Bad Idea Rodeo
Written on May 1st , 2020 by Jeremiah Habets
What
Bad Idea Rodeo is a drinking club that generates ideas. Not all ideas end up bad, but most start out bad and absurd and gradually nudge themselves into some semblance of ‘that could work.’ The ideas we generate belong to the club, unless we decide as a group that we either don’t care or perhaps, care very deeply about not being associated with an idea. Ask Brian about Flavor Fingers… it’s all him. Just him. Unless Bob got cut into some side action, but we’re pretty sure Bob’s smarter than that.
TricksterViz, LLC provides all the legal and infrastructure needs for the club. All copyrights and trademarks and infrastructure costs belong to TricksterViz, LLC until we decide to give it a new structure. The current default terms for taking one of the ideas and turning it into a real project is a $100 + 1% royalty on gross revenue. For example, if we claimed ownership of Flavor Fingers, which we do not, but if we did god help us, and Brian wanted to push forward with it, this is how it would work.
Brian would just start doing it. Making up prototypes and stuff. Eventually he’d get to the point that this is real and either put real money into it or convince some investor to put real money into it. We’d write a simple contract that for $100 and one percent gross revenue, he has a license for whatever IP he needs to control for Flavor Fingers. He can go off and make a million dollars. Lol. And at the end of each quarter, year, whatever the contract states, he’d pay the club one percent of one million dollars. The $10k and $100 paid to the club would be distributed equally amongst the founding members with a little bit, not yet determined, paid out to the junior members and hangers on. But good news. Flavor Fingers is all Brian and he can go make his million dollars on his own.
Why
Have you ever been to a Game Industry meetup? They all feel the same. Thirty devs trying to talk the other twenty nine devs into working on their idea. Ideas are cheap, especially when stuck in the land of me and mine. Bad Idea Rodeo is an attempt to turn me into we by creating the minimum structure necessary to turn individual ideas into group ideas.
Also, I was moving from working on games to working on enterprise VR tools and was worried about keeping some fun and creativity in my life. At one of our long-lunches, I pitched the idea of getting together maybe once a month or so for drinks and bullshitting about ideas for comics, or games, or movies, or tv shows, or whatever. Here we are.
When
I think it was probably January 2017. We’re still doing it here in May of 2020, at least every once in a while.
Where
Seattle and the East Side. Our original get togethers were at the Tiki Bar in the Anderson School in Bothell. Other nights, we met up at the Oaxacan Restaurant in Capitol Hill. Brian lured us to Kirkland a few times as well.
Who
Founding Members
The core team that started the rodeo is: Jeremiah Habets, Bob Gregory, Brian Patenaude, and Tony Ravo.
