Interview: Darksiders II's marketing style

This found-article is an interview with Creative Manager of THQ's Darksiders II about the marketing involved in the design of the upcoming Darksiders II videogame.


This article is cited from MCV Pacific, and is entitled INTERVIEW: Jeremy Greiner talks Darksiders II's marketing style.

At the recent THQ showcase event in Sydney, MCV sat down to talk with Jeremy Greiner, Creative Manager on Darksiders II.

Darksiders wouldn’t have stood out so much this time during the last generation. Competition would’ve been much stronger. Is Darksiders borne of a reaction to that trend away from this style of game?

I think if you look at gaming in general right now, it’s all going super photo-real. All the games out there. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re a shooter or an action/adventure, an RPG, it’s all like that.
Darksiders II is kind of a breath of fresh air. I think that in the next console cycle, we’re going to go back towards videogames and less towards a new representation of reality.

So once the novelty of approximating reality wears off, we’ll see a more stylised feel in games again?

More artistic, more stylised, yeah. I think that’s the only thing that can happen. Everything is really photo-real right now, especially in certain genres. In the next hardware cycle, especially with the new opportunities they’ll present (thinking here about how the landscape in general is becoming more digital), it all runs into us seeing some new things.

Can you tell me a little bit about the process of coming up with the iconic imagery used to promote Darksiders II?

Last summer, you would’ve seen a certain look out there and a different logo, which was very much in that comic niche realm. We decided to take it in a different direction in 2012, so in January we came out with the new logo and new key art.
What we wanted to do was introduce to consumers who weren’t familiar with the franchise, our main character: Death. We wanted to put some mystery behind him, so the first shot was very close cropped, and tight in, just showing the one eye. We didn’t want the image to say that Death was the saviour of mankind or anything like that, because that just fights your preconceptions of what that character is.
So we wanted him to be mysterious and kind of intimidating. Not necessarily evil, but definitely a guy who, if you’re walking down a back alley, you’re staying away from.
And as we went across the campaign from January up until now, we started pulling out the camera, so you started seeing more of Death in poses, more movement, more images which played into his personality and the actual game mechanics (like the wall running shot). We had all these pieces of key art that represented who the main character is in the game, but had to have mass appeal to people outside of the comic space.

Elizabeth Koukeris recently told MCV the title was tracking to be the number two title in THQ Australia’s history. What do you attribute the increase over the original to?

I think it’s a really good game, and when you market a game, if you’re starting from that point, it’s a lot easier to market it.
In the end, that translates over to consumers, their pre-sale awareness and their willingness to go and put money down on something before it’s on the market.
Also, you can look at the success of RPG games this year. They’ve done really well generally. Darksiders II has a huge wealth of content and a lot of those RPG elements baked into the game, a lot of those skill trees, NPC interactions and vast open worlds.
So I think it’s right in the wheelhouse for a lot of people this year.

Often times games which blend multiple genres neglect to satisfy any market rather than appeal to all markets. How does Darksiders II look to combat this?

I think it’s two things – it’s an action/adventure game, and I think that as our genre becomes more set-piece oriented it almost tends towards the shooter space. This is almost a throwback to the action/adventure of old, it’s trying to put the adventure back into action/adventure. You’re doing puzzle solving, it’s got a strong focus on story, and at the same time has all those RPG elements in there. A lot of that is what we wanted in the first game to begin with.
But when you’re building an entirely new engine from scratch for a brand new IP, there’s really only so much you can get in there. A lot ends up on the cutting room floor.

Product: Transformers 3- Dark of the Moon

Although both Transformers, and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen have the same appealing qualities, it was whilst watching the third Transformers’ film that I noticed how Paramount Pictures segmented this product to suit a masculine audience. Transformers: Dark of the Moon has three major features that are designed to suit their target audience:

Storyline: Although the film has a storyline, it is halted mid-way through the film only to be replaced with a good hour and a half of running and fighting sequences that would make a female lethargic while watching it. But what remains of a plotline is thick with military campaigns, characters, weaponry and patriotism. Although the armed forces are globally male-attracting, the movie specifically focuses on the US military and America- the major consumers and producers of these kinds of film.

Before being remade for an older audience, Transformers began as an 80’s children toy and TV series. The story focuses on the war between the good Autobots and the evil Decepticons. Unlike the Bay’s version, the transformers are not as violent and the situation never as dire. The franchise was very popular with boys, only to becoming a retro and a cult classic in the following decades. In the age of dark movie reboots, Paramount (in cooperation with Hasbro) bought the rights to recreate the childhood classic, into a mature action adventure in the same league as The Dark Knight and Sam Raimi’s Spiderman films.

Casting and crew: Michael Bay led the production team for the three films. Much like many of Bay’s previous projects, the film’s storyline comes second to the need for action sequences. Pearl Harbour, Armageddon and I Am Number Four sport Bay’s ability to compensate bad scripts with the perfect action adventure- explosions and impending doom included. And without attempting to stereotype the entire male population, this is exactly what turns men on.

Even the casting skews towards satisfying, or at least appealing, to men. For example, Meghan Fox’s character (and her replacement in the third film, who coincidently looks like Meghan with a blonde wig on), are extremely popular, smart, sexy and successful. Realistically, this kind of women would not date or even consider dating someone as ordinary as Shia LaBeouf’s character. But in the film they do, and that is what ordinary men would prefer to see and believe. And apart from a line of dialogue and being eye-candy, the female lead is largely irreverent to the plot.

Props: When it comes to transforming robots, producers cannot ignore pleasing and attracting boys with an interest in big toys. Among helicopters, spaceships and guns, the film deliberately draws attention to the very costly cars that are the Autobots. The Chevrolet Camaro, Pontiac Solstice, Hummer H2 and Saleen S281 Extreme are just some of the cars that would make a man’s mouth water when watching them tear up the roads (sealed or not) all across the globe at high speeds.