Most success stories have one unlikely element. This one is the location — a bar in Columbus, Ohio.
It was 1998, and John Kovalic was in Columbus at a game convention. He had left his full-time position as a writer and cartoonist at the State Journal two years earlier, borrowed some money from his parents and invested in a start-up game company with a Madison man named Mark Osterhaus and a couple others. They called the company Out of the Box.
Kovalic and Osterhaus had the company's first game, a chess variation called "Bosworth," with them in Columbus. They were approached in their booth by a San Diego man named Matt Kirby who appeared somewhat desperate to get their attention.
"He had a game called ‘Apples and Oranges,'" Kovalic was recalling Wednesday. Kirby had spent years approaching big game companies, with no success.
Osterhaus told Kirby that they were trying to sell their own game. They weren't buying.
But Kirby was insistent, and later that day, the Madison contingent found themselves sitting around a bar table in Columbus playing "Apples and Oranges." It was fun — a party game involving word association — but too complex. There was a segment of the game that involved cards, and when they reached it, Osterhaus said, "Wait a second! This is the game."
Kovalic recalled, "We moved the bells and whistles to another table and played with the cards for another couple of hours. Then we talked about it all the way back to Madison."
Out of the Box bought the rights to the game, changed the name to "Apples to Apples," and made gaming history. Several million of the games were sold and in 2007 Mattel bought the rights.
"I'm not allowed to talk about the details," Kovalic said, but it's clear all concerned made out well.
It gave Kovalic, 47, time to reflect, which he did for a time. Today he's busy as ever, mixing a variety of professional projects with new fatherhood. Kovalic and his wife, Judith Heise Kovalic — marketing director of the "Whad'Ya Know" radio program — have a 15-month-old daughter, Louisa. You could say Kovalic is a smitten dad. Sometimes he goes 10 whole minutes without mentioning Louisa.
They live in the town of Westport and John has a studio on King Street just off the Capitol Square. There is a room for writing and a room for drawing. Some of Kovalic's paintings — a new avocation — hang on the walls. The phone rings with calls from all over the world. Kovalic's "Dork Tower" comic has been translated in numerous languages and he's working on a screenplay treatment of another of his comic characters, "Dr. Blink," a shrink specializing in superheroes.
This week Kovalic noted that he recently surpassed 100 games for which he has served as illustrator and/or designer, which is funny because he got into games almost by accident.
He had been a gamer growing up in England — he purchased "Dungeons and Dragons" at a store in London — but it was strictly a hobby when he came to the United States to attend college in Wisconsin.
At UW-Madison, Kovalic started a daily comic strip, "Wild Life," which he eventually moved to the State Journal. (His mother had written comic books in England.) Once he went full-time at the State Journal, Kovalic began doing editorial cartoons, and one of them mocked the idea that O.J. Simpson was the victim of a conspiracy to frame him for murder.
Somehow somebody faxed a copy of that cartoon to a man named Steve Jackson in Austin, Texas, a highly successful game developer who had a conspiracy-inspired game called "Illuminati." Jackson contacted Kovalic. Might they work together?
"I was floored," Kovalic said. He said yes pretty quickly and the relationship continues today.
As it happened, Mark Osterhaus played "Illuminati." So when he was putting together his team for Out of the Box, he thought to ask Kovalic, a fellow Madisonian, to join. The buy-in for the new game venture was enough for Kovalic to gulp, but he went for it. It was the right move. Before long they were in a bar in Columbus and about to change oranges to apples.
