Everyone loves original games. But few developers take the risk of making them in the video game industry.
Enter Jeremiah Slaczka, the creative director at game developer 5th Cell, dropped out of high school in his junior year. Working with his partner Joseph Tringali, he made a string of licensed cell phone games to get their company off the ground. Then they decided to risk everything they had to make an original video game called Drawn to Life, and they did it again with another game, Scribblenauts.
In 2006, while living with his parents in Bellevue, Wash., Slaczka successfully pitched the game Drawn to Life to THQ, one of the biggest makers of video games. The drawing game was an original Nintendo DS handheld game that went on to sell more than a million units. Drawn to Life spawned a sequel and a spin-off, rewarding the studio with success and empowering Slaczka to proclaim 5th Cell would never work on a licensed game again.
In the video game industry, Slaczka’s proclamation is bold. For many developers, it’s just a pipe dream to work on their own original titles. The hit-driven video game industry, like the movie business, regularly relies on sequels and licensed properties to generate sales. This year, after a slew of recession-leery publishers have pushed their games out of the competitive fall lineup, only a few original games remain.
One of those original titles belongs to 5th Cell. Scribblenauts, the company’s fifth DS game, is an innovative puzzle-action title enabling players to use tens of thousands of words, which turn into objects to solve puzzles. The inventive Scribblenauts won best original and best handheld game at the E3 game trade show this year by the Game Critics Awards. The game shipped Sept. 15 to mostly positive reviews, scoring an above-average 81 on the review aggregator, Metacritic. Here’s the story of how the company survived, first by making crappy mobile games just to get its foot in the door, and then eventually investing everything it could in making games that nobody else was doing.
See the full story at VentureBeat.com.
