Man In Motion

Jacobe Chrisman deserves a rest. It's been a very busy six months for the former head of product development at Cranium. In that short span he's launched his own game company, I Can Do That! Games, taken his debut product assortment from idle ideas to actuality, and convinced the guardians of Dr. Seuss and retail titan Toys “R” Us to help him do it.

When Playthings caught up with Chrisman last month, he was in the midst of his first available spell of down time, relaxing in a cabin on the Vermont shore of Lake Champlain, secure in knowing that after all that work, I Can Do That!'s first three games were literally “hitting the water” on their way to retail just three days hence.

“The compressed time frame was one of the biggest challenges,” Chrisman says of the run-up to his initial games' release. “We had to sacrifice a lot of our own free time, but it was worth it.”

The result is three games based on beloved Dr. Seuss books: The Cat in the Hat—I Can Do That! Game, Horton Hears a Who!—You to the Rescue! Game and The Grinch—Sing Your Heart Out! Game. What they all have in common (besides the Dr. Seuss tie-in) is that they're all highly interactive, reflecting not only Chrisman's work at Cranium, but more directly, reflecting the way Chrisman leads his life. Prior to his four years at Cranium, Chrisman spent nearly 10 years as a camp counselor and rock climbing instructor. It was a period during which “a lot of times you'd have to make up games in a pinch to keep the kids happy,” Chrisman says. “I learned a lot about play testing. It was literally trying something out and seeing if it works. If it failed you'd have a bunch of screaming kids on your hands so the consequences were often dire!”

While at Cranium, Chrisman says he learned to turn his knack for creating spontaneous activities into “building really high quality products,” then took time off to travel around the world—at first purely to surf, but stopping along the way to work in an orphanage in Nepal, a period during which he created a game to help improve the orphans' English.

“That kind of got me thinking that when I got home I might want to [make games] again,” Chrisman says. “And by the time I came back, I decided that, yeah, I did.” Not surprisingly, the game ideas he came back with were just as active as the games he'd worked on in the past: games that got kids moving, while at the same time helping affirm their self-esteem.

“There's something about kinetic play,” Chrisman says. “I really love the notion of kids learning in the way you do when you're trying to juggle, or balance something, or do something that's a little more physical. It's a very visceral experience, and it sticks in your memory a little bit more.”

Kids will have the ability to test those physical skills starting this fall when the games launch exclusively at Toys “R” Us. A wider retail roll-out is planned for spring 2008, in time to tap into the activity surrounding the 50th anniversaries of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat.

In the meantime, Chrisman says he's “having a great time creating games that children are having a great time playing. As long as I'm holding on to that then we'll be doing this for a long time.”