Parallel Development

Toy and game inventors can be a paranoid bunch. When I was the gate keeper at Patch Products, a small game and puzzle company in Wisconsin, my job was to evaluate game ideas for consideration. A typical looping conversation went like this:

“Hi, Mr. Walsh, my name is ______ and I have the next Monopoly.”
“Great. Send it in.”
“But you’ll steal it from me!”
“Okay don’t send it in. Thanks for calli—“
“But it’s a great game!”
“Okay send it in.”
“But you’ll steal it!”

These people just didn’t know what to do. I mean who calls me “Mr. Walsh”? Geez.

Something that adds to the paranoia of creative people is something known as parallel development. This is when virtually the same idea gets developed at two different companies at the same time. Spying, you say? Gaming espionage? No.

Game and toy designers are like TV producers -- constantly on the lookout for what’s hot. When American Idol hit it big, was it any wonder that other performance competition shows sporting a panel of judges began popping up everywhere? Imitation is the sincerest form of thievery. Similarly, Trivial Pursuit spawned tons of trivia games, Pictionary plenty of drawing games, etc. It’s hard to miss an American Idol or a Trivial Pursuit. They weren’t just products, they were phenomena. Making a gazillion dollars on something will always produce people ready and willing to capitalize on that popularity. I think most inventors realize this, but what they fail to see is that it happens on a much smaller and subtler scale as well.

Ask a professional game inventor and she or he will tell you that almost anything can trigger an idea. In Timeless Toys, inventor Burt Meyer shares the story of seeing a huge display of different colored light bulbs in a store window while walking in Manhattan during Toy Fair and how the sight of it gave him the idea for Lite Brite. Could someone else, maybe another toy inventor at Toy Fair, have seen that same display and thought the same thing? Possibly. But if so, Burt beat them to it.

Say you’re me and you’re flying on an airplane and it's 3 or 4 years ago and you're reading The New Yorker and you realize how much you love their cartoons. You say to yourself, “I bet a game using these cartoons would sell.” You put that idea into your PDA for future development because you’re busy with other projects. A year or so goes by and one day you notice that The New Yorker is selling a book of all their cartoons AND have produced a thing called cartoonbank, a licensing program that encourages inventors and product designers to come up with ideas for using The New Yorker cartoons. “Man, I’ve got to contact them about my cartoon game idea,” you say to yourself. But you’re busy with other projects and… you do…nothing.

Well someone beat me to it.

Today I stumbled upon a game review on the blog Doombot, which led me to The New Yorker site and MY GAME! MY GAME WAS STOLEN! Someone hacked into my PDA and stole my idea!

Either that or I was too lazy...