This life-size Claptrap replica lives in the Gearbox lobby where it provides companionship to both visitors and the office’s receptionist.

When Gibson entered the marketing team at Gearbox around the same time Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway was released, he found himself inside a studio that was going through structural changes. “I can’t speak for everybody at the studio, obviously,” Gibson admits. “But the impression I have is that for a lot of years Gearbox was working within the confines of the Half-Life universe. With the Brothers in Arms franchise, the confines were in making a new world plausible and authentic. So there was a lot of structure to the design, the characters and everything else.”

Witnessing the studio freeing itself from a strict structure demanded by the franchises they’d worked on, Gibson noticed that the Borderlands project proved to be more than just a creative change of pace. “Borderlands ended up acting as a catharsis,” Gibson argues. “I think a big part is the way Borderlands started and the way it ended. People were still rolling out of the strict structure of what they’d been doing for the past five-plus years.”

Having ‘the look’

Gibson and his marketing team in action with ‘Minister of Art’ Brian Cozzens (left)

Even though Borderlands started out with a strict mindset, Gibson noticed the development team gradually realized the potential of its new found freedom. “It got wilder and wilder,” Gibson recalls. “The art style bubbled up from this new freedom and everything started feeling like fun and games.”

Experiencing so many changes from a PR & marketing perspective might be hard to handle, but Gibson says otherwise. “It made my job a lot easier,” he admits, “It did!.” Everybody had to look. “One of the hardest parts of the job when trying to get people to look at games is having something that is interesting to look at. Just in the fact that we did a very dramatic change, which was perceived to be late in development, everybody was looking.” While the perception of rapid change got everyone looking at Borderlands, Gibson fully focused his efforts on showing the press and public the quality of the game.

It’s alive!

Pitchford and Gibson charting the course ahead towards a Merry Christmas, followed by a bright and prosperous 2011.

During this interview, Gibson and Gearbox President Randy Pitchford were presenting Duke Nukem: Forever to the Dutch press during the Firstlook game event in Amsterdam, taking their first step of a long and tiresome press trip all around Europe. “I remember working on a website ten or twelve years ago and thinking that this game is going to come out one day soon,” Gibson recalls. “Ten years later, I’m still working at a website thinking this game is never coming out.”

Finding yourself managing the marketing of that same project a couple of years later was summed up by Gibson in one word: “Surreal”. “I think is a lot what we say,” Gibson admits. “In our department, we had a couple of guys work on the press release to announce it for the first time. Every few minutes we’d stop and be like ‘I can’t believe I’m working on this’. To be on that flipside, is just absolutely crazy. It’s hard to describe.”

Promoting Duke Nukem: Forever, Gibson found himself in the rare situation of promoting a legend that had already touched almost everyone he met. “Everybody had a story of how they interacted with this game, sometime, somehow,” Gibson says. “Different publishers, different developers, all kinds of people passed through it. It’s been really weird running into a guy that tells me ‘Hey, I worked on that concept seven years ago. It looks completely different, but I did want to do it in a stadium’.”

Duke Rising

A towering Duke banner with a tiny Steve Gibson below it

Gibson faced a big challenge keeping everything secret during this year’s PAX gaming expo. “We knew word was going to leak that it was coming,” Gibson recalls. “But we had this panel that was on Sunday, we had an investor call the day before. All those things would point that we would make an announcement.”

The big secret would eventually be preserved until the final moment. Duke Nukem: Forever would be hands-on playable at PAX. The revelation of not only its existence, but the actual witness accounts of it being playable resulted in the game’s title topping all Twitter trends and catching the world’s attention in one big blow.

Legacy of Duke

Gibson suddenly points to a random gamer trying out the Duke Nukem: Forever demo next to us during our conversation. “This guy was 4 years old when Duke came out. He’s enjoying it, he stood in line to play it!” The legacy of Duke seems to have continued on. “Star Wars also lived on through parents down to their kids,” Gibson argues. “There are some things that people talk a lot about, even if it was from a long time ago.”

Calling the atmosphere at the Gearbox offices ‘giddy’ and admitting to having to force his own colleagues from the marketing department to go home late at night to catch some sleep, Gibson is currently enjoying a rare commodity for many PR & marketing folks out there: promoting a legend.

Cammie Dunaway saw a future for games emerge when she ran Sales and Marketing at Nintendo of America. She recently took a moment with Gamesauce to share where she’s been, her current work at KidZania and where she’s going in large part because of the games industry.

Marketing a Vision

Nintendo sparked Dunaway’s attention in many ways. “I was attracted by the vision of expanding video games outside of the traditional audience. I really responded to [Nintendo’s CEO Satoru Iwata’s] belief that everyone from 5-95 is a potential gamer,” Dunaway shares.

Dunaway’s background involves connecting with customers. She isn’t exclusive to the games industry, having also grown large brands such as Doritos and Cheetos. That valuable experience, not to mention her tenure as CMO of Yahoo!, made her appealing to Nintendo of America. Recently, she left Nintendo and was appointed the US President and Global CMO of KidZania, but she has taken valuable lessons with her.

Lessons at Nintendo

Working at Nintendo was a natural fit for Dunaway, partially because of her interest in branding, but also because of her family’s interest in games. “My son thought it would be really cool to have a Mom who spent all her time thinking about video games,” she admits. “He loved it when I brought work home!”

When Wii Fit launched, Dunaway was inspired. “Who would have imagined that a video game company could become the world’s largest seller of bathroom scales! Wii Fit really taught me that if you make something fun, you can change people’s behavior. It is pretty powerful to use gaming mechanics like achievements and unlocking content to encourage consumers to do something positive like exercise.”

Applying Lessons

The importance of learning and changing behaviors through gameplay stuck with Dunaway. When she took her position at KidZania, she had bountiful experience to draw from and special insight from the games industry.

KidZania’s parks are much like live-action video games. The company builds kid-sized cities where children learn about jobs and economics through role-playing. They can be anything from doctors, to fireman, to veterinarians, to fashion designers, and more in a real world setting. Much like games, achievements are awarded. However, there’s an added value of education when tasked with using awards. “Kids get paid for their work in our currency [KidZos] and make decisions about saving and spending,” Dunaway explains.

The parks are hugely successful in cities like Tokyo, Dubai, Lisbon, and Mexico City. Dunaway’s job is to bring them to the US, as well as to build new global revenue streams through merchandising and the web.

So far, Dunaway’s biggest challenge is seeing how quickly she can get her team built and get a park open in the US. “Inspiring and equipping kids is critical to our future so I want to get KidZania here as fast as I can make it happen!” says Dunaway.

Dunaway is excited about the potential for change and the forward motion in her career. “At Nintendo I saw the potential for education and entertainment to come together and make a difference in the world. At KidZania I get to make it happen in a very powerful way.”

Cammie Dunaway is hard at work building her team for KidZania US.

Express yourself

Julia Lebedeva and her colleagues posing with the 2010 'best TYYCON/Sim Game of the year' Great Games Award for Nevosoft's My Kingdom for the Princess

When Lebedeva joined Russian casual game developer Nevosoft as a public relations manager, she was fresh out of her job at the radio station and looking for a new challenge.

”I didn’t have much experience in this sphere, but they hired me because they wanted a creative person,” she recalls. ”A person with ideas. That’s the great thing about Nevosoft. I have experience in another entertainment sphere and my job let me bring ideas from another angle, a completely new perspective than what they were used to.”

Catering to a very broad demographic due to Nevosoft’s casual titles, Lebedeva made sure she took every opportunity to come up new ideas that appealed to the developer’s loyal customers.

The game reviewer

Julia Lebedeva in the office's studio she set up to record her game reviews in.

“The greatest thing about working at Nevosoft is that the guys, the bosses, the directors, they are really open to all ideas,” Lebedeva admits. Most recently, Lebedeva started making reviews of the games that are launched on Nevosoft’s own game portal, partially returning to the ambience of her old radio studio. “It was just an idea, I offered to do it and they said, ‘Ok, do it’. It has been pretty successful.” Lebedeva’s reviews not only turned her into a popular figure within Nevosoft.ru’s own community of approximately 600,000 Russian speaking registered users, but has rewarded her with hundreds of comments about her work by the community and thousands of views on her reviews on YouTube.

Aside from purchasing professional gear and building a small studio in the Nevosoft office, Lebedeva takes her reviewing work very seriously. The reviews consist of a weekly top three of the four games Nevosoft releases each week, which she plays extensively to write up the biggest pros and cons of each project. “I try to show it from different angles,” she says. “People appreciate this honesty.”

Social engagement

Supercow, one of Nevosoft's mascots, doing the voice work for her own game.

The Nevosoft.ru website Lebedeva publishes her reviews on has turned into a full-fledged social network of players in the past couple of years. ”They write really great reviews of games,” she adds. Her reviews have proven to not only maintain that level of engagement, but spark a lot more in the process when Lebedeva sometimes quotes users on their reviews. “They’re happy that they are appreciated, valued and it even makes them want to write better and better,” she admits. Users can blog, play and do other activities that other users can give points for, resulting in a constructive community that Lebedeva has to deal with. “I think it’s important that they have this opportunity to give each other plusses or minuses on their activities.”

Like any creative person, Lebedeva is not a fan of routine work. Talking to press and writing press releases are an acceptable part of the job, but hasn’t stopped her from looking for something that makes her proud of her work. Since her first game review video in June, the effort required to make her reviews hasn’t lost it’s flair. According to Lebedeva, one of the reasons it hasn’t become boring is the positive responses she’s received from the Nevosoft.ru community, closely reminding her of her own days at the radio station. The number of comments Lebedeva receives on her reviews and the Nevosoft development blog are easily comparable to any popular international game website. “I’m trying to make people know us and love us,” she admits.

No routine

Most PR people would be surprised by the directions Lebedeva has taken in her job as a PR manager. But after seeing the results of her work, the success of her engaging and personal approach to PR is undeniable. “There’s always something new,” Lebedeva argues. But that’s not all. Lebedeva combines her PR work with being the partner relations manager at Nevosoft. “I’m looking for non-Russian developers who want to explore the Russian speaking market,” she says.

Her work with foreign developers doesn’t stop there, since Lebedeva also does the localization for projects that need to be translated into Russian. Her love for languages and a job as a translator during her last year of college took care of that for her. “Some people just translate the words, but the context is the most important thing,” argues Lebedeva. “To localize a game, you have to play it and like it. For me, it’ a matter of honor. Russian users really hate badly translated games.” Because of the expense of professionally localizing voice-over tracks for casual games, Lebedeva is currently also considering taking on this task. “I have my own microphone, I can do it,” she says. “It wouldn’t be for the money, I just like it.” Lebedeva can’t be happier about her job, which she feels was made for her.

Developers from Mars

When Lebedeva sat down to talk with us about her work at Nevosoft, she had just given a talk at Casual Connect Kyiv appropriately titled ‘What Martians Don’t Know? Mistakes Made by Alien Invaders.’ Her talk was the result of asking herself who actually made the games she was reviewing for the Nevosoft community. As an experiment, Lebedeva counted the game credits from 50 games. She found that 95% of the developers working on the casual games for the Nevosoft.ru portal are male, while more than 83% of Nevosoft.ru’s users are female.

Based on John Grey’s famous book, Lebedeva concluded that she was dealing with developers that truly came from Mars, while all the players come from Venus. So she asked herself “How do you guys, who do not understand our logic, thoughts and needs, make games for us to enjoy?” With a strong sense that this has lead to mistakes in some games, Lebedeva decided to prove her thesis by interviewing a large group of female Nevosoft.ru community members. “I took a camera and went to the streets to interview girls,” she recounts. “Then I invited some users from our portal to our offices.” She ended up spending three full weeks conducting interviews and making videos at the office, teaching herself how to operate a camera and edit videos.

Lebedeva presented her findings during her Casual Connect Kyiv presentation a couple of weeks ago. Most of the games directed at girls that Lebedeva looked at ended up being largely based on female stereotypes and had some design mistakes. In real life blonde girls turned out not to love pink, male characters could look more cute and hidden object games could use objects which are more familiar to women instead of wrenches or other power tools. Lebedeva also stole the show at Casual Connect when she turned the tables on all the male developers by showing a video where she asked the same female community members what the game developers looked like.

All the results of Lebedeva’s inquiries are available on the Nevosoft YouTube channel.

Filtering out the ego

Hines started out at Bethesda in 1999 doing the marketing and PR together with one of the company’s artists. As his team grew into the massive department it is today, with multiple foreign offices and a global presence, Hines sought only to bring in people that have the right personality. “There are a lot of people out there with the right skillset, but we have a very specific way of doing things at Bethesda,” Hines explains. “Which is really a reflection of my way since I was the only one doing anything for a while.” With every single person Hines added to his team, he made sure that the newcomer knew his methods and was a perfect fit within the team itself. The result is Hines’ continuing legacy to the company, a well-oiled marketing & PR machine that only selects the best people fit for the job when needed, where needed.

“When the going gets tough, and it starts to hit the fan, you find out real quick who you can rely on and who you can’t,” Hines explains. ”My approach has been to find the folks that I really enjoy working with and that I know that I can trust. Who are not only smart, who are not out there to grab all the glory or have a huge ego that has to be managed. I think that has served us well in kind of keeping that same feel from when it was just three or four people.”

‘Coach’ Hines

The growth of his department not only changes Hines’ position, but his approach to his work. Once the guy who spent most of the day talking to Bethesda’s community on forums and really being down in the grassroots, things inevitably had to change over the years. “I have to accept that I can’t spend all my time doing that anymore,” Hines admits. “But I’m certainly missing that. It was something I always felt I was pretty good at and I certainly enjoyed, but I can’t run a global department like that.”

Despite all those changes, Hines is still a well-recognized figure within the international game press community. “I still stay pretty involved in the different areas that I used to manage minute to minute,” he adds. “I’m just not the one doing it minute to minute.”

Instead Hines tries to spend more time coaching and helping members of his department. In that aspect, Hines remains a strong believer in the philosophy “if you want to do something well, you have to do it yourself.” “I’ve tried to step aside and let folks take more of a lead role in a lot of stuff,” he adds.

Like Franky said

Even though the department has grown, Hines has made sure that his philosophy and approach have remained intact within his department’s culture. “I sort of do what I do and try to do things a certain way,” Hines states. “I have a personal philosophy to PR. I really try to do things that stay true to the development of the game. I really am not a big fan of the ‘cheesy.’ I am not a big fan of beating our own chests or telling everybody how great we think we are. I’m a big believer in ‘walk softly and carry a big stick’.” Though Hines never discussed his approach extensively with fellow peers, press or fans, it’s hard not to think that the attitude he has fostered within the PR department at Bethesda has become a kind of a pleasant rarity for many members of the game press to deal with. “I’ll be pretty candid about our own stuff. More importantly, I kind of tend to err on the side of providing information and letting everybody else draw their own opinions and conclusions. That’s my own take on how to do things.”

After all this time doing things his own way, Hines acknowledges there are plenty of people in the industry who do a good job in PR by constantly trying to grab the spotlight or referring to their products as the next big thing. “I just have very specific ideas of what’s right and wrong,” he explains. “I have a very strong opinion that we should never comment on or criticize anybody else’s stuff unless what we have to say is positive. I play plenty of games that are terrible and drive me crazy, but who am I to go and tear down somebody else’s product? I have my own business, I pay attention to what I’m doing and what my company is working on. I let everybody else worry about their own stuff. They don’t need me commenting on their game any more than I need them commenting on mine. I see lots of people out there commenting on other people’s stuff, but that’s just not how I think it should be done. Over the years, I think our attitude has struck a chord with folks. They appreciate that. I don’t know, maybe I should probably ask them, but it’s certainly nice to have a good rapport with the people in the industry, be that fans, press or whomever.”

Being yourself

There are certain things that Hines is not prepared to do in order to sell another copy of a game. Having a big mouth or offering his opinion unasked are two of them. “That’s not who I am and I’m not going to be someone that I’m not trying to sell products,” Hines argues. “I tend to believe that most folks can see right through what you’re doing and can tell right away whether it’s genuine.” This preference for a genuine approach admittedly reflects his desire for the rest of the industry. “Do I wish other people would act that way? I certainly see folks doing stuff that makes me cringe,” Hines admits. “Why would they say that? Why would they do that? Yet, at the end of the day, it’s none of my business. […] It’s no more up to me to tell somebody how to make a game, than it is to tell them how they should do PR.”

Sincerity sells

It should be clear by now that Pete Hines is someone who can appreciate a sincere approach to PR. “I’d like to see more folks in the industry who genuinely love games and what games are about,” Hines admits. “You can’t fake that kind of knowledge, insight and passion.[…] You can tell when somebody is talking about shooters and really gets it, versus when they’re just reading off the back of their competitor’s box and really not having a clue what the difference is between Modern Warfare and Left 4 Dead.” Hines would indeed like to see more of a genuine aspect in the general activities surrounding PR. In his own experience dealing with the public, he has realized that half-hearted attempts and the lack of any knowledge and passion to the medium is no longer invisible to the public.

According to Hines, the experience of consumers starts in the initial promotion of a game. “Your first experience with Fallout: New Vegas isn’t really the moment you put the disc in,” Hines argues. “It’s all the times you interact with the game before it comes out, whether it’s the trailer that you see or the website you go to. All of that is a part of your experience of that game. Seeing more cases where that experience is tied hand in hand with the experience of the game makes it feel much better to the fans and ultimately makes it much more effective.”

The challenge of making a game and getting it out to the public has kept Hines fascinated in his work for more than a decade. “I don’t need something entirely new or different to do,” he admits. “Every time, it’s fun, new and different. No two games are the same, even when you do the same two games in the same series.” Hines had one of his biggest challenges in the launch of Fallout 3 , which not only demanded a rather strategic approach to both the development and promotion of the game, but had him traveling the world to inform a vivid community of fans what Bethesda was doing with the game. “We had a very specific idea about how we wanted to talk about that game and present it to the public. […] It was long and exhausting, but I think it was really well executed, and I think it had a lot to do with how big the game ultimately ended up being.”

Hines recently promoted Fallout: New Vegas, developed by Obsidian Entertainment, which was released on October 17, 2010.