Haven’t you grown?

When human beings become three years old, they have learned to walk, talk, eat and not do a wee or poo in their pants.

Did that really happen?

So we thought it would be fun to look back at the first three years of Neon Play’s history. And we’ve got a list of 10 of the things that we really couldn’t have dreamed would have happened when we started the company. Here’s our Top 10. Cue music...

Being mentioned twice in Parliament

We’ve all seen Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and clips of MPs all shouting at each other and the Speaker barking “Order, order!”. But we never thought in a thousand years (let alone three) that Neon Play would be mentioned in Parliament. Twice! Take a bow Justin Tomlinson MP for your kind words.

Meeting the Queen

We’ve been lucky enough to meet some fascinating people and even a bunch of celebs like Liz Hurley and MC Hammer. But we never thought we would actually have been to Buckingham Palace to meet Her Majesty the Queen. That’s pretty cool.

 

Becoming Apple’s 10 billionth app

There was a big countdown back in January 2011 on Apple’s site all over the world to become their 10 billionth download. So imagine our surprise when Oli got a call from Cupertino one Saturday night to say that Paper Glider had become Apple’s 10 billionth app download. We are now forever engraved in Apple’s history...


Having 10 number one apps around the world

Just launching our first game Flick Football seemed like a big achievement and since those heady days in the summer of 2010, we’ve gone on to have 10 separate games that have gone on to become number one games in some 155 countries. Not bad.

Persuading 20 talented folk to move to Ciren

It was always going to be a bit of a risk to start Neon Play in a Roman market town in the middle of the Cotswolds. But we believed if we created the right culture and with 10 great reasons to join us, that talented people would join us. And they have and we’ve now got over 20 amazing Neon Players making seriously high quality games.

Pocket Gamer Top 50 in Year 1

The mobile games industry has a dedicated site for all things mobile gaming and it’s called Pocket Gamer. And each year they rate the top 50 developers in the world. So we were gobsmacked to be featured in our first year as the 36th best mobile game developer in the world. Not bad as we were only 9 months old.

 

Topping Angry Birds in the charts with our first game

Our first game Flick Football was made in Oli’s kitchen with CTO Mark Allen and a bunch of remote freelancers. Neither Oli or Mark had made a mobile game before, so we made it up as we went along. So imagine our excitement when we went above Angry Birds in the paid charts...

Having the coolest office in Gloucestershire

We’re great believers that for people to be at their most creative and motivated, it hugely helps to have an inspiring, unique, cool, innovative, architecturally interesting place to work. And we’re incredibly lucky to be in the Old Museum in Cirencester, surely the coolest place to work in Gloucestershire...?

Being such a talked-about company!

We’re just a bunch of muppets making mobile games. So it amazes us that we’ve had so much TV, radio and press coverage. From live TV and radio interviews on the BBC to articles in the Telegraph, Sun, Metro, Sunday Times and most national newspapers, we have punched rather largely above our weight. As they say, it’s not how big you are...

Reaching 50 million downloads

We remember fondly when we reached a million downloads. That was a lot of downloads...think about it...a million people downloading our games. But in just three years, we’ve now had 50 million downloads, that almost one download per UK inhabitant, which is quite a lot of people. Almost the same amount of Michael Jackson “Thriller” sales!

PS We know this pic says 30 million, we just didn't do one for 50 million (but we should have).

Winning 15 business awards and a Queen’s Award

Everyone likes winning awards and we’re no different. So we enter local and national awards and since we started we’ve gone on to win 15 business awards for our great games and awesome company (though we say it ourselves). These include Best Start-up, Entrepreneur of the Year and best of all, a Queen’s Award for Innovation. Sh-amazing!