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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