Ethan Nicholas created a game for the iPhone that earned him $800,000 in five months. But programmers face long-shot odds of hitting the jackpot.

By JENNA WORTHAM


Is there a good way to nail down a steady income? In this economy?

Try writing a successful program for the iPhone.

Last August, Ethan Nicholas and his wife, Nicole, were having trouble making their mortgage payments. Medical bills from the birth of their younger son were piling up. After learning that his employer, Sun Microsystems, was suspending employee bonuses for the year, Mr. Nicholas considered looking for a new job and selling their house in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

Then he remembered reading about the guy who had made a quarter-million dollars quickly by writing a video game called Trism for the iPhone.“I figured if I could even make a fraction of that, we’d be able to make ends meet,”he said.

Although he had years of programming experience, Mr. Nicholas, who is 30, had never built a game in Objective- C, the coding language of the iPhone. So he searched the Internet for tips and informal guides, and used them to figure out the iPhone software development kit that Apple puts out.

Because he grew up playing violent computer games, he decided to write an artillery game. He sketched out some graphics and bought inexpensive stock photos and audio files.

For six weeks, he worked“morning, noon and night”- by day at his job on the Java development team at Sun, and after-hours on his side project. In the evenings he would relieve his wife by caring for their two sons, sometimes coding feverishly at his computer with one hand, while the other rocked baby Gavin to sleep or held his toddler, Spencer, on his lap.

After the project was finished, Mr. Nicholas sent it to Apple for approval, quickly granted, and iShoot was released into the online Apple store on October 19.

When he checked his account with Apple to see how many copies the game had sold, Mr. Nicholas’s jaw dropped: On its first day, iShoot sold enough copies at $4.99 each to net him $1,000. He and Nicole were practically“dancing in the street,”he said.

The second day, his portion of the day’s sales was about $2,000.

On the third day, the figure slid down to $50, where it hovered for the next several weeks.“That’s nothing to sneeze at, but I wondered if we could do better,”Mr. Nicholas said.

In January, he released a free version of the game with fewer features, hoping to spark sales of the paid version. It worked: iShoot Lite has been downloaded more than 2 million times, and many people have upgraded to the paid version, which now costs $2.99. On its peak day - January 11 - iShoot sold nearly 17,000 copies, which meant a $35,000 day’s take for Mr. Nicholas.

“That’s when I called my boss and said,‘We need to talk,’”Mr. Nicholas said.“And I quit my job.”

To people who know a thing or two about computer code, stories like his are tantalizing. The first iPhones came out in June 2007, but it wasn’t until July 2008 that people could buy programs built by outsiders, which were introduced in an online market - called the App Store - along with the new iPhone 3G.

There are now more than 25,000 programs, or applications, in the iPhone App Store, many of them written by people like Mr. Nicholas. But the chances of hitting the iPhone jackpot keep getting slimmer: the Apple store is already crowded with look-alike games and kitschy applications, and new programs arrive daily.

And for every iShoot, which earned Mr. Nicholas $800,000 in five months,“there are hundreds or thousands who put all their efforts into creating something, and it just gets ignored in the store,”said Erica Sadun, a programmer and the author of“The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook.”

The long-shot odds haven’t stopped people from stampeding to classes and conferences about writing iPhone programs. At Stanford University in California, an undergraduate course called Computer Science 193P: iPhone Application Programming attracted 150 students for only 50 spots when it was introduced last fall.

While iShoot is never going to be the next Google or Facebook, it is the type of program that people with minimal expertise view as within their reach.“Even if you’re not a programming guru, you can still cobble something together and potentially have great success,”said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

As for Mr. Nicholas, he is in talks to adapt iShoot to systems other than the iPhone, and says that investors and big video game companies have approached him about financing his second effort. He is also in full-swing inventor mode, working on a new game that he will not describe for fear that another developer might steal it.

“I’m going to milk the gold rush as long as I can,”Mr. Nicholas said.“It’d be foolish not to.”