Video games are his work

Timothy Gerritsen
Executive director of Big Rooster, the Madison area's newest video game development company, which he helped found and co-owns along with visual director Rowan Atalla and animation director Jeff Dewitt.

Age: 40
Family: Married since 1989 with three children, ages 5, 11 and 13.
Hometown: Oshkosh
Education: Holds a degree in Russian language from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., and a bachelor's degree in history with a filmmaking minor from UW-Milwaukee.
Experience: He got his start in video games as lead designer and project manager for the Oregon-based game company Dynamix in 1992 and worked for several other game companies before helping found Madison-based Human Head in 1998. He was CEO of Human Head in 2006 when he left the company to help found Big Rooster.

About Big Rooster
Big Rooster is a video game development company. It is currently working on games for the Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS platforms, as well as animated television shows for network and cable TV.
Address: 2690 Research Park Drive, Suite H, in Fitchburg
Web site: www.big-rooster.com
Founded: December 2006, opened its doors April 2007
Current staff: 14
Hiring: Aims to hire five more staff by June, and as many as 21 more by year's end.

Q: You've said that you want Big Rooster to be a different kind of game company. What do you want to do differently?

A: The three founders of this company all had previous experience in the industry -- and it's a very volatile industry with a lot of turnover -- so our goal was to create a company that really rewarded creativity and allowed for career growth and personal growth at the same time. We wanted to create a company where people could come and perfect their skills, hone their craft, and feel like they're being rewarded and supported by the company. Not the typical case where there's a very high level of burnout. The International Game Developers Association has published reports on trends in the industry that showed that a high percentage of the work force leaves the industry after five years, and even more after 10 years. So there's not a lot of long-term management skill or veteran experience in our industry. A lot of people in the game industry work 20-hour days for a long time during crunch period and really burn themselves out. And we've found that when that happens, productivity decreases markedly over time. So, by maintaining a strict eight hours, get out, have a life mentality we maintain a high level of productivity. And that's our goal. It's why we formed the company.

Q: How will that be reflected in the games you produce?

A: It comes down to the management of the actual project. A big part of it is just taking realistic milestones into account, not biting off more than we can chew where possible, and understanding the process to the point where we can really gauge how long something is going to take. Because there's so much turnover and the technology changes so quickly, our industry involves a lot of experimentation and feeling things out as you go along. It's really endemic in our industry. But a lot of the people here have over five years' experience, so we're trying to create and record that knowledge base so that there isn't so much guesswork involved.

Q: You've said that the current state of the video game market makes this an ideal time for independent developers, why is that?

A: Whenever there's a new generation of hardware -- meaning Xbox going to Xbox 360, PlayStation 2 going to PlayStation 3, Nintendo GameCube going to the Nintendo Wii -- it levels the playing field because you have a new set of hardware and a new set of assumptions. Old lessons have been lost because people have left the industry. As a result, old players in the industry have to reassert themselves, and new players get the opportunity to come in and prove themselves. Also, this time the new hardware has created a new distribution model: direct-downloadable games for consoles (games which can be bought and downloaded directly to a game console via the Internet). Direct downloading has become a proven, viable business model, whereas five years ago it was still largely unknown and very risky. Now we can reach out directly to the customers without the requirement of a publisher middleman. Companies that may have been well-established a generation ago may be set in their ways on that old technology, and may not be equipped to handle the change in technology that's come upon them.

Q: What made you and your cofounders choose the Madison area to start your company?

A: All of us are from Wisconsin originally. I've lived all over the country -- New Mexico, Oregon, Chicago, Texas -- and I really missed home. When I started to raise a family I wanted to come home to start a company. Madison has a unique combination of skills and interests that lend themselves to video game creation. You have a lot of creative people, you have a lot of technical people, and that combination is not always easy to find. So I think it's a uniquely well-suited town. It's really the many quirky pieces of Madison that come together. You've got the whole State Street youth culture and the urban feel that Madison has despite being such a small town five minutes from nature. That odd combination of factors just lends itself to game creation. Also it really helps that (Middleton-based) Raven Software sort of blazed the trail for us in terms of establishing themselves as a video game company. I remember when Brian Raffel, the founder, was hawking 3.5-inch floppies at Gen Con (an annual video game convention) back when it was in Milwaukee, trying to get the Raven name out there. It's great to see the success that they've had. Certainly the trail that they've blazed has been of great benefit to companies like Human Head and us.

Q: Do you think Madison is a business-friendly place for companies like yours?

A: Yes and no. It certainly is a very friendly technology town. There's a lot of highly skilled people to be hired in the local community. Even the lay community is very technically savvy. That certainly benefits us. Still, I remember back with Human Head we were once denied a sublet in a building when the lessor found out we were a video game company, because they didn't understand and didn't want "that element," or whatever they called it. That was kind of weird for us. But we haven't run into that since then. Most people are very supportive. Whenever I tell people I make video games for a living, usually the response is "Hey, I've got a great idea, can I tell you about it." So there's a lot of interest in the community.

And now that there's the Wisconsin Film Tax Credit which also applies to video games, we're starting to see support from government. People are starting to understand that it's an entertainment business and it's a worldwide business, we sell products everywhere. But I think Madison is going through a period where they're trying to decide how business friendly in general they are. There's a lot of back and forth between the business community and the city. I think unfortunately the city has had a rather adversarial relationship with businesses the last five or six years. That doesn't directly impact us though. It's just something we keep our eye on. You know, as an employer, we are pretty progressive -- video game companies are pretty progressive in general -- because we're in competition with all the other video game companies for new hires, so we have a fairly high standard for both salary and benefits. So we're not impacted as much by the local squabbles between the business community and the city.

Q: What are your plans for growing the company?

A: We just opened a technology office in Austin, Texas, with Paul Masters, who started at Dynamix a week before I did, as technical director. That was a big success for us. We think it will open new avenues for us. It gives us the opportunity to create staffing in another location in case people we want to hire don't want to move to Madison. Everything's online now anyway, so we operate the office virtually, with video conferencing, telephone, e-mail and direct Internet connections between our servers. We don't plan on opening any more offices though. Game creation is a pretty collaborative art. I could possibly see us getting to be the size of Blizzard Entertainment or other major companies. Blizzard started out like us: they just loved what they did, kept going, built some small games, built some bigger games, and eventually built World of Warcraft, which was rumored to have cost them at least $60 million to make but from which they probably make $1 billion a year. We're not banking on it though. Our success isn't dependent on a level of success. We do want to grow, we do want to become a major developer in the country -- which would make us a large developer locally as well -- but we're taking a very slow, conservative growth plan to it. We're not betting the farm on an overnight success. We want to build a lasting company. The three of us owners' ultimate goal is to build a company that will succeed us. I would like the company to be one of the driving development houses in five to ten years, maybe not the number one, it's a large enough industry that you can have several driving companies, but I want us to be a company that people look to for innovation and high quality products.

Q: All the talk about tech these days seems to be about "convergence," do you see that in the game industry?

A: Yeah, and it makes it more expensive and difficult for us to make games, quite frankly. As stuff converges, people have higher expectation levels. With higher expectations comes higher costs and more skill sets that we have to bring in. Back when I started, a company's artist was usually somebody who wasn't necessarily an artist but kind of understood the art tool and was able to put together a blob that sort of looked like a person. Nowadays, you have guys working on just the shoe and it's so detailed it looks like a real shoe with laces and rubber soles. The skills required are just mind boggling and the number of people we have to hire is much higher than ever before.

Q: But doesn't it also broaden the market? People who never played a video game before are buying the Wii, for instance.

A: Yes, it's actually ironic that we've found more wide-scale acceptance, and yet the sales totals haven't really climbed. The total number of sales for the top products hasn't increased. The total number of sales overall has increased, so the industry continues to grow, but a top hit today doesn't necessarily sell more units than a top hit from five or 10 years ago. There's more choice out there and games that reach different audiences, which is a good thing, but the dirty secret of the current generation of hardware is that it costs two to three times as much to make a game now, while the potential audience is exactly the same as it was before. The revenue model has changed, which is why you're seeing more subscription-based games and games that you get through a service or downloadable content-based games. And you're seeing more genrification of the industry, where only games in established genres are getting made and the more risky interesting ideas are getting thrown to the side, unless you're making small, quirky games which don't generate the kind of revenue that the larger companies are looking for.

Still, for companies like us those kinds of games are more lucrative, because if we make $5 million off of a game, that's great, that's awesome, but for a huge company like Electronic Arts, $5 million is a huge failure. Because there's been a convergence of publishers -- publishers have been eating each other up -- you're seeing a smaller pool of companies that will put the games out, and they have to bet bigger and bigger and only on sure-fire hits. So we're held to a different standard that, say, movies. A $200 million movie is only about two hours long. So they're creating about two hours of content. For a $20 million game, we need to present 12 or 15 hours of content -- interactive content -- and the visuals are getting to be as good as the movies.