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!
The booth itself was pretty modest: a 10-foot fabric pop-up mural with the three creatures from the game (Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and our take on the Roswell alien) wrapped around a counter covered in stacks of game boxes. Toy Fair is strange theater. The big toy companies take over entire halls; indie game makers like Stalefish Labs were tucked into a corner of one floor, hawking our wares to whoever wandered by. The buyers from major retailers had appointments scheduled with Hasbro and Mattel in private suites in entirely other buildings. We had whoever was curious enough to walk past Specialty Source.
"The Cell Phone of Games"
A reporter from Fox 5 News in New York stopped at the booth midway through the show. He was doing one of those "let's roam Toy Fair and see what's interesting" segments. He picked up the Pocket Edition box, asked what made it different, and I gave him the spiel: no board, no dice, no writing, fits in a coat pocket. He turned to the camera and said, on tape, "It's so compact and mobile — it's the cell phone of games!"
I have used that quote in approximately every pitch letter, sell sheet, and product description I've written since. Or at least until the term lost its lustre. It captures something real about the design: I had been trying to make the smallest, most portable game I could. The 2003 cell phone — flip-style, pocket-sized, ubiquitous — was the right shape comparison. The iPhone wouldn't ship for another four years; in 2003, "cell phone" still meant a thing you could close and forget about. Over the next decade the comparison aged in a funny way, but it did its job.
Two People from Pixar
The other thing that happened, which I've thought about a lot since, was a quiet conversation at the booth with two people from Pixar.
I don't remember either of their exact titles. I remember that they came by, picked up the cards, and asked thoughtful questions about the artwork. The three creatures had been drawn deliberately stylized as cartoons rather than realistic depictions, and the Pixar people were curious about the design choices: why the alien was shaped the way it was, why Bigfoot stood the way he did.
The artwork was Micah Laaker's. He had designed all three characters — Bigfoot, Nessie, and the Roswell alien — working out of Iguana Studios in New York. Micah had already won a Gold Award from the London International Advertising Awards in 2002 for the redesign of BattleBots.com, done in collaboration with Adobe Systems. He would go on to lead UX teams at Yahoo and, eventually, direct product design at Google. The Pixar scouts had good instincts.
They asked if we'd ever thought about doing the characters as an animated property: a TV show, a short film. I said we'd thought about it and had worked on some ideas but didn't have any of the relationships to pursue it seriously. Hint, hint.
One of them said something I've never forgotten: that his team was working on a movie at the moment, couldn't say much about it, except that it involved cars. This was February 2003. Cars was released in June 2006. I don't know if the people I was talking to were on the Cars team specifically, or if they were at Pixar in some adjacent role and happened to mention a project that everyone in the building was talking about. I never followed up. They never followed up. I don't know who they were.
There is, however, a contemporaneous record of the conversation in our files. A cover letter I sent to a buyer at Barnes & Noble, dated February 25, 2003, six days after Toy Fair ended, says, verbatim:
At Toy Fair we also caught the eye of several media producers, including a representative from Pixar, who thought the characters that appear in the game's artwork have potential for an animated television series or movie. We are in the process of entering discussions with those people now.
That "process" was more blind ambition; we never spoke with Pixar again. That letter is the exact sort of dressed-up look who else is interested! name-drop that a plucky indie game maker writes to retail buyers in the hope of getting picked up. But the encounter itself was real, they really were intrigued by the Tall Tales characters, and the cars detail is the part I remember sharpest.
Five Years Later
Fast-forward five years to October 2008: Pixar premiered a series of animated shorts on Toon Disney called Mater's Tall Tales — Cars Toons starring the tow-truck character Mater telling whoppers about his life.
The connection between that series and our 2003 conversation is, almost certainly, none. "Tall tales" is a stock phrase. Mater is a character explicitly built around exaggerated storytelling. A Pixar scout chatting up a stranger at a toy fair five years before a series airs is not a chain of causation. But it is, at minimum, a strange coincidence, a Pixar team at the booth of a card game called Tall Tales, talking about animated characters and a project involving cars, and Pixar later releasing a series of cars-character shorts called Tall Tales.
I think about it the way you think about a near-miss in a parking lot. Nothing happened. But you noticed.
A Few Other Notes
The snowstorm got bad enough that the Tall Tales Times, the in-character mock newspaper we made for promotional purposes, has a Q1 2003 issue with a story headlined "The Search for Matching Snowflakes Continues," reporting that "the biggest snowstorm in New York history prompted a massive search for two identical snowflakes by visitors to the Stalefish Labs booth at Toy Fair, where the old story about no two snowflakes being alike was debunked."
A reviewer for Parent Magazine stopped by, played a quick game, and offered an unsolicited blurb that has followed the game ever since: "I usually don't find games that I like, but I really like this one."
We sold a respectable number of games at the booth, mostly to buyers from independent toy and game stores. The big retailers passed. Tall Tales never broke through the way we'd hoped. The cell phone of games turned out to be more Blackberry than iPhone, and in many ways was the right metaphor for the wrong moment...the social-card-game category would eventually emerge, with games like Cards Against Humanity, Codenames, and Werewolf dominating dinner tables a decade later. Turns out Tall Tales was a bit early to that party in 2003. It was trying to be the next Cranium in a more compact form factor for a more casual environment, but it was aimed at a niche that hadn't yet been invented.
The remaining copies of Tall Tales Pocket Edition are here.
