WCAX.COM Local Vermont News, Weather and Sports-Growing game company

Burlington, Vermont - April 16, 2010

Smiling as she clicks the "play again" button on a colorful computer game, Amanda Crispel beams, "I was making games when I was a kid!"

Crispel has come a long way from organizing neighborhood playtime as a kid. She's now building a Burlington video game production firm called Hoozinga. Games are proving to be a really good platform for learning and communication," she explains.

Crispel moved to Vermont from California for her full-time job teaching video game design at Champlain College. She had worked for more than 15 years on teams creating children's computer games, including the famous "Carmen Sandiego" learning series. "When I first started, we had 16 colors!" she chuckles.

Sales of video games now total around $20 billion a year in the United States. While the lion's share of that goes to industry big dogs like Nintendo, Hoozinga has a different target customer: clients who want a snazzy way to market their products, educate users, or to amp up websites.

We played Crispel's Nordic Egg Toss, lobbing virtual eggs to an ice skating catcher to build points. It's for the Burlington branding firm Select Design to show off its fun creative side to its clients.

Other more serious Hoozinga projects include promoting blood drives or training technicians through games. Crispel and a handful of partners launched Hoozinga a year ago with a loan from the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies. It's a group that promotes the growth of the technology sector in the state.

Director David Bradbury says, "It's our only chance in Vermont to maintain a 600,000 or so population, keep our environment pristine and important to us, yet somehow create enough wealth through the sale of goods and services worldwide."

VCET helps upstarts build their teams, locate capital, get products to market, and find business mentors. Amanda Crispel hopes aside from making games, her ultimate product will be a job sector for her Champlain graduates and other young gamers who often leave Vermont to find work.

"If there were technology jobs to support them, they'd stay," Crispel predicts.

A serious goal for these "Made in Vermont" games.

Click here for a link to Hoozinga's website.

Click here to learn more about the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies.

Jack Thurston - WCAX News - Made in Vermont