MILL CREEK — While many 12-year-old boys might consider it a dream job, owning a company that creates video games isn’t always fun, Thomas Fessler admits.
But Fessler, the founder and chief executive officer of Handheld Games Inc., quickly adds that he’s happy with the way he makes a living, in spite of the day-to-day business challenges.
"Creating the games and bringing stuff to life on the screen is my passion," said 35-year-old Fessler, who said he still likes to help write computer code, the technical underpinning behind all game programs.
Situated in a downtown Mill Creek office building, Handheld Games develops titles for Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance and similar portable game systems. The company’s latest games include one based on Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham, Slugfest 2004 and Super Duper Sumos.
Fessler, who grew up in the Chicago area, said his interest in video games and computer programming started early.
"I’ve always been fanatic about them since I was a kid," said Fessler, whose first game-player console was an Atari 2600, the popular system that started showing up in many living rooms of the late 1970s and early ’80s.
As a teenager and into his early 20s, Fessler also led a computer users group and hung out at a computer store. The brother of the store owner turned out to be an employee at an Atari office in Illinois. So Fessler walked into the Atari office one day like he belonged there and ended up talking to employees and watching their work up-close.
"I found they were just a lot of regular people with a passion for games," he said.
Eventually, Fessler got the chance to write games for Atari’s Lynx system, a predecessor to today’s handheld players. The first he worked on was Dirty Larry: Renegade Cop, which he created when he wasn’t at his day job as a quality assurance technician for a software company.
"I worked four or five hours at night on my games. For some of them, I didn’t get paid at all, some I got paid a little bit. But I saw it as an opportunity to learn," Fessler said.
That night work indeed started his new career, as Fessler worked for a small game development firm and later for Sega of America before becoming an independent programmer in the mid-1990s.
When entertainment companies began using their own internal studios for game development, Fessler moved to Southern California to work as a senior game designer for Disney. There, he worked on several games and soaked in more experience, until a big layoff hit. He didn’t lose his job, but it made Fessler take a long look at what he wanted to do.
"It wasn’t the happiest place on earth," he said of Disney. "I saw so much potential was lost, and so many good people were lost. … I wasn’t happy."
So he quit, and moved with his wife, Maria, and their daughter, to the Puget Sound area. After "recharging" himself, Fessler began picking up game projects again, which finally evolved into Handheld Games. The company’s startup date was July 1, 1998 — Fessler’s 30th birthday.
"At first it was me, running out of an apartment spare bedroom, which was upgraded to a rental house spare bedroom, then a garage, then a small office and now a medium-sized office," he said.
In those five years of steady expansion, Handheld has developed 18 different games. Maria Fessler has served as the company’s chief operating officer, while their now 8-year-old daughter, Michelle, has been an invaluable tester for the titles aimed at young children.
"I enjoy doing young kids’ products, because so many companies don’t do it right," Fessler said.
Quality is one of the guiding priorities with all the video games Handheld develops, Fessler said. His crew of employees usually works on all facets of a game, including the music. Increasingly, he added, they’re competing for projects with contractors and firms located outside the country.
"I think people would really be shocked, if people knew how many of the games they buy for their kids aren’t made here," Fessler said.
He’s had the opportunity to use contract workers in Eastern Europe and Asia, but Fessler said he wants to keep people employed here instead.
Most of Handheld’s dozen employees, nearly all in their 20s, share Fessler’s personal passion for games. Lyndon Moore, the company’s 23-year-old director of software engineering, began playing video games before he was 5. He wrote his first game program when he was in third grade.
"It’s not a 9-to-5 job, but I enjoy this field," said Moore.
Nathan Gray, Handheld’s 22-year-old senior software engineer, said he relishes the challenge of writing what looks like incomprehensible code to a layman.
"It’s all about problem-solving," he said. "Finding ways to manipulate the code and numbers to create something."
Despite competing against overseas developers and firms that tend to be either much smaller or much bigger than Handheld, Fessler said his company has remained profitable since its birth.
With a vintage ColecoVision box from the early 1980s on his desk, Fessler talks about how computing power and battery life of portable game systems have both improved greatly over the years. He’s also optimistic about future growth in the sector. Sony is about to launch a portable version of its popular PlayStation platform, and Nokia has launched the N-Gage, which combines a game system with a mobile phone.
Industry statistics bear out Fessler’s growth outlook, as video game software for both console and portable players recorded sales rise 15 percent from 2001 to 2002. The 10 top-selling video game titles last year included at least one for the Game Boy Advance.
Nokia’s system points to where the next boom in the game industry could come from, Fessler said. Handheld already is creating cartoon character graphics for a major wireless company.
"As the technology evolves, my company evolves," Fessler said, adding that video games rarely are on the leading edge of computer technology. "It’s less about the technology then about creating fun."
Reporter Eric Fetters: 425-339-3453 or fetters@heraldnet.com.
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