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Paralyzed by potential: Gaming guru talks pitfalls of success

For the first time in his life, video game designer Asher Vollmer is bound by nothing.
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July 15, 2015

For the first time in his life, video game designer Asher Vollmer is bound by nothing. He has creative freedom and professional notoriety. And yet, he said, he feels bogged down by the overwhelming breadth of his opportunity.

“If you’re just running down a hallway, it’s easy. You go straight. It’s your only option. As soon as you get rid of the walls, you can go anywhere …” he said, trailing off. 

Vollmer, 25, who was named to Forbes’ 2015 30 Under 30 list in the video game category, exhibits a manic energy. He has a habit of cutting himself off and gesticulating in bursts. He constantly interjects his own stories with nonsequiturs, as if the inner workings of his mind are tumbling out of him and his mouth and hands are doing everything they can to keep up. Maybe it’s a byproduct of being one of the most creative young minds in the industry — his brain just won’t stop moving.

Born in Encino, Vollmer graduated from Milken Community Schools in 2008 and made his first mobile game, “Puzzlejuice,” in 2012 while attending USC. (The game combines elements from “Boggle,” “Tetris” and “Bejeweled”).

Later, at the game development studio Thatgamecompany, he started as a “feel” engineer, dealing with controls, character movement and camera behavior. He called it “the pinnacle of an indie, artsy company,” but he quit after 10 months because he thought the company moved too slowly. 

Vollmer then decided to work on a game he prototyped after messing around with the arrow keys in a word processor. More than a year later, he released his second mobile game, “Threes.” In this puzzle game, a player moves numbered tiles to link multiples and addends of three. When there are no moves left on the grid, the tiles are counted for a final score. 

“Threes” became a critical and commercial success almost immediately, receiving an Apple Design Award last year when the tech giant named “Threes” its best iPhone game of 2014. Last month, Vollmer re-released a free version of the hit game, allowing it to reach a wider audience. He said its success comes from the fact that a simple set of parameters creates an infinite number of possibilities. 

Vollmer’s ascendance into the upper echelon of the gaming industry is at the root of what he calls his “decision paralysis” — both in his professional life and otherwise. Following the success of “Threes,” he said he was practically useless and didn’t do any work for six months. When his car broke down, it took him a month to decide which car he wanted. The youthful desperation that propelled him was gone, he said, and he needed to take time to figure out what he wanted to live for.

“For me and a lot of my friends, our best video games come from dealing with constraints, and the fact that we have a limited amount of time and we have to do this really fast or else we’re going to starve or work for ‘The Man’ or whatever,” Vollmer said. “As soon as you hit it big, those constraints go away, and it’s not fun.”

As a game designer, “fun” is an especially textured concept for Vollmer. He started playing and programming games when he was a kid because it was fun, and he programs games today because he enjoys it and because he wants players to have a good time. 

But as an adult who has dedicated his existence to building great games, he wants to be respected for his craft. Vollmer’s relationship to fun might be considered analogous to a microbrewer’s relationship to drunkenness: The artisan accepts that his product will make you feel good but hopes you stick around to appreciate the beauty of his life’s work. 

He leaned on the craftsmanship of his games during the most difficult part of his career. In the weeks after “Threes” was released, clones of the game began popping up on different platforms. One of them was 19-year-old Gabriele Cirulli’s “2048,” which became a viral sensation. Two months after “Threes” was released, the Los Angeles Times ran a story with the headline “Maker of hit puzzle game ‘2048’ says he created it over a weekend.” 

Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend, Vollmer’s creative partner, were insulted by the headline. It had taken them more than a year to build “Threes,” Vollmer said, and his game was merely copied over a weekend. To combat the merits of Cirulli’s game, they posted the 570 emails they sent to each other during their game’s 14-month development process on the “Threes” website. 

Wohlwend said both he and Vollmer struggled with the massive success of “2048.”

“Deep down, in an uglier part of my brain, ‘2048’ really nagged at me,” Wohlwend said. “It was really valuable to have Asher there in that time. I think if either of us had created it on our own, that would have been a lot harder to deal with.”

Although the wounds from that headline have not fully healed, Vollmer is too busy to hold a grudge. He’s currently in the early stages of developing an unannounced mobile game, which is due out next year. He is leading a whole staff of designers and programmers on his new project. 

This is a first for him, but he hopes it won’t be the last. He sees himself one day running a game design company. For now, he wants to pursue whatever passion takes hold of him when he gets out of bed, like he used to do.

“If I was smart, I would have a cohesive brand,” he said, laughing. “If I was a good business person, I would have a vision and stick to it, but I like being creative and weird and starting projects and stopping them. Before [the success of ‘Threes’], that was fine because no one cared. But now that I made ‘Threes,’ people care.” 

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