The end of the game.com

Brian Rubash was the Director of Web Marketing at Tiger Electronics from 1997 - 2002. He was interviewed by Brandon Cobb for “The end of the game.com” in 2020.

Tell me what it was like, working at Tiger Electronics.

I mean you have to understand how Tiger was to understand why everything that ever happened to Tiger happened. So, Tiger was a small, I mean, literally a small toy company in Vernon Hill, Illinois. And I think, US, we had probably 50 employees, maybe 30, not too many. We had a huge, huge army of employees in Hong Kong and China. But for the most part, the American side was really small.

The company was run by a man named Randy Rissman and he was smart, could be really good with money. Really quiet, really not super personable. And then on the right side of him he had Roger Shiffman who was bigger than life: always in front of the camera, always in front of someone, louder than you could ever imagine. And they sort of complemented each other quite well.

But the one thing that we really worked well is if they wanted to do something at Tiger, they could take a concept and get it done in a month if they wanted to. I mean you could bring them an idea, you know, invent an idea, whatever it might be, a game idea, and they have a prototype in a month if they wanted it. And that allowed them to throw a lot of crap against the wall and a lot of hoping something stuck. You know, we got lucky when Furby stuck for three or four years. They were a super nimble company.

Every day was a blast. I mean I've never been in a job that I've had so much fun, and I've also worked at Hasbro and Mattel and I can't even compare the companies. I went to Mattel and I felt like I was working for an accounting firm.

Wow.

I mean it was so different. It was just night and day. But anyway, the key to this whole game.com conversation is that Tiger was primarily a toy company. Sales people were toy sellers, our buyers were toy buyers and that kind of made selling game.com a very complicated situation for us.

What was the inception of game.com? And why, other than cost, was its hardware so basic?

I think Tiger was always very price conscious. I mean, we very rarely got a product over $15. Most of our products were $10, $9, $14. We were very price conscious. I was not there when game.com was originated. I started in '97, I believe. But game.com was already sort of in full steamboat by the time I got there. I was brought in to handle all of the web related properties and toys that were connected to the web, and any new or interactive products that we decided to do. So, I worked on the connection for game.com to the website. We actually had three products. They're all connected to a website via serial cable for score uploading and stuff like that.

But with game.com, I don't know what the impetus was for changing design. We changed to the smaller units with only one cartridge slot, smaller. And I know that it was inspired by the iMac. If you remember the colors of the game.com at the early level, with the second game.com was called...

Pocket pro.

Yeah. We had the black and green, we black and blue. So anyway, I guess self-perspective: what we did early on I think is what we did in the long run. People might argue differently, but we had a toy company with 20 salespeople and toy buyers, we saw game.com come into the toy market and the toy aisle, and not the game aisle. You couldn't find game.com here. You found game.com probably near our handheld toys or by other people's games, board games and stuff like that. And so for the most part, I don't think anyone, because they didn't know more about it, I don't think they actually knew what they were going to buy.

So if they're going into the store to buy a handheld video game console for their kids, they're not even going to see it.

Right. I know that there were plenty of arguments between the VP that ran the game.com and the president that, you know, it's not going to work. If it's considered a toy, it's not going to work. Put it on the board game shelf, or the handheld game shelf. You got it. You have to sell it to the game buyers and get it placed near Nintendo and everything else. I don't know if that ever happened, honestly.

I do recall, though, that our local Kmart had the game.com locked up in a big display case along with the Game Boy. That's the only time I ever remember seeing the game.com for sale anywhere.

Kmart, they may have told them to do it because they figured it would sell better there. But I'll be honest, I don't think the president ever decided that it was a good idea to sell it to the gamer. And again that's personal to me, so that's why they failed.

And we spent a ton of money on the product. We spent a ton of money on commercials for that product. And we developed some actually pretty good games for it. So, I mean it wasn't a perfect system and it was black and white and everything...

Also, one of the other strengths of Tiger was we were a licensing juggernaut of sorts. I felt like we had unlimited licenses for everything. So, we had handheld games for Spider-Man. We had handheld games for Batman. We were able to get a lot of games ported over for game.com that would be considered, like, a game to come to. Like Resident Evil. But I don't think we took advantage of that, or that people realized.

Maybe that's where the lack of proper placement of the product comes into play again...

We just did not have the contacts in the game buyer's market. All our salespeople just didn't want to break into that market. It was too much work for them. And again, I think the president never approved that shift. So, I think we just were stuck marketing in the toy market. I mean I think he believed it to be a toy. The person who ran the division, Sandy Schneider, was former management. So, I think she knew what was supposed to happen and she just couldn't convince the right people.

This is my own thought, but I think the product was better than it was perceived. I think the product could have had a semi-successful time. But again, I think what really killed it was because it was in the toy aisle. I don't think we were ever able to really recover from that. And I think, the toy stores putting it on toy shelves, they didn't get the sales they wanted and they were probably leery about picking up the second version of game.com. I think that's the bad taste in their mouth, and they didn't want another thing that they couldn't sell.

It seems like Tiger did all the game development inhouse, rather than recruit third-party companies to help...

Well, I mean it's not altogether true. Actually most of our games were outsourced for development but to only one person who was local to the area where Tiger was. There was some work done in Hong Kong but for the most part, most of the stuff was done five or ten miles away.

I think we also got into a lot of trouble with the people that liked game.com because we did a lot of overpromising. Things that we had promised, or put in our catalog, commercials or whatever, but we never ended up doing.

Yeah. I think the list of unreleased games that Tiger announced was longer than the list of games that actually came out.

But the funny thing though with that is every game we could probably have listed that was unreleased, we had the license for. So it wasn't a matter of we were pretending that we were going to do them.

I can tell you a funny story real quick about the Godzilla game: We originally had the rights before the Matthew Broderick film got done. And we had a bunch of handheld games, and I think we had some kind of clock, and a bunch of other Godzilla products. But one of the licensing rules was that we were not allowed to show any pictures of Godzilla until after the movie came out. And so we had all these catalogs printed. We're talking, you know, 150-page catalogs printed for Toy Fair and stuff like that. So, we had to go through all of them and put stickers on top of all the Godzilla images on all our products. And unfortunately, those stickers were very easy to remove. And so we got in trouble and Godzilla walked away. That's why Godzilla never came out for any of our products.

Oh, so they all got canned.

Yeah. I guess another funny story: It was probably week or two weeks after I started at Tiger, I mean the game.com had launched probably a week after I got in and our lawyer gets a call from Peter Jennings, I believe. Anyway a major news outlet called our lawyer and said, “Do you know that when you go to game.com it goes to a porn site?” And he was right because game.com did go to a porn site.

And our lawyer called me into the office and he asked, “Is there a way to shut it down?” I mean they didn't have anybody at that time that was doing any web stuff, so I guess they didn't know how to stop it. But they didn't check it beforehand. So, everyone who was going to game.com was getting a porn site, which you can imagine was detrimental to selling that product. So, we ended up buying the domain name from the porn company for, I don't know if it was $25,000 or $50,000.

Back then, that was pretty high for a domain.

Yeah. But guess what? If you own game.com right now, what do you think you could get for it, $2 million or $3 million?

Oh, it'd be ridiculous. Some Chinese company's got it now.

Really, they actually let it go?

Anyway I only thought that was kind of an interesting story, because there was a couple of days of mass panic in the office, “What are we going to do?”

Oh, by the way, I remember the name of the developer that did most of the games: His name was Thomas Fessler.

Yes, of Handheld Games. They were the only developers ever credited by name for game.com development. So at some point he must have said, “We need to get our names out there,” and put the credits in.

Yeah, I don't know. I assume he must have had a relationship with Tiger, based on the proximity and whatever, but, yeah, I mean he's pretty much exclusive in his development.

So, he was onboard from day one doing all the development? That's how he and his team knew the system so well.

Mm-hmm.

You haven't reached out to Allen Richardson? I don't know if he wants to talk about it. But I mean he was basically in charge of every single game. He played every single game and he worked directly with Tom, he worked directly with Hong Kong. He was doing game.com daily so he would know every single game, he'd know about why we converted to a smaller unit. So, he's your best person to talk to.

Did you face any other challenges in marketing, aside from the toy aisle issue?

Yeah. We used the same agency to do our television ads, and probably some of our print stuff, for every Tiger project: a company in New York called Posnick & Kolker. They were used to doing toy commercials. But I think we were really able to step out of the box with the game.com commercial. Everyone liked the one with that little nuisance. But again, that was another deal where the VP of game.com would constantly be going head to head with one of our presidents.

And I think we were the highest spending toy company on commercials, even higher than Hasbro at the time. So I think there were plenty of game.com commercials on TV. But I guess I don't think we marketed it correctly. I don't think people saw us, for whatever reason.

And we tried to put so much crap into it. I don't know why anyone would ever use it. Obviously we used that to differentiate it, but I can't imagine anybody did anything with it. I mean, that stuff might've been confusing for people.

About the “little nuisance,” that was my favorite game.com commercial because of how obnoxious he was; filled with '90s attitude.

That was so unlike our VP, too. That was a complete departure from all of us. And so I think that was a good start. I just don't think we followed up.

How about where print ads were concerned?

We did do a lot of print ads in various magazines. But again, I think a lot of those magazines were Highlights Magazine, Nickelodeon Magazine, Cartoon Network Magazine, those types of magazines. I have to assume we did other magazines too. I don't remember seeing them, but I can't imagine our understanding would have made sure that we got into the game magazines.

Our ads were aimed at seven and eight year olds. We were not getting any product for thirteen or fourteen year olds, so they were just so foreign to us.

Which is ironic because a good chunk of your game.com games were going after teenagers: Mortal Kombat, Duke Nukem 3D, Resident Evil 2...

I may be wrong, but I expect there was probably arguments there too, which games we were releasing, especially things like Resident Evil. Or Castlevania.

And I think, that thing that we were really playing up on the smaller game.com – because we obviously didn't do anything internally to it – was the fact that it was smaller and it had colors, which I don't think people cared about. I think we chose all the colors of the iMac.

And how about the modem, and internet functions?

In hindsight, I think that was another feature that we wasted a lot of time on that no one really wanted. But I thought that it was just one way to say we aren't Nintendo or whatever. But again, I've never heard of anyone using it.

But the Web Link actually was used a lot more because the Web Link actually worked with three of our different products. It worked with the GigaPets, it worked with 99X and it worked with the game.com. So, I felt that was a multifunction kind of product. And that was developed outside actually. That was developed nearby but outside.

How successful was the Web Link, as far as how many people were submitting scores and such?

It wasn't super high. I wouldn't say it was high enough to call it successful. I mean I think it had to be a lot better than the modem, but I don't think we, as far as I know, really analyzed that data. But I believe that a lot of the scores were niche between our three products, and we didn't really differentiate the products.

So, you might get a score on Duke Nukem from game.com, and the 99X or whatever, and they were intermingled. I think it was great. But I think it happened a little early at the time, to do something like that. I don't think people were ready to upload their score. Again, in hindsight, we were way ahead of the game on that. We didn't realize it at the time, and we kept hoping upon that. It might've been something special, but sadly it was not.

And actually, you know, the ways that it was programmed, there was essentially, for lack of a better term, I mean the game.com didn't have some sort of API type system. Yeah, I'm using that loosely for the game.com. But if you had the web link cable, you probably could have hacked the game.com to do a lot more stuff if you wanted to.

There was actually a guy who did that. He abandoned it pretty quick though, but not before figuring out how to mess with some of the internal data.

I mean it was a very simple system.

One more thing, I think also at Tiger one of the things, because we threw so much crap at the wall to see what would stick, I think we also gave up on product faster than most people would. So, if something started selling, even if we spent $20 million on it, you know, we just try to get as much inventory sold as possible. And we move on to the next thing you can throw against the wall. So, I think that's pretty much probably what happened with game.com's demise, because I know we canceled a lot of games here and there for various reasons. Not all because of game.com not doing well, but various licensing issues or various programming issues or something like that.

Do you have the code for the old website, that interacted with the Web Link? I can't seem to find it archived anywhere.

I doubt it. It's possible. When I left, the web stuff was still up there and Hasbro must've taken over and moved everything over to Rhode Island. So, they must have handed all that stuff over to someone there. I mean they may have saved it. I doubt it because they weren't very forward thinking. And the developer that developed it, I don't believe is in business anymore, so I can't imagine there's much out there. It was company in Northbrook called... I can't remember.

Was there any reaction that you know of from IP holders, like Sega or any of the others, of the games Tiger developed based on their properties?

I don't recall. I know that – and I can't speak to which games they were – but I think some of the games that we were developing didn't meet the criteria of some of the licensors: Wasn't good enough, or didn't look good enough or something, where we ended up not being able to release the game. And obviously there were some companies that were harder on us than others, some fair. The funny thing is that no one's ever thought of competition. I mean we had Sonic, and no one thought that Sonic was going to sell enough to make something negative.

But I know that we had a lot of licensors not like the way certain characters move, or something removed from that game, or to change it. I don't remember which company was super hard on us. I think probably Resident Evil was the one to had to go through tons and tons and tons of work because of the comments.

We were always on deadline. And I'm sure we cut corners when we were dealing with a licensor. There's no way you get the time to add things because we'd have to go through the same approval for whatever we added. So, I'm sure some games overpromised and underdelivered. But when you think about it, there was only one person in charge of the game.com's games within Tiger. And I mean he had his plate full of patent games, constantly working with the licensors to get approval, you know, pumping out more games, getting new licenses and all that stuff. So, again, think if the company saw that product as being important enough or something that had legs, they would've probably had just one person on it.

Did you have any interaction with the Hong Kong side of the business?

I did. Not a lot on game.com related stuff. But I would say the Hong Kong team was probably the most important team to Tiger. They were so damn smart. We had a great group. A great group of people, smart people that didn't understand the word no, you know, to their detriment. They would never say we couldn't, they can't do something. And yeah, they couldn't always do everything. They couldn't always do what they said they could do, which always was fine. Yeah, they worked their asses off. I know that entire time I was there and probably much longer than that, I think Tiger's management counted on them a great deal and respected their abilities.

Is there anything else you'd like to say about your time at the company?

Let me tell you that Tiger was the best place I have ever worked. And I was young, but I thought I would never leave Tiger. Because I mean that was my job for life. I never wanted to do anything more. And it really tore me up when they decided to move the company to Hasbro headquarters and they started cutting all the staff, except for, I guess what they would consider, you know, critical staff, and I was cut loose. You know, I don't know if I would've gone to Rhode Island, but that messed me up for a really long time. And I only have fond memories of it.

I loved the people, I loved the products I got to work on. I looked forward to going to work every day. That was my dream job and I had fun doing it. I like telling people what a great place it was.

After working at Mattel and having worked at Hasbro, it was night and day and it was so different. I mean we could work on any projects we wanted to. And we'd come up with an idea on our own, and we could build it in a month. Just to be able to move that fast and never have people saying no. It was great. It was great. You don't get that kind of leeway everywhere. So, we need more places around like that.

Definitely.

I guess the funniest story I could tell about that is when I was hired as manager of web marketing. So when I first started, I basically just did the game.com website. And you know, I remember after about 15 months, I went into the VP of, I think it was handheld games at the time, and we had gotten the Star Wars license back. And I said, I hadn't worked on Star Wars product but would like to. I mean I don't have game development experience or anything, but give it to me, let me run with it. They trusted me enough to do it, and I mean you never get that kind of treatment at other companies. So, I began product development and it was great.

Right on. Say, before I forget: For a while, Tiger had a Usenet Q&A session going on. An employee with the “TigerGcom” handle would drop in and talk with game.com fans. Was that you, by chance?

It was me.

Ah! People would ask, “What's your name?” but would always get a cryptic answer.

Well, yeah, I never knew whether I should say or not. I mean I know I didn't want to get my name out. It's funny because that was my idea and I don't even think I asked permission. I just started doing it.

It's funny because after I get that, I got an article in Businessweek Magazine about the way we marketed this Tiger product in unusual way. Because my feeling had always been that the customer and the people buying our product had the best ideas, had the best questions and you could answer those questions or, you know, give them the information that they didn't have. And I loved interacting with people that bought our product. So, yeah, I was their Usenet rep. I don't think anybody else did that.

I know that a lot of times I got a lot of shit from people that I shouldn't be trying to represent the company if I don't work for the company. Because I never really said I worked for the company. And I know that a couple of times I had to prove that I worked for the company by changing the website, by putting their name on the website somewhere and then erasing it and going back to the original. So, I'd go on and I'd go to the home screen of game.com or whatever it was, add their names at the top of the page as I worked and then switch it back real quick. But yeah, I could get away with that, and I could do it at home because most of that flow, that sanitation, I did at night from my house.

What did you think of the pocket pro, by the way?

The first thing comes to mind is that it has a backlight, right? And you do realize that the game.com pocket pro, that wasn't a real backlight. It was a front light. But it was pretty crappy, if I remember correct.

And I wonder if some games weren't fully tested with two cartridges inserted? Like Jeopardy!, which won't even play unless the other slot is empty.

That's all on Allen. Anything that doesn't work is on Allen. Well, I am sure that we had other people test the games in Hong Kong. I just don't know how thorough they probably were. But for the most part, Allen was having to test everything himself. So, I think it was on Allen if it doesn't work.