When I was a kid, my family got a Franklin Ace 1000 computer. It had a green monochrome screen, and it booted directly to a DOS prompt (completely compatible with the Apple ][+ platform). It had a few games, too. Off the top of my head, I remember a PacMan clone, Lode Runner, Lemonade Stand (which is surely the root of all my lifelong entrepreneurial ambitions), Montezuma’s Revenge, Space Invaders, and a weird game called Dung Beetles.

Also: Zork

In case you’re not familiar with it, Zork was one of the original (now classic) text-adventure games. At each point in the game, you would be provided with a textual description of your surroundings, and then you’d navigate through those surroundings, collecting items, meeting characters, and performing tasks, eventually in the pursuit of solving some mystery. The whole game interface was a DOS prompt, but it was loads of fun.

It started out like this…

   West of House
   You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a
   boarded front door.
   There is a small mailbox here.

   >

Hmmmmmm. A house and a mailbox. What should I do?

   > open mailbox
   Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet.

   > read leaflet
   (Taken)
   "Welcome to ZORK!

   ZORK is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it, you will
   explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen by mortals. No
   computer should be without one!"

And so on.

Part of the reason the game was so fun was that there were no graphics. In fact, these kinds of games were commonly referred to as “Interactive Fiction”, since they were so focused on telling a story.

Based on our experiences with Zork (and a few other text adventure games whose names now escape me), my brothers and I designed elaborate maps for our own games. (There’s a key in the attic, behind an old chest. But the chest is too heavy to move until all the books inside are unloaded. And there’s a door in the basement that can’t be opened without the key. Behind the basement door is a shelf full of chemicals, but you don’t know how to mix them until you read the one of the books from the attic. And so on, and so on.)

Once we had made some progress with our maps, we’d start writing the code, in interpreted BASIC. That’s how I got my start as a programmer, more than twenty years ago.

In the mean time, though, I’ve kind of lost interest in most computer games. As a teenager, I was never very interested in Dungeons and Dragons style role-playing games, and the role-playing games on the market now that emulate that style of play hold very little interest for me.

Based on overwhelming recommendations from some of my friends (and a few dire warnings about addictions and 12-step programs), I created a World of Warcraft account. I played for the next month or so. But, for me, it failed to capture the magic of those old text-adventure games, and I quickly lost interest.

I like the idea of a game where thousands of people are all playing together, but I’m not so interested in the ever-repetitive battles. I’d be more interested in a big puzzle, where each player’s strategy would affect the strategies of every other player.

So, on that note, here’s a massively-multiplayer game that I think would be fun:

   You wake up at a sleazy motel in downtown Chicago.

   The prickle of tiny, leathery feet moving across your face snaps you
   immediately out of your groggy condition. You jump from the bed,
   brushing the rat from your face, and examine your surroundings.

   The room is bare. There are no sheets on the mattress. There's a
   cracked mirror on the wall, above a small sink. On the dresser is a
   small dagger, with a three-inch blade. Next to the dagger is an
   envelope containing $500 in cash. Written on the outside of the
   envelope are the words "KILL: EDWARD EPSTEIN".

At this point, you start wandering around downtown Chicago, searching through the streets, the hotels, the cafes, and the bowling alleys for a guy named Edward Epstein. You talk to bums, drug dealers, waitresses, cops, newspaper reporters, and whoever else you meet on the streets. When you find Edward Epstein, you put a knife in him.

As compensation for your services, you’re paid $5000 and given a new assignment: Nancy Reynolds.

Of course, Edward Epstein and Nancy Reynolds are two other players in the game. They’re also wandering around downtown Chicago. Both of them have been given a weapon and an envelope full of cash. Maybe one of those envelopes has your name on it.

As you complete more jobs, you get paid more. With that money, you buy food, weapons, fake IDs, disguises. You bribe hotel clerks for information about the names of last night’s guests. You steal security cameras from office buildings, and you buy the loyalty of certain cab drivers. You might even work with other assassins to exchange information. Of course, they could be lying to you. How will you know?

When you log out of the game, check yourself into a hotel. But don’t stay in the same place for too long. You never know when someone will find you sleeping and put a knife in your ear. You should probably bribe the hotel manager to lie about your whereabouts. But don’t forget that the hotel manager’s loyalty can be bought and sold by anyone else, for the right price. So how much will you spend to protect your safety?

To be successful at this game, you’ve got to be stealthy and cunning. You’re always after someone. And someone else is always after you.

Market Considerations

People are always interested in a new game. Especially something significantly different than what’s already on the market. And this would be entirely different.

Of course, I’m no expert on the state of the gaming community, but my intuition tells me that there’s nothing else quite like this.

Would people be willing to play a game (and pay money to do so) that was entirely browser-based, with no 3D graphics or sound. Would people be willing to play a game that departs from the predominant D&D style role-playing model (health, strength, magic, etc)?

I think so.

With a $10 monthly subscription fee (which seems reasonable), I’d need to have about 2100 subscribers to generate $250,000 in annual revenue. That seems totally reasonable. Though, since a game like this would require a large pool of users, the first couple of hundred users might be difficult to acquire. I’d have to give free accounts to lots of beta testers during the initial launch period.

Technical Considerations

I think it would be technically feasible to implement a game like this as a one-man shop. It would require no physics engine, no 3D graphics, no sound, and the entire game interface would be provided through a web browser (with maps and illustrations of the city and its streets, hotels, train stations, cafes, etc).

Also, I’d be able to host a fairly large user community on a single server, probably between 100 and 200 simultaneously logged-in users. And, since there would always be a certain percentage of users not-logged-in, I could probably handle more than a thousand user accounts before needing to scale to multiple servers. At that point, it would be possible to have different servers for different cities (Chicago, New York, Seattle) and to allow users to travel between cities, looking for their targets all over the world.

Pros:

• Fun fun fun!
• I have many years of experience developing webapps, so (even though it’s not my favorite kind of software), I already have the technical skillset to implement software like this.
• I feel pretty confident that there’s enough of a market for this kind of software to generate sufficient revenue.
• As an online monthly subscription, it’d be impossible for anyone to pirate the software. Anyone using the software would be, by definition, a paying subscriber. With no risk of piracy, I could expend more effort making the software better, rather than trying to implement anti-piracy protections.
• From a technical perspective, the demands of developing and hosting software like this would be easily within my capabilities (and budget).

Cons:

• I’m not a gamer. Most computer games are actually very disinteresting to me. So I’m pretty out-of-touch with the mindset of the typical gamer. I might be completely wrong in my assumptions about the marketability of a game like this.

…

This is the thirteenth of 30 business ideas that I’ll be writing about over the course of 30 days. Some of them are very serious business applications. Others are completely frivolous toys. One of them will become a product over the next six months, and the foundation of my new software business.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 1:22 pm and is filed under biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.