Pretty Good MahJongg is now five (plus) years old.

Last Friday was the 5th anniversary of the first public release of Pretty Good MahJongg. On October 12, 2002, Pretty Good MahJongg 1.0 was released.

Of course, the program had been in development for quite a while (let’s say 9 months, or 40 weeks) before that. This was the second product, and first actual game title, developed during our continuing collaboration with Goodsol Development. We started working together six years ago (this month, I believe), first producing a support library, PGScard (now GDcard), which provides some fundamental features of Pretty Good Solitaire.

Back in 2003, Thomas Warfield made a blog post, How Long Does Great Shareware Take?, in which he refers to Pretty Good MahJongg as “still an infant”, and it is an interesting article to read in retrospect, especially given the fact that we recently won our first software award (even before version 3.0). Even if Joel Spolsky is correct is his article, Good Software Takes Ten Years, we are certainly well on our way.

In lieu of gifts, our game has requested that everybody vote for PGMJ to receive the 2007 Epsilon Award.