HOW ADB BEGAN
Steve Cole reports:
I started in this industry back in 1974 or so, publishing a magazine called JagdPanther and a bunch of games. We shut that company down in early 1977 because it was never designed to make money and we were tired of doing it.
Two years later, my former JagdPanther partner and I were talking, and thought we could make a go of a game company. Several things caused this conversation, one of the most important being the introduction of "pocket games" to the market. These seemed easier and cheaper to produce, and an exciting new kind of product. We did some research, and made some plans. We wanted very much to sell only to wholesalers, not by mail order, to keep the workload down.
After a few years of that, my partner and I had been increasingly at odds. We just had very different ideas of how to run the company. (His was was doing everything as soon as possible, even if this meant taking on a lot of debt. My way was to have no debt at all, not spend money we didn't already have, and delay projects until we could afford them.) Neither one of us was right or wrong, but the business styles were so different that we just could not keep muddling the company through. It was like those two Roman generals fighting Hanibal and taking turns commanding the army to march in opposite directions. So we agreed to divide the company into two parts. He kept the publishing company, and I took the game design part (and the copyrights to Star Fleet Battles).
I selected the name Amarillo Design Bureau because I lived in Amarillo, and because the Soviets called their aviation companies "design bureaus" because the government owned them all but kept them separate so they would compete against each other and make better airplanes. That may have been a mistake, since lots of people think that the company is either Armadillo Design Bureau or Emerald Design Bureau. Considering that my good friend Steve Jackson named his company after himself, I should have called it Steve Cole Games as that way my company would be as big as his!
I ran ADB as a private company from 1983 to 1998, then incorporated it in January 1999 so it has been ADB, Inc., since that time.
Looking back, there was a moment when I could have bought him out and had all of TFG for myself. It is one of my deepest regrets that I did not do this, as I would have avoided the decisions that cause the financial collapse of two subsequent administrations of Task Force Games. (My previous partner, and the guys from England who ran the company from 1990-1996, both carried a lot of debt and then couldn't survive a hickup in the market.) I look at all of the money that those two administrations wasted on stuff I warned them not to do, and think wistfully of how much money I'd have if I had been running TFG for the last 30 years. Of course, I know a lot more about running a publishing company today than I knew back then, so maybe I'd have made some mistakes of my own. I know I've made about six "five thousand dollar mistakes" in the last ten years, and wish I had that money back.
I started in this industry back in 1974 or so, publishing a magazine called JagdPanther and a bunch of games. We shut that company down in early 1977 because it was never designed to make money and we were tired of doing it.
Two years later, my former JagdPanther partner and I were talking, and thought we could make a go of a game company. Several things caused this conversation, one of the most important being the introduction of "pocket games" to the market. These seemed easier and cheaper to produce, and an exciting new kind of product. We did some research, and made some plans. We wanted very much to sell only to wholesalers, not by mail order, to keep the workload down.
After a few years of that, my partner and I had been increasingly at odds. We just had very different ideas of how to run the company. (His was was doing everything as soon as possible, even if this meant taking on a lot of debt. My way was to have no debt at all, not spend money we didn't already have, and delay projects until we could afford them.) Neither one of us was right or wrong, but the business styles were so different that we just could not keep muddling the company through. It was like those two Roman generals fighting Hanibal and taking turns commanding the army to march in opposite directions. So we agreed to divide the company into two parts. He kept the publishing company, and I took the game design part (and the copyrights to Star Fleet Battles).
I selected the name Amarillo Design Bureau because I lived in Amarillo, and because the Soviets called their aviation companies "design bureaus" because the government owned them all but kept them separate so they would compete against each other and make better airplanes. That may have been a mistake, since lots of people think that the company is either Armadillo Design Bureau or Emerald Design Bureau. Considering that my good friend Steve Jackson named his company after himself, I should have called it Steve Cole Games as that way my company would be as big as his!
I ran ADB as a private company from 1983 to 1998, then incorporated it in January 1999 so it has been ADB, Inc., since that time.
Looking back, there was a moment when I could have bought him out and had all of TFG for myself. It is one of my deepest regrets that I did not do this, as I would have avoided the decisions that cause the financial collapse of two subsequent administrations of Task Force Games. (My previous partner, and the guys from England who ran the company from 1990-1996, both carried a lot of debt and then couldn't survive a hickup in the market.) I look at all of the money that those two administrations wasted on stuff I warned them not to do, and think wistfully of how much money I'd have if I had been running TFG for the last 30 years. Of course, I know a lot more about running a publishing company today than I knew back then, so maybe I'd have made some mistakes of my own. I know I've made about six "five thousand dollar mistakes" in the last ten years, and wish I had that money back.
posted by Federation Commander at 6:38 AM
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