A new game-development studio looks to carve out a niche in a fluid but competive business.

By Jonathan Ringen
July 2001

FROM LEFT: GameLab's five members--Frank Lantz, Eric Zimmerman, Peter Lee, Ranjit Bhatnager and Kurt Koller (portraits by Lee).
A handful of big, lazy, brightly colored butterflies that look as if they were cut out of construction paper float around your computer screen in an environment straight out of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. You draw circles around the fluttering creatures with your mouse, capturing them when you have combinations in your "net" that resemble a poker hand: two of a kind, for example, or three each in a different color. The goal is to grab enough of them (five to start, increasing with each level) before time, represented by a setting sun, runs out. As you move through the levels the game gradually becomes more difficult as obstacles are introduced and the butterflies get smaller and faster. It's simple--but simple can be addictive.

Above: Play GameLab's games--Loop and Blix--at Macromedia's Shockwave site.
The game is called Loop. It is the second release by GameLab, the New York--based game-development studio opened last September by designer Eric Zimmerman and designer-programmer Peter Lee. Their cheerful Tribeca office is a full-on expression of the love these guys have for their medium. Upon entering the narrow space--which in ubiquitous start-up style is outfitted in wall-to-wall Ikea--the first thing you notice are the four classic arcade games clustered around the door (including a nice tabletop version of 1980's Defender), lovingly salvaged by Kurt Koller, one of GameLab's programmers. The longest wall is tiled with a collection of 52 game boards, many of which, like the Mr. T Game, have substantial kitsch value.

Lee, who is almost always camped in front of his translucent Mac Cube, rarely leaves his desk. Zimmerman is constantly on the move--cordless phone surgically attached to his ear as he paces back and forth past shelves filled with Legos, German strategy games, Pez dispensers, anime figurines, and a library of hundreds of cartridges and disks for their many video-game consoles (an old-school ColecoVision and a state-of-the-art PlayStation 2 among them). In the back of the office a conference table faces a large whiteboard filled with cryptic shapes--an exploration, it turns out, of programmer Ranjit Bhatnagar's (formerly of the webzine Word.com) idea that there might be interesting relationships between Cubism and 3-D representation in a computer game.

Above: Their creations, Blix (left) and Loop (center and right), are inspired by classic arcade games (below), pop culture, and personal projects.
If you've been wondering what happened to the people working on the Web since the dot-coms went bust, this is where at least a few of the most talented landed. The five people who make up GameLab--Zimmerman, Lee, designer Frank Lantz, Bhatnager, and Koller--are all Silicon Alley pioneers who helped shape the Web as we know it. Lantz was one of the founding members of R/GA's Interactive division; Zimmerman was among the first people hired into that group. "The idea of the Interactive group was that we were going to develop entertainment software," he explains. "Then the Web took off, and it became much more about client-based Web development."

"I hadn't thought about making games as a career, but what I realized is that this is one of the few areas in new media that lets you do original content," says Lee, who moved from Korea to New York in 1990 to study animation at the School of Visual Arts. There he became intrigued by the possibilities computers offered to add interactive elements to his work. Upon graduating in 1995 he got a job designing and programming for Time Online, in its pre-Web days as a part of CompuServe. After some early exploration into the interactive possibilities of the new medium, Time Online started simply running its parent magazine's articles. Lee left after a year.

"I come from an art-making background," Zimmerman says. "As a painter I was always interested in the relationships between viewer, artist, and work of art. I realized that in making a game I am able to design those relationships, not as an effect of creating a work of art but as the thing that I am designing." Straight out of graduate school he joined Lantz's group at R/GA, but when it became clear that it was moving away from original work he started his own company, Flat, with two partners. "We were looking for investment for e-mail games," he says. "But in doing so we transformed ourselves into what those companies wanted to see. So Flat also became a Web shop."

In late 1999 Zimmerman left Flat in disappointment. At that time he was also co-teaching a class on game design and interactive narrative in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU with Lantz. That is where Zimmerman and Lee met--Lee was a student at ITP and later was hired as part of a fledgling game-design group at Funny Garbage. GameLab grew out of an independent project called Blix that they developed together (along with sound designer Michael Sweet).

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