Matthew Rorie

The Alley's first interview is with Matthew Rorie, the Marketing & PR Producer for California-based role playing game developer Obsidian Entertainment. I asked some questions about the process of marketing and PR by game developers, and about communicating with fans and consumers in general.

1. Let’s get on with the introductions. Who are you, what is your job, what is your favourite game and your wackiest personal trait?

I'm Matthew Rorie, the Marketing & PR Producer for Obsidian Entertainment. My favorite game of all time probably hasn't been made yet, but I really enjoy X-Com and I think the death of the turn-based strategy genre is a sad thing. My wackiest personal trait is that I whistle annoyingly well.

2. As a PR / Marketing manager, what are your daily activities? How much contact do you have with developers and the games in development?

I answer a lot of email and participate in a good number of conference calls. I also take screenshots, record video, interface with the press when they have interview requests, and sundry other tasks. I have a lot of contact with the developers and the games, although my role is to mostly make their lives easier by making sure that they can focus their time on making the games instead of having to deal with press and marketing concerns.

3. What did you do when you were at Gamespot and how does it feel to see video game PR / marketing from ‘the other side’? Were there any surprises, or ideas you had about how the game companies do things that are being broken? How different are the two roles?

I was the Game Guides editor at GameSpot for three and a half years. It feels fine to see the marketing from the other side; I had seen plenty of it from my time as a journalist. There weren't any real surprises in store for me, as I had been at developers before and seen how they work. Unless you count how cool the people at Obsidian are, but that was hardly a surprise to me, as well.

4. At Obsidian, who decides how games are promoted? Who are the people that decide when to reveal what, and what level of input do you have in that process? How much input do the developers of the game have?

This is kind of a complicated question and it varies from title to title. I don't think I should reveal much about the process, except to say that hopefully we do our jobs well.

5. You were recently at E3 to promote Obsidian’s Alpha Protocol and NWN2: Storm of Zehir. What were the key facts and ideas you and Obsidian really wanted to communicate to the audience? What were some of the ways you tried to achieve this?

Well, we wanted to make sure that all of the mainstream press was familiar with the main points of AP and SOZ. I mostly stuck to Storm of Zehir, so that entailed showing off the character creation system, the party conversation system, and the overland map. The main way you try to relate information about a game is to be personable and knowledgeable, which is pretty easy if you're involved in the game and like talking to people. Beyond that, hopefully you have a game that is fun and interesting, and I think we've succeeded on that count with our current titles.

6. How successful do you think your efforts at communication were? Do you think your audience – be they fans or reviewers – got the ‘right’ kind of impression? How do you get an idea of that?

Well, we got a lot of good press coverage for both games, so I'd say that most of our attempts at communicating were pretty good. As for Storm of Zehir, we got specifically called out as being enthusiastic and fun to talk to, so that's a good way of getting an idea of how people responded to us.

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