I think it touches on two of the most fundamental aspects of human nature. We all like doing something constructive, where we can see that we are creating something from virtually nothing, and we all have a desire to nurture or look after things. This is what the game is all about. You spend hours painstakingly building your park and roller coasters up piece by piece, and then it becomes your own baby, which you want to look after and keep running smoothly, watching it grow in popularity and delighted by all the little guests who are enjoying all your hard work. Of course, the subject matter, roller coasters and theme parks, helps a lot as well. What could be more fun in a game than to build and run a park which is full of little people also having fun? — Chris Sawyer
When Jeff Briggs, Brian Reynolds, and Sid Meier resigned from MicroProse Software in 1996 in order to found their own studio Firaxis, they left behind one heck of a parting gift. Civilization II, the last project Briggs and Reynolds worked on at MicroProse, became one of the rare computer games that sell in big numbers for months and months on end. Combined with a brutal down-sizing that involved laying off half the company and finally retiring the redundant Spectrum Holobyte brand, Civilization II managed to put MicroProse in the black in 1997 for the first time in more than half a decade. The $7.9 million profit the company posted that year, on revenues that were up by more than 40 percent, may have paled in comparison to the $120.2 million it had bled out since being acquired by the Spectrum Holobyte brain trust in December of 1993, but it was better than the alternative.
Unfortunately, Civilization II was a one-time gift. The departures of Briggs, Reynolds, and Meier, combined with the layoffs, completely destroyed any ability MicroProse might have had to come up with a similar game in the future. Meanwhile the action-oriented military simulators on which management had staked the company’s future in lieu of grand-strategy titles were proving a dud; with the Cold War and the Gulf War having receded into history, there just wasn’t the same excitement out there around such things that there once had been. Recognizing that the brief return to profitability was an anomaly rather than a trend, MicroProse’s CEO Stephen M. Race let it be known on the street that the company was up for sale, hoping against hope that a buyer with more money than sense would emerge before the rotten fundamentals of his business boomeranged back around to crush it. His hopes were gratified from a very unlikely quarter. Hasbro, which alongside its arch-rival Mattel ruled the American market for toys and family-oriented board games, took the bait.
Hasbro had been founded in 1923 in Rhode Island, by an industrious Polish immigrant named Henry Hassenfeld. It existed as essentially an odd-job factory until 1951, when the founder’s son Merrill Hassenfeld, who had inherited the enterprise after the death of his father, partnered with an inventor named George Lerner to create Mr. Potato Head. A bizarre idea on the face of it, it was a kit that children could use to dress up a potato or other vegetable of their choice with noses, ears, eyes, mustaches, glasses, hats, etc. (Later on, a plastic potato would be included as well to keep the tikes out of the pantry.) Thanks largely to savvy advertising (“The most novel gift in years, the ideal item for gift, party favor, or the young invalid!”), much of it on the brand-new medium of television, Mr. Potato Head became a sensation, selling millions upon millions and transforming its parent company forever. Indeed, Hasbro can be credited with inventing the modern industry of branded, mass-produced toys in tandem with Mattel, whose Magic 8 Ball made its debut at almost the same instant as Mr. Potato Head.
Many more toy-store successes were created or bought up by Hasbro over the ensuing decades: G.I. Joe, Transformers, Nerf guns, Play-Doh, Raggedy Ann and Andy, My Little Pony, Tonka trucks. Hasbro also collected an impressive stable of family board games, including such iconic perennials as Monopoly, Scrabble, Candy Land, Battleship, and Yahtzee. In 1996, the conglomerate’s revenues exceeded $3 billion for the first time. Remarkably, it was still in the hands of the Hassenfeld family; the current CEO was Alan Hassenfeld, a grandson of old Henry.
Yet despite the $3 billion milestone, Alan Hassenfeld was an insecure CEO. He had grown up as the free spirit — not to say black sheep — of the family, overshadowed by his more focused and studious older brother Stephen, who had been groomed almost since birth to be the heir apparent. But when Stephen died suddenly in 1989, after just ten years in the top spot, the throne passed down to Alan. Stephen’s brief tenure had been by many reckonings the most successful period in Hasbro’s history to date; Alan felt he had a lot to live up to.
In particular, he was obsessed by the long-standing rivalry with Mattel, which, soaring on the indefatigable wings of Barbie, was growing even more quickly than Hasbro; Mattel’s revenues for 1996 were $3.8 billion. To add insult to injury, Hasbro had only narrowly managed to fend off a hostile takeover bid by Mattel the previous year. Alan Hassenfeld was looking for a secret weapon, some new market that he could open up to unleash new revenue streams, prove his mettle as CEO, and vanquish his enemy. He decided that his secret weapon might just be computer and console games and educational software.
This wasn’t entirely virgin territory for Hasbro. The company had dabbled in the Atari VCS and Nintendo markets during the previous decade, trying to conjure up a measure of synergy with its existing toys and board games. Early in the 1990s, it had invested a not-inconsiderabe sum of money into a would-be virtual-reality system, a boondoggle that went nowhere when the state of technology proved not up to the task of presenting a living world inside a VR helmet.
One senses that Alan Hassenfeld’s decision to refocus his company’s digital efforts on more grounded and achievable products than VR was, like so much else that he did, dictated primarily by the actions of Mattel. For in yet another proof, should one be needed, that the picture of the 1990s games industry presented by most retro-gamers of today is at best a distorted image of its real past, the most profitable single game of 1996 was not Quake or Warcraft II, but rather Mattel Media’s Barbie Fashion Designer, which sold more than half a million copies in the run-up to Christmas that year. Alan Hassenfeld wanted a piece of that action, and he set up a new division called Hasbro Interactive to grab it.
... continue reading