Teenage Whiz Kid Tops App Store, Displaces Angry Birds
Filed under “kids that remind me I have wasted my youth” is Robert Nay, the 14-year-old creator of the iOS game which unseated long-time free app bestseller Angry Birds — a game we may have mentioned in the past. Nay’s brainchild is Bubble Ball, which challenges players to create a path that will get the aforementioned “bubble” to a goal in each level. The game has been downloaded over 2 million times since its December 29th release, and it is currently free on both the Apple and Android app stores.
Now, in the interest of fairness, Angry Birds still holds the top spot for paid games and is still the highest grossing game for sale in the App Store.
This story is like a throwback to a time, not long ago, when the popular conception of the internet was that it was dominated by super-smart children with computer skills that far outmatched their adult counterparts. At a time when computers were just starting to appear in the home, this story resonated with an adult audience that was largely ignorant of what a computer was and what you did with it (see the 1983 classic Wargames). But now, as huge swaths of the population have access to the internet and my grandmother on Facebook, the internet whiz-kid story has diminished. Seeing the success Nay had with his humble game might things up a bit, and maybe give talented young programmers like him a bit of a boost in an increasingly competitive online environment.
(Via The Escapist)
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