You or someone you love has probably faced a Snood addiction problem at some point in their life. It’s the weird game where you shoot grimacing monster faces at similar colored monster faces, knocking them all down before the ceiling collapses on you. Personally, I don’t like it all that much but I know a ton of people who do. A North Carolina newspaper sat down with the guy who wrote Snood, Dave Dobson.
Nearly a decade after Dave Dobson designed it, Snood — rhymes with “rude” — is keeping millions of people from what they really ought to be doing.
Dobson designed the game with the goofy little monster faces for his wife in 1996, when he was in grad school at the University of Michigan and she was teaching high school. On a lark, he offered it on the Internet as shareware, and figured if a few people bought it for $10 apiece, he and Christina could go out for a nice dinner.
Today, Dobson is an assistant professor in geology and computer science at Guilford College in Greensboro, but only because he loves teaching. Snood, once estimated to be the most-played computer game behind the games installed in new computers when they come out of the box, has made him a wealthy man.
Industry analysts say that only about 1.5 percent of the people who download shareware ever pay for it. Snood is said to do better than the industry average, though Dobson won’t say how much. His business partner says more than 30 million copies have been installed since it was introduced, or about 10,000 per day.
The emphasis is mine, so think about those numbers.
0.015 x 30,000,000 x $10 = $4,500,000
And the article says Snood does better than 1.5%!
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One response to “Snood Dude is a Millionaire”
I remember having a similar game at the local pinball place/bar in college. I believe it was callled “Bust a Move.” I spent *hours* playing that damn game. Hours.
I think at one point our phone was forwared there.