Are there successful startups working on what you may broadly call "programming games (with a serious practical purpose)"? I know of CodeCombat [1]. The story of how they got into YC [2] is pretty interesting:
>With all the chaos trying to keep the server up and the bugs down, we slept little and prepared for the next day's Startup School even less. We had been tapped for on-stage Y Combinator office hours with Paul Graham and Sam Altman. We watched a video of previous on-stage YC office hours and concluded that "office hours" really meant "eight minutes of two of the smartest startup guys in the world demolishing your idea in front of 1700 entrepreneurs and a live video stream".
>Fortunately for us, they liked our startup and were much nicer than we expected. In fact, as we were walking off stage thinking, "Hey, that went well--maybe we'll get an interview!"--then Paul whispered something to Sam, who nodded, and they called us back.
>"Okay guys. Wait, wait, come back! Come back for a second. You didn't realize that, but that was your Y Combinator interview. You're in the next batch."
It's worth watching the video for the founders' entire interview.
>With all the chaos trying to keep the server up and the bugs down, we slept little and prepared for the next day's Startup School even less. We had been tapped for on-stage Y Combinator office hours with Paul Graham and Sam Altman. We watched a video of previous on-stage YC office hours and concluded that "office hours" really meant "eight minutes of two of the smartest startup guys in the world demolishing your idea in front of 1700 entrepreneurs and a live video stream".
>Fortunately for us, they liked our startup and were much nicer than we expected. In fact, as we were walking off stage thinking, "Hey, that went well--maybe we'll get an interview!"--then Paul whispered something to Sam, who nodded, and they called us back.
>"Okay guys. Wait, wait, come back! Come back for a second. You didn't realize that, but that was your Y Combinator interview. You're in the next batch."
It's worth watching the video for the founders' entire interview.
Edit: Added the quote.
[1] https://codecombat.com/
[2] http://blog.codecombat.com/codecombat-in-y-combinator