I'm sipping tea at a kitchen table and playing Topiq, a new online word game. I'm in the Thousand Oaks home of Gary Dawson, who created the game.
"Get the tricky spelling? Looks like top IQ," Dawson points out.
Gary knows a thing or two about the art of games because he grew up on the sets of Family Feud and Match Game, where his father, game show host Richard Dawson, starred.
"When we were growing up, he was always into games. I think that's really how I kind of got into producing and creating games," he recalled. "They did a Password All-Stars, and when we were on Password together, we trained," he recalled. We trained for several weeks every day by playing Password at the table."
Some dads train their kids at sports; the Dawsons took their gameplay seriously.
He’s from showbiz royalty on both sides of the Atlantic. His mom was actress Diana Dors, a British blonde bombshell in the style of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield.
"I've been living this entertainment parallel universe my whole life, where here I mention my father and everyone's like, 'oh, Richard Dawson's your father?' And then I say, 'And Diana Dors is my mother'. And here they say, 'Oh, I don't know who that is.' But when I go to the UK, it's exactly the opposite: 'Diana Dors! Ooh, that was your mother!'"
He said that growing up here, he hadn't realized what a big deal she was until she wore a gold dress on the front cover of one of the greatest albums of all time.
"I think the first time that I knew she was really a big deal was in 1969 when the Sgt. Pepper's Beatles album came out. And she's on the cover. And it was like, 'wow, that's my mom.'"
His parents split when he was young; Gary was raised by Richard in Beverly Hills, and he followed in his dad’s footsteps, working in television and producing some of our most beloved game shows.
Hi game Topiq came about because, after years of creating games for other people, someone close to his heart asked if he could also create a game for her to play.
"My wife really loves word games," Dawson explained. "We'd heard about the guy who invented Wordle, Josh Wardle. He created the game for his partner during the pandemic. My wife thought that was the most romantic thing. She reminded me that in 30-plus years of creating game shows, I'd never actually created a game for her. That got me thinking, maybe this could be a fun mobile game. So I thought, yes, let's do it!"
He added, "And by the way, she handily beats me at the game just about every day."
Word games like Wordle are played by tens of millions of people daily, and Gary says they're a fun, free way to exercise your brain and connect with others.
"Games are part of our DNA," he said. "You don't have to tell a small child. You don't have to teach it a game. They'll make their own games up. Your brain will thank you."
