Stalefish-Labs

How Tall Tales Got Designed (in Letters)

In January 2002 I dropped an envelope in the mail addressed to my brother Steve. Even in 2002, mailing a letter to a sibling was unusual — but these weren’t usual circumstances, and the address wasn’t his usual one. He was, in the letter’s own phrasing, in a “new temporary environment” — incarcerated, briefly, in one of the not-good stretches that bracketed the good ones.

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The Cell Phone of Games: Notes from Toy Fair 2003

In February 2003, a blizzard later known as the President’s Day Storm shut down most of Manhattan and made it nearly impossible to get to the Jacob Javits Center, where the American International Toy Fair was set up that week. I was supposed to be at booth #6250 in the Specialty Source section on the 1st floor, debuting Tall Tales Pocket Edition. I made it. So did most of the other indie game makers — on foot, dragging suitcases of inventory through snow that was deeper than the wheels on the suitcases. It was my first Toy Fair, my first time designing a custom trade show booth, my first experience learning the ins and outs of NYC union labor…check with an electrician before you plug or unplug ANYTHING!

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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.

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