I had the opportunity to visit the Leap Frog company last Monday. If you don’t know what Leap is, or what they make, then I wonder if you’re really a parent. This is the company behind the Leap Pad early reading tools, the Leapster handheld system, and the new Fly pen. Cool stuff. At GamerDad I’ve never covered Leap before for a simple reason: They don’t carry ESRB ratings and frankly, there are enough platforms that we DO cover. Don’t need the extra workload, thanks. But I’m starting to have a change of heart. For one thing, Leapster is my recommendation of choice for the tricky 3-7 age group ill-served by text heavy GBA titles and tricky/challenging Nintendo DS games. Give a kid a Leapster game and the parent is pretty much guaranteed that the child will be able to get started, keep playing, without help. Sounds like lazy parenting, right? Wrong. It’s wonderful for a kid’s self-esteem to be able to pick something up and use it without help. So, that’s why when Leap invited me out to San Francisco for their first “Blogger Day” – I took them up on it. And why not? After all, when I told my kids, they both looked up from their Leapsters and said: “Cool!”

What I saw when I got there was a rarity. A happy company. Typical cubicle mazes festooned with giant fake leaves and lots of pictures of employee’s children. Leap is a small company and the impression I got was that they came in – dominated the market by releasing quality kids products, tried to expand into the toy market, you know, electronic baby toys and stuff – and got their butts kicked by giants like Fisher Price and Mattel. Not surprising really. Smarting from this error the company has taken an About Face and is trying to return to their roots. They showed us some of their 2008 product, stuff I’ll be able to talk about later, and have instead opted to focus – hard – on serving the tween and maybe even teen market. We’re talking educational quality games for older kids. Sounds like a good idea to me, so long as the games are as fun and creative as their toddler/preschool products.

Heard of the FLY Pen? That’s a pretty good indication of where they’re going. Put simply Fly is a computerized Pen that uses special paper (called FLY Paper, natch). It’ll quickly and mostly efficiently  translate handwriting to computer text, it offers help with mathematics, and I’d be able to go into a lot more detail if the darn thing worked on the Mac.  See, my PCs are dead at the moment. Que sera sera.

The overall impression I got was that Leap cares very deeply about two things. 1) Their reputation. They proudly showed off data that shows that when it comes to quality and edutainment value among parents, Leap is thought of first (that’s the way it’s always been at my house) over all competitors. 2) Educating kids and expanding the market.

One fun thing that might not actually happen: There’s talk of them expanding and making software for the DS, Wii, and maybe other consoles.

Caveat:  I don’t like edutainment because it’s rarely fun – and I think that while videogames are certainly educational, they’re main purpose is fun. Leap is the exception to this rule I think. Heck, I’ve played some of my kid’s Leapster games and… well… they are pretty fun.

My analysis:  Leap is on the right track here. There’s a wide open hole at the moment between baby games and teenage games, and nobody is making anything education for tweens. Remember Oregon Trail & Carmen SanDiego, it can be done. Also the GBA and DS, while terrific systems, aren’t filling this void well at all.  There’s room for Leap to make a lot of money here but the real upshot is better choices and options for parents, fun educational toys for kids, and it makes the game industry look good.

More ways to “Game with Children”?  Hey, you know I’m down with that.

Tags: Misc