We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.
Sorry for the delay in getting this installment of the series out. Part of it is because I went on vacation and came right back into Spooktober, so time has been a factor. Another factor is that this is a part of the Hex history that we’ve retold to our friends and families thousands of times, but have kept pretty quiet publicly for a variety of reasons (including embarrassment). Right after it happened, we had long discussions about how this part of Hex history could be turned into a Terry Gilliam movie, a Broadway musical (“He’s got the card! He’s got the card!”), and a true crime novel about the lamest corporate crime in history. For now, I’m going with a very vague overview without a lot of specifics.
So when we left last time, Leighton and I were ready to admit that we weren’t up to the task of the bureaucratic end of running a company, so we were going to officially disband and just make stuff as some guys who made stuff. As we were organizing the stockholder meeting to make this announcement, a guy we knew from college (who hadn’t been involved so far–he may have bought $5 or $10 worth of stock in the company, but I don’t think he even did that) asked if we’d be willing to hear him out on some ideas for how to keep things moving. His name was SupaGenius.
SupaGenius showed up with an organizational chart (with himself at the top, of course), specific jobs for everyone, a release schedule, and a bunch of other stuff that seemed like a good idea for a business to have. Despite some of us having concerns, we ultimately had to admit that the plan seemed pretty solid, so we talked it over and decided to let SupaGenius run the company for a while. As part of the new regime, one of his goals was to bring in some new investors that amounted to actual seed money instead of the beer money Leighton and I had raised.
Initially, this turn was beneficial for us. We got a lot of things accomplished that probably wouldn’t have happened if Leighton and I would have had to do it. Among other things:
- We got things settled with Bob and got the rest of the original QAGS print run.
- We released 3 more “Qik Paks” (what would be called zines today–in those days, zines were something cool people did, not gamers).
- We started doing regular conventions appearance at conventions outside of Lexington.
- We went through a few deals with various distributors (including 800-lb gorilla Alliance), which gave us national reach to retail stores. *
- We completed our first full-sized book, Spooky: The Definitive Guide to Horror Gaming.
*At this time, this was a thing to get excited about because it was the only way to sell more than a handful of books. In retrospect, it was a good way to lose thousands of dollars since every distributor has a tendency to order way more books than they can sell. Since they ordered them, you have to pay to print and ship them. Then a year later they return 75% of what they ordered and you have to give most of the money you initially made back to them and spend the rest on freight to return the books to you. But at the time it felt like a win.
We released Spooky at Archon in 2001 (the first few boxes of the book were actually shipped to the hotel) and it seemed like everything was going great. Steve Jackson Games, who had released a new edition of GURPS Horror that year, was Archon’s Gaming Guest of Honor that year, so we reached out to them and asked if they wanted to do some kind of competition to settle who had the best horror book. They were kind enough to agree, so we suggested the only logical contest: live action TOON. We won and the Daily Illuminator message of the day was titled “Beaten at my own game.”
Things seemed like they were going really well. That was all about to change. I’ll get into it next time.
