David Ruck | CUBE to Red Vs Blue Gaming Centre, West Auckland

The idea started before the business did.

By this point I knew I loved building telephone-sales environments. Hotel Dynamics Group had given me the foundation, TelstraClear had shown me what happened when I challenged the accepted sales channel, and HRV had shown me what I could do when I was given a damaged team and enough freedom to rebuild it.

I had started thinking about the next step: could I ever own the whole call centre?

What I imagined was not a grey office full of people being beaten with targets. I wanted music, energy, movement, competition and people actually enjoying the room they were selling from. In my head, I wanted to run an outbound call centre almost like a dance party.

The obvious problem was that I did not have a product. At that stage I barely understood product development at all.

Then Damian told me about CUBE.

One Friday after work I was talking to Damian, an HRV rep who had joined our call-centre team. He started explaining how he had ended up working with us. Before HRV, he had owned a gaming centre in West Auckland called CUBE. It had failed, and he was trying to sell what was left of it to recover some of the loss from his bankruptcy.

The place had roughly 50 high-end PCs.

He asked if I wanted to come and have a look. I still do not really know why he was so keen for me to see it, but he invited me out to have fish and chips with him, his wife and the kids at the centre. I thought, why not? We grabbed a few beers and headed out there.

First impression

It looked more like an abandoned internet café than a gaming centre.

The computers were coated in dust. The room felt library-ish, office-ish, almost institutional. Most of the machines were dead. It did not have the atmosphere of a gaming community at all.

There were still about three kids from the local high school hanging around the place, loyal enough to keep turning up even though only one computer was working.

I was not really a gamer, but I understood online communities.

No offence to Damian. He was a nice guy with a nice family. But it became apparent to me pretty quickly that the environment did not really match the culture of the people it was supposed to attract.

I was not much of a gamer myself at the time either. What I did understand was online community. I had spent a lot of time in IMVU ↗, which was also where I had met the young woman I moved to Auckland to be with. I owned several popular 3D rooms there and understood how varied, creative and tribal online communities could be.

Standing in that dusty room, I could see two different things at once.

First, I could see a future call centre.

Second, I knew the gaming centre itself had to be brought back to life before anything else could happen.

Roger brought the machines back. We brought the room back. I renamed it.

I knew a network engineer named Roger, so I got him involved. He revived the server and got the computer network functioning again until the machines were back online.

My girlfriend and I attacked the physical space. We cleaned the place until it was spotless.

At that stage the centre was still CUBE. The Red Vs Blue identity was my rebrand. As the place came back to life, I renamed it and introduced red and blue lighting so the physical room actually carried the new identity.

I became so committed to making it work that I actually moved into the back of the building.

Three kids were all the marketing we needed at first.

Those three high-school kids who had kept coming when virtually nothing worked were the nucleus.

Once the machines came back online and the room changed, they must have spread the word among their friends because the response was almost immediate.

Within about a week the centre was functioning again. Within about two weeks every PC had some kid sitting at it.

Counter-Strike, World of Warcraft and overnight sessions.

The two games I remember dominating the room were Counter-Strike ↗ and World of Warcraft ↗.

Then we started doing overnighters. The kids would arrive with sleeping bags, drinks and piles of munchies from home and settle in for the night.

The place that had looked abandoned when I first walked through the door suddenly had a community again.

As far as I knew at the time, with around 50 gaming PCs, Red Vs Blue was the largest gaming centre in New Zealand. I have not yet found the surviving industry material to prove that ranking, but that was my understanding while I was running it.

ALT TV made the whole thing stranger, and probably cooler to the kids.

All of this was happening while I was still involved with ALT TV / ALT After Dark. Sometimes I would appear on air with our presenters, and the late-night block was exactly the sort of thing the gaming-centre crowd understood: hard-edged skate videos, metal, rap and alternative music.

So the kids at Red Vs Blue would sometimes see the guy running their gaming centre turn up on television at night.

They thought that was pretty cool.

The part that mattered later

I had found the room before I had found the call-centre product.

The gaming centre was the first thing that needed saving, and saving it happened far faster than I expected. But in the back of my mind I had never stopped seeing the other possibility: fifty networked workstations, a large room, energy, people and infrastructure.

I had been wondering whether I could ever own my own outbound operation. Suddenly I was standing inside a building that could potentially become one.

Another legend was born. Or reborn.

CUBE was Damian's failed gaming centre when I first walked in. Red Vs Blue was the identity I gave the revival.

Within weeks it was full again.

It was not a carefully researched acquisition. There was no polished business plan. It came from an HRV colleague, fish and chips, a few beers, three stubborn school kids, a network engineer I knew, my girlfriend and me cleaning the place, and a feeling that the building could become much more than what I had first been shown.

Another legend was born. Or, more accurately, reborn and renamed.

Red Vs Blue: I went out for fish and chips and found a future call centre.