Last week I flew back to the US in order to undertake a Bad Day LA preview press tour. I’d had intentions to write a daily update of the tour but just couldn’t find the time or energy. Anyway… better late than never.

Behind the scenes the tour actually began several weeks before my flight out of Hong Kong. The development team worked furiously to make lots of last minute fixes to critical areas of the game. Emails flew back and forth on topics such as scheduling and strategy. Essentially there is a great mess of noise and confusion, a sense of urgency, a rush to deliver, and then… a simple calendar and a disc with the game and some assets.

I packed my bags…

This is how you bring WMDs into the US from China. Nail clippers. Deadliest of destructive forces. Note the florescent pink packaging, a certain indicator of the awful forces contained within.

So to the airport. On the way there, a quick aside. I think it is important to point out how *easy* it is to enter and exit Hong Kong, and for that matter China. Hong Kong features an awesome express train that travels from the heart of the Central district straight to the airport. You check your bags *before* you’re even within 50 miles of the airport. They vanish, not to be seen again until they tumble off the baggage-go-round at your destination. Same feeling with you, the passenger. Taxi->train->plane. That simple. That is UNLESS you happen to be going to the land of the free, the home of the paranoid. In that case, do NOT effortlessly check bags, do NOT go straight to your departure gate. Instead, lug said bags to the airport, stand in a half-hour x-ray line, then standing in another half-hour ticket line, THEN go to your gate. Whatever, I still brought deadly nail clippers. I blame these guys:

Back to the PR tour.
So the basic idea of a press tour like this is to introduce the press to your product in the hopes that they will say nice things about it and, if you are lucky, write special features to help promote it. These days exposure = success. As I’ve said before, you could have the best video game in the world, but without awareness you’ve got a certain failure. Hence the press tour.

The last press tour I went on was to promote Scrapland. At that time I made some quip about some of the magazine editors in San Francisco being a little sleepy. One response I read said to expect that if showing a “boring” game. Touché. And viva la difference when showing Bad Day LA. Not only did people not seem sleepy, they were genuinely interested, freaked out, and even offended!

Here you see what a press tour looks like, basically. Offices where guys and girls who write video game magazines spend their days uh, writing video game magazines.

The basic drill goes something like this: Arrive in random city, hoping it contains a decent number of video game media outlets. San Francisco and Los Angeles are likely targets. (Don’t forget Minneapolis. In addition to housing the largest indoor mall in the US they also happen to be home to GI. Note Game Informer has some of the coolest offices in the business. They also happen to have a mind numbingly large collection of previously reviewed video games.) Then go from office to office pimping your game. Pray that people don’t fall asleep. Say the same thing over and over in every meeting, trying to act spontaneous and funny, as if you didn’t just say the exact same thing in the previous meeting. Sigh. Then move to the next appointment. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The tough thing about a PR tour (aside from jetlag and the general malaise of travelling) is being “on”. This is what that “sigh” in the previous paragraph is about. The truth is that even if you’re honestly excited about the product that you’re pitching and the people that you’re meeting with you end up saying the same thing over and over again. You tell the same jokes, you make the same references. After a while it becomes a bit automatic, although it is always adjusted a little for each audience. At the end of the day this is the whole *point* of the PR tour, to sell people on the concept of your game as quickly and effectively as possible.

In all, with the help of my trusty PR guide Kyle, I was able to hit 14 outlets in 5 days. The response across the board was the same: surprise, amazement, and serious interest. Everyone we showed the game to *loved it*. To be honest, I was a little surprised. My biggest fears were that people either would not get the humor or that the gameplay would seem overly simple. On both of these points I was wrong. The humor had every person in every meeting laughing constantly (Ok, except one guy, but we suspect he’s a republican. Sorry D.) The gameplay was met with the sorts of comments that I had hoped for, that games these days are “too hard”, “too frustrating”, and generally “not fun”. The simple gameplay in BDLA is meant to alleviate that, harkening back to simpler times. We’ll see if the response holds once these editors get a chance to play hands-on.

Outcome: The Bad Day LA PR tour was a success. I got to see lots of people that I like to see, make them laugh, and give them terrorist weapons.

Sunrise over Victoria Harbour. One good thing about jetlag is that you get to watch the sunrise while the rest of the city sleeps.

If you are interested you can check out full sized images here.

Writer Paul Rice recently wrote an article for the Spare Change News discussing the response that Bad Day LA is garnering from some homeless advocates and coalitions. Seems there is some confusion over stereotypes vs. reality, satirical social commentary vs. uninformed disparagement. Remarks from both sides in the article below…

Video Game Divides Activists
By Paul Rice
Spare Change News

A forthcoming video game has some anti-homelessness activists up in arms over its portrayal of a homeless black man caught in an apocalyptic day in Los Angeles.

“Bad Day L.A.,” currently in development, puts the player in the well-worn shoes of Anthony Williams, a former Hollywood agent who voluntarily rejects the glitz and glamour of Tinseltown to live on the streets and ignore a society he despises.

During the story, the worst possible disasters that could happen to a megalopolis like Los Angeles all occur in a 12-hour period: the release of a bio-weapon that turns people into zombies, meteor showers raining down on skyscrapers, plane crashes and a tsunami, as well as numerous riots induced by such events.

Through all this tribulation, Williams inadvertently finds himself fighting for the lives of people about whom he could care less – people who would normally avoid him at every turn.

Homelessness in the game, however, seems to be more than just a character trait. The first video game to feature a homeless main character, “Bad Day L.A.” is drawing a lot of interest from a variety of communities.

“Do we really want our children to see homeless people as gun-toting, African-American ‘wackos’ and ‘bums,’ despite the failed attempt at some veiled redeeming moral theme?” asks Bob Erlenbusch, head of the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness in a letter to city and state officials. The letter calls for Enlight Software, the game’s distributor, to cease production immediately.

Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C., agrees.

“This is really bad,” he said. “It’s a bad product probably thought up by some people who have stereotypical attitudes and beliefs about low-income and homeless people. We will do all we can to fight it.”

American McGee, the game’s designer, responds by saying that “being homeless is what gives [Anthony] his strength – it is his superpower.”

There are advocates for the homeless who would agree, like Tim Harris, executive director of Real Change News in Seattle. “Alienated homeless guy saves city and reluctantly defends people who normally wouldn’t give him the time of day,” he said. “What’s not to like?”

James Shearer, a formerly homeless person who is a co-founder of and columnist for Spare Change News, shared Harris’ sentiments.

“I’m an activist, but I’m also a realist,” he said. “And there are times when I wish these agencies would just shut up. Bob Erlenbusch is the same type of homeless activist who didn’t want to see Spare Change News survive.”

American McGee is a legendary figure in the gaming community, known for creating unusual, narrative-based gaming. His largest success to date is a game called “Alice,” which let players take on the role of Lewis Carroll’s famous fledgling as she fights her way through a twisted looking glass.

In an interview with SCN, McGee explained his decision to create a homeless main character:

“The choice came out of my initial thoughts about what sort of person would really be able to survive, alone, on the most apocalyptic day this side of Armageddon,” he said. “And when you think about it, the homeless are the closest thing you’ve got to urban survivalists.”

Questioned further on Anthony Williams’ choice to embrace homelessness rather than a rich lifestyle, McGee said: “The concept of ‘homeless by choice’ is something that is alien to Americans who aren’t familiar with homelessness beyond throwing a quarter into a cup from time to time.”

“This game is saying, ‘if you aren’t happy, you have other options. Even options that sound as insane as giving up on everything you’ve ever been told is right. Go and find your own solution.’”

Finding solutions is the only way to progress through a video game. Although “Bad Day L.A.” won’t offer a solution to homelessness, perhaps it will “start a conversation,” as McGee put it. And for some homeless advocates, that’s more than they could ask for.

Leaving Hong Kong this morning for the US. Will be taking Bad Day LA to a variety of game magazines for preview coverage.

Over the past two weeks the development team working on the project has been busting ass to get the demo levels ready. The game I’m leaving with today looks great, plays well, and is a lot of fun. Great work guys!

While on the road I’ll try to do some ‘coverage of the coverage’. It will be interesting to see the first reaction to the game from the press… especially during such a disaster focused time.

First hurdle: Getting a few dozen BDLA 9000 nail clippers past customs in Los Angeles.

A quick note to everyone who helped to raise awareness about the Bad Day LA trailer, watched it, and registered it on their wishlists: Thank You! In less than a week you helped to raise the GameStats.com popularity of the game from 0 to 29.4! For an independently developed game that has had zero marketing dollars spent on it so far that’s an awesome achievement. The game now ranks in the top 100 (at #77) in the PC Library at GameStats.

You can now download the trailer directly from these links:

Low 12mb

Med 17mb

Hi 23mb

(Please continue to send your friends over to register the game on their wishlist at GameStats.)

A big thanks to my buddy Zav for helping to compress the videos using his 3ivx front-in app called “Crush“.

Reading about the hurricane disaster, which continues to unfold in Louisiana since Katrina passed through the region, I am repeatedly struck by a “truth is stranger than fiction” feeling. For instance:

Employees at A.J.’s Produce Co. on Chartres Street in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans, spray-painted bright-red stern warnings for would-be thieves right on the sides of the building.

“You loot, we shoot!” they read. “Looters will be shot!” And “loot and die!”

“We had a few come around, but the boogie man scared them away,” said 59-year-old John Allen, who sat in a lawn chair guarding the building about 10 a.m. Tuesday. “The signs did the job.”

Link to the original article.

Citizens taking up arms against gangs of looters?! Whoa.

When I first came up with the idea of armed citizens protecting their property from looters in Bad Day LA there were a few who questioned the “reality” of this scenario. My usual response to this sort of “But is it real?” question is to say, “Reality can go out the window for the sake of gameplay.” But here we have real life imitating something that was put into the game as a background element.

(Shooting looters in Bad Day LA)

The truth is that given a large enough disaster it IS every man for himself. As much as we like to believe that our government is going to immediately rush in and save us, often times it is only our direct friends, family, and neighbours that we can rely on. Waiting for help from “outside” is often a formula for a quick end.

The constant theme in Bad Day LA is that of helping others in order to help yourself. You want to live, everyone does, but in order to do so you’ve got to do your part to help control the chaos going on around you. Only by helping each other, protecting one another, and fighting together do we get through disaster.