Well, we knew it was a lot of fun; it was just a question of convincing everyone else. Plus the high price (because of the peripheral) made for an even higher barrier to entry.

It's easy in retrospect to say "Everyone wants to be a rock star, so sure it was going to be a hit!" but that need wasn't obvious. (And in even more retrospect, the need only lasted a few years, so it was kind of fragile.)

I guess one lesson is that just making the best product you can increases the chance of it catching on; we certainly were all passionate about it and tried to perfect every facet of it. Once we got to the point where the second-to-second experience was really satisfying, we knew we were making a great game, but honestly we were still rolling the dice.