{"id":337303,"date":"2017-04-01T01:12:19","date_gmt":"2017-03-31T17:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/?p=1471421"},"modified":"2017-04-01T01:12:19","modified_gmt":"2017-03-31T17:12:19","slug":"stealthy-gaming-company-wonder-is-ready-to-tease-its-new-mystery-hardware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/stealthy-gaming-company-wonder-is-ready-to-tease-its-new-mystery-hardware\/","title":{"rendered":"Stealthy gaming company Wonder is ready to tease its new mystery hardware"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Wonder<\/a>, the incredibly stealthy new gaming company, has quietly created a signup page<\/a> for information and perks related to its plans for global domination of the gaming market from its Los Angeles headquarters.<\/p>\n

The company is calling its new campaign the \u201cAlpha Program\u201d, and folks that are interested can get updates on Wonder\u2019s product, provide feedback, and get perks and invites to events involving Wonder.<\/p>\n

At face value, it wouldn\u2019t appear all that interesting.<\/p>\n

But the stealth and secrecy surrounding the company\u2019s product and purpose is as weird as the people who are behind the company are impressive (that is to say that both the team behind Wonder is ridiculously, ridiculously\u00a0<\/em>impressive\u2026 and the degree to which the company\u2019s founder is tight-lipped about what he\u2019s doing is ridiculously\u00a0ridiculously\u00a0<\/strong>absurd).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a shame, because Wonder founder Andy Kleinman, a serial gaming entrepreneur and executive, wants to do something pretty (forgive me?) wonderful.<\/p>\n

Kleinman has set himself the Herculean\u00a0task of building a gaming company that is by and for gamers. Everything he\u2019s told me about what Wonder\u2019s plans has privileged gamers as the first and only audience for the products and services that he\u2019s looking to build.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all going to begin with a new device and the\u00a0ecosystem that gets built around it, Kleinman says.<\/p>\n

While people are most curious about the device, Kleinman views the gizmo (which sounds like a cross between Nintendo\u2019s Switch<\/a>\u2026 and\u2026 shrug<\/em>?) as a gateway to what his company wants to be\u2026 which is nothing less than a new multimedia brand a la Apple.<\/p>\n

In conversation, Kleinman constantly refers back to the halcyon days when Apple product launches would draw lines of hundreds of would-be buyers<\/a> to stores.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are building a company with an objective,\u201d says Kleinman. \u201cThe way I think about it is this company was built by gamers and geeks and people who care about gamer culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Wonder chief executive Andy Kleinman<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The objective for the company is to build a community and a true connection for it users, Kleinman tells me. To him, that\u2019s about more than just the device. Wonder, he says, will combine all of the functionality someone associates with a media player,\u00a0phone and gaming console, he says. \u201cIt\u2019s an entertainment device, it\u2019s a gaming device\u2026 we are seeing this as a way for us to position ourselves that this isn\u2019t just another phone,\u201d said Kleinman.<\/p>\n

To this luddite, that doesn\u2019t sound all that much different from everything else on the market, but Kleinman speaks so fervently and ecstatically about his vision, that it\u2019s hard not to want to come along for the ride.<\/p>\n

You could, however, imagine a device that allows gamers to play their games both on the couch and on the train. One\u00a0that allows them to stream to their platform of choice automatically, or on an entirely new platform, viewable from any device.<\/p>\n

The gaming world is fragmented, and gamers are asked to constantly choose or pay the price of having it all. Wonder may look to fix that with a flexible, all-in-one and one-for-all-gamers device.<\/p>\n

Even the folks who have signed on to back the company are insanely accomplished.<\/p>\n

Nolan Bushnell, the brains behind Atari; Hayao Nakayama, the former president of Sega Enterprises; John Pleasants who was the chief operating officer of Electronic Arts and former chief executive of Playdom; and Pieter Knook, who previously was an executive at Vodafone are all backing the company. Oh\u2026 former NBA commissioner David Stern is investing, too.<\/p>\n

Those individual investors are joined by institutions like 8VC, Greycroft Partners, and Third Wave Digital.<\/p>\n

Wonder\u2019s executive team is equally impressive. Kleinman himself has been wildly successful as an entrepreneur. He founded his first company at 17, back home in Argentina. That company, a music website called Empe3, was sold in 2004 at which point Kleinman began his foray into gaming.<\/p>\n

In 2007 he founded the social gaming company Vostu, and later worked for Zynga and Playdom before becoming the chief business officer at Scopely.<\/p>\n

Also on the executive team at Wonder are Tyler Carper, a senior executive at Cyanogen who\u2019s serving as the company\u2019s Chief Technology Officer, Rafi Bagdasarian, a former senior vice president at Sony, Trevor Walsh, who was an early executive at Facebook, and former vice president of strategy at Machinima Matthew Cohen.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Wonder office in Los Angeles<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Scopely\u2019s success \u2014 and its approach to gaming \u2014 may provide some clues for the broader mission at Wonder. The company has built a market leveraging popular cultural touchstones like The Walking Dead \u2014 and it\u2019s the same\u00a0intertwining of science fiction, fantasy, and comics culture (hello, fellow nerds) with the cultural juggernaut of Hollywood that has created billions of dollars in value for companies \u2014 and is ostensibly the market Wonder wants to mine for its own future growth.<\/p>\n

Sitting at the nexus of the entertainment industrial complex in Los Angeles affords Wonder a unique position to think about gaming in a context that extends beyond the actual gaming device \u2014 or game development.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you think about the geek-gamer culture, there\u2019s no company that\u2019s been able to build that connection to users,\u201d says Kleinman. \u201cI\u2019m a gamer. We\u2019re working on a series of products that really identify with how I do things.\u201d<\/p>\n

So the device, where everyone has been focusing their attention, is only the first step. \u201cAs we continue evolving beyond this initial first device that we\u2019re launching\u2026 the innovation is going to be guided by what our community thinks is exciting.<\/p>\n

As for the capital it takes to launch a new hardware startup, Kleinman remained mum about how much he\u2019s actually raised. But he\u2019s got deep-pocketed backers who seem to be ready to go the distance with him.<\/p>\n

So in between games of Grand Theft Auto, Yahtzee with Friends, and NBA 2K, Kleinman is continuing to hatch new schemes for his business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\" Wonder, the incredibly stealthy new gaming company, has quietly created a signup page for information and perks related to its plans for global domination of the gaming market from its Los Angeles headquarters. The company is calling its new campaign the “Alpha Program”, and folks that are interested can get updates on Wonder’s product, provide feedback, and get perks and… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"\/ <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5817,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[59,66,26],"class_list":["post-337303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-media","tag-techcrunch","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5817"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=337303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=337303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=337303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=337303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}