Our History
	by Peter Shikli, General Manager

Somewhere around 2002, my son Tyler Shikli announced that he had discovered yet another cool video game. The basic idea was still that killing virtual people was great fun and had to be done every waking hour.

"Even better," continued Tyler, "is that I can sneak up behind them and slit their throats for extra points."

"Extra points?" I asked myself. "I don't want to be the 'No' person, but this is getting out of hand." Tyler was only 9 years old.

I started casting around for ideas, almost anything that could substitute for a boy's video game addiction. I had been a high school chess champ, but Tyler called all such endeavors "bored games".

Wizard's Chess from the Philosopher's Stone©

So it was that I found myself in a theater watching a Harry Potter movie, The Philosopher's Stone. When the giant chess game scene arrived, the horde of orangutans dissolved into quiet reflection, with barely an "Ooh" or an "Aah".

I realized I was in the presence of a master marketing organization when it came to kids, and they clearly knew their customers. I paid attention.

The key seemed to be the level of immersion. Harry became part of the chess game, and so did the audience, which seems to be the calling card of the "best" video games, too. The chess pieces became action heroes instead of place-holders for an intellectual contest.

That night, I scoured the internet and found nothing closer than a group of Indonesian artisans carving giant teak chess sets on the other side of the planet. In a flurry of emails, they offered me what we call a "two-fer", that is, three chess sets for the price of two. I figured if I sell one, I'll break even. If I sell two, I get a free chess set.

Tyler takes his MegaChess set to the beach

I threw together a website, mostly because I liked chess, and to sell two MegaChess sets. Worth mentioning is that my day-job at this point was running Bizware Online Applications, Inc, an online software company where I would occasionally be paid the big bucks for helping develop business plans, mainly their technology aspects. But when it came time to develop a business plan for my company-to-be, it was launched with nothing but a two-fer.

By the time the chess sets arrived, all three were sold. Thus started a business that set its own course where I would always feel more like a passenger than the driver.

I knew something about search engine optimization and had a great web design team as part of my day job, but the MegaChess website was fielded as a hobby site. I figured we'd get a few hundred hits for the year, make some chess friends, and sell a few chess sets. Six months after its launch, the website had half a million hits — and that was per month.

The kids with their new toys

"Where are these people coming from?" I asked a business friend.

"No idea", was the reply. "How many chess players are out there?"

I blurted out a big number "thousands", but I had to admit I was clueless. That was as embarrassing as the CEO of General Motors admitting he had no idea how many cars were out there. I started poking around to learn that outfits like the US Chess Federation estimated 17 million Americans averaged a chess game every day.

As though holding on to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland, MegaChess was to surprise me some more. At the next turn, I learned that almost half our customers didn't even know how to play chess. It wasn't chess they liked but chess players.

More intelligent, thoughtful and considerate, chess players rose to jobs that gave them a higher disposable income than most. In the words of a resort manager who promised one day to learn to play the MegaChess set he bought, "Chess players don't steal towels or spend Saturday night puking on the carpet."

We took the standard entrepreneur's tack, filling up the garage until my wife and city inspectors insisted I take MegaChess down the road from our sleepy San Clemente neighborhood. A nearby 10-foot deep storage rental grew to six 20-footers by the time I had to admit we needed a 1500 square foot concrete tilt-up warehouse in our beach town's business park, complete with steel racks and a fork lift. I figured that should solve the problem until we stuffed it full and expanded to add contracted floorspace and order fulfillment services through a huge warehouse in Ontario, CA.

Amber gets into modeling

So, did I succeed in extricating my son from his video game addiction? Not exactly, but he is a challenging chess player, as well as an effective virtual gunslinger. Chess turned out not to be the cure as much as a redirection in the most important aspect of a young man's life, the friends he chooses. Tyler's best friend is a good chess player, a good thinker, and a good person. If MegaChess had a hand in that, that's as good as it gets.

Child labor

Our other surprise was how Tyler's younger sister took to MegaChess. Amber is not Bobby Fisher, but she does like modeling and art. I used to make fun of Chinese laundries where the whole family worked together. I don't any more. With Bizware, the kids had no idea what daddy did for a living besides stare at a computer screen, and complain about his son doing the same. Now we share adventures getting boxes out on time, plotting new markets to conquer together, and pass around more memories than most families. Tyler is proud to show his MegaChess business card with the job title of "Founder".

Given that most people who actually play chess are kids, MegaChess has several initiatives to help kids and schools, to give back. This has expanded the family and we will occasionally have some fun reaching out to teach chess to kids, or at least to clown around pretending to do so.

The Wizard (me) and Harry (Tyler) inspiring kids to play chess