Richard Wah Kan
Age: 45
Title:‘President and CEO, DreamCatcher Games
Office location: Toronto, Canada
Ethnicity: Chinese Canadian
Birthplace: Trinidad, West Indies
Current Favorite Game: Syberia
AsianWeek: If you were a video game character, who would you be and why?
Richard Wah Kan: Special Agent Raven from Traitors Gate — he’s an undercover agent who gets to travel the world taking on covert and top secret missions … Who doesn’t want that?
Going from zero to $34 million in sales in just six years is like accelerating from zero to 60 in three nanoseconds ó which makes Richard Wah Kan, to misquote Rain Man, “a very good driver.”
Wah Kan is the president and CEO of DreamCatcher Games, a Canadian video game developer and publisher which recently ranked fifth on Profit Magazine’s 100 fastest-growing companies in Canada. Watch out, Moosehead!
DreamCatcher’s specialty is the genre of adventure games, which many experts in the video game field once declared deader than Carrot Top’s career. As usual, the so-called experts were wrong. DreamCatcher’s The Adventure Company brand has become one of the most recognized in the field of PC gaming, and its franchises have won a host of awards.
Wah Kan, a 13-year veteran of the video game industry, credits his father as the man who taught him the virtues of being in charge. “He operated his own business, worked long hours and was able to provide for his family,” says Wah Kan, who claims to work for fun. However, he also admits, “Sometimes I find the time to spend with friends and family.”
Born in the West Indies, which is a pretty nice way to start one’s existence, Wah Kan’s family relocated to Canada when he was 12 years old. Wah Kan went on to engineering and became the manager of developer relations at Apple Canada. “I eventually crossed over to the dark side and became a [game] developer myself,” says Wah Kan.
When his employer closed its doors, Wah Kan took control of his own fate by founding DreamCatcher in 1996. “On a very basic level, it’s simply about survival and a will to succeed and turn a dream into reality,” says Wah Kan. “When you call your own shots, nothing compares. You live and die by your own hands.”
Wah Kan claims that his Chinese heritage hasn’t helped or hindered him in his career, saying, “I hadn’t noticed a difference.”
The turmoil-free Wah Kan is happily married, and three of his four children are attending university, with the fourth soon to follow.
Wah Kan’s goals for 2004 are typically ambitious, both personally and professionally, as he intends to “grow the business profitability further, dominate the PC adventure marketplace and learn to fly.”