Boffo Games

» see boffo.us as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

After Infocom went under in 1989, Steve Meretzky freelanced for about five years, most of it for Legend Entertainment. He later described the arrangement as creatively unsatisfying and sometimes frustrating, and the complaint was specific rather than vague: he did not want to design games for people thousands of miles away, he wanted to sit in a room with a team.

In late 1993 he hired a friend from MIT, Leo DaCosta, to help with programming on Superhero League of Hoboken. Mike Dornbrook, also MIT and also ex-Infocom, had the business degree. The three of them began talking about a company of their own, and Boffo Games opened its doors in February 1994. Gayle Syska, who had designed at Infocom, drew the logo.

Two games shipped before the money ran out, and a third was cancelled partway. That is the whole catalog.

~ the dossier ~

~ the night of the earthquake ~

The thing that turned the idea into a company was Media Vision. It was a Bay Area hardware firm doing very well out of CD-ROM drives and sound cards at the exact moment when most computers still had neither, and it had opened a software division down in Los Angeles under the former record executive Stan Cornyn. Dornbrook knew Cornyn, so he and Meretzky flew out for a Monday morning meeting.

They landed on the Sunday. At half past four on the Monday morning the Northridge earthquake went off underneath them, and the meeting was pushed to that evening at Cornyn's house, where the power kept failing and the aftershocks came about every fifteen minutes. Staff and their families drifted in and out of the house all evening, leaving for pizza and coming back. In that room Boffo pitched a dozen ideas and Media Vision came back wanting five games and offering to fund the company to whatever size it needed.

~ two games got out ~

Three months into the first of them, Hodj 'n' Podj, Media Vision restated the previous year's thirty-million-dollar profit as a hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar loss and went from Wall Street favorite to bankruptcy court. The securities-fraud case that followed is the part of that story everyone remembers. For Boffo it meant their game was now an asset in a liquidation, and Hodj 'n' Podj was sold out of bankruptcy court to Virgin Interactive.

The Space Bar had the same shape. Rocket Science Games commissioned it, SegaSoft bought Rocket Science partway through the work, and SegaSoft was the name on the box when it came out in 1997. Meretzky's own summary of the period is one publisher after another going under or reorganizing in the middle of a project, with handshake deals evaporating and signed letters of intent that never became contracts.

~ the mgm wind-down ~

After The Space Bar they signed with MGM Interactive for another adventure on the same technology, this time for PC and PlayStation. Over the first few months MGM decided it wanted something closer to Tomb Raider than to an adventure, and shortly after that it decided it wanted the PlayStation version only. Two or three months in it concluded that an adventure studio had no business making a console action game, and asked Boffo to stop. MGM paid a reasonable sum to exit the contract, which did not replace the eighteen months of work that had just vanished. Boffo spent several more months chasing something new while key people left, and then the money ran out.

~ after boffo ~

Meretzky freelanced for another year. By the late summer of 1998 he was two or three days from accepting a design job at Microsoft, which had just shipped Age of Empires and offered the one quality he had been missing: a publisher unlikely to go out of business in the middle of a project. A headhunter called about GameFX instead and he stayed on the east coast.

Boffo did not run out of ideas. It ran out of companies willing to pay for them.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »