Why he mentioned it here, though, I have no idea.
To give Mr. Swift an idea of the magnitude of programmer salaries. My second job as a level designer paid me $30K a year.
I suppose that's what you get for working in a non-unionized industry. I don't know - maybe salaries (and the cost of living) is just really low in the US. In Denmark an entry-level programmer would get at least twice that. It would take EVEN FLAMEDUCK, GOD CODER THAT HE IS, a month to write a shareware game. That $24,000 just for the code.
A month? No way, only if I had to write it all from scratch. If all the basic stuff is there (sprite library, framework, etc.) it wouldn't take much more than a week, judging from your (somewhat ambiguous) description above.