At the recent Toy Fair in New York, ICv2 had a chance to talk to Rodger Raderman, Co-CEO and co-founder of Nukotoys, about the new company and its efforts to merge real-world and virtual-world play with NUKO cards.  The first two games using this technology, Animal Planet Wildlands and Monsterology, are both planned to release this spring.

 

Raderman describe Nukotoys business philosophy as follows:

 

“We are trying to bring a lot of the kind of innovation and speed of development and product development processes that are common in Silicon Valley to the toy industry.  If you look at all of the industries that Silicon Valley has innovated, it hasn’t quite hit the toy industry for some reason yet.  [We are] looking at ‘what is a toy for today’s kids,’ who by age one are tapping around on iPads with almost complete proficiency and by age 3 they’re discovering Dora the Explorer videos on YouTube and presenting the iPad to their parents, and their parents are kind of scratching their heads and saying ‘how did you find that.’”

 

“These kids are super-fascinated by digital experiences, so we want to create toys that meet that demand.  So we are creating toys that merge virtual and real world things.”

 

The Games
NUKO is a collectible game card that interacts directly with iOS devices like the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. When the NUKO card is tapped on the screen, objects appear in the game.

 

Animal Planet Wildlands is designed for young children, ages three to seven.  It features information and video taken from the Animal Planet cable TV network.  In the game, players can use animals from the NUKO cards to explore a virtual world, interact with other animals, and complete quests.

 

“We think this is one of the largest free-roaming worlds on the iPad, so there really is a lot for the kids to do and explore,” said Raderman.

 

Kids can collect the virtual animals by purchasing three or seven card booster packs.  Each card shows a single wild animal, or a special environmental action that the player can use to manipulate the game world.  The cards will have three rarity levels—rare, uncommon, and common—based on the animal’s current level of endangerment in the wild.  There will be a total of sixty cards in the game.

 

Monsterology is based on the “ology” series of books.  This will be a turn-based strategy game set in the “oloverse” described in the books.  Raderman describes the gameplay:

 

“The mechanic is very Pokemon-like, in that kids are collecting an army of monsters and they can level them up and they can battle them.  But rather than collecting made-up little animated monsters, they’re monsters from myth and folklore.  So, 75 different creatures that, while they maybe don’t exist in the real world, they exist in history and culture: the yeti and bakku and kraken and leviathans.”

 

Raderman believes that this game will appeal both to older children, seven and up, as well as adults.

 

NUKO cards will be available in both physical booster packs sold in stores and as virtual cards available through the App Store. Using a social media model, virtual cards will enter the game as weaker versions, and players will need to build them up through game play.  Cards purchased in the booster packs will enter the game at full strength, providing players an incentive to invest in the store-bought cards.

 

There will be two types of booster packs. A three-card “intro pack” will sell for $1.99, and will include one uncommon card and two common cards.  A limited number of random intro packs will feature a rare card instead of the uncommon card.  The larger seven-card “full packs” will include one rare, three uncommon, and three common cards.  The full packs will retail for $3.99.  The boosters will be available in a counter-top display box.

 

Raderman expects to distribute the booster packs through Diamond and Alliance into the hobby trade.  He also plans to produce special “premium boxes” for sales into markets that do not carry individual booster-pack style items.  These boxes will function as a sort of “starter box” for the games.

 

The game app itself will be available as a free download through the App Store, with a starter creature for new players to experience the game.

 

Nukotoys has assembled a highly experienced team of advisors to assist with the development of both games, including game industry veteran and Wizards of the Coast founder Peter Adkison, former Mattel CEO Tom Kalinske, former Lucasfilm President Gordon Radley, and Children’s Television Workshop executive Karen Gruenberg.

 

The new company was founded by veteran entrepeneurs Rodger Raderman and Doug Penman.