My friend Jake informed me about his latest game: Fairway Solitaire. I tested the game for 3 minutes, and that was enough for me.

3 minutes was enough because the game was so freaking addictive that I had to stop there – or I would have played the whole day. Jake was contracted by Big Fish Games to make a downloadable version of their most popular online community game of 2006. He worked very closely with a Big Fish Games game designer and an American artist for 8.5 months.

A “solitaire” game might not sound very fun, but I assure that if you check out the game – you’ll see how polished it is. The game was #6 most popular game 10 hours ago, and at the time of writing it climbed number #5.

As a game developer I cannot but congratulate BFG & Jake. Getting to top 10 in a such short period is a great achievement for a casual game. Big Fish Games found a great business opportunity by taking a concept that’s proven successful (their most popular free game) and for Jake (and rest of the team) for polishing the game to make it hit the top charts.

That’s a strategy that any game company can model.

Check out Fairway Solitaire.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.