Alyssa Walles is a seasoned executive with over 20 years of experience in entertainment, gaming, tech, and publishing. Known for catalyzing innovation and driving revenue growth, she has played a key role in launching the Walt Disney gift catalog, Sony PlayStation, and negotiating National Sports League agreements for the video game franchise Backyard Sports with the NFL, MLB, and NBA.

In addition to her new role as the COO of Midwest Games, an indie game publisher, Alyssa serves as an executive director with the International Game Developers Association Foundation, a global charitable organization that provides professional development programs to underrepresented and marginalized developers and individuals building their careers within the game industry.

Listen in for more on the art of deal making, advice for smaller companies and indie developers, and insights into board membership and advisory roles.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• The Art of Deal Making
• Advice for Smaller Companies and Indie Developers
• Insights into Board Membership and Advisory Roles
• Career Advice in Gaming

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Alyssa Walles on LinkedIn
• Midwest Games
• Ben Kvalo on the Here's Waldo Podcast
• International Game Developers Association Foundation
• The Video Game Bar Association

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Heroes Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. 

Today we have Alyssa Wallace with us. Alyssa has over 20 years of experience in leadership roles in entertainment, gaming, tech, and publishing. She played a key role in the launch of the Walt Disney gift catalog, Sony PlayStation, and negotiated National Sports League agreements for the video game franchise Backyard Sports with the NFL, MLB, and NBA.

In addition to her new role as the COO of Midwest Games, an indie game publisher, Alyssa serves as an executive director with the International Game Developers Association Foundation, IGDA for short, a global charitable organization that provides professional development programs to underrepresented and marginalized developers and individuals building their careers within the game industry.

Let's get started. I'm so happy we made this happen. Thanks for being here. 

Alyssa Walles: Thank you. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. So I think most people on the internet follow Ben Coelho on Midwest Games. And I've had Ben on my podcast and Gina who's on the board, but for anybody who's not in the loop, can you share a little bit about Midwest?

Alyssa Walles: Midwest Games, that's how I met Ben, from his posts on LinkedIn. So I'll start there with what we are. Midwest Games is an indie game publisher, as you said. Ben started talking on LinkedIn about underrepresented developers and the lack of an ecosystem in the Midwest, particularly Wisconsin, which is where he's from and how somebody needed to do something.

And so he is building this company. We have, I want to say at least six games signed, if not more, in our first 10 months, and he is walking the walk. The company is small. There are seven of us right now. And the opportunity to drive and support an ecosystem in the Midwest is why we're all here. It's really exciting.

Lizzie Mintus: That's awesome. I'm glad that the LinkedIn posts are how you connected. And I want to share how I connected with you. I know, not everyone, many people at Midwest, and they were telling me they had the COO role open. And I was like, Oh, maybe I have an idea. And they're like, no. We found our dream candidate. We think we're going to hire her. Her name is Alyssa. 

Alyssa Walles: Oh, wow. That's so nice to hear. Thank you. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Alyssa Walles: So you found it. I'm sorry you didn't get the search. 

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, no, it's okay. I just had a referral for them. I'm so happy that you're there. And it's fun when people are so excited about the candidate. You're so excited to be there.

Alyssa Walles: That's amazing. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's what makes recruiting special. There's a lot of nonsense along the way, often. 

I want to know more about your career and how you broke into the game industry. 

Alyssa Walles: Okay, let's roll it back a lot. So I worked at a company that doesn't exist but people still called Hanna Barbera, which is the animation company that made the Flintstones, Jetsons, Scooby Doo, a lot of favorite cartoons from way back.

And I headed up their international home video division. And so up until I got there, there wasn't any branding or consistent messaging around all of those cartoons. There were deals going for one episode of the Flintstones to one distributor and one to another, and it was a mess. And so I pulled that all together. I opened an office in London. to create an international Hanna Barbera home video brand. 

And in that process, I met all of the people who were doing video distribution for the big film studios. Paramount, Disney, Fox, and Sony, which at the time was Columbia TriStar. When Warner bought Hanna Barbera, we were all laid off.

Lizzie Mintus: Classic Yeah.

Alyssa Walles: It's been going on for a long time, the layoff thing. And I reached out to, very specifically, one of those companies because I had met all of their territory people in my work of trying to find the right home for our brand. And that was Columbia TriStar, which is now Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

And the person who ran international marketing is Chris Dearing. And Chris had worked at the original Atari, which had nothing to do with me wanting to work for him. I didn't know anything about the industry at all. I just wanted a job in home video with that team because I really respected how they ran the team.

It was very entrepreneurial, very creative. I just loved it. That team at headquarters and then their international team. And so very long story short, they were in New York and they moved to LA about eight months after I lost my job. And Chris called up and said, Hey, we're moving to LA. We have a job for you.

It's awesome. Great. And because I didn't have an MBA, I almost didn't get the job and luckily convinced him that I had the chops to do the job. And I was. in charge of all of the areas that nobody else wanted to handle. Meaning, if there was a movie of the week that needed to be distributed to all the territories that we worked with internationally, that was on my plate.

I created the Columbia Classics label and branding for the territories. Again, they didn't want to release that stuff. They wanted to release the newest movie that had just come out. And so my job, Chris lovingly referred to as the black hole, because I got all the things nobody else wanted to handle.

One of those areas, Came about because of Chris's background at the original Atari and because of the fact that Sony was just dipping its toes in the water and had created this division called Sony Electronic Publishing and was trying to figure out, I'm still friends with a lot of the people that were working there at that time. And they were creating cartridge games of movies out of the studio.

And so Chris said, Hey, we would like to handle distribution of your cartridges in our territories. And so that fell in my lap and I worked with Anton Bruhl, who has a company called IDG that does a lot of research in the industry, and he had worked with Chris at Atari and he helped put in place and helped me connect with a consultant in all these different territories that we were pitching to actually be the distributor. We're going to all the same retailers for the VHS cassettes that you would go to for cartridges. So it made a lot of sense. 

And again, very long story short, after a couple of years, I was still young and I was like, antsy and wanted a promotion that I didn't get or something. And so I quit and I went back to work for my boss from Hannah Barbera, cause he was starting a new, family entertainment company. I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I was very excited to be part of that. And so I went to help with that. And that didn't go well for a number of reasons. And I called Chris after about a year.

And at that point, he had been made president of Sony computer entertainment, Europe. So PlayStation in Europe based in London, they had Sony Hardware and moved him over there to lead the charge to take PlayStation to Europe. And I called him one day and I was like, you were right. I made a mistake. Can I have a job?

And he's like, I don't know, kid. Uh, we don't know. This is before launch. So this is in the summer of 95. He said, nobody knows if this PlayStation thing is gonna go anywhere. So are you sure? You sure you want to move back to London? Cause I lived there in five years before. It was like, I really need to leave the job I'm in. And I helped set these territory managers in place, and I would love to come see that through. 

And so I joined PlayStation October 2nd of 1995, and it was the best. It was great. I often talk about as the best job ever. I was there for three and a half years and, we did crazy stuff. I've never worked harder in my life, I don't think, because it was just always happening and I was responsible for setting up territories. A lot of times, it was either a Sony Hardware office that had never sold software or a Sony music office that had never sold hardware. And we had to have teams in each country who were flexible enough to do both and to work with them. And so I'm still friends with a lot of those people today. You know, we were, uh, earlier talking about travel. I love seeing my friends that I worked with all those years ago and still keep in touch with almost everybody. In fact, I had dinner with Chris Deering at PAX last week. So that was amazing. 

Anyway, I was there for three and a half years and I'm originally from Los Angeles, and I got homesick. And I tried to quit I think a year before I actually left, cause Chris said, you're not going anywhere. You love your job too much. And I was like, I know you're right. And I finally went home and I started my own consulting company that I ended up having for almost 20 years and Sony was my first client.

So one of the things that I'm most proud of during that time at PlayStation, in addition to helping it establish itself and being part of the management team, because of my work at Hanna Barbera and previous to that at Disney, I really had a, still do, have a love for children's programming. And we didn't have any. That just wasn't what we were selling at PlayStation. And at Christmas, my friends, kept asking me to help them get a PlayStation, and they all had young kids. And I'm like, you can't buy your kids a PlayStation. We don't have any games for them. So get an N64. 

It was really, really painful to say. So I kept saying to Chris and to the rest of the management team, we need to have kids titles on PlayStation. They responded, that's not our audience. That's not what we're doing, which was true. Our audience was   21 year old males. Through and through, that's who we were focused on. And I'm like, I know, but we're leaving money on the table. And so after a year or so, I went to Jim Ryan, who had just left PlayStation as the CEO, but he and I kind of came up together there.

And I went to Jim and I said, you know, we have these two games. They're ports from Super Nintendo. They're not that great, but they have cartoons on the front. What if those are sold? And he came back. He's like, you're not going to believe this, but they've both sold hundreds, maybe 100 or 200, 000 units, which at the time for a non AAA launch of a FIFA game was unheard of.

And I was like, thank you very much. And I went into Chris and I was like, so I know we all think there's no market here. But these titles that no one's paying attention to have sold whatever the number was. I don't remember. And so he said, okay. I worked with these two guys, James and Martin, who were on the production team. They were producers. And we were kind of this roadshow out to animation and kids companies, Lego and Disney, etc. Like all these companies talking to them about, we want your IP on PlayStation. 

And so we did two deals, one with Mattel for Barbie and the other one with Henson for the Muppets. And those companies are both based in LA, are both based in LA. And so I got to be the liaison when I started my company of managing those relationships for Sony Computer Entertainment, and making sure those games came out and had the attention. So I was a champion, essentially, for them. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's so fun. 

Alyssa Walles: Fast forward, I had my own company for a long time. I tried to launch a platform that would take The video game experience in the movie theaters and it was before esports. This is from 2002 to 2011. And for a number of reasons, we just could not get traction and it just didn't happen. And I really missed being part of a team. And so I had my consulting work and did a lot of different things in executive roles for different startups. And then in 2019, this great opportunity came along with a different indie publisher to run operations for them and be head of publishing for them.

And so I joined Madison Wells Media, MWM interactive. And we had a great team of people and then the pandemic hit. And for a number of reasons, again, it just wasn't on strategy for the company. And so we were able to launch a few games and then we had to find a new home for our portfolio. And so I left there and joined the IGDA foundation in May of 2022 and was still really looking for something similar to what I had done at MWM Interactive because I really loved it. I love working with indie devs. I love helping their games get more notice, sell more units, and see a wider, broader audience.

And Ben posted when he was building on LinkedIn and I just reached out to him. I didn't know him and I sent him a connection request and said, I don't know if you need an ops person, but I did that at my last company, which is very similar to what you're building. And I would love to have a chat. And a couple of months later I joined the company.

So I joined in November and it's just fantastic to be helping him build his vision. It's really great. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. I see why they're so excited and they said you're the perfect candidate. Like you're made for that. That's so exciting.

So you had your own consultancy. Tell me about being an entrepreneur at heart. What made you decide to launch your own thing? Cause I remember when I was going to launch my own thing, it's the scariest thing. I was like, should I just get a corporate job? Should I really do this? I definitely had a full on, maybe meltdown is the best word. 

Alyssa Walles: It took me a while. I think people were telling me to start my own thing for probably three or four years before I actually did, because I didn't believe them. And I had a similar conversation with some developers. lately. Like, Oh, I don't know if I could start my own studio. Like, why not? I think I finally had the confidence in myself and I had a client that really helped to get it all started.So that's really how it came about, was that I finally had the confidence to just go do it. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, and how were you able to, I mean, I think a lot of people think about transitioning to doing their own thing, and the ideal world is obviously to continue to consult for the company that you're at full time. How did you finagle that? 

Alyssa Walles: I think it's because of the deals that I did with Mattel and Henson. And I'm still friends with the people that I did those deals with. And we really did something new and different. And because of all the entertainment companies that are based in LA, and that's where I wanted to move back to, it just made sense.

So if there was a meeting with Disney, I went to the meeting with Disney because I was in LA. So I was their ambassador in a way, for a bit. Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Can you talk about doing all of these deals? You must be like key negotiator, but if somebody is going to work with a really major brand, how should they think about starting a partnership, contacting them and then building that relationship to eventually do the deal, which I imagine takes months, years. 

Alyssa Walles: It depends on the big companies. It does take a long time to do that. So I started really young doing deals, not really knowing what I was doing. The first deal I did was at Hanna Barbera trying to find a company that would treat the brand properly, understand the marketing cohesion across Flintstones, Jetsons, Scooby Doo, Dastardly, and Muttley, and whatever. 

And I learned a lot about branding at that point, and I learned a lot about deal making. I had support internally at Hanna Barbera. We had lawyers, we had finance people who were very kind and helped me learn. My boss was fantastic. I remember when I got there and I do not know how I knew this. When I first joined, my boss was about to do a deal for pan Europe. And I do not know how I knew this, but I said, wouldn't we make more money, if we did each country individually? And he was like, put the numbers together.

I didn't go to business school. I went to film school. I had never taken a business class, but it's all instilled in me from my dad, who was a business guy and taught business. Anyway, so I said, I think we have to go to this conference. And there was a conference in France. It's called Mipcom, where people sold video rights. And we went and we made a lot more money than the pan European deal he was about to sign. So I was, luckily I was right. 

In addition to the fact that the day we arrived, there was a huge strike in France and so none of our booth materials showed up. So we had no art, no anything for our booth. And I remember crying. I remember sobbing, because I was a kid. It was my first conference. I didn't know what to do and like, nothing's there. That's crazy. 

So when we were at PAX, recently, and I was just looking around and going, Oh, it's so nice. Everything's here and nobody has to worry about it. So anyway, so I started doing deals really early. I learned a lot of lessons along the way about meeting the companies that I'm working with in their offices. I learned that one the hard way because I did a deal with a soft porn company by mistake because I didn't know them and hadn't been to their office and I wasn't doing my vetting. I didn't know how, this is pre internet, right? So I wasn't able to do the research I needed to do. So I learned a lot of lessons very young. And I now do a lot of research on doing a deal with anyone. 

But that graduated to the deals with the NFL. Working on backyard sports was amazing. Putting Tom Brady on the cover of backyard football, Poppy on the cover of backyard baseball. I just had some great experiences in deal making. I'm just really, really lucky to be where I am now. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Luck and hard work. That's just always the combo. 

So tell me if somebody really wants to get into a deal making role in, let's say, general entertainment, what are some lessons that you learned from your deal making days? Go to the office, thoroughly research. 

Alyssa Walles: Attention to detail. It's all about detail. Talk to people who have done similar deals. Ask them questions. Ask if they will share. Make sure there's a lawyer involved. That's something that I think it's undervalued. I'm not a lawyer. I know how important that is to protect the company that you're representing and also the people that you're working with. 

In our role at Midwest Games, one of the things I love is that we are here to guide some of the younger developers, make sure that they are paying attention to details like currency exchange rates to make sure they're protected. But that's not answering your question. 

So I think if somebody wants to be on the business side, in entertainment of any sort, they need a really solid understanding of budgets, and they need to know how to work Excel, or Google Sheets, and they need to value the legal input they're going to get. They need to have a really solid support system that they rely on, that they collaborate with. 

The business side to me has to work together with all the other areas of the company. It's not just, Oh, I'm going to go and make this deal happen. Is it a sound deal financially? Is the timing right from when the game's going to come out? Does marketing have the right support in the deal? Or did the company, the developer, ask for a marketing guarantee that doesn't make sense for the scope of the game? All those things have to be considered. 

And I don't know if I was starting out today, how I would get here. I mean, I think it'd be really hard because you'd probably be starting your own studio and your own developer, I think. And you'd have to have people around you that had different skill sets than you do to help in those areas. 

Lizzie Mintus: I like what you said about finding people who have done it and asking how they did it. I feel like I've always been surprised how forthcoming people are. 

Alyssa Walles: Especially in our industry. I feel like our industry is so supportive of each other. Somebody approached me recently about an opportunity that they need the IGDA foundation for, and it's something I haven't done before. And so I reached out to one of my connections that I value greatly. And I called her and I was like, can I do this? I'm still asking questions and still very open about how to help as many people as possible within the scope of whatever project or company mission of it is there. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. You talked about, which I think is so important, a lot of smaller companies that need to understand how to operate a business, especially if you're indie. Or I was just having a conversation before this podcast about companies that have crazy successful hits and they're this little company and now all these big companies want to do deals with them, but they might not really know how to properly engage with a big company and they might get taken advantage of by the terms. 

So on the flip side, if you are a smaller company, indie company, or a company that's smaller and had this crazy success, I guess if you've had the success or you haven't had the success yet, regardless, and you are having a larger partner do a deal with you, what should you consider?

Alyssa Walles: First of all, find the lawyer. Find a lawyer who understands the indie space. There is an organization called, I think the Video Game Bar Association, if I'm not mistaken. I have a lot of friends that are in it. And just like somebody would interview candidates for a role. You can interview a few different lawyers to find the one that fits your needs and has the right experience.

If they haven't worked with indie devs or done indie publishing deals, if that's your lane, they're not going to understand the lingo. They're not going to understand the difference between first parties and other things, right? So all of those that do diligence, when not just jumping at the first publisher. Talk to, if publishers are approaching you because you have a successful game or because you're trying to launch your first game, talk to more than one. It's okay. Who do you feel like has the best set of skills to help you? 

We're really proud of our team at Midwest. We believe we have the right team to support the indie devs that want to work with us. And we'd love to work with all of them if we could afford to. And that's really important. And we talk to them. The entire team will talk to a developer and share our background and how we fit into the mix and what our role is in supporting them. And so I think every publisher is different. Some publishers, you may just talk to one person. Every publisher is different. I've heard stories that some are very data driven. Some have tastemakers who are just making the decision for the rest of the company. And so finding out what are their criteria, why are they interested in your property or buying your company? What is it about your special product or IP? Why are they attracted to it? 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, I think the advice is pretty similar. I've had investors on the podcast talking about doing mergers and acquisitions, and VCs. And everybody talks about finding the right match for you and your company and understanding the motivation. 

I mean, I talked to a lot of people who are fundraising too, and they're just like, oh, we're looking for money, but I feel like they're so interested in getting money, the factor of where we get money from is maybe less of a consideration. Same thing, maybe with candidates, right? Like we want a candidate that does this, but are they really the right fit for your company, even though they do that thing that you need?

Alyssa Walles: Right,, exactly. 

Lizzie Mintus: Lots of vetting is important. 

Alyssa Walles: So it's all about that research. Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And attention to detail. Those are great transferable skills. 

Alyssa Walles: Exactly. Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: You ended up back on the Atari board for almost a decade and I I think a lot of listeners may have interest or questions about being a board member.

What does that look like? Maybe it's the same advice that you just had. How do you decide that it's the right board for you? How do you find that mutual match? How do you even get on a board? What does your role look like? I would love to hear your experience. 

Alyssa Walles: Yeah, that's a very different thing, as far as I'm concerned. I had served on a board of a non profit many, many years ago, because I believed in the mission of that non profit, it had nothing to do with games. And so I had this experience of being on a board. I was vice chair of the board. 

And then, you a couple of years after I was working as a consultant through my company on the backyard sports brand trying to build that back up, the company changed hands a few times and somebody that I had worked for before came in to pull it out of bankruptcy and we were at GDC and he was telling me the story. And I said, well, what are you doing about your board? And he said, Oh, I need board members. And I said, well, I'm right here. And that's how I got my Atari board seat. I will always raise my hand if it's something that I'm interested in. 

Lizzie Mintus: This is an iconic statement. I am right here. 

Alyssa Walles: So I served. He turned the company around, pulled it out of bankruptcy. And set it on a path. What I learned, because Atari is a French public company, there are so many financial instruments, deals, regulations, that the role of the board in that case really was super, super financial.

And yes, I can work my way around an Excel spreadsheet, but I am not a finance person. I am not a professional investor. That language is not my language. And after the new CEO came in, I'm super supportive of him as well. I just said to him after I think maybe a year, I'm like, I'm struggling here. This just is not what I thought I was going to be supporting. I really wanted to get my hands more in the weeds of the operations and the marketing and the strategy. And this is all like, approve this regulation, la di la, whatever. And it just was not a fit for me. 

So in terms of being on a board, really ask a lot of questions about what is expected of the board, how often are the meetings, what types of things does the board need to deliver? There's different ways to support a company. You can be an advisor. You don't have to be sitting on their actual board. I've done a lot of advisory work for startups because, for one thing, there wasn't a conflict of interest because I had to make sure I didn't have a conflict of interest with Atari. And so it just depends on how you want to contribute and in what ways. 

We have an amazing advisory group of people at Midwest Games who really support us in different ways and are very active, as are our board members, by the way. But I'm just saying, the way somebody can get involved really depends on what you as a person want to do to help that company.

It may be just making introductions for them. I do that sometimes where I'm not an advisor or a board member, but I will help with introductions because a startup is trying to figure out how to get to these people, that kind of thing. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, how should you determine whether to be an advisor or be on the board?

Alyssa Walles: That, asking a lot of questions. And sometimes the CEO of a company is looking for something very specific. They are not looking for board members. They are only looking for advisors or vice versa. So a lot of times it's not necessarily your choice. It's sometimes just what does that person need? And if you've worked with them before and you trust them and respect them, how do they want you to help them and in what way? 

Lizzie Mintus: Makes sense. Yeah. Ask a lot of questions. It's kind of like a job too, right? Is the company available for your skill set at the right time? Hopefully. And then it works.

I want to hear more about your company, Big Screen Gaming, and I think people Sometimes who don't have businesses have many misconceptions about what it might actually be like to run a business and just the highs and the lows and you see highs and they're great but it's obviously a lot of hard work. And a startup coach I chatted with the other day said it's like eating glass sometimes for a while and I think that's accurate. But I'd love to hear how you got the company started, how you scaled, how you fired and maybe how you decided when you decided it wasn't going to work because that's a hard thing to go through. 

Alyssa Walles: I'm going to tell the story. I don't know if I'm going to hit every point, but I am going to tell the story. So when I was at, after I left Sony, I was in a meeting with some people who owned a movie theater in LA and they were talking about putting, we call them IDUs, like interactive display units. But there was a PlayStation console and a TV or a PlayStation console and a TV that people would play while they were waiting to go into the theater in the lobby.

At that time, this was probably 2001 or 2, digital projectors were coming into movie theaters. And there was a lot of, because I'm from L.A. And I was in L.A., a lot of chatter about, not chatter, negotiation between the film studios and the movie theaters, who's going to pay for the digital projector. It was a big thing.

And they're talking about these ideas. I'm like, why aren't we putting games up on the big screen? Like, if it's digital, you can do that now. And I did my research, there have been interactive movies. There wasn't anything like this. I had a very clear idea of a non-split screen. So, I don't know if you've ever heard of the, or ever seen Destruction Derby, but Destruction Derby is like on a big oval with cars just crashing into each other. And I had this image of either a soccer game, or Destruction Derby, where you would be a character, your car or your player, and you, everybody could see every character. Unlike if you went to a League of Legends eSports tournament now, the camera has to track around where the action is and it's moving. This was very static in terms of the field, and you knew your player. 

\There were no cell phones when this started. And so we were thinking about using a PSP, PlayStation Portable, and adapting that. And you would rent it at the movie theater, because that was part of our model and your character would be, like when you're driving, you aren't staring at your dashboard, you're like looking out the windshield. And so we always talked about what the windshield was. The big screen and on your PSP or your controller would be your character's lives and power and whatever you needed to know. Am I the red car or the blue car or number 13 or what am I? So all that was here, but your focus would be the big screen that was not a split screen.

So that was the thing. We had to find a developer and we didn't have any money. And I went to a few fundraising events for women. And most of the women there were launching a website for clothing or dating. I had this really big vision for a business that I believe is in the billions of dollars, still today, and just couldn't get an investor. And we worked with a game developer that I'm still friends with and he really was on board. And then at the end, he was like, we can't just make this game. You know, they couldn't do it for us because it was a big investment for them. 

And so, I often called my consulting business, my own VC, because the work I was doing in consulting paid for the demo, the business plan, my living expenses, you know, that kind of thing. And at some point, I think it was around 2010, I had some health issues and was like, I can't just can't keep doing this. You know, I just can't. And it took a while because I don't like to quit. But by 2011, I finally was like, I feel like I have chased every opportunity for funding possible. We're not getting anywhere. When I would talk to EA or any of the big publishers, they were not in a position to invest in an unproven platform. When PlayStation launched, it was all first party games. And so those publishers don't come on board, at the time, don't come on board until there's a proven platform.

And so we were an unproven platform. I still want it to be a platform. I resurrected the business plan during the pandemic, and tried to make it go again. It just didn't, for a number of reasons. It's a big, expensive undertaking and esports is around. It's doing great. I think it validates the idea of people going and watching other people play different kinds of games like you go to a movie for 90 minutes. So the idea was you would go into a movie theater. Some people will be playing, some people will be watching, and it will change out, just like movies do. That's expensive. The idea was, could we create a new window? I don't know if you know that term, but, when a movie comes out, that's its theatrical window.

And then, back in the day, it would go to video, and that was another window, and then television was another window. And so, we thought, one of the things that we wanted to create was a new window for games as a marketing tool, really. So part of that game, a set amount of time would be like a demo, but intended for that very social, loud, raucous experience in a movie theater.

So that's my story. I could talk about big screen gaming for days. 

Lizzie Mintus: Maybe someone listening will contact you. That would make me so happy. That'd be awesome. 

I have one last question and it's from WIGI which is one of the best organizations for women in games. I

Alyssa Walles: love them 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, they did so much good. Check them out and donate to them. But my question from them is, they have this whole program, I wish I knew all of them X at Y stage of my career. They call them cheat codes for the next generation. So they don't have to learn the hard way. And I love to focus on this on my podcast too. You can learn so much from other people. 

Do you have any cheat codes that you could share something that you wish you knew when you started?

Alyssa Walles: Oh my gosh, there's so many. What I wish I knew when I started, I wish I had an MBA to do what I do. I think it would be really helpful and I wouldn't go back today and get one because I've kind of earned it the hard way. 

Lizzie Mintus: You've earned it. . 

Alyssa Walles: And that's not for everybody in the business. That's not for everybody who's a developer. I don't typically recommend it, but for somebody doing what I do now, it would be incredibly helpful to have that broad experience of a finance class, an accounting class, or a business law class. All those things I think would be incredibly helpful. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. 

Alyssa Walles: And I want to think about it a little more and I may come back with something else, but that's off the top of my head.

Lizzie Mintus: That's good. Yeah. Well, starting your own business is going to get a really hard MBA. You do get to deal with all this different stuff. It's reading a book, there's so many different reasons why people start a business, but let's say you're a chef and you really want to bring your food to the world, but then what you don't realize is now you're an accountant, now you're working with a lawyer, now you're doing marketing.

Alyssa Walles: Yeah, and at Midwest Games, that's what we're trying to take off the plate of a developer. We're trying to help them focus on the creativity that they have, the game that they want to make. We want to take the business burden off of them. 

Lizzie Mintus: I love that. I guess they kind of want to take all the recruiting burden off of the people we work with, right?

I see, like, you're the CEO, stop scheduling appointments, stop scheduling interviews, right? What is your genius zone and how can you be in your genius zone? These things are not your genius zone. Yes, you can do them, But should you do them or is there someone better qualified? That's the best.

We've been talking to Alyssa Wallace, the COO of Midwest Games. Alyssa, where can people go to know more about you or Midwest Games or contact you? 

Alyssa Walles: I am on LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn. There's so much there. I guess that's my other cheat code is LinkedIn. Be active on LinkedIn. My email at Midwest games is Alyssa, A L Y S S A at Midwest Games and check out Midwestgames.Com when you get a chance. 

And if you have a game that you're just not sure if it's ready or if you should submit, we want to know what you have. There's a submission place on our games page at midwestgames. com. We would love it if WIGI's developers and IGDA Foundation's developers who are diverse would submit their games. That would be really, really special. 

Lizzie Mintus: Great. Thank you. 

Alyssa Walles: Thank you so much, Lizzie. This has been really fun. 

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.