A brief biography of the Accursed Toys founders. Updated 17 March 2003

The Accursed Toys Founders

Three people started Accursed Toys. We published our first computer game, Boppin', for the Amiga and PC in the early 90s. We moved onto the internet at the beginning of 1995 by founding the amazingly popular Happy Puppy Games Onramp (but with a totally original look unlike what they've done with it these days. You can see the original logo here).

Jennifer Diane Reitz was the motivating force behind the creation of Accursed Toys and Happy Puppy. She's been designing games for at least 15 years now. She started with her own versions of group FRP games. When she got a Commodore 64 in 1984, she began to design games for it. She even got a few of her concepts published by the pioneer game companies. Remember Pharoah's Revenge or the Game Maker Science Fiction Library? Those were her ideas and her art.

In 1985, Jennifer teamed up with Stephen P. Lepisto, a high school friend. They worked for themselves and for other companies as finances dictated. Stephen worked with the major names in the game software community. You'll find his name on products from LucasFilms, EA, Learning Company, EdMark and many others.

The Happy Puppy Games OnRamp Founders in a posed, unnatural photo. Left to right: Stephen P. Lepisto, Sandra Woodruff and Jennifer Diane Reitz. There's a large photo too.

In 1992, Stephen, Jennifer and their family partners Sandra Woodruff and Eldenath deVilya left the Golden State to recharge their souls amidst the forests and streams outside Seattle. Stephen and Jennifer inked a distribution contract with a major shareware distributor for their arcade puzzle game, Boppin'. Disappointed with that relationship, they decided to form their own shareware distribution company to handle future releases of their games. They brought Sandra into the partnership because of her experience in marketing and communications with companies like Sony and Westinghouse Broadcasting.

Happy Puppy started its own World Wide Web page on Valentine's Day 1995. The Internet community had apparently been waiting for their arrival. The Happy Puppy Games Onramp was literally an overnight success. We were getting 1000 hits a day within the first month online. In one year, it had grown to 525,000 hits a day and over 50,000 daily visitors.

The AToys team sold their interest in Happy Puppy to Attitude Network in September of 1996 and have used the proceeds to help them develop new projects.

Stephen and Jennifer are enmeshed in the completion of a project they've had in development for over ten years. It's a never-ending FRP in the Japanese style, but in English. They also help operate and maintain the popular Japanese Anime and Manga site, Otakuworld, currently hosting about 9000 daily visitors.

Sandra started another games site with a few friends called KickAss Games but let that one go after several years. Now she's concentrating on bringing comedy back to radio.

Oh yeah, our specialized personal search engine, Cognagent™ is now complete and in extensive use on our sites.

Eldenath quietly supports all of our projects by handling the business details so her partners can create new works.