The end of the game.com

Marc Rosenberg was the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Tiger Electronics from 1987 - 1998, and Executive Vice President of Marketing from 1998 - 2003. He was interviewed by Brandon Cobb for “The end of the game.com” in 2020.

I've found that people feel very positive about having worked for Tiger Electronics. Was that your experience too? Did you quite enjoy your time there?

Oh, I was the number three or number four employee, so yes. I mean I was there pretty much almost from the beginning; I started in 1987. So I was there all of the '80s, '90s, you know, from the time before we're really just starting to do handheld games, all our licensed games. You know, Roger Shiffman, he then brought me in very early and we had an incredible run. I think the biggest year we had seventy-two handheld games.

What was your overall feeling about the game.com?

This system was great itself. I mean, we're limited to black and white, which we got called out on a few years later. Everyone beat the crap out of us, because we did it in black and white. But we went out and got all the licenses; we kicked ass on that, but Nintendo had colored video the next year.

You know, with game.com we were climbing the mountain, we're fighting. We're battling Nintendo, who was really, really entrenched. And game.com was not our only focus. We're doing it at a time when we had a lot of other products that were, you know, taking over the world. Every year we have our gaming business grow too, with things like Brain Warp, and then we got into sound novelty with Talkboy. So, game.com was a brilliant system, right? It was probably bigger than we could have handled at that time.

The toys were awesome, but we were always fighting battles. And a lot of them too was the big video game companies who were trying to crush us at that point, keeping us out. And ultimately, Sega who was one of our competitors, we ended up buying the same Sega game business and we actually did all their handheld games. So I think we were really good at figuring out what we couldn't and could do well, and focusing on the things that really gave us the best chance for success.

What was your opinion of the game software being developed in-house for the game.com?

I think of what our guys were brilliant at was making games that were good enough for the audience that we're going after. So when you got in a hardcore gaming, you know, game guys, back then it was 8 at the start, 8 and 16 and it kept getting bigger and bigger. We weren't really in our sweet spot. But for the younger kids and the guys we were going after, we did a phenomenal job. And our in-house team did more with the resources we had and the technology we had to actually to give products a chance, than any other company out there.

Did you have third parties wanting to do software as well, or was that something Tiger wasn't too interested in?

With Tiger, it wasn't traditional third party software acquisition back then. It was inventors coming to us with ideas to attack. And one of the things Tiger was best known for was we had better relationships with the inventor community than anyone. But it wasn't a traditional work for hire where we go and find guys that were doing the greatest new software development. It was a lot of the guys that had worked on our handheld or self-contained games and talking to their brands.

And a lot of these people were creating new technologies for the system in that time, our own guys coming up with ideas. But we weren't going out licensing a lot of third party software at that point.

Do you have any funny stories about the game.com?

I think the funniest game.com story I remember: I was heading marketing back then. When we got on planes they would say turn off all your electronic devices, your Walkman or your Game Boy, and stuff like that. And Randy Rissman, the CEO, came to me and said, “I want you to get them to say turn off your game.com.” And I'm, like, “Are you nuts? No one has any fucking idea what a game.com is!” And he's, like, “You need to get it to the top that they need to say that.”

And we were on a plane with some of the Tiger staff – this is back in the day when the flight attendants were holding microphones and making this stuff up – and sitting in first class. And literally I said to the woman, “You need to do me a favor. Can you make an announcement to turn off your game.com?” Well, the entire first class of the plane with the Tiger people were cracking up because we were the only people that had any idea what the hell she was talking about. So that's the closest I ever got to having someone on a flight make the announcement: She made the announcement as a joke for me.

But I would spend hours trying to get to the right people at United and American Airlines and tell them to do that. And people would have thought I was just insane. Those were wacky days.

That's a pretty good story.

And it wasn't because of lack of effort that game.com didn't happen. This was kind of our M.O.: We were always David fighting Goliath. But when we were David fighting Goliath in the toy business, we had a track record that we could really, you know, stick it to him when we needed to. And we worked our asses off in the video game business because the projects were so insane. But it's just, it was just too big.

What kind of early feedback did you get from people about the system?

People were blown away by it. I mean everybody was blown away by it, but we weren't getting the titles yet, and it would have taken us years to really get it going. And we decided to kind of stick more to our sweet spot.

You had Duke Nukem 3D, a hit PC game.

It was like that one big title we had done. Roger Shiffman was not afraid to take chances. You know, Roger had relationships with every game company, every studio. We did Atari games, different things like that. And had we committed two or three years to really go after it, we would have won, we would have been fine. But we had so many other things going on. And the risk to reward wasn't there. So, away we went.

Other than a few commercials I didn't see much coming out in the way of advertising, like in magazines...

Randy didn't really believe in magazines. And the money we got, we spent on TV ads. But there were also things like, you'll see game.com on 300 million packages of Nabisco cookies and stuff. We would do a lot of it. That was my idea. We would go do promotions like that where we're giving things away, and we reached kids that way.