Dan Amrich
Los Angeles, CA
Male, 41
I started reviewing videogames professionally in 1993, when Genesis and SNES roamed the earth. Over the next 15 years I worked for magazines and websites like GamePro, GamesRadar, Official Xbox Magazine, and World Of Warcraft Official Magazine, while freelancing for Wired, PC Gamer, and many others. In an attempt to guide the next generation of reviewers, I wrote and published Critical Path: How to Review Videogames For A Living in February. Ask away!
Little confused by the phrasing here, so I will try to answer. Most press kits are a stack of paper, or rather, a zip file of screens and Word documents. I saved the Interstate 76 folder and papers because it is one of my favorite games of all time. The games themselves that you get for review -- if they are final retail copies, which they may or may not be -- usually become the property of the magazine, unless the publisher wants them back, and they sometimes do. Pre-release copies of games have to be returned or destroyed. Check the question about the process of reviewing a game for a more detailed answer on this one. I am proud to have held on to my copy of Earthbound for SNES. I really enjoyed that game (one of the few RPGs that I got into) and it has turned out to be rather rare/collectible. I also have a copy of an obscure Xbox game called Circus Maximus signed by the whole dev team; I was one of the very few reviewers who really liked that game, so when they sent me a personal copy, it was autographed by 50 people.
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Many times games would be 95% done, or "RC1" -- release candidate 1 -- meaning "we think it's done, it's being approved now by the first-party companies.": But my job was to evaluate, not offer advice for improvement; by the time it reached my hands, it was ready for judgment. A few times we got demos ahead of time and the publisher would overtly ask for design feedback, but it was something of an etiquette breach; most publishers hire consultants during development (many of whom are ex-media) to tell them what they feel the game needs and what score it is likely to receive in its current state. So the reviewer is really there to serve the potential customer, not the publisher.
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Sure, why not? There is no expiration date on loving your hobby, even if it's your job. One of my mentors is Andy Eddy, who has several years on me and jokingly calls himself "the oldest gamer." You're gaining wisdom and more information, which really puts a review in a more authoritative context. When you are reading the review of a 20-year-old, they have only been playing games attentively for maybe 10 years. When you read the review of a 40-year-old, you have three times as much experience going into that opinion. So older writers definitely have value...says the older writer. And I have no reason to fall out of love with my lifelong hobby.
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I have a specialty and most reviewers acquire one. I was not a sports guy when I was reviewing games, except for action-oriented sports games like NBA Jam or NFL Street. Simulation sports games were reserved for experts who really knew the depth of those franchises and could give better advice. My specialties have been music games, skateboarding games, and arcade racers, but I didn't do many JRPGs, as it wouldn't do the reader much good to to the reader to have someone who was not naturally drawn to and informed on that genre do a review.
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Swim Instructor
Do parents ever get angry at you personally if their kid isn't learning fast enough?
School Teacher
How do you feel about the idea of year-round schooling?
Tattoo Artist
Is it illegal to tattoo a client if he's drunk?
It's a big community; I think there's some of both. The negative gamer stereotype is not going away; you could argue that's because of cruel jokes being so common and tolerated, or you could argue that it's because they are based in fact. The very thin distinction is that the South Park guys are themselves huge WoW fans and players; they are equal opportunity offenders, so they are making fun of themselves along with everybody else they make fun of. So some gamers took that episode as an offense, and some took it as a signifying self-mocking. I laughed. I also laughed at the "Guitar Queer-O" episode they did. Would it be worth the time and energy to get offended anyway?
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I realized I was a writer in college, and on my first job at Guitar World, I learned that you had to be able to write about anything if you are truly going to call yourself a writer. So I specialize in entertainment stuff -- I've written movie reviews, music reviews, feature stories, news items -- but I have also written -- but I can, with a little practice, write other things too. More grown-up things, if you will. My mom spent 25 years as a bookkeeper. I do not have her gift for math, but I went to work with her one summer during college, in another department, in the typing pool at an insurance company. For me, it was a little taste of hell. New Jersey's drivers license numbers are 17 digits long and a mix of alphanumerics. At the time (early 90s) they were still hand-typing insurance cards on electric typewriters. I had a strict hour for lunch and was not allowed to leave my desk for other reasons. I was not allowed to get up to go home until a bell rang. This is in a company that has existed for decades. A bell. And when it rang, people RAN away from their desks. I could not believe it -- and I have never seen a less healthy work environment. Thankfully my mother has retired; I now check the news hoping to hear that the company has gone out of business, or perhaps burned to the ground. So when my parents said "what do you WANT to do for a career," I thought about what I thought my strengths were and what I found satisfacting doing, and I set about doing that. I then put a colossal amount of work into making that career happen -- lots of cold calls, lots of awkward introductions, lots of unpaid writing for exposure and establishing myself -- because I knew what I would wind up doing if I didn't. You're basically asking me if I wish I had chosen a job where the topic was less fun. The answer is no. :)
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It can take the fun out, if you let it. One of the worst but most common problems with the job is that the people who do it can become cynical -- they forget why they loved games and they start actively hating games. I think this is because before you get the job, your strongest memories are your best memories -- you remember the games that made you feel the greatest highs, and then you wind up with a job where there are many more mediocre to bad games than there are transcendent ones, and that's what you spend most of your time writing about. It's very easy to start focusing on the negative, and then believe that nothing can ever be good again. So that factors into how you start seeing games as a chore instead of the escape that they once were. I touched on this in one of the other answers, but it's really a personal path at that point -- you have to will yourself not to turn into a jaded jerk. You have to remind yourself that games are fun, and even if the last three weren't, the next one very well may be. In the book, I suggest that you have to leave yourself open to be amazed. (This is part of the free Kindle you can get from Amazon, by the way, if you want to read that part.) Gaming only really felt like a chore when I had to work weekends. It might seem like "Oh, poor baby, you have to play a game this weekend" -- but when that game isn't a good one, or might be plagued by pre-release bugs, then it really does become a chore. You start wishing you could paint the house or rake the leaves instead. It's frustrating enough to have to replay a level over and over because you can't figure out how to get past a part or beat a boss; it's extra frustrating when the reason you are restarting is because the console crashes due to a software error...and that's something you cannot fix as the reviewer. But your responsibility is to hit that deadline, so now you have to call your editor, who has to call the company, and you're in limbo until it's all worked out...but the clock is still ticking. That really, really makes it feel like a chore, to have a responsibility that you cannot fulfill. I don't think I ever fantasized about going back to being a "civilian gamer," as you put it, but I did constantly remind myself how other "normal" people saw and played games. I regularly discussed games with friends outside of the industry, gamers who did the normal thing of buying three, maybe four games a year and sampling the rest by borrowing from friends or renting. They didn't get to play as many games as I did, but they had more of an investment in the game they played, in both time and money. So I always felt like I needed to ground myself in reality, and remember that when I write, I am writing for people other than myself. My experience is valid, but I have to incorporate the audience's expectations and needs, too. If you lose sight of your audience, you can no longer do them any good.
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