MASTERMIND: Brian Spence

Brian Spence knows what it takes to turn an idea into a marketable product, but he will be the first to tell you how rare it is to make a living as a board, card, and dice game inventor.

"There are a lot of people who have ideas, but they just aren't sure what to do with them. They just don't know how the business works," Spence says.

Many will try, few will succeed

The harsh reality is that an extremely low number of the games that people dream up actually make it to stores, and even when they do there is no way to know just how long they will remain popular and on the shelves. Spence is concerned that too often newbie game inventors jump head first into the industry without researching what manufacturers are actually looking for, preparing themselves for rejection, or worst of all, they break the bank developing a product that falls flat.

This inspired Spence to give a talk at the Ann Arbor District Library - Pittsfield Branch entitled "The Business of Game Design". He reports that the event drew in "more people than I ever expected," revealing that Ann Arbor is brimming with creative, inventive people who want to know how to turn their ideas into the next big craze. He wanted to "help them get started and keep them motivated, but also give them information so that they don't get ripped off."

One of the best ways to find out how to successfully license a product is to ask someone who has already done it. Spence sees the city as a good home for budding game inventors because "this area has such a wide variety of creative people. I definitely think Ann Arbor has a high population of people who have goofy jobs," he says. Inventors working in any field, creative entrepreneurs, and book authors are a good resource because "they know a lot and have been through it. At first, talking with people who had already invented things was really helpful to me," he shares.

With over a decade of experience working as an independent inventor and spending the last ten years developing games with Garry Donner and Michael Steer of Ann Arbor-based design firm Random Games and Toys, Spence has rare insight into the process of hatching an idea, prototyping it, and licensing it to game manufacturers. As a sharp-witted creative-thinker, he has developed over 200 products and licensed around 60 to manufacturers, including big dogs like Hasbro and Mattel.

After teaching at Dicken and Burns Park elementary schools, Spence was inspired to get into the business of game design after talking with a friend who had licensed an educational toy. He thought, "Hey, I can do that. I can be creative enough to come up with some ideas." Since then, he has been an idea machine. However, his advice to newbie inventors is "don't quit your day job." Spence utilized his degree in elementary education from the University of Michigan to start a tutoring business. The move allowed him to continue working with kids and pay the bills in the evenings, while devoting his days to inventing games.

His career success did not happen overnight, but getting his foot in the door did. Well, kind of.

Spence had the highly unlikely experience of licensing a product on his very first try, a line of collectible teddy bears based on the nine biblical fruits of the spirit. "It was during the whole Beanie Baby craze," he remembers, "I blindly sent it in and they purchased it." His early triumph fresh out of the starting gate was encouraging, but the cold reality of the industry would soon catch up. It would be five years before he licensed another idea.

Spence still tutors a few kids, but nowadays he pays the bills with royalties. However, not every game that makes it on the shelves has fattened his wallet. His bread and butter are his two "evergreens," Buzzword and Last Word from Buffalo Games, which are each predicted to reach a benchmark of one million units sold sometime this year. When in comes down to it, his two most popular inventions "are by far the two that keep me eating," he laughs.

Clip art and contact paper

What does a prototype actually look like when Spence pitches it to a manufacturer? Not what you might expect. Walking into the Random Games and Toys office, you find a stack of cardboard boxes decorated in only solid colored contact paper. As he pulls out a card game he is working on, Spence makes the point, "I have no artistic ability whatsoever, but I have Coral Draw and a lot of clip art."

Flipping through the batch of clip art laden cards, he says, "Of course, the company would never produce that. They would have their artists do much better work. Our goal is to get the idea across. Our goal is not to give them a finished product. Even if we thought it was a finished product, they're going to want to add their own flavor to it."

Aside from eye-catching packaging and catchy names, which Spence cannot take credit for, "the key" to the success of his evergreens is that "they are simple to explain and people get the idea within a couple of seconds," he explains. Manufacturers have told him, "We want games where people are sitting all around a room, and if someone is out in the kitchen cooking and listening in, then they can still yell out an answer if they want to."

He is concerned that some people spend an incredible amount of time and money to develop game prototypes, and many fall into the traps of invention submission companies, which "lead you on" and give the impression that spending thousands of dollars on things like marketing and patents are necessary in the game design industry, according to Spence. In his experience, a prototype that "plays well" is the most important tool to getting manufacturers' attention. Instead of wasting energy on creating a finished product and patenting a design out of fear that someone will steal an idea, Spence suggests that it is better to "do your research and find reputable people to work with."

New inventors often hold tight to a single idea, when it is better to play the odds. "At first, they are going to fall in love with each of their individual ideas. So, the first idea they come up with is going to be like their baby," Spence says. When their games are rejected by design firms or game manufacturers, "people often get offended. It's almost like someone saying that your child didn't behave well in school today. But you really need to pay attention to what people in the business are saying about it because they are probably right."

He attributes his own success in getting the attention of Random Games and Toys to his willingness to listen to Donner and Steer's feedback and constantly think up new ideas. "I originally went in there with six ideas or so, which I think they aren't used to."

Spence remembers. Each time he returned, "I was coming in with new ideas, so they could see I was very serious about doing it," he explains, adding "I was also open to receiving their feedback and I wasn't stuck on some product that I thought was so great, but they didn't think they could sell."

Ultimately, Spence discovered that inventing a successful game wasn't all that different from inventing a new software program or biomedical instrument: lots of persistence, lots of revisions, lots of ideas and lots of luck.