OK Play inventor Denys Avis reveals how hard work and luck saw Big Potato launch his game

Let’s start with your name, sir. You’re known to me by two names… Denys Avis and DJ Wheelie Bag. You spell Denys: D, E, N, Y, S – the French way. But Wheelie Bag you spelling the English way?
Ha! I do! Is D, E, N, Y, S – the French way? I don’t know… My mother did that and I’ve had to somehow explain it ever since.

Ha! Breaks the ice though! You’re also known to me as the inventor of OK Play which is with Big Potato – and it has been for quite some time! So today, I want to do a really deep dive into the history of that… First, though, how would you describe the game?
Oddly enough, I had a chat of this nature yesterday with Big Potato! When they first came across the game, I referenced Connect 4. It’s not Connect 4 but it has a similar thing about building lines…

Because you have to play a number of tiles in a row?
Exactly. It’s an extremely accessible and portable line-building tile game… Up to four of you are looking to get five of your tiles in a row. There are a couple of other hooks to it! One is that you’re only allowed to place pieces down side by side – not diagonally – so it’s very difficult to block some line… You need to be a bit strategic! Also, when you run out of tiles, you have to start taking back tiles you played previously and put them it in a new place. And because the game grows outwards, that sometimes lets other people get in and win.

That’s the part that makes it genius for me! You’ve got to watch this game like a hawk.
You know, back in the day, Big Potato used a one liner about OK Play, saying it was basically an off-road Connect 4. Tris came up with that. But when James and I were talking yesterday, I mentioned this and he said we should revise it because we may’ve left Connect 4 behind! Ha! So maybe I should say Connect 4 is an on-road version of OK Play…

Ha! And tell me, Denys: how did it come about?
Back in the 80s, I was a photography teacher in a London college. The 80s were a bit of a crazy time – but interesting, because everything seemed possible. At that time, I was DJing on the side and collecting what they now call vintage vinyl… Old records, we called them! Life was pretty crazy, but great fun. Anyway, two people I knew at that time were painting for the artist Bridget Riley.

Bridget Riley?
Bridget Riley is one of the great British artists; she’s largely responsible for optical art. Her pictures are all straight and curvy lines interacting in a very optical way. She’s still going strong; very famous – Tate Gallery quality. Anyway, these two people painted in these lines for her. And I once said to them, “How does it feel just painting in the lines?” You know, because some of these canvases were massive! And this girl said to me, “It’s interesting – because some of the colours really vibrate.” So that got me going!

That’d get anyone going!
Ha! By that time, I was already doing dice games, but I thought: enough of that! I’m going to cut up some coloured card squares and see if we get this vibrating going. So I did a game with coloured squares and called it Vibes. Although I wasn’t pitching anything at that point, I got a little way with it; just playing around with stuff. It got me thinking about how it would play out… What would you do with all these squares? Because it’s not enough that orange sits with turquoise to give you a optical vibration. That’s a bit arty, you know?

Yes, I can see that not having much appeal…
No, not enough… Certainly it wasn’t enough for my daughter who was always a good critic!

Ha! “Dad! It’s called Vibes but it is not vibrating at ALL!” Ha!
Ha! Exactly! But that’s where it started… Then I started looking more at the squares and changing the rules. I got it to a point where I was looking towards Connect4. That was already a popular game even though it hadn’t been out that long… And I thought maybe my game was about forming lines, not stacks; squares, not circles; five not four… And that idea of being able to reuse tiles was important because that was, I think, the final thing that turned it into a proper game.

Agreed. And I think you mentioned that you weren’t pitching ideas then… So you were looking to make this yourself?
Yes – this was the middle of the 80s and everything seemed possible to me, so I wandered into a factory in Dalston, East London. They made cut card; they did press-cut boxes. So basically, I said to this guy there, “Could you do anything with this game?” And he said, “We can cut the squares and we already make a pretty nice little gold box. We use it for smoked salmon down in Soho…”

So the size of the original tiles was dictated by a gold box they already made… For salmon?
For salmon, yes. And they came up with the idea of embossing the game’s name on the tiles: Go Mosaic. It was pretty cheap to manufacture, which was just as well because I didn’t have any money, really. And this guy also said, “I’ve got a couple of fellas that pack the salmon. They can pack your game if you want.” So it kicked off like that. I found myself with 50 games or so at first. So now I walk into Hamleys…

Of course. Oldest toy shop in the world…
Hamleys was a different deal back then; nowhere near the barriers to entry you get now – it was a quite a lovely toy shop! And lots of games being shown on the sales floor, so there was clearly an appetite for them. So I got an appointment with the buyer and took my little game in. Eventually, he said, “I like it. We’ll do a gross, but you’ll have to demo it.” Well, both these words were new to me…

Demo and?
Gross!

Ah! Well, I would only know it from misconduct!
Ha! Same with me! Anyway, I go back to the factory to get 144 games, and ask the packers to pack them because I didn’t have time. This was the autumn of 1988… When I told the guy at Hamleys, “Okay, we’re on!”, he told me that, for them, Christmas started at the autumn half term – and that would be when he needed me demoing every week. Well, I had to hit a minimum amount of sales, it wasn’t just a weekend thing.

Oh, my gosh! That’s tough!
Yes. And for the latter part of that term, here I am, this photography teacher, who reaches about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, says to his students, “Well, I think that’s everything you need to know for now… Dark room’s open till 5:00.
Good luck.

Ha! A very hands-on course for the students!
For me, it was onto the moped and up to Hamleys… Every week it was the same story. I’d pick the boxes up from the salmon packers, head to Hamleys on my way to work… Drop them into the stores at the back of the shop, check them all in, go and teach… Then, 3 o’clock: back on the moped, into town, take my smart clothes out of the top box, put my work clothes in, go into Hamleys and say to the fella at the back end, “Was there a delivery for me today?”

I’m just going to interrupt, Denys, and say: I knew this was going to be mad. And you have not disappointed…
Ha!

Ha! It’s mad! Now I want you to tell me you used to wear a false moustache when you dropped the games off! Ha!
Ha! Sadly no! But it WAS mad! I had to do two or three hours of sales most days. I kept it up for two years. And it wasn’t just the game and the teaching: I had the DJing and I had the family. One of the Hamleys staff stopped me in the lift once and said, “Your game’s good.” Turns out she didn’t mean the gameplay – she meant the way I did the sales! So I suddenly realized it was selling quite well.

Do you remember any figures? Just out of interest…
That first Christmas, I think it sold about 2,000. The second year, I think it sold between 4,000 and 5,000 in the same period. It got into the top 30 games in the Sunday Telegraph or one of those things… Just off the efforts of me and a girl I got to help with the demoing – Troy. She was great; really good at it. But we were all amateurs, just making it up! Anyway, by the end of two years I was knackered! So I parked it.

I think I’d’ve been knackered after two weeks! And did you park it BECAUSE you were knackered?
Yes… That was in 1988. And it stayed parked for years and years and years. In the meanwhile, there were tough times in London. Margaret Thatcher was in office, the Greater London Council had gone, the Inner London Education Authority was closing… The whole industry I was in was in trouble. So when some of us who’d been there a while were offered a deal, I took it.

I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I began DJing a lot more seriously. As part of wanting to be more than just a DJ, I began to build games into my show: games and quizzes that I’d make up… So I was like a performance DJ. I even built my own rig to play the records because people didn’t get the games at first. I figured if I built a piece of kit that they also didn’t get, they’d know that I wasn’t what they thought I might be…

You realised that if you had a visual hook that got people asking, “What the heck is that?” then – by definition – people would know you were something different?
Exactly.

That’s inspired. And you’ve since written a book about some of your disco rigs… The DJ Wheelie Bag Annual.
Right! So, now we’re in the 90s. Go Mosaic is a thing of the past. I’ve left my job. I’m trying to be more than a standard DJ at a wedding. I’ve started building kit – and that becomes a full-time job! I’m building them for other DJs and I’ve got quite a lot of work. Then, one summer, I did quite a few very well-paid gigs: all-day events. While I had the money sitting there, I decided to get the old game made properly.

And since you’d parked it, had you occasionally seen it and picked it up? Or was it just gathering dust?
It was basically gathering dust. But to get it made this time, I found a company in Birmingham that could injection mould the pieces. It would cost a couple of grand – which was a huge amount of money back then. But I went to Birmingham, saw this person and we set it all up. I got the smallest run possible, but still walked away with sackfuls of the bloody pieces! Ha!

Ha! And were there any changes between the first version of the game and this one? Other than materials?
Yes. I didn’t know quite why I wanted to do it, but I had them put a hole in the middle of the tiles. And later, I looked at the little gold salmon boxes and wondered if there was a problem with the packaging…

In what way?
If you’ve stood in Hamleys for two years trying to sell a game in a box, you’ll have noticed things. For example, loads of people come straight in, look right past games things in boxes and just see something familiar… The EastEnders Game, say. So I thought: it’s got to look more interesting; its got to come out of the box. Now, because I’d made the tiles with a hole in the middle, I thought maybe they should go on some kind of stick. I didn’t know quite what I was doing…

That might be the headline for the whole interview, Denys!
Ha! It should be! Ha! Still, I threaded the tiles onto a coat hanger and I thought they looked quite good. Soon after that, the idea came to me that I could put it on a wire clip – like a climbing hook. Only it wouldn’t fit on a normal carabiner because the hole was the wrong size… So I then had to find a wire manufacturer that could make the right-size clips. I ended up with about 500 of those. Finally, I got a press-cut cardboard box that the game could sit in.

Which is pretty much how it sells now. And just to clarify: had you – at that point – a vision of where you would sell it? Because – presumably – you weren’t looking to go back to demoing in Hamleys?
No fear! Ha! And yes and no is the answer… Because I still had got some money left from those well paid gigs. So I thought: I’ll do London Toy Fair! I’ll buy a stand… At the same time, I was building up a little stock of games, so I took one round to a bar I knew on the canal down in Shoreditch, East London. A friend of mine was running it and said I could leave a copy there…

Just to see what people thought of it?
Exactly. And she said it was okay to put it upstairs in this room where people went to chill out. So I did that… I left and I did nothing more than that. I just asked her to let me know if it got any interest. Well, almost within the week, I think three of the directors of Big Potato happened to go to that bar for a beer.

Wow!
It seems they went upstairs to chill out and found the game… One of the most lucky chances of my life! When I say I’ve been lucky with OK Play, people say, “Oh, no, no! You worked hard. You did all this, you did all that…” All true. But luck still played a HUGE role in it. So anyway, I get an email out the blue asking if I’m interested in licensing it… Please come to our office. Well, they had a tiny little office then in down in Shoreditch. There were only four of them: Dean, Ben, Tristan… And I think James was there. He was doing the website, I think.

Roughly when was this, Denys?
Big Potato licensed the game in 2015. It was a small office back then. When I went in, they said they wanted to do the game. But weirdly, Deej, I was completely muddle headed… I said, “Well, I’ve booked a stand at Toy Fair. What am I going to do?” Honestly! I mean: come on, Denys – wake up! Don’t put obstacles in their way for God’s sake. Fortunately, Dean just said, “Have the stand anyway. If anybody likes the game, send them to us.” And that’s exactly what happened.

What an amazing story. It really is a great one to inspire new inventors. And I’m curious… Were there any major design changes once Big Potato took it on?
Not massive changes, no. They got a better clip on the top for health and safety reasons… I mean: it all had to be remade to conform to commercial standards.
The only big change to the gameplay came when Dean phoned me up… Because I think the original version had 21 tiles. He called to suggest 15.

Do you remember the reason for that?
Yes, because having fewer tiles means you run out sooner – and Dean liked that. He wanted to force you to play the advanced level. So yes, amazing luck, and I was thrilled with what Big Potato then did with the game. I haven’t got a bad word to say about Big Potato.

Oh, no; I’m not having that! Come now! Let’s find something…
Ha!

Here we go, look! Look how Big Potato market the game… “Clip it to your bag and take it to the beach, pub, school… Anywhere but the moon.” Very unambitious, Denys! Why not take it to the moon?! I’ll ask when I see them.
Ha! No, they’ve just been amazing and allowed me to enjoy this industry in a way I didn’t think possible. And, you know, if I had a word of advice for any new inventors, it would be to trust your idea… Because it might need thought, and it might need effort, and it might need luck, and it might need over 20 years… But you have hang on in there. I’m very, very lucky.

Well, Denys, what can I say? What a treat to speak with you! Thank you so much for making time – an amazing story.

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