Wired 2.11: Rocket Science

Rocket Science

The first digital supergroup is about to serve up addictive thumb candy - or become the next smoking crater in the videogame biz.

By Burr Snider

Think thumb candy. In the carnivorous world of videogames, a lot of smart people spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to appeal to a market consisting mainly of a lot of fidgety, fickle adolescent boys. Game designers talk of the connection between testosterone level and attention span; they talk of the phallic nature of the joystick; they talk of the classic hero's quest à la Joseph Campbell, of the primal appeal of mythological archetypes and Jungian mazes; they talk of gender-specific hunting-gathering drives and the etiology of the basic boyish glee derived from watching limbs being dismembered and gore being splattered.

What everybody is looking for, of course, is that elusive, addictive element of "playability" that glues a kid's hand to the controller, engages his motor functions pleasurably, and glazes his eyes as he sits for hours waging furious battle with enemy forces and dodging insidious traps waiting to do him in on the little screen.

Thumb candy.

It's what generates buzz - and buzz, it goes without saying, is what sends 'em dashing down to the mall, allowance hot in the pocket. It's the difference between shelf-clearing megahits like, say, Mortal Kombat, Myst, and 7th Guest, and any one of the hundreds of expensive failures littering the video landscape.

The only trouble is that nobody can accurately formulate sure-fire game hits on a consistent basis. Trends change, kids' tastes evolve, the moon enters a new phase. One day it's goofy Italian plumbers, the next it's gouts of spouting arterial blood. This is a big-time crapshoot with one constant: while per-unit profit margins are huge, the cost of producing games has soared astronomically, sometimes exceeding US$1 million a title.

Nonetheless, the interactive home-entertainment market currently generates around $6 billion annually, more than the box office earnings of all the motion picture studios combined. And with sales of PC CD-ROM hardware expected to double by the end of the year, the potential just keeps on ballooning. As the market matures, game theorists have devised a new strategy: grafting Silicon Valley engineering and gameplay with Hollywood production and special effects. The results, they hope, are games increasingly more theatrical in presentation and appearance - movies, in effect, to control and move around in.

But so far, no one's really pulled it off. It's a wide open race among the big-name, established contenders - Sega, Nintendo, LucasArts, 3DO, Accolade, Acclaim Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Spectrum HoloByte - to see who'll take the lead in this new generation of games.

But there's an unknown on the track, too - a brash little envelope-pushing San Francisco Bay area-based outfit sporting the whimsical name of Rocket Science Games Inc. With lavish financing, a radical new "Sili-wood" production plan, and a star-studded roster of designers, coders, and producers, Rocket Science is already generating the loudest buzz in videogames, even though its first titles (for Sega CD as well as Mac and PC CD-ROM) won't hit the shelves until the '94 Christmas season - right around the time you read this. All the hype surrounding Rocket Science may be glaringly premature, of course, since the ultimate jury is composed of those hordes of twitchy-handed teenagers, but a lot of very smart money is betting that this audacious upstart with the glittering pedigree might just hold the secret recipe for some of the tastiest thumb candy to come.

We've (Never) Done This Before

Sitting at a conference table in the industrial-gray offices of Rocket Science in Palo Alto, California, CEO Steve Blank is somehow simultaneously anxious and sanguine. A smooth Valley vet who's been through the start-up drill enough times to be realistic about the odds involved, Blank nonetheless exudes the confidence of a man who firmly believes he's riding a winner. By his own count, Blank's start-up record is pretty decent - three ringing successes against one "smoking crater." Before co-founding Rocket Science he was vice president of marketing at SuperMac Technology, the largest producer of hardware peripherals for the Macintosh, and before that he helped start Ardent Computer (the crater) and MIPS Computer Systems. He was also marketing vice president at Convergent Technologies. And, oh, by the way, he did a little spook work way back when with ESL, the hush-hush government contractor started by Bill Perry, Clinton's secretary of defense. (Blank isn't telling exactly what that was all about.)

Burr Snider has been a longtime features writer for the San Francisco Examiner and has written for such magazines as Esquire, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, Oui, and Crawdaddy.

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