ABOUT

aeiowu

I’m Greg and this is my game company, aeiowu [EH-YE’-EYE-OH-WU]. I’m a thinker-doer who enjoys thinking and doing. Born an orphan in America’s heartland, I rose to prosperity with the help of a kind rooster and a pocket knife named “Brian.” I don’t like everything. One example would be grapefruit, because I’m a supertaster. Self-diagnosed. That means I can taste more than you. When I sip on wines I’m picking up on subtleties like lilac scented baby tears while all you can taste is “feet grapes.”

But the truth is that I grew up in Iowa and started this whole journey by making FAQ websites for Final Fantasy VII in Microsoft PageMaker. The first games I played were on the computer. My mom was a kindergarten teacher and she would bring home an Apple IIe on the weekend and let us play Number Munchers and Oregon Trail. Later we got our own Gateway computer and I played Boa, Where in the U.S.A. is Carmen San Diego? and other awesome games. A lot of them were bought for us with education in mind. While they weren’t specifically educational, they weren’t exactly violent either. Eventually we got a computer with a CD-ROM in it and we played Myst, still a game I refer back to for inspiration. My mom would play Myst, Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire, Robin Hood: Quest for the Longbow, Full Throttle and The Dig with us. Incredible games. So while a lot of kids grew up with Nintendo, I grew up with PC games using a keyboard and mouse. Eventually the consoles came with Sega Genesis but the real nostalgia for me lies in these graphical adventure games. Even John Madden Football II has some serious real estate in my heart.

After I had beaten Final Fantasy VII for the second time I decided I needed to tell someone about how much I loved this game. So I started making these terrible websites about FFVII. That was sort of a thing, where people would copy and paste the huge Final Fantasy VII FAQ from GameFaqs and organize it and style it with their own terrible glow-filter buttons. I did about three of those in the awful Microsoft PageMaker until I realized I should just learn HTML and do it on my own. It was much easier and I enjoyed the process much more. So I was a sophomore in High School and I just made websites because I liked it. I didn’t have anything to say really [even though I thought I did]. I just made stuff because I liked the feeling. Here’s a list of every website I’ve made in chronological order:

Websites

This list isn’t exhaustive, there are some holes in there, like between 2005 and 2007 where there should be some mile222 stuff in there but the Wayback machine is being no help. There are also a couple more sites in the real early days that are so image heavy that their cache on the internet archive makes no sense to post here. Regardless, however embarrassing this might be to me, I think seeing all the mistakes I made along the way and how long it took me to get to today, can hopefully make things feel a lot more attainable. Start doing it and don’t quit and it’ll come.

So to recap, in 2002 I graduated from high school. 2004 I transferred from University of Iowa [art/english/design] to Iowa State University where I was later accepted to their Graphic Design program in the fall of 2005. I would take an elective course about game development every semester I could. There was only one but I repeated it for four semesters. I took any design job I could. I was a webmaster, a print designer, a independent web designer and a newspaper designer. I stayed at the Iowa State Daily for the longest and assisted the Design Director with a redesign of the entire newspaper’s system. It was really fun but I wanted to get back to focusing my off hours on game development. I found and got a job at the Virtual Reality Applications Center at ISU, a place that I had no clue about, but housed the most brilliant programmers on campus. I would spend the next 2 years at VRAC, working on simulations and meeting Mike Boxleiter, Ted Martens and Josh Larson who I would later found Intuition Games with. This is when we got our big break. We were after being a part of Kongregate’s Premium Developer Program with a game called Dinowaurs in May of 2007. We would get the funding and spend the next 1.5 years making a game that was far too large than what we should have made to start with.

Dinowaurs taught us a lot. About everything. After we launched in February of 2009 Dinowaurs, Mike and I went off on our own and began making smaller games. Wild ‘n’ Free: EX, Fig. 8, and Gray. All the while I was occasionally collaborating with other programmers like Tyler Glaiel or Jiggmin. Now January 2010 we decided to make it official and start Mikengreg, and for our first trick we made 4Fourths for Gamma IV. We holed ourselves up in our apartment [living together at the time] and worked all day every day until the deadline. It was kind of a glorious working environment. We got selected as a Gamma IV finalist [one-button competition] and we went to GDC where we would show it off. After GDC we came back and started Solipskier for Flash. Another similar working situation at the start we banged out the initial game in about 4 weeks, and we would later turn it into the iOS version with the help of Joe Bergeron. Just before the Solipskier launch we released Liferaft: Zero in August of 2010.

After Solipskier launched Mike and I began prototyping a lot of ideas and it was slow going in the beginning, mostly due to the whole fear of the sophomore flop. During this time I was starting up new collaborations like Hundreds so I founded aeiowu as a place to house all of these things officially. That brings us up to speed on aeiowu. I’m still working with Mike and we’re planning on releasing our latest game, Gasketball, very shortly. We recently met up in Chicago in an apartment for two weeks and recreated the 4Fourths suicide vibe and made incredible strides with the new game. We’re pumped.

So that’s how I got here. If you have any questions, ask me. Just make sure to sign your name if you want to go live with your identity.


Send your
question

WHAT IS THE ETYMOLOGY OF [AEIOWU]?

Asked by navaboo on 02/18/2011

aeiowu is a weird name, it’s not even a name so much as a convenient collection of vowels and a “W”. My last name, Wohlwend, starts with a W. I like that letter, it’s kind of strange when you think about it. It’s two Vs [typographically] but yet it’s called “Double ‘U’.” At one point I bought the domain doubleyou.com or something like that. Maybe it was a “.net” but either way I designed a cool looking mark to go with it. The whole website was nothing more than the acknowledgement of“W”.