This man plays games at work … and doesn’t get in trouble
Edward Di Geronimo is CEO of Saturnine Games, a product of the NJMC Business Accelerator. (Photo by John Soltes)
By John Soltes / Editor in Chief
LYNDHURST (Sept. 27, 2010) — In a small office in a large building off Chubb Avenue in Lyndhurst, Edward Di Geronimo shoots aliens and walks on ceilings. For this 29-year-old Fair Lawn resident, defying gravity and using powerful weapons as a means of defense in the solar system is all in a day’s work.
And he’s one of the few workers in the labor force who can play games at his computer and get away with it.
Di Geronimo is CEO of Saturnine Games, a client of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission’s Business Accelerator program. The alien mayhem aspect of his job comes from Cosmos X2, Di Geronimo’s space-themed video game that recently premiered thanks to Nintendo.
“This game started off about five years ago with a couple of friends I knew online,” Di Geronimo said in an interview in his Lyndhurst office. “We just decided we wanted to make a game. We knew we had the talent to do it, and so we just sat down and started work.”
Di Geronimo and his team found early success. They managed to receive a publishing contract with a small start-up publisher, and the sky (or perhaps the universe) seemed the limit. Cosmos X2 was completed and delivered as promise.
Then the hiccups arrived.
“The publisher wasn’t able to get it out into stores,” he remembered. “So we had a finished game, and nothing to do with it.”
Eventually the NJMC’s incubator program entered the fray. Founded in 2008, the business accelerator is a byproduct of the commission’s goal to bring commercial development and an entrepreneurial spirit to the Meadowlands area. The program, headed by director Michel Bitritto and located at 160 Chubb Ave. in Lyndhurst, helps start-up companies like Saturnine Games develop their legs from the Petri dish to the rough-and-tumble landscape of the business world.
When Nintendo premiered its DSi portable game system a couple of years ago, Di Geronimo saw a foothold for Cosmos X2. The new system allows for downloadable games via an online store that gamers can connect to and peruse — similar to iTunes on an iPod.
In the spirit of making more games available at affordable prices, Nintendo generally offers content on the DSi system for anywhere between $2 and $10. Di Geronimo’s game, which premiered Aug. 30, costs $5 for download.
So what do gamers get when they enter the mind of this Fair Lawn entrepreneur?
“It’s an action game,” he explained. “This kind of game, the story is not why you’re playing. … You got your spaceship and you just go in guns blasting, everybody shooting at everybody. That’s the game. We tried to do it a little different in this one, and we gave you a system where you get two weapons on your ship and each one has its own life meter. So you use one weapon at a time. The one you’re using takes damage when you get hit. When you kill something the one you’re not using regenerates. … So you get a balancing act in the game.”
The additional strategy aspect makes Cosmos X2 fairly unique among other shooter games. Players can choose from three weapons: a power weapon (straight, high-powered shots), a traction weapon (low-powered, rapid-fire homing shots) and a repulsion weapon (medium-powered shots that spread apart).
The shooter pilot is trying to repel an alien invasion of his or her home planet. In total, there are three forms of difficulty and six levels, with three bonus modes for those fortunate gamers who master the solar system.
Although Di Geronimo said it takes 30 to 40 minutes to play through the entire game, that time stipulation came with a challenge: “You’re not going to beat it on your first try,” he said with a laugh.
From the business side of the venture, Di Geronimo receives sales data from Nintendo on how many gamers are downloading Cosmos X2.
The outlook looks good. The promise for the future of the gaming industry is in smaller developers like Saturnine. “On the top-budget titles, the big things, they’ve worked up toward these 40-hour games that take $50 million or more to develop, and it got to a point that you can’t spend that money on it and not everybody has that kind of time,” he said. “Now with the downloadable market being available, you have got smaller developers doing smaller games for cheap prices.”
Bitritto said Saturnine Games is a model for why the business accelerator has been a success over the past two years. Di Geronimo actually started with the program working for another start-up company. “And that’s how we became familiar with Ed and Ed became familiar with us,” said Bitritto, a self-avowed solitaire player. “It really is a classic kind of incubator success story where an employee, so to speak, of a company starts his own business and comes back because he appreciates that there was some value in a place like the accelerator.”
Di Geronimo said that thanks to the NJMC’s program he has been able to receive and offer help to those other companies that set up camp around him.
As with any start-up business, the horizon can be a burden. But Di Geronimo has a plan beyond the mutilation of an alien species.
The next game he is developing is in a “completely different direction.”
“It’s a 2-D platformer, the same type of game as ‘Super Mario Brothers’ and things like that,” Di Geronimo said. “But the difference in this game, you have the ability to reverse gravity for short periods of time. So you can do that to run on the ceiling or to jump really far.”
It seems that some of these gravity-defying traits have rubbed off on Saturnine Games and its young, promising CEO.
E-mail JSoltes@LeaderNewspapers.net
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