“Interactive design is a really large box, and we’ve really only explored one little tiny corner of that box.”
Will Wright, E3 Expo, May 2006
Omar Khudari founded Cecropia to look at a different corner of Will Wright’s box; the corner populated by ‘personality’ video games – games where something is going on in the characters’ heads – and what’s going on in their heads is what each game is all about.
The epiphany behind Cecropia came in 1993, when Omar was having dinner at Dan Aykroyd's house: “We were reminiscing about Dan’s glory days on Saturday Night Live when it struck me, ‘Why not make video games with the same appeal as a comedy sketch?’”
The challenge was to use the building blocks of sketch comedy – characters, personalities and story – not just as the setting of a video game, but also as the actual game play. Cecropia first demonstrated this concept with a coin-operated interactive comedy called The Act.
The Act proved that Mr. Wright was right. Personality video games are a new kind of entertainment, rich with possibilities that have not yet been explored.