A space adventure tale of an Arkansas farmer hunting down the evil aliens who stole his prize-winning pig has Xatrix Entertainment back on the road to success.
The L.A. company, which produced the hit CD-ROM computer game “Cyberia” in 1993, got into trouble the following year when “Cyberia 2” did not live up to expectations.
But Xatrix is flying high again this summer, thanks to the success of “Redneck Rampage,” in which farmer Leonard and his sidekick Bubba use shotguns, pistols, dynamite and other weapons to combat the alien pignappers helped along by an occasional dose of “cheap-ass whiskey.”
The title has sold 250,000 units since its release three months ago, with sales helped along by enthusiastic reviews in gaming magazines and other publications. The Aug. 21 Rolling Stone named “Redneck Rampage” its Hot Video Game.
Drew Markham, the company’s co-founder, chairman and chief executive, declines to disclose revenue figures and other financial details of the privately held company. Typically, however, a game developer like Xatrix gets up to 30 percent of the wholesale price of each unit. With the wholesale price at between $25 to $30 a unit, Xatrix could easily have made $1 million to $2 million on that game alone.
“We succeed when we write games that we’re excited about,” Markham said. “When you let the marketing guys run things, you end up trying to write the equivalent of a hit song and that never works.”
Markham said he wrote “Redneck Rampage” in one night. When he brought it to work the next day, producer Greg Goodrich roared with laughter and insisted on immediately beginning development.
Dressed in a black, untucked T-shirt, jeans, sneakers and sporting a healthy set of sideburns, the 38-year old Markham is a man who wouldn’t look out of place setting up the sound system at an Aerosmith concert. But then the volatile and edgy world of CD-ROM games is hardly the place for someone who dresses at Brooks Brothers.
“The game business is different than the traditional entertainment business,” said Jim Jonassen, founder of the Los Angeles New Media Roundtable and of Larkin Associates, a recruiter for the multimedia industry. “There’s a cult of gamers and Drew understands that.”
Markham is a hard-core gamer himself and has been for years. It’s not uncommon for him to spend hours at a stretch playing the latest games or dropping by local retailers to see what’s selling and what isn’t.
“Drew’s one of the most talented and creative guys in the business,” Jonassen said.
And one of the most unconventional. When Markham made his initial overtures to investors before the company formed in 1993, the demo version of a game Markham brought to the meeting didn’t have any sound effects yet.
“So Drew sat at the computer terminal making all these sounds where they would’ve been,” Jonassen said. “‘Woosh!’ ‘Blam!’ ‘Kapow!’ He definitely got people’s attention.”
Markham received some of his technical training in the U.S. Navy. After his discharge, he went to work for ABC News as a cameraman and videotape editor. Later, he began a computer graphics consulting business out of his Burbank home which evolved into his full-time occupation.
To finance his fledgling company, Markham got startup funding from Brentwood-based Enterprise Partners, a venture capital firm.
With its very first CD-ROM game, “Cyberia,” Xatrix hit pay dirt in late 1993. It went on to sell 250,000 units retail and another additional 700,000 units as part of software bundles sold by various computer manufacturers.
With the successs of “Cyberia,” Xatrix decided to publish and market the follow-up game, “Cyberia 2.” That decision proved almost fatal for the fledgling company.
In the CD-ROM industry, publishers essentially do what they do in the book business print and market what their authors have written. “Cyberia” was published by Irvine-based Interplay Productions, which put out “Redneck Rampage.”
After the initial success of “Cyberia,” some members of the company decided that Xatrix should publish in-house in order to reap even higher revenues on the sequel. The company’s payroll expanded from 22 employees to 35. But there was a problem.
“We rolled out our advertising campaign and then the game was delayed,” recalled Markham. “By the time we got it onto the market, we’d run out of advertising money.”
The game bombed and Xatrix almost went bust.
“In a rapidly growing and highly uncertain industry like the multimedia industry, smaller and leaner is better,” said Jon P. Goodman, executive director of EC2, the Annenberg Incubator Project at the University of Southern California, which houses eight young multi-media companies.
According to Goodman, what Markham and other Xatrix executives did after the “Cyberia 2” fiasco was exactly right. The company jettisoned its publishing and marketing departments, cut back to 13 employees and focused on what they felt they did best develop games.
“It’s not the No. 1 game out there,” one retailer said of Rampage, “but it’s certainly holding its own.”
With the success of Rampage, Xatrix is looking to diversify.
For example, the company developed the software for a four-story-high interactive game in the Sega GameWorks arcade at the Ontario Mills shopping mall. In fact, Markham said he got into the game business in the first place to build the “next generation of arcade machines,” but found the hardware needed to do it prohibitively expensive.
The company is also developing an “add-on” for “Redneck Rampage” an upgrade for buyers who have completed the game which typically sells for $10 to $20. A brand new title is scheduled for a Christmas 1998 release.
