Thread: Just Play!

Alex Rigopulos promised he wasn't going to treat this as some kind of victory lap, as a fist-pump in the sky to proclaim that his long-struggling company had gutted out a decade of failure to explode in unlikely success. But, man, he could have. On a sweltering evening this July, the Who (yes, that the Who) was about to play a private concert for his company's 1,500 invited guests -- press, partners, investors -- at the rented-out Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. Harmonix Music Systems, the company Rigopulos co-founded 13 years earlier, was on fire. He and co-founder Eran Egozy and their patient investors had made millions of dollars, and millions more were on the way. The company's video games, Guitar Hero and Rock Band, which let players perform real rock songs on fake instruments, were pumping life into a panicking music industry, an industry that just a few years back only occasionally took the time to return Harmonix's phone calls. Tonight, the company was introducing Rock Band 2, in advance of its official release in September.

Rigopulos didn't dare think of this event as vindication, though. "You always feel like you're on the brink of failure," he had said in his office a week before the Who concert. Failure, after all, had chased his company for so long. He and Egozy had launched Harmonix in 1995 fresh out of graduate school, with a cool piece of demo software they had written, a dreamy business plan about bringing the bliss of playing an instrument to nonmusicians, and no truly marketable ideas.

Could you design a better blueprint for years of frustration? It came like a slow beating: a decade of scraping by as the founders struggled to turn their idea into a viable product and began sacrificing pieces of their vision (and their company) to stay afloat. A decade of learning that ingenuity comes in two flavors: the kind where you invent mind-blowing technology (that was the easy part for two guys with master's degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the kind where you build a legitimate business around it.

Just Play --Guitar Hero -- video game business

Great entrepreneurial success story after a lot of adversity.

This is from Oct 2008 but I never seen it here (did I miss it?)

Great story, I figured there'd be a great fastlane story behind the only "modern" video game that I can actually play and enjoy

Also goes to show in an industry where there was so much doom and gloom(music), someone came along and proved that there is success to be gained