July 2009
Game on
By Megan Malugani
Unlike today’s kids (who, for better or worse, are far more familiar with the language of Wii than the language of ‘oui’), Paul Rinde grew up—gasp!—video game-free in the Rochester of the 1960s and ‘70s.
The son of a car salesman father and a nurse mother, he played football and hockey (“I remember when I was a little guy going around and selling candy to raise money for Graham Arena”), and later ran track at Mayo High School. It wasn’t until 1977—the year he graduated—that Rinde remembers the home video game Pong bouncing its way into popular culture and bringing video games into the home.
Laughably simplistic by today’s standards, Pong simulated a game of table tennis, with the graphics consisting of one moving spot and two paddles. But at the time, Pong was revolutionary. “Pong started everything,” remembers Rinde, who enjoyed the game but just considered it another of his many hobbies.
Little did Rinde know then that Pong would change his life, and that his entire career would be devoted to the then-emerging, now-exploding home video game industry. Over the last 20-plus years, Rinde has brought hundreds of video games to market, from mega-hits like Deer Hunter and Dragonball Z (when he was a senior vice-president at Atari) to Wii games like Summer Sports and Iron Chef (published by his current company, Plymouth-based Destineer).
And with the home video games industry going bonkers (in the last few years, the Nintendo Wii and DS have broadened gaming “outside the traditional boundaries of teenage and college-age boys and young men” and into a “casual gaming” market that includes females and younger kids), Rinde may be just powering up.
Making a career out of games
After Rinde graduated from Mayo, he left Rochester to attend the University of Minnesota, where he studied business, economics, and marketing. As a student, he had no designs on a job in the virtually unknown realm of video games. A few years after college, however, opportunities in the industry were starting to take shape and he entered the video games business by working for an independent sales organization representing manufacturers. Rinde’s group represented Atari, and his job was to sell Atari games and game systems to retailers like Dayton Hudson and Musicland. “This was really the early days of the business. That was when it was a hobbyist business. No one really knew where it was going. It’s been an interesting trajectory,” he says.
A few years later, when a disc-based game system called the Commodore 64 was popular, Rinde went to work for a distributor. Inevitably, during his presentations to hobbyist groups and enthusiasts, Rinde would be approached by people who wrote their own games but didn’t know how to package and market them. The interest level was so high, in fact, that Rinde took the plunge and started his own Twin Cities-based computer game publishing company, which sold games that could be played on the Atari 800, Commodore 64, Apple II, and IBM PC jr. “We’d go to retailers and say ‘What are you looking for? Do you have any underserved areas where we could potentially make some games for you?’” Rinde says.
Eventually, Rinde’s game publishing company became so successful that it was acquired by Atari. Rinde became a senior vice-president at Atari, where he cemented his reputation as a top publisher by heading up the creation of Deer Hunter in the late ‘90s. (Rinde’s Deer Hunter legacy lives on: “He’s kind of known as the Deer Hunter guy. Everybody has heard of the Deer Hunter game,” says Destineer’s director of product development, Tony Chiodo.)
Rinde and his team developed Deer Hunter specifically for Wal-Mart. “We felt like a hunting game would do very well with their audience,” Rinde says. Deer Hunter sold five million units on a PC—“a phenomenal amount in those days,” he says. “What happened is that it created an audience that spread the word. It got so hot that everybody wanted to buy it to see what the talk was about. That’s the perfect storm. People are talking about it, and it becomes so popular that news organizations are writing about it, and then people want to find out what all the buzz is about.”
While at Atari, Rinde also brought the popular Dragonball Z to market. Rinde “has a really good nose for what will and won’t sell,” notes Chiodo. Adds Destineer’s director of operations, Al Schilling: “”He has an innate understanding of what his customers are looking for. He thinks outside the box. It’s really easy for a games company to want to make something similar to what someone else is making. But ever since Deer Hunter, [Rinde has] looked at video games from more of a ‘regular guy’ perspective.” According to Schilling, Rinde creates games that are “really a hit with the casual consumer, not games intended for hard core gamers.”
You win some, you lose some
At Destineer, which Rinde joined as CEO in 2003, the focus is definitely on developing “pick up and play, family-friendly” games for the casual gamer. “We have stayed exclusively in the ‘E’ and ‘Teen’ ratings. We don’t publish mature games at Destineer. We think that it matches the platform and the demographic that’s really active out there buying games right now.”
Destineer publishes more than 30 titles a year, on multiple platforms, and has been especially successful in Wii titles that fit the “sports party games” niche. (Destineer’s original Summer Sports is Rinde’s favorite game to play, he says. “My daughter kills me at mini golf but can’t beat me at lawn darts.”)
Not all of his games have been winners, Rinde says. At Destineer, he’s produced a few notable disappointments, like WordJong Party, a game that had been successful on the DS but that didn’t migrate to the Wii with much success. “If something for whatever reason doesn’t work as well as we were hoping, we say ‘Okay, now we learned a lesson,’” he says. “There’s always a risk in developing games. It’s not a black and white procedure. There’s magic at the end of it. You can do everything right and end up with a game that isn’t fun.”
Overall, Destineer is heading in the right direction—and fast. Destineer has grown “500 percent over the last four years,” he says. They’ve gone from four to 40 employees (a “jeans, Mountain Dew, and Fritos crowd”), and “we’re well over $30 million in revenue per year. In the big scheme of things we’re still pretty small, but I think in the next couple of years we can get over $100 million in revenue,” Rinde says, as the industry continues to grow.
Rinde is humble about his success and careful to share the glory with others. He is not an engineer, and “can’t write a line of code,” he says. Instead, he likens his role to “more like a movie producer. I do the marketing and business side of it. I know what I’m looking for on-screen, but I don’t necessarily know what goes on under the hood,” he says. “It’s like movie production. You know what you want as far as the ultimate product. How they make that magic happen behind the screen [with video games] is just like in the movies. It’s unbelievable.” In addition, recent technological advancements in “fidelity and interactivity and the immersiveness of the experience” have strengthened even further the comparison of video games to movies.
Rinde, whom one colleague describes as “inherently a very youthful person,” is like a gleeful kid when talking about how fun and exciting his career has been. “It’s really enjoyable. I have a lot of fun in this business, and I always have. It’s really amazing if you can find a business you can be successful with and enjoy along the way. It’s the perfect combination.” Rinde is living the dream, he says. “If you would’ve asked me when I was eight years old if I could be in this career, it would’ve been a dream come true.”