Gary Gabrel built Pente from a college-student's hobby to a million-unit sales success. But it may be time to trade in his unconventional moves for a more traditional game.
Gary Gabrel, the boyish 31-year-old president of Pente Games Inc., stands alone inside the television studio. A rolled-up Pente board rests in a tube under his arm; two velour bags of playing stones bulge in his pockets.
Another morning, another interview: He has been scheduled for two days with the press before this weekend's big tournament. It is not quite the life he imagined for himself.
After the first few dozen, local TV shows become a blur. While such giants of the board-game industry as Parker Bros. and Selchow & Righter Co. can afford to buy advertising to build a product, Gabrel knows Pente could never have reached $4.5 million in sales last year without the push of free publicity. But at times he tires of the endless succession of club sandwiches and tea, sterile motels and rented Chevrolets, of the same questions asked again and again.
Waiting his turn in front of the camera, Gabrel links his hands together, raises his arms over his head, and stretches from side to side -- the pride of Stillwater, Okla., dutifully loosening up. Under his pressed olive suit and white shirt he still has the thick thighs and barrel chest of a one-time high school defensive back; his face still carries the dogged clench of a regular starter before the big game. "A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits," his football-coach father used to tell him; the old truisms die hard.
"Today we'll discover Pente, the new mating game for the glamorous," the talk-show host announces. "And we'll talk about the medical consequences of nuclear war and fashion for pregnant women. But first, this message."
Gabrel is led to the chair he is to fill for the next 8 1/2 minutes. The host manages a wan smile. "Comb your hair," his public relations woman whispers. The harsh lights make him squint. "Fix your tie," a voice hisses.
"I'm talking this morning with Gary Gabrel, the inventor of Pente, a new board game that is being called the backgammon of the '80s. Tell me, Gary, just what is Pente?"
"Well, we call Pente 'the classic game of skill,' " he explains. "But actually Pente is the third generation in a family of classic games." The first generation was go, the complicated and time-consuming strategy game that originated in the Orient. The second generation was go-moku and go-narabi, speedier and less complicated. The third generation of games is Pente, an even quicker version, packaged for the Western lifestyle.
"It's simple to learn," he says, pointing to the Velcro display board set up behind him, "but difficult to master." Two competitors sit across a board of 324 squares, each player taking a turn placing one of his stones at the intersections of the grid. The winner is the first player to place five stones in a row or to capture five pairs of his opponent's stones by surrounding them. Just as go means five in Japanese, pente means five in Greek.
"How did you come to inventthe game?"
As often as he has told his story, it remains fresh. In the early 1970s, as a college student at Oklahoma State University, Gabrel took a job as a dishwasher at the Hideaway, a local pizza joint. Night after night, he and his coworkers would gather to play games on the restaurant's checkerboard tablecloths, classics like checkers and chess, go and its descendants, including the game two hippie friends taught him that would become Pente. Convinced that the game had all the makings of a great product, Gabrel sent it to 10 game companies -- and got 10 rejections. So he decided to sell Pente himself, out of the back of his van, traveling to craft fairs and trade shows. In 1979, he incorporated Pente Games and staffed his fledgling company with other recent graduates of OSU.
"We just sold our millionth set," he says proudly. "Sugar Ray Leonard plays Pente. So does Hugh Hefner. President Reagan has a set, too -- only his has jelly beans rather than stones."
Gabrel knows his lines by heart; over the summer his New York public relations firm ran him through a TV training course. Shy and soft-spoken in person, he is warm and believable on the air. But with a scant 8 1/2 minutes to fill and the host reading questions from a prepared list, he has to leave a great deal out. In 1981, according to a Game Merchandising magazine survey, Pente -- not Monopoly or Scrabble -- was the best-selling board game in the United States. That same year Gabrel himself was proclaimed both the Oklahoma small businessman of the year and a Casmopolitan magazine bachelor of the month.
"I've tried to run my business like I play the game," Gabrel explains later. All the strategies that Gabrel used to make Pente a success -- its product position and market approach, its packaging and promotion -- were born of necessity. He approached the business as if it were an empty Pente board. There are an infinite number of possible moves. The challenge is to play each stone to maximize your opportunities.
Pente has already overcome long odds. The market for board games is small, estimated by Game Merchandising to total some $213 million in sales for 1982, less than one-tenth the market for electronic games and equipment. And most board game successes are modest; a game will appear, sell 10,000 or 20,000 units in a season, then disappear.
The truly profitable games, the classics, keep on selling year after year. Since 1935, Parker Bros. has sold more than 80 million Monopoly sets worldwide. Last year, according to John Nason, marketing vice-president for Selchow & Righter, Scrabble sold "several million sets."
To become a classic, Nason says, "a game must be simple to learn and play, and it must play differently every time." According to Geoffrey Wheeler, editor of Game Merchandising, it must increase in complexity as well, being simple for the novice and difficult for the master. Pente, Wheeler says, has just those qualities.
