Story No. 01
How Neon Labs came to be
A doctor's waiting room, a game of tic-tac-toe that was mostly ads, and the three rules that came out of it.
It started in a doctor’s waiting room. My daughter and I had time to kill, so I installed a game of tic-tac-toe for the two of us.
Ten seconds of play, a minute of ads
That was the deal: ten seconds of playing, then a minute of full-screen ads. I tried another one. Same thing. And another. Every game I installed, one after another, worked exactly the same way.
So I made my own: two players, one phone, nothing in between. The first commit went in on July 17. Eight days later Neon XO was live on Google Play, without a single ad.
Three rules
That waiting room turned into three rules, and every title since has been built to them:
- No ads. Not a banner, not a video. The whole app is the game.
- No tracking. No analytics SDKs, no ad networks, nothing following you around the web.
- No pay-to-win. You can buy a new look or an extra track, or just say thanks. You can’t buy a better score.
Leaving the ads out costs money. Putting them in would cost more — it would be a different studio.
Two names, one person
Neon Labs is the studio: me, one person in Pyrzyce, a small town in north-west Poland. Neon Network is something some of our apps offer — one account that works across them — not a separate company or label.
Why neon
I was born in 1987. The eighties were neon’s golden age. It was the look of the decade, and it stood for two things: the night and the future. Both fit. Every Neon Labs app is built at night. And, honestly, part of me never left the eighties.
Two months in
Neon XO had a sibling within a week: Neon Comet, a climb against a ceiling that keeps coming down. Then Neon Shift, a runner where you match your colour to the barrier or the run is over. Ariadne became the first app that isn’t a game — a simple GPS that walks you back to wherever you pressed START.
A racer and a maths app for kids are in the lab. A couple of other games never left it. Not every idea deserves a store page.
Why write this
Neon Stories is where I’ll write about how these things get made: what worked, what broke, and the decisions in between. Short reads, like the games.
Thanks for reading. And the next time you’re stuck in a waiting room, you know where to find a game with no ads in it.
— Kamil