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A Southern Ontario grocery clerk has tied for top spot in an international video game design competition that has netted him $10,000 (U.S.) and a distribution contract with software giant Microsoft.

Yet, according to Dave Flook, the 34-year-old winner who hails from Burlington, Ont., not much has changed since last Monday, when he was notified that he had won the Dream-Build-Play game development contest - a challenge for amateur programmers to design a game for the Microsoft Xbox.

"I'm talking to a lot of [media] people now," Mr. Flook said in an interview yesterday.

"But other than that ... nothing has changed yet."

The 34-year-old is still working his regular shifts at a discount grocery store near his home, and has had to squeeze in his press obligations - including a rushed trip to Toronto to make a late-night TV appearance yesterday - during his spare time.

But Mr. Flook has good reason to believe he could be living the Silicon Valley life one day soon: He beat more than 200 amateur game designers with his entry - Blazing Birds, a two-player badminton game that looks like a modern version of Pong - that caught the attention of the contest judges for its originality.

The contest was to promote a new application called the XNA Game Studio Express - a product that allows a person to design a game for a video-game system, something that has traditionally been off limits to amateurs.

But for Mr. Flook, the chance to try something new was worth it, because for him, success has been a long time coming: Mr. Flook did some programming in high school and attended university for a short time, but decided school was not for him.

Since then, he said, he has kept at his high-tech hobbies - including electronic music composition - as best he could in his spare time, taking jobs "where I don't have to take any work home with me so I can focus."

But the people who saw his final product say it is the work of a talented individual who admits to having worked on "crazy schemes for many years."

Bill Wagner, who served as one of the contest judges, said Blazing Birds was like "a space-age Pong on steroids" and was remarkable for its creativity.