Rally the Team, Own the Wave

The Situation

MicroStar Software. Early 1996. I was head of the game development team, and things were going well on our side — we'd shipped Nuke It! and it reached #3 at CompUSA nationwide, which was legitimately rare for an independent release.

The problem was that MicroStar wasn't just a game studio. The other half of the company ran a monthly CD-ROM subscription service — the kind that made sense before broadband internet made downloading software routine. Subscribers would receive curated collections of shareware games, utilities, and other software on disc each month. It was a viable business model. Until suddenly it wasn't.

Charge-backs hit hard. Customers disputing charges, subscription cancellations, the mechanics of a business model that was already becoming obsolete as the internet made physical disc delivery unnecessary. The company's financials deteriorated quickly. The decision was made to cut the game development team entirely.

My team was laid off.

What I Did

I didn't accept that outcome. These were talented developers — people who'd been building games together, who had real momentum. The layoff didn't change any of that.

I rallied the team. Within weeks of the MicroStar shutdown, I founded Satori Interactive and started making calls to publishers.

This was 1996. The PC gaming market was real and growing. If you had a team that could ship, publishers wanted to talk. I got us into conversations with Activision and Viacom, and we signed deals. Satori Interactive became a functioning game studio — not despite the layoff, but because of the urgency it created.

We built throughout the late 90s: original titles and mission packs for popular games like Redneck Rampage and Quake II. The team was intact. The work was good. We were competing and winning shelf space.

Then Flash appeared.

Macromedia Flash started as an animation tool and became something far more significant: a programming environment that could make the web genuinely interactive. Not just animated GIFs and blinking text — games, applications, experiences that responded to user input in real time. I saw it immediately as the next platform, the thing that was going to define the web for the next decade.

Satori Interactive pivoted. We were already game developers; Flash was a natural extension. We started building Flash games and interactive applications as the platform matured and ActionScript (Flash's scripting language) evolved into a serious development environment.

During this transition, I connected with ActionScript.com — the leading community site for Flash and ActionScript developers. I joined as a staff writer, writing technical articles and contributing to the community. After about a year, the opportunity arose to acquire the site outright.

I bought it.

In 2003, Satori Interactive formally became ActionScript.com. The game studio had become a Flash consulting and community company. We built interactive experiences for everyone from Fortune 500 brands to the most interesting startups of the Web 2.0 era:

At RockYou (2006–2008), I was their first Flash developer — building the RockYou Slideshow, a viral social widget that helped them become one of the largest social platforms of the era with billions of widget installs.

At Zynga (2008–2010), I was the lead ActionScript architect for FarmVille — which went on to reach 80+ million monthly players and define social gaming as a category.

At Justin.tv — before it became Twitch — interactive experiences for what would become the defining live streaming platform.

Frontier Airlines, Bed Bath & Beyond, the Denver Broncos — the kinds of rich interactive experiences that, in the Flash era, could only be built one way.

All while ActionScript.com itself grew into the largest Flash developer community on the web. Tutorials. Forums. Code examples. News. The go-to resource for an entire generation of interactive web developers.

The Result

Satori Interactive / ActionScript.com ran for nearly two decades — from the mid-90s PC gaming era through the full arc of Flash's dominance. When Flash died (Steve Jobs' open letter came in 2010; formal deprecation followed), the era ended on its own terms.

What started as a layoff response became a two-decade run at the intersection of games, interactive web, and the developer communities that made both possible.

What This Proves

The ability to recognize a technology wave early and go all-in — before the consensus forms, before the "safe" move is obvious — is a pattern, not a one-time event.

In 1996, I saw Flash coming when it was still Macromedia's experiment. I pivoted a game studio toward it while most developers hadn't heard of it. By the time Flash peaked, I owned the community.

In 2023, I felt the same thing with generative AI. Same pattern. Same decision. The technology was real before the mainstream caught up. I went all-in again — and that's exactly how I ended up at HeartStamp.

There's also a specific skill here: building something from setback. The entire Satori Interactive story starts with a layoff. So does a lot of the best work. When circumstances change, the question is whether you fold or reorganize. I reorganized, found publishers in weeks, and kept the team together. That instinct — to rally, restructure, and execute — shows up repeatedly in how I work.