Susan Pascal  

Show Notes

• Archived Blog Post

  Date / Time: 6/15/2009 2:05 AM UTC

  Margaret Wallace: How One Woman is Changing the Way We Play Online
  

  We often think of the gaming world -- video, computer or otherwise -- as a guy thing. Don’t tell that to Margaret Wallace, CEO of Rebel Monkey, a New York City entertainment company focused on the convergence of casual games and social media. She has been involved in developing new technology since her college days as an undergraduate, and later, as a graduate student. “I have always been interested in how new technology and mass media impacts our daily lives,” she says. 

   

  Having worked her way through a series of successful positions on the West Coast in the high-tech industry, she developed noteworthy digital content for both PC and the Internet. One of her early projects was Virtual Petz, including Dogz & Catz.

   

   “We were quite passionate about the virtual lives of our pets,” she remembers. “We were high on our horses deciding whether our ‘life forms’ would live or die or even reproduce. It was so rewarding to get letters from consumers saying they believed their pets to be so life-like that they could actually interact in the most unique ways.” Wallace went on to produce and design games and interactive content for Shockwave.com., including the Planet Hot Wheels for Mattel. 

   

  Feeling frustrated by the loss of her content rights to outside publishers, Wallace left Shockwave, along with some fellow associates, to form Skunk Studios in 2000, one of the first “casual” gaming companies. “We got to own our creations outright, which was so unusual. We developed content and then utilized the Internet as the primary distribution method,” she says. The company created such hit online games as Gutterball and Tennis Titans.

   

  After spending several productive years with her company in San Francisco, Wallace moved to New York to form Rebel Monkey with Nick Fortugno, famed for creating the popular game Diner Dash.  “I was really interested in exploring the idea of virtual worlds and social networking. Nick and I actually went into stealth mode for about a year-and-a-half, developing content for our latest project, Camp FU,” she explains. 

   

  Camp FU functions as real time, multi-player game play; meaning at any time, you can log on, create your own avatar and play against another player, who conceivably is in another city, state or country. “Our program is different in that it’s about cooperation and working together. We are not the typical shoot ‘em up game,” she notes.

   

  Wallace believes that Rebel Monkey will carry casual gaming into the future, because they have developed a specialized platform that enables game-play to reach a variety of applications like Facebook,  iPhone and even arcade formats. “We’re very scalable. Our platform doesn’t care where it’s played, because it’s built that way,” she says. Rebel Monkey hopes to roll out a slew of new and exciting virtual worlds within the next couple of years.

   

  Wallace was recently named one of the game industy’s “100 Most Influential Women,” by Next Generation, the gaming news website. Don't miss Wallace as my special guest on The Athena Fortune Show for BlogTalkRadio, Wednesday, June 17th at 9:30 am PST!
  • Tags:
  • online gaming
  • video games
  • women
  • technology
  • internet
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