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人物专访:ThinkFun公司CEO谈益智类游戏发展前景

发布时间:2011-01-30 06:00:10 Tags:,,,

物理益智游戏发行商ThinkFun公司,于去年成功发布了iPhone益智游戏《Rush Hour》。进入2011年,该公司在1月20日发布了新款逻辑益智游戏《Solitaire Chess》,并计划在2月中旬发布第三款益智游戏《Chocolate Fix》。

据游戏邦了解,ThinkFun创始人为里奇夫妇,该公司CEO比尔•里奇(Bill Ritchie)进入这一行业已有25年之久,曾推出的头脑风暴棋类玩具在60多个国家均有销售,近年来由于iPhone平台的发展,ThinkFun公司也开始发行数字益智游戏。比尔•里奇在下文的访谈中讲述了ThinkFun的由来,以及该公司的一些早期数字游戏产品。

ipad-games-rushhour

ipad-games-rushhour

问:ThinkFun公司是哪一年成立的?

1985年。

问:是什么机缘促使您成立自己的游戏公司?

当时我和新婚妻子安德莉娅(Andrea)都在房地产行业工作,我们都不满意当时的人生规划,而且我们任职的公司还从事一些违法行为。

我们都想创立自己的公司,当自己的老板,这种欲望强烈地刺激着我们(当时我们都是29岁)。

我们为什么要选择益智游戏行业呢?我父亲是贝尔实验室的工程师,而年长我13岁的哥哥丹尼斯(Dennis)也是贝尔实验室的电脑科学家。我很小便接触各种益智游戏和智力开发玩具。我父亲的好友Bill Keister是个创意天才,在二进制编码的基础上开发了多款力学物理游戏,我是从小玩这些游戏长大的。

我得先介绍一下这些人的背景,Bill Keister是在1930年左右加入贝尔实验室的,经常有人向他请教关于布尔代数的问题,克劳德•艾尔伍德•香农(游戏邦注:Claude Elwood Shannon,美国数学家、信息论的创始人)那时候才刚进入贝尔实验室。Bill Keister在1931年编写完成了井字游戏程序(Tic Tac Toe)……那实在是太棒了。

大战之后,贝尔实验室将这些代码与一个匣子相连接,然后拿来玩游戏,并在全国各地展示电脑中的小鸡在玩井字游戏。我哥后来因发明了C语言而一举成名,然后就是肯•汤普逊(Ken Thompson),他创建了Unix(在60年代我还是个小孩的时候,我经常在我哥的办公室玩《Space War》这款游戏)。

因此在创建公司之初,我就已经意识到这世上还有许许多多的天才,他们可以想出非常多极其益智的点子,但却还没有一家专门的公司开发力学物理游戏。

我也正是因为这个领悟,发现了这个市场缺口,并意识到我们有可能成为这一行的先驱。(另一个机缘巧合则出现在1985年2月4日那天。当时我妻子安德莉娅辞职了,而我也在同一时间被公司炒了,所以我们迫切希望开始自己的事业。)

问:ThinkFun刚开始是一家夫妻合创企业,那么现在的情况又是如何呢?夫妻一起创业会遇到什么挑战和收获吗?

夫妻共同创业确实是一件充满挑战的事情。它的坏处在于,我们二人都要为了生计疲于奔命,承受巨大的压力。

好处则是我们两个人刚好擅长不同的领域,我们在共同奋斗中可以彼此依靠,分享共同的理想和价值观。熬过了20多年,我们的担子终于开始轻减了。

问:据我所知,贵公司最初命名为Binary Arts,和Electronic Arts有些相似。当时为什么选择这个名字?后来为什么改名为ThinkFun呢?

我第一次听到有人认为我们的原名与Electronic Arts很相似……我们是在1984年取了这个名字,比EA晚两年,但当时我们都还没有听说Electronic Arts。

我前面提到了Keister叔叔,他的益智游戏一般都基于二进制算法,我们希望在此基础上对游戏进行重新设计和美化处理。因此,当初的公司命名就是二进制(Binary)与艺术(Arts)这两者的合体。在许多年中都有人告诉我这个名字听起来更像是电脑咨询公司而不是玩具公司。

在1994年的MIT 企业论坛上,我发表了一番演讲,描述了公司的各种美好未来。但是在最后,观众提出的问题却是“名字太糟!改名吧。”所以我们就花了相当长时间考虑公司新名称。最后终于在2004年,决定重命名为ThinkFun。

问:你们早期可曾涉足视频游戏市场,iPhone游戏《Rush Hour》是贵公司进入数字游戏市场的首个作品吗?

是的,我们原先有涉足视频游戏市场。我们在1995年发布了Puzzle.com,1996年发布用户目录网站www.webgames.com,1997年有一个年轻的技术人员找上门,将我们网站作为微软OutLook的测试网站,同一年我们公司被微软选为“年度最佳小企业”(Small Business of the Year),他们还为我们制作了一个视频纪录片。

1998年,我们差点和伯克利系统(Berkeley System)签署了《Rush Hour》光盘版的合作协议,但这一项目最后由于该公司被Vivendi收购而宣告破产。

后来我们又开发了几款游戏,并希望以此赶上互联网热潮。但问题是我们无法突破技术难关,许多公司职员纷纷离职寻找更好的工作机会。市场形势十分混乱,而我们又不愿意在有可能破产的情况下寻求风险投资。

2000年初,我们与诺基亚签约合作,将《Rush Hour》植入该品牌手机,但这个项目也仅运营了短短数月。对ThinkFun这样的传统游戏公司而言,进军视频游戏市场十分艰难,因为这一行的文化理念,经营模式和营销手段都十分不同。

在之后很长的一段时间中,我始终坚信随着市场的发展日趋成熟,ThinkFun这样的公司最终总有可能进入在线游戏领域。而后来苹果iPhone 、App Store的发布又为广大游戏开发商打开了另一扇市场大门。

问:哇!原来ThinkFun确实很早就进入了网络游戏行业。那么,现在您对Puzzle.com和website.com的未来发展有何规划? ThinkFun将来会采取什么不同的数字游戏发展策略吗?

我们的确一直在关注网络行业的发展。告诉你一个题外话……在90年代初,我参与了“青年企业家组织(Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization)”。我组织了第一场网络会议,并创办了一家小公司,从Kauffman基金会获得了7万美元的资助,成功创建了YEO网站。

但可笑的是,当时我为YEO注册了网站ypo.org。然而有一天,我的注册所有权居然被神奇地删除了。在我毫不知情的情况下,YPO(Young Presidents Organization)成为了ypo.org的注册人。

讲到puzzles.com和Webgames.com,就让我们把故事回到我参加MIT企业家论坛的那年。前面说过,Binary Arts并不是个适合游戏公司的好名字,很多有品牌意识的人都充分认识到了这一点。1994年春,我加入了Ted Leonsis的商业集团,而突然有一天他宣布将把Redgate Communications出售给AOL(美国在线服务公司),同时自己也加入了AOL集团。他可真是个传奇人物。

当时他让我们提问,我便迫切地问了他关于益智游戏进军网络的建议。他问,“你的公司叫什么?”“Binary Arts”。他认为这个名字叫不响,并告诉我“如果不能树立良好的品牌,那么你的公司在互联网上将无法获得更好的发展。”正是因为这件事,我深刻地意识到有必要在品牌URL的基础上,采用更广泛的网络发展策略。其中Puzzle.com是我们的首选,而另一个朋友则提出了webgames.com这个建议。

在1995年2月,我们发布了Pizzle.com;1996年发布了Webgames.com。刚开始我们计划将Puzzle.com塑造成一个严肃,非商业性质的网站,为玩家提供更多机会接触高品质益智游戏,学习益智游戏,并与其他关于思考方式,开发智力的科学博物院或社交网站进行链接。

而针对更喜欢商业经验的访问者,他们将被导向webgames.com。在商业性更强的webgames.com网站中,玩家可以单人或组团进行益智游戏比赛。对于webgames.com,我们更希望将其打造成一个横跨网站和玩具市场的知名品牌。

在1998年,我们发布了《Rush Hour》和《Hoppers》游戏的自定义版本(custom version),又将它们分别命名为Traffic Jam Logic Puzzle和Top Dog Peg Solitaire Game,以斗牛犬作为品牌形象,摒弃了原来使用的青蛙形象。但用户似乎尚未能接受这一方式,因此最终不了了之。

同年,我们发布了webgames.com网站并开发了一个电子商务系统以便于在网络上销售游戏产品。我们筹划了一场促销宣传活动:参与者可以使用“mad-lib”模板给自己的父母亲人写一封有趣的信,要求他们为玩家购买一款游戏。

当时,我们彩印了7万5000份webgames.com产品目录,并捆绑成册以便赶在假期发放给用户,但后来却发现公司资金不足无法承担邮费,最终该活动不了了之。

但直到现在我还是很喜欢这个活动创意,只不过这种想法还是太超前了。

此后,Puzzle.com一直稳定经营,而webgames.com则一直被我们封存至今没有恢复运营。

我很高兴掌握了这两个标志性URL域名,我认为这两个网站必然有发展前景。但与90年代时为加强自身品牌(Binary Arts)而寻求网络知名度不同,我认为现在的webgames.com应该有自己的发展策略。webgames.com要是出击市场一定得大获成功才行。但在这之前,我们得先启动ThinkFun 的在线游戏和应用项目。

unblock me

unblock me

问:听闻贵公司的《Rush Hour》及早期iPhone游戏《Unblock Me》都曾陷入法律纠纷。您能讲一下事情的原委吗?

《Rush Hour》的事件是……在2000年中期,我们的《Rush Hour》手机应用与一家大型媒介公司就应用许可问题发生了纠纷。该公司不打算继续开发这个项目,但又掌握着相关权利不肯放手。虽然我们后来收回了游戏版权,但还是迟了一不,App Store中已经不乏各种《Rush Hour》仿制游戏了。

当然这类事件并不稀奇,我们的实物益智玩具或数码产品多年来都遇到了不少仿制品问题。我们通常采取“应战”策略。新奇的是苹果所打造的App Store居然能够吸引许多开发商争先花费大力气开发不同的仿制产品。

之后则是Unblock Me事件。仿制品游戏的开发商同意将游戏从App Store撤下,他们也的确在三周内信守诺言,但不久后仿制品游戏又重新上架了。

问题是这家游戏开发公司位于海外,因此我们很难付诸法律手段。这家公司的做法侵犯了我们的知识产权,我们虽然很不痛快,但又很为难,因为仿制《Rush Hour》的公司远远不止一家。

问:是否会担心游戏仿制品会败坏公司的品牌形象及知识产权?

我们当然很担心这个问题,我们时刻监测市场,一旦发现任何开发商仿制我们的游戏产品,我们会立刻诉诸法律行动。

与此同时,我们意识到游戏品质的重要性。我们的游戏一定要优于其他仿制产品,我们要投入更多精力维护品牌形象,不会轻易被山寨和盗版打倒。

问:《Rush Hour》是否帮助贵公司成功创造了进军iPhone平台的机会?鉴于目前贵公司正筹备在该平台发布另两款游戏,我们可以说ThinkFun的发展前景十分可观,是吗?

《Rush Hour》游戏应用发布的第一年取得了不错的成绩,迄今为止下载次数约达100万次,另外玩家们对该款游戏的评价也都十分不错。现在《Rush Hour》已经增加了Game Center功能,我们还推出了广告赞助的免费版游戏。我们很高兴现在市面上有三款我们公司的游戏应用,并通过这些游戏进行交叉推广。

问:为什么选择《Solitaire Chess》和《Chocolate Fix》作为下一批iPhone游戏?是单纯挑选最畅销的两款物理游戏呢,还是经过分析认为这两款游戏的设计适于发展iPhone版本?

我们认为《Solitaire Chess》和《Chocolate Fix》两款游戏可以在iPhone平台良好运行,同时又是我们公司的畅销产品,因此选择了该两款游戏。

此外,我们认为ThinkFun的游戏不仅是种休闲娱乐,同时有益于帮助人们锻炼思考能力。玩家可以通过《Rush Hour》、《Solitaire Chess》和《Chocolate Fix》体会益智游戏的魅力。

另外,我们即将发布一款侧重数字技巧的新游戏《MathDice》,相信这四款游戏将成为思维技巧游戏的黄金组合。

问:《Rush Hour》、《Solitaire Chess》,和《Chocolate Fix》三款游戏的原创者是谁呢?

《Rush Hour》的原创开发者是日本知名的益智游戏开发者Nob Yoshigahara,现已离世。《Solitaire Chess》的开发者是芬兰益智游戏创造者Vesa Timonen.,《Chocolate Fix》是早期多款游戏的结合,由Mark Engelberg 开发。

问:能否与我们分享下这几款游戏背后的故事?

1996年我们发布了《Rush Hour》,该游戏是立刻引起了市场关注,并获得许多重要奖项。该款游戏在全球都取得了不错的销量成绩。《Solitaire Chess》则在2010年夏天开始发售,同样销量不俗。

《Chocolate Fix》则是因为我想发行一款简单的逻辑推理游戏,但游戏开发者却不赞同我的想法,于是我只能咨询顾问自己开发了一款游戏。

我们开发的首个版本名为《DridWorks》,然而由于设定了过多游戏规则,因此推出后市场反映平平。之后我们在游戏中采用糖果主题,并简化了游戏规则。在2008年推出了《Chocolate Fix》,这一版本获得了市场的好评。

问:现在ThinkFun公司在游戏行业中已经取得了一定的成绩,而且在更早之前,当很多开发商还致力于CD-ROM的同时便预见了网络游戏,全屏游戏和早期3D技术。最后一个问题是ThinkFun在未来近几年有何发展计划?您认为游戏产业在未来5到10年将有何发展?

首先,社会将更快速地采用新科技成果,未来人们将更为快捷地进行各种活动。现在群体视屏聊天,个人广播渠道,机器人和传感器等各种技术都在研发之中。我相信未来人们将更快速地将这些技术成果投入使用。

在一年前,市场上并没有任何在技术上实现重大突破的移动设备,但iPad的问世为带来了一个新的转折点。

我认为iPad的问世是一个创造性的突破……它读懂了我们心里所想的东西。苹果对未来市场和旗下产品的发展有很强的预见性。

苹果通过iPad节省了人们阅读说明书的时间和精力,iPad的操作学习过程极富体验性,用户可以通过短视频学到新东西,操作很快上手,整个过程中没有任何干扰性的语言夹杂其中,这种指导方式非常特别。

事实上,iPad这一构想很早以前便有人提出。在1995年的TED会议上,John Warnock(Adobe董事长兼首席执行官)向Alberto Vitale(Random House的董事长兼首席执行官)提到了“适于睡前阅读的杂志大小电子平板设备”这样的产品可能有在一年半以内出现在市场上。当时,微软的Nathan Myrvold和Sun公司的John Gage都在座,而且都点头表示赞同。

但Warnock当时并非开玩笑,他在暗示Adobe公司正在开发类似的产品,Vitale也把他的话当真了。然而原本预言在18个月内问世的产品,最终历时15年才亮相。

其次,科技的发展将创造更丰富、更全面的网络连接和共享体验,换句话说,即社交网站的未来发展。

在未来几年,社交领域将掀起激烈的竞争,会有越来越我的玩家创建自己的好友圈,创建新工具等。“游戏一体化”和其他的激励技能也将变得更加复杂和普遍。

第三,提供个性化或高级内容的私人网络群体影响力将日益扩大。现在苹果的iTunes和iPad就正在引领这一趋势。Time等大型发行商也纷纷涌入iPad市场。所有社交网站及内容媒介经营者都有望从中赚到钱。

面对儿童市场,儿童在线隐私保护法(COPPA)将施加更多影响力。网络内容开发商、社交设计者、网站经营者的级别和专业性也将呈现更明显的分化,网站经营和管理技术的发展,将为科技盲用户创造融入这一社区的快捷方式,这些网站之间的竞争结果取决于谁更具开放性、谁的用户隐私管理方式更先进。

第四,科技的快速发展,将日益扩大和加深隔代人之间的数字鸿沟,并因此造成社交压力。举个例子,我们的教育体系已经落后了,未来还将面临更多压力。唯一的一线希望就是,压力有可能激发更多的创新解决方案。

如何运用科技发展为儿童提供更好的教育是全社会共同关注的问题。这不仅仅是学校的问题,所有人都可以加入其中,并思考如何使用新科技改善教育。

最后,你问到了ThinkFun近期的发展目标?这是一个很好的问题。我认为现在已经到了我们成为新媒介创新者的时刻。我是这么希望的——我们已经在这方面投入了大量精力,而且对未来发展已经有很好的构思了。

首先,我们是一家具有使命感的公司。我们认为市场上需要更好的儿童思维锻炼方式,以帮助他们面对21世界的挑战,因此我们会投身其中。现在我们的游戏产品已经可以帮助玩家锻炼思维技巧。但我们认为如果采用正确的方式和正确的程序,我们的游戏可以教导玩家处理重大问题的思考方式。

现在我们已经开始进行这方面试验。去年春天,我们试着发布了一个网络社区“ThinkFun BrainLab”。支持玩家可以体验,《Rush Hour》游戏赚取积分,也可以参加每周的Rush Hour竞赛,提供了积分排行榜的功能,玩家还可以选择并装饰自己的虚拟形象。

这个项目效果不错,在它运行的4周内,我们仅邀请了500名学生,却有2200人注册,体验Rush Hour益智游戏的人次超过了9万。之后由于服务器无法支持流量,我们只好搬到另一个更广阔的网络空间。因此我们相信,益智游戏拥有很大的市场发展空间。

在之前的问题中,我提到了目前ThinkFunde公司的四款主要益智游戏产品。未来的ThinkFun BrainLab也将包含这四款游戏,同时我们会重新设计游戏模式和奖励系统.

在过去的5年中,我们投入了大量精力为每款益智游戏中的每个挑战建立庞大的数据库。因此,我们可以不断地发布新挑战,不断地提供新颖的“每日一战”。

同时我们必须确保我们的所作所为是具有真实效用的。我们曾与加州大学伯克利分校Bunge Cognitive心理实验室的Silvia Bunge教授展开合作。Silvia Bunge教授在做脑部研究,希望得到“推理能力是否能通过锻炼提升”的答案,他请求我们开发有关“锻炼”的内容,作为他的调查研究工具。

但在植入积分排行榜后,我们发现为科研项目重新创建一个社交网站很困难。不过,现在已经有一些寻找内容的新兴社交网站与我们进行了联系。但正如我上面所说,现在各种事物发展迅速,因此我们有必要对目标进行反思,构想一个利于未来发展的计划。

我们期望ThinkFun未来能在新兴媒介领域也中占有一席之地。现在的市场发展正如我们预期,正适合我们这种小型企业的发展。我们对未来充满了希望,谢谢大家给我这个机会分享这些看法。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,转载请注明来源:游戏邦)

[Veteran physical puzzle game publisher ThinkFun (Rush Hour) has found its way into the digital games space thanks to the App Store, and here its co-founder Bill Ritchie discusses the travails of that space, as well as the future potential of technology.]

Just before the New Year I got the opportunity to eat some great chili and enjoy some fantastic discussion at Hard Times in Alexandria, VA with the CEO of ThinkFun, Bill Ritchie, who’s been distributing physical puzzle games – including the hit car-juggling title Rush Hour – for over 25 years.

ThinkFun’s mind-bending board games already inhabit brick and mortar stores in over 60 countries. Now, ThinkFun is joining the digital revolution thanks to the iPhone among other new age platforms.

Last year they successfully released Rush Hour for the iPhone and January 20th marks the release of their new Solitaire Chess logic puzzle. They’ll introduce a third puzzle, Chocolate Fix, in mid-February. In this interview, Bill Ritchie discusses the beginnings of ThinkFun, some early digital dabbling, and ThinkFun’s newest additions to the App Store.

What year did you start ThinkFun?

Bill Ritchie: We started ThinkFun in 1985.

What was the impetus to begin your own business making games? Was an epiphany involved?

BR: My wife (just married) Andrea and I were both working in the real estate tax shelter syndication industry. We really didn’t like the direction our lives were taking us, and the company we worked for was starting to do illegal things.

We both wanted to be entrepreneurial and to start/own our own company, so there was a powerful incentive for us at that time (we were both 29) to invent the next stage of our lives.

Why did we choose puzzles? My dad was a Bell Labs engineer, my older brother Dennis (13 years older than me) eventually became a Bell Labs computer scientist, and so as a young kid I was exposed to the world of puzzles and science toys and recreational mathematics. And my dad’s best friend at the labs, Bill Keister, was a creative genius who among other things invented several mechanical puzzles based on binary code, which I played with as a little kid.

It’s worth it to describe a little more about these folks. Bill Keister started at Bell Labs in the 1930s, and it was he who was asked to help explain the utility of Boolean Algebra, Claude Shannon had just joined the Labs at that time. To do this, he wrote a Tic Tac Toe program, accomplished in 1937… pretty cool!

After the war the Labs used the code to wire up a box that could actually play the game, and toured it around the country featuring the computer playing a chicken at Tic Tac Toe. And my brother went on to fame, he created C and, along with Ken Thompson, Unix. (I played Space War as a kid in the 1960s at Dennis’s office).

So… in starting our company, I was generally aware that there was a whole community of inventive geniuses out in the world creating very clever puzzle ideas, but not one company that was dedicated to producing mechanical puzzles.

Our epiphany, if you could call it that, was that there was a void in the market, that we could be the world leader in this field. (The other epiphany we experienced was on February 4th, 1985, when Andrea quit her job and I was being fired from mine simultaneously in a separate room. We weren’t expecting to launch so quickly!) We have an extended version of our story on our website.

ThinkFun has been a husband and wife team effort from the beginning. What has that been like? What were the challenges and benefits?

BR: Working together as a husband and wife team is challenging, absolutely. The bad news is that in order to survive, we both had to be very strong willed and committed, and this is a recipe for stress.

The good news is that, since we are good at different things, we each knew we always had the other’s back, we always shared the same vision and values. After 20 years it started getting easier!

The original name of your company (Binary Arts) sounds very similar to Electronic Arts. Why did you choose that name and what caused the switch to “ThinkFun”?

BR: It’s funny that Binary Arts sounds like Electronic Arts… we came up with the name in 1984, two years after them, but never heard of this company.

The puzzles from Mr. Keister were all based on binary arithmetic, and we wanted to add design and beauty to the engineering of them, so we just combined words that fit. For many years people told us that this was a lousy name, that we sounded like a computer consultant and not a toy company.

Specifically, in 1994 I presented our company at the MIT Enterprise Forum… I’m not sure if they still do this, back then every month they would bring in an industry expert speaker and then have an entrepreneur give a 20 minute presentation about their company plan, after which the audience gets to say whatever they want and the presenter has to sit back and just listen.

I gave a big vision presentation of where the future was going, all kinds of stuff, and at the end the biggest comment I got back was “Lose the name!” It took us a long time to figure out a better name, and a plan for what to do once we had a better name… this came in 2004. ThinkFun works as our name, people get what we stand for now.

Did you dabble in the early video game market or was Rush Hour for the iPhone your first entry into the digital games market?

BR: Yes we dabbled in the early video game market. In 1995 we launched puzzles.com. In 1996 we launched a consumer catalog tied to our internet website www.webgames.com. In 1997 we had a hot young technology kid who got us as a beta site for Microsoft Outlook. That year we were selected as Microsoft’s Small Business of the Year, and they made a video documentary about Binary Arts.

In 1998 we almost did a licensing deal with Berkeley Systems for a CD-ROM version of Rush Hour, but that crashed when they got bought by Vivendi.

We programmed several games and made a run to be a part of the dot-com craze, the problem was that the technology was hard, employees kept leaving for sexier job offers, and the market got really irrational and we weren’t willing to raise millions from VCs with the possibility that we would crash and burn.

In the early 2000′s, we struck a deal with Nokia to try to build our Rush Hour to be installed on their phones, worked on this for months before it went away. It has been a difficult thing for a traditional company such as ThinkFun to break into the video [game] market; cultures are different, business models and distribution are different, etc.

For a long time I have known that the market would evolve to support companies like ThinkFun getting into online games; Apple finally cracked the code and opened up opportunity when they launched the iPhone with the App Store.

Wow, so in all reality ThinkFun was early to the conceptual forefront of the game industry, as we know it today on the web. Do you plan on further development for Puzzles.com and WebGames.com or do you see ThinkFun pursuing a different digital strategy in the future?

BR: We were active at the start of the web, it’s true. Let me give you one fun side story… In the early 1990s I was active in the Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization, I organized their first internet committee and started a side company that got a $70,000 grant from the Kauffman Foundation to build the YEO website, which we successfully did.

As a practical joke, I had YEO register the website ypo.org (the Young Presidents Organization being a much larger and more powerful organization, who was slow to pick up on the web.) Mysteriously one day, our ownership of the registration was removed and YPO became the registered owners, without us giving permission or even being informed.

The story of puzzles.com and webgames.com goes back to my presentation at the MIT Enterprise Forum and other events this same year. As I described, Binary Arts was just not a good name for a game company, people who know their brands feel strongly about this. In Spring 1994, Ted Leonsis presented to a business group I was part of, the day he sold Redgate Communications to AOL and joined that organization. This was a very powerful experience. Leonsis is a force of nature.

At the end, he gave us a chance to ask questions, and I eagerly asked him for advice on a strategy for how a puzzle company could attack the web and make an impact. “What’s your company name?”, he asked me… “Binary Arts”. “You’re toast,” he responded. “You’ll never get anywhere on the internet if you don’t start with a good brand.” Directly because of this, I knew that I needed to develop a broad online strategy, based on strong brand URLs, and fast. Puzzles.com was an obvious first choice; a smart friend suggested webgames.com.

Puzzles.com launched in February 1995, and Webgames.com launched in 1996. Our original idea was that puzzles.com would be a serious, non-commercial site dedicated to giving players an opportunity to play the best puzzles and learn about puzzling, linking to other sites dedicated to thinking and puzzling such as science museums and others… early social networking, I suppose.

For visitors who wanted a glitzier more commercial experience, they would be funneled over to webgames.com, a louder and more commercial site that would develop competition leagues and teams and have players competing against each other and be more promotional. For webgames.com, our idea was to create a new brand that would both be a website destination and also be a mass market toy brand.

In 1998 we launched custom versions of our Rush Hour and Hoppers games, giving them new names and a new brand… Traffic Jam Logic Puzzle by webgames.com and Top Dog Peg Solitaire Game (by webgames.com) featuring bulldogs rather than frogs… that we tried to sell into Toys R Us and Target.

(We also planned a custom version of Peg Solitaire to be sold only on the webgames.com website… a version of Hoppers where the same game piece was always left last on the board after the others had been removed. With this version, the Hero Frog was a caricature of Bill Gates and the other frogs would be various dot-com executives like Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs.)

Alas, none of our customers was ready for this and this initiative faded.

That same year we launched webgames.com and custom built an ecommerce system into it to sell our games online. We developed a promotion, which we could never get to work, so that visitors could use a “mad-libs” style template to compose funny letters to their parents or loved ones asking them to purchase a specific game for them.

We also printed 75,000 Webgames.com consumer catalogs, in color, that we paid to have bundled with and sent out just in time for the holidays, the inaugural issue of Smart Kid magazine, a trendy publication targeted to our perfect parents. That company ran out of money with everything at the mail house and ready to go, they couldn’t pay for the postage and everything got destroyed.

I still love this idea, but it was way too early.

Puzzles.com has been steadily chugging along, managed by a Ukrainian puzzle family, since the height of the dot-com craze. We put webgames.com in mothballs at that time and have not relaunched.

So… am I excited about these two iconic URL names and do I think there is a future for them? Yes, of course absolutely. Unlike the 1990′s when I was looking for the web brands to strengthen our company brand (Binary Arts), now I think that webgames.com will need to be launched with its own strategy… and it will need to launch big for it to be worth anything. However, before getting to this, we need to launch our new initiatives for our ThinkFun online and App strategy.

You recently ran into a bit of a legal issue with Rush Hour and the early iPhone game Unblock Me. Can you fill in the details of this matter?

BR: In terms of Rush Hour and legal issues… In the mid-2000′s we entered into a disadvantageous license for the Rush Hour mobile app with a large media company, who decided not to move forward with the project themselves but held on to the rights through the end of the contract term. By the time we got the rights back, the iPhone had hit and there were a number of Rush Hour knockoffs already on the App store.

In one sense, this was not news; we have been fighting physical versions as well as digital knockoffs for many years, generally adopting a “pick your battles” strategy. What was new is that Apple had created a market where games were worth something to the developer, so there was a lot of effort and energy by different people to create different knockoff versions.

We did go after Unblock Me. The developer agreed to take their game off the App Store and did so for three weeks, but then put it back on.

The problem we face is that it is an offshore company who developed that game, which makes it much more difficult to pursue legal action. As a general matter, we are unhappy with Unblock Me and condemn them as rip off artists of our intellectual property, but they are by no means the only people who have knocked off Rush Hour.

Are you concerned about digital knockoffs eroding your brand or intellectual property rights?

BR: Of course we are concerned about digital knockoffs eroding our property rights, we do monitor this and we will sue developers who post knockoff versions of any of our games.

However, we also recognize that our job needs to be to develop digital versions of our games to be the best that they can be, better than the knockoffs, and that we need to do a better job of projecting our brand and telling our story. We will succeed not by stamping out the cheats and knock off artists, but rather by convincing people that they want to go with authentic ThinkFun games.

Was Rush Hour on the iPhone a success for your company? Considering the fact that ThinkFun is releasing two new titles for the platform it seems obvious that it must have been. Perhaps it was merely promising, though?

BR: Rush Hour has been a success its first year. We are closing in now on a million Rush Hour App downloads and players give it rave reviews. Rush Hour is now on the Game Center and we are delivering ads with Rush Hour Free, so we keep progressing it and learning from it. We are very excited about the idea of having three Apps in the market, working on how to cross promote one game through the others.

What made you choose Solitaire Chess and Chocolate Fix for your next wave of iPhone games? Was it simply a matter of choosing your best selling physical games to move into the digital space or did you analyze what would work well for the platform in a design sense?

BR: Solitaire Chess and Chocolate Fix are games that will work well on the iPhone interface and are strong sellers for us; these considerations helped make these games obvious choices.

But more than this, we at ThinkFun believe that our games are more than just casual entertainment. We believe that (with appropriate further work) that they can be used to help people build thinking skills. Together, the three games Rush Hour, Solitaire Chess, and Chocolate Fix provide a great platform for us to push this idea forward.

We have one more game coming soon – MathDice, which focuses on number skills – and the four of these games together will be the basis for a killer suite of Thinking Skill games. There are many more on the horizon, but we believe that these four combine the most fun combined with the clearest articulation of thinking skills.

Who designed the original Rush Hour, Solitaire Chess, and Chocolate Fix?

BR: Rush Hour was invented by the famous, now deceased, Japanese puzzle inventor Nob Yoshigahara. Solitaire Chess was invented by the Finnish puzzle inventor Vesa Timonen. Chocolate Fix was an adaption of several earlier games; the rules were developed by Mark Engelberg.

What was the story behind each of these titles?

BR: We brought Rush Hour to market in 1996, it caused an immediate sensation and won many major toy awards. It continues to sell strongly all around the world. Solitaire Chess is new to market in the summer of 2010, it is selling strongly and much success lies ahead.

Chocolate Fix started with my quest to find a good simple game based on logical deduction. I thought I had found one, but the game creator had different ideas than I did so I commissioned a consultant to develop a game for us.

The first version we came up with was called GridWorks, but we added too many rules and it was only a modest success. We changed the game to a candy theme and simplifying the rules, introducing Chocolate Fix in 2008, this version has been more successful.

This is all very exciting. It’s apparent to me that you’ve played a more significant role within game industry than most people realize and in fact to some extent you have been visionaries with pioneer efforts to get games on the web back when most developers were consumed with the CD-ROM, full motion video, and early 3D technology. So my final question is where do you see ThinkFun going in the immediate future and where do you see the industry going over the next five to 10 years?

BR: First, society’s experience of new technology is about to accelerate; we will be doing things more differently faster in the future, starting now. Things like group video chat, personal broadcast channels, wearable personal technology, robots and sensors everywhere, are on their way and adoption is going to be enthusiastic and fast.

The reason for this is that we have just passed an inflection point. Up until a year ago – I mark this with the arrival of the iPad – not enough infrastructure was in place to support radical breakthrough technology.

Incredible achievements in technology have been taking place, but much of the work has been in infrastructure building, in creating the technology groundwork and filling out the boundaries and in creating the social conditions of acceptance and receptivity so that accelerated change can take place. Now, things are ready to pop. Just wait — it is going to be wild.

I see that the iPad is ground zero of this change because it is so transformative… it is a mirrored window that can express anything we can think of. And Apple has a strong vision of the future and how they will create it.

The iPad is being used by Apple to move people away from having to read instructions, for example… iPad learning is designed to be experiential, users should be given a path directly into playing and offered short videos on how to learn new things, no disruptive words to get in the way. This is different.

The idea of the iPad has been around for a long time, by the way. In a panel discussion that produced one of the most dramatic moments of the 1995 TED conference, John Warnock (Chairman and CEO of Adobe) told Alberto Vitale (Chairman and CEO of Random House) that “an electronic tablet the same size as a magazine and just as comfortable for bedtime reading would be on the market” within a year and a half, while Nathan Myrvold (Microsoft) and John Gage (Sun) sat there and nodded approvingly.

Warnock wasn’t joking; he was hinting that it was in development at Adobe, Vitale took him very seriously. But… predicted in eighteen months, it actually took fifteen years to appear. Now that it’s here, though, there is a whole lot of room for growth.

Second, this acceleration in our experience of technology is going to mostly be about creating richer, more comprehensive experiences for people to be connected and share with others… In other words, around the further development of social networks.

In the next few years there will be intense competition around social networking as more and more players jump in to organize communities and explore social networking boundaries and build new tools. Gamification and other motivational techniques will become more sophisticated and more universal.

Third, to an increasing extent the internet is going to give way to private online communities that deliver custom or premium content. Apple is in the lead now with iTunes and the iPad, big publishers like Time are jumping to the iPad and off the web so they can start charging for online. Everybody who controls a social network or produces media is going to want to make money somehow.

In the children’s market, COPPA compliancy is going to have an accelerating effect. Tiers and specialties will develop, content developers working in networks with social designers and network hosts. Technology for hosting and managing communities will make it easier for non-technical people with fresh ideas to thrive in this environment, the battleground will be around how much will be open and how much under private community management.

Fourth, it is worth noting that the increased rate of change will widen and deepen the digital divide between generations, this will cause social stress. As one example, there will be more stress in our education system, which is behind already and is becoming increasingly more so in the future. The silver lining here is that stress can bring on creative new solutions.

There is a big social need to imagine how technology can better help to educate our children. If it’s not coming from the schools themselves, then it’s free territory for somebody else, using new rules and new imagination. It’s going to be an exciting time.

Finally, you asked where is ThinkFun going with this beyond our current endeavors? That’s a great question. I believe that it is time for us become new media innovators again. I want to achieve this… and we have already put in a lot of work and have a good idea of the direction we want to take.

To start, we are a mission-driven organization. We believe that society needs to do a better job of teaching thinking skills to our children and preparing them for the 21st century. And we believe we have a role to play in this. Our games get players to practice their thinking skills already. But, we believe that delivered in the right way in the right structured program, we can teach a method for critical thinking and problem solving using our games that can transfer across your whole life.

We have been experimenting with this already. Last Spring we beta-launched “ThinkFun BrainLab”, an online community where players played Rush Hour practice games for points and entered a weekly Rush Hour Tournament with interactive leaderboard and got to choose and decorate their own avatars.

It was really successful… The program ran four weeks, we invited 500 students, 2200 signed up and played more than 90,000 individual Rush Hour puzzles, at one point the traffic shut down our server and we had to move to larger space. So we know that there is an appetite for this kind of thing.

In my earlier response I described the four ThinkFun games that together promote thinking skills. We’re working now on updating Brain Lab program to include all these games and to redesign the play patterns and reward systems in the program itself.

We’ve spent a lot of research time the past five years to develop large databases of individual challenges for each puzzle, so we have the capacity to deliver continual streams of new challenges, we can keep game content varied and fresh if we decide to distribute “challenge of the day” style content into social network sites.

It’s very important to us that what we do is authentic, also. We’ve established a relationship with Dr. Silvia Bunge, head of the Bunge Cognitive Psych Lab at UC Berkeley, Silvia is doing brain research to address the question “Can Reasoning Ability be Improved With Training”, and has asked us to develop the “Training” part of what could become a formal research study.

We struggled with our leaderboard technology when we deployed a year ago, it’s hard to build a social networking site from scratch as an experimental research project. Now, though, we are being contacted by newly forming social network companies looking for content. As I described above, all this is happening so fast now that we need to take stock of our goals and objectives and make a plan that will move with the future.

Our plan is to create a clear ThinkFun presence in the new media world, no question. Everything is coming into focus as far as we are concerned, the time is almost just right for a niche company like us to jump in and make an impact. We are very excited about where all this is headed! Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about it.(source:gamasutra)


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