Quirky PC game maker trys to find niche

The Virtual Pet Cemetery (www.lavamind.com/pet.html) is one of the more oddly compelling Web side attractions to have sprung up along the Internet.

A million or so visitors find their way there each year to gawk at the eulogies posted in loving memory of Misty the Brown Mutt or Moretta and her kittens. Most are probably unaware that they have been flagged down by a larger-than-life roadside attraction, like a Paul Bunyan statue. Once there, perhaps the tourist will stop by the gift shop and make a purchase.

At least that is the hope of Steven Hoffman and Naomi Kokubo, a husband-and-wife design team in their early 30s who operate the pet cemetery as a come-on for Lava Mind, their home-based company in San Francisco. Lava Mind is best known for a series of zany CD-ROM business simulation games for personal computers, including Gazillionaire and Zapitalism, which generally receive high marks from game reviewers for sheer fun and pliability, and from educators for instructional value. (In Gazillionaire, players putter from planet to planet in funky spaceships buying and selling oddball commodities in an effort to outwit alien competitors. Zapitalism is a more advanced variation on the same theme, played out in a tropical archipelago complete with monks and pirates.) Despite the games' popularity, selling them has required its own creativity in the last few years, as the CD-ROM game industry has consolidated around a handful of big publishers and shoot'em-up action titles like Quake from Id Software. Small publishers like Lava Mind with niche titles like Gazillionaire have been all but squeezed out of retail stores. "It's impossible these days for a small, self-published game to get shelf space, no matter what the genre," said Elizabeth Crocker, publisher of Happy Puppy, a game review and resource Web site. So Lava Mind, which had been struggling with its retail- distribution network, decided to shift to a marketplace with infinite shelf space: the Internet. This year so far, sales on the World Wide Web, averaging about $6,000 a month, have been their primary source of income. "It gives us a good feeling to know if somebody really wants to get our game, they can," Hoffman said. Though it is difficult to gauge how much of their game sales can be attributed to click-through traffic from Virtual Pet Cemetery, it is worth noting that the pet site receives roughly three times the traffic of the Lava Mind home page itself. Whatever the leaping-off point, customers who have discovered Lava Mind through the Internet include prison inmates and a parochial middle school in Albany, Ga., which recently ordered 14 copies of Gazillionaire for a class in personal finance. And when the authors of a top-selling introductory college business text, Understanding Business, fell in love with Zapitalism earlier this year after stumbling upon it on the Internet, their publisher, Irwin/McGraw-Hill, bought 1,000 copies to send to professors to gauge their interest. The response was favorable enough that Irwin/McGraw-Hill is considering bundling the CD-ROM with the book. "What got me excited was the combination of good business sense and their sense of humor," Susan McHugh, co-author of the textbook, said of Zapitalism and its creators. "I tried it out on my own kids last fall and they're still playing with it. They came in the other day and said: `Mom, it tricked us. We're learning about business.'" Kokubo, a graduate of the International Christian University in Japan, first worked at Morgan Stanley's Tokyo office as a financial analyst and then held a variety of positions ranging from interpreter to production coordinator for the Leo Burnett advertising agency in Japan. Hoffman, who has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of California and a master's in film and television production from the University of Southern California, worked on entertainment software projects for companies that included Lucasfilm and Sega Enterprises in Tokyo. Early in 1994, having been married for four years and having built up a cushion in their savings account, they quit their jobs in Tokyo to make a go of it on their own in the United States. What appealed to them most about working on a shoestring-budget CD-ROM from their two-bedroom row house in the Sunset district of San Francisco was that they could create the game they wanted without waiting for someone else's approval or financing. Nine months and $30,000 later, Gazillionaire was born. They released a shareware version of the game over the Internet, which proved so addictive to members of the quality assurance department at Spectrum Holobyte, a Bay area software distributor, that the company bought the rights to distribute it in the United States. Lava Mind estimates that 150,000 copies of the original Gazillionaire and two repackaged versions, Gazillionaire Player's Choice and Gazillionaire Deluxe, have been sold. The more advanced simulation, Zapitalism, was released last year.

Copyright 1998
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