Thursday

July 8, 1999

We're back from Origins '99

Once upon a time, about two months ago, we created a new virtual game store called Contagious Dreams. Since then, we've been adding to it and giving it some polish while gearing up for the official grand opening of the store, which took place this past weekend in Columbus, Ohio. We put a huge amount of work into it, and I had to pull a 36 hour shift on the day before departure in order to get everything done in time, but I'm happy to say, it was a smashing success!

I've created a separate report on the show, in the form of a photo album, so go there for all the details. The short form of the story is that we dazzled the gaming community with our newest ventures, created a lot of new interest in both our products and our webstore, made lots of sales, and generally had a great time.

Origins was also host to the 10th International Icehouse Tournament, and I'm both delighted and surprised to be reporting here that I was the winner! For complete details, you can read the updated Icehouse Almanac, as well as Eeyore's report posted at the Unofficial Icehouse site. And while I'm handing out links to reports on Icehouse Tournaments, be sure to check out Eric Zuckerman's West Coast Tourney 1 report.

The one disappointment of the weekend was the Origins Awards. Both of our main game products, Fluxx and Aquarius, were up for Best Traditional Card Game of 1998. Sadly, we lost to Guillotine, published by Wizards of the Coast. Personally, I think it should have gone to Falling, one of two Cheapass Games that filled out the ballot... but James Ernest and I both suffered from having the votes for our games split between two contenders, and together we also divided up the underdog vote, being as we both are tiny companies huddling in the shadow of the great WotC. And anyway, by the end of the day it was clear that this really was just a popularity contest: WotC games won most of the awards listed in the program book.

But even though we didn't win, it was a thrill all the same just being in the audience of a major industry awards show and hearing, not one but two, of my inventions called out on the nominee list. Losers though we were, it was still really cool.

Stay cool...

On the way home we spent the night with friends in Pittsburgh. What a delightful city that is! I've heard for years that it's a great town, but this was my first real visit. I was impressed.

There's a show about the internet on the Bravo Network called ".com", hosted by Luke Skywalker. This week they contacted us about doing a 3 or 4 minute spot about Contagious Dreams on a future episode. It sounded great until they told us we'd have a shell out $33,000 in "pre-production" fees in order to be included. Yeah, right!

I had convinced myself that I'd lost a vital roll of exposed film during our dinner at the Kahiki, but when I got the rest of my film back from the developers, the missing photos were there! I had 'em all along.