“Our secret is not that we can shuffle the cards better,” he says, “but that we recognized from the beginning that social interaction is an essential part of the experience.”

He’s so confident of this that Freeverse and Aspyr Media (the folks who brought you The Sims among other games) have teamed up to release iPuppet presents: Colin’s Classic Cards, which is playable in Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. The suite features spades, hearts, euchre, and setback, and it will include a how-to for gamers who want to create puppets that will represent them when they access the GameSmith online gaming service and play against other card sharks.

You can even create your own rooms to play in and share them with other gamers. You can be as somber or as goofy as you want to be, but you’ll find the latter a pervasive mood at Freeverse, which has a history of not taking itself too seriously.

Free-form Computer Games
“It’s the classic story,” Smith says of the company’s history, which began with a Hearts Deluxe game that earned him a MacUser Shareware Award, “only it doesn’t lead to obscene wealth.”

Smith was a Cognitive Science major with an artificial intelligence focus at Vassar College, but the liberal arts slant of the school led him to view programming differently than most engineers do.

For example, he says he chose the name Freeverse “because ‘free verse’ is a type of free-form poetry, which can look almost exactly like computer source code.”

He’s joined in his endeavors by his brother Colin, who also helped found the Outsiders Art Fair; photographer Gareth Anderson, a fellow Vassar alum; customer support guy Carlos Sanches, who also works in a contemporary art gallery; and art director Steven Tze, “whose sense of design is felt in everything we do,” according to Smith.

The Boss is Coming!
If we had to choose one word to sum up the feel of a typical Freeverse game, it would be “irreverent.” From goofy characters such as the monkey Monty Zuma and the alien Zebulon Pesci — who populate many of the games and are of course available in iPuppet presents: Colin’s Classic Cards — to little touches like the animated Bill Gates who utters real sound bites when you click on him in 3D Klondike, there’s a twisted Monty-Python-meets-Douglas-Adams sense of humor in all their games.

And for those of you who like to play games in the office, Freeverse has wisely included a “Boss Coming!” option in the File menu of all their games. We’ll let you discover some of the other fun little features. These aren’t the nondescript Solitaire and Mindsweeper games you’ll find on other computers.