CartridgeCulture/To do

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To do

  • Clean up Contributions articles.
  • Add LaserActive to NEC Retro.
  • Mail to Gaming Alexandria: Sega VR book, Nicole Miller items, GameWorks Vegas papers.
  • This.

Rocket Science Games


  • RSG began with Barrett managing video game and development tools and Blank handling marketing and financing.[1]
  • 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.[1] 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."[1]
  • When RSG was founded, Blank went out and spent a month or two talking to 14-22 year old gamers (their target audience). He then realized he lacked an emotional connection his customers or product, and that this should have set off warning bells. This section of his article is titled "What do you mean you don’t want to hear about features?".[2]
  • Blank was a Silicon Valley person and unaccustomed to the entertainment industry.[2]


  • 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.[3]
  • Venture capital funding amount of $35mil total.[4] Fundraising was reportedly easy[1], with numerous venture capitalists competing to fund RSG.[5]
  • Executives became aware of (or could no longer ignore) the company's inevitable bankruptcy in January 1995, roughly a month after the releases of C&D/Loadstar.[4]
  • His investors, despite losing out on their returns, had promised Blank another $12 million in capital to start his next company. (WebTV?)[4]
  • By 1994, Blank had already launched and built six successful businesses, so his investors knew they'd most likely score another win.[4]
  • The ex-SoA VP that RSG hired was also in charge of gathering early feedback from customers, and that said VP was extremely insistent in trying to make executive staff aware of these issues (which was ignored).[1] Blank admits that ignoring poor customer feedback was one of his biggest mistakes in managing the company.[1]
  • 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[1], and that claims of extremely few ppl in the company being gamers are true.[4]
  • "I had a public, humiliating failure, and still the people who lost the money had enough confidence [in me] because it was an honest failure" -Steven Blank. Blank later returned $1bil to his investors through his next startups.[4]
  • Blank states he learned three things from the failure of RSG: "get outside your office and test your product's viability with real customers", "ensure the executive staff and founders are aware of your product's viability", and most importantly, "no formal launch until you have early sales validating the product and sales process".[1]
  • Blank believes that if RSG had listened to early feedback and dialed back hype, they could have delivered truly great future games. Per Blank, "The huge mismatch between expectations and reality of our first games diminished the brand and demoralized the company – we never recovered."[1]
  • Add this to external links, maybe.
  • There are too many good Blank quotes to choose from.
  • Add that one source in full as an interview.
  • RSG would be Blank's first and last time acting as his startup's CEO.[6]
  • "I would get to use my marketing skills at generating an industry-wide reality distortion field to make this company look like the second coming. I was going to find out why this wasn’t a good idea." This perfectly sums up both RSG as a whole, and one of its biggest legacies: hype. Between boring games and low sales, the "RSG hype" was one of the single-largest in the industry, and needs its own section.
  • Get a page for Blank up.
  • 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."[5]

Redirects to delete

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 https://venturebeat.com/entrepreneur/youre-not-as-good-as-the-press-thinks/
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 https://steveblank.com/2009/07/09/rocket-science-2-hollywood-meets-silicon-valley/ (Wayback Machine: 2022-12-07 00:55)
  3. ↑ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/03/someone-stole-my-startup-idea-–-part-1-are-those-my-initials/ (Wayback Machine: 2022-12-16 22:24)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 https://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/how-steve-blank-lost-35-million-and-bounced-back.html
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 https://steveblank.com/2009/07/02/rocket-science-2-drinking-the-kool-aid/ (Wayback Machine: 2022-10-05 01:41)
  6. ↑ https://steveblank.com/2009/02/23/out-of-the-ashes-something-isn’t-quite-right/ (Wayback Machine: 2022-12-16 22:24)
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