Thread by @craigphares

I sold my first software product when I was 12 years old.

“Sabacc” was a Star Wars themed card game built in HyperCard, available for download on America Online as shareware for $5.

Behold, the epic journey of my first ever software launch. 🙌

2/HyperCard shipped on every Macintosh computer at the time & was the first programming environment that I found even remotely approachable. There was no computer science in elementary school and the only code I had seen was in some obscure Atari ST magazine my dad subscribed to.

3/The card metaphor made sense - navigating between cards like web pages (which were not even on my radar yet). You could get up and running quickly with a few lines of code. It was just a scripting language, but it introduced me to loops, conditionals, arrays, and computer math.

4/I had to figure everything out for myself. How to build a virtual deck. How to randomize things. How to build an AI opponent. There were no tutorials. There was no Stack Overflow. I used the HyperCard help documentation relentlessly.

I’m sure my code was awful.

5/I designed everything. Every card, number, background. The graphics were embarrassingly huge since I didn’t understand compression. But I knew enough to separate background images from reusable foreground elements. I thought it looked pretty cool. 😎

6/Everything was designed on one of the earliest versions of Photoshop. Back when the app icon was an eye, and the dark room metaphors actually meant something.

I feel overwhelmingly privileged to have had access to a Mac and Photoshop at a young age. It set me up for life.

7/Back then, the internet was AOL. Or Prodigy if that was your thing 😝

AOL had a whole downloadable software section. And shareware was huge. There were so many shareware games available to download in every genre.

8/Shareware simply meant you could download an app for free, and pay if you wanted to. Sometimes you would unlock something extra if you actually paid. But for the most part, you could use something pretty cool without having to pay.

9/So when I thought “Sabacc” was ready to play, I put a little $5 shareware disclaimer on it and uploaded it to the card games section on AOL. I had to put my actual mailing address on it because PayPal hadn’t been invented yet.

I remember the thrill of seeing my game listed.

10/I have no idea how many people ever downloaded it. AOL didn’t provide metrics like that.

But about 6 months after I uploaded my game, a check arrived for $5.

I couldn’t believe it.

11/That’s the only payment I ever received for “Sabacc”. I didn’t even really expect that. But it didn’t matter. That wasn’t the point.

I wanted to build my game. I wanted to build it so that I could play it.

12/I poured hours of my pre-teenage time into learning and struggling with concepts that were completely foreign to me. Seeing my vision come to life - as simple as my vision was - that was the reward. I learned a lot from making that game.

13/I learned that you can make anything if you have the determination. I learned that programming is hard, but it’s not impossible. That people will pay for something if they appreciate it.

And I fell in love with it all.

14/So if you’re thinking of making something, but you’re afraid to start because you don’t know how to do it...

Just remember that a 12yo kid with the right tools and no experience was able to launch and sell his product. And turned it into a career.

Happy making ✌️