THE SHANGHAI STORY (con.)

Believe it or not it was nine months before it was ready to ship. While the heart of the program was there, we needed to add enough features to justify the $50 price tag. And, it's often the "additional features" that makes the difference between a good public domain program and a commercial one. And, we had to negotiate a contract with Brodie.

The contract negotiation turned out to be much tougher than I expected, or it should have been. And, it was all my fault. I tended to side with the developer when it came to contracts, and I wanted Brodie to get everything I thought he deserved for bringing this wonderful program to the world, so I negotiated with the company the best deal that we had ever done with an outside developer. And then I went to see Brodie so he could be impressed by what I had accomplished on his behalf, and sign this wonderful contract.

What I had forgotten was that, to Brodie, I was the publisher. And, he wasn't very happy with the concept of accepting the "first offer." What a mess, I had already pushed the company to the limit, and now our developer was saying it wasn't enough. Ultimately, Ken Coleman (my boss) got involved and was able to make some considerations that made Brodie happy, but I had learned my lesson, and never again did I leave myself in a position from which I couldn't move.

We, Activision, had decided that the game was good enough to move to other systems, so my next job was to find the people to do these other versions. The program looked so simple, was really simple. But, the programmers that I found, time after time, had problems duplicating Brodie's work on other computers. I had to fire the first entire group, when after three months they still didn't have something playable on the screen. This was when I first discovered that scientific and business application programmers often don't have the skills necessary to program entertainment products at the level our customers expect. Most "high level" programmers assume that games are easy to do but, it turns out, leading edge games are an extremely difficult programming challenge, one that only the top five percent of programmers are up to.

Finally I got most of the programming started, and now I had to begin thinking about the marketing plan. I wasn't responsible for the final plan, but it was my responsibility to get the marketing department up to speed, and excited. The first problem I had here was the marketing people tried to write the plan without playing the product, they wanted me to tell them what they needed to know. I put my foot down, and refused to talk to anyone who hadn't played the program for at least half an hour. Well I didn't do the bosses any favor, within a short time we had a whole department addicted, and lots of other work wasn't getting done.

As you can imagine, I had strong feelings about the program, and that included feelings about what it should be called. I was in favor of "Addiction." I thought that, since it was essentially an adult program the name Addition wouldn't hurt it. But, the industry had just finished another round of bashing by those people who were afraid we were losing a whole generation to the "addiction of computer games," and the company was concerned with that title. Ultimately the marketing team came up with the name Shanghai, and I learned why they are in marketing and I'm in product development. The name Shanghai was perfect. It spoke of being "captured" and it had an oriental flavor, just like the game.

To my credit they did say, in the advertising materials, that Shanghai "was addicting" and that phrase did end up giving the product a lot of good free publicity. It worked just like I thought, since the game was seen as essentially an adult product, the term did not end up being threatening, and, reviewers said things like, "Activision calls Shanghai addicting... I doubted I would find any program addicting... I was wrong. I haven't gotten any work done for three weeks, since receiving my copy of the program. You have got to buy and try Shanghai from Activision."

Within that first year, 1986/87, Shanghai won almost every entertainment award, and ultimately became one of the most played computer games in the world, selling over ten million copies in all of it's variations. I was happy, Brodie was happy, and our judgment as to the kind of computer program that people of all ages would enjoy was affirmed. Additionally, when people talk about the lack of computer entertainment that women enjoy they most often start out the sentence with, "With the exception of Shanghai..."

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