Stroke of genius? How one developer earned over £250k from games made in just 30 minutes
Game development is an expensive and time-consuming business. Right now, 2,000 people are working on the next instalment in Ubisoft’s blockbuster Assassin’s Creed series, across 18 studios around the globe, and it’s a project that will take 2 to 3 years. Imagine how any of those people might feel to learn that last year, a self-taught programmer racked up nearly £280,000 from a series of games he made while sitting in his pants on hot days in a twobedroom flat in Harlesden. And that each one took him about 30 minutes.
“The first one, I’ll be honest, probably took seven or eight hours,” says TJ Gardner. “But the subsequent ones – Stroke the Beaver, for example – would have taken about half an hour.”
Gardner is the creator of the “Stroke” video games, available to download from the PlayStation Store for £3.29 a pop. Each one features a different animal – cats, dogs and hamsters, along with less cuddly creatures such as snakes and fish – and they all follow the same blueprint.
When you start the game, an image of the animal appears against a plain blue background. In the top left-hand corner of the screen are the words “Strokes 0”. You press X to stroke the animal. The animal flashes briefly. The number in the corner goes up by 1. After 25 strokes, you are rewarded with a bronze trophy. Keep going until you hit 2,000 strokes, and you will receive a platinum award.
That’s it. There is no animation; there are no sound effects. Just a picture of an animal under a Creative Commons licence from Wikipedia, and some lo-fi acoustic beats looping endlessly in the background. No running, no jumping, no guns, no baddies, no special moves or power-ups or puzzles. Are the Stroke games even video games at all? “It depends how you define ‘game’,” says Gardner. “There is interaction – granted, that interaction is very limited, but it is there, and there is a goal … I’ll happily admit it’s not hard, it’s not complex, but it is still a video game.”
Looking at the figures provided by Gardner, perhaps it doesn’t matter – at least to his bank manager. Since launching in September 2022, the Stroke games have been downloaded more than 120,000 times, amassing over £275,000 in sales. Sony takes a 30% cut for hosting the game in the PlayStation Store, leaving Gardner with a pre-tax profit of more than £190,000.
No one is buying these titles for the addictive gameplay, gripping storyline or whizzy visuals. So what’s the attraction?
It all started in the mid-2000s, when console manufacturers began rewarding players with virtual accolades for completing extra objectives within games. These are called Achievements on Xbox, and Trophies on PlayStation. A new subculture emerged, established by a community of gamers who play for prizes rather than pleasure. They are known as trophy hunters. Some will go to any lengths in the pursuit of glory, perhaps even playing Hannah Montana: The Movie: The Game.
The PlayStation Store became populated with dozens of games aimed at these players: low cost, laughably simplistic titles, offering easy trophies in exchange for a few quid. Gardner, who had a partner and toddler to support, had recently taught himself to code (“mostly from YouTube videos and online tutorials”) and saw an opportunity.
“It was a bit of a struggle, with a young family, going from paycheck to paycheck,” he says. At that time, says Gardner, anyone could apply to sell a game on the PlayStation Store, and submit a design document outlining how it would work. “I had a look through Sony’s back end, and saw it was actually quite easy to get through their quality assurance,” he says. In 2022, his first game, Stroke the Dog, sailed into the Store without any issues. “So then I tried a few more, obviously with slightly different animals.”
Stroke the Hamster is the bestseller, with more than 11,000 downloads. Cats are the second most popular animals for stroking, followed – perhaps surprisingly – by tortoises. But what was the inspiration behind Gardner’s magnum opus, Stroke the Beaver?
“I’ll be honest, at one point it sort of became a joke to me,” he says. “I thought, I’ll see how far I can push it.” Quite far, it seems. Gardner then released Stroke the Dik-Dik. “It’s an animal, yeah?”
Not everyone found the games funny. Internet forums are full of posts condemning trophy hunter titles, the people who make them, and Sony for allowing them into the PlayStation Store at all. Gardner has attempted