Watch paint dry: How the non-game was released on SteamMar 30(AZINS) Teenage tech expert Ruby Nealon managed to sneak his virtually non-existent game, Watch Paint Dry, onto one of the world's biggest gaming platforms, Steam.

With its membership at over 125 million and daily concurrent logins currently topping out at 12 million, online retailer Steam is a ready reference in PC gaming. As well as carrying titles from some of the biggest franchises, it's also become a go-to for unique titles from smaller teams or solo developers.

Getting onto Steam

To help with that, there's a crowdsourcing admissions program called Steam Greenlight, a user-voted system designed to surface the more popular potential Steam store titles. Some, like the recent Stardew Valley and Undertale, turn out to be critical and commercial hits, while others are less well received. And, after the success of parody title Goat Simulator, more ironic titles have gained traction with the Greenlight audience: Grass Simulator and Rage Parking Simulator have graduated to the store, even if vanguard Rock Simulator quietly disappeared.

On the surface, Watch Paint Dry fits the parody-of-a-parody genre, but it was in fact a stunt to show how the Greenlight system itself could be gamed -- a public appeal to Steam's operator, Valve Corp, to close those very same loopholes. The British teen, now 16, earned an official acknowledgement from Microsoft in 2012 for spotting an untracked vulnerability, went to university at 14, and became "one of the youngest Computer Science students in the UK," as he explains. He'd already contacted Steam's parent company about the vulnerabilities he'd found but, receiving no response, thought up another way to get things moving.

Skipping the queue

Having gained access to the developer side of Steam, he started experimenting with the Greenlight submission process, as detailed via a March 29 post to blogging platform Medium. Built using hobbyist suite RPG Maker, Nealon's "45-second long paint drying simulator" was even furnished with progress-related Steam Achievements, digital trading cards, novelty badges and emoticons. Looking for a way to get those trading cards automatically approved via backend tinkering showed him how to get the entire game instantly published; another behind-the-scenes experiment meant that "Watch Paint Dry" immediately popped up as the Steam store's latest new release -- several days earlier than his ideal prank date of April 1.

Now that the game's removed from Steam, would-be players have been badgering Nealon for copies of the curio. Not for now, says the young security researcher: "I have [activation] keys but I will not be releasing them. Please stop asking for them."