The best, worst and funniest pitch stories in games

[Music] so I'm going to ask my panelists to come and join me or are you guys yeah ah hey turn up so I always like to finish off ah ha here we are we will focus awesome yes we work for spirit I think that I thought that was coming hopefully it's coming pretty good well I think we have all right thank you we got this yeah thank you I know I can count on you she she's got sort of applause so um that you don't know whenever I get involved in the indie pitch in the track I try to make sure that we end with an entertaining kind of light-hearted look at the industry but also hopefully get something useful across so I've started

trying to use some more game show steamed end panels so that's what it is about and you'll see are our stars here what we're going to do is look at pitching we all have to do it we all have to experience it and you plant under to us whether they're lovers yeah I can't use the podium so I'm going to move the board Oh actually what it might do is bring that further forward there we go there we go good so the plan is this these wonderful three gentlemen are going to help me explore the world of pitching by sharing with us their worst ever pitch the best pitch they've ever experienced and the funniest pitch civic spirit and I'm going to ask you guys to help me work out who wins and all the boarders

we'll see how it goes from there so hopefully you're about to violate RNG where yes exactly oh yes sorry aha you're here hang on I got only together this thing inside out that's around yeah exactly there are some beers it was simply bringing beers in so anyway just get me in the right mood so we're warmed up for it so let's start off thanks for peace around everybody could you just off just a bit Oh could you please share with us who you are and what you have done in the past of what you do now sure my name is Peter allow I've been in the industry about 25 years now and at one point I was the gatekeeper for Sony so if you made a Playstation or a PlayStation 2 game you got through me somewhere along the line and that gave me tons of work stories of really really bad games to see since then I've worked

for EA Crytek Linden Lab how portable and a few other small companies Macker I started there but I blocked up from your memory didn't you I you know as I started there that's the issue so this I love a train by the way still that's one of my favorite games bill so Mike hi because you're I've been live for about 25 years okay actually maybe just a little bit longer than that but I've done to financial services startups I've done to software startups I've worked for Microsoft for a while I work for Amazon now and at Amazon I actually get all kinds of pitches from Amazon with a lot of fun people come and pitch me with videos they asked me to feature their games an hour store you know they'll catch me in

between meetings and try out their elevator pitch they want me to vote for their games and game competitions they want me to commit Amazon to being business partners of theirs because they've got something amazing that you know Amazon absolutely has to partner with them for I get all kinds of pitches how can you possibly understand my genius and the fact that we had to turn you down wasn't it wasn't personal could you do something about they promptly repeat totally relates to what Mike no is it I like yeah okay um yeah I could completely relate um I've been with Samsung for a little over seven years now I can't remember anything beyond that Oh but actually I work for companies like Yahoo of the search product manager experience on freecreditreport.com but

past a little bit three years now just focusing on VR yeah so one thing we should set out is that any names mentioned in this are under what we call in the UK chart house rules that means if anyone said anything inappropriate you can talk about it but not name names and not say we said it okay so don't tweet out who said it or who it was about and we're all be fine so under that veil of security legally binding a source completely legally binding what would be like a jobs bill by the way if they change the name to protect the innocent that's fine and I'll accept that but we're going to start off which which I think we probably should start off with the worst you know so who was to start with you suggest the worst pitch you've ever had oh you're right actually I've got two one

of them short pardon the pun when you understand how short it is okay Sonne was probably the first console that started to get the attention of celebrity since they started putting towards consumer marketing and one of these celebrities God rest his soul sent us a one-page pitch document for a game that he was thinking about and it was clear that he played plenty of games and really like the opening FMB the one-page pitch was done in magic marker on ruled paper 80% of it was the description of the ship descending through the clouds and the way the light went over it and then it ended with and then you start shooting stuff so abundant I'll buy that

exactly well we did use our shooting stuff yes exerting things yes nonspecific things but you know homina a few million dollar games have people shooting stuff come on right so it's I guess it's been long enough and but anyway that one was sent in by Gary Coleman oh wow yes who did end up working with running on scissors Wow so and a you know a power alter to Garrety go he was a nicest guy he really was he just didn't understand the game industry and I think that's going to be a running theme of the you know not understanding my favorite worst pitch ever is the one that I'm most proud of the company in general for rejecting it we got the pitch six times and it was done by Titus they paid two million dollars for this exceptionally good license which they then proceeded to do

absolutely nothing with it ended up being launched only on the n64 got a 1.3 out of 10 on what was then the equivalent of metacritic and hand by everybody is still listed infamously in the top 10 worst video games of all time and of course I'm talking about Superman [Laughter] the [ __ ] came to us directly ported from the n64 to the PlayStation which is the not the correct way to go technically the way the rendering systems worked were the opposite you should have started on the PlayStation gone to the n64 it was completely uncontrollable Superman fell through the floor often they had fog everywhere in order to explain that there was some sort of kryptonite frog that he couldn't get through when what they're really doing is hiding the fact that the farplane distance on the the rendering system was about three feet it was there's nothing

there the control got in our hands and he just couldn't turn or he would turn like this and back like this and then drop through the floor and favorite pal tried to explain that this isn't completely controllable and with a straight face the producer said well that's because he's in kryptonite the fog the control is to enhance the fact that he's lost control of his abilities and then that moment where we all looked at each other I got ya who do you think you're kidding here rejection - okay now he's not dropping through the floor rejection three oh the frame rate has gone up from 10 FPS to 12 FPS rejection 5 we you actually have a complete level [Laughter] rejection 6 was the fight what I will

call the last gasp they came to us and to the account managers complete total credit she kept a straight face when they asked is there anything that you like about this title and she smiled and said the license [Laughter] they ran out of money for the PlayStation version which was very conveniently timed because we would have rejected them forever and ever my proudest moment in the industry is making sure that that god-awful title never showed up on the platform I did that note let's move with the mic well I should that Steel's just about every single theme I had to have I rolled up in the one amazingly hideous experience similarly I I was I do a lot of game judging and probably one of the you know most trying four minutes I ever had and it was at a very big indie pitch someone sat across from me opened their laptop

and started showing me the PowerPoint for the game the PowerPoint for your game yeah yeah yeah the PowerPoint for our game we don't actually have the code finished but we do have the visualization and the concepts well okay well show me the non finished game well we actually don't have any code written but we have these wonderful concepts and these visualizations okay these visualizations on the art style for a for a platformer is kind of non-traditional well these are just sketches so you really don't have art well we have concepts so we proceeded to get a concept for a platformer where you would dodge enemies go ahead and gather treasure on your way to successfully achieving the objective which would be decided upon a large meeting of potential players and users yeah remarkable of that thing yes truly remarkable no the nice thing is this

could have turned into any game on the market so I am certain that when they obviously didn't even come close to winning the competition they were just infuriated by how blind the judges must have been because obviously this was Donkey Kong reborn or or you know inserting yourself a map yeah here now that was probably one of the most awkward Moe I've had a moral could make indication that but yeah yeah well 20 percent of the pitches that I hear based on PowerPoint so yeah it's mind-boggling out let's see well I do have a very interesting story um I think I swear I think our VP was trying to screw me over so he he got connected with one of the probably the biggest online porn operators at MWC and I got introduced to

via email and I'm like the [ __ ] was supposed to do it was I guess it's just like your app will never get published through oculus do you realize that right but I was trying to be nice fun kind of fun ways for him to make his content available one one way so I ended up helping knocking some tips I could you know what might be a good way to go and he contacts me like three months later I'm pretty serious like oh um our users are complaining that they want to be able to like their way to move the horizon of the videos or users are watching our content laying down flat [Laughter] you know is just completely stunned like what am I supposed to answer and the funny thing is there was a solution like that I can provide reply back and

obviously he was you know pretty huge guy serious I didn't he even gave me like a free like blogging access wow I've never tried yeah yeah yeah yeah all right you know never security guys like oh like tokens like what the hell um yeah it's probably one of my worst yeah yeah I nearly wanted to share my garry kasparov story which was all right it's not gay it's not it's not games it but it is Garry Kasparov who I did hire to promote s75 I launched on bTW basically set up a meet with me so he could sell me crystals that would help you avoid the radiation from mobile phones seriously Garry Kasparov yeah um anyway sorry any

really good collection in the tinfoil hat he was yeah yeah yeah I thought we need to lie so the funny thing is it was so obvious he didn't even believe in it yeah he just what he was just looking for a way to make a quick buck got the anyway future Russian president maybe so back to the plot can we let's get you guys to vote we have Peters classic Superman dodge I hope we have Mike big Indy beginning PowerPoint PowerPoint and obviously Paul's important extravaganza so let's vote for Superman hands up all okay cuz we like the big indie PowerPoint so much oh and the porn extravaganza oh we could have it all closed I think I'm going to give it to Superman but it's closed it's so I

almost want to give you the porn they're going owns or so yeah that's that's not working our but that's kind of it right so we have our first score next we're going to move on to the less sugar best I think next yeah that's the funniest to later now we're really because obviously there's a serious part of this no there isn't compliance but let's pretend there's a serious part to this you know we want to kind of learn some lessons about what great pitching is like so I'm gonna start getting with you Peter you're the best pitch you ever saw well it does a lesson that comes out of this it's actually that good pitches don't necessarily turn into good games but we and it sounds a little self-serving but I was working for Digital Extremes when we pitched and got the Star Trek title right after it right in between the two Star Trek films and we knew that we were going to be asked to show up to the bad

robot offices and sorry I'll be dropping names here and pitch directly to the producers we also knew there were eight other companies that were doing the same pitch so what we did is find out everybody in the room and what their latest success was and what their latest failure was and when the last time they managed to get in kind of Hollywood press so I actually like combed through a variety to figure out whether these guys had their recent cachet bumped up because hey this is the Hollywood game and what your name is in the world matters so we found exactly what everybody in the rooms motivations were what they needed in order to make themselves look good and we also knew that none of the other teams doing the pitches were capable of developing a first playable level the way we were so we dusted off a level from a previous game that we absolutely just tossed away it was a terrible idea and weary skinned it by stealing screenshots and building

textures and pretty much over four days we just had four people burned through and build one workable level of Star Trek with the characters running around shooting phasers with Klingons beaming in and getting shot and pretty much everything that was out we'll be playable and while the other teams showed up with PowerPoint presentations and sketches and artists and ideas and lists of previous successes that they worked on we came in there and had an Xbox ready to put up on a HDTV put a controller in their hands and said why don't you play this and before they know we had only been told that we were doing this pitch maybe six days previous and in four days we showed up at their offices with the first playable gold disc in their hand and after they were done looking and saying oh my god this is better than what I thought it was going to be we then said

great here's a disc for every one of you to give to all of your bosses and show on your X boxes so that when you go back to them you can show your first playable so short version every one of these guys are now walking back to their offices with no due diligence in hand with the first playable and able to show that each one of their bosses look at much of a badass I am I've actually already got a game and you were just sourcing it at this point yeah of course I got the contract it took almost three days for them to come back to us with a whole fiery day yeah Mike I really like that story one of the things I like about how well you pitched that was you actually put the controller in their hands one of the perennial worst pitches I see is of people telling me all about their game showing me all about their game and I'm reaching out trying to grab the controller or the tablet like no no I'm

not done explaining it that's like really we are judging your game I'm not judging your trailer come on it's it's anyway the best pitch that I've heard was in the context of someone pitching to a publisher for investment and I don't know if you guys know mark back or he's got this really great game where you're reading a story but the words and the story that you're reading become elements in the platformer game and you need to manipulate the words use the words to kind of get the character to exist the story into a completed level absolutely charming thing what Marc did was he started with hey here's the game here's what it looks like and now while I explained the rest you guys can start playing the game and he handed out the game on tablets - I mean a fully functioning level to the publishers and he went on to say here are other games that are similar here's why mine is different and unique and

here's a good way to pitch it here is my timeline of when I expect to be done with the game here are the individual work items I'm going to do during that time here's how much money I need here's what I need the money to do and if you write me this amount of money I will have this game done on that day would you like to publish it damn that was good and he got the money because one it was a really good looking game you know what they all tell you why I mean lots of people have good-looking games he got the money because he convinced the publisher that he knew exactly what he was doing and they had confidence that he would be able to actually get this done on time and on budget and that nones the world and he doesn't know what he's doing you know Marc yep of course you know Marco so hot oh well in the spirit of supporting the Indies so recently I probably for the past six months where I work with a lot of

developers to get geared up controllers to out our developers and make sure there's no content available when the device when retail I would say one of my favorites a group of Oh actually the team that I worked on for the controller was paint we are so done by a couple of brothers in San Francisco I think one still has a full-time job I Sephora so they came to pitch their idea basically you know stupid simple drawing out for using your VR I'm like and these guys did that they'd say to have a running prototype we don't have the controller back then but it'll still make a drawing with your headset moving head around but um these guys were so young and so I don't know naive but didn't know what they were asking but there was just super passionate like

totally sweet guys so I ended up giving a little direction Hey look we're gonna be launching the controller pretty soon but let's have you guys create like a version of tilt brush for gear VR but you know don't try to meet the performance of hell brush but think of more like a Microsoft Paint for gear VR simple and considering the gear VR devices are generally used by family I think it's going to be a good hit and they ended up basically doing everything what I asked them to do ended up getting a little bit of funding from us too and the cool thing is that our marketing guys liked the experience so much that they got even featured in our commercial that's actually running being airing and all of movie theaters across America right now and and in the same TV commercial it's a 60 second spot I don't up you've seen it but it features

experiences from Harmonix which we know you're a good team anybody put that harmonics here I think the in space could use a bit of an improvement I think it's good like two and a half stars but considering you know I'm sure multiple six figures and then insert that in a budget into a sink space and a nice crap you guys from Sam Sisko launching this little tiny little app think just really well on the store I'm converting well and that's it just makes me feel good they can able to support like super small indie six on wimzie's are always so let's desperately low so we have full six small indie discord is painting thing we have the last word from Mike well from Marc book Mike's mafia accent pieces Star Trek extravaganza experience so let's start off with voting for the painting app okay voting for the last

word okay and voting for Star Trek I think we have a winner so now we are well actually yeah this is starting to look like a one source rate so we're going to get to second position here okay so against me is sort of a frowned upon just I think you know he did tell us our dream or Scott's needed so this is the one to win them all it's all to be played for when it takes all funnier pitch you've ever had picked up can you go back to Superman yeah I know I know Superman was unintentionally funny I can't go funny I think the best I can do

is weird that's fun wait there was a strange woman who was like kind of a hardcore motorcyclist and she was very fascinated with the paris-dakar races and wanted to do a Paris Dakar game but had absolutely no experience in the game industry and had absolutely no familiarity with what it took to make a game but she was very very French and very very tall and incredibly attractive and managed to get her way into the Sony offices at some point or another so we said okay fine we'll take the pitch and what she mostly did was bring bottles of champagne and talk about how wonderful these motorcycle races are and that we should be making a game about them and we were looking at it like so you didn't bring a company or anything as you just had this idea and thought you wanted to tell us about it and in the middle of that she pulls out champagne glasses much like Scotch glasses I guess but

there wasn't a show associated with it other than her dancing around the room with bottles of champagne pouring it into glasses for everybody talking about paris-dakar and at some point or another we were thinking do we call security this is weird pain yeah exactly it's like well thank you for your time this has been great and she said well that was wonderful are you going to pay me for my game idea yeah thank you I think you like lots of blinking like well we thank you for your time Laurie meets and then one of the account managers was kind enough to escort her out and we lock the door and told security make sure to come back in this yeah it was kind of embarrassing that's the weirdest one idea that's pretty good pretty good what you know I would like someone to come and pour me champagne while they pitch something that actually sounds like we can do not agree pretty good idea the so again I get mostly pitches from

Indies for games please feature my game please vote for my game in the competition won one of the pitches I got for you know a request to feature a game was from someone who had written a game with a really engaging mechanic where you would find in a in a grid of objects three things that were similar and you could slide them over to match three of them a match three game well yeah it is it is a match three game okay so he finishes his pitch about how you can do different kinds of matching threes horizontally and vertically and it was really going to be great and I said well this is wonderful but you realize there are thousands of match three games out there what makes yours different there's this long pause my gems are blue Wow oh my god Oh what

do you what do you say to that boy you know I really think that the the market for for magistrate games with gems of different hues of blue may be saturated no they all have different colors mine are different shades of blue niche market probably not going to get featured their front page thank you very much for your time come back to me when you're going to game bye um yeah I believe I told oh well maybe I should have started with the porn I do have a as I say that everyday may be recorded to the audience it work sure actually people who work on the VR industry mom there's some somewhat of a pet peeve of mine but I wanted to get this out so but I'm sure how many of you guys have been pitched with the VR title okay and you

guys all know what a headset funk is yeah and this is one particular time these guys at former it developers um they're always like logging around dividend office a couple of times interlocking their vibe rig around like you know and their headsets alright [ __ ] it it's like and every time I get an email like hey Paul would like to come ashore than you build a mag no not today oh and moisture ahead where is it there's there's a what what's uh anybody know wanted to Rihanna's yeah what is the durian have in common with a common headset you really hope it doesn't smell like that you know mold smell bad yeah and the content can be great right whole

content of your headset and Riaan can make it ahmud well and I still recall that day and they bring their SSI oh my god another durian and the funny thing is their game that they're developing they're still developing I think it's actually pretty good right well one of these days I do hope they and it bring me a gear VR build but um yeah oh wow so I think it's an interesting kind of mix we have the Peters champagne supernova we hope we have but that Mike's true blue and we have a VR durian fruit I mean no how do we choose between that so let's try and see what the audience think is if you think that the champagne supernova should win please we hand up okay okay those of you who think that the true blue game should win okay

and those of you who think that the VR durian should win yeah I knew that was going to happen on that note I think we knew where the winner was going to be already and I would want to thank the palace for taking the time out to share those stories and I hope we had a lot of fun doing that but I think the end of the day what we're saying is we've got to basically tell people things that they're going to emotionally connect with and if we fail to do that it's going to be told years later on a stage like this in front of a public audience and humiliation will ensue and we didn't even talk about tootie's which is another subject talk to me about another time so thank you very much guys figure how much audience and we're going to demo so that the guys can announce the beginning pitch thank you thank you oh and the winner of course okay pleasure but at the end of the the

indie success track thanks for joining us and again thank you to all the sponsors of the of the show if you have any kind of further questions reports or new this because I think some of them are still around or come and grab me thank you guys [Music]