Out of work TV exec comes up with a new app for the Iphone.
“I speak two languages, I’ve won a bunch of Emmys, and I’m pretty much qualified to do a whole bunch of things,” Sherno, 50, says. “But all my contacts in the TV industry are searching for work as well.”
It’s enough to make a guy want to mete out some justice.
“‘Shoot a banker’ ran through my mind,” Sherno says. “I’m not an inherently violent kind of guy, but a lot of people were angry.”
Also, he had an iPhone.
So Assassin FPS, the first iPhone application from Sherno’s one-man company which he runs out of his Silver Spring home, Differentium LLC, was sort of inevitable. The first-person shooter game uses the iPhone’s built-in camera, but instead of shooting at computer-generated enemies, the target in Assassin FPS is whatever’s in front of you. Once you’ve selected from weapons like an AK-47, a bazooka, a laser blaster, or even Nerf darts, the weapon and its crosshair appear over the objects—or people—in your viewfinder, and you can commence blowing them into the next realm.
Apple’s initial objections had nothing to with the violence factor, and everything to do with the fact that it relied on the Iphone’s camera feature
Apple initially rejected the app, not because of its content, Sherno says, but because it used the iPhone’s camera. “Apparently we were too far ahead of the curve,” Sherno says. So he and and coder Kris Zabala dumbed down the guts and pitched the game a second time, only to have Apple reject it again. It wasn’t until June, when Android, an open-source mobile operating system used by Google, began incorporating the camera into its apps to create “Augmented Reality,” that Apple was forced to follow suit. (Augmented reality is a technology that allows visual data to be projected over the image in a mobile phone’s camera.) The company released a new application programming guide last month, Sherno and Zabala re-applied, and bingo: They were in the Apple store.
Of course, there is a political angle to the story
Sherno created an appropriately violent YouTube trailer to promote the game. “[I]t shows the user shooting Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, and Nancy Pelosi,” he says. “I got in some hot water with and took out Pelosi and Cheney—but left in Rush. No one really cares about Rush.”
Found here via Radley
Tags: IPhone
