Orange County Register

One of the Web’s favorite free distractions, Line Rider, has inspired a new company.

Newport Beach’s inXile Entertainment spun off a new company called SparkWorkz.

Line Rider, which started in 2006 as an art-school project, is a web-based game where users draw lines and then watch a bob sledder ride the lines. It has since been played by thousands who then uploaded their creations to YouTube. The most popular Line Rider video has been viewed 7.4 million times.

InXile bought the rights to the game in late 2006 from creator Bostjan Cadez, who spent time in Newport Beach to meet the developers. Read the original Register story: If you draw it, Line Rider will come. Line Rider is now heading to the Nintendo Wii and DS this summer. The first preview of the game for the Wii and DS is expected to be posted at game site IGN.com Thursday night.

Online, anyone can play for free. The official site features a ‘Bostjan’ with a new look but the game is pretty much the same.

“Vanity is a big thing on the Internet. It’s either you show off, ‘Hey, look at me,’ on Facebook and MySpace. Or it’s look what I can do. That show-off aspect is what I like,” said Brian Fargo, inXile’s founder.

Above: See the inspiration of Line Rider from art student Bostjan Cadez’ drawing pad.

Fargo is a long-time game developer who started one of Orange County’s first game companies, Interplay Entertainment in the early 1980s. The virility and flexibility of the Internet amazed him and he starting thinking of ways to use it to help game development.

“It reminds me of the video game business 25 years ago in terms of it being the wild west. If you can make something work on the Internet, you can hone what you do month by month and year by year. With a video game, you finish it and you’re done. You don’t get a second chance,” Fargo said. “I would relish the ability to have something up and running and then say, let’s try to make it bigger and better.”

Hence, SparkWorkz was created. It named David Heeley as director of the division, which will develop more online distractions. Heeley most recently served as regional business development and sales manager for Microsoft’s Online Services group in Singapore. SparkWorkz plans an official launch this summer.

“We had 100,000 people a day coming to our (LineRider.com) web site. Other people would love to have that opportunity,” said Fargo. “We would be foolish to not take this traffic and turn it into something better.”

SparkWorkz will focus on the creativity of online communities. The company plans to offer free tools and resources for anyone to play with and come up with the next Line Rider. It’s not just games, but any sort of online entertainment and distraction that people create and share.

“We want to be the Sundance of creativity. We want to be a forum where people come for music, games, all these channels that people do,” Fargo said.

Related stories:

• The Sims Carnival: Design your own game for free
• VIDEO: Line Rider creator wins video-game industry award
• Watch the original video with Bostjan Cadez explaining his pet project
• Free Microsoft game-development software for students

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