This is a direct transcript of what I overheard, they get asked a lot how this all started…
The ‘story’.
Way back in 2008 I had a random thought which collided with another thought, I pondered this a while and formulated an idea, it seemed valid, I talked about it a little and asked some questions and life moved on.
The idea persisted however, the more I thought about it the more interesting and far reaching it seemed.
Now this wasn’t an idea for a game or a game world or some new haircut for an MMO, nothing like that and in fact to me it seemed very obvious and now I’d thought about it thought it a little odd that no one was doing this already.
It’s not a complicated idea. But of course I’m not going to tell you what this idea is, but with a little luck and a lot of hard work one day you’ll find out because we’ll have made it the thing that makes our MMORPG Morphus different from the games that have come before.
Ok so time past and midway through 2009 I was sitting by a pool in Turkey with my now business partner Stephan and I told him the idea, finally it hit fertile ground and he saw what it could mean in terms of gaming and he agreed that an MMO was the best platform to make use of the idea, we spent most of that day a happy pair of geeks, brainstorming daydreams of impossible size, but as the sun set the conversation turned more serious, how in reality could we do something with this idea, quite frankly we didn’t even know how we’d go about selling it, what it would be worth if anything, sad that we wouldn’t get to midwife the idea into reality and see the game clutched in sweaty gamers hands on launch day…dreams all gamers entertain at some point.
But then looking at each other we asked the question ‘why can’t we do it ourselves?’…ok we know that’s a dumb question in many ways, but we were not impeded with the knowledge of why that wouldn’t be possible, if fact our ignorance was like an armour saving us from fear at the impossible task we’d have to attempt.
So other than fleshing out and planting the seed of Morphus as a game world over the next 5 days we enjoyed our Holiday then went home, myself to Wales and Stephan to The Netherlands, both fired up with a dream and the desire to make it reality.
I spent a few days typing up the idea, making it clear on paper, Stephan made an appointment with a Start up Business advisor who has knowledge of casual gaming.
That meeting cemented the path we’ve taken in many ways. We were told that the idea was indeed valid and had great potential, on it’s own it had sizeable financial value but the advisor agreed that if we sold it we’d be selling ourselves short.
Stephan and I talked about this a lot, what was going to be needed from us in terms of commitment, Stephan in a moment of total lunacy offered to work and keep both of us so I could focus 24/7 on the project, so I needed to move to Holland to make that practical. In the meantime I was making best use of the amazing pool of talent hidden away in the small welsh village I was in, and through a series of amazing coincidences and chance meetings had made the idea something that was growing and inspiring other people, the paperwork was getting more fleshed out in terms of the game world.
I booked a trip out to Holland to see if that was liveable and to meet with our advisor.
That second meeting brought us down to earth, truth normally does that to dreamers 
We would never gain investment for Morphus without a solid track record as game developers. We could either sell the idea, not the first choice. Gain industry jobs and be patient or try option 3 start small, develop our own small titles and learn on the job working on larger and more complex projects until we can hopefully produce a demo for Morphus and attract serious investment.
We left that meeting feeling that although this wasn’t quite the overnight life change we’d dreamt of it was an honest and welcome challenge and we were up for taking it on, the long haul wasn’t going to scare us off.
So we started cooking up some new ideas, we decided to start small and the iphone app market was a good place to start for many reasons. Lenlem was the first concept on the table but we decided that was too complicated for our first and chose Tickletumm as being simple, fun and having a decent potential market.
So here you find us 6 months later, The company is registered, the website is up, Tickletumm is being coded as we speak (I should be working on animations but tea and cake happened) I’m living in Holland, Stephan hasn’t tried to kill me yet, we have a cat! I’m too busy for words but I wake every morning with a smile on my face and a list of things to do as long as your arm (thank god for Magic Whiteboards) I go to sleep thinking about what we need to get done…the business plan is huge lol.
It’s a risk, nothing is guaranteed, but we’ll learn as much if not more from failure as from success, we’re just going to try to make the best quality products that we can, that we find fun and easy to use or play, Morphus may be on our far horizon but it fills the sky.
We’re at the start of the journey, we hope you’ll come along, share some stories round the camp fire and find Hatstand a place where you’ll be happy to hang your hat.
Game on.
