snmag.com

From scrounging off minimum wage to becoming one of the most accomplished men in Hollywood today, Anthony Zuiker has made his way through a turbulent career path that has ultimately led him to success in the most fruitful manner. Zuiker is the man behind the CSI empire, which includes CSI: NY and CSI: Miami in addition to the original CSI set in Las Vegas. After everything, he is still creating and writing, with a new show in the works in addition to expanding the CSI reign with the introduction of a board game, CSI: Senses, which builds off the premise of the show.

But this latest venture into a realm unrelated to Zuiker’s directorial endeavors is actually a return to his roots. Long before he made it big with his three primetime shows, long before he even hit adulthood, he had conceptualized more than 500 board games out of pure boredom. It had been his dream to launch a toy company, so when Specialty Board Games acquired the CSI license, he said “it really clicked that I could help them in terms of the CSI part of the board game and they could help me learn the toy business.” With this enterprise, like all of his projects, he intended to be a part of every aspect of creation, “so when you see my signature on the box, it’s not just some vanity credit that you paid me a bunch of money to put my signature on it. I was up with my small team, up for a year, in my hotel room really thinking of what it would be,” Zuiker states.

The game that results from hours of toil by Zuiker and his team asks the players to solve a series of challenges that will relay clues about the killer, very similar to the design of the shows that has made Zuiker a success story. And he’s fully confident in the game he has created, just as he was convinced of the promise of Hollywood much earlier in his career – convinced enough to quit his job at the hotel immediately after getting feedback about the first screenplay he had written. His story is an inspiration, as he says, “it gives people hope that when they’re doing their job and if they have a dream that they’d like to try to accomplish, that it really happened with me, driving a tram to creating CSI.”

Even after the simultaneous success of three hit television shows, the drive that pushes Zuiker to continue to create is one that is ever-demanding. Zuiker says, “if I’m left to run free I could really over-think myself to death… [because] I’m a creator, so it’s hard for me to turn off the creative juices that flow.” With his newest creations in the works, he acknowledges his limits but knows better than to succumb to them. “If you’re good at tennis that doesn’t mean you’ll be good at ping pong. But it’s really a fun challenge.”