COLUMN ONE : Playing to the Teen Market : Youths paid to review video games wield considerable influence over a $6-billion industry where scoring with children is key. But some older editors are skeptical about hiring kids.
Glenn Rubenstein’s video game review column reaches half a million readers each week. His radio show, the one on which he once announced “Sega sucks, and their CD games are average,” is syndicated in 60 markets. He’s recently taken a job as executive editor of a start-up magazine called Blast: “I am the head guy,” he says.
This head guy just turned 18. But video game executives three times his age can’t afford to hold that against him. From his home in Petaluma, Calif., where he lives with his mom, he’s been flown to New York, Los Angeles and Chicago by companies seeking praise for their products. An avid gum-chewer emerging from a case of adolescent acne, he’s already accustomed to limos and luxury hotels.
Crystal Dynamics has offered to put his image in an upcoming game. Howard Lincoln, who is 54 and chairman of the multimillion-dollar Nintendo of America, spent a recent Friday evening entertaining the young journalist on a press junket to a Seattle Mariners game.
Nintendo happens to own part of the team, so “We sat in that little box behind home plate,” Rubenstein recalls. “I even had a Corona!”
Rubenstein played his first video game at age 4 and started writing reviews for the local paper at 14. Now, he is the elder statesman of a pack of teen-age reviewers who wield considerable influence over a $6-billion-a-year industry--and get treated accordingly by the industry’s most powerful corporations.
Catering to this crew calls for special measures. When Sega of America offered to fly Joel Easley, 16, to Los Angeles for the introduction of its new “Tomcat Alley” game last spring, for instance, the Knoxville, Tenn., native--whose column appears in 60 Scripps-Howard newspapers--said his parents wouldn’t let him go alone. So the company put up the air fare for his mother, Mary Ellen, and got rooms for both of them at the ITT Sheraton in Cerritos. Coming up next: a Sega-sponsored trip to Disney World. Joel is trying to arrange some days off from school so he can make it.
Like kids set free after a long day in class, the teen-age press ran rampant over last month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, storming the Acclaim Entertainment Inc. booth to check out an unfinished version of “Mortal Kombat II,” demanding to get on the list for the private showing of Nintendo’s new Ultra 64 machine, scarfing down chocolate-covered strawberries and chugging beer at the after-hours parties.
“If there’s free food, I’m there, basically,” says Sean Pettibone, 17, of Troy, Mich., who publishes his own “fanzine” (circulation: 3,000) and free-lances for several game magazines. Because the show rules prohibit anyone younger than 18 from entering the exhibit hall, “a lot of us are fake I.D.-ing it,” confided one 15-year-old. “That’s off the record!”
So what if they can’t vote? It is, after all, mostly boys ages 8 to 18 who are responsible for the video game industry’s skyrocketing score in that super-realistic game called global capitalism (said by some to be more violent even than the best-selling “Mortal Kombat”). It seems only right that their generation should help shape public opinion about the products in which they invest so much of their time and parents’ money.
The teen crowd is still a minority among the video game press. Rubenstein, who keeps close track of his peers’ popularity, believes his circulation is the largest of the group. But dozens of youthful game connoisseurs write for their local papers, publish “fanzines” and post reviews on the global Internet computer network. Others free-lance for the big video game magazines.
“It’s more than what they write,” says one executive. “These are the opinion leaders for our industry. They’re the first ones on their block to get every new game, and the word on the street is very important to us.”
This youth movement is a new phenomenon. Nintendo, which resurrected the video game business after Atari flared and faded in the 1970s, didn’t come out with its first hit until 1984. Sega, whose star character Sonic the Hedgehog now is featured in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, wasn’t a significant presence until a couple of years ago. So only recently have kids weaned on cartridges and joysticks reached the age where basic grammar is not a problem. Now, they are challenging the turf of older reviewers who still wax nostalgic over “Pong”--the first hit video game, which rose to popularity about the same time as disco.
“All those guys are way too old,” says 19-year-old Andrew Cockburn, who edits the Agoura Hills-based magazine Diehard Gamefan, of his thirty- and fortysomething colleagues. “They’re still living in the ‘80s. And they’re not gamers, either. They’re just editors.”
Forget fast cars, girls and the willingness to perform life-threatening stunts to impress your peers. In the video game subculture, machismo is measured almost solely on how well you play. If you can’t rescue the princess in the classic Nintendo game “Super Mario Bros.” in 15 minutes flat, you’re not a “gamer.” And it is axiomatic throughout the industry that, as the editor of the French magazine Player One puts it: “The younger they are, the better they play.”
The rise of the post-”Pong” generation is forcing a reassessment of the “kids” among the editors and publishers who must decide whether to hire them--and among the publicity and marketing executives who must wine them and dine them.
“It definitely makes you feel the age you are, I can say that,” sighs Perrin Kaplan, 34, corporate communications manager at Nintendo. “You get in these situations where you feel like, ‘Jeez, I could be your mother.’ But you try not to think about that because it makes you depressed.”
Mostly, Kaplan and other company officials say fielding calls (sometimes dozens a day) from the zealous gang of teens is a refreshing change from fending off the cynicism of their more mature elders. Bright and ambitious, several of the reviewers are set to graduate early from high school, even as they make time for their weekly columns and dozens of hours of game play a week.
But dealing with a distinctly juvenile set of guys, many of whom haven’t yet figured out what to do with their new dose of testosterone, can sometimes be a drag. Though no one will talk about it on the record--lest anyone take offense and disparage an upcoming game--female public relations representatives say they sometimes find themselves being asked questions with which they are not entirely comfortable.
One time, a group of them discovered they were being “rated” by the teen-agers at a press event. “I think for some of these kids, maybe this is their outlet. Maybe they’re not into girls as much, and their hormones are going overtime,” observes Melinda Mongelluzzo, product publicity manager for Accolade, a San Jose-based video game maker.
Of course, such behavior is not limited to males younger than 21. And it certainly won’t keep any of the young reviewers off company press lists. Nintendo, which for years gave preferential treatment to reviewers at its in-house magazine, is making a special effort to reach out to young critics at other publications. It’s part of an image campaign to gain back market share from rival Sega.
“We are heavily influenced by the opinions of these game reviewers, just like Hollywood is by the movie critics,” says Lincoln. “One of the things I want to do is get to know a lot of people who are in the game-player magazine business, have them up to Nintendo and show them we’re just like everybody else.”
Yes, but aren’t some of them a bit, uh, unformed to be levying so much control over his business? “I’d rather talk to them than people my own age who believe they know something about the video game industry and have never played a game,” Nintendo’s chairman insists.
But Lincoln is probably just as happy that he wasn’t along on a Nintendo cross-country publicity tour last summer. Matt Williamson, a 16-year-old reviewer from Aurora, Colo., had stayed up for 36 hours playing the adventure game “Zelda” on his Gameboy before retiring to a sleeping car. When it was time to switch trains, he was nowhere to be found.
Rubenstein, also on the trip, went around chanting “he’s dead, he’s dead” until the porters broke down the door of Williamson’s sleeping car with an ax. “I was just sleeping,” Williamson recalls.
If the companies are willing to put up with the vagaries of youth, the same cannot be said for certain crusty older editors. They remain skeptical about hiring someone who has yet to pass Composition 101, simply because of his superior game-playing skills.
“I don’t think there’s an advantage in having a staff full of 15-year-olds, and I think the best writers are observably older than 15,” says Arnie Katz, the 39-year-old editor of Electronic Games.
Ed Semrad, editor of Electronic Gaming Monthly--one of the largest magazines for enthusiasts, with about 350,000 subscribers--won’t say how old he is, except that he is over 30. Most of his staffers are in their 20s and 30s: “It’s a big responsibility to review the games,” he says. “We find that it’s better to have professionals here who sit down, objectively look at the game, and make comparisons, rather than a person who might not finish it because he has a final exam coming up.”
But Andy Eddy, senior editor at rival Gamepro, based in San Mateo, says he’s been impressed with the young critics he encounters at press events. “They don’t have the life experience and some of the social grace, I guess you might say,” says Eddy. “But they seem to be very focused on what they’re doing.”
And the teens do come cheap. Williamson--who counts among his career highlights an interview with the creator of the puzzle game “Tetris”--recently quit writing for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, in part because he says they paid him $50 per column. Joel Easley says he gets $25. Matt Neapolitan, 18, who writes for Kids Today, a Gannett publication, gets $55, which means he had to save several checks for the Rollerblades he just bought.
“It’s much easier to take advantage of a kid that doesn’t know how well he’s supposed to be paid,” notes Williamson, a four-year veteran of the trade. “When I started I got $10 or $20 a week, and I thought that was pretty big pay. Then someone on the staff told me I was getting ripped off.”
Reviewers’ requests for fatter paychecks largely have gone unheeded by their publications. But for a dedicated player, access to an unlimited number of new games can do a lot to make up for low-ball cash compensation.
“Free hardware, free software. You name it, I get it,” says Easley, who sent his first column to the Knoxville News-Sentinel when his parents told him if he was going to play video games all the time he should find a way to pay for them.
The most favored reviewers get as many as 20 free games a week, plus a multitude of machines to play them on. Which raises the delicate question of ethics and young, impressionable minds. When Cockburn met the creator of “Super Mario Bros.” last month, he dropped to his knees, clasped his hands, and gasped “Thank you, Lord, for this day.”
None of the reviewers are too big on “objectivity,” but most seem constitutionally incapable of softening their criticism.
“BOR-RING,” writes USC freshman Anthony Shubert, 19, of an Accolade basketball game featuring Charles Barkley. “In all, this game does not really seem like anything worth playing. But because I like Sir Charles, I’m giving it a higher rating.” Shubert’s Game Master Journal is distributed over the Internet and the first videotaped version is now on sale.
“I used to review only games I liked,” says Rubenstein. “But now I review bad ones to make people think I’m more credible.”
They’ve all endured angry phone calls and letters from company officials who didn’t like their reviews, although most of Easley’s correspondence comes from adults inquiring about shortcuts to victory. Williamson thinks the most amusing letters are from parents asking him if a particular game was a good one for their kids.
Perhaps the purest of purpose are the teens who publish the fanzines, mostly photocopied newsletters with no corporate backing that nonetheless have strong followings. They tend to have circulation in the hundreds, they don’t get the super-deluxe treatment from the game companies, and the biggest issue among them is how much funding they’re getting from their parents. “With fandom, you have nothing to lose,” explains Andy Saito, 17, of Toronto. “We say whatever we want.”
But fanzine writers, largely on the younger end of the teen scale, are the likely Glenn Rubensteins of coming years. Rubenstein already depends on his brother, Matt, 13, for a second opinion on games. And he may be moving on to bigger and better things.
“If it wasn’t for my brother I couldn’t go on,” Rubenstein says. “If Blast gets really big, I may even let him write my column. But keep my name on it, of course.”
For there comes a time when every teen reviewer hits his peak. And, says Williamson, it’s best to get out while you’re young. “I think I was one of the better video game reviewers, but now I’m getting older, and I need to pay more attention to school and stuff. I guess I’m growing out of it.”
The Nintendo Generation Weighs In
Teen reviewers hold considerable sway over the $6-million video game industry. Here are some excerpts from their work.
