Don Draper Pitches Video Game Marketing

Gone Home

When I was a boy, my father liked to push me beneath a sycamore tree on a swing he made himself. We would go outside for what felt like hours in the last light of summer. When I was on that swing I seemed to be sitting still and the world moved beneath me. Years later, I went back to that house to see that swing. To sit in it.

That was pretty hard, because there was a Taco Bell there. The world kept moving even when I wasn't sitting in that swing. The place existed only in my memory.

You cannot go home. Yet, here we are, a game with no enemies. No friends. No action. Nothing driving the story forward. Permeated by a sense of unreality. It's just a house full of memories.

You are capturing the place we can never return to, that alienation I experienced with that swing. This isn't a video game. It's a dream.

You don't need me to tell you to plaster bikini babes and dubstep all over your trailers. Get some nostalgia music playing on a cassette, some cute notebooks, and lots of dark rooms and the game sells itself. You don't care about the audience, because your audience is going to be writers at those weird Estonian websites and Italian PC Gamer offshoots that fill Metacritic. A theme wandering around with no story or gameplay will be lapped up by every gaming journalist who would have complained about the slow walk speed or lack of variety of guns in an FPS. Each of them more desperate than the last to burnish their credibility by heaping praise on the weird indie game.

You'll have a Metacritic 90 faster than Spelunky. You don't need me at all.

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– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)