Parts one and two can be found here and here.
As I made my way down to the hotel lobby for dinner, I was thinking about how I really didn’t want to go to this dinner. I’m not a social person, and meeting new people while having to be professional didn’t appeal to me on a good day, much less one where I had just spent most of the day working and then took a 4.5 hour plane trip. Nevertheless, I felt it was a good idea for me to be there. I was also concerned about my outfit as I hadn’t packed for being semi-professional for one day, much less two days and I was pretty sure my “roll off of the tarmac” shorts and t-shirt ensemble wasn’t up to the dress code of the restaurant. At least I had elected to leave the monkey t-shirt at home, all four of them. I was also hesitant because, honestly, I didn’t feel like I belonged to be there. Nothing against my talent, meager as it may be, but the game reviewing thing is strictly a side gig for me. I use the money I get for it to buy Transformers and video games. The other people attending this event do this for a living. Should I have been there? I was, so it’s not like I could have changed any thing at that point, but I wonder, if I were in their shoes, and someone like me rolled up, would it bother me or would I not care at all?
I wasn’t waiting in the lobby long before I realized that my dress wouldn’t be a problem as the rest of the gaming journalists filtered in all wearing some variation on my outfit. Geek wardrobe FTW. Introductions were made all around and while I was told the name of the outlets everyone worked for, for the life of me, I can’t remember them. You hear the six names, all with some variation of “game” in them within the span of thirty seconds and see how well you do.
Once everyone was rounded up we headed in for dinner. I sat between the lead designer of the game and an editor at Team Xbox and across from the event planner. It was, literally, the best seat at the table as to the right of me I had someone to talk to about making games, to the left of me was someone to talk to about writing about games and across from me was someone to talk to about the promotion of games. Unless Ken Levine was going to pour the wine, I don’t see how it could have gotten better. It was a very fun evening with lots of good conversations. The event planner and the guy from Team Xbox were both big wine fans so they had lots of stories about wine and California which were surprisingly entertaining. I got in some really good discussions about GTA IV with the lead designer of the game. The wine was good and the food was good, although expensive. I would not be surprised if the bill for the meal was over a thousand bucks.
Now, a thousand bucks is an extreme amount of money for a meal, even a meal with 12 people present, and certainly with game developers and publisher grousing on how expensive it is to make games, it doesn’t make sense to drop that kind of cash on dinner, but in the grand scheme of things, that dinner, hell the cost of the whole event is a drop in the bucket. The original Saints Row sold around 2 million copies. If we’re conservative and say that only the first million copies were at full price, and retailers buy the game from the publisher at 50 bucks a pop, that’s 50 million bucks. If the game cost 10 million to make and promote, you’re 40 million in the black before you start tallying up sales for the second million copies. Even if the entire event cost $100k to put on, it’s such a small percentage of what they will probably bring in for Saints Row 2 that it doesn’t mean anything.
After dinner, folks were going about their evening in Las Vegas, and me being the type of guy who never shied away from wasting his money, I proceeded to get killed by the slot machines, thereby erasing any hope of making this an even remotely profitable trip.
The next day was game day. They dropped the 360 HD off in the room around 10:30 and I started to play the game. At this point, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to have happen. On the one hand, if the game was bad, I could prove to myself that these people could buy me all the steak in the world and it wouldn’t prevent me from writing my honest opinion. On the other hand, the guy I had just spent the last evening talking to was very nice and this game represented his and his team’s life for the past two years. Why would I want it to fail? This was exactly the problem I was worried about. My responsibility to the reader has to win out every time, but if the game sucked, what would I do at that evening’s co-op event? Smile politely, say something nice about it and then trash it in the preview? Be honest but make everything awkward? The mind reeled.
Once I got into the game though, I realized that my worries were unfounded. The game was very fun and offered an open world experience that was a lot different than the one provided in GTA IV. There was a distinct lack of focus, unlike in GTA IV, which I’m sure many people will find liberating even if I was somewhat put off by it due to my OCD like tendencies. Graphically it looked good, and the sound was great. It was a game that I wanted to keep playing once it got time to shut the console down and prepare for the evening’s event.
Unfortunately, by the time I got to the co-op event, I was so burnt out on playing games all day that the last thing I wanted to do was play more games. I endured though and managed to get some co-op rounds in. The evening’s event was interesting in that I could hear about everyone else’s experiences with the game, and how different they were from my own. We all had similar likes and dislikes, and I remember one guy, the guy from Gamespot, saying that he kept comparing it to GTA IV in his head. My reply was that you almost have to, because when people are making their decision to buy it, that comparison will probably be the foremost thought in their heads. Everyone seemed to like it, or was just really good about faking it.
I spent most of the night watching people play co-op and talking to the PR guy from THQ about his views on the industry and gaming in general. Once I had time, I spent about 25 minutes interviewing the guy from Volition, showing off not only my shiny, new voice recorder, but my inept interview skills. Listening to myself ask questions while transcribing the interview later on was an exercise in torture. I’m going to blame it on the alcohol. I thought it was odd that only myself and one other writer took the opportunity to interview the Volition guy. The other guy was also a freelancer, so I wonder if he too was told that he could get extra cash for an interview piece. I would think that everyone would want some time with the developer, if only to get some quotes to spice up their pieces, but that’s where I would be wrong. I can only assume that spending eight hours playing a game was more than enough material, and if most of them do this full time, and get paid salary, why put in the extra work?
Once the event was over, I was pretty much wiped out. Thankfully the THQ guy told us all that there was an embargo on the preview pieces that wouldn’t expire for a week, so that meant that I didn’t have to go back to the hotel and try and churn out a coherent piece. I was bummed out that I couldn’t go out with everyone else, but I was tired, it was late and I had to get up early in the morning. Game, set and as they say, match.
The next morning, I got up, waited in the lobby with a fellow writer while trying to get my driver on the phone and then rode to the airport with the writer from Gamespot. We had a really interesting talk in the car about how Gamespot reviews games, and about how they had just given Mercenaries 2 a pretty low score. I’m sure it was pretty boring for him, but for someone like me, a gamer who occasionally reviews games, it was fascinating. Once we got to the airport, I gave him a business card and we went our separate ways.
I’m glad I went on the trip, even if staying at home would have made better economic sense. Everyone I met was very nice and I got two good pieces out of the experience, one of which is here and one is here. The talks I had, both about making games and about reviewing games were very interesting, and not ones I could have had any place else. Even upon finding out that this writing for me was just a side gig people were real supportive and in no way made me feel like a second class citizen. Still, it was nice to take that plane ride home, even if sitting right on the wing made it so that I had to shove my earbuds deep within my auditory canals to hear The Untouchables on my PSP.
In October I’ll be reviewing the game, which means that I’ll have to start from scratch and do a lot of those eight hours all over again. A bummer, certainly, but at the same time, there’s so much to do in the game, I can take a different route and most of the stuff will be different. It will be interesting to see if my final opinion matches up with the preview opinion now that the glow of free food and drinks has worn off. If I don’t like the game, will thoughts of those I met come to my head as I’m writing some snark filled review? Maybe, but probably not. After all, I’ve been working for commercial software places for ten years now, and I know that there are a myriad of decisions that go into putting out a crappy product, many of them completely removed from the hands of those in charge of making said product, and that hasn’t stopped me yet. No reason to let a 50 buck steak do so now.
