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Fire Hose Games Releases Go Home Dinosaurs

  • Jay London
  • slice.mit.edu

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From left to right: Ethan Fenn, Eitan Glinert, and Sharat Bhat of Fire Hose Games.
From left to right: Ethan Fenn, Eitan Glinert, and Sharat Bhat of Fire Hose Games.

You may know the family-friendly video games Slam Bolt Scrappers for the PlayStation Network and the PC, or a new iPad and PC game Go Home Dinosaurs, which made it onto the top five iOS games sold this week. But did the name of the studio that makes them—Fire Hose Games—sound familiar?

“It's an MIT reference: ‘learning at MIT is like drinking through a fire hose,’” explained Eitan Glinert ’05, MNG ’08, co-founder of Fire Hose Games, an independent game studio near Kendall Square. In 2008, Glinert co-founded the company with Sharat Bhat ’08.

Glinert and Bhat met in MIT's GAMBIT Game Lab program (now called the MIT Game Lab). When Glinert decided to found a studio, Bhat was a natural choice for partner.

Then Trey Reyher ’09, a producer at GAMBIT, introduced Bhat and Glinert to Ethan Fenn '04, an audio designer who soon joined the Fire Hose team.

Ethan Fenn, audio designer at Fire Hose Games.
Ethan Fenn, audio designer at Fire Hose Games.

“I used to work at Harmonix,” said Fenn. “So, when we were starting up here, we reached out to Eric Malafeew [SM ’93], the technical director over there.” The Fire Hose team just wanted advice, but instead they got an assignment. Malafeew and Harmonix Music Systems co-founder Eran Egozy '95, MNG '95 recruited them to work on the game Dance Central and, later, Rock Band Blitz.

Fire Hose Games has grown by now into an independent studio in its own right, with more than a dozen employees. Glinert credits MIT Venture Mentoring Services with the company's success as a start-up, noting that VMS helped him with issues from “how do I get money?” to “Oh my god, I have to pay taxes!”

“When you make games as an indie developer, it's really easy to be in your own bubble,” said Glinert. “It's really easy to just focus on what you're doing and think, ‘nobody else has to deal with these problems.’ Having that larger community acts as a safety net, and that matters a lot.”

Fire Hose Games has spent the month since their release of Go Home Dinosaurs doing a series of internal game jams to inspire ideas for future projects. Each employee gets assigned to a partner at random, and no one knows the game jam theme ahead of time. Each pair must start from scratch and make a game in three days. “We'd rather come in and come out with fresh stuff,” Glinert explained.

You can buy the iPad verison of Go Home Dinosaurs from the App Store, or you can purchase it for the PC.

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