From Madden to the Triple Crown: Ian Cummings' success with Derby King

Rich Grisham

From Madden to the Triple Crown: Ian Cummings' success with Derby King image

Ian Cummings wasn’t sure if his one-man project would ever work. After all, over the course of his career, he’d been the creative director of the ultra-popular "Madden NFL" football series, designed mobile titles for a startup studio, and built licensed card-collecting games for social darling Zynga. Cummings spent his life making many different games for audiences worldwide, wrangling teams of individuals together to bring a title to market.

But a horse racing game built completely on his own?

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“I didn’t really know what to expect,” Ian told me in an interview on Hit The Pass Radio. “It’s just a really hard and random business. A lot of things will get to the top of the charts and you have no idea why or how. I turned it on in the U.S. and it’s just been unbelievable; I didn’t spend anything on marketing and now, to have my little one-man project that I worked really hard on in a top tier is really exciting for me.”

And what a success it’s been. Derby King: Quest for the Triple Crown is the top horse racing game on iTunes and has made it as high as the top 25 of all sports games on Apple’s service, no small feat considering the many thousands of titles produced every month.

“I expected it to do nothing,” Cummings said with a laugh. “I went for a little niche that no one had gone after and none of the big guys are going to, because it’s a smaller market sport. I didn’t really know what to expect, but as of right now, it’s just growing on the theme of it being a really good-looking horse racing game.”    

What has made Derby King a winner is a simple formula with a compelling experience. You start with a horse that is, in Ian’s words, “terrible,” and your goal is to win the Triple Crown. There’s a small collection of attributes that each horse has, such as acceleration, top speed, and finishing ability.

You run races, and by winning those races you win cash. In turn, you spend that cash on upgrades to your horse and its equipment. Ultimately, you reach the major races and run for the roses. Once the pinnacle is reached, very exotic breeds of horses can be created and run at higher difficulty levels. While you can spend real-world money on items that will help speed up your progress, there’s also plenty of fun to be had without having to hand over cash. 

“It’s a game horse racing fans will enjoy, but it’s not trying to be the most authentic simulator in the world,” he says. “I tried to get as many details right as possible but I also bent the rules where I could. If you did an authentic, one-to-one simulation it would probably be pretty boring. They only last a year; it’s all about paying all these rights to get the finest thoroughbred bloodlines, and none of that seemed all that interesting to me. I chose to make it a little more mainstream.”   

The bigger challenge now is how to keep the Derby King momentum going. Cummings got a nice, unplanned bounce from American Pharoah winning the Triple Crown in 2015, so awareness of big-time horse racing has been raised. The next Kentucky Derby won't be until May 2016, though.

“That’s definitely the hard part,” he says. “It does have a long tail, assuming the content and the game stays fresh. That doesn’t have to be daily updates either, but consistent updates and answering people’s questions as they come.”

By applying lessons learned starting with Madden and stretching through social and mobile behemoths, Cummings and his Derby King game prove you don’t need to have massive appeal or a cheap gimmick to capture a viable segment of the mobile gaming market. What you need is a good idea, dedication to your audience and persistence to see your vision through to completion.

To hear the entire interview with Ian Cummings about Derby King, listen to it here on Hit The Pass Radio or subscribe to the show on iTunes .

Rich Grisham has been writing and podcasting about sports video games for over a decade. He is the host of the Press Row Podcast and co-founder of the influential sports gaming site HitThePass.com.

Rich Grisham