Rob Angel: Creator of Pictionary
If you’ve ever wondered how a person may go frow waiting tables to inventing some of the most popular board games of all time, Rob Angel may be able to answer your question. Even if you haven’t heard of him, you’re sure to have heard of some of the things he’s brought to this world, like Pictionary and Monopoly.
Speaking with Steve Sims for The Art of Making Things Happen podcast, Angel explains the plan he had originally had for his life. “[My father] was an executive, so I wanted to be just like him,” says Angel. [But] all of a sudden, halfway through my second year [of college], he gets fired…. Everything that I had planned for my life was now up-ended.”
It led to a reckoning. Angels explains, “I had to make a decision at this point. Who was I? What did I want to be? And I knew that I was not gonna let anybody else be in control of my life. I was going to be an entrepreneur. I was going to take care of myself.”
Of course, Angel couldn’t have predicted that his way to do that would be to create a board game. But it happened naturally. As Angel tells it, “I moved in with three buddies after college and one of them one night said, ‘Hey, do you want to play a game of charades on paper, sketch words out of the dictionary?’ And I said, ‘sure, it sounds like fun’.”
It turned out to be much more. “We’re playing the game three or four nights in a row. And I’m thinking this is fun. Maybe, maybe I can turn this into a board game.”
Initially, Angel was overwhelmed. “I was like, ‘I can’t do it. I’m just a waiter. I don’t know what I’m doing.’,” he explains. “So I figured out that I should break it down to the simplest easiest first step. I didn’t make a big plan. I didn’t say, ‘Pkay, I’m going to do all these things.’ What’s the first step? And that was the word list.”
It started with “aardvark.” But the simple act of choosing a word led to a fundamental shift in Angel’s thinking. “In that moment I was no longer just a waiter. I told myself I was a game inventor. That’s all it took: one word. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t know what was going to happen. It didn’t matter. I got all excited. I wrote aardvark. That’s all it took,” says Angel.
From there, Angel was off to the races. He got business partners, invested $35,000 in the first 1,000 copies of the game, all hand-assembled in Angel’s apartment, and went door-to-door selling games. It was an obvious hit. Says Angel, “Bottom line: Pictionary is a fun game. It’s not an overly complicated game… It’s inclusive and there’s no barriers to playing no matter what your age or your drawing skill… Once [we got the pencil in people’s hands], they wanted to play the game. They wanted to buy the game.”
This universal appeal led to sales. “We sold 8,600 games that first year. And that’s when things started to get a little crazy,” explains Angel. “All of a sudden, after less than a year, we became so popular. We could not fund our own growth. We just couldn’t up with demand… We had to make a decision and that was to license.” This was the choice that changed the course of Angel’s life.
He describes, “Here I am at 26 years old, I’m making $500 a month. I’m driving a 10-year-old car. And the president of this huge company looks at me and he looks me in the eyes and says, ‘Rob, do you want a game company? Or do you want to make money?’.” Angel chose the latter and sold 38 million games. But even after licensing the game, Angel insisted on control, such that even the packaging couldn’t be changed without written approval.
Explaining is thinking behind this, Angel says, “You have to take care of your product. You have to treat it like a human, because when you do then, you know what’s best for it… And you can’t lose sight of that ever. Don’t go for the quick buck, don’t go for the money until you have that established and keep control. That’s why I’m sitting here today. Not because of a superior product… because I kept control of my future.”
These smart decisions have allowed Angel to live the life he wants. “When I sold the business, unlike a lot of my friends who got into new businesses and most of them fail, I did what nourishes me: raise my kids, doing nonprofits, mentoring people, enjoying my life, travelling, raising my family.” And, eventually, writing a book to inspire others to be able to do the same.
Among the advice in his book, Angel talks about the idea of getting started, explaining, “I’ve got a big idea. Well, if you don’t take a step towards it, it doesn’t mean anything… What I suggest is if you have an idea, hold onto that idea to take the easiest first task that you can.”
“Just do it. Don’t overthink it… You’ve got to get started. And that’s the premise of the book.”
For more on Rob Angel and his book, Gamechangers:
