WC grad hits big time with gaming software
Published 10:44 pm Friday, September 9, 2016
The tech wares of a Warren Central High School student will soon hit the shelves of two of the largest video game retailers in the country.
Seventh Knight Inc. CEO Luke Koestler said his company has two products in 5,300 GameStop locations across the United States and will soon have those products available on Steam, a PC game and software purchasing website.
“To put it into perspective, we’ll be sitting on shelves with a couple of other solutions from billion-dollar companies. There are really no small companies that produce antivirus that sit on retail shelves, so that’s why we feel it’s significant,” Koestler said.
The two products, which will also be available on GameStop’s online store, include the second version of Gaming Accelerator, a product that “devotes all your resources to that game so they play smoother and function better” and Seventh Knight PC Security, a “new type of antivirus security.”
“(Gaming Accelerator) was successful enough last year that they picked up this product line,” Koestler said.
He added the “big news” on the Seventh Knight PC Security is its availability for individual use.
“We brought up the idea of a new type of antivirus (software) based on our software for big business and government but scaled down for people’s home machines to address the growing threat of ransomware because their really wasn’t anything on the market that would address it for home use.
“It replaces antivirus software, whatever a person is currently using to scan their computer and clean up viruses. It will prevent all the other junk, like viruses and malware, but it also prevents ransomware. Someone who uses their PC for work or gaming can go into a GameStop Store, replace their product with ours for $40 a year on all their PC devices and not have to worry about that stuff.”
Friends and family experiencing issues with ransomware, which blocks access to a computer until a sum of money is paid to unblock it, prompted him to create the personal antivirus software.
“Just being in the tech field, friends and family would call whenever they had problems with their PCs, and we were addressing so much ransomware just with friends and family that we decided we had the ability to help and we wanted to help on the national level,” he said.
The company, which Koestler started at age 19 and is now going on 17 years old, is already looking forward, he said.
“Steam and GameStop are the largest outlets for a product like this on the home market so our next step is to launch our new enterprise software for government and big companies, which essentially does the same thing but for organizations of that size,” he said.