Today is Father’s Day, which got me thinking about how my dad inspired me to become who I am today.
When someone describes themselves as a “creative,” it means they’re in a creative profession, like a video director or a copywriter. My dad is not a creative by that definition. He’s a radiologist, but he’s extraordinarily creative by any other definition of the word. He wrote the scores for four original musicals and staged them in our hometown of Buffalo, NY. (Off-Off-Off-Off… Off-Broadway.) A longtime theater and movie critic in his spare time, my dad ended his reviews on the local NPR station with rhyming couplets. And we have some of his unique, abstract landscape photography of decaying buildings hanging on our walls. No one else I’ve driven in a car with has ever insisted on pulling over to capture geometrically-pleasing urban blight.
Of all the things my dad created, his games impressed me the most. He designed two board games! This was in the 1980s, when board games were a mainstream form of family entertainment. They were one of my favorite types of toys. (I think the order was Video Games, Action Figures, Board Games, Trading Cards. Bottom of the list: Sports Equipment.) We used to play board games all the time at my grandma and grandpa’s house. Clue was a favorite. My dad and I played a lot of Scrabble together after the divorce. He usually won. He had an Ivy League education and I was in middle school, lol. On my mother’s side, card games like Uno and the family game Splash were perennial favorites. The idea that my dad actually designed his own games was really cool.
The first game of his I remember was a horse racing themed roll-and-move game. He drew a racetrack and spaces on thick cardboard. I asked him about the game recently, but he couldn’t remember much about it, besides rolling dice and moving pieces. We would play it with company after dinner and dessert, usually jello.
Okay, this is a tangent, but we ate a lot of jello back in those days. I don’t know why! When I went over to other family’s houses for dessert, we’d have ice cream or cookies. The closest thing we’d get to “jello” was pudding pops. Jello with bits of fruit in it was big in our house. A time warp dessert straight out of Nick at Nite. I can’t remember the last time I ate jello. I don’t miss it!
The second game he designed was special. Inside Track is a grid based strategy game. The board looks like a pixel art rendition of the Target logo with alternating red and white layers that lead to a center red square. Players have to move three pieces in a row on a layer, which allows the middle piece to move up a layer, towards the center square. To win, you have to get one of your pieces in the center square first. I really liked how players got to decide if they would play offensively, trying to bring their pieces together, or play defensively and block their opponent from creating rows. A lot of kids’ board games (Candyland, Chutes and Ladders) are entirely based on random chance. Inside Track felt deeper, like Chess. I generally went on defense in Inside Track, hoping to stymie my opponent, then make an unexpected offensive move. This slowed down the game considerably, which I’m sure no one who played me enjoyed.
My dad was proud of Inside Track. He got a nice wooden version made with a clever box design. The board was the top of the box, and it slid off into storage for the pieces and rules. No plastic and cardboard packaging required, unlike the other clunky board games on our shelf.
The story goes that dad submitted the game to different publishers. After many rejections, he found one who was excited about the game! The publisher gave the game an Egyptian pyramid theme and showed off the prototype at a toy industry show in New York City. They were ready to mass produce this version of Inside Track in China, but the publisher’s production pipeline got crushed by authoritarian shit. Without a cheap manufacturer, the publisher went under and the deal fell through. I remember him hand-selling copies of the wooden prototype version of Inside Track to local toy stores. I think the whole experience left him frustrated with the games industry and he pivoted back to theater, which was his true love creatively.
Until I came to Los Angeles and got my first jobs in game design, I didn’t know a game developer in person. I was aware of Shigeru Miyamoto and Will Wright, but I didn’t know much about them, besides their names being associated with games I loved. My dad was the person in my life who made his own games. By watching him, he gave me an intimate understanding about how games are conceived, designed, playtested, and marketed. He showed me the way and I continue walk that path. Thank you, dad, for giving me an inside track.
🎲 Your Turn: Do you have a creative family? In what way? Has your family inspired any of your own creative pursuits? Reply to this email to let me know, or tell the whole world by hitting the orange button below to leave a comment.
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