The Quest to Build the Best
All In Sports Entertainment
The Beginning
I remember moving to Nelson in 1970, attending the first day of Grade 3, and being challenged to a table hockey match. This was my first sign that I had a special table hockey talent.Due to the low quality nature of the games available, I didn't play for 3 years.
I attended a Rosemont school spring bazaar where I found a used Bobby Hull table hockey for sale priced at $3.00. This was by far the best game available but was no longer in production.
Despite having to repair the game daily, and sit on the floor playing it, this is the game that I developed my skill and a good idea of what was right and wrong with table hockey.
Customized My First Game for Fun (1983)
Like most kids in that era, my table hockey interest faded and I never thought much about it for 8 more years until a friend gave me a game from the 50's that had sturdy metal players. The board was badly designed. I dreamed up how to adapt the existing game mechanisms to a thicker board with my own slot design. A friend said to me "it would be great to build a really good one of these!" At first I was offended but soon I understood what he meant.
Table Hockey as a Business (1984)
Upon first sight of "Bubble Hockey" in a bar, I thought, "a good table hockey game is here!" Playing the game revealed a poorly designed, foosball table hockey hybrid. Despite its shortcoming, this game made its creators millionaires within 2 years. I thought to myself, some day soon, someone would build a table hockey game that takes this great concept to its full potential.
An Opportunity Presents Itself (1996)
After 9 years passing without any well-designed table hockey games appearing on the market, I decided that I would take on this challenge. I started building prototypes of all shapes and sizes and started analyzing which markets looked most attractive to pursue first.
Prototyping
Prototyping is expensive both monetarily and in time commitment. Even so, I remained passionate about bringing a great new table game to the world. I realized that the Chexx success story could be repeated and go even bigger with a better product. I visited an amusement game trade show and quickly discovered that many manufactures wanted to design their own table hockey but didn't know how to improve on Chexx.
In fact judging by the results no one in the world seems to know, except us. To be fair, it has come down to AiSE's more time and money spent on research and development. Our unwavering focus on creating a game that fully develops the table hockey concept has made the difference.
The table hockey game home market is full of designs that are not completely thought out. Overzealous designers wanted to change the game too much in areas that just needed to be tweaked. I followed the same line of thought but then realized that I needed to spend more development time and money to create a game that is vastly superior. The formula appears to be simple ~ hold on to what was good in table hockey and add fun features.
Surveying Top Tournament Player's Opinions (2003)
When I was competing in a tournament in Chicago, I had the opportunity to hear the opinions of many of the top tournament players in the world. Their answers confirmed the improvements I was considering and gave me great ideas to further develop my vision of the perfect game.
A Partnership is created (2004)
Darren possesses all the skills and intangibles needed to complete our business model. Being a master craftsman and having an unwavering vision of creating local employment were welcome assets. Darren relished the chance to use his problem solving skills and inventor's mind to design a CNC modular series of games to service various markets. The last two year's of intense research and development resulted in meeting all of our goals: beauty, functionality and the ability to be mass-produced. He also came up with more patentable concepts and inventions for the company. Our choices in front of us were: licensing through a large game manufacturing company, contract manufacturing anywhere in the world, or manufacturing our products locally - laying a foundation for a long-lasting and globally successful company. Making a final choice to produce the game locally was an easy one. In Kaslo and the surrounding area there are an abundance of talented individuals, wanting to showcase their talents. Attracting a pro-active work force to work with is exciting and allows us to live where we have and enjoy close family, friends and business contacts.
The end result
We have invented a new line of table hockey games that have a number of unique features that offer the easiest and most exciting gameplay ever.