It's a humdinger: Your task is to whistle "Stayin'
Alive" with enough skill for your teammate to identify the 1970s disco
hit. On your next turn, your partner draws a clue -- with his eyes closed --
and you have to figure out what it is. Some players even find themselves
spelling words backward in order to win a round. These odd challenges, along
with 11 others, make up the hottest new board game since Trivial Pursuit. It is
a "whole brain" game appropriately labeled Cranium.
In only nine short months, two former Microsoft employees conceived a unique
game and took it to a market that's been craving something different. Company
founders Richard Tait and Whit Alexander are trying to satisfy the world's
intellectual hunger with a game designed to include something for everyone.
So how's this new game playing out? Cranium is currently the best-selling
board game on Amazon.com and is also selling like hotcakes at Barnes &
Noble, Starbucks Coffee and Virgin Megastores, among others. And while the
dynamic duo prefers not to reveal the exact number of games they have sold to
date, Tait reports Cranium hocked more copies in their first week on the market
than Trivial Pursuit peddled
during its entire first year.
Tait and Alexander are enjoying incredible success in the
board game industry -- but they haven't let it go to their heads. After living
in the safe and warm world of Microsoft for a combined 15 years, the
entrepreneurs are grounded by the big challenges of running a small business.
Tait left Microsoft in May 1997, but not before working on
several pioneering frontiers with the company, including their operating
systems, networking and reference products. He also helped to launch
Microsoft's consumer online businesses, such as Sidewalk, Carpoint
and HomeAdvisor.com.
In February of the same year, Alexander also left Microsoft,
where he held the position of group program manager for the geography product
unit. Sounds confusing, but he explains it this way: If it's a Microsoft
product with a map in it, such as Encarta World Atlas or the Expedia travel
line, he played a role in its original development.
The two indicate that there were no hard feelings with
Microsoft when they left the company. In fact, it was quite to the contrary.
They each describe their time with the behemoth software developer as an
incredible learning experience. But, much like Michael Jordan's exit at the
height of his basketball career this year, Tait says things couldn't get any
better at Microsoft, and he chose to exit on a high note.
By November 1997, personal experience would lead Tait to
consider a new breed of board games that incorporated a variety of talents,
unlike the popular uni-skill products currently crowding toy store shelves.
On vacation in the Hamptons with his wife and another
couple, Tait's entourage found themselves stuck indoors one rainy afternoon and
decided to pass the time away with a board game. They first played Pictionary. Tait, a huge fan of the game,
and his wife, proceeded to "demolish" the other team. But his
competitors sought revenge and quickly challenged Tait and his wife to a game
of Scrabble. Tait admits his good friends were the overwhelming victors in the
popular word game.
"I felt terrible and wondered why there wasn't a game
where everyone that plays can have a chance to shine -- still a competitive fun
board game, but one where everyone can show what they are good at,"
explains Tait.
Tait says he and Alexander, who was a good friend, vowed to
leap at future opportunities to work together when they left Microsoft. So,
upon germinating what he viewed as a hot concept, Tait approached Alexander to
help him examine the possibilities of producing an offbeat, new board game.
"I must admit, we looked more at online opportunities
than thinking about a board game," recalls Tait. That is, until they
recognized the cash cow a blockbuster board game can represent. After all,
there have been five billion-dollar board games created in the industry's
history, but there has never been a billion-dollar PC game.
"We saw there was an opportunity to create something
with a life span and a strong revenue potential," says Tait. "All of
the intellectual capital was going into online and PC or [Sony] Play Station-type games, and we didn't
feel there was a lot of horsepower being applied to the board-game
market."
Further, Tait explains that board games go back centuries
and have endured many different competitive threats, from radio and TV to the
PC-based gaming environment. This gave the braniacs confidence that board games
are here to stay. Finally, Tait says the level of capital required to launch a
board game was significantly less than the investment required to get into the
high-tech video-game industry.
Once the duo decided to take the proverbial plunge, they
began conducting research to flesh out the concept of their "whole
brain" game.
"The next objective was to get to a really robust
prototype and get a lot of customer feedback, but before we could get there, we
had to undertake a good bit of research," explains Alexander. He reveals
that if you go back to the pre-television era, or even as far back as the turn
of the century, you can find antecedents to most modern games, including
Pictionary. The two soaked up as much knowledge as they could about the history
of social games, comparing their findings against the criteria for Cranium.
Their conclusion was to develop a left brain/right brain
game, but neither knew much about the hypothesis, so they began researching the
field of intellectual psychology. Tait and Alexander would soon discover a
Harvard researcher named Howard Gardner whose "Theory of Multiple
Intelligences" postulates that there are eight core competencies where
people demonstrate intelligence, such as linguistics, mathematical, spatial,
and so on.
"We thought it was a really rich framework to try to
base the game design on, so we built up from Gardner's work," explains
Alexander.
The inventors identified a number of occupations that people
might pursue if they are gifted in one of Gardner's intelligences. They then
broke down the findings into subject matters or areas of interest that those
same people would be exceptionally strong in, ensuring each player their moment
to shine.
After about three months of research during early 1998,
Alexander and Tait realized the novelty of their approach to the board-game
market. In total, they had come up with 14 different activities, each one
innovative in its own right.
"We had some great new ideas that hadn't been
popularized in a board game," says Tait. One such example is their Cranium
Clay used to play "sculpterades." As the name suggests, this activity
requires players to sculpt clues while their teammates guess what they are
sculpting, bringing out the child in the most mature adults. The duo's
commitment to research and design took them through 10 different clay recipes
and multiple scents before settling on purple, citrus-smelling clay that boasts
a long shelf life. Tait says customers e-mail them often looking for more of
the putty because they like it so much.
Next, they settled on four unique groups of question cards,
including "Creative Cat," which features sculpting and drawing
activities; "Data Head," which focuses on trivia; "Word
Worm," which includes vocabulary-based questions; and "Star
Performer" featuring performance-based activities.
"It's the team with the best combination of skills that
wins," explains Tait. "Unlike in Trivial Pursuit, where all the
"data heads" would prevail, or Pictionary, where the artists prevail,
or Scrabble, where the "word worms" prevail."
Tait and Alexander say many of the early challenges with
Cranium were creative in nature. Ironically, the two depended greatly upon
their high-tech skills to invent this low-tech board game.
Understanding the value of a diverse knowledge base, Tait
and Alexander assembled a "virtual team," which acted as their
editorial board. Though they never met during production, together this cyber
crew of about seven specialists would overcome one of Cranium's greatest
obstacles: creating the content that would make or break the game.
The founders attracted contributing experts in areas like
the theater, visual arts, word games and pop culture, and also worked with an
experienced editor who reviewed the questions for qualities like
appropriateness, level of difficulty, age specificity, and so on. Alexander
says the group developed 100 percent of the content via e-mail using special
software he had worked on during his time at Microsoft.
"Another challenge was really putting it in front of
consumers and watching them play," recalls Tait. "We watched things
like duration of play and determined what people are looking for is really a
60- to 90-minute fun experience that they can have after dinner with some
friends."
Alexander would rely on his computer technology skills once
again to tackle another major challenge for any popular board game: engineering
the most effective play duration and play dynamics. He simulated virtually
thousands of different board lengths to determine actual game duration,
including the number of cells on the board, the number of questions and how
many sides were on the die.
Cranium avoids play dynamics that allow one group to
"demolish" another by limiting each team to one task before passing
the turn to the next player. Tait says this is just one example of hundreds of
game dynamics they fine-tuned throughout the play tests. But, he adds, there
was one constant throughout the testing period: People were having a good time.
Tait and Alexander describe funding as one of the challenges
of coming up with an early business model, digging deep into their own pockets
to finance an invention they believed in with their hearts and their heads.
"The reality check for us was that, traditionally, it
takes about $4 to $6 million to do a great computer game, and the investment
we've made to date in Cranium is only a fraction of that," reveals Tait.
In the months of April and May 1998, Tait and Alexander
began to identify their distribution partners. By November, they had secured
four major deals, giving Cranium both domestic and international exposure. The
theme behind their distribution deals was consistent: playing is believing.
Tait and Alexander identified distribution partners that
were focused on the same demographic they were targeting with Cranium.
Cranium's target audience, affectionately called "dating yupsters" by
the inventors, is made up of individuals between the ages of 25 and 35, with an
attractive disposable income. Tait says this demographic seems to have a
natural social tendency to play games like Cranium and Pictionary.
Their first major deal came from Starbucks Coffee.
"We felt the social dynamic of the game fit with their
coffee-house culture," explains Tait. "We knew they were looking for
distinctive products, and we discovered upon meeting with them that they had
been looking for a game for two years. And we were the game they chose."
Their next stop was popular bookseller Barnes & Noble, whose gift buyers
had only five words for a zealous Tait: "We don't do board games."
But Tait convinced the group to hear him out, and during the meeting, he began
to play a spirited round of Cranium with the buyers.
"By the time I left the meeting, they told us we were
going to be the first game to be stocked in 150 Barnes & Noble stores
nationally since Trivial Pursuit," he recalls.
From there, the impressive duo would use their contacts to
get a foot in the door of one of the hottest shopping outlets on the Web, Amazon.com. An eclectic group of Amazon
representatives gathered to conduct play tests of Cranium, and Tait says the
outcome was a place on the virtual shelves of the leading online bookseller.
Finally, after identifying a second, slightly younger
demographic (18-21) during their focus groups, the inventors decided to pursue
an entertainment partner to help target this lucrative audience. They focused
their energies on Virgin Megastores
because Tait had read the biography of Richard Branson, Virgin's founder and
CEO, and felt he would be most receptive to Cranium.
"I knew if I could get this game into the hands of his
kids and they liked it, we would have a chance of getting stocked by Virgin.
So, at Branson's book signing in Seattle, I approached him with a game under my
arm," explains Tait.
When Branson asked what Tait was carrying, Tait presented
him with Cranium. As it turns out, Branson had missed an opportunity to invest
in Trivial Pursuit and was eager to reclaim lost ground in the board-game
arena. Within four days of this nonchalant encounter, Cranium had an
international distribution deal with Virgin.
Cranium is also sold via the company's e-commerce Web site
and through their toll free number. Alexander says these efforts account for a
growing 10 percent of Cranium's overall sales.
Tait and Alexander are quite pleased with Cranium's initial
distribution methods, but Tait says they have started to look to the
specialty-game-store market as one avenue for growth and have found shelf space
in stores like GameKeeper and Seattle-based Turn Off The TV. The duo also plans to
build on their own direct-sales efforts.
"The future of how to develop a board game is pretty
well documented by some of the other big, hit games, where you develop new card
packs," explains Tait. And he says Cranium will offer new and unique card
sets in the near future.
Tait reports that the company has spent zero dollars on
marketing efforts and indicates the most effective selling tool is sitting down
and playing the game. Targeting additional demographics is another probability
for the continued growth of Cranium. Tait says it has become apparent from
playing in family settings that younger children also appreciate the
"whole brain" game. As a result, the inventors are developing a
younger version of the game scheduled to debut next year.
"We originally started with a much broader vision than
just a board game," explains Tait. He says they looked at the 1980s and
how the heart was so heavily emphasized in conjunction with good health.
"We think it's going to be the brain that's going to be the organ for the
new millennium, and we would like to be the company that's at the forefront of
providing fun things to do with your brain to keep it happy and healthy."
This strategy has made Cranium a standout among its
competitors in the board-game industry, as there simply is no other game that
offers such a variety of activities. Even while still on the shelf, Cranium
stands out amongst other board games. This is thanks, in part, to their choice
of illustrators and the inventors' talent for consumer-focused iterative
product design, another skill they refined during their Microsoft days.
Tait's and Alexander's roles in the company are almost
interchangeable. However, Tait handles a lot of the marketing and business
development, while Alexander deals more with operations and fulfillment. Each
works on product design, customer requests and public relations.
"That's one of the challenges. We can both do a lot of
different tasks, but we each have special skills. What makes us a good team is
that we know which one is better at which thing, and we are happy to delegate
that between the two of us," explains Tait. But he admits, as busy
entrepreneurs, they do end up overlapping on a lot of tasks just to complete
them. The flourishing company currently has no other employees.
Today, the pair's main challenge is building the Cranium
brand name, and Tait alludes to a potential TV show as well as new Cranium
products in the distant future.
Tait and Alexander are highly motivated by the potential of
Cranium and indicate they have no interest in selling their brainchild to
larger industry players like Parker
Brothers. "We are committed to seeing this thing through into the next
millennium," insists Tait. "It's too much fun to give up."
Name: Cranium
Location: Seattle
Founder: Richard Tait and Whit Alexander
Founded: 1997
URL: www.playcranium.com
Industry: board games
Revenue: undisclosed
For additional reading on this topic, don't miss
When Large and Small Companies Do Business, Strategic Partnering for
Maximum Success, Competing With the Giants, Taking Inventions to
Market.
Copyright © 2000 by Virtual Advisor, Inc. All rights reserved.