Difference between revisions of "CartridgeCulture/To do"

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==[[Rocket Science Games]]==
 
==[[Rocket Science Games]]==

Revision as of 09:13, 16 February 2023

Back to: CartridgeCulture.

To do

Rocket Science Games

Funding

  • 4mil: Initial funding gather (around January 1993)[1]
  • 10mil: Tokyo investment company (around July 1994)[2]
  • 12mil: Sega of America, Bertelsmann Music Group (May 1994)[3]
  • 5mil: Times Mirror (July 1994)[4]

Company

Background

  • Cassidy phrases this better than I will, but RSG (both the company and its games) was developed with making investors happy. This quote: "The CDROM content business in the early 1990’s was one of the many of the long line of venture capital fads. If you were a “with it” VC you needed to have a “Content” or “Multimedia” company in your portfolio to impress your limited partners – educational software companies, game companies, or anything that could be described as content and/or Multimedia."[1]

Beginning

  • RSG began with Barrett managing video game and development tools and Blank handling marketing and financing.[5]
  • Shortly after CartridgeCulture/To do's founding, Blank dedicated time to going out and directly meeting with his target audience: 14-22 year old gamers. While the feedback would undoubtedly provide insight into an industry he was largely unaccustomed to[6], he then began to realize he lacked an emotional connection to his customers or product, and that this should have served as a greater warning for things to come. Additionally, the feedback received by the company's games was regularly poor. To quote Blank in a conversation between himself and a young gamer, "what do you mean you don’t want to hear about features?".[6]
  • Blank also realized pretty early on that the company would need some high-level advice in the fields of technology, game development, and video game distribution if it hoped to be successful. To this end, he created an advisory board of specialists which could assist the company in an industry it was unfamiliar with.
  • At some point, RSG entered into an agreement with American print publisher McGraw Hill to publish strategy guides for their games.[7]
  • RSG had plans to distribute their games in Japan, or at least were selling the potential distribution rights. Despite a mid 1994 trip to Japan to meet with potential investors in person, however, the company was not able to work out any deals.[8]
  • Blank said he was upfront about his finances, and that every major decision was brought to the board ahead of time. This speaks to how many people in the company truly believed in what they were doing[5], and that claims of extremely few ppl in the company being gamers are true.[9][10]

MARKETING

  • The "Hollywood meets Silicon Valley" angle was easily digestible by the media, and this marketing angle ended up netting RSG stories in Fortune, Forbes, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, among others.[5] According to Blank, "the theme of our press blitz was all about how we were going to show the old tired game companies the right way to make video games. Our press infuriated the established companies who had spent years building games that sold well, but had zero press recognition."[5]
  • At some point, RSG demo'd some of its games at a promotional event at the Playboy Mansion.[11]

TOOLS

  • RSG's actual business was to be split between games and software development tools. Per Blank, "A key premise of our new company was that our video compression and authoring technology would revolutionize how games were made and played. We believed that by putting full motion video (i.e. movies) into video games we could tell stories, build characters, have narratives and bring all the 100 years of craft and cinematic experience of Hollywood to the sterile “shoot and die” twitch games that were currently in vogue. (This wasn’t just some random Silicon Valley fantasy. My partner had convinced several major Hollywood names that this was the inevitable consequence of the merger of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. And at the time it was a plausible scenario.) But in reality our passionate belief that video would transform gaming was just our hypothesis. There was zero proof in the marketplace that was the case. And we weren’t going to be bothered to go out and prove ourselves wrong with facts. (Why should we – our VC’s had already told us what geniuses we were by fighting to even get into the deal to fund us."[6]
  • To expand on tool development, Blank states RSG was planning on producing an easy to use CD-ROM authoring system that would revolutionize how games were made, particularly through efficient video compression technology as a means of allowing all games to have that "Hollywood cinematic" feel. To this end, Peter Barrett had convinced several of the key members of the Apple Quicktime team to join. However, these plans never came to fruition, as by Blank's account, the company was so passionate about the development of the tools that it had never really asked itself why customers would want to buy their product in the first place.[6]
  • One of the company's tools, its "V3O technology", was eventually sold to Attitude Software and retitled "3D Anarchy", where it was sold again to Adobe and renamed "Adobe Atmospheres". The initial sale was sometime in 1996-1997.[12]

Decline

  • After the release failures, when Blank was seeking the next round of funding from his venture capitalists, they denied him. It was a trip to SF with two investors. I believe this may be the same investor who was quoted as "We sold to Sega for nothing". They liked how the business was being run, but stated "we realized that we’ve backed a business we don’t know much about, the company is a money sink and both our firms have no stomach for this industry.”[13]

Redirects to delete

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 https://steveblank.com/2009/07/02/rocket-science-2-drinking-the-kool-aid/ (Wayback Machine: 2022-10-05 01:41)
  2. ↑ https://steveblank.com/2010/02/01/incentives-and-legends/ (Wayback Machine: 2023-02-07 17:49)
  3. ↑ https://www.wired.com/1994/11/rocket-science/ (Wayback Machine: 2023-01-17 02:45)
  4. ↑ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-07-26-fi-19960-story.html
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 https://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/youre-not-as-good-as-the-press-thinks/
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 https://steveblank.com/2009/07/09/rocket-science-2-hollywood-meets-silicon-valley/ (Wayback Machine: 2022-12-07 00:55)
  7. ↑ https://www.abandonware-france.org/compagnies/mcgraw-hill-620/ (Wayback Machine: 2021-09-26 01:29)
  8. ↑ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/03/someone-stole-my-startup-idea-–-part-1-are-those-my-initials/ (Wayback Machine: 2022-12-16 22:24)
  9. ↑ https://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/how-steve-blank-lost-35-million-and-bounced-back.html
  10. ↑ https://www.inc.com/magazine/19940401/2864.html (Wayback Machine: 2022-05-27 06:10)
  11. ↑ https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-orr-112b3a36/details/experience/
  12. ↑ https://phoenixtoews.net/phoenixcv (Wayback Machine: 2020-11-21 14:44)
  13. ↑ https://steveblank.com/2011/02/03/vc’s-are-not-your-friends/ (Wayback Machine: 2022-12-25 12:05)
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