A Highly Creative Time
Greetings netizens,
Did you expect to see this in your inbox today? Hello again friend!
Been feeling a little reflective as of late. On more than one occasion, I have woken up with the thought, “WE MADE A BUTT BOARD GAME” only to remember that our Kickstarter is over and that our original plan kind of turned into mush. But there is another thing I think happens when I think about The Everyone Shares One Butt Game: what a god dang fun time it was.
The original ink of what would end up being our gorgeous back art.
My mind is still digesting what it was like to work on something like this. It was so radically new creating this beast of a concept and I still get goosebumps having to recount the tales we traveled. I remember what it was like opening our very first clean prototype with our assets on it. I remember the smell of new game, seeing the pieces in action in the way they were meant to. Brian and I had long nights arguing semantics for the text because that was our UI. Every time someone saw the box, we would relive the shock that this was, is real. I told a friend recently that this game felt like it was spit out of an alternate universe. There was never a boring conversation.
I have many emotions when I look at this game, look at this website, or randomly get the urge to search ourselves onto the annals of the internet. I look back today and think, damn, what a highly creative time this was.
On the heels of graduating college, we were making a game and a company at the same time. With experiences that only media nerds found fun and useful, I found myself tremendously out of my depth. I was dreaming up every which way things wouldn’t work, how failure was going to be our default landing pad when things didn’t work out, but amongst the chaos, my brain also dreamed up hope. And it was on this single hope, that we would succeed, that continued to motivate me that we really could do anything we wanted.
So we did. We made a website. We bartered an advanced copy of the game for a giant samosa costume. We prepared thousands of words of copy on every major social networking app. We experimented an ESOB account on Tindr. We premiered ourselves at the historic Giant Robot in Los Angeles. We playtested with hundreds at a night market in San Diego. We sponsored a review video on YouTube. We were on podcasts, interviews, newsletters, instagrams. We filed and secured our own trademark. We connected with thousands of people. We hustled. We crashed. And I felt so alive.
For so much of the time we spent campaigning, I had such a sharp distinction with my ideas of business vs creativity. I felt like the business had to feel uncomfortable and when I wasn’t having any fun at all, it confirmed that business was happening. This is wrong. To work on ESOB was a privilege in so many ways and to tether our success to some financial bar always felt awkwardly placed. I cannot ignore the unquantifiable laughter, confused glances, and petty arguments elicited. Fun is rewarding. It’s about time I acknowledge a fundamental truth to every future self I have: this was a success.
I want to one day better articulate how formative our creativity was during this time. I am getting more comfortable reframing our risks into strengths. We had vision and we were willing to really put ourselves everywhere to meet everyone. I recall that someone had told us that the game made them feel more comfortable being themselves.
We have begun having very exciting conversations about The Everyone Shares One Butt Game again. The questions are coming with new angles of experience from a room of even smarter, enthusiastic advocates. What has changed? What has stayed the same? Where are we going next? Where are we coming back to? We can introduce this to someone new still. That door is still open for us.
A dream come true.
I will come back to this writing one day and attempt to draw conclusions from this, maybe someone else will too. Here’s a lesson: work in a highly creative time.
Believe in yourself. You are here and now. And that’s awesome.
Justin