The average gamer spends 18 hours per week playing video games according to Education Database, but not many players make a career of gaming.

It’s surprising to find that many of the independent video game creators are high school or college student age. Future video game developers may be your classmates at this moment. In 1997 – 2001, David Maestri was just that person.

On November 26^th, Maestri will be visiting Linganore as a part of the Distinguished Graduates Organization in honor of his business accomplishments.

“I got into developing video games because as a child I was captivated by Nintendo,” said Maestri. “My dad had a computer for his job, and I became determined to make games for it.”

In order to reach his current status as CEO and founder of a game developing company called Metamoki, Maestri worked hard to become skilled at coding. He even began working on games when he was in high school and developed his skills long before he made it big with a Facebook game called “Mob Wars.”

“I built a bunch of TI-85 calculator games and DOS text adventure games before that, some of which collaborations with fellow Linganore students. I also made a few simple web-based games. Perhaps more importantly, I built out a bunch of other failed website ideas which did not have to do with games. I was able to leverage all of this web knowledge and code to build Mob Wars very quickly since it is as much a website as a game,” said Maestri.

When Maestri graduated from LHS, he had no idea what he wanted to do. He went to the University of Maryland from 2001 – 2005, although he didn’t know what he wanted to major in. “I dropped out and worked at Best Buy in Frederick. I eventually figured out that coding was a marketable skill and pursued web contract work along with lots of failed business ventures,” Maestri said.

At his current job, Maestri works on games for mobile platforms. He decides what games to build and how they will be designed in order to keep users happy and generate revenue and codes when he can. “[Mobile] devices are a lot of fun to develop for because everyone seems to have one. Any game we release is immediately accessible to a billion people around the world. This is still mind blowing to me,” said Maestri.

Maestri has experience with the ruthlessness of the gaming industry. In 2009 he settled a case with the popular gaming company Zynga. Maestri sued Zynga for millions because they copied his game “Mob Wars” with their own “Mafia Wars.” Zynga was given the rights to develop games similar to Maestri’s.

“Seeing someone from your own community creating successful businesses might be the spark some students need in order to get motivated to execute an idea they have.” Maestri said. Not only is seeing distinguished graduates beneficial to high school kids but others as well.

“I think it’s a huge benefit to the teachers and staff to see that what they do deeply matters,” Maestri said. In Maestri’s case, what they did was a huge success.