The creator of Scribble is David Westray. David was a film cameraman for many years working for the Australian Broadcasting Commission and later as a freelance cameraman filming documentaries all over the world. During his time at the ABC he was involved with filming children's television programmes and later on film assignments for ABC television news.

It was during this time that he became the first western cameraman to be invited into Vietnam at the request of the Vietnamese government to show how they were rebuilding their country after years of devastating warfare.

Some months later David left the ABC and went on to film many documentaries including the history of Qantas Airways. Some of his work has won an Australia Television Logie award and the prestigious "United Nations Media Peace Prize for Television".

However, the good times weren't to last forever and in the mid 1980's film projects dried up as a recession bit deeper.

It was during this time that he met up with an also out of work actor and the two of them discovered they had one thing in common, games.

Utilising the medium they were used to, videotape, they put their inventive minds together and set about creating.

By 1985 they had their first product into the market place. It was a horse racing game.
A game that involved a video tape as the central item to the product together with other game pieces packaged into a novel game box .

The main problem was how to index races and how could you play them at random.

"Paravisions" were invented and in the horse racing game a marshalling yard scene was used edited in between each race on the tape.

Now all you had to do was fast forward the video tape, stop it anywhere and speed search with picture to the next Paravision then pause the button, make sure all bets were on and play the race!

Using this idea they were ready to apply it to other videotape games.
 

Next came a world travel game.

Armchair travel had always been popular with most people around the world so Travel Bug was created.

Using the paravision technique again, this time a Qantas aircraft, players had to make their way around the world collecting duty free and travelling to countries they had picked for their game itinerary.

The game was also supported by Qantas, American Airlines and the now defunct Ansett Airlines.

Both of these games were exhibited at the London, New York and Sydney Toy fairs in 1987 and received high critical acclaim for their inventiveness.

Next came a word game idea, "Loony Letters".
It was immediately recognised for it's literacy potential, however people were getting tired of fast forwarding and rewinding video tapes while their video heads kept getting clogged speed searching to the next "Paravision".

The sun was setting on videotape games. Technology hadn't kept up with the concept of playing games sitting around your TV substituting the television for a game board.

A new media had to be invented using the television and involving a group of people all playing the game together making a games night an event.

17 years later, the technology Westray had been waiting so long for finally arrived. DVD was the ideal replacement for his old video tape games.

This time you didn't need Paravisions and there was no shuffling the video tape backwards and forwards.

A new fresh look was needed, different letters, a whole revamp of how it was played and essential DVD packaging to make it look like a movie not a traditional boxed game. All game components had to fit into the slim plastic DVD packaging therefore needing less shelf space to display it and cheaper to ship it.

No longer restricted to a 1 hour tape, the new word game was reborn and it's new name of "Scribble".

In April 2005 "Scribble the DVD Word Game" was quietly revealed for the first time at the Australian toy fair to only select buyers.

After playing just one round they needed no more explanation.
They too could see it's enormous market potential for family fun interaction but more importantly a game that could help improve children's literacy, something that is of great concern worldwide..