Play Games, Win Bitcoin With THNDR Games CEO Desiree Dickerson

Company Name: THNDR Games

Founder: Desiree Dickerson, Jack Everitt, Greg Flor and Rafal Gawel

Date Founded: Originally founded in 2019 | Re-launched in 2021

Location of Headquarters: London, UK with remote team members

Amount of Bitcoin Held in Treasury: “Not enough” (said Dickerson jokingly)

Number of Employees: 6

Website: https://www.thndr.games/

Public or Private? Private

Desiree Dickerson believes that games are a powerful way to onboard people to Bitcoin.

She posits that, in recent history, games have been used to get people accustomed to using new technologies.

“They put games on the original PCs to get users familiar with a mouse,” Dickerson told Bitcoin Magazine.

“This is similar to Snake and Nokia,” she added, explaining that the game Snake was added to early Nokia feature phones “to get users familiar with the Nokia handset.”

Dickerson sees games playing a similar role when it comes to getting people used to using bitcoin on the Lightning Network.

This is why, in 2021, she helped launch a revamped version of THNDR Games, a company that has developed a suite of mobile games through which users can win sats just for playing.

And she was the perfect person for the job considering both her background as both a gamer and her experience in working with the Lightning Network.

Dickerson’s History With Gaming And Lightning

Dickerson has been gaming since she was a child.

“I grew up gaming with my dad,” she recounted. “He had NES, and I grew up playing Duck Hunt with him.”

While she’s been exposed to a variety of different games over the course of her life, as her dad had “every single gaming console,” she said that she currently thinks of herself as a “cozy gamer” and that she isn’t into more consuming (and frightening) games like HALO.

“It just has to be absolutely mindless like picking weeds in Animal Crossing,” said Dickerson with a chuckle of her current gaming preferences.

Not only does Dickerson have a long history with gaming, but she’s also been involved with the Lightning Network since just about its inception.

She began working at Lightning Labs in June 2018 and stayed there for three years before starting at THNDR Games.

Dickerson met THNDR’s original founder, Jack Everitt, while she was still at Lightning Labs. She’d come to the realization that gaming was a way to spread bitcoin, and Everitt, a gaming developer, was already hard at work developing THNDR.

The two started working together on a project called MintGox (a play on the defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox) in which they showcased what companies like ZBD, Satoshi’s Games and Donner Lab were building in the Bitcoin gaming space.

By October 2021, Dickerson was CEO at THNDR.

Building THNDR Games

In the following years, THNDR rolled out 6 games, all of which were more akin to cozy games than they were to extended-play first-person shooters or other types of games that required more prolonged involvement.

These games included Club Bitcoin: Solitaire, a classic Solitaire game; Tetro Tiles, a combination of sudoku and tetris; and Bitcoin Snake, a version of the aforementioned Snake.

By September 2022, Club Bitcoin: Solitaire was the 21st (the numerical significance of which wasn't lost on the THNDR team) most downloaded app in the Apple App Store.

Lucky number 21!