decision about cutting things that didn't work that much more difficult," Redwood told Wired.co.uk in a Bermondsey pub a couple of weeks ago. "When you don't have a lot of time and you're throwing away two weeks of not getting enough sleep when you throw something away -- you get pretty disciplined."


Throwing things away is an integral part of Redwood's process. "I had the basic idea in mind but I made lots of different prototypes and kept iterating until it was fun," Redwood said. "It all just came out of testing. There were even physical models of the game. I got some cards and highlighters and made a grid on the floor." [pictured] Redwood experimented with dozens of variations, each one getting a little closer to the end goal he envisioned.

Redwood's development budget was so shoestring that to compile the final versions of the game, PC user Redwood had to borrow a friend's Mac. After a year of hard graft, Redwood submitted the game to Apple and it appeared with no fanfare at all. "I had a marketing plan, a big spreadsheet of sites I was going to write to.

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Turns out I didn't need it."

Editors at TouchArcade (the unquestioned "paper" of record for iOS games) discovered the game shortly after it was released. In an adulatory 5-star review posted on a Friday night, TouchArcade critic Eli Hodapp called 10000000 "mind-blowing" and raved about the game for 1,000 words -- about twice the length of a typical review on the site.

Friends of Redwood noticed the review and emailed it to him, who stared uncomprehendingly at his monitor on Saturday morning. "After that TouchArcade review the game sold 2,000 copies a day for the first ten days," he said. "I was floored." Within a month the game has sold more than 50,000 copies.

10000000 is superficially similar to the world-renowned casual game Bejeweled, where players clear gems from on a constantly-refilling board by matching them up -- a simple but highly addictive gameplay formulation that has been emulated countless times. 1000000's interesting wrinkle is to combine that mechanic with another proven gameplay model, the endless runner, where the player's 2D character must overcome obstacles encountered on a perpetual run towards the right of the screen, with the goal being to get as far as possible. But unlike endless runners like Canabalt, 10000000 is finite -- the goal is to reach the eponymous high score and escape the mysterious castle that the player is trapped in. Every run of 10000000 starts with the player standing next to a sign that features your highest score to date and your goal of 10,000,000 points written out under a single word in all caps: FREEDOM.


When I'd played 1000000, the game's theme had felt like an afterthought to me -- frippery that was playing second fiddle to the compulsively addictive gameplay. But that was before I met Luca Redwood.

In Bermondsey, I asked Redwood what other games he'd played over the past year that might have influenced 10000000. "Other games?" "Or films, perhaps?" I offered. "I haven't played any games at all in the last year. I worked on 10000000. That was the deal I made with my wife -- I would make the game but that was it, it was my project." Luca Redwood spent a year in monastic isolation with no free time distractions besides new prototypes of 1000000, getting a little better each time.

I asked him what the most frequent comments were that fans had sent to him. "Some people said to me that they wanted to play more," Redwood told me. "It's great that they like the game but, you've finished. You're done."