Can a group of arcade, console, and casino veterans change social games? Spooky Cool Labs hopes so.

CEO Joe Kaminkow worked for arcade greats in the 1980s and has the Donkey Kong and 1942 -fueled anecdotes to prove it -- and has spent the last 13 years working in the casino space at industry leading manufacturer IGT.

Spooky Cool Labs: What happens when arcade vets take on Facebook

He now hopes to shake up social games by bringing in the same elements that shook up those spaces: better graphics and gameplay depth (for arcades) and better licenses (for casino games).

The studio's first title, The Wizard of Oz -- officially licensed from the classic film -- hasn't made major waves just yet. Graphically impressive and complex for a Facebook game, it's only captured 500,000+ monthly active users since it went into beta late last year, after a year and a half of development.

Still, the team is confident about its strategy. When he and his team started investigating the social game space, "We felt a little bit like when we got into the arcade market -- when games were black and white and we started to put color on them," says Kaminkow. "We think we can take this genre of gameplay to the next level... better graphics, better sound, a better caliber of entertainment."
Unity + Facebook = Better Games?Using Unity for 3D graphics and allowing players to zoom down and into their version of Oz and interact with the munchkin citizens -- the game is a city-builder -- was a necessary step to making the black and white to color leap, the team says.

Chief creative officer Brian Eddy, a Midway veteran, has a background in pinball, arcade, console and mobile games, with credits as diverse at the Medieval Madness pinball table and John Woo's Stranglehold for current-gen consoles, concurs.

"We all had the same vision. I was in the same space they were and wanted to do something bigger," he says. "We thought the user was ready for something next-level -- the next step up in graphics and presentation."

"These gamers who play these games are just as dedicated as the hardcore gamers who play Halo and Call of Duty ," he says, of Facebook's city-builder audience.

"We have our equivalency of a smart bomb -- but it's a Glinda smart bomb to kill a bunch of flying monkeys," Kaminkow adds. "We're taking some tried-and-true play mechanics and exposing it to a whole new audience of players who'd never seen anything like this before."

According to Eddy, this strategy is paying off: "We're seeing players saying it's hard to go back to those other games now."

But it's not just visuals, argues Chuck Hess, the company's CTO. The advanced tech (for a Facebook game) adds depth of play, too. "It's not a game where the inhabitants are window dressing -- they're real living entities in the world... if you want to look a little deeper you can get some extra strategy. There are things to find you normally wouldn't."

"People who love making a real creative world can go down and experience it," says Eddy. "We don't want super-hardcore, really difficult games, but these really fun elements... have really brought people to get attached to the game."
The Future: Casino Games?Even if The Wizard of Oz never attracts CityVille -style numbers -- or even close -- the company is ready to move on to its next challenge. Given the undercurrent of excitement around real money gambling on Facebook, and Kaminkow's background, can we expect casino games from Spooky Cool?

"I think when my noncompete expires in Feburary, I will begin to embrace that segment of the marketplace," the CEO says.

With custom client and backend architecture built from the ground up, Hess is confident that the developer has what it takes to continue to develop new high-end games for Facebook (and, eventually, mobile and tablet).

"We want a variety of games. I think we can build a great brand around Spooky Cool Labs," says Bob Holtzman, the studio's director of marketing.

With "full metrics, full backend, full customer service," says Kaminkow, Spooky Cool is akin to "a standalone publisher" -- and an attractive acquisition target, he half-jokes.