Have you ever met someone who has known what he/she wants to do for a living since childhood? When I was a toddler and someone asked me ”What will you be when you grow up?” I answered ”I want to be a cashier lady” because I did not know any other occupations. Later I wanted to become a police officer, photographer, detective and hotel manager.

When FB’s CEO Lauri was an 8-year-old kid, he got his first computer, a black and white PC with a 086 processor. He had a dream: some day he would be a game designer. He knew that there is no shortcut to happiness, and so he decided to start right away. Why wait if you know what you want to do?

He started designing a game called Space Adventure, ”Avaruusseikkailu” in Finnish language, a text adventure game. There were four questions in the game. Each question had three answer alternatives, one leading forward and two leading to Game Over. The goal was to survive from an attack of a mean spaceship.

When Lauri was in junior high school, he made another text adventure game called School Game (a popular theme for Finnish text adventures, I hear). In the game the player was supposed to escape from the school. There were more questions than in Space Adventure and different paths through the game. School Game was extremely popular with Lauri’s classmates. It might have had something to do with the question ”Would you like to blow up the Principal’s car?”.

Later Lauri made more small games and eventually he started up Frozenbyte with his friends.

-Susie