Alternate Worlds Podcast: Justin Cinicolo, early GM for Mafia Wars
In this wide-ranging conversation, Brian Schneider sits down with veteran game executive and creator Justin Cinicolo to explore a career that spans educational toys, social games, mobile gaming, leadership, entrepreneurship, and creative production. What begins as a discussion of past projects quickly becomes a deeply personal conversation about ambition, resilience, leadership, family influence, and the evolution of game development over the last two decades.
Note from Brian:
Justin Cinicolo started out making educational games at Leapfrog, then shifted very early to Zynga and helped launch Mafia Wars on Facebook.
This was very successful. :) Justin ended up being an early GM for the project, before shifting to spearheading the early mobile studio effort.
Suffice it to say, Justin has made a ton of games, across a variety of stripes.
After Zynga, Justin helped shepherd early prototypes & team development at Pocket Gems, supporting very successful launches for Episode Interactive (still a category leader today, 12 years later, in interactive fiction) and War Dragons (a unique combination of rail shooter & 4x).
Justin went on to join the C-team at Rally Health in its early days, and more recently returned to making games.
He’s been an avid MtG player for decades now, and has great production sense as well as game design chops.
(In other words, when he’s making games, he’s in the right place.)
Topics Covered
* Early career at LeapFrog and educational game design
* Building games, toys, and interactive learning products
* Joining Zynga during the early social gaming boom
* The rise of Mafia Wars and Facebook gaming
* Product leadership and scaling game teams
* Data-driven design versus creative intuition
* Lessons from Battlestone and failed game projects
* Mobile action RPG development before the genre matured
* The evolution of free-to-play monetization
* Community-building and GameInnovation.com
* The history of game design and preserving industry knowledge
* Leadership, empathy, and cross-disciplinary collaboration
* Startup culture and rapid growth
* Creativity, responsibility, and personal ambition
* Family influences and the impact of losing a parent early in life
Memorable Moments
* Justin naming Battlestone as the project he most wishes he could revisit, describing how corporate pressure to broaden its appeal ultimately diluted the original vision.
* Stories from Zynga’s early days, including unexpectedly correcting CEO Mark Pincus during a rooftop conversation about real-time strategy game history.
* Justin recounting how he chose Facebook over other social platforms when assigned ownership of a Mafia Wars variant, helping position himself at the center of a massive industry shift.
* The creation of GameInnovation.com, a community-driven effort to document video game history that attracted more than 100,000 contributors.
* A deeply personal story about losing his father at age thirteen and learning to become self-reliant after his mother moved away during his teenage years.
* Justin identifying a High School Musical educational music game as one of the projects his father would have appreciated most because of his lifelong passion for music and creativity.
