Business student headed for video game success

Nicholas Laborde can envision a world where humans, born away from this planet, leave their colony to find out what happened to the rest of us. And it's dangerous out there.

You have to elude attackers and collect weaponry parts and build an armada of support, all while evading terrors, such as a black hole — and you don't want to go there. No, sir.

There's this, too: All this has already happened, back in the 1980s.

Student formed his own company

Laborde, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette senior from Pineville, heads his own video game company, Raconteur Games, and the setting and circumstances above are all part of "Close Order," a game he and his colleagues are developing for the video game market. It's due for early access release next month on Steam, which he described as "basically iTunes for games."

The idea for early access is to sell the game at a discounted price, get feedback from those who play it and then, using those consumers' suggestions, improve the game before its ultimate release in late 2015, just before Laborde's graduation. That's the "lean" start-up method, he said: build it, measure it, learn from the feedback. Repeat.

Here's the world that Laborde, a B.I. Moody III College of Business honors student has created for himself back here on Planet Earth: He enrolled at UL determined to release a video game before he was through. Over the past 18 months, he and an ever-changing cast of colleagues have taken the project from concept to near market.

Colleagues met in Lafayette

He and his colleagues have brainstormed and developed the project mostly through Skype, although recently five of the seven — the others come from Georgia, Virginia, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois and Pennsylvania — met for a fruitful week of collaboration at the LITE Center at UL, which has catapulted his project into the before-graduation timeline he'd planned. The others in the group include a composer, two artists and three programmers.

Of the seven, only Laborde, the project manager, is an original team member. Others have contributed and moved on, taking on new projects or developing new interests. But Laborde, who has been playing video games since he was 4, had the initiative to launch this project and see it through.

He's had some help along the way. In high school, Laborde was tasked with a senior project that included creating a playable demo of a game and securing a mentor. He contacted the CEO of Gearbox Software near Dallas, who in turn sent him to Aaron Thibault, Gearbox's vice president of product development. Thibault became the mentor Laborde needed; for three days during his senior year, Laborde shadowed Thibault, meeting programmers, artists, producers, sound engineers, lawyers and human resource professionals — all the types of professionals he would need in developing a project like Close Order.

He's had help at UL, too. Zachary Barker, OM's executive director and Moody College's entrepreneur in residence, took keen interest in Laborde and his project after Laborde gave a crisp and compelling presentation at OM's Rapid Pitch Night in November 2014. Listening to Laborde present the idea to potential investors, Barker was convinced Laborde could make his project work. Before year's end, Raconteur Games had a backer and $10,000 to fund his project.

Game tells a story, compelling to experts

How good is Close Order? Phil Spencer, head of XBox, played it and told Laborde, "Need to play more to build up my armada. ... Was fun."

Marcus Estrada of Hardcoregamer.com said, "I don't believe we've seen a title quite like Close Order before."

Laborde calls himself founder and "Chief Storyteller" for the company because that's what raconteurs do: They tell a story or anecdote. That story may shift from game to game, which keeps games fresh.

Laborde plays video games for at least an hour a day, both for personal relaxation and to keep current with trends in the business. As a manager, he said, he sees his own role within the company as helping others be successful. Ultimately, if the individuals are successful, the project will be successful.

His own story began with his parents, John Ed Laborde, who runs Panaroma Foods Catering in Marksville — the company that makes crawfish bread at Jazz Fest. His mother, Elizabeth Battalora, retired as a colonel from the Army Reserves and teaches nursing at LSU-Alexandria.

His single tie to UL came in the form of his grandmother, Gertrude Noel Laborde, who graduated Southwestern Louisiana Institute in 1945. He followed his grandmother to UL after seeing the bright lights of LITE.

Next step depends on game's success

Where is that personal story heading? It depends on the outcome for Close Order. If it's a success, he said, he prospers; if it struggles, he's learned a lot nonetheless. The next step is likely graduate school in business, he said, and ultimately a career in video games.

As seen in The Daily Advertiser, June 28, 2015

Photo: Paul Kieu