About us

Our Mission...

Leisure time is one of the most valuable things you own, and we are dedicated to making games worth that time. We create games that are easy to learn and we craft them to appeal to all ages and all genders. We constantly strive to publish quality software that you can easily download on a low bandwidth connection.

Who we are...

As featured in the New York Times...Brain Block Interactive, Inc., creates and markets original high-quality interactive entertainment products. We are a proud member of the Association of Shareware Professionals, and we've been building great games since 1997.

Details...

The journey began in the early 1980s. Simeon Peebler, BBI's founder and lead developer, began to design and program games for the popular Commodore 64. As time went by he began to study a variety of programming languages and created games for the Commodore 128, Atari ST and the Macintosh. He also pursued the study of visual art and music composition, and these abilities aided his game-making efforts. In college, Simeon studied journalism and philosophy, but the most important outcome was that while in school he met his wife. She inspired and encouraged Simeon (who is now her husband) to follow his passion for interactive entertainment.

In the mid 1990s he took an Application Developer position at a small Chicago company called Imagination Pilots Entertainment (IPE). While at IPE, Simeon developed several popular CD-ROM based products for the PC. When the owners of IPE changed business focus to Internet content sites, Simeon accepted a position at another Chicago game development company, FASA Interactive. He gave content contributions to totalPlay, and others. He also worked at Jellyvision, and is credited on the programming staff for You Don't Know Jack: 5th Dementia. These experiences, matched with a personal urgency to create original games that are easy to learn and fun to play, gave Simeon the motivation to build his own company.

While on a Chicago city bus in late 1997, Simeon was sketching on a piece of notebook paper. A closer examination revealed several lost games of tic-tac-toe. He looked at the drawings-the Xs and the Os set into a grid pattern. "What if the Xs could move?" he pondered. Nearly missing his stop, he quickly jotted down the full concept behind Logication and even created the name just as spontaneously. Within weeks he created a small prototype and in the beginning of 1998 he pitched it to several large game publishers. They all gave him the same feedback -- it is a great game but it has no brand, so the risk of developing, marketing and distributing it was too high. Simeon then created a less ambitious version of the game and made it available on the Internet. With barely any marketing effort, positive reviews popped up across the Internet and even into magazines such as Computer Games Strategy Plus. Soon, orders began to come in from people around the country and around the world. With the support of that success, in 1999 Simeon began building a version of Logication that matched his original vision. It is available from BBI's website now.

Kyodai and Shanghai and a slew of other Mah Jongg tile-matching games always intruiged Simeon. The games were utterly simple yet complex to play. How could something new be added to the genre? Good question! What if the tiles moved around, in real time? That idea gave way to the need to find a method by which the player could select the matching pairs. After playing yet another game of DX-Ball, Simeon realized that the tile matching problem was solved! He took a paddle that moved around at the bottom of the screen and allowed the player to shoot bullets! And the bullets of course hit matching pairs. Arcade Mah Jongg was born.

Super Bubbles, similar to Logication, was created on a sketched grid. (By the way, for anybody interested in game design, graph papar can make some really cool games!) If you examine Tetris, you'll notice a number of key and pure things about computer game design. One thing that really stuck out in Simeon's mind was the concept of making "order out of chaos". Simeon's thought was that if you take a giant grid of unique items and require the player to move things around to clear the grid, it fulfills the ordering of chaos idea. So from there he added the idea that the player has to move items around to match small patterns and sequences. Hence the name, Super Bubbles.

Bloink is our latest game. We have always wanted to do a game that wasn't oriented toward purely abstract logic. And Bloink has an emotional and personal element that makes pushes it away from the abstract and more toward the realm of "life". The characters represent our favorite silly animals in general. Monkeys, ducks, koalas, hippos -- you name it, they're there! We hope you have fun with it. We sure had fun creating those silly guys in this simple yet wonderfully complex game.

In the June 13, 2001 issue of the New York Times, Logication and Brain Block Interactive, Inc. were featured prominently in an article regarding the business of Shareware in the e-Business section. The highly regarded International Herald Tribune also ran the story.

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