"I was amazed at the depth of Steve's passion," Snoddy recalls. The three men shared a reverence for games and, says Snoddy, a hatred of the backwaters called "arcades" in which games had been stuck: "Skip, Steve, and I agreed that we're not ashamed of video games. Somehow, traditional entertainment people viewed video games as 'unserious.' As it was hard for my parents to think of rock and roll as serious music and to understand that it was part of my culture, it's hard for traditional movie-industry and theme-park executives to take video games seriously."
It was a manifesto that constituted an initial business plan. The founders envisioned a company that would reach a new kind of human-leisure animal. "There was a generation of people out there who had started to run the world," Snoddy says. "They had lived their entire lives with a game plugged into their TVs. We thought, That has to change the way that adults view entertainment. When you're playing a video game, you're in control. I think that has to affect people. It makes them demand a role in their own entertainment."
So they said, "Let's build a place that we would want to go -- adult, sophisticated, a peek behind big companies, a look at technology, injected with the best parts of movies."
Go to level 2.
In the business of games and in the game of business, every decision has the potential to be the one that will kill you -- or propel you to the next level of success. Take the decision that Paul says was one of the toughest calls that his team had to make: where to put GameWorks's headquarters. It was less about geography than about how the company should be run.
Says Paul: "Snoddy and I sat in a room and said, 'Are we going to do this in San Francisco or at Universal Studios in LA?' It was originally supposed to be in Silicon Valley."
It wasn't the location that was important but what the location said about the kind of company that GameWorks would be. Paul wanted a Silicon Valley - type company. "At the most fundamental level, GameWorks is put together out of a belief in and a reverence for what has made those companies successful," Paul says. "Low salaries, basic and functional surroundings, and group ownership. Most important is ownership, the sense that you are part of building something. If you arrive at a Silicon Valley company at 9 at night, you see men and women working, because they are owners. That's totally different from the Hollywood business model, which is a subsidy of lavish lifestyles and surroundings, big expense accounts, inflated egos, and focus-group thinking. In Hollywood, hierarchies of power are important. At GameWorks, the receptionist has stock options."
It sounds odd: Paul has managed to thrive within the Hollywood business model while having no respect for it? "No," says Paul, "I don't respect it. Why? Because too few people make too much money. It's not open, it's not accessible, and the distribution of wealth bears little relationship to the distribution of talent. In the technology world, exclusion never has a chance. Hollywood has some incredibly hardworking people like Lew and Sid, but it's also full of people who glide by on cell-phones. Silicon Valley is about creating things."
But one compelling factor brought GameWorks to the Universal lot in LA: Paul wanted to be near Spielberg while the director was shooting The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The goal, Paul says, was to make it possible for Spielberg to "come around, to feel as though he had a proprietary interest, to give his input." But at company meetings, Paul made it clear what kind of business he was interested in starting: "We did not inherit a culture. I don't want MCA Universal. I don't want Disney. This is Silicon Valley. This is a startup. You carry your own bag at this company."
When you're playing a video game that's based on a team sport, Madden NFL 2000 or NBA 2K, for example, there's one important rule: The guy with the best team wins. The same rule holds when you're starting a company to produce games -- and Paul, Snoddy, and Spielberg started by assembling the best creative team around. Snoddy picked the biggest names in the theme-park and movie-magic business: Disney designer Bill Stout; media and technology guru Tim Onosko; and Jim Schelter, tech director for some of Universal's biggest attractions. Whenever someone needed special persuading, Spielberg made the phone call. Paul had done a little negotiating with Universal Studios, and he delivered Soundstage 35 to the hotshots. (Most studio newcomers are lucky to get a small bungalow.) In March 1996, GameWorks was officially born.
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