Congrats to the CodeCombat team! Their recruitment-oriented business model reminded me of an 80's movie called The Last Starfighter [1]: A young guy living in the middle of nowhere masters a space fighter arcade game. He has no idea that it's actually a fighter pilot training and recruitment tool until one night, when he's picked up by a "headhunter" (in a spacebound DeLorean) to join the force defending the galaxy against alien invaders. Fun flick, with some decent early CGI.
The parallels, I think, really help demonstrate how the CC concept has the potential to change young people's lives.
That is an excellent movie, here's hoping that we can pick up some excellent space pilots, er, devs, with the platform. It's incredible how many people have written to tell us that they started their dev careers building games, I think it's a common entry point. I know that I started working with computers because of a game called gorillas.bas on my dad's Kapro '86 (whopping 3 megahertz processor and 512k hard drive). Here's hoping I'm not the anti-pattern!
The parallels, I think, really help demonstrate how the CC concept has the potential to change young people's lives.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/