Brash: the Mickey Mouse story

(This is the fifth of eight or so posts going up throughout the holiday weekend tied to an article I have in the forthcoming weekly Variety that looks at the promise of Brash Entertainment, the first Hollywood videogame publisher, and the reasons it went from $400 million to out-of-business in a year and a half. The article and posts are all based on extensive interviews with nearly a dozen former employees, executives and developers who worked at or with Brash, most of whom understandably spoke only on background. The posts here on the Cut Scene will summarize and expand some of the key points from the Variety article and also provide some interesting details and anecdotes that didn't make print.

You can read the entire article here.

You can see all of my related posts, and get all the important background, on the Cut Scene's Brash category page.)

Since I'm about halfway through my series of Brash post-mortem posts, I figured it's a good time to post the "light" one...

In all my interviews with former Brash employees, there was one name that came up almost as much as Mitch Davis: Mickey Mouse. "Did you hear the Mickey Mouse story?" people would ask me, their voice dipping almost to a whisper like they wanted to talk about our alcoholic sister-in-law but didn't want to be the one to tell me she's an alcoholic, in case I didn't know.

Did Brash actually manage to get the rights to make a game with Mickey Mouse? Isn't Disney a bit more protective with its IP than that? What were these people talking about?

Finally I found out from someone who was there. It actually involves the oddest story of a corporate retreat I've ever had. And I've been on a few funny corporate retreats myself.

I want to issue a big disclaimer before I go into the details: This is just a funny story. I don't think this actually reflects badly, or well, on Brash management. The worst you could say is someone hired a weird consultant. In the grand scheme of things that happened at Brash, it's not even a blip. So I'm not posting this as an actual reason Brash went down in flames, or even to be emblematic of any problems. It's just an amusing tangent.

So here's the deal: Brash had a few off-site meetings for staff over the summer. The first was in June with almost everyone, at Shutters in Santa Monica. The topic was essentially "What have we done wrong and how can we improve things moving forward?" There was a "team building consultant" who served as a moderator for discussions and took notes. She had a funny quirk of wearing Mickey Mouse t-shirts. A bit weird, but, you know, it's L.A. and her title is "team building consultant," so it's just barely noteworthy.

Then apparently there was a second off-site just for the sales and marketing staff the next month. The consultant was there again. As any reasonable person would, she noticed employee morale was quite low and stress was high. At one point, during a break, she was talking to a few employees and had this piece of advice (as related to me second-hand):

When you need to center yourself and find a place of happiness, take a Mickey Mouse doll and stick it between your legs. Because Mickey Mouse is what happiness all about. When you're looking for happiness and you need to center, that’s what Mickey Mouse is for.

Don't give me that look. I just report the news, folks. I couldn't make it up if I tried.

More actually serious insights about Brash coming over the weekend as I get breaks and feel like writing more. And again, please don't take this to mean anything more than exactly what it is. It's just, well, if you were a journalist and you heard this story and you had a blog, could you resist posting it?