Ron Dimant and Mark Cottam, friends and colleagues who were at the time members of the Dallas-based video game conglomerate Gathering of Developers, found themselves twirling their thumbs on a flight to MacWorld Expo in New York in 2001. Dimant, an Englishman with Israeli and Japanese roots who had founded MumboJumbo in January of that year, was particularly disappointed with the lack of in-flight entertainment. Being a self-professed gadget geek, Dimant pulled out his Palm Pilot and spent hours tapping away at the PDA’s tiny screen, playing game after game of Bejeweled.
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| SHOOT TO THRILL: MumboJumbo’s Ron Dimant (left) and Mark Cottam (right) take aim at the still-growing video game industry. |
“It was fun and challenging,” says Cottam, a laid-back Californian who understood Bejeweled’s allure but avoided its tractor-beam-like hold. “He was addicted.”
As chance would have it, the creators of Bejeweled were also present at the Expo, looking to license the Macintosh rights to the game. “We spent three days talking to them,” says Cottam, then COO of Moto1.net. “Bejeweled was outselling all our big games.”
On the return flight after the Expo was over, Dimant again brought out his Palm Pilot and killed time by sorting the colorful gems of Bejeweled. But this time was different. The stakes were raised. Dimant and Cottam had taken a diversion and made it their business. The two friends returned to Dallas with a business deal done that gave them the right to publish Bejeweled for Macintosh computers.
It turned out to be a stroke of genius: Bejeweled was the biggest thing since Tetris broke in the 1980s. The title was the first licensing hit of many to follow. After seeing the success of Bejeweled , the two friends licensed the next big hit, Super Collapse, which also exploded. “The potential was there for much bigger sales,” Cottam says. “We started licensing the rights to all the top casual games we could.”
The strategy was so successful that Cottam left his job to focus on casual games with Dimant at MumboJumbo. The company published the biggest casual games of 2002 and 2003, but Dimant and Cottam were ready to advance to the next level: game development. The programmers scored big when they came up with Luxor, one of the most downloaded games of all time. But what makes MumboJumbo unique isn’t the number of games it sells; it’s the kind of people it sells them to. Sure, MumboJumbo’s audience includes hard-to-impress gaming Gen Xers and easily bored commuters on their way to software Expos. But MumboJumbo’s biggest fan base is comprised of its least likely: soccer moms, who gobble up the casual games as fast as Pac-Man eats yellow dots.
The trick now is for MumboJumbo to keep the games simple and the gamers happy, no matter who they are.
Luxor, so called because it’s set in ancient egypt, involves a single-file burst of multicolored marbles rolling down a serpentine pipeline, intent on clogging the conduit. The player’s mission is to destroy the marbles before they reach the end of the pipe and enter your pyramid—put three like-colored marbles side by side and they disappear, with the possibility that more like-colored marbles will come together in the chain reaction. It’s easy to play—point and click—and it’s addictive. So addictive that MumboJumbo research indicates the average player spends 90 minutes a day obsessed with this task for months at a time. The game was released on gaming Web sites and Internet portals like MSN Games, where it quickly became a player favorite.
At the beginning, casual games had been an ad-supported medium—a banner ad next to the game screen. When the bottom fell out of the Internet boom, online advertising dried up and casual games were forced to find new avenues for making money. For example, the “trial” model became popular. Players could download an incomplete, free version of a game over the Web as a small file. When they reached the end, the game would unlock additional levels for a price. Like most savvy sellers of a habit-forming product, MumboJumbo gave players a taste of the game for free. After the customers were hooked, they had to pay to play. Luxor followed the trial model to a tee—not all the players spent the money to upgrade their trial version to the full game, but enough did to show the company that interest in the game was massive and devout.
Downloads weren’t the only revenue stream. As it turned out, bricks-and-mortal retail is alive and well, even for computer games. “We caught on to the retail market,” Dimant says.
Although the Internet can be seen as the ultimate distribution medium, with its marginal costs and gigantic audience, casual games were reaching people, like those aforementioned soccer moms, who were not at ease giving out a credit card number over the Web. In fact, only 1 percent of downloads of Luxor resulted in a sale, a number consistent with most casual games. MumboJumbo made a push to sell games in more conventional stores like Wal-Marts and Best Buys, and the push paid off.
“The sizzle is in the digital side,” Dimant says. “But retail is what built this company.” Luxor has sold 500,000 copies including paid downloads, but retail amounts to 75 percent of MumboJumbo’s business. By having in-store displays where the popular Luxor stood with other MumboJumbo games, customers familiar with the hit decided to try the other offerings as well.
The huge response to casual games is not surprising, according to Dr. Peter Raad, executive director of Guildhall at Southern Methodist University, a program for aspiring video game creators. “This wasn’t at the expense of what the video game industry already had,” he says. “[Casual games] aimed at a wider cross-section of society and broadened the marketplace.”
BY THE NUMBERS Video Games Hollywood Music |
The big players in video games, already a major entertainment industry (see sidebar), had ignored the majority of the population, which didn’t especially care for stealing cars and blasting demons with a many-buttoned controller. MumboJumbo embraced the non-gamer. “My mom,” adds Raad, “is a big fan of the MumboJumbo games.”
Industry analysis says the average consumer of casual games is, surprisingly, a 39-year-old female. It goes without saying that this runs almost completely counter to the average consumer of Grand Theft Auto. But this bit of statistics is misleading, according to Dimant. “The consumer is everyone,” he says. “The age range is 8 to 88.” But will casual games be a passing fad—the new hula hoop—or will they last? The answer may come down to the creativity with which they evolve.
Casual games are not yet big business. MumboJumbo and its competitors are sardines in a sea of Playstation and Xbox sharks. But, significantly, casual game companies feed from an ocean far bigger than has traditionally been chummed by video game publishers. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the biggest hit for the Playstation 2, has sold 13 million copies worldwide at $50, versus 500,000 at $20 for Luxor. But more than 50 million people have downloaded Luxor’s trial version.
At least some of the big players are kicking their way outside this box. Nintendo, a famously innovative company (they did, after all, see the potential for Tetris back in 1989 and put it in a handheld that people could play anywhere—tagline: “From Russia with fun!”), saw the chance to sidestep the console arms race and attract new players with a novel input method for its Wii console. The interactive system has been an unprecedented success, outselling Sony’s monstrously advanced Playstation 3 by a six-to-one margin.
Still, top video games can be incredibly expensive to make. A best-selling triple-A video game franchise, be it The Legend of Zelda or EA Sports’ Madden football game, can take a hundred or more people years to develop at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. Ken Harward, MumboJumbo’s Dallas studio general manager, knows from experience. He used to make those games at Ritual Entertainment, a company that was run by MumboJumbo’s Ron Dimant before he started the casual games publisher. (MumboJumbo’s office was on the floor above Ritual in a West End building.) The developers at Ritual would spend months pulling all-nighters, cranking out code for graphics-intensive action games that ran on turbocharged machines. “The longer projects felt like we were never going to finish,” Harward says.
A rough draft of a casual video game, on the other hand, can be put together over a weekend by a handful of programmers working out of a garage. That’s what Harward and his colleagues at Ritual would do to relax in between the brutal work of the big-production games (games with names like SiN, Heavy Metal: FAKK2, and 25 to Life). The “game jams,” as the team called these sessions, gave them the satisfaction of completing a fun game in a short period of time.
“The people at Ritual were downstairs, watching our success in reaching millions of people,” Cottam says. “They were tied up with the big publishers.”
Dimant was so impressed by the results of the game jams that MumboJumbo bought his old company in January of this year, with the purpose of creating more, higher-quality casual games.
A tour through the merged company’s two floors on North Lamar Street is telling. On the third floor, MumboJumbo’s digs, the environment is serious and sterile, open, the lighting bright and the furniture modernist. Workers enjoy coffee from a sophisticated, multi-tasking machine and drinks from a soda fountain. The second floor, where the ex-Ritual members work, is the sensory inverse: a dark, labyrinthine cove of brick lined with carved totem poles (a decorative nod to “Ritual,” where team members called themselves a tribe). Posters of the company’s releases line the walls, along with one of Julie Strain of late-night Cinemax fame, who modeled for the team’s Heavy Metal title. The only illumination is the glow of the coffee table–sized monitors on which artists and programmers manipulate the virtual world of their creation. Old desks are strewn with coffee mugs, cables, and scores of video game consoles used for testing. One shelf alone supports 15 Playstation 2s. Drinks, all caffeinated, are available from stacks of boxes in a room next to the stand-up Pac-Man and other old-school arcade games.
The employees at Ritual have been completely absorbed by MumboJumbo, and the merged company has 30 developers working on various games. There was a shift of culture, from high-tech to simple fun. The transition to making casual games, Harward says, has been logistically easy, but required a new philosophical approach.
“Writing casual games is harder,” he says. “There’s no room for error. We can’t cut corners.” Harward, who holds an English degree and once aspired to be a writer, compares developing a casual game to writing a short story and a hardcore game to a novel. “A novel can be grandiose, with time to develop things,” he says. “In a short story, the plot has to be very tight and everything has to be there for a reason.” Even with less content, the effort is the same, since timelines are shorter—a game like Luxor can be made in three months.
In order to keep development agile and innovative and stick to schedules, software companies have been adopting a new project management technique called Scrum. The approach was first described in 1986 in a Harvard Business Review article entitled, “The New Product Development Game,” but it only got a name 10 years later at a programming conference in Austin. Scrum, which has become widely used in the software industry in the last two years, supposedly derives its name from the huddled mass of teammates in rugby, all inching toward a goal.
As on the playfield, Scrum at the office approaches projects with only a vague objective in mind. In the case of software development, it’s to finish a game in a given amount of time. The process is taken in small steps, and the results are assessed at short intervals, sometimes daily, to redirect the effort. Instead of being predictive, Scrum is reactive, allowing for unknowns and the innovation they may bring, while being able to turn quickly if the project strays. “We don’t know what’s fun when we start,” Harward says. “There’s no blueprint for making a game, like building a car or a bridge. It’s like saying, ‘Put out a hit record.’”
THE TAKEAWAY |
1. Casual games let you get a taste for free, higher levels for a fee. 2. Some customers still like bricks-and-mortar retail over the Internet. 3. Creative managers should look no further than rugby for their next team project. |
Another characteristic of Scrum is that management structure is nearly flat. “We called it a tribal atmosphere,” Harward says. “What that means is I’m the director, but other than that we don’t have a lot of titles. We’re merit-based. We look for talent. We don’t want an environment where people have to wait 10 years to exercise their full talent.” This includes “tribal council” meetings where all members can pitch ideas and contribute in all aspects of development. “It brings out the creativity in people,” Harward says. “They feel like collaborators.”
And this makes the ethos of the company cohesive, according to Dr. Raad at Guildhall. “Video games require sustained creative output, and the process requires that people like each other,” he says. “This creates an internal culture, a chemistry where everyone has a common aim.”
Casual games are relatively easy to make, which means they’re also abundant. Although dedicated developers such as MumboJumbo release scores of games, most of the shoot-’em-ups and point-and-clicks come from dedicated individuals operating independently with nothing but an idea and some time to kill. For instance, Jeff Wofford, a faculty member at Guildhall, created a Tetris clone over a few days, Fill, and released it on the Internet for free. “He got thousands of responses,” Raad says. “People went berserk over it.” In order to distinguish its games over this kind of competition, MumboJumbo’s plan is to turn casual games from a junior-high student performance of Shakespeare in the park into a Royal Shakespeare Company-level production.
“We’re one of the top three developers of casual games, but there’s many people clawing at our backs,” says MumboJumbo’s Cottam. His friend and co-executive Dimant puts it this way: “We have an advantage over new companies,” he says. “We’re five years ahead and have significant revenue, but those things can be wiped out if we don’t innovate.”
MumboJumbo has a head start, and it also has a good crew and, to extend the metaphor, a solid track record. Success can beget success. The upcoming Luxor 3 bears this out—watching concept artist Richard Luong use a digital pen to draw what will become a three-dimensional papyrus plant for the game, a background object at best, is light-years ahead of the clunky graphics of the original. Models of Egyptian deities like Horus and Anubis extracted from heavy books of Egyptian archeology all undergo the same loving attention to detail. “The game has to be solid,” says Cottam. “But the presentation will bring people in.”
Luxor 3 isn’t the only Scrum in the works. MumboJumbo purchased a license to build a game based on the successful NBC sticom The Office, whose audience seems perfect for anything MumboJumbo will crank out.
The market for community-based games is there, too, but MumboJumbo faces a distribution challenge. Casual games achieve exposure through Internet portals like AOL, where games are second only to e-mail and instant messaging in popularity. “Our partners don’t necessarily want a community we build inside their community,” Cottam says. “This is something we’re trying to figure out.”
In the meantime, MumboJumbo’s bread and butter—casual games—are showing up on every imaginable platform: PCs, Macs, consoles, handhelds, cell phones, PDAs, and bartop units. Games can now be found in another, previously unlikely place: seatbacks on planes. MumboJumbo’s gambit ensures that passengers, like Dimant on that fateful flight, never go bored again, and, perhaps, come back for more.
 LUXOR (AND SEQUELS) |
 XANGO TANGO |
 7 WONDERS (AND SEQUEL) |
 SNOWY ADVENTURES |
 BEJEWELED (AND SEQUEL) |
 HAIKU JOURNEY |
