Stalefish Labs

The Cracker Barrel Edition That Almost Was

I’m a native Nashvillian, which is increasingly rare these days. I grew up with Cracker Barrel as a road trip staple, complete with the vintage candy in the gift shop, the triangle peg game, and endless biscuits. The company is based in Lebanon, Tennessee, half an hour east, and after getting an initial soft reply via a cold letter writing campaign about them carrying our card game Tall Tales, I learned I had a surprisingly direct connection to the top. I ended up getting a real sit-down, inside the building, with the founder and CEO himself, to show him the game. A truly rare opportunity for someone with zero marketing experience trying to launch a new game.

Pitching a Card Game to 70 Dead Retailers

There’s a folder sitting on my computer in the Tall Tales project named, with no imagination whatsoever, “Cover Letters.” Inside are 113 of them, written across 2002 and 2003, most addressed by hand to a specific buyer at a specific retail chain I hoped would carry the game — about seventy retailers in all, since the bigger chains got more than one letter. I looked the addresses up one at a time and tailored every letter. Most of those companies are now dead.

How Tall Tales Almost Ended Up in Starbucks

In the fall of 2001, I was deep into creating a trivia/storytelling game called Tall Tales. I started meeting my brother Steve at a Starbucks near where we lived in Nashville, after his AA meetings let out. It was one of the “good periods” with my brother, when he was focused on recovery and we could have a reasonably normal relationship. We had ups and downs over the years, and this stretch would prove to be the most meaningful one we shared. Often a few of his sober friends came along for our nightly coffee sessions, and it being summer and nighttime, we’d typically sit outside. The tables were small, maybe twenty-four inches across, and we’d push two together to get four or five chairs around. The conversation ranged wildly and there was a variety of interesting characters from night to night, and periodically I’d pull a half-finished prototype of my game out of the car to playtest.