Zach Gage '07 joins the big leagues of game developers

A word game for iPhones and iPads created by a 2007 Skidmore graduate has soared to the top of charts and is causing a sensation in the games community.

SpellTower is the addictive word puzzle that art major Zach Gage created in just 13 days last fall. When he initially released the game in the App Store, it was around 300th on the most-sold chart. Today it's at number 3 and challenging Angry Birds Space and Draw Something, which are at number 1 and 2 respectively.

What this proves is that "there's hope for anyone out there looking to develop an app," writes Kevin Holmes in a recent post on The Creators Project, a blog that spotlights top young talent in music, art, film and design. "One man and his independently produced game have taken on the might of developers Rovio and Zynga?"

Aiming to drive his app to number 1, Gage ran a two-day sale over the weekend, reducing the game's price from $1.99 to 99 cents. Cheering for the little guy, the game community got solidly behind him, generating stories at Wired, Forbes, and other news sites and blogs.

SpellTower hasn't made number 1, but the campaign generated amazing numbers, as Gage reports here. SpellTower sold 21,576 copies during the two-day sale, more than a third of the total 61,987 copies it had sold in the previous five months. SpellTower now stands at number3 in US Top Paid iPad Apps (up from number 6) and at number 10 in US Top Paid iPhone Apps (up from number 97).

So successful has the sale been, says Gage, he's going to keep it going "so all the people just hearing about this can still get it half off."  

It's a great game. You can buy it here. 

Describing himself as a "designer, programmer, and conceptual artist" whose work "explores the increasingly blurring line between the digital and the physical," Gage recently was recently profiled by The New York Times Magazine as the "young design genius" most likely to "invent the next Drop7 or Angry Birds or Bejeweled."

In that cover story, Times readers learned that Gage works out of his apartment, where he "comes off as the classic young artist toiling away in his garret, except instead of anatomy books and turpentine and canvases, he's surrounded by board games and old controllers and Xbox discs." They also learned that his parents are both artists, that he has an M.F.A. from the Parsons School, and that for several years he "scraped out a living from a combination of teaching gigs, speaking engagement and game sales ? with game sales being the least reliable contributor."

SpellTower has changed all of that, generating enough sales   in its first two months to sustain him for two years, he says.

"It's kind of funny that I would finally find success with a word game, since it's a space where if you have only have shapes and colors nobody notices," he says in his interview with The Creators Project. "Anyway, it feels great to be contending for the top. I never thought this would happen."