Of all the people that started their own independent game developer companies, Michael Gesner owns the rights to perhaps the most unusual start in the history of business. Gesner's first game challenged players to complete a Herculean task that few have accomplished in reality - balancing the Massachusetts state budget.

Talk about an ambitious goal. All players need to do is navigate through murky layers of red tape and figure out a way to solve the state's fiscal year 2004 budget crisis, which featured a deficit of more than $3 billion. Proving that democracy indeed works in mysterious ways, Gesner and some of his classmates at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) were approached by Massachusetts State Senator Richard Moore, who had an idea for a computer simulation. Gesner and a few friends had founded the WPI Game Development Club a couple years earlier. Moore, whose district included part of Worcester County, had heard about the club and asked the members to write Ma$$ Balance. "A couple of students and I at WPI started the Game Development Club my sophomore year," Gesner says. "The idea was to give students a practical application for their computer science and engineering skills and to help them get into the game development field, which has traditionally been very hard to do."

Gesner, who played the role of lead developer, teamed up with other WPI Game Development Club members as well as members of the Massachusetts Academy for Mathematics and Science at WPI. Together, they built more than a simple simulation. Ma$$ Balance creates a complex virtual world where, for instance, budget cuts on public health may have serious repercussions. Players are given real budget numbers and must deal with random events such as snowstorms or rioting following the Red Sox winning the World Series.

Ma$$ Balance debuted online in 2003 and received so much attention and positive buzz that Gesner and fellow WPI graduate Michael Melson decided to start a game development company. After several months of development work, the two friends launched Dragonfly Game Design in March of 2004. And Gesner quickly realized that when it came to crunching numbers for his own company, it was no simulation.