When Nick Popovich was a kid, his parents ran the Sprague Road Tavern in North Royalton, Ohio. "Everything was a dive bar," Popovich, now co-founder and CEO of Monomi Park, says of the drinking scene in the Cleveland suburb. "It was all working-class, like dive-bar kinda thing. Which is basically what this place was." His mum and dad wanted to do up the joint, make it into something resembling what today would be called a sports bar. As part of this plan, Popovich's father added a game room to the building, filled with pool tables, shuffleboard ("As a result I'm hugely into shuffleboard", Popovich notes) and most importantly of all, a rotating stock of arcade machines.
Back in the day, explains Popovich, the cabinet was the expensive thing. So his dad would find a cheap cabinet, they'd put in a cheap second-hand board and monitor, and paint the outside to make it look like the official version of the game. To the regulars drinking and shooting pool, it didn't matter that the arcade cabinet looked like a bootleg – that Donkey Kong was just a picture of a monkey that Popovich Senior had stencilled onto the side of the cabinet. What mattered was that the cabinet did what it needed to do, and that the game inside was legit. This line of thinking, of making something only as good as it needs to be, was an essential component in the development of Slime Rancher, Monomi Park's massively successful sci-fi farming simulator. "The original Slime Rancher cheated. A very small group of people made it, and it looks like many more people than that made it," Popovich says.