It was not a good time to enter the toy business. Toys R Us was rising to market dominance, independent toy and games stores were going out of business and the big department stores were moving away from selling board games and puzzles at Christmas, which had been a tradition for them. The Rubik’s Cube fad of the early 1980’s, which we took as a sign that our puzzles would be successful, had actually left store owners with a huge overstock of Cubes that still left a bad taste several years later. But we started with complete ignorance about how things should work, which turned out to be a blessing for us.

ThinkFun was called Binary Arts when it started

Our first products were three mechanical puzzles that had been invented by Bill’s father’s best friend, the Bell Labs engineer William Keister; called The Hexadecimal Puzzle, the Cat, and the Horse. Wonderful as they were, they were over priced and a little bit amateurish. The tagline for The Hexadecimal Puzzle was “An Advanced Mathematical Puzzle With 16 Variations”.

The Horse & The Cat Puzzles

The Hexadecimal Puzzle

Our company mission to start was “To translate the brilliant ideas of the craziest mathematicians, engineers and inventors into simple toys that can be appreciated by boys and girls around the world.” We still believe that today.

By the late 1980s we had introduced three really good plastic brainteaser puzzles, SpinOut, TopSpin and BackSpin, to the market. Two things happened around 1990 that catapulted us forward. First, the recession of 1989 threw loads of yuppies (young urban professionals) out of work, which caused them to stop shopping at Sharper Image and Nature Company where everything cost $50 or more, and to look for less expensive grownup toys and gadgets, which now included our sophisticated $10 brainteaser puzzles. Also at that time, “Edge City” suburban shopping malls were just hitting the American landscape in a big way, bringing with them a new generation of adult lifestyle stores that were hungry for fresh products, including sophisticated brainteaser puzzles. Stores like The Museum Company, Natural Wonders, Brookstone, Chesapeake Knife and Tool, World of Science, Hudson Trail Outfitters and InGear came on the scene around 1990, and completely changed the retail landscape.

Spin-Out, Top-Spin & Back-Spin

The world of retail changed over the course of two years, and suddenly was tilted our way. We went through a very creative period and developed a widening range of puzzles, all with an eye towards cleverness and integrity of design, and all in collaboration with the best puzzle inventors, with whom had become good friends by then. The moment that stands out most for us was when Izzi Daddaboy, the senior toy buyer for Harrods of London, walked into our booth at Toy Fair to tell us, “We need to do business together,” and then placed a huge order. The scariest time was in the Fall of 1990 during the run-up to the first Gulf War, the US military almost commandeered the factory making our puzzles. We got one machine allocated to us, running 24 hours a day, just keeping up with really big orders that were flooding in from these new stores. We made the Inc. 500 four years in a row in the early 1990s… it was fun!

 

In 1995 Nob Yoshigahara showed us his Tokyo Parking puzzle, which we brought to market as Rush Hour in the Summer of 1996. Our timing was perfect. Once again, the retail market was shifting, and the upscale grownup lifestyle stores were being supplanted by a new generation of upscale children’s toy stores. In the heady atmosphere of the late 1990’s, chains such as LearningSmith, Zany Brainy, Store of Knowledge, Noodle Kadoodle, as well as online toy store eToys took off and grew like weeds. This period from 1995 to 2000, was the most creative and vibrant in the history of American retail shopping.

Tokyo Parking By Nob Yoshigahara 1995

Rush Hour By Binary Arts 1996

We knew we had a winner with Rush Hour… we also knew we had a winning formula with our “Beginner to Expert” challenge system in general. In short order we brought to market Stormy Seas, Hoppers, Railroad Rush Hour, River Crossing, Lunar Lockout, Safari Rush Hour, and many other multi-challenge brainteaser logic puzzles. We also experimented with science toys, optical illusions, simple Aha! Style brainteasers, and started working locally in schools to learn whether and how our games could be used to teach learning skills. Retail customers were hungry for anything that was creative and different, we had a license to showcase a lot of different ideas and introduce a lot of creative inventors to the market. Prairie Dog Town By Binary Arts

Stormy Seas By Binary Arts

Paper Illusions

We made a hard run at the internet during this time also… we were well aware that our “Select a Challenge, Beginner to Expert” formula was perfect for online play. Our high water mark was when we were selected “Small Business of the Year” by Microsoft in 1997! This was a crazy time in the online world, some of you will recall. The whole country went nutty in the “dot com craze” of the late 1990s. We couldn’t quite buy into the required business formula for that time, which was to raise a huge amount of investor money by promising to run the business at huge losses currently and the promise of enormous revenues later… so we lost our techies to the competition and went back to what we did best… working with the whackiest inventors and translating their ideas into wonderful puzzles for boys and girls around the world. Creators: Andy & Jerry

The dot-com bubble burst in the Spring of 2000, and loads of technology companies promptly went bankrupt. Right beside them went all of the fancy retailers who had come on the scene during the 1990s. Starting with LearningSmith, the children’s retail market faced bankruptcy after liquidation, as The Museum Company, Natural Wonders, World of Science, LearningSmith, Zany Brainy, Store of Knowledge, Noodle Kadoodle, FAO Schwarz, and online retailer eToys all went down within two or three years. This, combined with George Bush becoming president and 9/11, made the early 2000’s as tough a period for creative games and puzzles as the 1990’s were a fertile time.

We kept making great puzzles to start the new century. We also turned our attention to making games for preschoolers. Like when we started the company, we didn’t really know what we were doing, and we had a few misses to begin with… Silly Stories, Picture Link and the Same Game were retired within two years. But at the same time we came out with ZINGO! In many ways, Zingo is as big a product for us as Rush Hour… Preschool Parents LOVE this game. If you don’t own Zingo yourself, you need to get it.

Little things make a big difference in our business. Our first Zingo package cover was good, we thought, but it actually was out of step with the times and consumers didn’t like it. It didn’t sell well at the start, but there were a few toy stores that sold Zingo like crazy, so we knew something wasn’t right. Only when we changed to our newer package did the game take off.

Zingo! By Binary Arts

Zingo! By ThinkFun

Another example is the Same Game. The product failed for us, but we kept hearing about people who really loved to play it. In 2008 we took another look with more experienced eyes, and re-imagined it as S’Match! S’Match! launched to great success in 2009 and there will be S’Match Hands-On Displays in the game aisle of every Target store in America for all of 2010. Amazing!… It’s the same game!

The Same Game By Binary Arts

S'match! By ThinkFun

It was in 2003 that we changed our name from Binary Arts to ThinkFun. Binary Arts was a wonderful name, but it was a glass ceiling name… if you knew us you loved us, if you didn’t know us you would never find us. We knew for a long time that we needed to change our name… we just needed to discover the right new name. We found it in ThinkFun, are very happy about this.

Gordian's Knot By ThinkFun

The market for hand-held brainteasers died in 1996, and It just felt like 10 years was about right to end the down cycle. In 2006, encouraged by several good puzzle friends, we brought Gordian’s Knot to market. This is an extremely difficult 3-D sliding piece puzzle, most people thought we were crazy to even try it. Sales started slow but rose steadily, then we heard about people posting movies of themselves solving Gordian’s Knot on youtube and it’s been upwards from there. In the past couple of years the trend has swung back to hand held brainteasers again, we’ve got great new puzzles in this category and growing competition, as always happens once something gets hot.

The Official Rush Hour on iPhone

Things are changing – big things are changing fast - again here at the end of the decade. The world is going online, and more importantly young people are now growing up online. We at ThinkFun have got to get online ourselves and have something to say in this environment. Of course we’re not going to abandon what we do best, making brilliant physical puzzles and games and selling them through stores. But we’ve got to add a new online presence also… we’ve got to grow to the next level. In many ways we’re reminded of when we started the business… clueless with a vision. This is OK, we have a history of getting it figured out, these are really exciting times at ThinkFun. On November 30, 2009 we launch Rush Hour for the iPhone. There are knockoff Rush Hours already on the iPhone, unfortunately… it’s a long story. For us the great news is that our version is THE BEST as well as being THE ORIGINAL. Rush Hour iPhone has 2500 challenges, all of them really good. And the game has great features, too. Please check it out.

Our education team has been working with school kids and college professors, using Rush Hour to explore children’s thinking patterns and skills. Our belief is that we can design different Rush Hour games to exercise different parts of the brain. Really! And that we will be able to help improve people’s thinking skills through a disciplined program of playing these challenges.

Now we are experimenting with an online program designed specifically to exercise a child’s ability to describe her thinking process - to articulate, or to metacognate - as she solves a problem. The program can be run completely online with children logging in from any location, or it can be used along with real Rush Hour games in the home or classroom. ThinkFun Brain Lab Online

We think we have something genuine to contribute to the online world, and we are very excited about exploring this and to make something happen.

We founded ThinkFun on a dream, that we could change the world by translating the brilliant ideas of the craziest mathematicians, engineers and inventors into simple toys that can be appreciated by boys and girls around the world. At 25 years old, we feel like we are living that dream. Stick with us and follow us as we move onto the internet and beyond. These next few years will be an adventure!