Seven things you should know about space gamer Stuart Montaldo
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Katherine Bish
First things first: The game’s called Cogno—not Congo. “We get that all the time,” says Stuart Montaldo, Ladue native and creator of the kid-centric educational board game about space and physics. But with his intergalactic empire growing—Codebreaker, a new Memory-style game, came out last year, and he’s planning a late-2007 release for the third book in his “science-faction” series based on the characters from Cogno—Montaldo’s hoping that easily misread moniker will eventually become a household name. “One of these days,” he says, “when people say ‘Congo,’ their friends will correct them: ‘Don’t you mean Cogno?’”
1. He likes his toys sans gimmicks. Montaldo was more of a “Lincoln Logs–and–Erector Set” kid growing up, so it stands to reason that he’s not a fan of today’s Furbies and iDogs. “They build in bells and whistles,” he says, “but after you’ve played with it once, it’s a dust collector.”
2. He takes board games seriously. Monopoly was a favorite because it appealed to his “merciless” side, and he got a kick out of the multiple paths of Life, but the code-breaking game Mastermind lost its luster after only a few playings. “It was the only game my mom could beat me at.”
3. He believes in little green men. Hard to imagine that a guy who’s building a franchise around a band of misfit alien scientists might think that ET’s out there, huh? “I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t life beyond Earth,” he says before adding this comforting qualification: “I don’t think they’ve visited us, though.”
4. He’s gunning for J.K. Rowling. Already at work on the third Cogno book—the characters are on a mission to keep a roiling blob of dark matter from swallowing Earth—Montaldo says there’s plenty more where that came from. “I don’t even have a specific number of books in mind,” he says, “but it’s more than six.”
5. He’s occupationally conflicted. A born entrepreneur who sold homegrown vegetables door to door when he was 7, Montaldo wonders now whether his naturally inquisitive mind would have been better suited to science. “Cogno is my little way of doing what I thought maybe I should have done in the first place.”
6. He’s a sucker for special effects. With all the “making of” documentaries you get on DVDs today, the secrets of movie wizardry are gone, but that wasn’t the case when Montaldo saw the first Superman in theaters. “It was amazing to watch, because we couldn’t imagine how it was done,” he says. “It was just magic.”
7. He’s got friends in high places. Lest he risk feeding little consumers bogus info, he’s got some people checking his work—namely scientists at NASA and SETI who know a thing or two about physics and what life might be like beyond Earth: “These people are highly trained in everything about space.”
