Santa Rosa Junior College art instructor Michael McGinnis has been developing his 3D invention Perplexus for 35 years. A cozy audience assembled Sept. 30 at the Mahoney Library Reading Room to hear McGinnis recount a journey marked by significant growth.
McGinnis grew up in Sonoma County and was a student at Casa Grande High School in Petaluma, SRJC and Sonoma State. As a child he had an interest in mazes and labyrinths and it led him to be creative. He drew mazes and built things with his friends. In high school, his interest developed into a labyrinth-structured game he envisioned in 3D for an art project. His first model was not a sphere shape, like his current design, it was a cube which at the time he called “Equilibrium Hable,” Latin for “balanced skill.”
Several years later McGinnis began teaching art at SRJC and continued to develop and improve his model. He wanted to earn more money so he decided to try to get his invention marketed as a toy. He failed to do so for many years until a student introduced him to her brother who worked with Dan Klitsner at KID in San Francisco, a company known for its invention of popular toys like Bop It. With them he began to model more sculptures and a new company called NeXT Elexctronix showed interest in his designs. He made a model for them and named it Perplexus, which has the root word “plexus” that stands for “interconnected networks.” McGinnis said it is a name that perfectly encapsulates the model of his design.
Perplexus was marketed for a short time until unfortunately NeXT Elexctronix went out of business.
McGinnis actually felt relief that the model for NeXT Electronix was not marketed for long because he did not like the design.
“I hated that version of the toy. I was given like a couple days to work on it. Never really resolved it and I didn’t like it. I didn’t want that to be what’s it about,” McGinnis said. That’s why he continued to work on more models and came up with the idea of Superplexus, a larger-scale and more intricate design.
Perplexus has been marketed by different companies since such as Tiger Electronics and Hasbro. It is played throughout the world – receiving success abroad in countries like Japan, U.K. and Germany and has won more than 25 awards. McGinnis has also received several commissions from private collectors, corporations, and museums.
The journey has not been easy. McGinnis has faced struggles finding companies to show interest in mass marketing Perplexus and even had to re-imagine the shape of one of his designs so that it could be shelved at Toys “R” Us stores.
Still the process has not discouraged McGinnis. He said the ups and downs in the game are actually a perfect metaphor for his process, “You get on and you fall and then you get on again. There’s no end. It requires failing over and over again to develop better and better stuff.”
Following that line of reasoning, McGinnis continues to work on more designs to further develop Perplexus.