Bob Glouberman: The Million Dollar Gamer Dad

Teenage Bob didn't want to be a gamer when he grew up. He wanted to be a lawyer, a career choice that pleased Mr. and Mrs. Glouberman. Bob breezed through lower education and enrolled at Stanford University for his undergraduate degree, a safe school with a high rate of producing successful young professionals. The unwritten purpose of college is to discover what it is one truly wants to do with one's life, and then, ideally, pursue it. At Stanford, Bob discovered he loved games.

For Bob, games were a hobby, at first, an excuse to get away from the stacks. But soon enough, he fancied himself an amateur game designer; not behind a computer, as one might expect, but outdoors under the California sun. He organized an outdoor scavenger hunt called BARF, short for the "Bay Area Race Fantastique."

"It was a 24-hour experience," explains Bob, "a scavenger hunt with the boundaries of San Jose to the south and Berkeley to the north. It included laser beams and it included swimming across a lake to an island to catch a greased pig. It was on a scale that had never been done before."

The point of the game, as Bob explains it, is that you never know what's coming next.

Bob began three years of studying for his degree. Bob loved L.A. Law, the one-hour legal procedural. At any moment, promiscuous divorce lawyer Arnie Becker (played by Corbin Bernsen) would knock the stacks of books off his desk and announce this week's juicy case. Such passion!

The fantasy was rubbish. Bob never knocked the stacks of books off his desk in a fit of zest for the legal system; no salacious cases came to his door. Actual L.A. law, Bob discovered, was nothing like what he watched on television. It was slow, careful, and required hours upon hours of studying in a soul-sucking mausoleum disguised as a library. The stacks of books on his desk just grew and grew and grew.

Bob fondly remembered Stanford and BARF. To get him through the week, he needed to, somehow, replicate that fun. Nintendo had a videogame console out called the NES. Bob bought one from the local electronics shop. Nights and weekends would be lost in a dark room behind a glowing television screen. Some students took up beer and pot to cope; Bob had Super Mario.

Like almost anyone who has played games as an escape, Bob Glouberman begun to consider what gaming might mean as a profession. Would it be viable, monetarily to love games for a living? Would his parents, who had done such a top-notch job steering him on the road to a white collar, ever forgive him?

Bob did what any down-on-his-luck, swinging-for-the-fences twentysomething would do. Bob went to Hollywood.

Years passed. After Bob's big day on Classic Connection, he had tried rotating through a few law firms, failing to find one that clicked. But this was L.A. - the beacon of hope. To distract him from the monotony of daily life (and perhaps to finally experience the fantasy of living inside an episode of L.A. Law), Bob began auditioning for character roles on TV shows during long lunch breaks and days off.

"I would occasionally book a job," says Bob, "but you can't really be a lawyer and work on a television set at the same time, so I would call in sick for the week. I was like the sickest associate. I came down with all of these stomach problems, I tried diseases that House would treat, diseases that would knock you out for a week but knock you out suddenly and then they would go away just as easily."

Bob lets out a laugh, and continues, "Then I had a bunch of relatives die, and my secretaries would see me on TV and go 'Hey, you were on The Wayans Brothers last night!' and I would go 'Nah, that wasn't me.'"

On September 15th, 1995, what Bob calls "one of the happiest days of his life," he quit a steady job at White and Case. It was a gamble, but he wanted to act, and game, and bring back BARF. That was a top priority. So newly unemployed Bob carved out a chunk of his time to arrange a new BARF. It would be on a shoestring budget, and limited to his friends, but that was good enough for Bob. Actor by day, alternative game designer by night.

With more time to audition, Bob's acting career picked up. On camera, his face and figure reads like the comedia del arte costume for the bumbling fool. He is the archetypal Nerd, Chubby Loser, Stranger #3. Bob's ordinary look, the casting agents noted, wasn't just ordinary. It was extraordinarily ordinary.

"I WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ATTRACTED TO BOB AS A LAWYER. I LOVE THAT HE CHOSE A DIFFERENT PATH."

His "type" also appealed to other people, for other reasons.

"I met Bob [in 1996] through a friend after I described the guy I was looking for as 'the alpha nerd' or 'the head nerd in a group of nerds' - like the Michael Anthony Hall character in Sixteen Candles," says his wife, Stefanie Klein. "My friend's boyfriend said, 'I totally know that guy.' They invited us both to a party. I told them I would go, but I did not want to know which guy they were trying to set me up with. I wanted it to be natural - not forced. I spent the entire evening talking to Bob who then left without asking for my number. It took a month and several more forced meetings for him to finally call me. He claims he thought I was not interested. Meanwhile I cried because I didn't understand why he did not like me."

Art imitates life. Over the course of their relationship, Bob nabbed five different gigs as the Awkward Blind Date, appearing across the dinner table from Calista Flockhart, Jenny McCarthy and Carmen Electra.

In 1999, Stefanie wed Chubby Loser Nerd #3.

"I would not have been attracted to Bob as a lawyer," she says. "He would have been an unhappy short guy in a suit with nothing interesting to talk about. I love that he chose a different path."

"Gaming is really his primary love if you ask me," says Stefanie. "If this were the movieSliding Doors one of his lives would have been designing video games. Since he did not choose to go down that path - playing, reviewing, discussing games fulfills that part of him."

Spending time on sets in the early 90s introduced Bob to the Los Angeles acting community. At an actor friend's weekly card game (a game the friend's family created), Bob connected with local actor Larry Toffler, a chisel-chinned man who nearly a decade earlier had been the host of Finders Keepers, a children's game show. The two bonded over their love for games of all varieties. Larry enjoyed hearing about Bob's new BARF, and finagled his way into a couple upcoming events.

"I'm perfectly content to create an amazing game and show it to fifty people," says Bob. But Larry saw the potential. In 1997, they began making it bigger. They started theming them like movies and music. Adding lasers and animals.

Around this time, CBS launched the reality television program Survivor, the game show that drops players in exotic locales halfway across the world. It shattered the traditional game show format, which had players ask questions or solve riddles from behind a podium. Survivor was a phenomenon. On August 23, 2000, 51 million people tuned in for the first season finale.

Living in Hollywood, Bob and Larry believed BARF had the potential to be a similar television show.

"We got together and said, you know, 'what can we do to supplement our acting that isn't waiting tables or tending bar?'" recalls Larry. "Something that's more conventional. And he said, 'why don't we make BARF a business?'"

With the help of their acquaintances in the business, they scored a pitch meeting with CBS.

"We thought hey, this would be a great TV show. We actually went and pitched it over at CBS. This was shortly after Survivor premiered. And we said, we think this would be a great companion show. They looked at us, and they kind of shrugged, and said, well, we'll see. And then, six months later, we saw an ad in the paper, 'Now casting! New reality show! See the world!'"

That ad was for The Amazing Race.

"It really kind of took the wind out of our sails when that happened. We kept saying, 'We should do this, we should do that.' We never really did."

BARF would, as the duo envisioned it, be a perfect daytrip alternative. Bound to appeal to couch-potatoes-cum-tropical-adventurers hoping to experience first-hand a favorite reality show. They spent two weeks in Mexico doing research, then another six weeks setting up the game. This was it. Bob's fantasy from so long ago was about to become a reality.

"Basically, the first year we got killed," says Larry. "Nobody knew what or who we were. And we had all these projections. Ships carry 3,000 people or more. All we have to do is get 1%. There were days nobody played. It just devastated us.

"I don't know if Bob shared this with you," he adds, "but Bob is a bit of a panicker. Literally, within the first month, he's like, 'we need to quit. We need to pull the plug.'"

Bob missed his wife and his two-year-old daughter.

"After the first year," says Larry, "we had a real soul-searching moment there where we were like, 'do we want to keep going with this thing or not?'"

Bob believes it was word of mouth that saved BARF. That it took some time for positive reviews to show up on TripAdvisor and Yelp. "Our product really kicks ass," says Bob. "People say, 'Oh my god, I read how good this was, and it was even better than my expectations.'"

"For better or for worse, I always think I'm the smartest man in the room," says Bob. "Most of the time, it turns out that's not true."

On the set of Who's Still Standing, Bob has stopped sweating. He's down to three competitors, having dropped seven of them through the floor in excruciatingly embarrassing slow motion.

"It's time to make a decision," says host Ben Bailey, "Are you going to stay and play for [$1 million], or are you going to take the $55,000 and walk away."

If Bob misses a single question, he will lose it all. The audience doesn't seem to care. They egg him on.

"I'm going to make a kick ass arcade for myself," yells Bob, directly into the camera. He tells Bailey he wants to exit.

The arcade is a nice addition to Bob's man cave, built for him by another television show, Garage Mahal. He spends much of his time playing games there with Lexey, who's nine now. According to Bob, she loves her Dad's jobs, and thinks he's the coolest.

"Drop me, baby!" Bob plunges through the floor in slow motion. On his face, the biggest smile. No embarrassment. Just pride. He lives for this.

Image credit: Bob Glouberman, Larry Toffler, LA Law, Who's Still Standing (NBC / Hulu)