If Make Your Move Inc. has been
long in the making it's because until
recently the Reno-based game developer
was a little short handed.
"I was a one-man show," said Henry
Rolling, founder, chairman and senior
vice president of business development.
For Rolling and Make Your Move it's
been a long, winding and bumpy road
from sports to board games and, if all
goes well for the company, beyond.
It all starts back in 1996, when
Rolling founded DCP Ltd. to sell board
games, called Doubles Classic Series, he
had co-developed. DCP sold the games
on QVC, in FAO Schwarz and in Target,
raking in a total of about half a million
dollars.
Jump to June 2001. That's when
Rolling, a former football star for
University of Nevada, Reno as well as
several pro franchises, bought a small,
dormant company called Pacific Sports
Enterprises Inc. The company had been
established in 1998 to own and operate a
team in the American Basketball
Association, which never got off the
ground. Rolling bought it for about
$50,000 and changed its name to Make
Your Move.
"I estimated that changing the company's
name, rather than incorporating a
new company, saved me $750,000," said
Rolling.
At the time, Make Your Move set out
to buy DCP, which also was being run as
a one-man operation by Rolling. "I did
marketing, PR, shipping, receiving," he
said.
Rolling's solitary ways, though, led to
a problem that put the kibosh on Make
Your Move's acquisition of the company.
"DCP would have to have had an
audit and since our accountants didn't
witness our inventory," being received,
said Rolling, "there would have had to
have been a disclaimer."
So, the two companies now have a
management agreement in which Make
Your Move will distribute DCP's products.
After that, Rolling worked on taking
Make Your Move public, spending the
next year filing the necessary documents
with the Securities Exchange
Commission and National Association of
Securities Dealers.
Again, he worked alone. "I did all that
myself," said Rolling. "Every word you
see I've written."
That took until this past October, said
Rolling. Rolling is the company's majority
stockholder with 6.8 million shares.
His wife Kristin has 10,000 shares as
does Dr. Luther Mack, the owner of
eight Nevada McDonald franchises and a
director of Make Your Move. Another
director, Stuart L. Brown, has 1,000
shares.
Now, the company is trying to raise $2
million to launch its ambitious plans to
build a small games empire that spans
board games to Internet subscription
games to content for existing game consoles
like Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox to
building its own proprietary console.
Rolling has contributed close to
$500,000, he said, and the company is
close to securing the rest through private
equity deals.
The plan starts with the company's
existing board games. Make Your Move
is working to repackage the games under
an umbrella brand, reestablish retail relationships
and forge a few new ones.
Its board games should start showing
up on store shelves, in catalogs and on
online in the first quarter of next year,
according to Alice Heiman, recently
hired as Make Your Move's senior vice
president of sales. Next, in 2003, the
company plans to move its board games
to the Internet where it will provide a
subscription service. Also next year the
company hopes to start selling about 20
games it is developing for games consoles
such as the Playstation and GameCube.
Finally, sometime in 2004, Make Your
Move plans to launch its own games console
that Rolling says won't compete with
the systems already on the market.
"Those consoles are at one extreme,
board games are at the other and we're
coming right down the middle of the
market with ours," he said.
That's why Larry Hinderks, Make
Your Move CEO and president, joined
the company in June.
Hinderks, a former Bell Labs engineer
and founder of a company that developed
the audio encoding for DirectTV as well
as technology called Coolcast for delivering
TV over the Internet, was looking for
a new challenge and had decided video
games was it. He started developing his
own games, to amuse himself, says
Hinderks, and then met Rolling through
a mutual friend. Once Hinderks started
looking at what Make Your Move was
doing he realized he and Rolling had a
similar vision.
The company isn't disclosing the
details of that vision yet. But Hinderks
said the console will be a simple, low
priced, single-function device, somewhat
analogous to e-mail machines.
Make Your Move has a lot to do
between now and the launch of its
device. But at least Rolling is no longer
working on it alone.
