Doomlaser

Doomlaser Doomlaser is a software & videogame studio based in Champaign, Seattle, and Oakland, California.

We've been around since 2007, with the release of Space Barnacle and Cursorcerer. We helped make the Tap Tap Revenge series & much more
doomlaser.com

02/01/2026

Bird Blade is a new game coming from Doomlaser next month.

It will be playable on the web first, with an iOS / Android / PC release following, if you guys like it

01/29/2026

Created by Doomlaser, Adam Saltsman Paul Veer, and Danny Branowsky

01/28/2026

In 2011 and 2012, I lived in a classic 1911-built, 2-story American Craftsman bungalow in Champaign, Illinois.

While there, I built the official iPhone game for the first Hunger Games movie through our studio Doomlaser, which launched alongside the film on March 23, 2012.

My work was assisted by our director-producer Adam Saltsman (creator of Canabalt), Paul Veer on art (artist on Sega's Sonic Mania), and Danny B on music (musician behind Super Meat Boy, Canabalt, The Binding of Isaac, & Crypt of the Necrodancer)

When the game launched on the app store, it was downloaded over 10 million times within days. The game was played by millions of young adolescent women who loved the books and were excited for the movie.

I think the game came out great. Here's a video that shows some behind-the-scenes of the creation of The Hunger Games: Girl on Fire and the culture of our studio, Doomlaser.

I think it's a fun watch! You tell me!

-Mark Johns (https://x.com/Doomlaser)

12/24/2025

A small piece of Doomlaser archaeology.

In 2015, I did a long public radio interview with Dave Monk in Illinois, where I talked about AI as something closer to high-level algebra than magic—and spent a surprising amount of time on scaling limits, institutional incentives, and governance.

This was years before Transformers were productized, and long before OpenAI existed.

With recent comments from Sergey Brin about Google under-investing in the Transformer architecture that they invented, and which OpenAI used for ChatGPT, that old interview suddenly felt relevant again—so I resurfaced it and wrote some context around it.

It also ties directly into what we’ve been building quietly at Doomlaser over the past year: Dream Factory, a narrative / performance tool that now runs entirely on local neural models (no cloud APIs), and treats AI as a controllable instrument rather than a black box.

Don't worry. This isn’t a pitch, more a snapshot of how our thinking has evolved, and why Doomlaser is increasingly focused on creative infrastructure rather than just consumer games.

Full blog post + archive here:
https://doomlaser.com/doomlaser-interview-on-ai-scaling-limits-and-governance-from-2015/

(Video clip included for those who prefer artifacts over essays. Shout out to Champaign-Urbana's WEFT 90.1 FM!)

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Champaign, IL
61820–61822, 61824–61826 (PO BOX)

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