Daniel Terry was at a bar when Tap Farm reached 30,000 downloads. That is the detail worth keeping. Before the financing rounds, the expanding teams and the hundreds of millions of downloads, there was a game that two engineers had made, and an audience large enough to make the evening feel different. Terry later remembered the milestone as surreal. Numbers acquire their meaning from the size of the world around them. At that moment, 30,000 was a very large world.
The game had an unexotic premise: a farm on an iPhone. Farming games already had an audience on Facebook. Terry and his co-founder, Harlan Crystal, were interested in what happened when that kind of accessible play met a touchscreen. A phone was something you carried around, consulted repeatedly and operated with your fingers. The question was how to make a game that belonged there. The agricultural subject matter was familiar; the circumstances of playing it were changing.
By 2014, Pocket Gems had recorded 185 million downloads across 25 games. The company had also introduced Episode, an app for interactive stories. Terry's early celebration had become a useful measure of distance traveled. But the more interesting movement was sideways: from helping people build little worlds to helping them write stories inside them. Today, his work also includes Imprint, which uses visual lessons to explain ideas. The phone stayed small. His brief for it kept expanding.
Two engineers, one open door
Terry met Crystal while studying computer science at Cornell. He later went to Stanford for an MBA, and Pocket Gems began in 2009 while he was still a student. These were engineers entering a business in which they had little game-design experience. That makes the partnership more interesting than the usual story of industry veterans deciding to strike out on their own. They had technical skills and liked games. They had to discover much of the rest by making something people could actually play.
The company's origin story places its beginnings in an apartment above a pizza shop. It is a pleasantly practical setting for a business devoted to small, repeatable pleasures. More consequentially, both founders wrote the code for their first game. They were close enough to the work to turn a promising idea into a released product without first constructing an elaborate organization around it. A new platform sometimes rewards that proximity: the people asking the question can also build the answer.
Tap Farm was followed by Tap Store, Tap Jungle, Tap Zoo and Tap Zoo Christmas. Pocket Gems' December 2010 funding announcement reported that its first five titles had reached Apple's top ten free-app chart and that the business became profitable within weeks of its first launch. Sequoia Capital led a $5 million round. Its partner Jim Goetz joined the board. There was already a business here, rather than merely a handsome presentation about a future one.
The titles also suggest a certain lack of ceremony. A farm, a shop, a jungle, a zoo: a player could understand the invitation before opening the app. In a crowded store, that clarity does work. The first click need not require an explanation from the founder. The design can introduce itself, leaving the player to decide whether the next minute is worth spending there.
The craft behind the tap
In 2011, Terry gave a concise account of his competitive position: “To win on mobile, it has to be the focus of your business.” Pocket Gems was organized around phones from the beginning. Its games offered short visits that players could repeat. That pattern asked the developer to care about the return as much as the arrival. A download was an introduction; a game had to keep furnishing reasons for another visit.
Terry also described an unusually hands-on standard: “We obsess over details and hand craft everything.” The sentence helps explain the apparent mismatch between modest premises and serious engineering. A zoo on a screen might seem an undemanding proposition until every button, animation and decision has to remain agreeable on the hundredth encounter. Familiarity is unforgiving. The small irritation that survives the first session can become the whole experience by the tenth.
By March 2012, the company had more than 100 people and over 60 million downloads. Ben Liu, then chief operating officer, described an approach built around the device itself. Tap Paradise Cove was arriving, adding another setting to a growing catalogue. The early team had become an organization with the ability to develop and support multiple titles. Success introduced another design problem, this time inside the business: how to keep producing new work while looking after the work already in players' hands.
There was a creative question underneath the operational one. In his early interviews, Terry talked about giving users a canvas on which they could create, with more depth added over time. The language matters. A player arranging a world has a different relationship with an app from someone merely completing a prescribed task. Pocket Gems' experiments increasingly made room for that sense of authorship. Eventually, the canvas would be large enough to hold a plot.
“To win on mobile, it has to be the focus of your business.”Daniel Terry, 2011
A story with room for its reader
Terry moved from CEO to chief creative officer and executive chairman in 2012, with Liu taking the CEO role. Episode arrived publicly in February 2014. The sequence is a reminder that a founder's contribution can change shape as the company grows. The title at the top of an organization chart is only one way to influence what gets made. Terry's next public project asked what a story could become when its reader held a touchscreen.
Episode mixed animated characters, dialogue and decisions. Its writer portal allowed people to create and share stories, while the company curated content for distribution. Early genres included mystery, comedy, romance and science fiction. Terry described ambitions for a distribution platform suited to mobile audiences. That is a larger proposition than releasing a single successful tale. A platform invites other people to supply the imagination, and then has to give their work somewhere to go.
A conventional story can make a reader wonder what a character should do. An interactive one can ask the reader to choose. That changes the job of the writer. A scene must still be compelling, but it must also accommodate a decision and whatever follows from it. The reader gets a small share of responsibility for the unfolding fiction. Even the most ordinary conversation can become a junction, with several possible routes away from it.
The creative tooling was part of the wager. Writers used a scripting process to turn scenes into animated episodes. A background in drawing was unnecessary. That separated the ability to imagine a scene from the ability to illustrate one, bringing visual storytelling within reach of people whose strongest skill was writing. For an engineer who had entered games without an art background, there is a pleasing echo here: the next product lowered a barrier the founders themselves had encountered.
By July 2014, Episode had reached 500,000 writer sign-ups. The appeal reached beyond one studio's ability to commission scripts. The figures describe people expressing an interest in making something, an audience on the supply side of entertainment. They do not mean that every registrant became a working author. They do show why the portal was central to the idea: the reader could cross the counter and start contributing to the shop.
The farm gets some rather unexpected neighbors
Episode's later partnerships brought recognizable entertainment into the format. Demi Lovato: Path to Fame launched in August 2015; by July 2016, Pocket Gems reported $13 million in revenue and 20 million unique viewers for that story. Mean Girls also appeared on the platform. The imaginative distance from Tap Farm is considerable. A little agricultural simulation had helped open a route into a business where a singer's fictional career and a familiar film could become material for reader decisions.
Pocket Gems was pursuing another direction at the same time. War Dragons, launched in 2015, brought three-dimensional strategy and synchronous multiplayer to phones. Episode and War Dragons make an instructive pair: one invites readers into a narrative, the other players into a competitive game. The company was supporting distinct kinds of involvement rather than treating every person with a smartphone as an interchangeable customer. The device provided the common ground; the experiences demanded different approaches.
Tencent invested $60 million in 2015 and another $90 million in 2017. The later financing supported expansions for Episode and War Dragons and plans for further multiplayer development. Money is an imperfect description of creative progress, but these rounds put the scale of the undertaking in view. By the second investment, Pocket Gems reported more than 300 million downloads. The business Terry had started with Crystal now involved audiences and partners far beyond that first apartment.
Capital for the company behind Episode and War Dragons.
The next chapter is a lesson
Terry subsequently founded Imprint, an education company whose mobile app launched in 2020. The format combines tappable illustrations and animations with nonfiction ideas. The subjects include philosophy, history, business and technology. A chapter can take two minutes or less. The family resemblance to his earlier work is visible in the format: an experience assembled for a phone, with visual communication doing some of the work that a larger screen or longer sitting might otherwise do.
The change of subject alters the bargain with the user. A game needs to make play rewarding. Interactive fiction needs to make the next scene desirable. A lesson has to leave behind an idea the learner can understand. Illustrations can help explain relationships, and short sequences can control the pace at which an argument appears. None of that makes a difficult subject easy by decree. It gives the person holding the phone a manageable place to begin.
In November 2023, Google Play named Imprint its Best App in its United States awards. Google highlighted its use of visual storytelling in short lessons. The recognition belonged to an education product, years after Terry's early successes in gaming. It gives his career an unexpected punctuation mark. A developer who began with a virtual farm had helped build an app that could put a little philosophy into the same pocket.
Imprint now lists Terry as founder, executive chairman and chief innovation officer, and Jeff Feldman as CEO. It also identifies him as founder, chairman and former CEO of Pocket Gems and Episode Interactive. Across those roles, the recurring interest is a format with enough room for people to do something: arrange, choose, write, learn. His early ambitions for mobile entertainment have found several different expressions. Thirty thousand downloads once supplied an evening's celebration. The more durable achievement has been finding another reason to tap.