Playing for Keeps
Kurt Kirckof says he is all about his kids. When he goes to bed, his kids are on his mind, and when he wakes up, his kids are on his mind. And it’s no wonder—he and his wife, Celestie, have five of them: Ashley 13, Aaron 11, Josie 8, Macie 5, and Emmit 2.
One particular night, Kurt went to bed and dreamed about a kids’ game. “In my dream, I was playing this game with my two kids (Ashley and Aaron, who were then 8 and 6). I’d never played games with my kids. It’s not what I grew up doing.” Milking cows morning and night on a dairy farm, young Kurt had no time for horsing around. But now this father of five dreamed of a game called Going-Going Crazy.
“Everything from the Going-Going Crazy name to the colors and design came to me in the dream. When I woke up, I drew it, then put the drawing in my dresser drawer.” A year later, Kurt pulled out his notes, bought a board game, and used the board and box as forms. “At the time, I did lettering for sides of vehicles, so I had vinyl and a special cutter on hand. I designed the game on the computer and, using the vinyl, laid it out on the board. For the box, I had a picture of Ashley and Aaron put on a big sticker that I wrapped around it.” He played the game with his kids and their friends, and they loved it!
The next year, Kurt took his Going-Going Crazy Game to the world’s largest invention show in Pittsburgh. “I went with the game under my arm and bought helium balloons from Wal-Mart to put on the corner of my table. Out of entrants from thirty-five countries from around the world, I got the gold medal! I left that place in tears. I knew I wanted to get this game made.”
But getting a product made can be the ultimate game, and Kurt had no idea how to play. He had no information, no experience, and no contacts. When a guy who works with overseas manufacturing finally helped him get pricing in China to compare it to U.S. pricing, Kurt liked the numbers. He ordered 6,000, selling his very first game to a little store in a town thirty miles from his Minnesota home. For the next ten days, leading up to Christmas Eve, Kurt went on seven radio shows to promote it. “In those ten days, I sold 600 games out of two little stores in a town of 10,000 people. People were standing in line to buy Going-Going Crazy Game!”
Based on feedback, Kurt changed the game’s original red, white, and black colors, to blue, yellow, orange, and purple—colors designed to keep kids interested—and repackaged it. Two years after winning his first-place award, he went back to the Pittsburgh show and got another gold medal. Since then, he’s won so many first-place awards, he can’t keep track of them all. His latest improvement, making all the pieces, including the board and spinner, glow in the dark, got three more catalog companies to pick up the game. He was on the cover of Inventors’ Digest magazine for two months and has been in twenty different magazines and 500 different newspapers. But Kurt says that all that publicity didn’t greatly influence sales, since his product isn’t available nationwide yet.
The Going-Going Crazy Game and related products are available on the game’s website, but Kurt tries to route buyers to specialty stores that carry it in twenty-one states, Canada, and Japan. “Three years ago, Wal-Mart put me in forty-eight stores for a trial. We were the number one game for two years straight, but Wal-Mart won’t put me nationwide unless I’m a million-dollar company. I wish I had a millionaire investor to back me. Still, that placement helped me build a sales history.”
Over seven years, Kurt has invested $650,000 in real money, not play money. This inventor’s playing for keeps! “If this game ever went nationwide, it’d be worth multi-multi-multi-millions overnight.
This venture has been tough for this 38-year-old auto body shop owner and his wife, a registered nurse. “We’re making monthly payments and are trying to raise a family. There’s a point where you draw the line and say ‘enough,’ then pull the plug. But we just had more catalogs pick it up. I’m confident that it will work—you aren’t going to sell 30,000 games if people don’t like it. Besides, I’m at the point now where it has to work. I’ve got a lot of money invested! It’s all a matter of getting the name out.”
Target recently called Kurt to set up an appointment, and he has a good feeling about it. “If people will give me five minutes of their time, I can almost guarantee they’ll walk away with this game. If you get one large retailer to pick up your product, then they all will. Once it’s nationwide, we can do a big advertising campaign.”
This game is far from over.
Trangleball®
Having a Ball
I don’t know who invented baseball, basketball, or football. I’m sure the information is out there; I just don’t know it. But I do know who invented Trangleball—New Yorker Mark Miller.
Mark says he doesn’t care about his own fame and fortune. He just wants the name Trangleball to become known throughout the land. By that, he means he wants kids to play his game on the streets, at summer camp, and in gym classes, plus on beaches and places where people get together for fun. “Trangleball provides a lot of exercise in a little space and it’s fun like you wouldn’t believe.”
Mark owned a music studio. One morning, waiting for a band to finish rehearsing, he picked up a ball and threw it at the corner of the room where two walls meet the ceiling. After throwing it at what seemed like the same spot, he noticed that the ball rebounded in a different direction each time. Sometimes it went left, sometimes right, sometimes high or low. Mark thought that the unpredictable rebound was fun and could be used to improve ball players’ reflexes.
Deciding to make a portable corner, he cut a 4-foot square of plywood into triangles, from corner to corner “the way my mom used to cut my sandwiches.” He then nailed three of the four triangles together to create a corner. Mark had his portable corner, and it worked just fine.
Soon after he created it, he flipped it over and realized that his corner was a three-sided pyramid. He began to throw the ball at one of the panels, but the ball rebounded right back to him. Boring. Then Mark had an “aha” moment. “If I ran five steps to the right of the panel that I was throwing the ball at, an opponent would have to take five steps to the left to catch it.” The random rebound was back in the concept, but now it had turned into a competitive game.
After a few hours of playing this corner game with his employees, Mark realized that the other two sides of the pyramid weren’t being used, so he had them play three games at once: one against each panel, for a total of three balls and six players. As time went on, he eliminated two balls and created a passing game between the players. That’s how his inverted corner became Trangleball.
Mark’s advice to other inventors: “Prototype it. It’s difficult to build on an idea without something to physically touch and play with. A prototype will build fresh new ideas. Without my first proto, I’d still be throwing the ball at the inside corners instead of flipping it on the pyramid side.”
Today, Trangleball has a circular court (portable), a yard-high pyramid in the center of the court, and a squishy ball the size of a baseball. “I even created the Trangleball logo in the shape of the court itself.”
If you go to Fire Island’s Ocean Beach and walk along the shore, you will see six players bouncing a ball off one of the three faces of the pyramid in the center of a court. Mark lives nearby and sets up the Trangleball court every morning with the permission of the community. A player throws the ball to a teammate and, within three throws, one of them has to aim for a face on the pyramid to score a point. A game is complete when one