Launch Party Massacre

When it comes to the promotion of a new game, publishers basically have two options. They can either spend their marketing money on advertising campaigns and, by buying pages in games mags and banners on gaming websites, support the crazy journalists who dedicate their lives to hyping up every aspect of every new game… or they can spend the money on an elaborate launch party where the journalists will get very drunk.

The result is largely the same: journalists will love the game, or at least love writing about the game, because the party was so awesome. Oh wait, that’s not it at all. That’s what the marketing hacks think will happen. What will in fact happen is the journalists will get very drunk, say a bunch of sarcastic stuff about the game, and maybe fight each other at the venue. What they actually WRITE about the game won’t change at all.

So the people who actually have to run the magazines - the editors and publishers and advertising sales managers and such - get very angry when their staff all swans off at 1500h on deadline day to attend another pointless launch party, since the money would have - in their opinion - been better spent on actual advertising.

Anyway, this is a story about a launch party for a game that was largely about dinosaurs. It was also somewhat about shooting dinosaurs with high-powered hunting rifles, a dinosaur hunting game if you will, but really the big draw was the supposedly highly realistic dinosaur behaviours modelled by the game, which was just my kind of ridiculous. The actual name of the game is unimportant, because it would ultimately never be released, for reasons which will become apparent.

The launch party was to be held in an old wine cellar in Sydney’s historic Rocks district. For the whole of the 20th Century, the cellar had been a place of dark, earthy silence and the occasional starving death of a Hungry Mile orphan who had stumbled in there and been unable to climb the coal chute out. Now, the cellar had been fully corporatised and was just gorgeous. There were halogen lights in nooks, I’m saying. And exposed brickwork. And polished floorboards, really wide ones.

I tagged along with the staff of PC Quinine. The event promised to be interesting. The games writers, you see, are sort of one big amorphous pool of collegiate camaraderie. They work for different companies, have competing interests but really, they’re mates. But once you add in editors, art directors, and woe-betide publishers - the people who have invested in these magazines actual effort and careers and occasional equity -  things get more tense. And interesting.

There’s a strange compulsion suffered by games writers where they have to quote Hunter S Thompson every time they walk into a launch party that has both dinosaurs and lots of alcohol.

“Somebody’s giving booze to these goddamn things!” cried PC Quinine’s deputy editor. The rest of us groaned. In this case he’d got it precisely the wrong way around. The dinosaurs - or at least, the expensive full-sized puppet dinosaurs being operated by despondent NIDA dropouts in camouflaged tights - were there to give booze to us.

I accepted a Frangelico and lime from a very rubbery velociraptor with sad eyes. We experienced a brief moment, then it swung its huge rubber head away and I heard the student deep within its fibreglass torso sigh. It staggered off, no doubt wishing it were as drunk as it looked.

The publishers of the game (An outfit you’ll come to know all too well throughout the course of this book as Blind Drunk - Ed) stood on a slightly raised sort of platform thing all decked with fake jungle plants, and beamed at us. The developers of the game were, as per launch party tradition, hiding in a back room. This was because, if they just walked around in a venue full of journalists, they’d run a real risk of being asked a question. Maybe even one about their game.

I found myself in that limbo where the staff of the magazine had already rushed off to find their favourite PR hacks to toy with, and my other games writing friends had yet to arrive. So I stood alone in a sort of plastic forest glade with my Frangelico, my lime, and the Boots.

“Oh wow!” cried a very cute PR girl, probably an account executive of some description, as she rushed up to me, black plastic rimmed specs akimbo, bob haircut with bangs, and just the neatest pin-striped pant-suit. “It’s so good to see you! I haven’t seen you in ages since that thing you know at the restaurant!”

PR girls tended to speak without any punctuation except an exclamation point at the end of whatever tortured clause complex their highly trained minds had thrown out at you. In this case, there was a pretty good chance she’d mistaken me for another generically nerdy games writer, but she was very cute indeed, so I didn’t disabuse her. Well, not right away, and not deliberately.

“Oh hey… Michelle,” I said, after a discreet peek at her nametag. She was indeed an account executive, for crack all-girl PR consultancy Sulk. Being an account executive was basically a license to fact-check and photocopy press releases. Flirting with seedy games writers was covered by the “any other duties as required” clause in her contract.

“Hey!” Michelle said, raising a champagne flute filled with cheap sparkling white wine. She looked down, saw the Boots, realised she’d made some kind of huge mistake, but decided to carry on anyway. “So how ARE you! How are things GOING!”

What I meant to say was: “Really good thanks, how are you?” What I actually said was: “Oh, okay I
guess. I mean, I’m living alone in a basement apartment after my ex-girlfriend’s cat tried to eat my eyelid and my crazy ex-third flatmate escaped into the sewers and I think it’s probably driving me kind of crazy, what I should really do is move out and go and get a real job and put my life in order, you know?”
Michelle and I stared at each other in a sort of shock. She shut her mouth with a click and uncurled one finger from the neck of her champagne flute to point toward the other side of the room. I nodded in resigned understanding and she slunk away.

“My God,” said the Guerrilla Gamer as he appeared at my elbow, Toohey’s New already in hand. “Somebody’s giving booze to these goddamn things!”

“We already did that line,” I said, not even looking around. A rubbery parasaurolophus tripped over a rubbery edmontonia and fell down a short flight of steps into the venue’s basement kitchen. I knew it was the basement kitchen because I was something of an authority on basement kitchens.
“Mind the bloody animatronics!” shouted a stagehand-looking kind of guy dressed all in black as he hurled himself down the steps after the dinosaur. There was a great deal of swearing and shattering of champagne flutes and sloshing of cheap sparkling white wine.

“Awesome,” said Nintendo magazine editor L—. He and possibly-unofficial-now PlayStation editor Meatloaf had arrived hot on the Guerrilla Gamer’s slightly foetid heels. PCQ’s tech editor Reboot was over in the corner trying to convince the DJ to play some Skyhooks, but the DJ was dressed as a diprotodon and a writer from a competing magazine was shouting at him about how a diprotodon wasn’t actually a dinosaur. Then Reboot started shouting about Jukebox in Siberia and the DJ started looking like he was really regretting some of his life choices.

Now, if this whole episode seems kind of aimless and without much direction or point, that’s only because I want to capture, for you the reader, the true experience of attending a launch party for a videogame. What I need to stress here - and this really is important - is that unlike a book launch or even a film premiere, at a game launch party there is rarely any actual finished product with which to engage. There might be what we call a “beta”, a sort of half-finished version of the game. Or maybe, if we’re lucky, there’s “review code”. This is a version of the game that isn’t finished, but which has enough stuff shoehorned into it to allow us games writers to rip the heart out of the core gameplay in our reviews.

Then, the following Monday morning once he’s had a bacon sandwich and a few Beroccas to kill the hangover, the publisher looks at the bill from the launch party and then looks at the scores the game got in the various magazines, and if the publisher is smart, starts a slow but inevitable cultural shift away from letting games writers see games at all before they’ve been on sale for at least a week.
A side note here: despite the event being called a “launch party”, it is important not to confuse it with the event that is the game’s actual launch, ie the moment when shops start selling it. The launch party is more of an announcement that the developer and publisher have become very serious about probably doing the game and probably releasing it sometime maybe.

“Hello!” said PR girl Michelle, floating back into my field of vision. I blinked and snapped back to the here and now. She was a little bit drunker now, and a little bit cuter as a result. Something to do with a low-grade flush. “I’ve done the room!” she went on. “Your story about the cat that ate your face was the least weird thing I’ve heard all night so I think I’ll talk to you some more do you think you’ll get another cat!”

She was hard to parse, that was for sure, but no less cute because of it. Girl was cute, I’m saying. And who knows where that conversation over exclamation points and cheap white wine among the rubberised dinosaurs would have led? To an actual date? Maybe, but just then the staff of a rival magazine that focused on tech over games (while PC Quinine focused on games over tech) arrived, and the aggressively chain-smoking art director of PCQ spotted the aggressively chain-smoking art director of this other mag which, to keep things simple from a legal perspective, I won’t name.

They had history, this pair. It was indeed a sexual history, much as it pains me to think of art directors doing that kind of stuff. Deep-etching in CMYK, as it were. And it hadn’t ended well.

“Now now…” said the CEO of the publisher, but he was gently dissuaded from further involvement by a lit cigarette applied to the fleshy wattles that dangled beneath his fat publisher’s chin. A shocked and slightly awed silence fell across the room.

PCQ’s art director did that thing where she pointed at the other art director using the hand holding her cigarette which somehow made it all the more aggressive. “YOU!” she said. “Right HERE, right NOW!” She pointed at the floor and it was clear from the snarl on her face she didn’t want to rekindle special sexy relations with the other art director. She wanted to tear his tongue-stud out.

The publisher rose from the floor and tried to intervene again, so the other art director stubbed out his own durry on the guy’s shiny bald head. It must have hurt even more because he screamed even louder.
“All right then,” said the art director from behind his hipster glasses. “Bring it.”

PCQ’s art director then took up a bottle of cheap sparkling white wine and hurled it at the art director of the other magazine. It struck him quite heavily on the brow, and down he went. The editor of the other magazine launched himself at the gathered PCQ team with his hands hooked into killing talons, shrieking something about how nobody did that to his art director because his art director was a genius and then L— punched a passing velociraptor because a) how often do you get to punch a passing velociraptor and b) L— liked fighting. A lot. And probably thought it would be better if dinosaurs were involved.

And so one thing led to another and there was an affray and mob mentality ruled and people were hitting each other with bits of fake jungle and animatronic assemblages they’d torn off passing dinosaurs, and the stagehand guy was losing his mind running around trying to stop people damaging the dinosaurs, and the DJ was spinning mad fighting tracks, and then the developers of the game all ran out of their hidden back room and started kicking the crap out of the publisher because why not?
Michelle, the cute and slightly drunken PR girl who thought my cat story was the least-weird thing she’d heard all night, made an exciting sign to me from across the room that she’d like to get out of here - we’d been separated in the fracas, you see - and I was all about to jump right on that, but the DJ’s heavy rubber diprotodon crest was torn away and hurled with force by PCQ’s deputy editor, and it impacted Michelle with considerable speed, and she folded prettily to the floor and assumed the coma position. Probably by habit. I sighed and turned to the steps that led up to this old cellar’s street entrance.

My crazy ex-third flatmate appeared silhouetted in the doorway. He surveyed the scene of carnage. Dinosaurs - possibly, as far as he could tell, half-robotic cyborg dinosaurs with human legs and dangling, sparking electronics where their eyes and tongues should have been - filled the room. People were kicking and gouging and biting. The noise was incredible.

He opened his mouth.

“Already did the line,” I said, stomping past. “Did it twice.”

So he shrugged, and set course for the unattended bar.