^{Hacker’s desk, 40 hours into a 72-hour project.  Look familiar?}

I’ve been trying to think of a clever opening sentence for this post, and coming up flat.  You know:

“It’s like the Manhattan Project, except for nerds!”  No, no; the Manhattan Project people were nerds.

“It’s like the Manhattan Project, but not!”  No, that’s just stupid.

“It’s like the Mojave Experiment, but with good software!”  Better, but how many people know what the Mojave Experiment really was, anyway?  Besides, do iPhone hackers really want to be associated with a Microsoft disaster?

You get the picture; it just wasn’t coming.  So forget it.  Forget the metaphors, the clever comparisons, and the over-intellectualizations:  let’s just do it straight.

Rasmus Hansson, a developer at Moyo Studios, and three of his partners in crime, have embarked on something they are calling “Project 72,” a 72-hour project to create an iPhone game from scratch.

As part of this effort, the Dogtown Studio folks (as they are calling themselves) are recording their efforts and keeping records of it live and in real time.  As Rasmus says

A long time ago there was this guy that wanted to make an iPhone game without any experience in 30 days. I don’t remember if he succeeded or not, but nevertheless it was a brave attempt, and I think the game came out quite nice.

Since we have some experience we wanted to try and make one even faster, and thought that it would be fun to write about what we were doing. So we decided to make a game in 3 days, which is 72 hours and try to turn it into a successful one.

So if you’re into heavy geeking–and let’s face it, plenty of us are–surf on over and follow the Dogtown Studio boys in real time.  Could be pretty durn interesting.