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Please introduce yourself and tell us what you do in the video game industry.

Dawn McKenzie, Director of Marketing for MumboJumbo, LLC.  We’re a developer and publisher of casual games, producing hits that include our LUXOR franchise, the 7 Wonders series, and most-recently the Midnight Mysteries games.

What gaming platforms does MumboJumbo develop for? 

Our games are available on the Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, Sony PSP, PS2 and Xbox Live.

MumboJumbo is known as a “Premium Casual Games” developer and publisher. How would you say this distinguishes MumboJumbo’s games from other casual game developers?

We have a real focus on quality and making games that are fun.  Casual games are sometimes pigeon-holed as being quickly developed and thus low on quality artwork or level design.  What sets us apart is that you’ll find a lot of love and care goes into our game concepts, the artwork we create to set the tone for the story, and the meticulous level design that we create to set the pace for the game.  You can see this in all of our games, but our recent title Glowfish really embodies this commitment.  Glowfish has received really great user and critical praise for the artwork and level design, and it’s the perfect example of how a casual game can appeal to a broader audience.  We’ve had great success with the Steam audience since launching there last week with both the PC and Mac version of the game.

What kind of puzzle games does MumboJumbo offer, and who would you say is your audience?

We offer a lot of different types of games, from the classic match-3 to the arcade-style marble popper to the hidden object adventure games that have become so popular over the last three years.  We have a broad reach with our games, and the mass appeal is especially evident in our key franchises: LUXOR, 7 Wonders, and Midnight Mysteries.  We first launched LUXOR a little over six years ago, and we still hear from fans ranging in age from 4 to 84!  When we initially launched Midnight Mysteries for the PC, the game struck a chord with the more typical casual games audience, and a slightly more female demographic who enjoys hidden object games.  But, what we found with the second installment, Salem Witch Trials, was that we were able to broaden the audience.  This was really brought about in two ways: 1) We launched it for the iPad almost simultaneously, and 2) We incorporated some really innovative adventure and puzzle elements into the game play.  This not only broadened the appeal for the game to an audience beyond the PC/Mac, but we also were able to pull in fans of adventure style games.  Our audience continues to grow, and we really have seen that with Glowfish recently—we’re pulling in fans of hard core games who are looking for a few hours of Zen-like, quality gaming, and we’re able to satiate that with Glowfish.

Is there any platform that you see the greatest growth in gaming?

Obviously, we have seen massive growth of the iOS audience, and we are continuing to support the iPhone and iPad platforms with new titles.  We also have seen a big push to Android by some companies, and I think you’ll continue to see the social/mobile scene grow as the smart phone user base continues to expand.

Please tell us about some of your recent and upcoming releases.

Our most recent release is 7 Wonders: Magical Mystery Tour for the iPad.  The match-3 game took on some elements of resource management in this installment, and we were able to further the franchise and keep it fresh for fans with new wonders, polished gameplay, fun new power-ups, cool locations, and some new whistles like the power-up wheel and the mini games.  The game is going to launch for the PC at Target over the next couple of weeks, and it will come to the digital download space in the coming month.

Our dev team is hard at work on two games right now, one of which is the next installment in Midnight Mysteries.  We hope to announce a new game launch in November, and then we’ll unveil the new Midnight Mysteries shortly thereafter.  They both look fantastic, and our artists are, once again, hitting it out of the park on quality.  The game design team is really stepping it up on both of these—players will be the real winners when all of the design team’s hard work comes to fruition over the next few months.

What are some of MumboJumbo’s most popular game titles?

Midnight Mysteries has been a big win for us since we first launched the franchise in 2009.  We hit the market at exactly the right time—hidden object players were looking for a little more in terms of depth, and the casual players started really gravitating to dark and spooky themes.  The Edgar Allan Poe Conspiracy served both of those audiences well, and we were able to spark the success of a new franchise with the game play introduced in that title.

Of course, we still have amazing success with our cornerstone franchise, LUXOR.  There are still 20,000 LUXOR downloads each day, and we continue to find new ways to bring great content to them.

How does MumboJumbo bring attention to its games in the very busy and crowded iOS App Store? Any social and community networks, or other forms of advertising?

Usually we launch our titles on PC/Mac first, and we have great digital partners for those launches.  We’re able to have our games distributed through a number of really successful digital download sites, which is the start for us.  It gives us fantastic exposure to casual gamers ahead of our iPad and iPhone launches.  We also nurture a Twitter account, @MumboJumboGames, and two Facebook pages: MumboJumboGames and LUXORGame.  We regularly posted sneak peek content to these accounts and keep our fans in the loop on what’s going on behind the scenes.

On the App Store, we take care to put our best foot forward with compelling screenshots, a great icon, and informative game descriptions—we wrestle with what features to highlight, how to convey all that is cool in a game, and what the game’s icon should look like.

What are some of the challenges in releasing completely new game titles/franchises?

As you mentioned, there’s a lot of noise, but we are able to leverage the MumboJumbo fan base and use our catalog to build up new titles.  Having known, successful games really helps give us the opportunity to launch new titles.

What are some of the challenges in releasing a new title in an existing franchise?

Like with anything, you don’t want to break something that works, so we are very careful when we release a new title in a franchise to be sure it doesn’t degrade the brand.  We also want to be sure that we are keeping the franchise fresh.  We don’t want to make changes for change’s sake—we try to add value or improvement with new iterations.  And sequels are a great way for us to incorporate player feedback and explore ideas that we may not have had the opportunity to fully realize in a previous version.

Has MumboJumbo worked on any games that crossed over with an existing brand (for advertising)?

For our Midnight Mysteries series, we have been incorporating writers into our plot lines, which has been a fun way to reach a new audience.  For Devil on the Mississippi, we incorporated Mark Twain and William Shakespeare, both of whom have been prevalent in pop culture during the last year with various books and movies releasing that also touch on their lives.  Our game was a way for us to capitalize on that buzz while exploring two really intriguing characters for this installment.  We tried to stay consistent with the Twain “brand” by doing a lot of historical research and incorporating both well-known and lesser-known facts about him and his life into the fictionalized work that we produced.  It was a fun challenge, and the Twain-angle to the story definitely broadened appeal beyond just Midnight Mysteries fans.

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Thanks to Dawn McKenzie and MumboJumbo for making this interview possible! For more details on MumboJumbo’s game lineup and availability, visit the official website at www.mumbojumbo.com or the iOS App Store here.

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