Stroke of genius? How one developer earned over £250k from games made in just 30 minutes

More than 120,000 PlayStation users have paid 3.29 to pet virtual hamsters, dogs and beavers. What's behind this madness?

Game development is an expensive and time-consuming business. Right now, 2,000 people are working on the next instalment in Ubisoft's blockbuster Assassin's Creed series, across 18 studios around the globe, and it's a project that will take 2 to 3 years. Imagine how any of those people might feel to learn that last year, a self-taught programmer racked up nearly 280,000 from a series of games he made while sitting in his pants on hot days in a two-bedroom flat in Harlesden. And that each one took him about 30 minutes.

The first one, I'll be honest, probably took seven or eight hours," says TJ Gardner. But the subsequent ones - Stroke the Beaver, for example - would have taken about half an hour."