00:00 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
So they were going to originally launch in the beginning of January of 2009 and then, a few days before, they said you know, something's complicated, we can't launch it, it will be the following week. And then that happened two or three times. I said, Lydia, is this really going to happen? And she said, Bob, we have more people trying to put KenKen in the New York Times than we have covering the war in Afghanistan.
00:32 - Nate Kadlac (Host)
Welcome to the hey Good Game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks of your day.
00:42 - Aaron Kardell (Host)
Well, today we are meeting with Robert Fuhrer to KenKen Puzzle fame. He's got such a rich background in the toying game industry. It's such a joy for the three of us to chat with him today and just kind of hear from his years of experience in the industry, traveling to Japan and learning more from all of those experiences. Nate and Joseph, what were some of your takeaways?
01:09 - Nate Kadlac (Host)
Well for me. I thought, kind of going into this, I knew that he wasn't a developer himself but being able to sort of spot opportunities and put himself in a position to collaborate, find the right people to work with and find the right ideas, he just had a knack for kind of picking that out of the thousands of opportunities that he had in front of him. So I just really had a ton of respect for Robert's curative abilities.
01:36 - Joseph Rueter (Host)
Yeah, he has lots of stories that he shared and some philosophies along the way. He talked about freedom being currency, which came early in the conversation. I was like ooh, it's not just games here. And then at the end he had one where he goes. I'm glad I didn't know you couldn't do it, and I think that cap over the top of most of the stories as you're listening helps you get a sense of how he went about the opportunities that were in front of him. So really enjoyed our conversation.
02:09 - Aaron Kardell (Host)
And now to the chat with Robert. Thanks for being here, Robert.
02:16 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
It's a pleasure, nice, to meet you guys.
02:17 - Aaron Kardell (Host)
Good to meet you too. You know, robert, you've won numerous awards in the toy and game industry and you've had the opportunity to work on some really big board games in a past life. I'm wondering you know what got you interested in the industry in the first place?
02:33 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
So when I was a kid, my dad was a salesman from Matchbox cars. That was his first job in the toy business. He came from book publishing actually. So when I was, I guess, 10, 12 years old, he was already, you know, with Matchbox. He was owned by a British company. Later on he went on to work at Estes Rockets, which you may know, and a few companies that no longer exist, a kite company, handicraft company and so on.
03:09
So so I got, I guess, introduced to the toy industry, you know, from that time on, and my, my first job coming out of school was was, you know, right for a like an agent, a toy agent.
03:24
In fact, the first toy idea that I ever had was accidental, was when he was at Estes Rockets. Yeah, I think you guys know Estes Rockets, right, the model rocket tree, it's like a hobby, absolutely. I wasn't much into them personally, but he was there and he came home one day I was about 15 years old, I guess 16. And he said we're trying to appeal to younger children, so we're coming up with this line of products, so if you can think of anything you know for a younger person. And then I have kind of a corny sense of humor and I said, oh, you know why don't you design a rocket like a foot and call it the mistletoe? And wouldn't you know what they did? So, so so they, they came out with this product that I think it sold about seven pieces, you know it was. It was not there, but that was the first idea that I guess I ever had that made it to a market, even though I didn't do much on it.
04:30 - Aaron Kardell (Host)
That's awesome to get that kind of an experience at a young age. You know, I think one of the things that we keep seeing is such an opportunity for kids to get involved in creating games and learning about entrepreneurship from an early age. Were there other experiences that just working with your dad in that capacity, that kind of set, set you on this path?
04:52 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
Right, I didn't really work with him. He was at the industry so we got you know, the trade magazines were coming to the house and you get familiar with things. And then my first job at a school was so he knew, he knew the agent for the game of fellow and I was hired as the product manager for the for the person for the small company that that were the at the time were the agents for the game of fellow. So I was made the project manager for that. I worked at that for about four years and that was probably the most important time, because a fellow came from Japan originally and part of my job was being assigned to work directly with the Japanese and they sent somebody to the US to kind of learn the US market and my job was to be his friend. So so I did that. He was a few years older and I learned to work with the Japanese at that time and the reason that's so important is a lot of our company history. The next story history is really steeped in Japanese relationships and we worked very closely with one of the big Japanese companies for about 27 years where where I worked with them to develop a lot of products together.
06:25
You had mentioned earlier Crockett, val, dentist and Gator golf, but there were many others as well and that really jump started my career in toys and games. You know those are more typical toys and games like tabletop, plastic, skill and action that we wanted to radio control, cars and a lot of other fields. And I'm still doing the same thing. I find a lot of, I find a lot of joy and it's a lot of fun. I really enjoy that part of. I don't even consider it work, it's just like something that I do. You know it's become second nature, necessarily, because there's always surprises, but it's part of. You know, it's like just part of my life because it's been like that since 1977. So it's a lot of years doing that that's a wild story.
07:15 - Nate Kadlac (Host)
So with the game of fellow, did you have any idea of the success that it might have? Like what could you? Could you talk a little bit about that experience?
07:24 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
Well, it was already successful when I, when I was hired. I think it came over in 75 and I was hired in 77 and it had been shopped around to a bunch of different toy companies who all turned it down because strategy games, you know, didn't sell, or whatever the conventional was the most of the time. And then I went to a company named Gabriel Industries. They were eventually gobbled up by CBS Toys and I think then Hasbro, but so it was already established and part of my job was they were running these, they had an international federation and they're running these international tournaments, fellow tournaments internationally, and I was a referee and just just basically a person that was sent on all the errands to do everything.
08:20
What's the word for the? Johnny something Do everything, johnny do everything or Bob do everything, and it was. It was very it was actually exciting because right off the bat I was associated with a global product, a global game that had success, and I was able to meet people from all the different toy companies that had the Othello rights and their respective countries. And then, ultimately, after four years, when I went out of my own and started Next Story in 1981, I already had these relationships. Because of that, and especially the relationship in Japan, which doesn't happen overnight. You really have to nurture that relationship even, even to this day just requires patience and persistence and an understanding of the Japanese culture.
09:15 - Joseph Rueter (Host)
Yeah, right. What tips have you come across, working specifically in the third largest market in the world? It be in Japan. Yeah, in Japan.
09:25 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
Well in Japan. So what I've learned is that when we're dealing with like Western nations, like Germany or France, england, italy, etc. And they're working in the United States, it's a real common understanding on how to do business. You don't need anybody in between. But even China to a large degree, and Chinese work well with the Americans. But the Japanese culture and the Western cultures are so different. And then, as a simple example, we're taught in the United States and probably elsewhere, from a very early age. We're taught to give a very firm handshake. Give a firm handshake. Look them in the eye. And Japan they're bowing, they're not touching. So we're starting completely physically different. And then the mentality. So there's a saying in Japan which translates to English as the nail that stands up must be hammered down. So they want more teamwork and less individuality. And the US we go by, stand up and be counted, or the squeaky wheel gets the grease, things like that. So there's a big difference.
10:47
To begin with, I also think that there's a everybody values human relationships. But I think that's a very intricate and integral part of the Japanese business etiquette, of when they're dealing. They want to know, they want to get drunk with you, they want to have dinner with you. They want to talk about things other than business. What are your hobbies? What do you like to do? Get a really better understanding of the person? Well, a lot of times business relationships are just that I have something that you want and let's make a deal. But in Japan also, it's team decisions, so it's not an individual decision. So actually to get anything done takes a long time and it takes patience. But it's hard to have the patience for a lot of times and I find it challenging too. But I've learned how to deal with it. I've been molded that way by my Japanese colleagues.
11:54 - Joseph Rueter (Host)
Molded. Yes, they make good ceramics in the west of the country too, so he must have been molded. Well, cool, well, thank you for that.
12:04 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
But one of the reasons I started working with them is I was so young that they did feel like they could train me how to deal with them. It was expressed to me that way actually, so there's a lot of truth to it.
12:19 - Joseph Rueter (Host)
There are a lot of rules for sure, kind of like games. Oh there you go, nice.
12:25 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
The other big difference. Like Japanese toys to American toys, there was a lot of watch me toys we call watch me toys. You know, you wind something up and it has this like wonderful mechanism thing. You're like hop three times, do a somersault, you know, jump up in the air or something like that, and you just marvel at the mechanism. But none of the US toy companies were interested in that. So what we tried to do is play with those mechanisms and apply them into a game or a toy.
12:59 - Nate Kadlac (Host)
That makes a lot of sense. It's a four years later. You launched next toy, is that right? Yeah, I'm kind of curious like was that always a plan of yours to do? That was to go out on your own.
13:10 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
Yeah, I mean I always had a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit growing up. You know, I had various little businesses to make cash in the summer and stuff like that, and I don't think I was really good working for somebody. You know, I obviously did it for years and I learned from it and I think I was a good employee, but it wasn't something that I was driven to. I was more driven to be independent and kind of control my own destiny, for whatever reason. I think even as a young kid I was not a good student. I never liked being told what to do. Even to this day I don't have my wife to hear that, but no, she knows it. But it's just like a personality trait. And I say to some people like they think they want to be an entrepreneur and you go like, well, what's your motivation? And I feel like if it's just to make money, that's not the right motivation. The motivation, at least for me and for other entrepreneurs that I know, it's really just to be independent.
14:27
And you know the financial. I mean, obviously financial stuff is important but it's not the driving force. It's sort of a result of what you're doing. If you're doing it well, you get lucky and I feel like luck plays a lot of role too. Of course you have to create your luck, but I've been lucky with my relationships and you know it's a philosophy to be free.
14:57
I actually tell my kids so I have three kids and I've told them their whole life and they all it's great, they all have great work ethics, they all have kind of an entrepreneurial spirit to themselves and usually you'd think that comes from, you know, growing up with some hard knocks, which you know, thankfully they didn't. But I've always told them that freedom is a currency. It's, you know money is a currency but freedom is. And as you get older, you know you get less and less freedom. And if you end up with relationships and maybe children and jobs and so on and it gets squeezed, then you get to my age and starts opening up again when the kids are out on their own.
15:44 - Nate Kadlac (Host)
Yeah, I think we can all. We all agree with that here, absolutely. You know, when you first launched Next Toy, what was, what was a catalyst Like? What was the first thing that you did? Was it was it. Did you invent something, did you?
15:57 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
I had an idea for something. I had an idea for a game that was going to lead some time to develop with a friend. And we did, we developed the game. It actually ended up coming out several years later. It was sort of a memory game called Locomotion and it was sold by a now defunct company named Shopper. You may remember the Cooties very classic toy Cooties and that was by this company named Shopper, s-c-h-a-p-e-r. Not like your shopping and it was acquired by Milton Bradley and they sold it for a few years.
16:40
And there's a lot of these things. You have these dreams when you create a game that it's going to be something huge and it isn't. So that's sort of the norm. But the process is fun and that jump started but the key was about a. So this was in September of 1981. Actually I was like saying my official start date of my business in the paperwork was 9981, which is a square root day and they only come once a decade. So and I like the 18s, the 9, the 99, the 81s, the 18s, the whole thing. I like number stuff, aside from Ken Ken, that's just a coincidence and I started the business in September of 1981. And then in July of 82, I was in New York.
17:35
My dad was working in Boston for a corporation he was the liaison to the Estes Rockets that I mentioned earlier, the kite company, and in Japan he got a call from another company, another Japanese company, and I called him up and said he's just been assigned to run this international division of his company. He knows the name of the guy was Kono, the one who had lived in the States, and he asked Kono to introduce him to people in the US because he was going to make a trip. And, interestingly, kono wanted to show off and thought I was too young and gave him my dad's contact and information because he was an executive and Takashi Makana was the person's name who had made the query. And he came to New York and my dad's office was in Boston. But by fate my dad was in New York that day and he called him up and his secretary hooked him up and wanted to meet my father to pitch him something. My dad asked if I can join the meeting. I didn't have that much going on and it was a dinner and I joined the dinner and I saw right away he was. So my dad was working with Estes Rockets and this kite company and Takashi Makana was showing him like vehicles, a completely different category and not an appropriate category for the company. They weren't going to do a vehicle business. So I just piped up and said you know, this has to go to this company, that company, it should go to Tonka or Remco, whatever the vehicle company is.
19:31
One of those days, and the focus of the conversation shifted more to me, he in a funny way asked my dad for permission to take me out the next night. You know, very formal, like asking him to hand in marriage, you know. So the next night I went to dinner with him, with Shimakata, and he said can you really get this product to the companies you mentioned yesterday? I said yes, I sensed an opportunity. He said to me that his company, which is a big Japanese company, would never understand him, that he would like ask me to do that. So this has got to be between he and I and if there is some success then he'll find a way to reward me. So he gave me these samples of these toys and he left to go to Europe and I had a dozen of them.
20:37
There was a product. The company had gotten bankrupt and they had already developed this. So there was some production pieces of it and I took them and I just sent them out to a bunch of different toy companies, these things. And wouldn't you know what? I got a bite and a company by the name of Erdo ERTL, no longer in existence too. I put all these companies out of business maybe.
21:05
So Erdo this guy, jack Stolman, remember his name called me up and said they were working on a vehicle just like it, except that this one was done and it didn't use batteries and the one they had used batteries. And I didn't even know how to make the business deal. I'll tell you the truth. I was like well, this is exciting. And I scrambled, somehow, got a hold of Shimakata and they made a deal and it was a maybe beginner's luck, and one of the rewards they provided to me was a trip to Japan, my first trip in December of 1982. First of probably 130 or 140 over the following years.
21:54
So I went to Japan in December of 1982. And they gave me another project there and this one didn't come to market. But we got down the road with one of the toy companies and it just grew very slowly and I got introduced to the company. Yeah, I wasn't a secret anymore, I wasn't being hidden Like you have an affair. I finally came out and there you go, and I worked with this group for 27 years, in fact, to this day there's. I mean sadly, mr Shimakata tragically died from brain aneurysm in 1996. I was unexpected, but one of his senior, one of the senior people reporting to him, had taken on a leadership role. And I'm saying, to this day I still work with him, 40, 40 years later, more than 40 years later.
22:57 - Joseph Rueter (Host)
It's a wonderful story. So 140 trips over 40 years, it's like five trips a year.
23:02 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
I took. Well, it was about 30 something years. Yeah, I would average for at least minimum four times a year.
23:11 - Joseph Rueter (Host)
I was going to Asia Japan up until actually weirdly, I haven't been since COVID, and so in that in all of those trips you came across a bunch of games.
23:21 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
Well, most of them were being developed. So I had very talented people working for me with me in the US. And then what was great about this Japanese group was that they didn't want to be like the personality to talk to the companies and do all the follow up and they were interested in making business outside of Japan. So I really had very little to do what they were doing in Japan. And they had this overseas operation, ootd, overseas operation, toy division and I had pretty much free reign of that and they would show us mechanisms and drawings I don't know if I said thousands, it's probably true. They recounted them of concepts and of ideas and you know, you whittle them down. It's a rival of the fittest. You see what our customers want. We pitch them.
24:20
I mean, looking back, I really think we should have done more, but there's so many factors that control things. First of all, you have to have a customer that wants the product, and so many products end up going down the road and then dying for some reason or another, or even coming out on the market after two years and flopping for whatever reason. So we're fortunate enough that a few good successes over the years, but it's really kind of a huge library of ideas, of some very interesting ideas. I go back. I still have a lot of these archives and I do go through them once in a while to see, but I end up donating many of them to the. There's a toy museum in Rochester, new York, the Museum of Play Strong Museum, and they actually have a lot of my stuff now.
25:22 - Joseph Rueter (Host)
Hey guys, we're going to spend the weekend in Rochester, new York, that's happening. It reminds me of the wallpaper store in Soho. Have you been there? He's got all of the posters this big through space and it's posters from forever ago. Right and just amazing. Oh, I love that. That's what happened in my brain when you were talking about mechanisms and operations sketches from decades ago.
25:54 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
We have some really hysterical ones, because nobody comes up with ideas like the Japanese. Some of these ideas are just hysterical. One of my favorites was my Dog Can Talk. It was basically a collar with a speaker and then at the end of a leash you talk into it, but it would sound like it was coming out of the dog. That's great.
26:23 - Joseph Rueter (Host)
That's funny. This morning I was talking as if I was the dog and my daughter went that's not what she sounds like and I went. How do you know?
26:37 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
I get it. There's scooby-doo imitation, but yeah, some really really crazy ideas come out of Japan. Anyway, it's really been fun and interesting working with the Japanese all these years.
26:54 - Nate Kadlac (Host)
Just on that topic, you've seen thousands of games. Just in your mind what makes a great game.
27:00 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
Oh, I'm sure I'm a good person for that. So we look at games not for the gameplay necessarily, but more for like a marketing hook or marketing feature or what we can sell to a toy company. So my business is like product placement of ideas. So a lot of times certain products may be great and how they play and the rules and depth of it, but they may not be the kind of thing that you can pitch and sell. It'd be something they'd rather develop internally or what they look for from the toy inventing communities who are considered part of this fraternity of toy inventors, toy and game inventors and what they look for are customers being like Hasbro, mattel, spinmas, the big toy companies, something that's very mass market and they can promote and in 10 seconds the target buyer goes. I love that. So it's not necessarily about the rules of the gameplay, it's more feature driven, the kind of things that we do.
28:15
In that case so many elements have to come together because you have the industrial design, the theming.
28:23
So one game that we're very famous for and it's really just a lot of great things came together, wasn't really planned is Crocodile Dentist, and I give so much credit to the industrial designer and Milton Bradley, who's the company that took him at the time, because he's the one that came up with the design of a crocodile and the way it looked originally and it was so charming just as easily could have been a dinosaur, could have been a. I think we presented it as a crocodile, but a lot of times the historic garbage will change the theme. You know, make it into a dog, they'll make it into a dinosaur, a shark or whatever. But he kept the crocodile and somehow his design of it, the color of it it's changed over the years but he put it together in such a way that I mean it was just a cocktail of good decisions came together and it sells it. 30 something years later it's still selling. It's considered a classic in our industry Gator Golf. Do you know Gator Golf?
29:39 - Nate Kadlac (Host)
I've not played it myself.
29:41 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
Okay, so it's been around since the early 90s. It's a putting machine in the shape of a alligator and the way it came about I mean, yes, it makes a good game. And I'm kind of going into like what you know how do we approach games and how do we sell them. So it's a little bit different answer to your question. But at the time crocodile dentists succeeded. There was a game called Shark Attack that was on the market and it was a shark that marched around a board and I was trying to eat characters that were you roll dice and they were running away and it was a huge success. That was probably like 1990, 1991.
30:24
And then crocodile dentists came out tabletop. In that version you pull the teeth and then one of the teeth would snap the jaw closed. And then we were trying to figure out in our office how do you extend that, like what do you do to get crocodile dentists? You look, I know you can make it smaller and you can change the color, but how do you merchandise it and get another game out of it? And couldn't think of anything. We were really stuck or stumped and came to Toy Fair and Moem Bradley is introducing a spin off of Shark Attack and they call it the Shark Attack Bowen. You probably never heard of it because it was a failed product, but I thought it was brilliant.
31:09
I was merchandising personally. So they had a shark, it was like the bowling ball, and then they had fish as the pins and you'd rub up their shark and you'd aim it at the pins and would knock them down and I immediately said it's sports. We got to do crocodile dentists with a sport. We rendered up a bunch of different sports, I think tennis, baseball I don't remember anymore all the sports by the drawings someplace and one of them was golf and it just seemed the most natural because of miniature golf, and so that won the survival of the fittest. That's the one that emerged and it went into the Moem Bradley line pitched as crocodile dentist golf.
31:59
Then Sharkapak bowling failed like right off the bat. Two months in, three months in, they pulled the plug. They may have sold a few of them and because of that they made up their mind that sports iterations of these popular games they don't sell. You know, suddenly it becomes a rule. So they were going to kill Krokodile Dentist Golf because Sharkapak bowling did sell and luckily the designer, the same guy that crafted the crocodile. He was assigned to the Krokodile Dentist Golf game. He kept at it and he pitched it in a meeting and they loved it and they just changed the branding from Krokodile Dentist to an alligator, from a Krokodile to an alligator and it became Gator Golf and it's one of the best-selling games we call pre-school games in that category. It's a floor game but to this day it's one of the best-selling games in the country I was going to say the world, but the truth is it doesn't sell so well overseas but in the US it sells great.
33:15 - Nate Kadlac (Host)
What a wild story. Thanks for sharing that. The perseverance of that designer also pretty interesting. I'm sure there's a lot there.
33:22 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
Yeah, his name is Phil Grant. I'm going to shout out. He's a bit older now and will be tired, but he was a critical, critical guy.
33:32 - Aaron Kardell (Host)
If I understand the story, it sounds like you were on one of these business trips to Japan and you were introduced, maybe by a business colleague, to what is now and I'm curious to hear if you could just describe kind of the first moment you played with Kashi Koko Narrow Puzzle. Probably I said that, right.
33:52 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
Kashi Koko Narrow Puzzle Puzzle. So I'd been going to Japan or those dozens and dozens hundred times already and you meet people and there was one particular guy at a Japanese book publisher. So book publishing, despite its nature, is very language-based. And they had a little toy division and we flirted with some things over time some educational toys and very tiny successes. A little couple of things happened, but the guy that ran that division, I really liked them.
34:33
He's a great personality, warm and friendly and outgoing, and whenever I went to Japan I was always trying to find a coffee, a lunch, a dinner Sometime you'd be there and just to catch up. It's the human relationship thing that I'll circle back to what I mentioned earlier. So told them I was coming over to Japan. This was April of 2007. They were just returning from the Bologna Book Fair, which is the largest children's book fair in the world. So actually I was already in Japan and they were just coming back. So my meeting with them was towards the end of my trip. So I went over to the office. His name is Tak Kubidera and immediately he's a very charming guy and he said you know a Bob song? We have this game and he uses numbers. So there's no language. And so we showed it in Bologna to a bunch of companies and there's a lot of excitement.
35:38
It was, keep in mind, this was on the heels of Sudoku coming to market in the US already for a year or two and, like you know, meteoric rise to popularity. So he brought out a book of this, puzzles, and you asked my immediate reaction. Well, my eyes glazed over, completely glazed over. I was, I'm not really a puzzle person and I didn't hadn't done Sudoku. I was aware of it because it was so popular and it looked like a Sudoku clone and we always tried to die selves on being innovative and original and I didn't really want to be like a me too kind of product. And then I saw like addition signs and subtraction signs and divisions, like the operators. And if you look at Ken Ken, it's got thick lines and thin lines, like right off the bat. It's very I always say it's very visually intimidating, ken Ken, like you look at it and you have to be a certain kind of person that embraces it. I'm not that person and I looked at this thing you show me this book and I was like, you know, forget it. And he was saying look, we introduced this book in June of 2006. This was now April of 2007. And in that 10 month period they sold 1.3 million of the books, which was extraordinarily high number for a book of this type.
37:24
And he goes it's got depth, it's got scale, it's got all ages, it's you know what I've been preaching over the years? It's gender free, so it's male or female, it's any age, and it's language free, so technically, everybody in the world is your potential customer. And that didn't escape me, because I had a friend from the toy business that made an enormous success selling candy. And if the candy is very funny, he made a bigger success selling toothbrushes. It's great to go from candy to toothbrushes, but he made the first electric, $5 electric toothbrush and he sold it to Proctor and Gamble as the Crest electric toothbrush, let's say a nice amount.
38:14
He stole a good friend then, and he had always said to me what appealed to him were products that weren't restricted by gender or age or language, and candy and toothbrushes were a more than those. So I had that in the back of my head, even though the product and they were just telling me how great it was, this, that, and then my not so brilliant comment was talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. This could be the greatest product in the world, but if nobody's ever heard of it it doesn't mean anything. And his immediate response was well, how do people hear of it? And I said, knowing Siddhoka, I said, well, it has to be in the newspaper. And he said Bob, please put it in the newspaper. And it was kind of funny and I was just thinking to myself, oh God, but I knew I could get to Will Shortz. So Will Shortz is the New York Times puzzle editor. He lived near me. He had just gotten more popularity because he was subject to the documentary called Wordplay about the crossword puzzle business and he runs the crossword puzzle for the New York Times. And I have friends, of course, in the puzzle and the toy world and the toy business.
39:43
And I was just thinking really to stop this sales pitch about Ken Ken. I was like all right, I think I can show it to somebody at the New York Times. So it was really like a throwaway line. But I meant I'd try to get a hold of Will Shortz and, funny enough, there was a woman working for Coup de Dere, her name was Nikki. Her name is Nikki. And she said oh, I already sent it to the New York Times. I never heard from them. Of course you can't just send these things cold and expect to get an answer. So they loaded me up with a bunch of the books in Japanese and I was not language. Of course, the title and the rules and everything's in Japanese and I had an English rule sheet which made a few copies. As it turned out.
40:40
I was on this trip to Japan with two colleagues from two different toy companies that I was bringing around to my different colleagues in Japan to see new ideas, and I gave the to each of them. They were presidents of their own companies, respective companies, and they both loved it, like I hadn't even played it yet, and I gave it to them and they were like this is great. And that year or the year prior, this is before apps. So there was a handheld Sudoku, like a handheld game, electronic game, like almost like a calculator, but it was dedicated Sudoku. They sold some crazy number, like 50 million of them or some number like that, I don't know, I don't remember the exact number. So they both said we want the handheld rights to this. So that was like the first inkling, that something.
41:39
And I went back to the US and I wrote a name. I called my friend Mark. They said you know we're short, right? Yeah, said can you introduce me? So he goes, well, just send him an email. Here's his email address and just don't mind Referred you. So I sent him an email saying I live near you and it will tell us the story.
42:06
The most appealing thing that I wrote in my letter was I won't take more than five minutes of your time. So I guess I wrote that. I said give me five minutes. I want to show you this. So I thought I'd be going down to the New York Times. You know, like in my head, I'm going to. You know we'll short the New York Times. I'm going to go to the New York Times and show them. So he goes. Well. You say you live in Chappacore. I was in town. He was in the town next to you. He goes come over to my house at 11 o'clock on Tuesday. So I went over there and he answered the door and like shorts and a t-shirt, you know, and I'm thinking you know it's the New York Times, you're going to be in a suit. So I went in.
42:51
I had this Japanese book, or these books I'm trying to explain like you know, I have a little bit of success and history and toys and games. He couldn't care less. Tell you the truth. And I said, let me show you and I've learned how to play the game. At this point, let me show you how to play this game. And he was like, if it has to be explained to me and I can't learn on my own, it's forget it, just leave it.
43:21
I left, I left and three days later I get an email from well saying hey, bob, you know you came the other day and you know you left this book and had 105 puzzles in it and I couldn't put it down. I finished the first 103, the last two were a little too hard, but I'll get to them. But what I really don't understand is how a puzzle of this quality I never heard of, and you know, because he gets pitched everything, everything, everything. And before you do anything, come back. And now, now I was greeted a little more openly, you know, and we had a nice conversation and I didn't even know, I didn't have any rights to it. I tell you the truth I didn't know and I thought it was going to be a book business and I'll be the agent for the books and I'll find a book publisher and whatever. I didn't know.
44:28
And the name, as you said, was Kashi Kaka Narrow Puzzle, but one of the Japanese editors called it Blocks and they had like a category of kind of logic games and things and you all have different names, sort of you know Western names, and this one was called Blocks. The reason was called Blocks was Ken means wisdom in Japanese, so was wisdom squared, and I just called it intuitively Ken Ken. Just it was easy to say, easy to spell and whatever. I thought actually it was a little too trite and kind of simple sounding, but I didn't want to be like a doku. I wanted to stay away from the doku thing. As I said earlier, I didn't want to be a copy of Sudoku, I wanted it to be its own thing. So I just called which is what the Japanese were doing Blocks.
45:34
And he said look, he goes. Whether I'm involved with this or not, I think it's a great puzzle. He goes the New York Times I've been trying to push them for years to do another puzzle other than the crossword and they won't hear of it. But I'm happy to set you up with the New York Times to have a meeting. So sure, great. So he did that and a little more intricacy to the story, but that's basically the essence of it. And I went to the New York Times and I showed it and you know they seemed a little bit intrigued but at the end they said you know, we're not going to add a puzzle.
46:16
I kept in contact with Will a little bit and he thought that if they were ever going to add a puzzle it was going to be the Sunday magazine, the last page, and never in the newspaper, because it was too big an undertaking. Actually the opposite happened, but I'll get to that in a second. So in the meantime I didn't know what the deal would be and I pitched something to Will about how it would be structured and he rightly thought at the time that if it was going to happen in the US it was going to be progressive his name and presence and I just couldn't find the right formula to involve the Japanese creator, the Japanese publisher, myself and Will. What everybody's expectations were. The math wasn't working. So I kind of just slept on it. I had it. I knew at this point it was a special product because Will Shortz had given it to these good housekeeping seal of approval. There's a Will Shortz seal of approval. The people that I exposed it to thought it was fantastic, who were into Sudoku and into puzzles. So I kind of knew I had something, but I didn't know how to make the business deal on it candidly and I just thought it wasn't going to happen.
47:43
And then I was working on a chess project with Hasbro and it required programming. And the person at Hasbro said if this is ever going to see the light of day, you need to work with the father of computer chess. His name is David Levy and he lives in the UK. Here's his number. If you can get him involved with it, then this has a possibility of moving forward with us. You've got to hold the David Levy.
48:18
The project got down the road but ultimately was killed. Five years past, six years past. Now, ken Ken, I have Ken Ken, but I'm thinking of this chess thing again. I think it's maybe I'm going to revive it. And I called David Levy up and I said I'm thinking of reviving the chess thing.
48:41
And he says well, I wrote a book. He was an artificial intelligence expert before. Ai is on everybody's lips now. So this is back in 2007. And he said I wrote a book and my publisher's Harper Collins, in England and they think I should be on the Colbert Report, a television show that you have in the States. They called the Colbert Report or Stephen Colbert. So they're flying me into New York and I'm coming in next week and my only free night is the night I get there. Why don't you come for dinner? We'll talk about it. So I go into the city, my wife and we go to dinner and this is in October of 2007 and start eating dinner. On his phone rings and I am talking. He hangs up and he goes. They just called the writer strike. So my parents are. The Colbert Report is being postponed until that's finished.
49:49
Then he says it's just as well, I have to get back to England to run the world's Enoku Championships. So I said hold on for a minute. What are you talking about? So David is a chess expert and he actually officiated Bobby Fisher matches and deep blue and IBM had their machine against. They was Casparov and the first time and he was a referee or some official doing it and he was tagged by the Times of England who started Sudoku. They were the first newspaper to publish Sudoku and they asked him to run Sudoku tournaments because he was in that world. So I said what do you have to do with Sudoku? And he mentioned and I said well, I have this Sudoku like product that I found. Come back the next night.
50:46
And the fun part of the story is the name of the book that he wrote that he was going to be in the Colbert Report and he subsequently was, and I urge you to look this up to Google this. It was called Sex and Love with Robots and how, between artificial intelligence and conversational software and robotic technology, that people are going to fall in love and marry and have sex with robots, which is happening. And David wrote a book about it and Stephen Colbert interviewed him several months later and it's a very entertaining five or six minutes, I'll tell you that much. So, anyhow, he went back, I met him, I showed him the game, he flew back to England. He contacted me and said this puzzle is fantastic and, as it turns out, times UK are looking for a successor to Sudoku. And would I be able to pitch this to them. I said by all means.
51:57
So he went into the Times, he pitched it to them. They were very poker faced but they showed interest and they kept on saying give me an answer, but never got the answer. Never got the answer. Never got the answer. And finally, there's a British Toy Fair. Every year it takes place in London in January. So I said, tell them I'm coming to the British Toy Fair, see if you can set up a meeting at the Times London, times UK. I said I wish you did. And I went with my daughter, who was 10 at the time, went in and couldn't believe it. They said we're launching on Easter Sunday it was March 22nd that year of 2008. And they had a 14 page supplement of puzzles, 14 pages supplement. And they had it all prepped and ready to go and the whole thing.
52:53
And I'm in this, you know, in this meeting and really quite by surprise, I know the decision had been made and that was very exciting and I hadn't been in touch. I came home and I hadn't been in touch with with Will at all since since summer before I called him up and I said you know, the Times UK is doing it. And the next day I got a call from the Times going to Utah. Well, shorts were doing this. I was like, oh, they said this is a secret. I got my, I got my hand slapped, but a week before it launched I think I'm pretty sure it was March 22nd, maybe they were but a week before it launched in the UK I got a phone call from McMillan Publishing in New York St Martin's Press, who run all of the New York Times Crossword and Puzzle Books. And the woman on the phone, lisa Sence, said Will Shorts says you have a property that we must have, so went down. We made a 10 book deal with them. I hadn't even launched yet. It didn't do well, the only thing I kind of neglected here where I skipped over was the rights for it.
54:18
So what happened was that the Japanese company so it's guy Takubo Dera I mentioned earlier. I told him you know we were generating some interest but didn't know where it was going to go. It was going to take a kind of a significant investment because we had to build a generator. Call it a generator, because you can't make enough Ken-Kens by hand and there's intellectual property and things like this and he said Can you guarantee success? Can you guarantee this thing will be a success? There's no way to guarantee anything, but it's going to need investment. So he said that his company would never invest on speculation on this and there's no way he could get a budget, which we were estimating is a couple of hundred thousand dollars, to build the Ken-O-Rena, do the intellectual property and the continued development and everything like that.
55:22
And I had a, I don't know. I felt like I had an opportunity in my schedule, my life and whatever. So I said, well, I'll do it, I'll do it, but it means that I'm going to end up owning it because trademark is going to be in my name. I'll pay for it all, we'll work out something. And he gave it his blessing. We figured out an arrangement which we still have to this day and it did take over a year to get that contract done because there's a lot of, lot of people weighing in on it.
55:59
But that's how I came down Ken Ken, as I called my lawyer up from his bar at this hotel in New York and I said can you register the name for? And we picked three categories, you know, computer, play and Print and whatever the categories were the class is 1641 and 9, I think, was something and and you know, and then over the course of time we expanded that to like basically all over the world, even though we didn't have any business, and for a long time I thought I made maybe a foolish Expenditure because we, like, registered in China, we registered in South America, we registered every place in it. There's a lot of depending on the country. There's a lot of fees, there's renewal fees, there's maintenance fees as well as fees, and we didn't have business in a lot of these places. It was really mostly in the US started, but but when you know it, about five years ago I got a will introduce me to the guy who brought Sudoku to China and the Chinese government basically appropriated it from him after it became so successful and he was looking for something else. And Now he's my partner in Ken Ken, china and he's doing a fantastic job with it and and it was really because we had strong trademark production.
57:28
You know, this decision I'd made 10 years prior or eight years prior that we hadn't had any return on, finally had a return and it's happened like that. I mean, I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning I was used to dealing as we talked, spoke before, tabletop plastics, mechanisms, batteries, all kinds of things, and is largely a digital product a year after we law. So we launched in times UK in March of 2008. Then, literally watching my son play lacrosse, I was Speaking to one of his friends, mothers, who was a lawyer for Rita's digest. They were in our town and I asked her to set me up at Rita's digest and I went in there and I pitched and they said Ken will show us his name beyond it. I said yes, I forget, I'd ask him later and they said, okay, we'll do it, and he was fine with that. I didn't even know how to make the deal. You know it was a modus deal, but they came out with it and I Suddenly just decided to build this website dot com website with no game on it, just like information and rules. And because it was in Rita's digest, we were getting about 250 visitors a day or something on a good day.
58:58
And then I went back to the New York Times and we had built this um, this player that would generate Canterate the puzzles for the newspapers and it always Can't make them by hand, there's too many of them. So we built this and in the middle of it I said to the developer actually, David, leave, you was overseeing it. I said, can this be an interactive player as well? I was sure For another X amount of money, do it. So they, they built that. So I had this, now this, the Ken Arader we still call it the Ken Arader, which would Ken Arate, ken Ken, of all different sizes and challenges and scale, skills and operations, and it was also a player.
59:46
So I went back to the New York Times, I would in one of the newspaper and I said would you Put this on your website because it doesn't take up any real estate, it's just a game. And they weren't in the games business like they are today. And and they went okay, we'll give it a try. And then, luckily, I said something like all right, you have 16 a's to make a decision. If you want it in print, and you can be, you can have exclusive print rights for a year for um, and there was some restriction to it, but something like that and the Times UK was already, had already come out with it and and like a month in, they said all right, we want the print rights. And it was like, wow, great.
01:00:33
So they were going to originally launch in the beginning January of 2009, like the first Monday. And then, a few days before, they said, uh, you know, something's complicated, we can't launch it, it'll be the following week. And then that happened two or three times. And finally I was dealing with a woman, lydia Reynolds, there. I said, lydia, is this really going to happen? And she said, seriously, sounds like a joke. We said, seriously. She said, bob, we have more people trying to put in the New York Times than we have covering the war in Afghanistan.
01:01:14
And finally, on February 9th 2009, the New York Times put it in print and my little website, which we didn't even have a game on, we had 250 visitors a day and a good day I had, uh, 35,000 visits that day and I don't know Thousand easily a thousand emails like what is this? How do you play? A million questions, mostly similar. And, uh, that's how started in the New York Times, and this is before apps. So I thought it'd be a book guy.
01:01:50
And then that year or 2008, I got contacted by um capcom, a big mobile game company they had. Who wants to be a millionaire and some other games Are they called? And they asked for the rights after the times uk. So so I made that deal and and expired it the three years, and then we decided we'd build it ourselves, which we did so, so we do our own self-publishing. Now we have our own app, we run the website. These things are requiring constant changes. It's actually we haven't updated in many years, but we're investing a lot into it, into a huge overhaul which we're about a year behind on, but for no happens soon, and that's that's kind of a story.
01:02:41 - Aaron Kardell (Host)
It's, uh, that's a fascinating journey. Thanks for thanks for sharing that. Robert, I'm super curious from a business perspective. It sounds like as you were getting started on this, you kind of First thought of yourself is like, well, maybe I'll be a book agent on this and and that'll be kind of the the primary Right income stream, but it from what you've outlined. I have to imagine there are quite a few different income streams now maybe licensing Publishing rights to newspapers, maybe Licensing digital rights to gaming companies, some direct publishing of both books and direct publishing of websites or other games. And I'm just curious to the extent that you're willing to share, like on a Percentage basis, like where are you seeing a lot of the revenue today?
01:03:31 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
Good question. So when I first started it and I didn't but that I know so much more now, but I really didn't know anything then and I just built it, okay, and we had a lot of players and we had no, we had no revenue model, no business model, and I figured we'll figure that out later, let's just get the players. And that's sort of what happened then. Um, I brought in a guy grew up with, actually, who was a business. You know, at the Harvard Business School they run big companies and and he kind of straightened out my mess and trying to make it a business. So so our Primary income is digital advertising, so there's a lot of digital ads, so there are several income products. Uh, so we do self publishing. We also do license publishing. We don't do so much of that anymore. It started that way, but it's mostly our own books for the people who want to solve and pencil on paper. Then we have a app which we control and it's android and apple and it's about to get a major overall. Been working on it for quite a while. It's got a very straightforward income model. We're going to enhance that a bit with um. You know, maybe it's some kind of token model and some other things that you see in a lot of a lot of mobile games. I want to help the experience I don't want to ruin the experience so so it's requiring a lot of uh tweaking. Then we we have a syndication model of newspapers and that's actually how we got most awareness. So we're in a few hundred newspapers now, including the new york times and where we see players mostly are where those newspapers have been over the course of time, and we have a tournament model. So we have um international franchises. Right now they're in china. Well, that's a joint venture with the with the sudoku they call monkey sudoku, the guy there george, india, egypt, the uae, malaysia, indonesia, australia, but that's not going so strongly.
01:05:48
A lot of the asian Countries are much more math-centric than we are. In the us. They, they the importance of math. At the end of the day, is a logic and math puzzle. I said before it's visually intimidating, it's. It's sort of like the riding the bicycle analogy. Once you learn how to do ken ken, you go oh my god, it's. It's like Uh, that's the system and it's easy, but when you see it looks a lot harder than it is. I've had so many reactions over the years of when I show people how to play it, they go that that's all it's. They thought it was much more complex than this. But, um, the franchises are mostly tournaments. They run tournaments. They just held a huge one in egypt and in india and the uae is. The ministry of education basically endorsed us in the uae. So in the us A lot of people have heard of ken, but a lot of people haven't.
01:06:51
In the uae it's, it's almost like a household word because the ministry of education endorsed it and it's in all the schools as a, as a supplemental math product, and it's growing very fast and in india and egypt. Right now it's in other countries and we get frequent inquiries in africa. We had a In uganda, of all places, a, a partnership, but we're price shifting it to a, to a bigger company in africa and uh, that's the, but it's it's digital ads. I personally not in love with it. I, I don't like, I don't like swapping people with a lot of advertisements.
01:07:35 - Aaron Kardell (Host)
I, I think we can do a better job doing we do it, but you and my son robert he he doesn't like that.
01:07:42 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
We have ads in in the games we created there, so it's a necessary it's kind of a necessary evil, you know to keep and we and we have a big uh education following and we give that away for free. So we have 42 000 teachers, Uh educators not all teachers, but educators that receive free weekly sets Every friday. So many educators are watching this and they want to just go to puzzle dot com and select the Find the teacher page and there's a way to sign up there. I couldn't tell you how to navigate to it unless I looked at it, but should be easy and real quick.
01:08:26 - Aaron Kardell (Host)
Uh, maybe just a quick answer on this. It sounds like you've got like a lot of joint ventures and a lot of uh, you know indirect partnerships on on ken ken. In the early days you were answering a thousand emails at your kitchen table. I'm, I'm curious, do you, do you have him direct employees for at this point? And yeah, what is? What does your team look like on that?
01:08:49 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
So our team, so we have the same developer Since day one. He's located in croatia. He is an employee of ours now for many years. He was moonlighting.
01:09:02
I have a young man in new york city that handles the customer service, the customer care. You know. People write in saying we made a mistake in the puzzle. For the record, there's never been a mistake or All kinds of things. Most of them are technical issues. They paid for something and they don't see it. Maybe they didn't log in. There's a lot of reasons. So he rocks, and david levy Still canorates our puzzles for all the newspapers and our website and so on, although, uh, this young man is also starting to supplement that and support that effort.
01:09:44
And then I have a partner, jerry march, who basically runs the company and, and he's really a business, I'm, I'm, he's the operations and knows how to make it into a business. I'm I think I'm more of a of the face of it, maybe a marketing idea person about it. I, I'm the dreamer. I've been called the dreamer. So so, uh, not always complimentary in a complimentary way, but uh, but, um, you know, like I have the, you know the dreams of what it should be, I, maybe I've lost a little bit of that energy getting a little comfortable with it, but uh, we are ready, you know, maybe to go to a next stage. Uh, I think there's a huge opportunity. We're like really well known and maybe one of the most successful games of this type, but I think we're only a small percentage of what what it can be with the right right thinking and investment on it.
01:10:48 - Nate Kadlac (Host)
So I still think the best is yet to come anyway, For aspiring game developers or designers out there who are looking to build their games or have the entrepreneurial spirit. If you will, do you have any advice for them?
01:11:05 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
I think the key word is persistence, but there's a delicate balance between persistence and nuisance. And I think if you believe in something you know I mean I see it a lot of times a lot of creative people don't want to deal with the business aspect of things or they don't know how or they don't have the confidence to do it. So if you feel that way, maybe don't be afraid to collaborate with somebody that will complement your skills. And I know for myself I've always done better when I've had a, when I'm able to just like do business development. You know the business school term is business development, but it's basically the dreaming and going out there and trying to find new things and then have somebody behind me to execute that and do it.
01:12:00
And Ken, ken I have my partner, jerry does a great job with it, with my toy business. For years I had Taksha Makata, who I met accidentally, and then I just had a great, great people working for me over the years to help to follow up. So so I would say, don't be afraid to collaborate. I guess that would be the biggest. I think a lot of people don't want to do it, they're scared or they don't know. You know the other party and and I think there is some validity to that you know you got to be careful who you partner with, because there are a lot of horror stories with that. But it takes a lot of different components to make a successful business and it's very rare one person can do it all.
01:12:48 - Joseph Rueter (Host)
Yeah, I will absolutely say yes if I'm assigned to be a friend of a Japanese person or you know anybody else in the country, because it sounds like your, your adventure in business came from being assigned a friend, which is lovely, that's right, so it is. My question would be you know, it would be like a game developer's guilty pleasure when you play someone else's game. Do you have any game that you would assign me to play?
01:13:18 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
Oh, I've always liked inductive logic, which is interesting, this sort of in that field. So I was like stratae, go and mastermind, even like battleships, even a simple level, I guess who you know the little flippy cards.
01:13:37
Yeah, yeah, it was invented by an Israeli. That's a great story on its own. Actually, the father died just past a couple of years ago was a classmate of Anne Franks. Oh wow. The husband and wife created that and many other fantastic games out of Israel. Their sons now run the business and have their own particular successes that you know.
01:14:04
My, my middle son, who works for the company, works for us. He's a real gamer and I know he's gotten very much into like magic to gathering and I mean he just loves all kinds of games. Just, he's just like really buried in it. He just knows games. He knows what's commercial, what's not. He'd be, in a lot of ways, a better person to ask I look at games strictly from, you know, almost like a commercial standpoint whether it's something we get.
01:14:42
I see so many games so I get turned on if they have like a clever mechanism, either either gameplay mechanism or physical mechanism. Or I mean by gameplay mechanism like I would have loved to have come up with the game at the time, you know which which is like a completely new way to play. Even to this day, there's hardly things like it, games like Bop it I particularly like things like that. We created a game trying to think of when. It was maybe about must be almost 15 years ago that I love it. It had modest success. It's called the itop and we have this great patent but it senses the earth's magnetic field. So when you spin the top, every time it passes magnetic north it registers it, so it counts rotations. So because of that there's like a lot of games you can play. But it's fit, you know it's physical, it's kind of a clever, you know. Device, gadget yeah, I call it more of a gadget than a toy or game.
01:15:57 - Joseph Rueter (Host)
Maybe there's a mashup between the magnetic top and twister. That sounds fun. How many times you have to touch yellow? Come up with it, come up with it.
01:16:08 - Robert Fuhrer (Guest)
We're represented, that's so good.
01:16:10 - Joseph Rueter (Host)
Well, it's been a pleasure to hear your story. Thank, you so much for sharing it my pleasure Thank you, please, please, edit a lot of stories.
01:16:23 - Aaron Kardell (Host)
No, it was time well spent. We really appreciate sharing your journey.
01:16:27 - Joseph Rueter (Host)
Yes.
