[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/colinferguson.jpg” caption=”Colin Ferguson graduated from McMaster with a bachelor of commerce degree in 1996. After spending more than a decade working internationally, he returned home to Hamilton start Snakehead Games, which he co-owns with his brother and a third business partner. Photo by JD Howell.”]Colin Ferguson remembers laughing at his marketing professor, years ago, when he
spoke passionately about Hamilton's potential.

“Marvin Ryder was the closest I had to a mentor and I worked as a teaching assistant of
his,” said Ferguson. “He told me that Hamilton's a great place to live, and I laughed at
him.”

Now a co-owner of a rapidly growing online gaming company, Ferguson has chosen to
live in Hamilton precisely because of that potential. “Now I feel bad about laughing,” he
said.

Ferguson graduated with a bachelor of commerce from McMaster in 1996 and spent
more than a decade working internationally in marketing, advertising and international
development. He returned home in 2008 to start his company, Snakehead Games Inc.,
and compares Hamilton to post-industrial cities like Pittsburgh that are experiencing a
shift in local economy from heavy industry to technology and innovation. “In all the
places where interesting creative art is happening, it comes out of a crucible of an
industrial city that has been on the way down.”

He's excited about a developing project at the McMaster Innovation Park called Eight:
The Hamilton Institute for Interactive Digital Media. It is a partnership between
McMaster University, Mohawk College, the Art Gallery of Hamilton and Silicon Knights, a
local video game company that has worked with Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

Eight will bring together professional developers and designers, local artists and
academics to collaborate on digital projects. The name is a nod to the idea that digital
media is the eighth major art form after music, poetry, dance, sculpture, painting,
architecture and cinema.

“This will be great for us,” said Ferguson. “We used to have nobody to talk to about this.
It would be great to work with organizations, whether they are gaming companies or
people somehow associated with it, that we could just chat with.”

Snakehead Games currently offers three games online: Star Pirates, 2165 Spy Battle and
a Facebook app called Coliseum. The games are set in the Star Crash Universe, a dark
future world where humans can live forever, resources have run out, asteroids are
wreaking havoc and players are left to navigate the scenario as renegades and rebel
groups.

The company estimates that 100,000 unique users have played their games. “We have
thousands every day,” he said, “maybe 3,000 to 6,000 active per day internationally.” He
defines the company's precise niche as “free hyper social gaming online for bored office
workers.”

It's this focus on the social aspect of online gaming that Ferguson credits for their
success. “We're much more of a community,” he said. “Or perhaps a community of
communities. In our games, we have a Twitter-like functionality built in, so it's more
social and you can chat and post information.”

Ferguson co-owns Snakehead Games with his brother, Greg, who does all the
programming and game design, as well as a third business partner. The two brothers
have always loved games. “We grew up playing games and we're both pretty good at
taking a game and changing it and making it fun,” he said. “I love to do that for a living,
because that's not work, is it?”

Ferguson said he's looking forward to getting more involved with the people behind the
gaming industry in Hamilton. “The social part of it more than anything else is where it
happens,” he said. “You meet people, share ideas and both groups benefit, and so
Hamilton benefits.”