Life Without 'Apples'

At some point, every parent has to send his child into the world. For Al Waller, president of Out of the Box Publishing, the decision to sell his company's flagship game, Apples to Apples, to Mattel—after the its years-long run as one of the specialty toy market's consistently best selling titles—felt much the same.

“There was a time when we saw the product growing not only bigger than us, but that it was ready to go,” Waller tells Playthings. “To do otherwise, would be like saying to your child, you should go to high school but I'm not going to let you go to college. For us, passing the baton to Mattel is like sending your child off to college. It was ready to go to the mass market and the international markets. Mattel's reach with licensing and international distribution and marketing is just greater than what Out of the Box wanted to do, and the product is that good that we think it has a life beyond the U.S. market. We'll see if Mattel can pull it off. I believe they will.”

It's anticipated that Mattel's distribution prowess will also put to bed recurrent consumer complaints that finding the game at retail, even with extensive specialty toy store distribution and sales through Out of the Box's own website, was difficult.

Rights to Apples to Apples, plus those for Snorta! and Blink, cost Mattel $25.1 million. Last month, Mattel previewed Apples to Apples and Snorta! as part of its spring 2008 line, unchanged but for the logos on their boxes.

Despite all the talk about the kid being out of the house, the period after Mattel's August acquisition of Apples to Apples has been a busy one for Waller. “Mattel said they couldn't build [the games] fast enough so they asked us to build them, ship them and invoice them until the end of the year,” he explains. “So, for me, nothing's changed yet. I'm as busy now as I would have been. I haven't felt the 'it's gone' yet.” The official end comes on January 1.

“The focus going forward in the next couple of years will be more party games coming out of this think tank,” Waller says. And thanks to the Mattel deal, finding follow-ups to fill the gap left by Apples to Apples' sale may be easier than anyone would have anticipated. Designers are coming out of the woodwork to pitch ideas to the firm.

“Game designers know what we've done in the past,” Waller says. “They know we can take a concept off of a napkin and grow it in specialty, take it to the mass and then sell it to a Mattel. Every game designer on the planet has taken notice. The number of game submissions we're getting has quadrupled [since the Mattel deal]. Everyone and his brother wants us to publish their game because they feel it's the next ... we used to say 'the next Trivial Pursuit,' but now we say 'the next Apples to Apples.'”

Waller says the trade can expect to see more of its games go from specialty to mass in the future.

“We use the term internally that we're an incubator,” he says. “We take these concepts, put them in a box with a pretty package around them and see what grows out of it. We're providing the specialty market with products that have mass market potential. Of the party games that we're coming out with, some of them will go to the mass market down the road. Which ones? Only time will tell, but we're going to do it again. That's the message I want the specialty retailers to know: We'll do it again and they can be part of it. Just like we did with Apples to Apples, we can repeat that success.”