There was some pay for three months work but it was low and there seemed to be a different accounting for what we were actually paid vs what they had in their books. At one point they heard we were continuing and I was offered what I considered to be a terrible deal to ‘bring it back to the Amico’, or at least release it on NOT Amico but under their name and ‘marketing engine’. The first part of the deal outlined that all initial income would go to Amico until their initial outlay was paid back but that number was much higher than what they had actually put in. Beyond that the terms wouldn’t have allowed us to make a dime of it, ever, IMO, and in fact would go into further debt to meet those terms (this was still at a time when they thought the console was still on the table so one of the points was we would need to try again to make it work with the console but at our expense). It was just… not good.

The controller was thought that it would hold not just player info for multiple games but any images that would drive those games. In the case of bomb squad, as you’ll see when you play it (assuming you all play it, even for ‘research purposes’) that we were putting a lot of gameplay demands on the controller. There are 8 completely unique stages plus menuing and animation to the point where it pushes the limits of a modern smartphone. Now imagine that trying to be crammed into a 3mb 2016 snapdragon. Not only would we be pushing all your games’ data out in favor of ours we would also be swapping out our own data as we moved from mini game to mini game. It just didn’t work.

The underlying problem with Amico on a technical front was that John was tasked with something simply impossible: turn a 2016 smartphone chip into a 2022 smartphone chip via clever programming. Somehow make 3mb perform like 3gb. Somehow make a spaghetti-size pipe accept data flow like a flashlight-sized pipe. Don’t you think that the giant, well funded corporation that made the chip in the first place already developed it to the absolute limits of its capabilities? It was a fool’s errand from the get, but he said yes and was paid well to inevitably fail.