No longer hiding behind a little yellow smiley face, the famed Jared Lynch Smith, also known as El Carnicero de Canciones, or The Butcher of Songs, poses with his son. View Slideshow 
Reader's advisory: Wired News has been unable to confirm some sources for a number of stories written by this author. If you have any information about sources cited in this article, please send an e-mail to sourceinfo[AT]wired.com.
NEW YORK - For seven years the earnest little face has appeared on many Mac desktops, blithely lip-synching a vocal track remarkable for its endearing combination of gusto and absolute tone-deafness.
The overwrought yelps of a washed-up cabaret singer or the yowling of a cat getting ready to cough up a hairball are melodic in comparison to the vocal stylings of Jared: Butcher of Song.
"Of course if it wasn't so awful, we wouldn't love it so much," said Nick Graves, an advertising director on hand for the MacWorld CreativePro Expo this week. "Jared is the computerized version of velvet Elvis paintings, tacky tourist souvenirs, lava lamps, polyester shirts from the '70s and mullet haircuts."
Jared is one of a handful of free toys offered to Mac users by Freeverse, a software company that primarily churns out Mac games.
Owned by brothers Colin and Ian Lynch Smith, Freeverse is known for taking simple games like solitaire and jazzing them up with additions like combustible chimps, singing gorillas, a grumbling Bill Gates and flying bagels.
The company got its start in 1992 when Ian graduated from college and coded a card game program while avoiding a job search.
"We all come from liberal arts rather than engineering backgrounds, and I think that lends our games a certain sensibility; we're geeks, but we're arty geeks," said Colin.
Hearts Deluxe was released as shareware and soon after, Ian started getting some checks in the mail. The not-very-enthusiastic job hunting completely ceased and Freeverse was born.
Freeverse programmers have devoted years to fine-tuning the company's renditions of basic computer card games, but the company's most famous and beloved product, Jared, was just a lucky accident. On a fateful day seven years ago, Ian and Colin's brother, the real Jared, had just gotten back from Central America where he had been working at an orphanage.
"He was in our office with his guitar, singing in his uniquely bad voice," Smith recalled. "He knows he sucks, he just doesn't care and that gives him this earnest, pathetic quality that's, well, charming.
"We captured his impromptu performance on the built-in microphone on the Mac, Ian wrote the Jared app around it, I wrote some text, and we laughed, uploaded it, and forgot about it. We had no idea at the time what an hour of effort had produced."
Jared has since spun off several applications, including a holiday choir of multiple little yellow faces happily howling Christmas carols, and another that butchers MP3 files of the user's choice when the Sing, Jared, Sing! button is clicked.
Freeverse, long a Mac-only company, recently ported a few of its other games over to Windows. And its latest titles, Burning Monkey Solitaire 3 and Solace, a strategy game, were developed for both platforms.
"We're not averse to trying new platforms or new markets, but our heart is with the Mac," Smith said.
The company's booth at this year's MacWorld Expo was crowded with interesting Mac games, most priced under $20, and the company was offering $5 off each title, as a special show promotion.
Smith said that catering primarily to Mac users hasn't led to amazing wealth, but the company isn't teetering on the brink of bankruptcy either.
"Actually," Smith said, "there are a lot of advantages to being a big fish in a damp sponge."
