Brash's Wall Street MMO

(This is the seventh 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.)

Beside Mickey Mouse, the most common crazy/weird story former Brash employees would bring up to me was "the Wall Street game." Never have I heard a project so bad mouthed by the people who worked on it.

I haven't seen the game myself, so I can't ultimately say how good it is. And obviously it's not done, so nobody knows what the final project will be like. But literally every former Brash employee or partner I spoke to, from the highest level executive to the lowest level staffer, had bad things to say about the "Wall Street" MMO.

Beyond the numerous people who spoke about it, I can also confirm the game is real because Brash filed a trademark (thanks to the reader who provided that link!). That's the logo from the trademark above on the left. (A bull and a bear in the same symbol. Kinda clever.)

What was it? An MMO in which players place virtual bets on stocks, bonds, and other financial products. Basically, you get to be a Wall Street "player." And there would be various real world prizes for the people who bet the most successfully each month. People who worked on it or saw it said it would be funded via subscription and it was more a 2-D interface than a full 3-D virtual world (so it wasn't nearly as expensive as something like "Warhammer Online").

So why did it continue if nobody supported it? CEO Mitch Davis felt passionately about it. He kept the project going despite all the opposition. Some noted his abiding interest in Wall Street given his business background. Others noted that Brash's "Wall Street" game would be a natural partner with Davis's other company, LiveGamer, where he served as chairman. According to its website, LiveGamer "enables a complete marketplace solution for the player-to-player trading of virtual items." So the synergies are obvious.

Two separate people were hired to work on it early this summer: a producer and a marketing manager. Both had experience in the MMO space. Both worked there about a month before quitting/being asked to leave out of total frustration with the project.

What did people dislike about it so much? Sources mentioned that it wasn't a real MMO, but a virtual world with betting mechanisms; that anyone interested enough in finance to pay a subscription fee to play the game would probably be making real world investments; and that with the financial market collapsing, the Wall Street doesn't feel that much like a fun game.

But despite the lack of support within the company, Davis persevered. The game remained in development until the end. And it's still alive. I recently heard from several sources that some of Brash's investors, led by Davis himself, have decided to continue financing the game. I'm not sure exactly how the financial details work (are they buying it from Brash? funding it within what's left of Brash?) But it appears to be the only Brash game that's not being sold or returned to a licensor. Which means we may get to see it for ourselves whether Mitch Davis knows something that most of Brash's employees don't.