Press Release Pain
Or, how we learned to stop complaining and love the spin.
It's easy for you. It's hot, you're invited to a mate's barbeque, and one of his other friends who you met in the pub once says "so, I'm a professional sheep-shearer from the mountains of Borneo - what do you do for a living?" Well, you say, I have a perfectly reasonable job that won't send attractive ladies into giggly fits, and won't provoke derisory comments from anybody over the age of 35. We, on the other hand, get to say "oh, I, er, I write about computer games for a living." Oh the stares. Oh the crippling agony of having your own eyes tunnelled through by Goldfinger-esque laser beams of pure loathing. Do they expect us to talk? No! They expect us to die! Whether it's a bloke or a bird, they'll probably find some reason not to like us. These days, we tell everyone that Eurogamer is a Norwegian, mafia-funded escort agency employing starving Danish buskers. Nobody gives a shit, and we escape unscathed.
You lot, though - we can't lie to you. And we're bloody sure a lot of you think all we do is sit around rewriting press releases all day.
While pondering this on the bog last week, we - er, well, I think it's worth dropping the royal 'we' for that one - I found myself thinking, wouldn't it be worth at least showing you just how unbelievably painful rewriting a press release actually is, and, thus, why we absolutely hate doing it and try to avoid it as often as possible? Well who cares if it is or it isn't worth it, it's happening now and you can't stop it any more than Goldfinger.
So, for your consideration, we'd hereby like to present a model press release, and draw your attention to some of the many arduous things we have to put up with every day. By the end of this, we're pretty sure you'll have a lot more sympathy for us, appreciate our witterings a bit more, and even feel less inclined to call us lucky, lucky wankers if you ever bump into us in the street. We're the bloke with the rose in his lapel talking about reflections and bump mapping.
1. The reason we are brilliant
"HOT, SUMMERY BEACH, STATE OF CALIFORNIA, USA, AUGUST 16TH, 200X - Low Thing Entertainment Inc. (NASDAQ: TWAT), a leading computer leisure software industry publisher and developer, announced today that Space Attack: Cobra - The Unicorn Incident, the ultimate science fiction action space comedy first person shooter action/adventure videogame about extinct and/or mythological animals involved in a galaxy wide interstellar conflict, is scheduled to ship in 2007 for the PlayStation 2 computer entertainment system, the Xbox video game system from Microsoft, the Nintendo Game Cube home video game entertainment system, the Nintendo Game Boy Advance portable video game entertainment device, and on PC CD-ROM and DVD-ROM special edition."
Welcome to the hated opening paragraph. Traditionally, it begins with an altogether useless piece of information about where the company laying claim to the press release generally resides. It then shoves the date at you, so you know that you should have been sent the bloody thing weeks ago, before somebody takes pity and leans over and stabs the Caps Lock key on the author's computer.
From here, it moves onto the long and aggravatingly intense journey from publishing credits and stock market references through oodles of useless twaddle about leading the industry (and the reader) up the garden path, before vaguely mentioning what the overblown fanfare is all about. Then it wastes about a hundred words reminding us in order of market share who makes the various consoles and how each is roughly referred to, and presumably what the text would say if you were bored enough to look at the sticker on the hardware's backside.
After about two months reading these things, you learn to scan an opening paragraph and gather the important facts. In this case, it's 107 words which can be summarised thus: "Low Thing has announced plans to release Space Attack: Cobra - The Unicorn Incident for PS2, Xbox, GameCube, GBA and PC during 2007." And you think that's a boring sentence.
2. The things you must include in your copy
"Featuring online gameplay modes for PlayStation 2, Xbox Live and eight player LAN or TCP/IP internet play, Space Attack: Cobra - The Unicorn Incident is set in the wartorn Retardi nebula, where the once peaceful world of Kentucki is locked in a thousand-year conflict with the dreaded Frichikken invaders from the withering Batterifarm planet. Players take on the role of Colonel Zanders, a grizzled and decorated veteran of the conflict, whose cunning tactical knowledge has led him to form a squad of rogue stealth operatives who could tip the balance of power in the galaxy for good.
During 74 action-packed, super stealth missions, players will be able to control each of Zanders' unique operatives, including Kate Flesh, the highly strung knife expert, Brad Tethers, a scarred former Jizzball player who's out to avenge his pet rabbit, and Jonathan Shandleflatch, the toughest and coolest soldier in the known universe with a penchant for heavy weapons. Each character will be able to make use of several totally unique abilities which can be upgraded between chapters and at save points. The mission system, which is completely unique, will have players completing one mission, and then moving onto another, and depending on your skill in combat, you might be able to download special upgrade cards from online servers."
You may think we jest, but this is no exaggeration: publishers honestly do tell us that things like heavy weapons experts, third person camera systems and online play are "unique". They often feel the need to emphasise this at least seventeen times in the space of a matter of words, tossing the already unhelpfully ubiquitous term around and expecting us not only to swallow it but also reprint it with alarming regularity.
It's also customary to overwhelm journalists who haven't already blacked out with all manner of instantly forgotten names for people, races, planets and devices. If that's not enough, throwing the word "intriguing" or "individual" in front of some thinly veiled excuse for "experience points system" or "collectible coins" is another option.
There isn't much more to say at this point, which is just as well really because it's time for...
Interruption: forceful telephone conversation with PR person
"Hi Tom, I was just wondering if you received our press release about Cobra this morning and whether we can talk coverage? We really like Eurogamer and that's why I've also taken the liberty of emailing you five hundred and seventy two megabytes of useless character artwork that bears no relation to the project as it is. As I know you never post boring and useless character artwork, I'm sure you'll find no possible use whatsoever for this. Now, would it be too much to ask for a full preview on this? Today? We've got a lot of info out there and you're one of our most important contacts. Got to go now mate, I'm literally rushing into a meeting with your biggest riv- my marketing team right now, but send me an email if you manage to get anything done today. I hope you do, because next week we want to fly you to Amsterdam and ply you with drugs, alcohol and naked ladies until you give our other game 95 per cent. Preview code? Absolutely not I'm afraid, but I can sit here and play it and tell you how brilliant it is without a hint of shame or disillusion. Let me know if you want to talk to the bloke who cleans the toilets on odd weekends. Ciao."
Back to the text.
3. Quotes from people you've never heard of
"Unicorn is a very popular brand and the potential marketing kickback loop synergy ker-blabby-blah is staggering," Low Thing Marketing Director, Managing Supervisor of Development Direction and Chief Bagel Overseer Kevin Lesley Adam Samson commented. "Gamers have been asking us for years to make a game which crosses over these two fantastic storylines and with Space Attack: Cobra - The Unicorn Incident we can finally offer them their dream come true. Spectrohoggyflab bedango wobber kewoppyha tekynog!"
Low Thing Development Managing Supervisor Director, Straddle Von Nob, commented: "I've always wanted to work on a game which involves shooting waves of unexciting aliens with amazing artificial intelligence and so when Low Thing offered me a job title longer than my willy I jumped at the opportunity. I'm sure gamers will react strongly and probably contemptuously when we decide to can the GameCube version and fire 87 staff days after we've told everybody it's been released."
Now, you're probably thinking that not every press release has quotes on it, or we'd see more of them! Well you're wrong. Every press release ever written ever has useless quotes from people whose job titles are so stupendous that their business cards are printed on 52 starving gorillas handcuffed together and cattle-prodded around the office and trade shows. These people often had absolutely nothing to do with the comments attributed to them, just as the press release often seemingly has absolutely nothing to do with the lump of crap that gets pressed to a CDR seventeen months later at the cost of about ninety-seven million quid. (Ninety-six million of which is spent on press trips, bribery and T-shirts that end up padding ET carts in the Nevada desert.) Generally speaking, we can just ignore this part of the release, but we have to read it anyway in case it slips in a game feature or some release date speculation, but the chances of this happening are generally very slim.
Far more likely to be worth reading is the...
4. Bit with more details that ruins whatever you've written so far
"Space Attack: Cobra - The Unicorn Incident is powered by Cabbage Patch Tools' Banal Retention 3D game engine, and the game's most significant breakthrough is the incredible, groundbreaking artificial intelligence of the Frichikken soldiers, who will literally ignore you until you start shooting them in the face with a shotgun. Their complex routines have been designed based on the actual metaphysical layout of a horse's colon, giving them unbridled authenticity and ultrasonic doowigglypuff jiggycobgibbons. This is the experience they're already calling: 'The best first person shooter action/adventure that we made up whilst on the piss since whatever game all the magazines are being paid to love right now.'"
The key to a good "bit with more details" is blatantly contradicting whatever you've already jotted down. See, most people who sit around turning press releases into news posts make some aimless attempt at producing copy as they read, hoping to cut down the agony in the long run. We generally don't, of course. Ahem. By the time they get to this section however, they realise that their two brilliant paragraphs of witty, entertaining prose are now utterly useless, because nobody mentioned up until now that the game is based on some comic, or that "the most significant feature" is something to do with advanced AI routines. Speaking of which, if you ever see a press release that doesn't mention "groundbreaking" or "unbelievable" artificial intelligence, then you've actually fallen out of our universe and you are in another one. Stay there.
Top tips for press release fans and potential bonuses
That, mercifully, is just about it, but that's not all that dedicated fans of tiring, loathsome press fodder can look out for in this day and age. There are often hidden bonuses to unlock, and nuggets of useless trivia to absorb.
One top tip, should you come across a press release in Word document form, is to have a look at the document Properties. You'll be shocked and saddened to learn that these are often written by freelance journalists in about 57 seconds, and are so old that it's obvious the magazines had them 57 months ago to make way for their lead times. Press releases are often sent out without anybody bothering to edit them at all. You can often find amusing spelling mistakes or typos, and you can be sure that nobody bothered to check if the game name is actually going to be written that way. Website operators can expect to find themselves editing old news posts, screenshot galleries and release date entries for months to come until the game finally arrives and it becomes obvious where all the commas, hyphens and apostrophes officially belong.
Oh, and you can be bloody sure that as soon as you say anything to anybody about not knowing how the game looks yet in the absence of screenshots, you'll find hundreds of the things watermarked beyond recognition all over the internet. Your PR contact will of course see what he can do, but the chances are you'll get them a day or month late. Because, let's face it, if you've got this far without phoning me up to call me an arrogant stuck up miser who just wants to upset the status quo, then you clearly aren't important enough. Oh, and airbrushing out watermarks gets you struck off PR lists. True.
ABOUT LOW THING ENTERTAINMENT
Low Thing Entertainment is something that the bloke writing this feature made up, and if it or any of the other words this press release uses bear any resemblance to any existing press releases then that's because they are all the same. This section is usually dedicated to glossing over seven straight fiscal years' worth of losses, downturns and retail surges and focusing instead on multi-vectored platform marketing strategies and other indecipherable gobbledygook that trade magazines pretend the industry cares about. Ultimately, everybody knows the score, and the purpose of the ABOUT section is to produce something directors can stick in their email signatures when arguing over porn DVD postage and packaging with Hong Kong distributors. After all, nothing says "I'll happily sue you for three quid" than a multi-million pound turnover figure and repeated use of the words "lobbying" and "synergies".
So, in future, when you see a news post that reads like a toilet roll magazine advert, just remember what we have to go through hundreds of times a month, and thank your lucky stars that you earn more money than us and have jobs that you can get away with not giving a flaming hoot about. Readers, we salute you. And PR people? We love those of you sitting there honestly thinking "I never do that." Smooch.