A Cubicle with a View
So I wasted 10 years of my life doing useless work for government agencies and charities, trying to improve the education system and helping the vulnerable – whatever! I could have been making games! That’s ten years I’ll never get back.
This column is my attempt to prevent this tragic waste from ever happening again. By taking you through what’s happening with my games company, and going off on wild tangents about some of the issues raised, I’ll show you how a small corner of the games industry works. I hope that it will be of interest to people who are intrigued by the process of making games and that, should you want to, it will help you figure out your place in the industry.
The first obstacle I must overcome is that no one knows who I am, and very few people have heard of my company. I’m Dominic McDowall-Thomas, vaguely related to Roddy, not to Malcolm. Can’t decide if that’s the better way round or not. I run Cubicle 7 Entertainment Ltd. with my business partner, Angus Abranson. You may well know Angus – he’s a well-spoken, clean-shaven Wookie who’s worked in games since the ‘80s and has been the subject of one of John Kovalic’s strips. Comic strips; I feel I should clarify.
The Dangers of Drink
My involvement with Cubicle 7 and the games industry began on the London Underground at 3am on 1 January 2004, on the way home from the B-Movie New Year party. Angus and I were friends: we gamed and went clubbing together. So he waited until I was drunk before he got me to sign up to edit SLA Industries books. To be fair to Angus, that plan worked beautifully.
The plot thickens...
After coasting along for a while, everyone involved started to notice the passage of time, and that gave us the extra motivation that we needed to go up a gear. In October 2006, Angus asked me to come on board properly and look after production and marketing, and we published our first book, Cannibal Sector One for SLA Industries, that December.
Over the next couple of years, we published a small number of books including Victoriana and Starblazer Adventures. By this stage, no one had given up their day job, so we were pretty limited in what we could do by lack of time and other resources. We had a number of ‘first’ experiences – including our first GenCon as exhibitors. I think that the ‘product late for GenCon’ experience is a rite of passage for publishers. Mine resulted in me, Andrew Peregrine (Victoriana lead writer) and the Hilton Bell-hop pushing ten boxes of Victoriana 2nd Edition through the streets of Indianapolis from the hotel to the hall on a gilded luggage trolley. Even though the damage done by a speeding, overloaded trolley under debatable control has yet to be statted, the queue outside the main trader hall parted with alacrity.
What shall we do tonight Pinky?
We had no illusions about what we were doing – we were a very small publisher with a small number of products. But we had a plan. We were going to get a license and use it to fast track ourselves a few rungs up the ladder. We thought it would take a while…six months later we had the Doctor Who license. But I’ll come back to licenses and pitches in a future column.
We now had opportunities and challenges on a new level. The license gave us access to a larger potential market, and the opportunity to sell more games. On the other hand, we needed to operate on a much larger scale than we had up to that point.
That meant investment.
There are a range of methods and means of securing investment – another topic I’ll come back to in the future. There are pros and cons for them all, and you have to weigh up what will work best for you and your organisation.
Matthew Sprange of Mongoose Publishing introduced us to the guys at Rebellion, who became our favoured option. As well as giving us the benefits of their experience and the back up of their organisation, Rebellion also gave us a very rare opportunity for an early-stage games company – the opportunity to work alongside an established company, Mongoose Publishing.
Mongoose and Cubicle 7 are separate entities that share an office and sales and finance teams. It’s been invaluable to be able to get informed second opinions and advice from Matthew and the mongooses.
Obviously we had our concerns about autonomy and control, which is one of the reasons that we chose the source of investment so carefully. I’m happy to be able to say that so far it’s all working rather well. We are independent, well advised and secure.
And now, the real work begins
Since March, Angus and I have been working full-time on Cubicle 7. It has been an eventful year. We’ve upped our production rate dramatically – 15 new titles since June, as opposed to four in the previous two years. We’ve had delays and setbacks, but are more or less still on track.
So that brings us more or less up to date. My following columns will be a mix of giving you an insight into what’s happening in Cubicle 7 and a discussion of the areas and issues in the games industry.
In the coming columns I’ll be talking about some of our games, so it will probably be useful if I give you a summary here so you know what I’m on about. So far, we work on:
- Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space (time travel adventures)
- Starblazer Adventures (Rock’n’Roll Space Opera)
- Victoriana (Fantasy Victorian / “Victorian Shadowrun”)
- Qin (Warring States era Medieval mythical Chinese game)
- Call of Cthulhu (we have a license to publish supplements)
- Print partnerships (we work with Adamant Entertainment, Alephtar Games, Arc Dream, Beyond Belief Games, BoxNinja, Jabberwocky Productions, John Wick, Postmortem Studios, Talisman Studios, and Triple Ace Games)
Thanks for reading this far – I hope you’ll catch up with me again next month!
Or, if you are coming along to Dragonmeet in London on Saturday 28 November, drop by the Cubicle 7 stand and say hi - I'll have an advance copy of the Doctor Who game to show you.
