Chapter 3 – Tailfins and the American Dream
While the designers were debating “bad”, I put my own focus during this design process on tail fins. I happen to believe that American automobiles of the mid-to-late 1950’s represent the highest and best design expression of the American Spirit that has ever been… and I see tail fins as being the essence of this expression. Our Traffic Jam Escape Car needed to have tail fins, this was very important to me.
Think about it. The American Spirit is restless. As a country we’re moving, we’re growing, we’re hungry for challenge and to take charge of the future. Tail fins aren’t just objects… they are icons, they represent this spirit. Yes, they’re beautiful in themselves… but more importantly, they take you places. They take you to the American Dream. The Escape Car could do this for us, and more importantly it could do this for our puzzle playing customers.
We needed to convey these ideas on the package cover, and not the negative ideas we had been working with. I sketched out a rough concept for our design group to use to head in a new direction.
The first artboard that came back was weird, I’ll leave it at that… we had a creative group back then. But at that point we started talking about who the escape car driver was, and what values he stood for. This changed everything… we realized that we could define the driver’s personality to match our message and build from there. Since we had decided we were searching for the American Dream, we needed to create the American Everyman.
From there, everything just fell into place. We moved away from Tokyo Parking and decided to call the puzzle Rush Hour, and we cast the puzzle as the American Story, the story of Rush Hour Joe. Joe, who figures things out and lives on top of the world while others complain about their situation. Joe is you… and Joe loves playing Rush Hour, it is just so much fun when you solve a really hard challenge and use your mind to play!
Rush Hour joined Binary Arts, Binary Arts became ThinkFun, and the rest became history.