“One of my biggest faults was, in the beginning of developing apps, I decided I wanted to do a very ambitious app,” Gary Garr admitted in a session at Casual Connect USA 2014. “It almost crippled my business because I was too ambitious. I didn’t keep it lean, I was learning as I was going along and that was a big mistake. That’s something I look in retrospect and say ‘Wow, I could have done things a lot better,’ but at the same time, I don’t fully regret doing it. It’s part of the process and it’s helped to get me where I am now. You just have to keep it lean.”
Gary Carr is the owner of Toneaphone, LLC and a professional graphic designer. His passion for games was evident from an early age, with Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast two of his favorite systems. Possibly his all-time favorite game was Power Stone. The first time he played it was at an arcade where he defeated 22 consecutive players.
His long-standing ambition was to own and operate his own business. The opportunity came when Apple opened the App Store, making it possible to create a project and easily present it to the world. So, in 2009, he realized his dream with the founding of Toneaphone.
With his brother Ron, who is a gifted musician and Sound Engineer, he determined they could combine their talents to produce something interesting. Their first project was a whimsical ringtone application. He wrote some catchy jingles with the help of friends and hired a musical artist to sing them, with his brother doing all the instrumentals. The application was well received, and millions of their original ringtones have now been downloaded. This gave him the motivation to move forward and continue developing apps.
Developing Different Apps
He developed all sorts of different apps, from a comedic Patois translator to a voice changer. Interestingly, his most successful app was a simple, but amusing, sound board called 100’s of Buttons and Sounds. To date, it has been downloaded nearly 2 million times on iOS and Android.
Despite his success with entertainment applications, his real passion was still in games. He became friends with Jim Prucey from Canned Bananas shortly after starting Toneaphone. The two shared stories of their businesses and planned to work together. In 2011, Carr and Prucey decided to develop a new variation to Prucey’s successful Lock n Roll series and hired an indie development team to do it. The result was Lock n Roll Deluxe, which was well-received when it hit the App Store in 2012.
Moving Forward With Games
From that point, Carr decided to move forward with his passion to create video games. He has produced more than a dozen iOS and Android applications since 2009, and has designed all the graphic elements himself. He has two recently released applications. One is a game-themed voice changer called Voice Transform and Share. The other, a multi-player sports game called Arcade Basketball Blitz, was released just this May, and has been rapidly gaining traction since.
When Carr is not immersed in his work, he is enjoying his hobbies of reading, exercising, painting, and poetry.
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