| Log In | Register Now
By Liana B. Baker
July 14, 2011 2:00 PM EDT
Curt Schilling was one of Major League Baseball's dominant pitchers for some 20 seasons and since retiring, his game playing has taken a new direction -- he owns a company aiming to conquer the $65 billion video game industry.
Schilling's company, 38 Studios, so named for his jersey number, is no casual pastime for the three-time World Series champion, who won pitching titles with the Arizona Diamondbacks and Boston Red Sox.
Schilling has invested $30 million to $35 million of his own money into the company, he told Reuters in a recent interview in Los Angeles. The company plans to release its first game next year.
The former All-Star chose a tricky time to jump into the video game business, where startups such as Zynga Inc have won fanfare and challenged old powers by rolling out simple, addictive games for Facebook and smartphones.
Against this backdrop, Schilling's 300-person business has pursued a different strategy: It plans to release a new fantasy-action franchise featuring original characters and stories.
Follow us
It is the sort of business plan that used to be commonplace but has fallen out of favor as major video game publishers, including Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard, have tried to lessen their risk by focusing on expanding existing franchises rather than developing new ones.
"It's hard, but anything worth doing in life is challenging and hard and I've never had a problem with hard," said Schilling, who is remembered for pitching in the 2004 playoffs with an injured ankle that bled through his sock.
How the 44-year-old Schilling ended up on stage last month at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, the industry's top U.S. trade show, is a path that dates back to 1980 when a close friend bought an Apple computer and Schilling began playing games on it.
"I was hooked," he said. "I was coding and programing and playing games and I've been playing ever since."
STAYING OUT OF TROUBLE
While traveling during his baseball days, Schilling said he would return to his hotel room, log on to the Web-based fantasy game "World of Warcraft" and play along with his sons back home.
"There were a lot of ways to get in trouble as an athlete," he said. "So I stayed in my room and played PC games on my laptop."
As his pitching career wound down, Schilling told his wife Shonda he was thinking about starting a video game company and that he wanted to set aside a little money to fund it.
Before long, "that little chunk of money got really big," said Schilling, who founded 38 Studios in 2006, just before his last professional baseball season. He would work mornings at the office in a Boston suburb before heading to Fenway Park to pitch.
We value your privacy. Your email address will not be shared.
