I can’t believe how long it’s been since I last made an entry. Well, I guess I’ve been busy. I really have no idea how many people read this blog. But I do know that the Spammers seem to have found it 
Well, for the last couple of years I’ve been working on a little business that has turned into something interesting.
In April of 2006, I started a crazy idea called The GameTruck. (check out gametruckparty.com). Between leaving THQ and joining the Walt Disney Company – I got this bug to start my own company. I looked at Franchises, and I looked at buying a business. And I kicked around a couple of other ideas. For a time I was convinced the world needed another video editing package. Actually plug-ins for existing video editors that made it easier for you to turn your home videos into professional looking presentations.
However, one day on my way to the NAB show in Las Vegas (National Association of Broadcasters) – The Idea of the GameTruck grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I was sitting in the office of Harriett Mosier, a wonderful franchise consultant talking about what I wanted to do. I told her about the Home Video Scrapbooking idea and then I mentioned GameTruck. She said, “I like this GameTruck idea. It’s simple. And simple works.”
The next day I got on a plane for Vegas, but instead of planning my meetings with people to get the components I would need for my home video scrapbooking, all I could think about was GameTruck. So for the next two days I looked at portable screens, portable generators, and I talked to the news guys who built mobile TV trucks. The GameTruck had me and it wouldn’t let go.
What is GameTruck? If you haven’t checked out the website – The GameTruck is the worlds first Mobile Video Game Theater. It’s a living room on wheels, built for video game parties. The “Big Idea” was to roll it up in front of kids houses and use it for birthday parties. Video game birthday parties. In my mind, it was what is after bouncy castles.
I got the idea standing at a Pizza Arcade in Phoenix. It was my son’s birthday and I was watching all the kids running around 12 different ways from Sunday. Twenty dollar bills were flying out of my pocket like scared birds as kids begged for more tokens. I couldn’t talk with any of the other parents because we had to chase our kids all over the restaurant while always keeping an eye on the door to make sure no one wandered outside. A kid from another party swiped my son’s tickets. My daughter had to go to the bathroom. Our “party planner” had apparently entered the witness protection program because she was MIA. And then I noticed the game my Son was playing. It was so old, I think I was playing it when *I* was 10!
So this was what my generation had created for kids birthday parties – expensive, scattered, loud, impersonal events driven by stale technology.
My God, there had to be a better way.
It was the bad games that bugged me the most. Having been involved in the video game industry for almost 10 years, I knew that my X-Box had better games and graphics than anything I had seen in the arcade. So I spent some energy trying to figure out how to get put better games into the pizza arcades. I honestly wanted to help those guys. You know, make it better for EVERYONE.
As it turns out that problem isn’t likely to be solved any time soon. The main reason has to do with the way games are made today. It used to be that video game companies made money by putting a game in the arcade, then selling it to the home video game audience. Games were made to eat quarters. But sometime in the 1990′s video game publishers started making more money selling games into homes than into arcades. People didn’t want to feed quarters to machines. They wanted to play. Games were no longer built for quick 3 minute turns, they evolved into something more complex, more engaging. The 3 minute experience became a 20 minute experience, and eventually a 2 hour experience.
In and of itself, this was a major driver, but the thing that really killed the arcade happened outside the realms of technology. It started almost 10 years before the introduction of the Playstation.
In the 1980′s dairy companies started printing pictures of missing children on milk cartons. When I was growing up, our moms kicked me and my friends out of the house until dinner time. With nothing to do, a generation of kids wandered into the neighborhood arcade and poured all our money into the amazing entertaining machines we found there.
Fast forward two decades. What parent today would let their kids out of their sight for 10 minutes let alone turn them loose to ride their bikes to an arcade 5 miles away in a strip mall? Not knowing where your kids are is a unique form of shame for this generation of parents. Evidence of this is all around us. Youth sports exploded, organized kids activities spread across the country like wildfire. As parents, we were NEVER going to see a picture of our kid on the cover a milk carton. So the very force that built the arcades into a successful business vanished. Besides, there were better games to be played at home – where Mom and Dad could keep an eye on everything.
But arcades weren’t just about the games, it was also about hanging out with your friends. Even today, as game makers we knew the highest form of gaming entertainment usually takes the form of playing together. Whether it’s World of Warcraft on the PC or co-operative play in Halo or Resistance Fall of Man. Playing together is fun. I’d seen one of my best friends lug his X-Box to work every Thursday and set up a LAN party to play Halo with his buddies. Man what a hassle. But what an amazing game to inspire people to go to such great lengths to play it.
Then it hit me. I wondered how many people would play if we took away the hassle of setting up such a party? Instead of trying to put home video games into the Arcade, what if we created an arcade experience for home video games?
The GameTruck was born. When I came home from my conference in Las Vegas I went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of plywood and carpet. I then went to CostCo (love CostCo) and bought every kind of TV display that I thought would work. I bought gaming chairs, and bean bags, and rockers. Then I taped out the maximum legal road width dimensions in my garage and erected the walls. We setup a mini lan and I invited all my sons friends over. I also invited my friends over and we talked about what it would be like to play network games together in a “living room on wheels.”
The results were astounding. People loved the idea, and on one Sunday the son of one of our neighbors said he would love to have it for his birthday. I had no choice but to build it. From that early beginning we assembled the first GameTruck. We ran in stealth mode for a while, proving the concept, working out the kinks and just basically doing neighborhood parties and parties by word of mouth.
Convinced we were onto something, my brother moved down from Michigan and took over the business while I went to Disney. As they see, keep the day job until your business finds it’s legs. Starting in March we made a full court press to get the word out about the GameTruck. The response since then has been spectacular. People really love it.
I left Disney in January, to focus on this full time, and what an adventure it has been. The GameTruck really hit a chord with people. It’s amazing fun for the kids and the parents love it as well. We are nearly finished with our Franchise Documentation and should be able to start contacting many of our leads in the coming months. I went to a motivational speach by an Entrepreneur named Ken Loesch, and he said something that stuck with me. It’s fun to be around people who have big futures. After conducting literally hundreds and hundreds of parties and seeing thousands of people entertained in the truck over the last 2 years, I know this idea has a bright future. I think kids all over the country would love to have a GameTruck party.
After all, who doesn’t enjoy playing with their friends