The biggest moment in video games

Microsoft to defend the Activision deal in court Thursday

(Excuse the subject line and image pun. I’m in a rush today!)

Microsoft is set to defend its nearly $70 billion deal to buy Activision in San Francisco court starting tomorrow morning. I’ll be freelancing stories for IGN this week and next, and will post highlights to this newsletter as well. It’s one of the biggest stories in tech and you can bet we’ll be covering it from every angle.

Xbox executives Matt Booty, Sarah Bond and Bethesda executive Pete Hines will speak in court on Thursday, as will two people for the FTC. Here’s more on the deal and why it matters.

Like back when I covered the Epic v. Apple trial and wrote extensive stories about the evidence we saw, this antitrust court case will be a way to see the inner workings of these often opaque tech and gaming corporations. More on that later this week.

Below, coming out of June’s video game conference, Summer Game Fest, I’m beginning to delve into reporting observations. I’ve also been collecting background material to pitch outlets including the New York Times, Vulture, Vice, Verge, Polygon and more, and recordings I can use for this summer podcast I’m crafting for Scientific American. All while still applying to full-time journalism jobs!

PS. Nintendo had news of its own today to share, notably that it’s working on a Princess Peach video game for the first time in decades.

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Remedy Entertainment talks Alan Wake 2, after Control’s success

In New York, Control chief writer and creative director Sam Lake sat across from me in a WeWork meeting room. We were both in the city that Max Payne and Alan Wake belong to, but Lake has imagined this city countless times in different iterations. The New York City of reality is not the one you see in video games.

“Growing up in Finland, all of the American popular culture was something that I emerged and was inspired by,” Lake said. “As an example in history, when I wrote Max Payne a long time ago, I had never visited New York. This was a kind of mystical, archetypal clarity and dream.”

In Alan Wake 2, you can play Saga Anderson or Alan Wake and switch between these two characters throughout the title, which opens up the title for players but also means that the developers had to relinquish some storytelling control. The game is a sequel that has been over a decade in the making and it’s also designed to be standalone so that you don’t need to play all the previous games, spinoffs, and downloadable content.

“Now we are looping back to that [kind of New York] in Alan Wake 2, in the sense that he is trapped in this nightmare dimension of the dark place, which is a dream reality,” Lake continued. “New York, where it’s always night and always raining, and just these shadowy figures, glimpsed at the end of the alleyway. So yeah, coming back full circle on this video game journey that has lasted 28 years.”

That was just an excerpt of my conversation with Lake, which we plan to reprise for an upcoming podcast I will be working on discussing the science of why players love horror games. I’m about to run outside of my house to give a brief talk about this newsletter, but on another occasion, I will revisit this. Part of my video games coverage has been extensive talks with creative leads of major titles. Here’s my sit down chat with the God of War director, for instance.

Throwback to Naruto of yesteryear

Decades ago, I used to wander the aisles of the now-defunct Circuit City while my mom purchased the latest camera for casual family vacation snapshots. At the front of the store was a Naruto display and a chance to play the old fighting games to beat a familiar foe or two.

Earlier this month in Los Angeles, this piece of my childhood was suddenly thrown into relief. I faced off against a Naruto producer in the upcoming title Naruto X Boruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm Connections. Fittingly, I played Naruto and he played Sasuke. To his great dismay, I somehow beat him, despite just learning all of the controls. I interviewed him as well, and I’ll return to this in another issue.

Fun asides

• Whoopi Goldberg has taken to Instagram to call out Blizzard and ask for Diablo IV to be playable on Macbooks. Watch the video here or below. “A lot of people are upset that they did not get what they were promised,” Goldberg said. Macbooks are famously known for not running most video games, but it’s entertaining to see this news make its way so slowly to Goldberg. This is arguably yet another reason why we need games journalism to exist.

• I was quoted in this Canadian broadcast report about Summer Game Fest. The reporter notably interviewed Geoff Keighley and asked him why there were no women on stage at the event, which has come to replace the historical E3 gaming conference. Keighley said there was supposed to have been one woman but she couldn’t make it, a point that Kotaku picked up and ran a story on.

  Here’s my excerpt:

  Liao notes that for the average gamer simply hungry for announcements and trailers, watching them from home will likely be enough — no matter who's running the show.

  "They don't really care if it's E3 or if it's Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest," she said. 

• I was on the Giant Bomb couch earlier this month discussing the state of the industry! Cheers to all the folks in Los Angeles I was able to see and apologies to those I missed. Please excuse my camera, which needed cleaning.

  

And now, what’s next? As I’ve observed in the past few years of doing this work full-time, video games run on a school schedule. When kids are on summer vacation and approaching holiday break, big news and titles start dropping. *Cue knuckle cracking and tying the hair back to get some work done.*

This newsletter will be going ‘choose your own adventure’ mode in the next few issues. I’ve collected so much reporting and video footage over the past few months and I haven’t had time to post most of it. Investigations and playing Tears and Diablo. What would you rather know more about? AI, trash reality TV shows starring Twitch streamers, insights from antitrust analysts are all in my reporter’s notebook. Please feel free to write in via email or in the comments or direct messages with your feedback!