News from Johnny Monsarrat




Too good an idea to let go

April 1994. I was a PhD student at Brown University in computer science, building mobile robots and programming them to roll around. It was great fun to stay up all night hacking away at the code. Managing projects and going to robot contests was to me more fun than the mathematically-oriented artificial intelligence research I […]

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Everything but the garage

Of course the idea involved computer games. Every programmer I knew wanted to want to write a computer game. So it’s was going to be a game… on the Internet. Right! It had to use the most cutting edge technology. If it weren’t a challenge, it wouldn’t be fun. At MIT, I had done a […]

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An unusual way to raise money

September 1994 was almost the end of Johnny Monsarrat. I was walking in Providence, and suddenly an accident forced a car up onto the sidewalk. Bam! I went flying. Fortunately I survived, and thanks to the personal injury system I got $30,000. It wasn’t much, but it let me afford to become Turbine’s first full-time […]

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Rehoboth Office

As I mentioned, Turbine's first real office was in my Mom's house in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. The summer of 1995 was a hot one and we had no air conditioning.

 

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Demos, Demos, and More Demos

At last we built enough of a product to be able to give real demos. And our business plan and business savvy kept improving. By this time we had the game roughly planned out. We had hired a game designer, Toby Ragaini, who built the backstory for the game. I had architected, at the highest […]

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Mom’s House

Meanwhile we kept expanding. The living room was turned into a communal work area.

 

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Demo

Before we spoke with any publishers, we gave "internal" demos to businesspeople friendly to the company. This is a fun story that I also include as a chapter in my forthcoming book, Soulburners. Johnny Monsarrat, Jeremy Gaffney, Tim Miller, and Toby Ragaini are featured.

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Expansion at Rehoboth

Camp Turbine at the Johnny Monsarrat household. As I mentioned earlier, we started expanding until about 10 people worked in Mom's house in Rehoboth, most of them parking in the driveway and basically living there. Me, well, of course I lived there to begin with. We worked very hard. Imagine 12 geeky guys staying up until 4am and reviving around noon. Rehoboth was a tiny town with only 10,000 people and tons of forest, a bit of Iowa plunked into Massachusetts. What a strange place to start a company in!

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More Expansion at Rehoboth

Here are some shots of the chaos that the artists' room became. This was also the room we used for "stalling" a demo that we were still working on when guests arrived!

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Providence

In late 1995 we moved into a new office in Providence, Rhode Island. As well as our working space improving, we had gained some investment and some organizational efficiency. We grew to 15 employees here. I also grew in the tummy area. That's proof that starting a company creates stress!

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