An excerpt from "Digital Game-Based Learning" book by Marc Prensky (2001), on page 10:
Think3's product, thinkdesign was demonstrably better than the product that the vast majority of mechanical designers were using, known as AutoCAD. More like the rarified "high-end" CAD packages costing $15-20,000 per seat, thinkdesign allowed mechanical designers to work directly in 3D, instead of starting from the 2D drawings of AutoCAD.
Backed by impatient venture capital money [$15 million] from Goldman and others, Costello’s business objective was crystal clear -- to convert as many of the 3 million-or-so AutoCAD users to thinkdesign as quickly as possible. His first major obstacle, the traditionally large difference in price between 2D and 3D products, was removed by his board’s agreement to lower the price of thinkdesign to match the price of AutoCAD.
This was happening back in 1998. The author helped think3 come up with "The Monkey Wrench Conspiracy" game whose larger purpose was to teach CAD users how to use the thinkdesign software. It was renamed (or perhaps another game released) as "Time Mechanic." None of the urls work, neither http://monkeywrench.think3.com/ nor http://www.timemechanic.com .
Costello’s strategy with Monkey Wrench was both a learning strategy and a marketing strategy as well. He was convinced that the game could, in fact, sell the product, especially to engineering students who were still forming their tool preferences. Through the creation of a demo version — two levels instead of three — that could fit on a single disk along with a trial version of the actual thinkdesign product, the demo disk was bundled into sixty thousand copies of Cadence magazine, the mechanical design industry standard. The next print run was two hundred thousand. Then another two hundred thousand, followed by translation into Japanese and other languages. A year later, there are close to a million copies of the game in print.
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