Two important lessons were learned by students in the Midwest Entrepreneurs class last Thursday.

Lesson One: Change happens and you must be ready to adapt to it. In the morning, we had to quickly reorganize and reschedule speakers as our scheduled speaker, Vanessa Wetterling of local radio provider Prarie Communications, had to cancel due to a weather-related emergency at the office. Although many people are obsessed with structure and predictability, change such as this is inevitable and adaptation is a must; for Vanessa, for entrepreneurs, and, in this instance, for the class.

This need to adapt to change also became evident with our eventual guest speaker, whose firm perished due to not seing radical change in its industry coming on the horizon. More on that soon...

Lesson Two: Being an entrepreneur–particularly a high-tech entrepreneur–can be a very wild ride. This was a core lesson learned from our spur-of-the-moment guest speaker; Paul Schuytema, a former PC game programmer whose turbulent tale of very high highs and very low lows kept the students both laughing and on the edges of their respective seats the entirety of the class period.

I now yield to today’s student blogger–Tom Lawson–to tell the tale of reluctant (former) high-tech entrepreneur Paul Schuytema as he saw it.  However, I will insert my self and marketing-professor insight into Tom’s blog entry at one key point.

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Before Tuesday I had no idea of who my speaker for Midwest Entrepreneurs was or what she did. However, when I found out that she would not be speaking and that Paul Schuytema would be filling in for her, I was delighted. I am sure that Ms. Wetterling is a wonderful woman, but I had the pleasure of working for, as well as getting to know Paul over the summer, so this came as a great surprise.

Paul grew up in the town of Park Ridge, IL, and he described himself as a “nerdy kid.” He felt his claim was justified by his addiction to board games, love of miniatures, and the creation of his very own rule-based game by the time he was in fourth grade. Although tragedy struck Paul early, with the death of his father when he was thirteen, it set in motion something that would create the man who stood before us. To keep his mind off the death of his father, Paul’s mother bought an Atari computer, one that allowed him to start his life-long love affair with programming.

Sadly, Paul’s love of programming had to remain a hobby, as it was not offered as a major during school at the time. After a few years working at our very own Monmouth College, Mr. Schuytema worked on a handful of PC video games on the side before being offered a job with 3D Realms, the creator of the Duke Nukem franchise. The company, however, ended up shutting down the game that Paul and many others had worked so hard on, due to a greater need for focus on the new Duke Nukem release. Disheartened but wiser, Paul returned to Monmouth in 1999 to start his own video game company, now knowing how a company should not be run. To get some spending money, he and his partners wrote video game walkthroughs and attempted to launch their own games, but they subsequently ran into branding problems.

The big break for Magic Lantern Playware (their company) came with the release of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Covert Ops Essentials. This first-person shooter received four stars upon release and gave Magic Lantern the money they desperately needed; a profit of around $750,000. Not only this, but during the process of writing the game, the team assembled the largest existing encyclopedia on counter-terrorism. After Rainbow Six, Magic Lantern released a few more commercially successful games, including Combat and a game based off the hit TV show Survivor. 

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NOTE from Prof. Gabel: As I sat listening to Paul’s story at this point, I got the feeling that the release of the Survivor PC game signalled one of the highest high points of his turbulent entrepreneurial ride. Exemplary was the picture displayed on the projection screen of a happy Paul–drink in hand–laughing it up at a major video gaming conference with one of the female stars of the Survivor TV show. However, looking back now, I see how Paul’s experience with this game was a bit of both a signal and a microcosm of the downward spiral to come. As Paul described the experience, although the game was introduced with great fanfare in the industry it ultimately sold poorly–and quickly vanished from shelves–due to the fact that those responsible for the marketing of the game–not Paul’s programming firm–did a poor job of market segmentation and targeting. While much money was spent on advertising and otherwise promoting the game, lacking concern for who might actually want to buy the game led to a situation in which, as Paul put it: “No one cared.”

Sounds like a situation of wasting tons of money on advertising due to their being no demand for the product and lacking concern for the target market; essentially there was no demand because there was no target market for the product.

Not Paul’s fault but also a recipe for entrepreneurial decline if not remedied… Things had started to unravel…

Back to Tom Lawson’s account of the END of the story…          

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Although they stepped on various “landmines,” as Paul put it, the demise of the business came not because of a selling out or bankruptcy. In the T.S. Eliot poem “The Hollow Men,” the last two lines read, “this is how the world ends; not with a bang, but a whimper.” The same can be said for Magic Lantern. The company had a handful of new ventures and featured hits and misses, but nothing replicated the success of the Tom Clancy release.  When Bungie released the console video game Halo, it revolutionized the gaming industry and was a death sentence to small developers like Paul who failed to see console gaming coming in time to adjust.

Having Paul Schuytema come speak provided the class with a unique opportunity, to hear about a business failing. Maybe fail is a cruel word for this instance, because his company being edged out with the rise of console gaming was something he had no say in. As Professor Connell teaches in Business 105, innovation is creative destruction; Magic Lantern is living proof of that.

Not all is lost, however, for life can start anew.

Paul is currently the City Planner for the city of Monmouth, runs the Blues Festival every year, plans to cash in on his latest business venture with Connell, and is newly married to the lovely Susan Schuytema, owner of Market Alley Wines (our very first guest speaker of the semester).

Although they did not have the money that big developers did, Paul took care of his coworkers within his LLC by providing healthcare, a 401k, and a sense of family. They didn’t try to grow and take over other companies and make six figure salaries, although it would have been preferred in retrospect, they just tried the best they could. The members at Magic Lantern simply tried to make a quality product for the customer while living out their dreams of doing what they loved.

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Well stated Tom!!…

And thanks to Paul Schuytema for both filling in at the last minute and then captivating us with his turbulent “best of times, worst of times” entrepreneurial story!!