SAVED BY THE CELL: Min, Kan, She and Miao went mobile after the dot-com bust shattered their Internet game company. Adam Tow

Sitting in an airport terminal about 10 years ago, Oliver Miao and Leighton Kan decided to kill some time before their flight by playing Magic, the card game. Before long, the pair had become so engrossed in mighty wizards, warring goblins and other fantasy creatures that they didn’t notice when their neighbors began to leave. By the time they’d re-entered that reality, their flight was gone.

If that degree of immersion in a game sounds a little intense, such dedication has served them well. Miao, ’97, an electrical engineering major, and computer science alums Kan, ’98, Justin Min, ’97, MS ’98, and Winston She, ’98, went on to found Centerscore, a mobile-phone game company. It has become a significant player in an emerging industry: cell-phone games could generate more than $4.4 billion in 2006, according to tech consulting firm Ovum Research.

Centerscore produces games for T-Mobile, Verizon and several smaller carriers, Miao says, and hopes to make its titles available to all carriers nationwide. Users subscribe to the games for $2.99 per month or purchase them directly from the carriers (prices vary between $4 and $8) by accessing their phone’s online game-shopping option.

The games attract players through a variety of innovative touches. Take Amy’s Hangman, for example. The winner of a 2004 Mobie Award—“the cell-phone game equivalent of an Oscar,” Miao says—the game puts a spin on the paper-and-pencil version with networking (allowing users to compete against other players around the world), vivid graphics that look like pencil sketches, and a hostess whose wardrobe changes with the seasons.

Or there’s Aquarium Pets, in which players use the phone’s keypad to create fish that will either inherit parent fishes’ characteristics or mutate into one of more than a million distinct fish forms. “Plus, it’s fun to see the fish ‘pop’ when they eat too much,” Miao notes.

Aquarium Pets, adds She, “breaks the mold of what you think of as a video game. A 12-year-old boy might not like playing [it],” he explains, “but someone with eclectic tastes, or a more casual player, would play it.”

The Centerscore founders met while living in Twain and quickly bonded over their favorite pastime. “We spent a lot of time—way more than we should have—playing games,” Miao says. They constantly fantasized about starting a company, but plans didn’t materialize until after graduation. Wanting to stay in touch motivated them as much as profits did. “We’d all started writing games on our own,” Kan recalls, “so we put them onto a website.”

Adam Tow

The games, browser-based applications coded in Java or Shockware, performed well initially. So well, in fact, that “some high schools banned our games from being played on school computers,” Miao says. “Too many people were playing them during computer class.”

Centerscore’s progress was severely impeded when the dot-com bubble burst. The company made its money selling advertising space on its website, but buyers became scarce as the industry sagged. “We were basically living off our savings for about three years—we had almost no money to our names,” Miao says. Min recalls, “We had this kind of naïve thought that tomorrow will be better—until the tomorrow [when we would be] closing our company came.”

At the eleventh hour, a contact Min had made at Trilogy, an Austin-based software company, offered the group a contract to develop cell-phone games—a reprieve from the company’s near-certain demise. Kan remembers thinking, “Hey, now we can afford to eat!”

Centerscore’s transition into the fledgling mobile game business catapulted its consumer base into the hundreds of thousands. Operating in the red during the Internet days, the company turned profitable in 2003. Revenue quadrupled the following year. The founders, who initially worked out of an apartment shared by Min and Miao, moved their operations to Palo Alto, and soon after to San Mateo.

As their staff grew to 16, the four original members found their roles changing. Miao became CEO—“a really easy decision,” he quips, “because none of them wanted to be”—while Kan now focuses on design and art, and She on engineering. Min serves as jack of all trades. “He’s kind of the glue that holds the pieces together,” Miao says.

Although expansion has brought many benefits, including a switch from 16-hour workdays to “saner hours,” the founders enjoy keeping the company small. It
helps preserve what Miao calls a “professional yet goofy” atmosphere, in which boardroom furniture sometimes doubles as a pingpong table.

The intimate environment promotes collaboration. The whole company gathers for brainstorming sessions and bounces ideas around until something both practical and exciting emerges. “The advantage of a small company is you’re able to hear each person,” explains She. “Everyone in our pipeline gets to have input into the game.”

Centerscore, which develops everything in-house, has created several high-profile properties—among them games based on the Garfield comic strip, The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Charlie’s Angels. But being small gives the company the flexibility to take risks that larger companies—including Electronic Arts, THQ, Disney and Yahoo! (for which Centerscore designed five of six launch titles)—might shy away from. Aquarium Pets is one example; another is Surviving High School, in which players control a transfer student trying to fit into a new setting. “You can spend your time studying and you can get good grades, or you can spend your time working out or going on dates, but some other stuff suffers,” says She, explaining the web of options. The impressive graphics are on a par with home gaming systems of a few years ago.

Miao acknowledges that maintaining the company’s size and its founders’ control will be difficult as the market grows. “A lot of our peer companies have been bought up. There are a lot of much larger players in our space.” Still, Centerscore intends to control its growth and keep churning out innovative products. “It’s what we like to do,” Kan says simply. “It’s very gratifying.”