knockknock.biz luggage tags. Photo courtesy of justinph.

I guess it's finally time for me to level up.

It was the summer of '99 when I convinced my then editor to send me on a tour of the U.S. videogame industry. When I finally returned three weeks later, my head was still spinning. I felt as though I'd seen the future of entertainment. It was then that I made it my mission to put NEWSWEEK's coverage of this growing medium on the map. I did that in print, with cover stories on the Japanese launch of the PlayStation 2 and the spread of online gaming. I did it online, with the debut of the blog N'Gai Croal's Level Up. I did it on television, with appearances on MSNBC and CNN. You all watched me push, prod, praise, scold, discuss and debate videogames across multiple media, both mainstream and enthusiast. That's because my editors were prescient enough to let me apply my talents and establish my reach beyond the magazine, from co-blogging with MTV News to writing a monthly column for Edge and more. For this, I say to them all, thank you.

Having achieved all of this, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I've accomplished what I set out to do ten years ago. And now it's time for me to take that decade’s worth of accumulated knowledge and do something else with it. After Friday March 6th, my passions will take me beyond the world of journalism. I’ll be wearing many hats on this new journey: videogame design consultant, media strategist, consumer technology reporter, columnist, blogger and, as always, provocateur. You’ll be able to keep track of my various adventures at ngaicroal.com, and feel free to reach out to me via email at ncroalbiz@gmail.com. It’s been a pleasure conversing with all of you, and I look forward to continuing our dialogue in the years to come.

Cheers,

 The redesignedGameHouse front page

The best things in life are free, or so the song goes--and that goes double for those toiling in our troubled economic times. But according to John Barbour, the recently appointed president of RealNetworks' games division, the economy is just part of the reason why, starting today, the company's GameHouse casual games site will offer a new free casual game for download. Every day. For the foreseeable future. The first title to be made available under this offer is the hidden object game Mortimer Becket and the Time Paradox, which is currently the most popular title at GameHouse.

"The gaming world has really gone through a bit of a revelation," Barbour says. "People thought games were about processing power, but it's about great games," he adds, citing the success of the Wii, the record-setting subscriber base for World of Warcraft, and the growing prominence of casual games. He reminded us that GameHouse had already announced a partnership with Capcom to bring games like Mortimer Beckett and the Secrets of Spooky Manor to the Wii; Tropix to the DS, and that it even has a WiiWare title, Boingz, going live on November 24th. (We inquired about Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network; Barbour said that those platforms could become more viable for GameHouse titles as their audiences broadened further.)

Barbour's goal is to get existing gamers to try his company's games as well as non-gamers who may be curious, but have been reluctant to try their titles out. The Web is, of course, chock full of free Flash-based games, but even though Barbour and his crew may face some challenges breaking through the clutter, he says they're up to it. "It's about the experience and branding over the long term," he says. "Someone can come to a site like ours and get quality games for free. No-one with our scale and experience is offering that right now." We're curious ourselves to see what kind of response this free-game-of-the-day offer receives.

To read GameHouse's press release in its entirety, click on the link below.

Update: Post a story, and all of a sudden, more sources jump out of the woodwork, to say nothing of similar stories from competing outlets. We've spoken with four additional sources since our original post went live, and it appears that our original source's statement that there would be an extra two days specifically set aside for the public--Friday June 5th and Saturday June 6th--may have been incorrect. We're working to pin that down, and as soon as we find out, we'll whip up another post. Separately, we're also looking to gather information about what criteria the ESA will use to admit a broader audience than it has to the previous two E3s, and to find out--as one journalist asked us privately and as many fanboys would like to know--whether the infamous booth babes of years past will make a comeback of their own. Stay tuned.

***

Level Up has just learned that after long, bruising and politically difficult negotiations, the Entertainment Software Association is preparing to announce tomorrow that E3 2009 will take place at the Los Angeles Convention Center during the first week of June--and that for the first time, E3 will officially open its doors to the public at large. According to a source close to the process, the convention floor and meeting rooms will open on Tuesday June 2nd to media and industry professionals. On Friday June 5th and Saturday June 6th, however, the show floor will open up to the public. What about the famous press conferences from Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, along with a handful of third party publishers? Our source told us to "expect a boat load of press conferences on Monday during the day and on Tuesday morning."

Internally, the ESA and its members are referring to the event as a "prosumer show," a term our source found puzzling. Presumably it refers to the ESA's intent to reach out to not necessarily the world at large, but to media, industry professionals and the most avid gamers. For while attendance is expected to rise dramatically from the 2008 show, our source informed us that the ESA is aiming to cap next year's attendance at 40,000. That's significantly less than the record 70,000 people that attended E3 in 2005, and it's also less than the nearly 60,000 people who attended this year's Penny Arcade Expo in August in downtown Seattle.

Three years ago, when the ESA decided to drastically scale back E3 in response to the annual carping about the show's cost to its members, industry scuttlebutt pegged the Four Horsemen most responsible for the original format's demise as the three console manufacturers--Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo--and leading third party publisher Electronic Arts. But as the song goes, sometimes you don't know what you got 'til it's gone, and two years of the new min-E3--first spread out over downtown Santa Monica, then as a shell of its former self back at the L.A. Convention Center--was pleasing no-one, to say nothing of publishers like Activision Blizzard, which pulled out of E3 and the ESA entirely. Clearly, something had to be done.

To read the rest of our exclusive post on the new E3, click on the link below.

 The Cars' 1978 debut album, "The Cars"

As the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises compete for the hearts and minds of ersatz rockers around the world, both sides are doing their best to lock up exclusives. For instance, there's the recently released Aerosmith team-up with Guitar Hero, an an arrangement whose exclusivity was first reported on Level Up by Newsweek writer Ashley Harris. Rock Band has made similar arrangements with bands like The Who. We asked Harris to look into whether The Cars, whose eponymous debut record was the second full-length album released on the Rock Band Music Store, had entered into a comparable agreement with Harmonix and MTV Games for Rock Band. Harris contacted Rhino Records, a division of Warner Music Group, for comment. Here's what spokesperson Jason Elzy had to say:

To read the rest of this post, click on the link below. 

Level Up has just learned that Electronic Arts veteran Neil Young has left the company for an unspecified "new project," on which EA Games label president Frank Gibeau wishes him the best of luck. During his 11 year tenure at EA, the affable Brit captained such projects as the ahead-of-its-time alternate reality game Majestic and the well-received licensed game The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Following that, Young was put in charge of Maxis during the production of Sims 2 before being promoted to vice president and general manager of EA Los Angeles, where he supervised Medal of Honor Airborne and Boom Blox. Before his departure from EA, Young was heading up EA Blueprint, which was exploring the creation of adventurous new intellectual properties with smaller teams and budgets. We're working the phones to find out where Young will land next; as soon as we find out more, we'll update you.

In the wake of Young's departure, EALA bigwig and Westwood Studios founder Louis Castle will take over EA Blueprint.

To read the the full text of the email from Frank Gibeau to the team at EA Games announcing Young's departure, click on the link below.

When Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment senior vice president Jason Hall stepped down from his post in February of 2007, Level Up was there for an exclusive first interview. The press release announcing his exit declared that Hall would enter into "a first-look videogame and feature film development deal through his wholly owned production company, HDFilms Inc," and last May, we got a glimpse at one of his first projects in an embryonic stage. The project in question was a proposed 15-30-minute "Jackass"-meets-"Game Head" television show in which Hall would alternate between interviewing/playing games with celebrities and videogame luminaries--and stunts like pepper spraying his assistant. We weren't quite sure what to make of it at the time, and not long thereafter, we put it out of our mind entirely--until February at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, where Hall jointly interviewed the Level Up staff and Geoff Keighley.

Last month, Hall invited us back to his offices on the Warner Bros lot--located in the same bungalow as those of "300" and "Watchmen" director Zack Snyder--to show us three episodes of the completed product. Titled "The Jace Hall Show," it's now a five-minute Webisodic series available for download through Crackle and Xbox Live Marketplace, and we've got the exclusive trailer for the show above. Below, in today's installment of Just the FAQs, we grill Hall about exactly what you can expect from his "Curb Your Enthusiasm"-meets-"Jimmy Kimmel" take on videogame culture.

What is "The Jace Hall Show"?

It's a five minute weekly video show that covers lifestyle, entertainment, celebrity and culture as it surrounds videogames.

Free or fee?

Free on Sony's Crackle service. You can also get it in HD on Xbox Live Marketplace for 80 points?

Are you really going to make me do the math?

That's $1 U.S.

Cool. Who's hosting it?

Uh, Jace Hall.

Duh. I knew that. Did his mother really name him "Jace"?

To read the rest of this installment of Just the FAQs in its entirety, click on the link below. 

 

On Monday, GameStop exclusively revealed to Level Up that during the first week that Grand Theft Auto IV was available in its U.S. stores, 64 percent of all copies sold were for Xbox 360 and 36 percent for Playstation 3. We sought reaction from both Microsoft and Sony to GameStop's results and our impromptu analysis, a portion of which we shared with you on Monday. Today, we're publishing our conversations with the two console manufacturers in their entirety. We spoke by phone with Peter Dille, senior vice president for marketing at Playstation. Here's what he had to say:

GameStop has exclusively provided me with the percentage split on their first week sales figures for GTA IV. According to them, 64 percent of the copies they sold were for Xbox 360, and 36 percent were for PS3. So given that Grand Theft Auto has primarily been associated with PlayStation platform since GTA III in 2001, are you surprised that the PS3 wasn't able to corral a higher share?

I'll take a couple steps back. First of all, we're not in a position to share retailer specific information. I'm not sure if you got that from Microsoft or Rockstar or GameStop themselves.

No, I got it from GameStop.

Okay. It's our experience that GameStop probably does a little bit better with the early adopter crowd. There's a larger installed base right now on Xbox 360 than on PS3. So it's not surprising that there's going to be more selling on Xbox 360 than PS3. Having said that, we're really excited about the ratio. If I had an installed base advantage of 3-1, I wouldn't be crowing too much about a 60-40 sales advantage. We think it's not as high as what GameStop's telling you, if you look at [the full picture on] the national level. They're outselling us, but not by that same margin, and it's because of their installed base lead. With an installed base lead that's close to 3-1, if you're bragging about a 60-40 software split, it's clear evidence that the Playstation 3 consumer is overindexing on GTA IV, and the Playstation brand loyalty that we've been talking about is bearing itself out in the marketplace as we speak.

So when you were looking at the release of the game, you didn't think that the history of GTA on Playstation was necessarily going to bring you guys to 50 percent parity or more [in terms of GTA IV market share]?

To read the rest of our conversation with Dille in its entirety, click on the link below. 

 

On Monday, GameStop exclusively revealed to Level Up that during the first week that Grand Theft Auto IV was available in its U.S. stores, 64 percent of all copies sold were for Xbox 360 and 36 percent for Playstation 3. We sought reaction from both Microsoft and Sony to GameStop's results and our impromptu analysis, a portion of which we shared with you on Monday. Today, we're publishing our conversations with the two console manufacturers in their entirety. First up is Aaron Greenberg, director of product management at Microsoft. Here's what he told us via email:

GameStop has exclusively provided me with the percentage split on their first week sales figures for Grand Theft Auto IV. According to them, 64 percent of the copies of GTA IV sold were for Xbox 360, while 36 percent were for PS3. Given that Grand Theft Auto has been primarily associated with Playstation platforms since Grand Theft Auto III in 2001, are you surprised that the Xbox 360 was able to corral this high a share?

I think many people have been surprised to see how well GTA IV is selling on Xbox 360 given the history of the franchise. These sales results add GTA IV to a long list of franchises that have switched over from Playstation to find a new home on Xbox 360 similar to what happened last year with titles like Madden and Guitar Hero. As you have covered on Level Up in the past, the majority of third party franchises are being developed first on our platform so they end up playing best on Xbox 360 and when you combine that with Xbox Live, we expect this trend to continue as more multiplatform releases hit the market. With that said, it is fantastic to hear that we beat PS3 two to one on Grand Theft Auto sales from a major retailer like GameStop.

Do you expect this gap to widen or narrow over the rest of the year, and why?

It's tough to say, I think GTA IV will have a much longer tail than some of the other blockbuster titles that have released on our platform. I expect that even this holiday as a lot of new console buyers enter the market we will see GTA IV remain a top title they purchase for the console. Then you also have to consider the excitement and buzz that will be generated when Rockstar starts to promote more details around the exclusive episodes coming to Xbox 360. However, it is clear that there is going to be a completely new Grand Theft Auto IV experience coming to Xbox 360 this fall and I think it is fair to expect that it is going to be a driving factor for another big round of sales of the game.

I did a little math of my own with the help of NPD, which says that through the end of March 2008, 9.9 million Xbox 360s and 4.1 million PS3s have been sold in the U.S. That's a total of 14 million units, of which 70.7 percent are Xbox 360 and 29.3 percent are PS3. When I compare this to GameStop's split of GTA IV sales--64 percent on Xbox 360 and 36 percent on PS3--it's clear that GTA IV underperformed on Xbox 360 relative to Microsoft's pre-April installed base, while it exceeded expectations on PS3 relative to Sony's pre-April installed base. What's your reaction to this, and to what do you attribute this result?

To read the rest of what Greenberg had to say, click on the link below. 

 

Before the April 29th launch of Grand Theft Auto, industry observers declared their intentions to use the sales as a way of determining the state of the ongoing battle between the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. After all, the Xbox 360 has the installed base advantage, with 9.9 million units sold since its November 2005 debut as compared to 4.1 million units of PS3 since its arrival November 2006, according to the market researchers at the NPD Group. What's more, savvy gamers would certainly know that Xbox 360 would be the exclusive home for Rockstar Games' planned-but-as-yet-unrevealed downloadable content. But the last five major Grand Theft Auto games either premiered on or remained exclusive to PS2 and PSP, and the bulk of those sales took place on PlayStation platforms. So could consumers' perception that GTA is somehow a PlayStation franchise give Sony the edge in unit sales, or at least enable the installed base-lagging PS3 to punch above its weight and take a greater share of GTA IV units sold than its market share would suggest?

We won't have a complete answer about how things shook out here in the United States until later this week, when the NPD Group releases its sales data for the month of April. But thanks to the kind folks at GameStop--North America's largest specialty videogame retailer--we've got a partial answer. According to sales information that GameStop has released exclusively to Level Up, 64 percent of the copies of Grand Theft Auto IV sold during the first week were for Xbox 360, while 36 percent were sold on PS3. Put another way, that's a roughly 2 to 1 sales advantage for Xbox 360.

To read the rest of our exclusive report about the first week sales split for Grand Theft Auto IV at GameStop, along with reactions from both Microsoft and Sony, click on the link below. 

At Nintendo's media event in San Francisco a few weeks ago, we made the acquaintance of The Game Factory publicist Damien Sarrazin. He was there to show off the first of an intriguing series of relaxation games for Nintendo's DS handheld. But as we chatted, Sarrazin casually mentioned another title that had yet to be revealed, this one involving the Rubik's Cube license. The combination of a mainstream brand and an unannounced title was too intoxicating for the Level Up staff to resist, so like Activision and Aerosmith, we locked up this announcement exclusively. We've also scored an interview with the game's developer (Two Tribes) and the owners of the Rubik's Cube intellectual property (Seven Towns), which you can peruse by clicking here.

To read the Game Factory press release that will be crossing the wires tomorrow, click on the link below.

 Aerosmith singer Steve Tyler in concert

With the rising popularity of rhythm games like SingStar, Guitar Hero and Rock Band, is it only a matter of time before some acts start going exclusive in exchange for more loot. Ever since Harmonix and MTV Games revealed last year that they would be offering full-length albums for download in Rock Band, followed by Red Octane and Activision's announcement that they planned to build an entire Guitar Hero game around a single band like Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, we've wondered whether the game makers were locking up exclusive rights to featured acts. It hasn't been easy finding out, because the relevant developers and publishers have been surprisingly reticent to discuss this matter.

Still, we persevered, and with an assist from NEWSWEEK business reporter Ashley Harris, we've learned that Aerosmith is indeed exclusive to Guitar Hero for an unspecified period of time. "It's an exclusive deal for this game," Aerosmith publicist Marcee Rondon told Harris. We confirmed this with Tim Riley, Activision's vice president of music affairs, who told us through Activision PR that "I can say that we do have the band exclusively, and their catalogue should be exclusive to us beyond the one or two tracks they had licensed out to Rock Band before we made our deal." (According to MTV's Rhythm Game Track Finder, it's one song: "Train Kept a Rollin'.")

 Electronic Arts' famed "Can A Computer Make You Cry?" print ad, which departing exec Bing Gordon helped create 

Once we got wind last week of William 'Bing' Gordon's impending departure from Electronic Arts, we quickly sought a pre-briefing, to which the PR teams at both Electronic Arts and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers graciously assented. We spoke by phone yesterday evening with Gordon, whose laconic California drawl belies one of the industry's most colorful and outspoken characters. Last night's chat, however, found him in a more contemplative mood, as he looked back at his tenure at EA--where he's credited with everything from creating the EA Sports brand to founding EA's studio system--and forward at the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead as he enters the dizzying world of venture capital. To give you a sample of our conversation as quickly as possible, we've given Gordon the Just the FAQs treatment, but we plan to publish a more complete Q&A from our wide-ranging conversation in the days to come.

Why did Gordon decide to leave Electronic Arts for Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers?

Three reasons. First, he's comfortable with the partners at Kleiner Perkins. "I've known the leading partners at Kleiner since John Doerr and Brook Byers made a founding investment in Electronic Arts in '82," Gordon told us. "Then Brook went on the board, and Brook was kind of the cool guy on the board; deeply believes in entertainment and entrepreneurial possibilities. So he shaped my thinking about what a board member can be."

Over the last decade, Gordon has stopped by Kleiner Perkins from time to time to see what they've been up to. This, he says, resulted in him being invited to join the boards of such Kleiner Perkins investments as Amazon and Audible. "I kind of have 25 years with them. Like 'em; get my best reading list from them. So that's kind of the first thing: long experience and love for the Kleiner way of doing things."

What's the second reason?

With an empty nest looming as his daughters go off to college, he's been wondering about the second act in his American life. "I've got 15 more years to do something—might be cool to do something else" says Gordon of his thought process. "The first thing that popped into my head was Kleiner. Just unbidden, popped into my mind."

And the third?

To read the rest of today's installment of Just the FAQs, click on the link below.

 Bing Gordon (far right) pictured with Jeff Bezos, Will Wright and Robin Williams,  courtesy valleywag.com 

The renowned venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers has just announced something that we learned late last week. Electronic Arts chief creative officer William 'Bing' Gordon will join Kleiner Perkins as a partner in June, serving alongside such luminaries as John Doerr, Bill Joy and Al Gore. According to Gordon, with whom we spoke by phone on Sunday evening, the first week of June will be his last at EA before starting at Kleiner Perkins on June 9th. "Being on campus with young people in videogame classes; seeing what they're interested in; seeing what's going on with the Internet turning into new kinds of platforms, from iPhone to Facebook and Amazon Web Services--I've gotten fired up about an all-new ride," Gordon told us when we asked why he was moving on from the company that he helped build into a global power.

That's not all the generally outspoken Gordon had to say. To read our Just the FAQs post with chunks of our conversation, click here. To read Kleiner Perkins' press release announcing his joining the firm, click on the link below.

 Bill Trinen and Shigeru Miyamoto show Wii Fit to journalists last week in NYC

Last Wednesday, the Level Up staff and one of its colleagues, health writer Anne Underwood, made the two-block trek to the Le Parker Meridien hotel for a private demonstration of Nintendo's upcoming exercise game, Wii Fit. Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America executive vice president of sales and marketing and self-proclaimed "Miyamoto groupie" (more on that in a future Page 110 report) was among our gracious hosts, which put us in a VIP kind of mood. But the star of the show was product marketing manager Bill Trinen, best known as He Who Translates Miyamoto Into English. But until Wii Fit is finally released in North America, he should be known as The Fittest Man In Videogames, for demonstrating how the "game" works at various events.

Asked if we had experienced Wii Fit at previous events, we responded affirmatively, leaving Trinen to demo it and Underwood to try it out, freeing ourselves up to sample the delicious oatmeal raisin cookies that were so incongruously being made available during our preview session of a fitness game. Strange, that. But oh, so tasty.

Despite our reluctance to get our sweat on in front of witnesses, we nevertheless managed to elicit one exclusive scooplet when we asked Trinen whether there were any features that had been added to the North American version of Wii Fit following its Japanese release last year.

To read the rest of this installment of Page 110, click on the link below.

 

Whether it's the Knicks and the Lakers, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the L.A. Dodgers or Biggie and Tupac, there's always been a rivalry between New York and California. But when it comes to videogames, NY might as well be bringing a knife to a gunfight. Sure, we've got Take-Two, or as we like to call it, The House That Rockstar Built. There's Vicarious Visions, those masters of handheld development. Kaos Studios, which worked on Battlefield for EA and just did Frontlines: Fuel of War for THQ, is also located in our fair state, as are smaller developers like Gamelab, which brought us Diner Dash.

But compared to Northern California (Electronic Arts, Lucasarts, Sega and Namco's U.S. HQs, etc.), which even stole 2K Games from us, and Southern California (Activision, THQ, Warner Bros Interactive, Disney Interactive, Brash Entertainment and more) and, well, it's clear where NYC's interactive inferiority complex comes from. So when we got wind that a brand new publisher was debuting not only in our adoptive state, but a mere subway ride away from Level Up's midtown HQ, we pulled out all the stops to bring you this news--and an exclusive interview with the company's CEO--first.

The publisher in question is GreenScreen Interactive. "It was initially founded by Ryan Brant, Mark Seremet and Susan Cummings," CEO Ron Chaimowitz told us yesterday during an exclusive interview at his SoHo offices. "Mark and Ryan were founders of take-Two Interactive, and Susan was at Take-Two and actually worked with Ryan to build the 2K label very successfully from zero to $400 million over four years." Chaimowitz is himself no slouch, having co-founded GT Interactive Software in 1993 and published such well-known titles as Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem and Unreal.

To read the rest of our post on GreenScreen Interactive as well as the full text of the company's press release, click on the link below.