Rodger Raderman and Douglas Penman have backgrounds in the web and games, respectively, and they're setting out to merge those worlds -- and the world of toys -- through their startup, Nukotoys. The co-CEOs and co-presidents of the San Francisco startup, which hopes to blend top-notch gaming technology with inventive toys and exciting IP to create a revolution in children's play, are out to take on the big toy companies and media empire-backed online worlds. "Why hasn’t Silicon Valley addressed the toy industry before?" asks Raderman. "If you look at Mattel and Hasbro, they’re in Torrance. All respect to Torrance, but there’s so much talent all over the world, and we’re really setting ourselves up to work with these people in ways that make sense for us and for them. We don’t need to hire people and require them to go work in a cubicle down south." Not a fan of the location and staffing mentality of the Southern California-based toy industry, Raderman also doesn't much like its output. "You buy a toy and it's plastic junk, and for the honor of buying that plastic junk, it comes wrapped in plastic junk. And the toy, the plastic junk, gets tossed out after an hour and then the wrapping gets tossed out after five minutes, and it all goes in the ocean and it just never goes away," he says. Quality Ideas, Quality Talent That explains why Nukotoys is not going near the traditional toy space, though it has announced some licenses. "A lot of the heavy licensed brands are heavily commercial," says Penman. Instead, the team is so far focusing on original IPs, which can be developed into areas beyond games, and licenses such as the Animal Planet cable channel and the New York Times bestselling Ology series, which includes books such as Wizardology and Monsterology that are popular with both girls and boys. Of the books, says Penman, "I have two girls, Rodger has one girl, and they’re nine and 10, and you can’t get that out of his school library; it’s always booked out. My girls love it, so I have to bring mine now to them." The two feel their desire to foster inventive, connected play has allowed the company to land licenses with meaning behind them -- and attract top talent, too. Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering, is working with Nukotoys. So are longtime Sesame Street veteran Karen Gruenberg and Dr. Mike North, the company's CTO, who created Discovery Channel cult hit Prototype This! The Nukotoys Goal With a goal of "merging real and virtual play," per Raderman, the company hopes to launch online games, created by experienced game developers working primarily with Unity, and tie them in to smart trading cards and figurines which use RFID technology. These cards will contain items that affect the game world meaningfully. Kids will be able to trade them, building up an online social network through offline play behavior, as the toys' unique ID tags are scanned by progressive owners. All of this action will be tied in to iPhone apps, which will act as both stand-alone games and as enhanced interfaces for the final products. While Raderman recognizes it's no secret that kids love to collect and trade cards, he says that they rarely actually play the games as outlined by the rules. While there will be "simple" offline play with the cards, Raderman sees "the real power of the cards" as their ability to tie directly into the online games -- "the primary game mechanics will happen in the interaction with the online world." The Nukotoys Games With an emphasis on creating what Penman calls a "3D immersive environment," Nukotoys' games are aimed at "merging the old school classic adventure games with trading card game mechanics," according to Raderman. The "complex algorithms and mechanics" that govern the rules of collectible card games will move online, keeping the depth of play while enriching the online worlds into engrossing games, Penmans says. "Scanning and combining cards really does influence what happens in the online world." For example, the team showed Gamasutra a demonstration of Cryptids, a 3D, Unity-based game which required the player to use a grappling hook to traverse a canyon. The grappling hook was contained in an RFID card which Penman touched to a USB reader on a MacBook -- at which point it appeared in digital form as a usable in-game item.

Cryptids

When it comes to playing these 3D adventure games, "I think kids love it," says Raderman. It's a view based on early experiences the team had with its educational game Mission to Planet 429, which PBS Kids is launching later this year, and which has already gone through play sessions with elementary school students. "They really go nuts for the gameplay and the idea of pulling these cards, using the cards, and making stuff happen in the online world," says Raderman. Business and Competition To the Nukotoys team, these cards aren't just paper, and the games aren't just virtual worlds. The cards are "physicalizations of virtual items, and we’ll do virtualizations of the physical cards, that way. What we want to avoid is making kids collect, collect, collect, collect, collect, in order to earn currencies to buy virtual goods," he says. And the company's business model is based around big partners and big retail launches -- differentiating it from some of the competition. Raderman recognizes that today's virtual worlds for kids are "all highly consumeristic and very derivative," and wants to avoid that in Nukotoys' products. "We’re going to do [virtual goods] in ways that [are] more fundamental to gameplay," Raderman says. "The core of what we’re doing is about the gameplay." Is it essential to do it this way? "For the kind of gameplay that we want, the strategy and puzzle based play? Yeah, it’s very important." "There's an enormous opportunity to engage kids in a way that they haven’t been. If you look at all the virtual worlds out there, for example, and my opinion -- I think our opinion -- they’re all derivative," says Raderman. "I think there’s a really interesting opportunity to introduce new kinds of gameplay there, that’s building on established play patterns, trading card games." Of course, Nukotoys also intends to make money from its products. Says Raderman, "These are commercial, but there’s just a lot of room for creative exploration. And we really do want to be a toy company that parents can love." Penman finds current toy companies' attempts to go digital unconvincing. "Anything that is vaguely offline going online is either really executed hideously bad, or it’s a direct replication of offline play, or it’s not deeply connected to the critical gameplay," he said. Tech, Creators, and Learning When it comes to the physical products the company sells, Raderman says "everything will be connected." No Nukotoys will be offline-only toys. "'Interconnected toys', we call them." To this end, the team has Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield working on game design which brings the cards in to these online worlds. "We’re doing it kind of as an overarching system," says Raderman, which can be applied to multiple properties -- like the company's Cryptids or the Animal Planet license. Kids expect console-quality games, says Penman, and the company intends to give that experience to them. While the games will first be launched as browser-based products, the company is "very interested" in moving its games to the Wii. "We can just as easily take Unity, and port that across onto the Wii, and put that on your TV. And with a trading card component as you play on with the Wii," says Penman. While the company isn't ready to unveil which developers are making its games, "we’ve been at this for 18 months," says Raderman. "A lot of these game development companies, they’re very fascinated about what we’re doing. A lot of them naturally want to start moving their games online; a lot of the console game makers see things going in that direction." The company also believes in utilizing Apple's iOS devices not just because they're "selling like crazy," says Raderman, but also because touch is the best way for kids to learn and manipulate items. "If you can use the touch screen to actually learn how to screw works or lever and fulcrum works, and actually manipulate it here and manipulate it on the screen here. You can... learn through touch."