The Story

GoCrossCampus (and later PickTeams) was the flagship product of GXStudios, a venture-backed company founded by four Yale students and one Columbia student active 2007 to 2010. GXStudios was one of the early players in the online social gaming space. As a new type of massively multiplayer, rivalry-based game, GoCrossCampus (GXC) was one of the biggest gaming crazes in the college world, involving hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players and reaching millions of students. Over half of all students on many college campuses played, and GXC inspired many players to recruit friends in cafeterias and dormitories to join a virtual battle, elect commanders, chat with teammates and foes in real-time, oust spies, and attend war strategy council meetings in their basements, libraries and dorm rooms.

All of the games were team-based tournaments, typically featuring multiple teams representing different affinity groups (colleges, high schools, sports teams, geographies, etc.) facing off asynchronously (as in GoCrossCampus) or in real-time (as in AlphaBlitz and Pocket Towers). These games were fueled by team spirit, taking sports and college rivalries beyond the playing field and onto every student's laptop.

GoCrossCampus, the company's flagship game, was a strategy game of territorial conquest in which opposing schools competed online to conquer each others' campuses. With the launch of PickTeams (a team-based social gaming platform), three new real-time multiplayer games were developed. In AlphaBlitz, players raced to find the most words in a grid with the fastest team winning. In PocketTowers, teams cooperated to build defenses and send waves of attackers at others teams in a "tower defense" style of play. In DomiNation, players competed in a rapid-fire "lightning" version of GoCrossCampus, set on a number of fun, themed maps.

In addition to college campuses, GXStudios also took on the world of corporate teambuilding events. The GoCrossCampus concept was expanded into a team-based exercise specializing in connecting virtual workforces through strategy gaming, boosting office morale, encouraging cross-team communication — eventually creating a new program called GoCrossOffice. GoCrossOffice was played by employees at companies worldwide, including Google, Vivendi, Digitas and others.

Unfortunately, the recession of 2008-2009 took its toll on GXStudios as well as ad and sponsorship budgets across the board. Rather than raising more capital and rebooting the business model, the management team decided to shop assets, license their IP, and wind down operations.

GXStudios was one of the first companies to come out of the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (YEI), a Yale University entrepreneurship initiative co-founded by GoCrossCampus creators Brad Hargreaves, Sean Mehra, and Jeff Reitman. Matthew O. Brimer currently runs the NYC alumni affiliate of the institute. YEI continues to create awesome startup companies to this day.

The Team

Here are some of the people that made GXC happen:

• Matthew O. Brimer (@brimer), Founder, Chief Marketing Officer
• Brad Hargreaves (linkedin), Founder, Chief Executive Officer
• Sean K. Mehra (linkedin), Founder, Chief Operating Officer
• Jeff Reitman (linkedin), Founder, Chief Technology Officer
• Isaac Silverman (@issilver), Founder

GoCrossCampus could have never taken place without its amazing team of all-star employees, including Leyla Alieva, Gerardo Giacoman, Nick Helton, Shane Hill, Walter King, Son Nguyen, Grant Rauscher, Pete Romano, Nick Selz, Heather Robinson, Rosie Stutsman, Henry Finkelstein, Emmanuel Quartey, Drew Teer, David Rolston, and Erik Semmelhack.

GoCrossCampus also owes much thanks to our tens of thousands of dedicated players, as well as Jim Boyle, Eric Goldberg, Easton Capital Investment Group, WGI Group, Dan Googel, Mark Hammond, Phil Gillman, Kurt Schneider, Greg Costikyan, Ed Pratesi, the law firm of Wiggin and Dana and Andrew Brimer, among many others.

Our Products

GoCrossCampus (GXC)

GoCrossOffice (GXO)

PickTeams

AlphaBlitz

PocketTowers

DomiNation

Press / Buzz