📖 Our Story

From games played in a suburban cellar to Silicon Valley: The Origin of Dice Infinity

Way back in the early 1980s, a group of high-school students played some of the first-generation role-playing games. There were weekly gatherings around a poker table in the wooden-paneled cellar of a suburban house. Nearby, a deep freezer sat next to a worn-out couch for studio wrestling reenactments. Our drama and adventure came from portraying characters from medieval fantasy, space opera, espionage spies, and even cartoons in many adventures. These “goofy dice” we rolled, that were not cube-shaped, were a curiosity to some of our parents.

Somehow, we all managed to get prom dates.

A few years later, each of us attended different colleges but still kept in touch during the summer and over the holidays, running role-playing game sessions. The characters were the same, but the passion was not as strong. Career plans in front of us all kept us away from the poker table, character sheets, and dice. Life moved on … college, careers, marriages, children. For me, it was earning an engineering degree and arriving in Silicon Valley less than a year after graduation.

Come the 1990s, kept interest in role-playing games, attended some of the California Bay Area gaming conventions, created some gaming groups, ran many games, and published some role-playing game rules with a local game house.

Then the Apple Newton came out. I took initiative, pulled in my passion for role-playing games, and wrote one of the first dice-rolling apps for handheld mobile computers. The “Dice Roller” app for the Apple Newton was exhibited at the Origins Game Fair in July of 1994. You could enter a general dice formula such as “2d6” (meaning two, six-sized dice), and the app rolled a simulation, randomizing the appropriate set of dice and reporting the set sum. It was complete with dice-rolling sound effects.

Dice Roller gained great attention and praise. The Apple Newton did not do so well in the marketplace, and Apple discontinued the project in 1998. As the Newton fell, the Palm Pilot came into the market. My career embarked on writing apps and designing hardware accessories for the Palm Pilot and later derivative products such as the Handspring Trio and other Palm OS-enabled products.

Then the iPhone showed on the scene. I was one of many developers with Newton and Palm Pilot experience moving into this new mobile systems market darling. Medical device design with wireless connectivity to the iPhone became my professional forte to great success.

All during this, my children grew and thrived. They became teens with their own personalities and desires. A big box of role-playing game material, character sheets, rulebooks, dungeon adventures, and “goofy dice” that did not see the light of day for a generation came out of the attic. I wondered if they would like this game. One of my favorite role-playing games was in its fifth edition.

To say my children liked role-playing games is an understatement. They loved solving puzzles in dungeons to open doors, dramatic dialogs with villains, zapping the monsters with their spells or fighting them with their swords. I became the “daddy game master.” Soon, many dice-rolling apps showed up on their phones. I was quite opinionated about them.

One of my children said, “Dad, can you write a better dice app?” A huge grin came on my face, and software code routines started spinning my mind. In an assertive voice, I responded, “Oh yes, I can!” to that challenge. Re-acquainted with a graphic artist whom I had worked with previously to help design the look and feel of the app. Investors, most known for over a decade, viewed this project as a darling to support.

Then coding started.

Two years of off-and-on development, about a hundred app testers, applying professional software engineering disciplines, user experience knowledge from industrial and medical device design, were all focused on making the best dice-rolling app out there — developed in the heart of Silicon Valley. It was a winding path. Rarely is tech development a straight line to the objective.

The goal was not to make a spectacle of graphics and sound, but an app working as an elegant aide next to your game space, rolling dice for you.

Be it a role-playing game, a casual board game, or whenever there are no cups of dice to slam on the countertop … Dice Infinity is here for you.

Free download. Enjoy!