Back in 1998, I teamed up with my friend Rick Hou and created a number of board games under the name “Walking Ideas”. \u00a0We were young and brave… and naive. \u00a0I 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. \u00a0To our surprise, we did manage to sell all of the game sets we made. \u00a0There was a math teacher who bought three sets for her class. \u00a0A young working couple who turned out to be avid chess players, picked up a set. \u00a0 And a grandma picked up two sets for her grandkids who couldn’t stop hogging our demo display at the booth.<\/p>\n
That was when I knew I was going to be a game designer for life.<\/p>\n
In 2009, we made an online version of one of our board games, Oshiro<\/a>. It won the grand prize of the GameTrust Evolution Challenge<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em> has never gone away. \u00a0 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. \u00a0Now 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.<\/p>\n So here we are – I hope you find my posts insightful, and let’s keep the good ideas<\/strong> rolling!<\/p>\n – Shawn “Manto” Chiao<\/em><\/p>\n