As game developers, everyone wants the same things: to make great games, to prosper, to innovate. It's difficult to find truly successful independent developers as examples, or even a great number of storied independents that have stood the test of time.

At some point, in this industry, survival itself is a badge of honor.

NetDevil, the Colorado-based developer has been around for ten years. Currently, they're working on the LEGO Universe MMO. And tonight, they'll celebrate their decade of game development, with a party to christen their new offices.

When the company began in 1997, the entire landscape of the games industry was different. 3DO was a major publisher, Sony was years away from releasing the PS2, and massively multiplayer online games were in their infancy.

NetDevil was started by Scott Brown, Peter Grundy and Steven Williams, in a suburb north of Denver, Colorado called Louisville. They worked at an information technology firm called Digital Creators. And they dreamed of being creators of their own digital worlds.

At nights and on weekends, they began to develop a game, Jumpgate. After a full year of part-time work, they quit their jobs and officially started the company, with headquarters in the basement of Brown's home.

Their first proper office was 750 square feet, sub-leased from friends with another technology company. Brown recalls that, at one point, they had fourteen people packed into one big room. "But the rent was great...which was good with money being so tight," he remarks.

Like any good independent developer, there were times when it looked like NetDevil wouldn't make it. "Almost every day," is how Brown puts it. They had no previous experience making a game or getting a game deal, and since the Rocky Mountains aren't precisely a center of development in this industry, there was no one nearby to talk shop with.

"We have often joked that we shipped Jumpgate on shear willpower," says Brown. But ship it they did. And shortly afterwards, their publisher, 3DO died. NetDevil didn't stay idle, and began to develop a new game for NCsoft, called Auto Assault. They moved to larger offices four miles away, and the team grew to 45 by the time that game shipped.

Since then, NetDevil has followed a typical learning curve. They've become familiar with better ways to negotiate contracts and they've improved their process for developing games. Brown now believes the first step to making a game needs to be "a focus on very little content and iterating until it is really, really good, no matter what"—a process quite different from throwing all the features one can into an alpha version.

Even before Auto Assault, Richard Garriott (a.k.a. "Lord British") was familiar with NetDevil's work, having been impressed by their skill and ambition since their early days. Garriott, the man behind Ultima Online, and now executive producer at NCsoft, has some of the earliest experience in independent game development. And he told GameDaily BIZ that "lots of people talk about their devotion to the product or their team, Scott absolutely lives his life to that end."

And over the years, some things have gotten easier for NetDevil. The company now has a small amount of overhead for things like new computers and travel expenses, "something that always came out of our pay before," says Brown. However, a bigger company means bigger overhead, and that means the risks are higher.

Of course, there are always risks in being an independent developer, without the monetary safety nets major companies have, but Brown would "absolutely" do it all over again if faced with the choice he made ten years ago: "Making games is all I ever wanted to do, and now I get to work with some really amazing people."

Today, the company has a new 30,000-square-foot facility, a block away from the old offices. They hope to grow to 100 employees by the end of the year, and are at work on several new projects: the LEGO MMO, a physics-based shooter called Warmonger, and the remastering of Jumpgate for a new generation of players.

Is it fair to say, then, that NetDevil is living the dream? "In the sense that we are still in business and making games, sure," says Brown. Simply staying in business is succeeding at first. But, he notes, they've hardly achieved all of their goals, and "we have a long way to go still."

So what would Scott Brown say to a young person today, toiling away in information technology, and dreaming of making games? "Just do it," he says. The best way to find out if you can make games is to make one. "Pick something you can achieve and start working on it," advises Brown. "It's really not rocket science, it just takes passion."

And so, tonight, as NetDevil celebrates their ten year anniversary, it's we'll worth raising a glass to toast all those developers across the industry who work to uphold the dream of independence and innovation in this greatest of art forms, video games.