First Terror, Then Weightlessness

Ending a dream career to begin another

Late this year, I ended my dream career. I felt very little at first. Maybe a tingling sensation buzzing in my brain like I’d just woken up from a deep sleep. Then a lightning strike of terror.

What had I done?

My daughter was about to turn a year old. I had a family now. And both fields I’d invested over ten years of my career into — gaming and advertising — were deep into rounds of layoffs and hiring freezes. LinkedIn was wall-to-wall downsizing posts and stories of talented, wonderful people going months and months without work.

Yet insanely, irresponsibly I handed in my resignation at a job that only a few years ago, I would’ve cut off a finger or two to land. The culmination of ten very hard years grinding away in the industry demolished by me, of my own free will.

What the fuck had I done?

Like almost all of my friends working in games, I grew up gaming. My clearest memories aren’t birthday parties or family trips, they’re the moments that played on the tiny RCA television in my bedroom after school or late at night: My brother whispering to me quiet quiet as I watched him clear the halls of Raccoon City PD while our parents slept down the hall. The sickening thrill of getting my heart pulled out by Kano for the first time, then the mad rush to learn how to do it before my friends. A sunrise over Tanaris after spending all night getting my first WoW paladin to 40. Aerith. Dom. Ghost.

So aimless, having barely graduated high school, I followed a friend to art school with the impossible dream of working in games. I quickly realized I couldn’t draw for shit and I was too dumb to code, but I could write. I was pulled towards games, but in particular the trailers for those games, which began showing up on a growing platform called YouTube.

The quick burst of action and emotion contained in a minute and a half was magical. It was the purest distillation of a game crammed into a stirring 3D fantasy that I could watch over and over again. These trailers captured exactly how I felt during some of my favorite gaming memories, but often painted them more beautifully than I could have imagined. I obsessed over Gears of War Mad World and DCU Fractured Future, showing them to anyone who’d watch. If I could just be near one of those — maybe, impossibly, write one, I’d be living the dream of my younger self.

This, as I later found out, was marketing. My reaction to these trailers — becoming an obsessive fan overnight — was an almost ideal outcome for a publisher. The marketing worked, and I didn’t feel misled or tricked into my fandom. This was simply beautifully executed marketing that somehow made me feel like that kid who powered on his first PlayStation and became lost in the infinite adventures ahead.

So I continued writing and eventually landed my first job in the industry. I was pulled almost immediately into marketing, learning from the brilliant people who had actually shipped many of the spots that first made me fall in love with the craft. I became a creative director years later because a few mentors took a chance on me and taught me everything they knew. The dream had materialized and it was my career.

But a nagging feeling pulled at my mind, even from the start. Marketing for games, despite my efforts and the efforts of much more talented client-side creative directors, felt at times outdated. We were pulling from a classic playbook defined by our friends in traditional advertising years ago, so the work sometimes felt disconnected from modern games with modern audiences. Creative marketing for games wasn’t new by any means, but most of the habits adopted by us and some (but not all) agencies were built for products that benefited from classic tactics, but not often gaming.

Within every game, there is a community shaped by a genre, that’s further shaped by a competitive or casual desire, that’s even further shaped by a console, and so on. To attempt to use classic “go wide” advertising falls short of capturing what makes games so special. They are so varied and so vast that anyone can find an experience uniquely suited to their souls, from power washing to swashbuckling, all the way to inhabiting the body of a rampaging goose. Slip up and come off as inauthentic with any of these communities and the reality of losing them and the power of your brand becomes inevitable.

Over the years, as I worked in my dream career, a new dream began to materialize in my periphery: opening a creative agency built for games by people who worked and lived within gaming spaces. The hope was that our time spent in the trenches of internal development and marketing would give us the perspective to create authentically for gaming communities. We would reject advertising models that worked decades ago when gaming was a different beast and fill that void with our own methods, built from hands-on experience making and marketing games.

After years of planning and learning as much as I could about starting an agency, I quit my dream career to start Summoner with my partners. We wanted to put our theory to the test while shaping creativity for deep communities around a game or genre. We feel qualified to do this because we are members of those communities. We’ve helped build them in the past, and care deeply about how fans, players, whatever you want to call them, are portrayed. For too long game audiences have been reduced and flattened to stereotypes, marketed to as one broad demographic— “gamers.” We want to change that. We want to build creative that speaks to the specific wants and needs of unique communities. We believe it’s the future of game marketing.

First there was terror, then weightlessness. Leaving a dream I thought impossible to chase another. The floating, dizzying feeling of embarking on a journey most people will tell you has a slim chance of success. However, I read somewhere once that the only pain worse than failure is the pain of never having tried at all. So here we are trying.

I’ll be using this space to speak about our agency’s journey as much as possible and as transparently as possible. Any thoughts, feedback, or whatever you can throw my way is greatly appreciated.

You can also learn more about the agency, Summoner, here.

This is a cross-post from the Summoner Substack, which you can sub to here.

-Matt