Last Thursday at GDC, James Silva, lead dishwasher at Ska Studios, gave a postmortem for last year’s XBLA hit The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile. He opened with the story of how the first game in the series, The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai came to be.
As a hobbyist developer in 2007, Silva submitted Dead Samurai as a Dream.Build.Play contestant just months before graduating college in upstate New York. Writing it off as something he didn’t believe would actually win, he soon forgot about it and began to work as a Java developer for a local business upon finishing college. Two months later he received a phone call that changed his life.
Microsoft had contacted Silva to let him know that they wanted him to come out to their offices in Seattle, and that he had won an XBLA contract. For several months he “did the starving artist thing,” and before he knew it, he had a shipped title. As a project done by one man, it was certainly impressive: it eclipsed the 200,000 sales mark, and not only did fans crave a sequel, but so did Microsoft.
