Four years ago today…
…I took a plane to Copenhagen. Oh, this sounds familiar…
Well ok, it all started a bit before:
I exchanged some emails with David and Joachim and they invited me for a gamejam in their office. Then one thing led to another, I was young and needed money (oops! wrong topic) and on January 2006 I started working on this thing called “Unity”.
Unity was at version 1.2.1 then. Since then we’ve released about a dozen new versions, added hundreds (or thousands?) of new features, a handful of new platforms and have grown a lot.
Also, we stopped saying “Sales are INSANE!!!!11″ whenever they exceeded a whopping ten thousand euros per week. Seriously, that much money in 2006 was a big thing. Our Windows build machine was a single core Celeron with 512MB RAM because that’s what we could afford! Well ok, we’re still saying “sales are insane!” from time to time, just the threshold has gone way up.
Occasionally we’d get excited about strangest things. I think this email is about some car model from ATI that was on front page of our website in 2006. It’s beyond me why we’d put a car on Unity website, but somehow it seemed to make sense at the time.
It would take too much space to list all the awesome things that happened in those four years. I got to work on some things too, like Windows Web Player, Direct3D renderer, shadows, editor for Windows and whatnot. But I mostly concentrate on creating trouble, which does not seem to hinder Unity that much. I need to get more efficient!
Seriously though, it has been an amazing ride so far, and I hope it will only become better. Thanks to everyone at Unity Technologies and the community!
Rock on!
Oh man Aras, it has been a wild ride hasn’t it? I just passed my “three years ago” date last month and remember the immediate worry upon my arrival that we’d need to make 16k Euro per month or else. :P Kudos to you and all the awesome work that you’ve done, it’s been great working with you and seeing Unity Tech grow like it has. Rock on indeed!
The growth of your company is impressive, but more impressive is the way you managed to keep it the way it always was: close to it’s customers, interested in their needs, familiar, agile, flexible. Congratulations for all that you achieved in this 4 years, and I wish you even greater success.
I love to read these stories of the early days :-) Thanks for not only having such a good product, but being such cool cats ;-)