JOHN NEWCOMER

“To me, it was absolutely clear that the future of toys was electronics. You knew that people weren’t gonna be satisfied with LEDs that made beep and boop sounds”
John Newcomer

How did you start your career as a toy designer?

I had an industrial design background and knew a bit about psychology and mechanical engineering and design, all kind of mixed together. That’s pretty much how they did it in the toy inventing industry and it was like a secret society. Everybody thought [that] Kenner and Parker Bros came up with were their own [ideas]. They didn't. They had their own internal group and sometimes they did [create their own ideas] or they did a line extension of things. A lot of times the original idea came from these inventing groups. Marvin Glass and Associates was the most-known one and they were in Chicago. It’s like Chicago is this magical place with Marvin Glass, Mother’s Arcade, Williams, etc.

At any rate, [board game designer] Gordon Barlow was one of the senior partners and it was after Marvin Glass himself died that the place was run by five senior partners of the company. He broke off and started his own firm in Skokie, a suburb of Chicago and was most famous for doing but he had over 100 patents. He had this book in his office of patents and it was huge. He had done a lot of games and stuff. It was really weird. There was a small group of middle-aged people in their 40s or late-40s and here comes this little punk in his 20s and we had very different personalities but he sort of took me under his wing. Part of it was