#wwdc18

In the truest sense, Snowman owes its existence to the release of the iPhone. 

At the time, my lifelong friend Jordan Rosenberg and I were working separate jobs in marketing & design here in Toronto. Privately, we were nurturing ideas for an elegantly designed suite of scheduling and reminders software, without a real sense for where those concepts would feel most at home. Then came the iPhone, and the App Store – ubiquitous, beautifully crafted hardware married with a totally new platform for creators. 

Inspired by the opportunity the iPhone represented, Jordan and I took a leap. We gathered some money we had saved, left the security of our jobs, and set about creating what would become our first two iOS apps, each designed to harness the power of iOS to make people’s lives a little more pleasant: Checkmark and Shifts. 

The audience these first apps found enabled us to formally start Snowman. As for the iPhone? It introduced us to a community of unbelievably talented craftspeople and creators, some of whom we still collaborate with today!

Perhaps our most well known collaboration is Team Alto – the partnership we have with artist & developer Harry Nesbitt, and his team in the UK. Together, over the last five years, we’ve made Alto’s Adventure & Alto’s Odyssey.

At the heart of the Alto series is an exacting focus on polish, down to the very smallest details. During development of both games, we cared deeply about everything from subtle sound cues to small visual flourishes. 

This commitment to using beautiful wood for the back of the cabinet, so to speak – pouring ourselves into the small details people may not notice for the sake of delighting them – is also central to the hardware and software Apple creates. It’s this philosophy that we think makes our games feel so at home on iOS devices. 

And yet, words can’t describe honoured we felt when that approach was recognized in a way we couldn’t have dreamed of earlier this week at WWDC. In what is a sentence we still can’t believe we get to type: along with 9 other spectacular games & apps, Alto’s Odyssey was awarded a 2018 Apple Design Award!

To be a recipient of an Apple’s highest honour for design & innovation was surreal and overwhelming, to say the least! More than that, though, it was a validation of our belief in making premium games that people sit with for a short time, which linger with them for a long time after.