page_title: Mikengreg
section_title: Gasketball
hierarchical_section_title: Mikengreg / Gasketball
caption_attribution_description: English: Screenshot from Gasketball
context_page_description: Mikengreg is an independent video game development team of Mike Boxleiter and Greg Wohlwend. Their games include Solipskier, Gasketball, and TouchTone. The two met in a game development class at Iowa State University and later began to collaborate on the Adobe Flash game Dinowaurs. When the project was funded, they founded Intuition Games with other college friends in Ames, Iowa, where they worked on small Flash games such as Gray, Lifecraft, and Fig. 8 for Flash game sites such as Kongregate. Dinowaurs was one of the first games signed for the Kongregate platform. Their other games involved controlling the weather, influencing individuals in a riot, and riding a bicycle. Boxleiter and Wohlwend worked on several additional games that were put on hiatus.
  They later became Mikengreg in 2010 and released Solipskier in August for both Flash and iOS later that year. Its success let them take a more experimental approach towards their next game, the free-to-play Gasketball. Mikengreg ran out of money during the game's development and the two lived on friends' couches. The game was reviewed favorably upon its August 2012 launch, but did not earn near the developers' estimates.
context_section_description: Riding the earnings from Solipskier, Mikengreg continued to pay themselves their same salary but now had the means to try new ideas. Wohlwend estimated that they discarded about six "fairly polished prototypes" over the development of their next game, Gasketball. They were able to live on $20–25,000 a year each in Iowa for the next two years while working on the new game. Wohlwend made somewhat more income due to other collaborations, such as Puzzlejuice with Asher Vollmer, but shared his income with Boxleiter. Even though Solipskier was successful, the duo did not have a following comparable to indie developers like Team Meat and thus felt like their external pressure was low. Instead, their pressure was internal. Wohlwend said he worked 100-hour weeks with no weekends or vacations while living off of the Solipskier funds. In making Gasketball, Boxleiter and Wohlwend felt that their game quality had improved continually, but found the idea of a million-person audience "daunting" and Wohlwend questioned whether he could even recreate Solipskier's success. When they ran out of money, Boxleiter borrowed money from his parents, and eventually they both went homeless, living off of the couches of friends.
  Gasketball was released for iPad on August 9, 2012. They had decided to release the game as what they deemed to be an ethically non-coercive free-to-play game, with a free base game and in-app purchases for the extended content. Not as many players paid for the content as expected. This was due, in part, to the players' difficulty in finding the purchase function. The game had been downloaded 200,000 times in its August 2012 launch week and was briefly ranked near the top of an iTunes top downloads ranking, though it did not break the top 200 grossing chart.
caption: Gasketball gameplay
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