Photo © 2006 Erik Arneson
Inventor's Forum Breakfast at ChiTAG 2006
On Saturday morning, ChiTAG was home to an Inventor's Forum breakfast which was not open to the public. Tim Walsh (standing, right), designer of the classic party game Tri-Bond and author of the book The Playmakers: Amazing Origins of Timeless Toys, served as moderator. The three panelists were Mike Hirtle (seated, left), vice-president of research and development for Hasbro Games, Jeffrey Breslow (seated, right), founder of Big Monster Toys (read this article from the Chicago Reader for more on BMT), and Joey Breslow (seated, middle) of Grape Games. (Joey is Jeffrey's son.)
Among the many tidbits of useful advice that the panel game to the assembled audience of about 200 game designers was this, from Hirtle: "You have no idea how many people have The Next Great Game."
Hirtle said Hasbro officially accepts about 1,600 game submissions in a given year. (They do not accept unsolicited submissions; instead, they work through brokers or rely on existing relationships.) Of those, only 400 get a "serious look" and only 100 are presented to the higher levels of Hasbro management. Maybe 25 of them make it into stores, and just a handful will be really successful.
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