Michael Crick, 71, developer of Microsoft’s Spell Checker and popular games like Will Wright’s “The Sims” and “John Madden Football,” is testing a Crickler, his latest creation, which is a reinvention of the crossword puzzle for the Internet age.
Bill Volk, 55, once the vice president of mighty Activision and now creative director of PlayScreen, Crick’s game publisher in Encinitas, fusses about happily at the laptop.
The Crickler has just recently rocketed to the top of the Apple app puzzle pile, knocking off the venerable old lady of crosswords, The New York Times.
“To reinvent the crossword for the mobile age,” explains Crick, son of the late Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, “you must get very far away from this silly idea of the same stupid little filler words.”
Crickler crosswords don’t cross at all. They are cascading single lines of pulsing tiles whose spaces on succeeding lines fill magically and addictively with correctly guessed letters according to a key algorithm that is determined by your skill level or handicap, pretty much live, as you play. For a hint, you can always tap on the Crickler owl at the top, which looks like Michael, and costs a fraction of a penny each time.
If you want to keep playing, you buy more Cricklers for 99 cents or elect to watch ads for “free,” the “freemium model” in game monetization since advertisers then pay Crick and Volk for the number of free looks.
“The Crickler is the most broadly based product ever put out on the iPhone: 42 percent male, 58 percent female, 22 percent for 13-17’s, 18-24’s also 22 percent, 25-34’s at 28 percent, 35-54 at 22 percent, so odd!” says Volk, thumbing stats on his smartphone.
Crick believes fun is one of the keys to a successful game, although his idea of fun is to get up at 4 a.m. with his wife, Barbara, a former ace programmer, skim the news of the world and quickly line out 20 crosswords, which are then zapped to Volk for marketing.
“My wife is better at expressing things clearly, so she does the first draft, unless it’s something heavily scientific, Higgs boson particles or Kenyan fossils. Then I play the game, testing it to make sure nothing is spelled wrong or a mountain has been put in the wrong state. Misspell Marilyn Manson and you will be instantly cascaded with emails. We tend to avoid stories that are too gruesome or too political. We like to look on the positive side, not so much shootings in Syria, though we couldn’t avoid Batman in Colorado.”
The other key to building a successful game, believes Crick, is understanding human evolution.
“When we were running half-naked around the African prairies, there were certain things that helped us survive. Obviously, chipping flints was one of them, and so there is a certain innate satisfaction in doing something psychologically similar to chipping your flint. There’s pleasure in repetitive motion. Also, masterful hunting games. Pac-Man is in the area of berry-picking games. The females stay back in camp, and they pick berries and they have all sorts of nasty things running around that they have to avoid, and that’s Pac-Man. At some point, over 200,000 years ago, we practically died out, and all sorts of little branches of the evolutionary tree went absolutely nowhere. Most of the good games, if you look at our common ancestors you can look and say, ‘Ah, this is what they were selected to like.’ Sports games back then weren’t ‘your score is better than mine.’ It was ‘wipe the other guys out!’ ”
Michael Crick, friend to Bill Gates and Alexey Pajitnov, the original designer of Tetris, grew up with the idea of human evolution, and he is not just playing a game here today on Rutherford Drive at the top of La Jolla. He’s readying his father’s house for sale, $1.795 million, if you can spare the non-virtual-world cash.
“My father, Francis Crick, had a bit to do with deciphering the structure of DNA,” says Crick. Francis Crick was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. He also helped create a large number of top-paying jobs in San Diego in industries and at nonprofits related to genetics and neuroscience. The senior Crick, who worked at La Jolla’s Salk Institute, died in 2004.
“Would you like to see my father’s Nobel Prize?”
Michael Crick carefully unpacks a medallion with the likeness of Alfred Nobel.
It seems a little light for gold.
“Ah!” says Crick, “it’s brass. A copy. I keep the real one more safely.”
You get the feeling Crick tests people the way he used to test Spell Checker.
We linger by several fetching portraits of naked Salk scientists, painted by Michael’s stepmother, Odile Crick, who also drew the famous original portrait of DNA’s double-helix structure. Outside, Crick points to the table by the swimming pool where guests parsed neuroscience and nudes (“our family’s friends fell into two precise categories: they were either scientists or they were artists”) — and on to Francis Crick’s study.
It’s like being in a Sistine Chapel for evolutionary biologists, a long, L-shaped wooden desk overlooking a fanciful garden, with endless bookcases flanking a floor-to-ceiling, stained-glass image of the double helix, chromosome strands glinting in the afternoon light.
All the while, following like a droid, Volk has been thumbing and thumbing his smartphone, checking on bugs, gauging the day’s Crickler response on Twitter.
“See,” he says, finally looking up, “Cricklers are like Zynga. Zynga for smart people.”
Bill Volk, 55, once the vice president of mighty Activision and now creative director of PlayScreen, Crick’s game publisher in Encinitas, fusses about happily at the laptop.
The Crickler has just recently rocketed to the top of the Apple app puzzle pile, knocking off the venerable old lady of crosswords, The New York Times.
“To reinvent the crossword for the mobile age,” explains Crick, son of the late Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, “you must get very far away from this silly idea of the same stupid little filler words.”
Crickler crosswords don’t cross at all. They are cascading single lines of pulsing tiles whose spaces on succeeding lines fill magically and addictively with correctly guessed letters according to a key algorithm that is determined by your skill level or handicap, pretty much live, as you play. For a hint, you can always tap on the Crickler owl at the top, which looks like Michael, and costs a fraction of a penny each time.
If you want to keep playing, you buy more Cricklers for 99 cents or elect to watch ads for “free,” the “freemium model” in game monetization since advertisers then pay Crick and Volk for the number of free looks.
“The Crickler is the most broadly based product ever put out on the iPhone: 42 percent male, 58 percent female, 22 percent for 13-17’s, 18-24’s also 22 percent, 25-34’s at 28 percent, 35-54 at 22 percent, so odd!” says Volk, thumbing stats on his smartphone.
Crick believes fun is one of the keys to a successful game, although his idea of fun is to get up at 4 a.m. with his wife, Barbara, a former ace programmer, skim the news of the world and quickly line out 20 crosswords, which are then zapped to Volk for marketing.
“My wife is better at expressing things clearly, so she does the first draft, unless it’s something heavily scientific, Higgs boson particles or Kenyan fossils. Then I play the game, testing it to make sure nothing is spelled wrong or a mountain has been put in the wrong state. Misspell Marilyn Manson and you will be instantly cascaded with emails. We tend to avoid stories that are too gruesome or too political. We like to look on the positive side, not so much shootings in Syria, though we couldn’t avoid Batman in Colorado.”
The other key to building a successful game, believes Crick, is understanding human evolution.
“When we were running half-naked around the African prairies, there were certain things that helped us survive. Obviously, chipping flints was one of them, and so there is a certain innate satisfaction in doing something psychologically similar to chipping your flint. There’s pleasure in repetitive motion. Also, masterful hunting games. Pac-Man is in the area of berry-picking games. The females stay back in camp, and they pick berries and they have all sorts of nasty things running around that they have to avoid, and that’s Pac-Man. At some point, over 200,000 years ago, we practically died out, and all sorts of little branches of the evolutionary tree went absolutely nowhere. Most of the good games, if you look at our common ancestors you can look and say, ‘Ah, this is what they were selected to like.’ Sports games back then weren’t ‘your score is better than mine.’ It was ‘wipe the other guys out!’ ”
Michael Crick, friend to Bill Gates and Alexey Pajitnov, the original designer of Tetris, grew up with the idea of human evolution, and he is not just playing a game here today on Rutherford Drive at the top of La Jolla. He’s readying his father’s house for sale, $1.795 million, if you can spare the non-virtual-world cash.
“My father, Francis Crick, had a bit to do with deciphering the structure of DNA,” says Crick. Francis Crick was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. He also helped create a large number of top-paying jobs in San Diego in industries and at nonprofits related to genetics and neuroscience. The senior Crick, who worked at La Jolla’s Salk Institute, died in 2004.
“Would you like to see my father’s Nobel Prize?”
Michael Crick carefully unpacks a medallion with the likeness of Alfred Nobel.
It seems a little light for gold.
“Ah!” says Crick, “it’s brass. A copy. I keep the real one more safely.”
You get the feeling Crick tests people the way he used to test Spell Checker.
We linger by several fetching portraits of naked Salk scientists, painted by Michael’s stepmother, Odile Crick, who also drew the famous original portrait of DNA’s double-helix structure. Outside, Crick points to the table by the swimming pool where guests parsed neuroscience and nudes (“our family’s friends fell into two precise categories: they were either scientists or they were artists”) — and on to Francis Crick’s study.
It’s like being in a Sistine Chapel for evolutionary biologists, a long, L-shaped wooden desk overlooking a fanciful garden, with endless bookcases flanking a floor-to-ceiling, stained-glass image of the double helix, chromosome strands glinting in the afternoon light.
All the while, following like a droid, Volk has been thumbing and thumbing his smartphone, checking on bugs, gauging the day’s Crickler response on Twitter.
“See,” he says, finally looking up, “Cricklers are like Zynga. Zynga for smart people.”
