When Hello Games programmer Sean Murray and his three friends left their roles at large development houses to found Hello Games, the studio behind the IGF-nominated and PlayStation Network-bound Joe Danger, he knew there was a big risk. He knew failure was not only possible -- it was likely.

"We really wanted to do our own thing," said Murray during a talk at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. "When we were kids, it's all we ever talked about. But we realized when we were leaving, it was a really stupid thing. It was an illogical thing. We're going to do this and we're probably going to crash and burn doing this."

Murray and his friends used to work at companies like Criterion, Sumo and Electronic Arts.

"Most companies don't last very long," he continued. "It's really tough."

The advantage of working on their own, however, meant the studio could quickly adapt.

"We're much more flexible," said Murray. "In theory, we can do amazing things, get people on the same page and that's kind of more powerful...We can do everything ourselves. We can write our own engine. And with marketing, we just kind of talked about 'we'll do something personal to us, we'll do something that we are really interested in, and we'll see how people react to that.'"

Joe Danger arrives this spring on PlayStation Network.

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