GameCyte sits down with Alex Epshteyn, the creator of the world’s first competitive online typing game.
In the relaxing calm and quiet of a Massachusetts café, 26-year-old Alexander Epshteyn is sitting fully upright in a chair that, although comfortable, is perhaps slightly too low to ergonomically accommodate his mobile computing. In the dim light of a room mostly occupied by students doing their homework, few looking on might imagine that the young man typing away at his Thinkpad T61 is an internet entrepreneur whose website attracted one-quarter of a million visitors in a single week.
But then again, I’m not looking at all: from the dusty confines of my home office in San Jose, California, nearly 3,000 miles away, I’m speaking to the former Google intern in a private chat-room of his own construction; a brand-new feature for his game TypeRacer. But before he explains any of this, much less who he is or how he quit his day job to single-handedly build the world’s first competitive online typing game, Alex Epshteyn does something that simultaneously intrigues and delights — he challenges me to a race.
After beating him handily (little did he know I’d spent the last two hours performing transcription) we begin the interview in earnest. Here’s the story of how TypeRacer came to be:
GameCyte: So tell me a bit about TypeRacer. How did you first come up with the idea?
Alexander Epshteyn: The summer between college and grad school I had an internship for a small Artificial Intelligence research company in Cambridge, MA…
GC: Now, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that one…
AE: ’smiles’ I was really excited because this would be the first time I’d be getting paid for doing what I love — coding. But when I got there, it turned out that there were whole weeks with no work for me to do — very boring — so I decided to make the best of the down time and finally learn how to touch-type. I was one of those kids who didn’t take typing seriously in 7th grade and then regretted it all through high school and college.
Let me get this straight — you were serious about coding, but didn’t know how to touch type?
Yes, typing constitutes a surprisingly small fraction of the software development process! It’s mostly reading, thinking, and debugging, with the last two alternating in an infinite loop.
Did you have your own method for typing, or did you hunt and peck?
I did something very close to touch-typing except I was only using 2-3 fingers on each hand; I had most of the letter positions ingrained in my head but still wasn’t quite at the point where I could type without looking at the keyboard… That’s how I made it through college.
‘grins’ That sounds very familiar…
So at that summer internship, between surfing the web and reading various random articles about programming, I installed a shareware typing tutor for Windows, and two weeks later I was finally touch-typing. I didn’t bother paying the registration fee because the beginner and intermediate lessons were free, and that turned out to be enough. More importantly, though, the typing games were free, and that was the best part of the program. In fact, I spent most of my time playing those games. But what they lacked was a multi-player mode, and that’s when it occurred to me that I should make a multi-player typing game myself.
Why choose racing?
It was the most obvious choice — in every typing game you try to type as fast as possible, and if that became multiplayer, the most natural extension of that was to try to type faster than the other players. Another thing that was missing from typing games at the time were complete sentences — most of them either made you type random words or gibberish like “fwergffs.” I didn’t think that skill was very useful in the real world. The only part of the typing tutors that made you type real sentences was the typing test, and even there I noticed that the passages were typically weird or boring, like most of those simulated newspaper articles in SimCity 2000. So I decided to only have texts that make sense and are funny or memorable in TypeRacer.
The other thing I didn’t like about those typing tests was that they allowed you to make errors and then adjust your score at the end. I didn’t think that was realistic because you always have to go back and fix your typos in the real world. Hence TypeRacer does not allow errors.
Before the gaming blogs posed the inevitable comparison, had you ever heard of Typing of the Dead?
I’ve heard of Typing of the Dead, but never got to try it. I played a few flash-based typing games in addition to the games that came with that shareware tutor, including a game where you also got to shoot enemies with words on them, but that one had a 2-D overhead view. I think I spent about two minutes on it.
‘laughs’
I think what makes TypeRacer so much fun is the multiplayer competive element that all of these games lacked.
Before coding the project, did you tell anyone about your idea? If so, what did they think of it?
I told some of my friends and family members about it. They didn’t get it. The only guy who also thought it was a great idea was Michael Giles, the creator of Furl.net (now owned by LookSmart.)
But you went ahead with the idea anyhow… What did Michael say?
Yes, I believed in it! Michael told me “Casual games are awesome!” and “Make it appeal to women!”
I worked on TypeRacer some nights and weekends for a year while working full-time as a software engineer at Brightcove, but then decided I wanted to dedicate all my time to TypeRacer. I spent 3 months working full-time on TypeRacer before I launched it [in early March.] The working prototype was ready in less than a month.
When you began TypeRacer, what were you expecting it would become?
I wanted it to become a sport, kind of like those multiplayer 1st person shooter tournaments on G4… I also envisioned having all sorts of statistics and graphs to track and compare your typing progress — I’m a big fan of stats in the games I play. I’m still planning to do that.
Before the beta went live in March, who did you have testing it out?
Michael Giles was my most frequent tester — I think he derived a lot of pleasure from beating me every time! I can’t wait until he switches over to Dvorak and I get my two weeks of revenge while he’s learning it.
’smiles’
Other than that I had some friends test it out before I released it on Orkut. It was in the hands of the Estonian Orkut users for a few weeks…
Estonian?
Orkut picked Estonia for their application platform beta release. Since relationships on social sites tend to be geographic, they probably decided to start with a smaller country to make sure they could handle the load. My traffic came in waves: first it was the Estonians, then Orkut expanded the apps beta to India and my traffic increased fivefold. Then someone posted it on StumbleUpon and later Reddit, and when the blogosphere started writing about TypeRacer, my traffic went up fivefold again… and I’ve had about a quarter-million visitors in the past week alone.
Alexa seems to show your traffic peaking on April 28th… (no doubt the influence of Grand Theft Auto IV. Just kidding.) Are you worried that your fifteen minutes of fame might be up?
Not at all; I’m just getting started. The most fun features are still to come.
On that note, what’s next for TypeRacer?
The ability to race your friends live, in a private chatroom-like setting; permanent user accounts on typeracer.com; a Facebook application, and lots of stats and graphs. Another upcoming feature is cheat-protection. After that we could have a list of all-time high scores and see if anyone will set a new world record in typing. Right now, all high scores expire after one hour because some people are cheating. I can’t be too hard on them though, because they, like me, are probably the guys who didn’t take typing class seriously in 7th grade.
After that, I guess I’ll try to monetize TypeRacer because I’d like to keep working on the game instead of getting a new job. But right now, I’m entirely focused on building those new features and creating a great user experience.
How do you plan to monetize the game?
I have some ideas for monetization that include light advertising and/or corporate sponsorship. But as I said, my main concern is the user experience. That means you’ll never see flash videos of cute girls chatting when you visit typeracer.com — unless I add a video chat feature to private rooms at some point. ’smiles’
Who would you most like to take notice of your game?
I was talking to some of the guys from iLike a few weeks ago (they’re a music-related social network apps maker and my fellow Orkut launch partners). I wanted to know how they managed to get Bono to visit their studio and sing a song that he wrote twenty years ago but never performed in front of an audience. I’m a huge U2 fan. I don’t suppose Bono does much typing, but if I ever get to type-race Bono, it will be the pinnacle of my career.
Last question: what would you recommend to others trying to start up their own web application?
Try Google App Engine before doing it the traditional way. Some of the hardest work behind creating a web application is figuring out how to configure your servers. GAE promises to let you focus entirely on your application logic.
Tags: Alex Epshteyn, Independent, interview, TypeRacer
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