Carlo Sunseri didn’t have a budget. He didn’t have much financial backing, either.
But in 2005, that didn’t stop the then-sophomore at Robert Morris University from pitching the idea that would become his life’s ambition: to produce a lacrosse video game.
“I was in college and e-mailed a production company to ask how much it would cost to make a lacrosse video game,” said Sunseri, of Rennerdale. “We had a basic conversation, but at that point, everything exceeded my budget.”
No wonder. He was a college sophomore, and he had a budget?
“I liked to pretend I had a budget,” Sunseri joked.
Sunseri, 26, can’t help but laugh when he thinks back to 2005, when he thought a haphazard sales pitch would cause a few executives to jump out of their chairs.
But Sunseri transformed his proposal into his own company, Crosse Studio LLC, which recently released its fourth lacrosse video game.
“I’ve always had a passion for video games,” said Sunseri. “I’ve also always had a passion for lacrosse and business. This sort of rolls them together.”
After playing high school lacrosse at Mt. Lebanon, Sunseri went to Providence College in Rhode Island, then transferred to RMU, where as a midfielder from 2005-07, he scored 59 points, enough to place him eighth on the Colonials’ all-time list.
But as much as Sunseri loved lacrosse, serving as an assistant coach at RMU from 2008-09, he always envisioned doing something with his sports management degree.
In early 2009, Sunseri decided to start his own production company and contacted Jonathan “Fritz” Ackerley, a successful video game programmer, about his idea of producing what would turn out to be the first-ever lacrosse video game.
“The lacrosse community has been demanding a video game for such a long time,” said Kirk Klett, a lawyer and friend of Sunseri, who has assisted him with licensing and contract issues. “We’re really a video game generation, and we’ve always played the NHL hockey games — the Madden football games — but there’s never been a lacrosse game.”
There is now
In November 2009, Crosse Studio launched its first game: College Lacrosse 2010, which like all of Sunseri’s games, is available through the X-Box Live Marketplace. Each game costs $5 to download, of which Microsoft gets about 30 percent, netting Sunseri around $3.50 per game.
Five months later, Sunseri and his crew released National Lacrosse League 2010, which mimicked the NLL’s faster-paced, indoor style. Unlike the first game, this one featured actual players, as opposed to the fictitious ones Sunseri had to use because College Lacrosse was not sanctioned through the NCAA.
College Lacrosse 2011 was released in February, and National League Lacrosse 2011 came out on April 15. In total, the four games have been purchased for download about 95,500 times.
“They’re really fun, playable games,” Ackerley said.
Sunseri does not program the games; instead, he hires programmers such as Ackerley, to whom Sunseri submits his ideas and suggestions.
Sunseri is chiefly responsible for how the game plays — whether the shooting and hitting are realistic and user-friendly — and works full-time out of the basement office in his home.
“He has ideas about what he wants to do, and he goes and gets them done,” Ackerley said. “He convinced me that this was the right thing to do, and it turned out it was. There was a good gap in the market, we got the game done and got tremendous numbers.”
One hurdle remains: to secure the necessary licensing for College Lacrosse through the NCAA, allowing for the inclusion of such powerhouses as Johns Hopkins, Syracuse and Duke.
Sunseri thinks this will happen. There’s even a Facebook page, which he administrates, devoted to gaining one million followers as a way to petition gaming companies such as EA Sports to pick up on the idea.
“The game is growing, but the market isn’t as big as hockey, football, baseball or soccer, so you have to keep it low-cost,” Sunseri said. “You can’t go out and spend $12 million and have a 40-man team, but right now, I’m in the process of trying to build a smaller team based in Pittsburgh to develop the game.
“To get it sanctioned through the NCAA — that’s the ultimate goal,” Sunseri said. “To have all those universities included, that would be a big step forward for the sport of lacrosse and for our company.”
Read more: Lacrosse comes to small screen near you – Pittsburgh Tribune-Review http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/ae/more/s_735405.html#ixzz1RodxV1nd
