Nanovor

» see nanovor.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Jordan Weisman's name is on BattleTech and Shadowrun. He founded FASA in 1980, sold the MechWarrior license, built the Virtual World laser-tag pods, and ran one of the companies that invented alternate reality gaming. In February 2007 he started Smith & Tinker in Bellevue, Washington, with the stated plan of reinventing play for children who were going to grow up with a screen in front of them. Investors put in $29 million, DCM among them.

The first thing out of the building was Nanovor. The premise was that microscopic silicon creatures had gone dormant when Earth's atmosphere filled with oxygen, and that electrical activity in silicon chips woke them back up in 1961, after which they spread through processors and then the internet. They needed adrenaline to survive, so they fought. Players collected them into teams called swarms and battled other swarms, and a creature reduced to zero health was "splattered" and gone. There were three families, divided by whether a creature leaned on armor or on speed. The third kind had attacks that ignored armor altogether.

It went into public beta in May 2009 and it was built to be bought from more than one direction. There was a browser client and a DVD-ROM, and there were Nanocash game cards hanging on pegs at Best Buy and Walmart. Children in the United States were the target and the whole retail apparatus assumed they would be walking into those stores with a parent.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the thing in the plastic shell ~

In October 2009 the company shipped the Nanoscope, a handheld unit modeled on the devices the Lab Rats carried in the fiction. It ran a solo training mode and talked to other Nanoscopes over WiFi for short-range multiplayer. A USB cable plugged it into a computer so the same creatures could go online. Minigames in training mode paid out Jolts, which you spent raising a creature's stats.

Hardware was the part that did not survive contact with the business. On 2 December 2009, seven weeks after the Nanoscope went on sale, Smith & Tinker laid off about fifteen people, roughly thirty percent of the staff, and most of them were the retail-facing ones. The company came out of that month with twenty-five employees and no toy division.

~ wrong age, wrong continent ~

I was twenty-five when Nanovor opened its beta, working toward an engineering career in Ankara. The game wanted a ten-year-old with a parent holding a Walmart receipt, and the retail layer that made the whole thing legible never existed in Turkey at all. There were no Nanocash cards on any peg I ever walked past. The closest I can honestly get is the shape of the business, which is one I recognize: a physical object subsidizing a free client, sold through stores, in a year when that arrangement was already coming apart.

~ eighteen days ~

Having dropped the toys, the company rebuilt the game as browser-only and launched Nanovor: Evolution for the 2010 holiday season. It did not work. An announcement on 13 December 2010 scheduled the discontinuation, and on 31 December the servers went off. The relaunch and the shutdown notice were separated by a matter of weeks, which means the version built to save the product was live for less time than most games spend in a closed beta.

Chief executive Joe Lawandus gave the reason to Gamasutra the following July, and it was arithmetic rather than drama. "Where it started to fall down a little bit for us was the business model," he said. "You've got to see a pretty significant uptake in order to be able to profitably run a game that has that much content." Nanovor had been built deep, with hundreds of creatures and stats and evolutions behind them, and deep is expensive to keep lit.

~ afterward ~

Smith & Tinker shrank to under ten people and became an iOS studio on a Marvel license, shipping Marvel: Kapow on 8 June 2011. A version of Nanovor reappeared on iOS on 16 April 2012 to very little attention and was later pulled from the App Store. The company itself closed in November 2012. nanovor.com now forwards to an unrelated host, and the official site survives only as a Wayback capture from 2018.

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