About

Back in 1998, I teamed up with my friend Rick Hou and created a number of board games under the name “Walking Ideas”.  We were young and brave… and naive.  I remember spending a summer working the circular saws and sanding down the game pieces by hand, then bringing them to a street fair and played them with kids and parents.  To our surprise, we did manage to sell all of the game sets we made.  There was a math teacher who bought three sets for her class.  A young working couple who turned out to be avid chess players, picked up a set.   And a grandma picked up two sets for her grandkids who couldn’t stop hogging our demo display at the booth.

That was when I knew I was going to be a game designer for life.

In 2009, we made an online version of one of our board games, Oshiro. It won the grand prize of the GameTrust Evolution Challenge and was published on shockwave.com, getting paid to create video game for the first time in my life. I would end up catching the dot-com bug however, spending several years at early-to-mid stage startups, with a short stint on an MMORPG project in between. Later, I went on to partner with my college buddy Tommy Wu (who crucified me in Quake with a score of 20 to -2 when we first met in the college dorms) and co-founded a couple VC backed companies in social game and interactive narrative space.

Even though my interest in technology and start-ups has taken me to various stops through out my career, my love for creating thought provoking and inspiring games has never gone away.   The name “Walking Ideas” had always reminded me of the ideal that brought me stumbling into the game industry as a young and naive kid.  Now that I am writing to share my learning and discoveries from my adventure as a gaming entrepreneur, I can’t think of a better name for this blog.

So here we are – I hope you find my posts insightful, and let’s keep the good ideas rolling!

– Shawn “Manto” Chiao