By Dr. Sandi Woodruff - Vice President - Accursed Toys

Accursed Toys is an electronic entertainment company, founded by Stephen P. Lepisto, Jennifer Diane Reitz, Dr. Sandi Woodruff and Eldenath deVilya. Their most noted creation is the Happy Puppy games web site.

In the early 1990s, Jennifer and Stephen had worked individually or as a team on other peoples games at Activision, Electronic Arts and LucasFilms Games. Jennifer as an artist, and Stephen as a programmer. The first commercial product they produced on their own was Boppin', a platform puzzle game for the Amiga computer. Boppin was later ported to DOS and eventually Windows.

In an attempt to market Accursed Toys creations online, Dr. Sandi created HappyPuppy.com[630]. The site went live February 14, 1995 and within the year, Happy Puppy became the most visited games site on the web, surpassing previous leader Games Domain[631] .

Happy Puppy was a collection of PC game demos gathered from around the Internet with short reviews of each demo. While other sites generally linked to outsite FTP sites, Happy Puppy made sure that all of its files were hosted on its own servers. This made it relatively simple to keep valid links to games featured on the site. At the time, dead links were a major problem for game lovers because of the transient nature of many of the file hosts.

In addition, Dr. Sandi did research to find out which demo files were the most popular from month to month. The top downloads were then featured at the top of the Happy Puppy home page. As a file's popularity waned, it would move down the page. Eventually, games that had lost their mass appeal would be moved to "Happy Puppy's Boneyard," a separate page on the site.

Woodruff believes that this "Top 40 Radio" approach to website design is the key reason Happy Puppy had such rapid early growth. The files that were most in demand were right on top of the page, while the rest of the hits were also available further down the page. The home page was usually updated several times a day. This made it imporant for the diehard gamer to check the site often, which was considered a key to building site traffic.

Because of its quick growth, Happy Puppy attracted investors. HappyPuppy.com was launched as the web's first advertising supported website in January, 1996.

The day to day operation of the website kept the AToys team so busy that there was little time to create the games. Jennifer created website art, found unusual game demos and reviewed games for Happy Puppy. Stephen handled the technical issues demanded by the emerging Web technology. He also created one of the first interactive Java applets for a commercial website. This was the original "Cute Puppies" Happy Puppy logo, with random animated elements not possible in an animated GIF file. The logo also made a barking sound when a site visitor clicked on it.

Dr. Sandi was in charge of web design and content. Happy Puppy was using the famous "No more than 3 clicks to any content" rule before Yahoo had yet figured it out. Dr. Sandi's toughest job was finding demo copies of upcoming PC games and making them available as downloads before other entertainment websites were aware of their existence. This became increasingly difficult as alliances began to be forged between game companies and websites.

Eldenath was the Happy Puppy utility person. For example, when Happy Puppy needed somebody to wear the puppy suit at the E3 show, Eldenath was inside. She was the person who freed up the rest of the team to do the job of putting the website online.

Happy Puppy's fortunes inflated along with the Internet Bubble. When that bubble burst, Happy Puppy's fortunes popped with it. This freed Lepisto and Reitz to create new games, but they faced another problem. While they were developing HappyPuppy.com, the games industry had quickly developed into a business where two people working in a basement could no longer hope to compete with the graphics-intensive, high-budget programs that were being released in the late 1990s. AToys was no longer able to create commercial games as an independent developer.

Eventually, Stephen took a job creating progams at educational games company Edmark in Redmond, Washington. He later moved to Microsoft, and now works as a Computer Scientist with Intel at their DuPont, Washington facility.

Jennifer turned to creation of online comics. Her first series was a science fiction drama, Unicorn Jelly [632]. She currently creates two online science fiction series, Pastel Defender Heliotrope and To Save Her, available at PastelDefender.com [633].

Their mutual love of anime and manga led Stephen and Jennifer to team up with graphic artist Dov Sherman to create the website OtakuWorld.com Otaku World.

Dr. Sandi returned to her first love, radio. She currently oversees the operation of three Low Power FM (LPFM) station in Western Washington. Stephen, Jennifer and Eldenath are heard on the stations from time to time. Accursed Toys has invested time and money in the ongoing operation of these stations.

KCFL 104.5, Fall City and KYAO, 89.5 Ocean Shores go by the name of "Radio KYA" and feature "Hound Dog Rock & Roll" from the '50s and '60s. While not exactly a tribute to the original AM 1260 KYA, San Francisco, they use KYA jingles from 1966 and feature much of the music that was heard on KYA when it was a Top 40 station. The RadioKYA.com [634] website features information about the stations, as well as links to live MP3 streams of the KYA air signal.

KAYO, 94.3 in Aberdeen, Washington is pioneering an Easy Listening/Adult Standards musical format called "Color Radio. The image jingle package is an edited version of the original Color Radio jingles created by Chuck Blore when he was Program Director of KFWB, AM 980 in Los Angeles from 1959 to 1964. Color Radio is also not so much a tribute to the personality-driven KFWB format, as it is a tip of the hat to the music and mood of the era, the Sweetest Music Ever Made. Color Radio has its own website, [635]SweetestMusic.com .

External links

Accursed Toys

Unicorn Jelly

Pastel Defender Heliotrope

Radio KYA

Color Radio