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1998 –2000: Word-of-Mouth Marketing for a Hot New Start-Upīy summer 1998, the Cranium team was ready to market its game.
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At each step along the way, Alexander and Tait showed their prototype game to potential consumers and solicited their opinions, a technique they had learned as software developers at Microsoft. of Illinois to produce, package, and ship the Cranium game boxes. They also hired Foundation Design of Seattle and illustrator Gary Baseman to help them design the game board, the cards, and the players' pieces, and Chuckerman Packaging Ltd. By spring, they had assembled an editorial board of eight to work on questions for the game cards. Alexander became Cranium's Chief Noodler. Tait assumed the role of the company's Grand Poohbah. Tait and Alexander founded Cranium in 1998. Activities ranged from spelling backward or forward, to playing Hangman, to defining words, sketching or acting out a clue, drawing blindfolded, impersonating a celebrity, whistling a song, or answering a question about an arcane fact.
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To get to their next stop along the way, teams performed activities that were described in four decks of cards called Word Worm, Data Head, Star Performer, and Creative Cat.
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The winner was the player who reached Cranium Central first. In its finished form, the game had four or more players, who moved clockwise around a board to reach Cranium Central. The men spent $100,000 of their own money to build and test the prototype Cranium game from 1997 to 1998. In so doing, "e were able to get a much richer framework to base the game on than just the left brain/right brain idea," explained Alexander in the 2001 Arizona Daily Star. Alexander and Tait also consulted numerous books about indoor activities, such as parlor games, published before television became commonplace in American households in the 1950s. According to Gardner, people who excel spatially and verbally may do well at the game of Scrabble, but will not necessarily stand out at Trivial Pursuit, which rewards a good memory. Their first step was to embark on research on intellectual aptitudes, including the studies of Harvard University educator and psychologist Howard Gardner, whose theories explain that people learn and perform through a variety of intelligences. Together Tait and Alexander began work on the board game with the goal of getting it into stores by Christmas 1998. Tait took his idea to Alexander, who at first laughed at it, then came around. After Tait and his wife easily defeated the other couple at Pictionary and then lost miserably at Scrabble, he began to dream up a board game that would allow everyone to shine and to have a great time. Soon thereafter, during a vacation with his wife and friends in the Hamptons, Tait came up with the idea that evolved into Cranium. Tait and Alexander first toyed with the idea of starting a dot-com company, but "t was already-been-done-dot-com time," as Alexander recalled in a 2001 Arizona Daily Star article. Unemployed, the two men began to meet regularly for breakfast at Seattle's Jitterbug restaurant and to discuss starting their own business. He had been an employee of Microsoft for the past ten years. Tait, a native of Scotland, resigned his job as senior manager for Microsoft's Encarta and World Atlas three months later. In early 1997, Alexander, a native of Tucson, left his job of five years as developer of systems used in Encarta and other software, "ready to try something else," but uncertain of what that would be. Whit Alexander and Richard Tait met in the 1990s while working on the Encarta Encyclopedia at Microsoft and discovered that they shared a passion for entrepreneurship.
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1997 –98: Developing a Game Allowing Everyone to Excel Cranium's games have won more than 50 industry awards and sell in 20 countries in ten languages. The games are sold primarily in bookstores and Starbucks throughout the United States and in Target, Wizards of the Coast, and through. "Dedicated to restoring the brain to its rightful status as the body's most popular organ," the company has introduced a family of games, including Cranium, Cranium Turbo, Cadoo, Cariboo, Conga, Cosmo, Hoopla, Hullabaloo, Balloon Lagoon, and Zigity. creates board games designed to bring out the best in everyone. Three-time winner of the Toy Industry Association's game of the year award, Cranium, Inc. NAIC: 339932 Game, Toy, and Children's Vehicle Manufacturing