GENERATION STARS

When Goran bought his first PC, thanks to that, Edi and Goran met. It is universally unknown how they heard about each other, but one thing is for sure, their interest in computers was the same. In this period Edi was preoccupied with programming small programs and learning the basics of Visual Basic. Goran was not too interested in programming; however, he worked on a web page dedicated to soccer news. The website's name was "Football News". Edi too was a webmaster of a page dedicated to his programs and so-called games, "Big Bear" was the name. Already here you can feel the presence of stars.

In mid 2001, Goran felt all the joy in making games for the first time, looking at one of the very first versions of Snakey. When Snakey was released, a few of our friends wanted to make games. Dragan, Ivan, and Luka were the first ones to jump in and help Edi. Although at that time we didn't care much what we were called as a team or what our goals were. There was only a desire for a new way of having fun. We heard for the first time "Generation Stars".

By releasing Yambo and Yambo 2, Goran confirmed his place in the team, while Ivan and Luka were too occupied with their own business. Dragan and new member Dino helped Edi in making and releasing Raklem, till then our most noticed game. Raklem was the first game that found its place on a CD of a magazine. The magazine's name was "Hacker". Because of Raklem, we were mentioned in one more magazine, PC Play.

Edi, again as surely the brightest star, makes and releases CaveShip, while Dino helped him. Dino also showed a talent by making Find 5. In the meantime, new members Milos and Igor came along with great enthusiasm. Unfortunately, Goran was inactive because of his move to another town and was beginning to lose touch with the team. Again our games showed up in magazines. This time it was "Bug". Two more small games Generation Stars released that year.

Although it seemed like our least productive year, we made 3 small freeware games including Panic Invaders and Yambo Extra, the merged version of Yambo & Yambo 2. Also, 2004 goes into history, for it was then that we registered the domain name GenerationStars.com. This year is surely characterized as the beginning of professionalism under Edi's leadership. Of course, we had new people on board. Mate Maksan joined as a member. We were mentioned in the newspaper "Nedjeljni vjesnik".

This is the year of a turning point. The accomplishments this year raised the bar to a much higher level with much more quality and professionalism. There was as much work done as in all previous years combined. Never before in a single year had we made and released so many games, present on the whole Internet, mentioned in the press, Internet portals, and even on TV!

And yes, new team member, Nikola.

New Games

There were 10 new games, amazing! We also made localization into Croatian for four of our games, and also our website.

GS goes retail

Together with the opening of our association under the Croatian name 'Zvijezde Generacije', with permission to use the English name 'Generation Stars', we found a co-publisher and a distributor for the Croatian market, Conor Ltd. In cooperation with Conor Ltd. we released 'Gink u nevolji' (Gink in Trouble). Released and put on sale, that is. Big collaborations with respectable companies were made. Companies like Iskon Internet and Log IT, and of course many others.

Records

Absolutely every existing record was broken this year. Visitor records, new users, number of posts on our website and on our forum. Records in sales, released games, new members, mentions in the media, number of downloads of our games. In short, if there was a record, it got broken this year!

The year 2005 is remembered for releasing our first retail game, Gink in Trouble.

A slow year for Generation Stars. Many members were fired and one even quit the job he loved. Bad year but a fresh start.

We got a huge interview by a magazine called "Enter" spanning 3 pages; we were also mentioned a few more times in other magazines and newspapers.

Also, we got Gink in Trouble all over Croatia on shelves and on the most popular portal in Croatia, "www.net.hr".

While Zombie Driver was in development, we registered another company to make and sell websites, GEM Studio. And without any luck, we were still working with zero profits. Some would say that every company needs two years of work to gain a real profit. Today we make games, programs, websites, sell hosting, backups, fix computers, make game and other non-related portals... all that just to make the first step towards success.

We are patient!

We sold our website igrice.hr, a game review website, to the owner of igre.hr, the biggest network of game websites in Croatia. We are drastically reducing our services in Croatia, down to web hosting. That being said, selling one of our oldest websites is natural and we consider it a smart move.

There's a chance of a comeback with Generation Stars development for iOS.

GEM Studio, the company we started 5 years ago, is a success! We are serving hundreds of happy clients and we're very happy with what we accomplished. Our office is equipped with everything we need. We are also starting a startup and could use some funding from investors (foreign or domestic).

All former team members are connected through Facebook and other social networks. We're happy to say that everybody is still in IT. :)

Looking back at last year, we are maintaining our plans and vision, continuing our focus on international business. This led us to selling our hosting company GEM Studio, which was focused on the Croatian market; it was sold to the Croatian leader in the hosting business, Avalon d.o.o. It also means we started a new company called Smart Queries Ltd.; however, we will work under the project name WhoAPI (tm).

Now we plan to develop the WhoAPI service and serve at least 1,000 happy customers (which is double what GEM Studio had) :)

We presented WhoAPI on numerous events (HackFwd and Seedcamp are some of the popular ones), and received funding from one of the CRANE (Croatian Angel Network) members. As you can see from last year, what we intended, we achieved.

We are one step closer to making games for iOS with Generation Stars. :)