I’ve threatened On Here that I’m going to write a book about my time in the video games industry. It’s going to end up being mostly about Pokémon, because they were silly enough to let me out without an NDA. So I’m workshopping titles.
My current working title is stolen from a Brian Eno album: My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. But I’m starting to lean toward: A Pika Behind The Curtain: Steps and Missteps In Building The World’s Biggest Brand.
I’ll take suggestions.
(Aside: can you imagine how bad at business you’d have to be to let the guy who ran Business Affairs and Government Affairs out of the building without an NDA? Think of the stories I must have about the decisions such people make.)
I was at Wizards of the Coast so early, there was no such thing as an NDA.
And in a grievous oversight, Hasbro didn’t make me sign one, either.
Probably thought Wizards had me under one. 😏
Sadly my long-proposed memoir title got scooped: “House of Cards” 😁
I’ve known Doug since I used to buy comics from his shop in St. Louis in the ‘80s.😁
The Aronses were late additions at Wizards, whom I occasionally had friction with - one of several reasons I didn’t wind up at the Pikachu Mill™️.
😏
Imagine being their lawyer. Doug, I like well enough now that he’s gone. He turned out to be one of those people for whom a little authority went straight to his head. If you asked Rick, he was the business genius behind Wizards.
I’ll never fully know. I think it’s a healthy dose of: “he quit, why should we pay him?” combined with a thing my replacement said to me a couple of years ago when I mentioned this to her: “I guess we’re just assuming you’ll be a pro”, which means giving them a free NDA or some shit.
Do they normally do NDAs?
I'm sure I'm totally wrong, but I have a suspicion that a Japanese company is used to their extreme libel laws (recently learned that's why ja.wikipedia is the way it is) and/or thinks mandatory NDAs look bad.
Another aside: I know the publisher’s Marketing department will choose the actual title, but I’ll need a good working one to make the sale. And as one of my Pokémon colleagues once said to me, there’s a reason I don’t do the creative (yes, the background for that one will be in the book).
You could reference that one tweet you did about how wacky PokeGo is from an outside perspective:
"That time I got governments to agree to a geo-location app aimed at children" would probably grab a few eyes.
Wikipedia says, "According to Byrne's 2006 liner notes, neither he nor Eno had read the novel, but they felt the title "seemed to encapsulate what this record was about"."
I figured you could still write about Nintendo even if you hadn't directly worked for them, but yeah obviously you know far better than me where your focus is going to be. Good luck with it!
The challenge on that would be that I don’t know enough about their inner workings so it would be no more accurate than your average Reddit thread from some kid whose “uncle works there”.
Pokemon Go was *such* a weird moment. I remember talking to Niantic buddies that they should do Pokemon branded external batteries. Would have made serious coin, but so be it.
That is why I discovered Anker battery packs, and every time since that I have bought a non-Anker battery pack I have regretted it. If Niantic had done a collab with Anker with, like, team colors? Or starter pokemon? They would have needed to rake up the money
