20 Years? Really?

In 10 days I head to the Big Apple to attend my 20th International Toy Fair. It doesn't seem possible that we've been tinkering in the toy business for that long, but the proof is in the photos.

Toy Fair 1990. Yours truly, Ed Muccini, Dave Yearick, Staci Yearick

Suspenders anyone?

We loaded our $10,000 booth into my beat up Jeep at 3:30am and headed down the New York State Thruway to the future of TriBond. We arrived at the Jacob Javits Convention Center at 6:00am on set-up day. Big Fun a Go Go Incorporated was the first to arrive at Toy Fair. The second shift cleaning crew let us in. We arrived at the opening day of the 1990 Toy Fair without thunderous applause. We carried inside 5 custom-made wooden boxes of marble tile, which weighed 75lbs a piece. We had to pretend that they were quite light so that the union workers wouldn't see us struggling and charge us for the labor required to help us. We had glass table tops, columns, yards and yards of fire-retardant, purple velvet, and oh, yeah 48 copies of TriBond, a game we'd invented in our spare time.

My brother Mike, our first investor, and me, Gordon Gecko

The morning was slow: no million dollar deals. The afternoon was worse: no orders. Buyers liked our booth, but didn't stop to play TriBond. We took one order on the second day, and only a handful after that. By the end of Toy Fair we had sold 30 TriBond games. Orders only trickled in from game shops in the weeks following Toy Fair. Thinking that our hit game was dying on the vine, we decided that drastic measures were in order. Although it weakened our hand by calling them before they called us, we decided to contact Milton Bradley. It was shortly after the sample TriBond game we sent was returned to us unopened, that we realized we didn't have a hand and we didn't have a clue as to how the game business worked.

20 years later and TriBond has sold over 3 million copies and is finally headed back to the market after 3 years on hiatus. It's been one weird and wonderous ride.