Once upon a time in northern Maine, a place with potato fields as far as the eye could see, Christopher York built a business from his couch at home.
But before there was even a company, there was just a kid and his trusty TRS-80 and an Atari (a computer system of yore), teaching himself to code. “I didn’t have any kind of formal schooling in computer science or anything,” he says. “I basically lived on the home computer: writing code, dreaming of starting a game company.”
Then smartphones arrived on the scene.
They heralded a kind of reset button for indie developers everywhere. Suddenly, a single person could ship something that millions of people could play.
So Christopher leaned into what he did best: minimal visuals, maximal puzzle goodness. “As long as I kept things really minimalistic design-wise, I could focus on a good game mechanic and puzzle,” he remembers.
In 2008, he officially formed Blue Ox Family Games as a one-man shop. And by 2010, he launched a word game with a deceptively simple hook: 7 Little Words.
Apple took notice and featured it. Then everything changed again. “It went from being me, one guy on the couch with a laptop, to a whole business,” Christopher says. Today, Blue Ox employs 19 people out of Caribou, Maine.
Despite all the changes, Blue Ox’s mission has stayed steady: “To uplift, delight, and bring people together through good, clean family games.” That ethos also underpins choices both big and small — from the tone of clues down to their ad policies.
And the human ripple effects still surprise Christopher to this day. Just take the players who mail handwritten cards expressing how important these kinds of games are to them, while teachers are even adapting 7 Little Words for the classroom.
And then there are the love stories.
In 2016, a Springfield, Oregon man proposed to his partner using a custom “8 Little Words” puzzle placed in The Register-Guard (a wink to the Blue Ox franchise and the couple’s shared puzzling habit). Over breakfast, she solved the clues, looked up, and asked: “Is this a proposal?” It was. And she happily said yes.
“We hear from people all the time about what the games mean to them,” Christopher says. “Those types of notes remind you what this is really about.”
