Investment
New Investment Means We Can Grow
Over the next two years we would end up raising everything we needed from private individuals who saw something special in our company. This faith in our future was a real gift that kept our company alive and going. It allowed us to remain independent as the company grew more valuable.
Bringing in some money enabled us to hire our first employees. We assembled a superb team. We also changed the name from “Cyberspace” to “Second Nature Interactive”, but there was a developer of screen savers called Second Nature, so a year later it became “Turbine”.
A continuing cycle of demos and investment allowed us to hire more programmers, artists, and game writers. We eventually did not have to raise real venture capital money (just angel money) to make it to signing a Microsoft deal. This was thanks to our staff, who believed in the vision of the company and were willing to live like students.
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- Mike Ferrier, a programmer who worked on the user interface and the character builder.
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- Tim Brennan, working on the server code for “real-time load balancing”, which is why our virtual world can hold so many players.
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- Rickland and Tim
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- Larry, Jeff, and Chris
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- Jon Charette, system support, and Toby Ragaini, head game writer
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- Jeremy, working on the networking and user interface, while managing half the company.
