The Quicksilver Story: Chapter 6
Welcome to Quicksilver!
This is the sixth post about the story of our company. You can jump to the beginning here: The Quicksilver Story: Chapter 1 and to the previous chapter here: The Quicksilver Story: Chapter 5
Our story is four decades long, and still going strong. It involves more than 50 games for numerous different publishers, and some very interesting educational products. This is the story of one of our largest educational projects.
Rich Dad’s Cashflow 101
We are big fans of board games. But making electronic versions of these types of experiences is not simple. Many times, the rules just don’t quite translate to an online setting, or there are fundamental design conflicts between the turn-based nature of most board games and the tendency for online games to be real-time focused. In the early 2000s, we were challenged to build an ambitious online game about financial literacy. Wikipedia says:
"Rich Dad Poor Dad is written in the style of a set of parables based on Kiyosaki's life. The titular 'rich dad' is his best friend's father who accumulated wealth due to entrepreneurship and savvy investing, while the 'poor dad' is claimed to be Kiyosaki's own father who he says worked hard all his life but never obtained financial security."
Wikipedia also notes that the book has sold over 32 million copies.
But Kiyosaki and Lechter didn’t stop there. They knew that playing games was a great way to drive home lessons. That’s how we became involved. They were also savvy enough to realize that it was also a great way to make money.
Together, they created a game called Rich Dad’s Cashflow 101. The board game taught basic financial literacy, including how to understand a balance sheet and an income statement, how to evaluate rental properties and stocks, and how to become a business owner. It was like the famous “Game of Life”, but with lots of numbers. They sold large numbers of copies at seminars – for $195 a copy. But they wanted to expand and enable people to play even if they were not all around the same table, so they explored building an online game.
Soon, we were reading the books, playing the board game and flying out to Scottsdale to meet the team in person. They wanted a first-class product, which meant having superb graphics, plenty of animations, and of course rock-solid gameplay. Most of the elements of the board game worked well, but some required careful thinking and planning.
For example, the easiest way to address the manual math required in the board game would be to have the computer do all of the work. But that goes against the design philosophy of the game, which challenges players to get close to the numbers and work hard to understand how they affect one another. We came up with a solution: we required players to manually enter certain numbers related to a given purchase, but we gave them an in-game calculator that let them quickly total things up.
Explaining the context of the game was important, so we also created an elaborate introductory video sequence, complete with animated characters based on those in the board game, plus detailed in-game help and even videos of Robert explaining key points. Given that this was in the early 2000s, the tools were fairly rough and computers barely up to the task of rendering the necessary images. We could not render the sequences in real time, for example. We had to pre-render the videos and then play them back. Otherwise, too few people would have been able to play the game.
Another challenge was the back-end hosting. Again, in this era, modern “cloud” systems like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure simply didn’t exist. We had to rent space in a hosting facility, purchase servers and configure them to play the game. Then we had to write special code to implement the real-time turn management via TCP/IP from a standalone Windows/MacOS app, since the browsers of that day could not provide the necessary user experience. Technically, this required a lot of work, but with our proprietary cross-platform engine and our deep understanding of computer networking, it wasn’t actually very hard at all.
AI opponents needed to be part of the picture for the game, of course. Not everyone would have access to enough human opponents, and we wanted the game to be playable at any time. Once again, we were able to leverage our extensive past experience in AI design to come up with credible opponents. We never short-cut the AIs in our games. We don’t just slap together random moves. We write code that understands the rules and knows how to leverage them to its advantage. Our test of AI is always this: is it so good that we need to “dumb it down” to make it feel fair to normal players? If so, we’ve done it right.
Soon, we had an amazing game up and running and a ton of animation sequences. One especially memorable meeting took place at our offices. The Rich Dad team pulled up in a 40-foot limousine (which barely fit in our parking lot) and sat down for a review of all of our artwork. They were thrilled – it was better than anything they had expected. The characters really did come to life, the humor was just right, and the game design decisions were exactly what they had hoped for. Following this major checkpoint, the game was delivered a few months later and we entered a long-term maintenance phase of operating the servers and reporting activity.
When this game was ready for the market, the Rich Dad Organization invited us to a special meeting of their closest business partners at a top-quality resort in Scottsdale. We drove from California to Arizona with servers in the car, because we didn’t want to take a chance on flaky hotel Internet connectivity. We ran demos of the game using a dozen computers in a very fancy hotel ballroom. It worked perfectly, and folks were very complimentary (unlike the other demo that day, which was done via Internet and crashed due to the poor hotel Wi-Fi).
Rich Dad’s Cashflow 202
We were now managing servers for both games, usable on Windows and MacOS X, from our dedicated hosting facility.
The highlight of the Cashflow 202 E-Game was the rollout, which took place on the back-yard tennis court at a home in Scottsdale. Dozens of celebrities were in attendance, and we went on stage to demo the game live. After the demo, one person approached us and asked for our autographs on the box. We learned later that he was an NFL player for the Denver Broncos! It’s not every day that a sports figure asks someone else for their autograph.
We continued maintaining the system for a number of years and enjoyed periodically connecting with the team again.
Coming Up Next: Chapter 7 – Military Trainers
With the increasing capabilities of personal computers around the turn of the century, the US military became increasingly interesting in ways to leverage computers for training – not just basic skill development, but what’s known as “cognitive training” (teaching people how to think). Our extensive game experience and our ability to develop powerful time-saving tools served us well in our military work.
The Quicksilver Story: Chapter 7
Let’s talk! We love to take on new challenges. Tell us what you need and we’ll let you know how we can help.
You can reach us here: https://www.quicksilver.com/contact.html#contact.
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You can find us on the Web at www.quicksilver.com.