PushButton Labs

Social City soft-launched!

Tim Aste — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:02:27 +0000

Social City was soft-launched last week! PushButton Labs consulted on this Playdom Eugene project and it was a joy for us to contribute to. We had our reservations about announcing this game until the beta was complete but it has been so well received so far that we thought we could make a special note about it early.

So check out Social City today on Facebook. Build and run your own virtual city. Create the perfect place for the people that call it home, and you’ll become the most loved and revered mayor of all time!

Also, Jeff, Tim & Ben will be attending Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. Be sure to say hello!

GDC ‘10 Wallpaper

Tim Aste — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:43:56 +0000

I took a quick break from my GDC 2010 preparations to turn the cover of the booklet I’m working on into a desktop wallpaper. It’s been fun working on print materials today, hope to be able to give a few away at GDC, even if I’m rushing so we can get a few printed up in time. Tons of good information in here about PBL.

Quick reminder, our GDC schedule is almost completely packed! We still would really like to meet with as many indie, flash, and social game developers as possible. We want to help you make games! If you are a developer and want to schedule some face to face time drop us a line at tima@pushbuttonlabs.com.

Click read more for the wallpaper download links.

PushButton Labs @ GDC ‘10

Tim Aste — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:28:45 +0000

PushButton Labs will be attending Game Developers Conference once again this year down at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Jeff Tunnell, Tim Aste, and Ben Garney will all be attending the conference and in addition you will be able to find us at the Flash Gaming Summit on Monday (March 8th). Be sure to check out Ben as he presents PushButton Engine 101 at the Flash Gaming Summit.

We are currently scheduling meetings for individuals, studios or publishers who would like to meet up with us to talk about anything PushButton related! We cover a lot of areas such as PushButton Engine Licensing, Game Development, Social Gaming, Flash Gaming, as well as our various game properties (The Incredible Machine, Grunts, The Great Games Experiment). PushButton will only be in town through the morning of Thursday the 11th and our schedule is filling up fast! If you would like to schedule a time to sit down with any of the PBL guys in person feel free to drop us a line at tima@pushbuttonlabs.com. See you at the show!

Incredible Machine 50% off at GOG!

Tim Aste — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:56:56 +0000

Good Old Games has recently released some great titles from the famous and beloved Sierra. To To keep thing in the same theme they’re launching a Dynamix/Sierra weekend promo!

This weekend only they’re offering two great game packs with a 50% discount! If you’re feeling like mind-bending and brain-twisting puzzles is your thing then grab yourself The Incredible Machine Mega Pack for only $4.99. If flying biplanes and shooting down enemies during World War I is what you like the best, than you have to pick up Red Baron Pack for only $4.99. That’s 6 great classics for only $9.98! Go to the promo page and benefit from this nice deal!

PushButton Engine @ Flash Gaming Summit

Tim Aste — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:25:35 +0000

Are you attending Mochi Medias Flash Gaming Summit 2010 in San Francisco this year? If so, be sure to catch Ben Garney’s PushButton Engine 101 session. The session description:

PushButton Engine is an open source game framework for Flash. It is used in several social games, among them hive7’s YouTopia, Zynga’s Fishville, and an upcoming Playdom title. Learn about its design, strengths and weaknesses, and how it can save you time and effort on your next project.

Flash Gaming Summit is being held on March 8th, 2010 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. You can find more information about the event (as well as register) at the Flash Gaming Summit website. Hope to see you there!

Incredible Machine 25% Holiday Sale!

Tim Aste — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 21:55:11 +0000

The recently released Incredible Machine Megapack is now on sale at 25% off over the Holidays! This includes most of the original Incredible Machine titles and is set up to run on modern machines with ease. The titles “The Even More Incredible Machine” (includes The Incredible Machine with new puzzles), “The Incredible Machine 3″ (Windows compatibly “The Incredible Machine 2″ with new interface and enhanced graphics), “Return of the Incredible Machine Contraptions” and “The Incredible Machine - Even More Contraptions”. As a bonus it also includes a digital download soundtrack! Makes a great gift, so if you haven’t already go pick it up now over at Good Old Games!

Link: The Incredible Machine Megapack

Ben on 2010 FGSummit Advisory Board

Tim Aste — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:35:20 +0000

PushButton Labs attended the 2009 Flash Game Summit (put on by Mochi Media) and we must be making an impression around the Flash Community as Ben will be serving on the 2010 advisory board! Mochi Media will once again be putting on the one day conference in March right before the traditional Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Early Bird Registration is once again open at $99.00 a ticket. You can read the full press release announcing the second installment of the FGS by clicking read more.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — 12/08/09 – Today, Mochi Media announced the Flash Gaming Summit 2010, which will be held on March 8 at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. The second annual conference will bring together leaders of the Flash gaming industry to share ideas and insights about the future of Flash in front of an audience of game developers, artists, entrepreneurs, investors and game publishers.

Mochi Media CEO and co-founder Jameson Hsu will give the keynote address at the conference, titled “The Future of Flash Games,” and the summit will also feature a return of the “The Mochis Award Show,” sponsored by Kongregate, recognizing the best Flash games of 2009 across 11 categories. Nominations are now open for these games.

“We were overwhelmed by the positive response to last year’s Flash Gaming Summit, and this year we look forward to raising the bar and creating an even better event,” Hsu said. “With the rapid evolution and change in the online games industry, a lot has changed since last year and we anticipate explosive industry growth in the coming year. To have the best and brightest minds in the industry coming together at this event at such a pivotal time is really exciting.”

Flash Gaming Summit’s Advisory Board includes Ben Garney (PushButton Labs), Danielle Deibler (Adobe), David Scott (Casual Collective), Jim Greer (Kongregate), Matthew Annal (Nitrome), and Tom Fulp (NewGrounds).

Adobe is the premier sponsor for the event and FlashGameLicense is a platinum sponsor. Additional sponsors include Zynga, Kongregate, MindJolt, Armor Games, Candystand, Hero Interactive, and Zong.

For more information about the Flash Gaming Summit please visit http://www.flashgamingsummit.com or follow @fgsummit on Twitter. Speaking submissions will be accepted now through January 15, 2010.

About Flash Gaming Summit

Flash Gaming Summit is a conference focused on fostering the growth and success of the Flash games community. It was established to bring together industry leaders to share industry insights and strategies around game development and the business of making games. Flash Gaming Summit is organized by Mochi Media. Learn more at www.flashgamingsummit.com.

About Mochi Media

Mochi Media is the world’s largest casual online game network, serving the needs of thousands of Flash developers, reaching over 100 million unique users each month with a library of over 14,000 games, and enabling advertisers to reach engaged consumers with targeted display, text, and video ads. The company’s Flash game development products and services provide developers with tools to track distribution and usage analytics, enable version control and live updates to distributed games, and provide monetization via micro-transactions and real-time insertion of pre-game and in-game ads. Mochi Media’s developers gain distribution opportunities to over 30,000 Web sites, as well as monetization opportunities by sharing in the ad and micro-transaction revenue generated by their games. Mochi Media is headquartered in downtown San Francisc

Press Contacts:
Corey Lewis or Christopher Schreiber
LaunchSquad
(415) 625-8555
mochimedia(at)launchsquad(dot)com

Jeff Interviewed on IGN

Tim Aste — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:37:15 +0000

Jeff was recently interviewed on IGN.com about being the “not-on-purpose” grandfather of the Survival Horror genre. He talks about his work on Project Firestart and beyond:

It wasn’t until 1986 that Jeff Tunnell began the journey that would make him the unwitting father of the modern survival horror game – an achievement that has gone widely overlooked in the years since. As the co-founder of Dynamix, Tunnell is better known for classics like The Incredible Machine and The Adventures of Willy Beamish, but it was Project Firestart on the Commodore 64 that would prove to be one of his most difficult and most significant accomplishments.

Check out the full article, IGN Presents the History of Survival Horror over at IGN, it’s a good read. The interview with Jeff starts at the bottom of the very first page!

PushButton Labs Partners with Adobe

Tim Aste — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:31:06 +0000

Today, at Adobe MAX Adobe Systems Inc, announced that developers will be able to use Adobe® Flash Professional CS5 to create rich, interactive applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. A public beta of Flash Professional CS5 is expected to be available later this year. In a sneak peek, during the MAX keynote presentation, Adobe demonstrated how developers can utilize Flash Professional CS5 to export applications for the iPhone, leveraging the same source code used to deliver applications across desktops and devices for Flash Platform runtimes – Adobe AIR™ and Flash Player 10. Adobe also showcased a series of new iPhone applications that were built using a beta version of Flash Professional CS5, including Trading Stuff which was developed for the program by PushButton Labs. Trading Stuff In Outer Space was built as an early technology prototype in the initial beta version of Flash Professional CS5.

Developers that created iPhone applications with the beta include Digg, BlueSkyNorth, MTV Networks/Southpark, and others. Several of these new applications are currently available for iPhone users to download within the Apple App Store. The Apple iPhone SDK license terms do not allow runtime interpreted code, so Adobe is not able to deliver Flash Player in Safari on the iPhone without support from Apple. Applications for the iPhone built with Adobe Flash Professional CS5 do not include any runtime interpreted code.

For more information on Trading Stuff (including the free download link from the App store), please check out our micro-product page!

Welcome home The Incredible Machine!

Tim Aste — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:21:41 +0000

Eugene, OR October 1st, 2009 - Today, PushButton Labs, L.L.C. announced that it has acquired the rights to The Incredible Machine intellectual property in its entirety. The classic physics & puzzle game franchise originally debuted in 1992 and was later followed by several successful sequels selling millions of units. To mark the reacquisition of the property on a happy note, PushButton Labs has placed t of the newly Windows XP/Vista compatible Incredible Machine series for sale on the Good Old Games Website (GOG.com).

“TIM was a genre defining franchise and I could not be happier to have the property available to PushButton Labs. I’m very excited to see what we can do with it moving forward.” said PushButton Labs co-founder Jeff Tunnell, who was the original co-game designer of The Incredible Machine.

Considered by some to be the grandfather of the Physics & Puzzle game genres, The Incredible Machine pitted players against a series of Rube Goldberg style devices which were composed from a wide range of objects such as ropes & pulleys, bowling balls, and even cats and mice.

The Incredible Machine was the winner of several prizes due to its innovative style and simulation abilities. A spin-off of the series, Sid & Al’s Incredible Toons earned Jeff Tunnell and Chris Cole a patent for their game design concepts.

The series is available for sale at the time of this release and can be found online at:

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/the_incredible_machine_mega_pack

In addition to his work on The Incredible Machine, Tunnell is well known within the gaming industry for successfully co-founding several gaming companies, including Dynamix in 1984 where famous franchises such as Starsiege: Tribes, Trophy Bass, and the 3D Ultra product line were developed. In 2001, Tunnell and partner Rick Overman co-founded GarageGames, makers of the Torque Game Engine and the Marble Blast series, leaving in 2008 to form PushButton Labs.

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About PushButton Labs, L.L.C.
Founded in 2008 by veteran independent game developers, PushButton Labs is “a company by us and for us”. The mission behind PushButton Labs is refreshingly simple; “Make great products and have fun doing it.” PushButton Labs is committed to developing high quality web & game technologies alongside great games. Visit the PushButton Labs blog at pushbuttonlabs.com to discover what is new around the lab.

Press Contact: Timothy Aste (tima@pushbuttonlabs.com)

If you’d like to download this entire Press Release Pacakge, please click here.