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Atomic Sushi Projects Wave 1 from Robot Martini Inc.
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Now that I've gotten the official press release posted, I thought I'd put our launch titles together in a Geeklist so that I could explain a little bit about where the games came from, what they're about, and if I can answer any questions about them.
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Posted Tue Feb 6, 2007 12:30 am
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The first game developed specifically for the Atomic Sushi line. We had our ideal number of cards per game for printing costs, and so set to work developing games to fit this standard. We also wanted a game about zombies terrorizing a high school. This was a game developed from theme first: the bid cards in people's hands represented things from their locker used to bribe other students. There were some tweaks in mechanics along the way to make the bidding a bit more interesting, but the basic concepts of the game stuck all the way through.
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After we had our concept for our product line, I began talking to game designer friends of mine, most of whom I had met when I was a Looney Labs intern. After I described what kind of games we wanted, a talented playtester and designer Kristin Matherly came back with this game almost completely finished. She said she had a particularly long meeting at work that she didn't need to pay attention to, and the concept of a game that emulated approaching women for dates came together then. Some quick numbers work and she had a prototype. The original game was about approaching Booth Babes at conventions specifically, but we changed it to be a slightly wider audience. We also spent a long time back and forth coming up with the funniest pickup lines we could!
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While having one of our meetings about Robot Martini, we somehow got on the subject of Lunch Money, and how popular a card game it was despite having a lot of gameplay issues. So I said, "Why don't we just make our own version of Lunch Money, but good?" From that comment, DHV was born. A lot of work went into developing this game, both in terms of mechanics and theme. For a while the game was about giant robots battling- but when we came up with the idea of historical figures (who didn't fight) being involved in a bar brawl, we knew we had come up with a great theme.
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My only game design in the first wave, I had come up with the idea behind the game last year for Balticon. I wanted a trivia game for the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons: for those of us who are very nitpicky about our "nerdy" topics, this would be the game. Instead of just using this knowledge on the Internet, I made a game about it. But I also wanted to balance the scales a bit, so I built in a mechanic by which even if you didn't know the answer you could still get points by guessing which of your friends do know it. However, after designing it, I worried that it would be tough to find a publisher for this type of game: so when Robot Martini started up, I knew it had found a home.
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We had our games, but we were lacking star power. Enter Stephen "Snoop" Glenn, who I had met years ago at Protospiel and then later at Stephen's game design convention "Pow Wow." I knew that he had a great card game that he had been shopping around for a long time, and I really wanted to publish it. I didn't realize at the time that the game in question- then called Jet Set- had actually been a Hippodice finalist! We're very lucky to be able to bring this game out and finally get it into print.
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Posted Mon Feb 5, 2007 8:53 pm
I see your point, I've updated my collection appropriately.
(And Jonathan, I really dig your site, it does what I try to do with my site but far more indepth, and is always a great read)