The Thinkyhead Story
Thinkyhead is a software dojo committed to the creation of fun, interesting, useful, deeply simple software products that push the limits of convention and extend the powers and aesthetic of Mac OS X.
Hi, I'm Scott Lahteine, the programmer behind FretPet X and the founder of Thinkyhead Software. This is a brief account of my programming career and some of the milestones that led to the creation of FretPet X, TabletMagic, and this gaudy web site.
I first got hooked on personal computers in 1978, when as an 11-year-old kid growing up on Cape Cod I spied the inner workings of a TRS-80 computer at the Radio Shack adjacent to the local arcade. One moment there was a picture of a tank on the screen, then with the press of a key the man at the console brought up skeins of mysterious green text - the magic code that lay behind the image. Wow. Up to that point I had enjoyed playing video games, but I never thought of what went into making them go. I wanted to get in on the secret. I begged my dad to buy me the fat BASIC programming book that sat on the shelf. I didn't own a computer in 1978 (who did?) so I wrote my first programs on note paper, running them in my head.
In the early years I used my Atari 400 to make programs to do my long division homework and wrote games to amuse myself and the neighborhood kids. I tried going pro as a games developer in the 80's, producing the Amiga games Dino Wars and Bill 'n' Ted's Excellent Adventure before abandoning the game scene in 1990 and moving to Boston to pursue a life of Bohemian splendor, taking up new interests like writing, music, and philosophy.
I returned to programming in 1996 with the aim of joining my programming experience with my artistic interests. After a couple of months getting my chops together on a secondhand 386 computer, I bought my first Power Macintosh and got to work. In 1998 I released FretPet for Mac OS 7. FretPet won an award from the Institute of Electroacoustic Music at Bourges and got some good reviews, but it failed to reach a wide audience.
In 1998 I moved to Northampton, MA where I did a contract job for Cyberlore Studios writing the Windows installer for one of their popular games. I also worked as a web developer with Tortus Tek in nearby Holyoke, MA. That was fun and interesting, but I was restless.
I relocated to Portland, Oregon in 2001, taking a position as web developer for the Mac-friendly Critical Path Software. Among other things I co-developed the Native Seed Network website for the Institute for Applied Ecology of Corvallis, Oregon.
In mid-2003 I gained the opportunity to become a full-time freelancer. Around that time I began a collaboration with former Looking Glass game designer Chris Laskowski. We founded Botfly Games in 2004, and have been busy working on our first titles: a darkly humorous outer-space strategy game called Deep Space: Outpost 0 and a pulse-pounding arcade game titled Zorbles!.
In late 2004 I took a break from Botfly to work on TabletMagic and the enhanced Mac OS X port of FretPet. It took a lot longer than expected, but after many months of intensive late-night programming FretPet X was released in June, 2005.
"There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going. There's no knowing where we're rowing, or which way the river's flowing. Is it raining? is it snowing? is a hurricane a-blowing? Bah! Not a speck of light is showing, so the danger must be growing. Are the fires of hell a-glowing? Is the grisly reaper mowing? Yes! The danger must be growing, for the rowers are still rowing and they're certainly not showing any signs that they are slowing! Stop the boat!" - Willy Wonka