Relate

I loved Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland. I also loved the old Romero flicks. Who doesn’t like Zombies? So when former Arena Net co-founder Jeff Strain asked us to help him announce the formation of his new studio and game, we jumped at the chance.

We worked with Strain on his Guild Wars expansion, Eye of the North and were excited to announce the formation of Undead Labs and a yet-to-be-named Zombie MMO. Yep, you heard that right, a ZOMBIE MMO! Announcing the studio and game was quite an undertaking and lots of coordination, but everyone was happy with the way it was received.

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I just read an article on Time.com about The Last Days of Cubicle Life (written by Seth Godin). It was a short blog post but there were some amazing revelations that just validate the kind of work we are doing. Seth talks about what types of work will be obsolete in 5 - 10 years. One quote really stood out for us though: 

Most of the best jobs will be for people who manage customers, who organize fans, who do digital community management. 

Guess that means we’ll have a good outlook for our business in the future! 

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We’re excited to be working with Atari on another title, that being Cryptic Studios’ Champions Online. If you know Lila and I, you’ll know that we’re both big MMO gamers. I played City of Heroes religously for a number of months on release — even running a decent sized supergroup! So we’re really looking forward to working on this exciting PC and Xbox 360 title.

I spent last Thursday in San Jose (Los Gatos to be specific) to staff a press visit for the game. I met Bill Roper and saw a great overview of the game. Of course I got to play it (and still am), but I can’t tell you about it specifically from that perspective, or I’d have to kill you.

We did just lift an embargo on preview coverage though, and the previews are starting to make their way online. I’m excited to see that they seem very positive, and not surprised to see that Character Creation is a big hit with editors. I know I spent HOURS on mine!Check out a few previews here:

Massively Character Creation

Massively Combat

Talk About Games 

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We’re back on the Ghostbusters: The Video Game train, this time with Atari. We’re excited to be working on one of this summer’s hottest releases! The game will be released alongside the updated Blu-ray edition of the movie. I remember watching this movies when they first came out and loved them. It’s amazing to see how many hardcore fans the series has. All you gotta do is look at Ghostbusters fan sites such as Proton Charging and Ghostbusters Fans. Gonna be fun ride to June 16th!

Another update — We’ve currently wrapped up our contract with NCsoft and had a great run with them working on most of the current and past projects over the last year or so. Hoping to do some more with them sometime soon, but in the meantime, that frees us up to work with other MMO projects! So if you have an MMO (or MMOs!), give us a call and we can chat about how we can help you get the word out to a whole new audience that you’re probably not currently servicing.

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I always hate starting a post with “it’s been a while since we updated our blog,” but really, it’s been a while since we updated our blog!

It’s been a busy summer for us here at Relate. We’ve been traveling for a few events, as well as added a couple of new clients. Last month I was at Comic Con in San Diego for our new client cdv who is publishing the action-RPG Sacred 2. Comic Con was a blast, got to meet Michael C. Hall of Dexter fame, clothing designer and videogame publisher Marc Ecko and other VIPs, and even played model handler along with other PR duties at the show.

Lila was recently in San Francisco helping out our new client Disney Interactive with a multiplayer press event for PURE. The new action sports game on four wheels will be out next month, and we’re helping to spread the word for Disney. It’s a fun game that’s easy to pick up and play.

So what’s up next for us? PAX at the end of August is something we’re heading down to Seattle for. PAX is always a blast for us since we stay with some friends down there and we both work AND play hard while we’re there.

We’ve also got a new client to announce shortly. We’ve just finalized the deal and are waiting until we can say something publicly. Stay tuned! Gonna be an exciting 3rd and fourth quarter here at Relate!

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As we mentioned before, one of our clients, Greenwave Games, is publishing the Deadliest Catch Alaskan Storm game, based on the hit Discovery TV show, Deadliest Catch. Well tomorrow we have an opportunity to visit the famous FV Northwestern, which is captained by Sig Hansen, as well as get our hands on, along with 50 Xbox MVPs, an early build of the game. And as if playing the game and viewing the boat that fans of the show will surely know and love wasn’t enough, we’re going to meet some of the crew members who appear on the show and partake in a veritable feast of the deadliest catch itself - Alaskan King Crab!

I don’t know about you, but *I* am excited, and will be sure to take lots of pictures and share them here later in the week.

Bon apetit!

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We’re excited to be working with Greenwave and Liquid Dragon Studios to announce the Deadliest Catch Alaskan Storm game for Xbox 360 and PC.

In case you’ve been living under a rock over the last few years, you probably have heard of Discovery’s Deadliest Catch TV show. With nearly three million viewers each week, there’s bound to be some interest in the game — and the water looks incredible.

Captain Sig Hansen put together a little video announcement for the game and more information will be coming soon.

Three screenshots are available on our Flickr site as well.

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When I read stories like this, it makes me realize why there are smart clients out there who pay PR people who actually “get it” to reach out to the blogosphere and community outlets.

So Gridskipper, a cool urban travel guide blog (part of the Gawker network of blogs), gave a scathing little review to a product called TravelKleen on its blog, way back on March 8, 2007. Well about 11 months later, I guess the TravelKleen folks finally got around to checking these newfangled sites they call search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.), and realized that this “little blog post” is ranked in the top five search results when searching for their product. The horror!

So what did TravelKleen do? They sent off a scathing, nonsensical email to Gridskipper complaining. Let me break it down after showing you the email (and after you’ve wiped the laughter tears from your eyes and settled your belly):

From: Travelkleen Date: Feb 5, 2008 6:07 PM Subject: spam? To: tips@gridskipper.com Cc: sales@travelkleen.com

Hi

What is going on?

Your comments are distasteful.

Please remove your comments from Google, Yahoo, etc.

Thanks

TravelKleen

Excuse me if this seems elementary to our readers but I have to break it down:

1. The email makes it out like it’s not written by a human, but written by the product (or company). A bit impersonal perhaps?

2. No link to the offending article. No mention of what was wrong. It was just simply “what’s going on” and “your comments are distasteful.” Oh really? Tell us how you really feel!

3. The third line really cracks me up. I mean how dense are you? Why limit the good folks at Gridskipper to cleaning up just Google and Yahoo? Don’t you want them to contact every search engine on the Interwebs and have every reference of their article stricken from their records! Maybe the search engine companies just have them all on piles of paper stored in monstrous filing cabinets in a warehouse the size of Cleveland?

It’s really beyond me how idiotic some people can be. I guess it just illustrates why people like us have clients who value what we do and how we go about things. On the flipside, TravelKeen will probably have a bunch more hits from blogs like ours on those crazy things called search engines.

(Thanks to BrotherMagneto on Twitter for the link!)

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Well it’s a new year, and it’s shaping up to be a fun, challenging and exciting time for our company. So who you gonna call …. Ghostbusters!

*cue Ghostbusters music*

Well for starters, we’re beginning to work on some Vivendi titles, namely Ghostbusters, The Spiderwick Chronicles and a few other titles (more to be announced at a later date). We’re really pumped to be working on some of Vivendi’s hottest titles, especially since we’re going to be working with one of our former co-workers, Arne Meyer. Arne, Lila and I worked as a well-oiled machine on the Microsoft Game Studios and Xbox account while we were together at Edelman. The best part about this relationship is that Arne “gets it” when it comes to community. So we’ll be well prepared to execute some some fun, creative community tactics without so much of the corporate back-and-forth that traditionally goes on.

One of the other clients we’re working with right now is a new start-up from Seattle called Fyreball.com. I really can’t go into a lot of detail about the site at this point, but will be able to very soon. The cool thing about Fyreball is that it’s headed up by Pete Parsons, who is the former studio head of Bungie (creators of Halo, etc.). Pete and I worked together over 10 years ago on the first titles I ever did PR for Microsoft. So I’m excited to be working with him again, as well as the great team he’s assembled.

Happy New Year to all! 

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Over the holidays I’ve been reading a book called “The Waterboy,” (not to be confused by the Adam Sandler movie of the same name) written by Bobby Ackles, current president and CEO of the BC Lions football club. Ackles has a long and storied career in which he began as a waterboy for the CFL’s BC Lions in the `50s. He eventually elevated his status to the managerial ranks with the Lions originally, which then included stops along the way in the NFL and XFL before coming back to the Lions in his current capacity.

It’s a great book, but what really struck me was that Ackles really understands what it takes to get support from the community and the value placed on that support. After years of poor ticket sales, financial problems and business crises, Ackles realized he needed to get the players into the community. In his book he sums it up best with this quote:

It taught me a lot about community marketing - you’ve got to get out, get involved and support others if you want people to support you.

Now there’s someone who gets it! We’ve been preaching this gospel for a while now in the videogame space and it’s nice to see high profile individuals like Bob Ackles who also understands this concept.

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