Martin Rae considers himself to be atypical for the video game industry. With a professional background in banking, Rae entered the world of video games when working for an investment firm that put money into gaming. He later was chief executive of Sunleaf Studio where he helped develop the children’s online gaming site Pandanda.com. In October, Rae was named president of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, the Calabasas-based organization promoting the artistic and technical achievements in the video game industry. Each year the academy hosts the DICE Summit for business leaders, and the Interactive Achievement Awards to honor the work done by its 23,000 members. Rae takes the helm of the academy at a time of transition in the industry and the changes taking place will in turn have an effect on the group’s membership. The video game companies are looking hard at how to allocate their resources and determining just what the game-playing public will pay for. Many are investing more in small footprint social games for mobile devices while finding new ways to keep console games fresh and relevant with motion devices that put a player more into the experience. The West Coast, Rae said, is gaming central and he is glad to be back working with a creative and irreverent group of people. “They can do things that people have never done before,” Rae said. Question: So how did you become president of the academy? Answer: Joseph (Olin) had been here a while and he had elected to do some new things. I think great ideas can last X amount of time and then you want to do something new. I knew some people on the board; I’ve been involved in the games business for quite a while. They asked me what I was up to. They talked to me about (the president’s position) and it sounded like a great opportunity. What I really missed is being around the creative energy of the business. The personalities, the risk reward, the creative juice of the deal. It was at a position that the industry had changed quite a bit. It is moving in a new direction. If you look at the latest retail numbers, 30 percent of the retail numbers aren’t even captured at retail. They are captured via the iPhone, premium play on line. That piece of the constituency is growing really fast, the social game piece. How do you address that, how do you move that forward, how do you get these people to be inclusive with our academy and our vision. I’m a (business development) guy at heart. It sounded like a really great challenge to me. Q: But it’s not the end of the console game? A: Absolutely not. “Red Dead Redemption” is a great example. I have no idea what the budget was but if you read the credit list and back into it using a little math, it might be a $70 million budget. It’s an action feature film kind of budget. Those aren’t going away and that experience is incredible. People want to spend the $60 for that kind of experience because it’s tens of hours of enjoyment. If you want a small I’m-on-the-airplane piece of interactive game enjoyment, that can be an iPad game or an iPhone game or an Android game. Somebody can do that on an indy basis where it’s two people and a really great idea and get it done. That is really great for the business. Q: How does the rise of social gaming affect the membership of the academy? A: It expands it in two ways. One, there are new companies, like Zynga for example, that really are defining the whole social gaming network on Facebook. And two, it expands the demographics. From a member perspective there are more people who want to be involved with the academy. They’re right in the target zone for us. And two, it expands the demographic. Everybody thinks a gamer is a 22-year-old guy who gets home from work, takes his socks off, has no shirt on, eats popcorn and plays games all night. Now it’s moms, it’s women at home, it’s retired people playing games and interactive entertainment that we’ve never had before. That is a really good thing for us. We are trying to expand our corporate membership base to include the people who are producing those kinds of games. From an outreach perspective, you’ll see it somewhat at our Interactive Achievement Awards on (cable channel) G4 that more people who are interested in games will want to view our awards and celebrate the achievements there. Those are different demographics. I think that’s a great thing. Q: A few weeks ago there were layoffs at Disney Interactive. What does that say about the industry? A: I think it’s a reflection of an industry-wide change in how games get done. One, you have great big budgets and if your game works well you have great success. If it doesn’t the numbers don’t quite work. You make a blockbuster movie, it doesn’t sell well at the box office, and things get readjusted. The other piece is that I think that as the industry changes or moves a different way those resources get spent in different directions. Disney has been a big investor in small footprint games. So, I think a little bit of it is how you figure out where your sweet spot is for producing games that sell and make money. As long as the industry continues to grow as it is then overall it will be really healthy. It is more where do the resources go. Sometimes you make bets that work and sometimes you make bets that don’t work as well as you want them. Q: Are motion devices like Kinect, PlayStationMove and Wii a way for console games to stay fresh? A: They all have games that are more physically interactive. Those are games that appeal to a certain group of people that love them. I have a 16-year old daughter and she loves to get me in Kinect track and field. She has figured out how to sprint and hurdle and do the rest of the things. I can throw the javelin but she kicks my ass every time. She loves it. She gets in her friends in there and literally it becomes a physical workout. Right now that is more grouped around a family-type environment but those motion devices will go to an “Unchartered 2” and where you are doing an action game, an adventure game and you’re physically interacting. That will happen. The technology is getting there where it will be a much more immersive experience. That will add to our business and will transcend youth and family. Q: Can playing video games help solve real world problems. A: It’s funny you should say that. At our DICE conference we have a woman named Jane McGonigal. Her position is you can solve most of the world’s problems through gaming. I will say if you do a lot of background reading on interactive, not entertainment but interactive training and research, it’s all coming out of the game business. Most of corporate training is interactive and it will be based on gaming theory. There is a company in Seattle that is a biological research company and they had some problem that could not be solved with computer power. So what they did is created a game model around solving problems and answering questions. They made it a social gaming experience. All of sudden you have 5,000 people answering questions and playing this game to answer basic research questions and are able to solve fundamental research problems through this network. You will see more of that. Gaming theory will drive a lot of that. Q: How important is the greater Los Angeles area to the gaming industry? A: It’s huge. There are a lot of companies down here; there is a lot of creative talent. If you ask me the academy is in a nice spot in L.A. What are we? We’re a production in a lot of ways. Through the DICE Summit and the awards show. There is no greater production talent on a creative talent than that in L.A. You have a good base of gaming and creative people. It should remain a real hot spot. Q: How does the academy differ from the Electronic Software Association, the group that puts on the annual video game trade show E3? A: Their main charter is advocacy of the industry on a more legal and regulatory and support perspective. Ours is based on recognizing the creative and technical achievements of our industry. It’s a very different deal. We have a very close relationship with the ESA. Mike Gallagher from the ESA sits on our board. We share a traveling art exhibit, Into the Pixel. We have a close relationship but it’s a different mission. Q: What game titles coming out this year are you looking forward to? A: I’m a sucker for the Rockstar Games. I played too many hours of “Red Dead Redemption,” and “L.A. Noire” is coming out. I love old 40s and 50s detective novels based in L.A. I think that is going to be a lot of fun. So I am definitely looking forward to that. Q: How old were you when you started playing video games? A: I am going to date myself. I grew up in a really small town in rural America and I remember one of our friends had one of the first Pong games. I cannot imagine the number of hours I burned on that Pong game. Martin Rae Title: President, Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.College: B.S. in Economics, University of Washington.past experience: CEO, Sunleaf Studios; CEO, Boss Game Studios and The Electriic Playground.
Playing Up Industry Strengths
