knockknock.biz luggage tags. Photo courtesy of justinph.

I guess it's finally time for me to level up.

It was the summer of '99 when I convinced my then editor to send me on a tour of the U.S. videogame industry. When I finally returned three weeks later, my head was still spinning. I felt as though I'd seen the future of entertainment. It was then that I made it my mission to put NEWSWEEK's coverage of this growing medium on the map. I did that in print, with cover stories on the Japanese launch of the PlayStation 2 and the spread of online gaming. I did it online, with the debut of the blog N'Gai Croal's Level Up. I did it on television, with appearances on MSNBC and CNN. You all watched me push, prod, praise, scold, discuss and debate videogames across multiple media, both mainstream and enthusiast. That's because my editors were prescient enough to let me apply my talents and establish my reach beyond the magazine, from co-blogging with MTV News to writing a monthly column for Edge and more. For this, I say to them all, thank you.

Having achieved all of this, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I've accomplished what I set out to do ten years ago. And now it's time for me to take that decade’s worth of accumulated knowledge and do something else with it. After Friday March 6th, my passions will take me beyond the world of journalism. I’ll be wearing many hats on this new journey: videogame design consultant, media strategist, consumer technology reporter, columnist, blogger and, as always, provocateur. You’ll be able to keep track of my various adventures at ngaicroal.com, and feel free to reach out to me via email at ncroalbiz@gmail.com. It’s been a pleasure conversing with all of you, and I look forward to continuing our dialogue in the years to come.

Cheers,

Yesterday, we posted excerpts from Round 2 of the second annual Slate Gaming Club, featuring four journalists discussing the year in videogames. The lineup consisted of New York Times op-ed page staff editor Chris Suellentrop, MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, New York Times games reporter Seth Schiesel, and the staff of Level Up. Round 1 was cordial, while Round 2 got a bit more testy. How would we describe Round 3? Thoughtful. Heady, even. Some excerpts:

Stephen Totilo, MTV News: To save us the embarrassment of not having deeply discussed 2008's biggest gaming newsmaker, I must add that [Wii Fit] served a number of interesting roles. It presented to average people the idea that playing a game could be good for you, it convinced some gaming executives that fitness gaming is the next trend that must be followed, and it expanded the currently unlabeled category of Self-Help Video Games that Nintendo's brain-workout Brain Age software opened up in 2006 (and which may someday force gaming-sales charters to give self-help games their own list, the way the New York Times had to in 1983).

Chris Suellentrop, New York Times: Stephen is saying that video games are a Fourth Medium, then, something truly new under the sun. (Maybe this is just a different way of saying that games are an Eighth Art Form, as Dennis Dyack says.) I often think that's right. But it also helps explain my long face, as Stephen puts it. Don't I have the right to expect something more from this marvelous new medium? Something more wondrous than beautifully and impeccably crafted worlds filled with enemies for me to kill?

What I want is a game with the elegant gameplay and level design of Gears of War 2 but with the story of The Force Unleashed. But I want it told in a manner like Braid—or even You Have To Burn the Rope—meaning, a telling of the tale that is consistent with the promise and the mechanics of this Fourth Medium (or Eighth Art Form).

I haven't played this game yet. Have any of you?

Seth Schiesel, New York Times: [W]ith every passing year I grow deeper in my conviction that the most interesting and meaningful games are massively multiplayer online games in which you have thousands of people in emergent, persistent communities with their own politics, their own tribes. In a massively multiplayer game, every day is different because people are always different. As I've played through dozens of games this year for my job, it has been so vital to maintain a gaming home base, a center of gravity with a group of people that I can just hang out and play with. I've found that most of this year in Eve Online, the hard-core science-fiction MMO that continues to grow. Eve is the kind of game in which the group of people you play with is the most important part of the experience. These are the people I'm on IRC with even when I'm playing something else, and it is that sense of community, of getting to know people from around the world just a little bit, that is the most valuable thing in gaming for me, and it is something that other media usually fail to provide.

N'Gai Croal, Newsweek: [I]n just 24 months, Nintendo has blown past its rivals and continues to do so even though the 360 is now $50 cheaper than the Wii's suggested retail price. To put this Nintendominance in perspective, for the month of November, Wii (2.04 million) outsold Xbox 360 (836,000), PlayStation Portable (421,000), Playstation 3 (378,000), and PlayStation 2 (206,000) combined....

Yes, the data show that the video-game industry's revenues continue to rise. But how sustainable is that when development budgets are tilted toward 360, PS3, and high-end PCs and away from the market-leading Wii and low-end PCs. If a remake of Resident Evil 4 sold extremely well on the Wii, surely there was an opportunity for Dead Space. The liberating sense of movement in Mirror's Edge could have translated well to the Wiimote and nunchuk. But because EA built those games for the top-of-the-line machines, the Wii wasn't even a possibility. So with Nintendo as top dog, I think it's time for publishers to throw it a much bigger bone by leading development on Wii, then up-porting the games to the more powerful systems, which should result in a larger addressable audience.

Share your thoughts with us in the comments below

Earlier today, we posted some excerpts from Round 1 of the second annual Slate Gaming Club, in which four writers discuss the year in videogames. The roster? New York Times op-ed page staff editor Chris Suellentrop, MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, New York Times games reporter Seth Schiesel, and the staff of Level Up. In Round 1, the group was pretty polite, but there are definitely some pointed remarks and glowering stares in this, Round 2, of our email exchange. Some excerpts:

Chris Suellentrop, New York Times: [W]hat to think of Gears of War 2? The game is even more shamelessly derivative than the first one. I picked up allusions to, off the top of my head, Independence Day, Battlestar Galactica (the Ron Moore re-imagining), The Empire Strikes Back, and the speeder-bike chase scene in Return of the Jedi. Mitch Krpata of the Boston Phoenix pointed out on his Insult Swordfighting blog that one of the game's levels is a tribute to, or a rip-off of, the final level of Contra....

[Yet] I think Gears of War 2 was the most fun game I played all year, and the game that most achieved the goals it set for itself. If you want to see what an interactive Sylvester Stallone movie looks like, play Gears. It's everything a big summer blockbuster should be. But this is awards season, right?

Stephen Totilo, MTV News: Gamers abandon games--even games that they like--before finishing them. Gamers get angry at games--even games they like--for being repetitious or derivative or for falling short of being as good as it seems like they could be. That's what you get when you, the gamer, indulge in a creative form that was created to convey satisfying-but-repeatable, controllable bits of action for a quarter per minute. This is the creative form that has somehow evolved into a medium of 25-hour, $60 collections of satisfying-but-repeatable, controllable bits of action without inventing many successful strategies for telling stories, figuring out how to develop characters, or turning into a more interesting way to spend an hour than listening to Beethoven or watching The Wire.

Seth Schiesel, New York Times: Over the course of this year, plowing through game after game, what surprised me most was simply how good most of them were. Though the crop of 2008 has demonstrated its talent in different ways, it seems clear that the overall level of production quality and creative talent is higher now in video games than it has ever been. This is the real golden age of gaming because only now is the audience large enough, variegated enough, and mature enough to support high levels of investment in such a broad portfolio of genres on such a wide range of devices and screens.

The major publishers have finally figured out that schlock is not a business strategy that can compete in the long term with producing a high-quality product. I have played through and reviewed most of the biggest games of the year, with a few formal reviews still to come, and the one word that keeps coming back to me is professionalism.

N'Gai Croal, Newsweek: Your point about professionalism also intrigues me. You're correct that, by and large, the level of craft in the video game industry continues to grow each year, and 2008 was no exception. I wonder if, however, by settling for the professionalism inherent in the acknowledgment that "we are those men, and we had fun with these games," we let games off too easily when they take the easy way out, interactively speaking....

Was Epic's handling of Maria's fate a failure of craft or art? I say it's worth thinking hard about, especially when writing for a mainstream audience like yours in the Times and mine at Newsweek. Because when we avoid such questions, we're gulling our readers into believing that story and gameplay are mutually exclusive--or that games are just like other media.

Feel free join in and take shots at us in the comments below, or just share your thoughts on the best and worst of 2008.

Last year, the Web magazine Slate (which, like NEWSWEEK, is owned by The Washington Post) convened its first ever Gaming Club to discuss the year in videogames. Participants included New York Times op-ed page staff editor Chris Suellentrop, MTV News reporter Stephen Totilo, New York Times games reporter Seth Schiesel, and the staff of Level Up. We debated and discussed such notable titles as BioShock, Halo 3, Desktop Tower Defense, Portal and more before drawing things to a gentlemanly close. Now don't go calling it a comeback, but we've returned for a second installment of what we all hope will be an annual affair. The epistolary exchange kicked off yesterday with three of the Four Musketeers contributing, while today's round will include the full quartet. Some excerpts:

Chris Suellentrop, New York Times: One thing I've been wondering: Is it a good sign or a bad sign for the medium that this year's crop of games has produced such a wide divergence of opinion? Michael "the Brainy Gamer" Abbott thinks Fable 2 is perhaps "the most seductive game world ever created." Chris Dahlen thinks Fallout 3 "balances—and sometimes betters—the approaches of other videogame masterpieces: the retro immersion of BioShock, the paranoia of Portal, the exploration of Oblivion and the seamless storytelling of Half-Life 2. The pseudonymous "Iroquois Pliskin" says GTA IV is "a classic, and stands head and shoulders above its previous iterations and nearly every other game released this year."

Those are three more of the smartest people writing about games. They each think their Game of the Year is a new addition to the canon. Maybe they're right. Or, more likely, this was a year of just-misses, which is why there's an absence of consensus.

Stephen Totilo, MTV News: Fable II as Game of the Year? Getting warmer. In the reverse order of what happens in GTA IV, this game begins with a poorly defined character in an uninteresting medieval European fantasy world but winds up with you controlling a man or woman who is literally the shape of the choices you've made in the game. All that celery he ate made my guy skinny; his ample scars came because he was a clumsy swordsman; his youthful visage remained, because I chose not to sacrifice his looks when given the alternate option to sacrifice a maiden to the gods instead. Ten years from now, the world will remember Nov. 4, 2008, as the day America elected its first black president. I'll also remember that day, I'm sure, as the day when I was first emotionally affected by a video game. Pausing my DVR just after California was called for Obama, I had to go back to Fable II to make the game's final moral decision, a triple-optioned Sophie's choice involving money, loved ones, and community that would affect characters I'd interacted with for weeks. I'm still haunted by the pick I made. Obama's victory speech later that night distracted me from the unease that my final actions had put in my heart, but as I went to bed, with cheers still echoing down the Brooklyn streets near my apartment, I was haunted by the wonderful emotional pain I finally felt from a video game.

Yeah, that's my frontrunner for Game of the Year.

N'Gai Croal, Newsweek: [Fallout 3 and Braid] aren't the only two games I'm considering for whatever top 10 list I assemble whenever I assemble it; others include Patapon, Grand Theft Auto IV, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, The Last Guy, PixelJunk Eden, Gears of War 2, LittleBigPlanet, Left 4 Dead, and Play Auditorium. But I'll end here by asking each of you to name and discuss the game you've had the hardest time expressing your opinion of. For me, it's Resistance 2, a staggering work of heartbreaking mediocrity from one of the industry's most accomplished studios. Staggering in its we-put-every-dollar-up-on-the-screen production values, in its scope, in its careful borrowing from all the right touchstones of the shooter genre. Heartbreaking in that its overblown scale may have helped do it in, in that it has created a fictional world that over two games has never truly connected with me, in enemy encounters that hit all the notes without ever quite playing the tune. It's not mediocre in the way that most games are mediocre. It's just off, and for the life of me I still can't figure out a succinct way to explain why.

Any games from 2008 make you feel that way?

Consider this an open thread for sharing your opinions on our discussion as well as your favorite games of 2008, and check back later for a post on Round 2.

 Midnight Club Los Angeles, developed by Rockstar San Diego and published by Rockstar Games

UPDATE AND CLARIFICATION: Rockstar Games has just forwarded us a copy of the email blast they sent out earlier today about the patch being issued simultaneously for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Here's what the email said:

A title update is currently available for both the Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3 versions of Midnight Club: Los Angeles. The Xbox 360 update adds support for additional leaderboards for tournaments on the Rockstar Games Social Club, broader multiplayer match searching, and upgraded streaming and performance. The update also brings improved AI balance to adjust dynamically to user skill level.

Separately, the folks at Rockstar wanted to clarify that players were never required to play red-level races in the pre-patched version of the game. We regret the confusion.

***

Despite our use of the word "patch," in the headline, let it be known that the fine gentlemen and ladies at Rockstar Games prefer to say "update." We learned this yesterday when we stopped by Rockstar's Manhattan offices to chat with Rockstar vice president of development Jeronimo Barrera about the company's recently released racing title Midnight Club Los Angeles. Apparently, inexperienced gamers were struggling to progress through the game, and just as Rockstar is doing for PC gamers who've complained of problems with Grand Theft Auto IV, console owners of Midnight Club Los Angeles will have their troubles wiped away with a patch, er update that goes up today for Xbox 360 owners and at an as yet unspecified time for PS3 users.

"Obviously, we like to listen to our fans," says Barrera. "We've done a bit of tuning on the dynamic race structure so that early on, it will be easier for novice players to get to the later races." Asked how they achieved this, Barrera says they wanted to keep it feeling natural, so they focused on how and how often the computer-controlled cars screw up on turns and intersections rather than on the rubber-band approach to A.I. that typifies many racing games. The tweaks, we're told, cover roughly the first third of the game.

To read the rest of our post on Midnight Club Los Angeles, click on the link below.

Update: Post a story, and all of a sudden, more sources jump out of the woodwork, to say nothing of similar stories from competing outlets. We've spoken with four additional sources since our original post went live, and it appears that our original source's statement that there would be an extra two days specifically set aside for the public--Friday June 5th and Saturday June 6th--may have been incorrect. We're working to pin that down, and as soon as we find out, we'll whip up another post. Separately, we're also looking to gather information about what criteria the ESA will use to admit a broader audience than it has to the previous two E3s, and to find out--as one journalist asked us privately and as many fanboys would like to know--whether the infamous booth babes of years past will make a comeback of their own. Stay tuned.

***

Level Up has just learned that after long, bruising and politically difficult negotiations, the Entertainment Software Association is preparing to announce tomorrow that E3 2009 will take place at the Los Angeles Convention Center during the first week of June--and that for the first time, E3 will officially open its doors to the public at large. According to a source close to the process, the convention floor and meeting rooms will open on Tuesday June 2nd to media and industry professionals. On Friday June 5th and Saturday June 6th, however, the show floor will open up to the public. What about the famous press conferences from Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony, along with a handful of third party publishers? Our source told us to "expect a boat load of press conferences on Monday during the day and on Tuesday morning."

Internally, the ESA and its members are referring to the event as a "prosumer show," a term our source found puzzling. Presumably it refers to the ESA's intent to reach out to not necessarily the world at large, but to media, industry professionals and the most avid gamers. For while attendance is expected to rise dramatically from the 2008 show, our source informed us that the ESA is aiming to cap next year's attendance at 40,000. That's significantly less than the record 70,000 people that attended E3 in 2005, and it's also less than the nearly 60,000 people who attended this year's Penny Arcade Expo in August in downtown Seattle.

Three years ago, when the ESA decided to drastically scale back E3 in response to the annual carping about the show's cost to its members, industry scuttlebutt pegged the Four Horsemen most responsible for the original format's demise as the three console manufacturers--Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo--and leading third party publisher Electronic Arts. But as the song goes, sometimes you don't know what you got 'til it's gone, and two years of the new min-E3--first spread out over downtown Santa Monica, then as a shell of its former self back at the L.A. Convention Center--was pleasing no-one, to say nothing of publishers like Activision Blizzard, which pulled out of E3 and the ESA entirely. Clearly, something had to be done.

To read the rest of our exclusive post on the new E3, click on the link below.

Earlier today, the Port Washington, NY-based NPD Group, which tracks sales data for the videogame industry and other sectors, issued a press release about a new service that it would be offering along with its counterparts in the U.K. and Japan. Titled the "Top Global Markets Report," the three companies state that it will be "the first report to integrate point-of-sale (POS) data for video game software sales in the world’s largest games markets," specifically the United States (NPD), the U.K. (Chart-Track) and Japan (Enterbrain). To clarify some details in the announcement, we dashed off some questions to NPD toys and videogames analyst Anita Frazier and corporate marketing director David Riley. Here's what they wrote back:

How did this collaboration among The NPD Group, Gfk Chart-Track Ltd and Enterbrain come about? Who approached who first?

David Riley: The foundation for this was built back in 2004 when we met with Enterbrain at E3. NPD's relationship with Enterbrain grew from there. We've had long-standing relationships and various business partnerships with both GfK and Chart-Track, so it only made sense to form this alliance.

Will the Top Global Markets Report be issued in North America simultaneously with the monthly NPD videogame reports ? If not, how soon afterwards can we expect the global report?

Anita Frazier: This is a top global markets report, not a comprehensive global tracker. The report will be issued to subscribing clients. The Global Markets database won't be available simultaneously with the standard U.S. database. It will be released a few days after but we don't have a set schedule at this time.

Which parts of the report will be made available to media and the public? Can we expect to receive both hardware and software data?

To read the rest of our Q&A in its entirety, click on the link below.

The respected Game Critics Association--of which the Level Up staff is a part--has just announced its nominations for the best games for the 2008 E3 Media & Business Summit which recently took place in Los Angeles. Last year's front-runner was Rock Band (from the three-headed hydra of Harmonix Music Systems, MTV Games and Electronic Arts) with a five nominations. This year? It's Media Molecule and Sony Computer Entertainment's roll-your-own Playstation 3 platformer, with a similar industry-leading total of five nominations. Our obsession with the game has been well-documented here on Level Up; after today's announcement, it would appear that our fellow scribes share our enthusiasm.

Just behind LittleBigPlanet with four nominations each were Gears of War 2 and Left 4 Dead, both console-exclusive to Xbox 360. They were in turn followed by four games that each received three nominations: Fallout 3, Mirror's Edge, Resistance 2 and Spore. The winners will be announced next week; you can see the entire list after the jump. While the Level Up staff has yet to convene to determine which games will make its final ballot--theough we will confess to having a soft spot for Best Original Game nominee Flower--we encourage you to drop us a note in the comments section and let us know which games you think we should vote for, and why.

To see the entire list of nominees, click on the link below.

The short version is that with a compressed E3 schedule and our temporary West Coast HQ located miles and miles away from the action, bringing our customary insights and analysis on a regular schedule is proving somewhat tricky, to say the least. That's not to say that we haven't been hard at work--just shockingly remiss in informing you where you can follow our up-to-the-minute coverage for the rest of the week. Let's remedy that right here, right now.

• You can scan our Twitter feed here on the Level Up home page, in the right column just beneath the archive calendar. If you'd like to subscribe to our feed, the link is here.
• We have two Tumblr blogs that are following the action: Page 110 (photos and quotes) and EGO...trip (occasional pictures and updates, though this week, it's mostly another place to read our Twitter feed).
  

Otherwise, talk amongst yourselves during our temporary absence from the Level Up main stage. We'll have much more detailed observations and reportage for you next week and in the weeks to come. Ta.

When Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment senior vice president Jason Hall stepped down from his post in February of 2007, Level Up was there for an exclusive first interview. The press release announcing his exit declared that Hall would enter into "a first-look videogame and feature film development deal through his wholly owned production company, HDFilms Inc," and last May, we got a glimpse at one of his first projects in an embryonic stage. The project in question was a proposed 15-30-minute "Jackass"-meets-"Game Head" television show in which Hall would alternate between interviewing/playing games with celebrities and videogame luminaries--and stunts like pepper spraying his assistant. We weren't quite sure what to make of it at the time, and not long thereafter, we put it out of our mind entirely--until February at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, where Hall jointly interviewed the Level Up staff and Geoff Keighley.

Last month, Hall invited us back to his offices on the Warner Bros lot--located in the same bungalow as those of "300" and "Watchmen" director Zack Snyder--to show us three episodes of the completed product. Titled "The Jace Hall Show," it's now a five-minute Webisodic series available for download through Crackle and Xbox Live Marketplace, and we've got the exclusive trailer for the show above. Below, in today's installment of Just the FAQs, we grill Hall about exactly what you can expect from his "Curb Your Enthusiasm"-meets-"Jimmy Kimmel" take on videogame culture.

What is "The Jace Hall Show"?

It's a five minute weekly video show that covers lifestyle, entertainment, celebrity and culture as it surrounds videogames.

Free or fee?

Free on Sony's Crackle service. You can also get it in HD on Xbox Live Marketplace for 80 points?

Are you really going to make me do the math?

That's $1 U.S.

Cool. Who's hosting it?

Uh, Jace Hall.

Duh. I knew that. Did his mother really name him "Jace"?

To read the rest of this installment of Just the FAQs in its entirety, click on the link below. 

 John Cusack in the 1989 film "Say Anything," courtesy EW.com

Diane: I just can't have any social life right now.
Lloyd: Don't worry about it. We're just having coffee. We'll be anti-social.
Diane: Be friends?
Lloyd: Yeah. With potential.
--Diane Court (Ione Skye) and Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) in "Say Anything"

We've always been told that persistence is an essential element of success. So as Friday's deadline for shareholders in Take-Two to accept Electronic Arts' tender offer came and went, we wondered whether EA would give up or stand firm. Today, we got our answer, in the form of a press release: stand firm. The official explanation is that by extending the offer for another month, EA "will allow the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] review process to continue," according to Owen Mahoney, EA's senior vice president for corporate development. We also learned from the press release that EA has only secured 6.2 million shares of Take-Two stock via tender, out of 73.1 million shares outstanding. Clearly this will not do. But how to put this in perspective for you, Dear Reader?

As our love of film here at Level Up is well documented, allow us to describe this in movie terms: like John Cusack in the 1989 classic "Say Anything," EA will stand beneath Take-Two's window, blasting Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes," for as long as it takes for Strauss Zelnick and company submit to its, uh, tender embrace. We don't have a dog in this fight, but if EA and Take-Two could join forces like Gabriel and Youssou N'Dour and together make sweet, sweet games, wouldn't that be a beautiful thing?

To read EA's press release in its entirety, click on the link below.

 Promo image for the 1983 film "Never Say Never Again," courtesy The Nostalgia Factory 

When we saw the news this morning that Criterion Games' much-debated-then-much-praised Burnout Paradise would be coming to PC, we were more than a little surprised. That's because in the past, the studio's creative director Alex Ward has made some playfully disparaging comments about gaming on PCs. So as we were Googling for one of his previous statements on the matter to throw into this morning's High Score post, we came across a statement that he had made previously to...us. Here's the exchange we had on the subject back in the fall of 2006:

What about PC gamers? You've been critical of the PC in the past. What would you say to someone who's finished F.E.A.R., they've finished Half-Life 2, they've finished Quake IV. They've seen their little brother rocking out with Black on the console, and they want to know, "When is Alex Ward going to show me some love?"

Never. I'm just being totally honest. I could lie, right, and say "Maybe you'll see a PC game from us in the future." No.

To see the rest of what Ward told us back in Fall 2006, along with some screenshots and the full text of the press release, click on the link below.

At Nintendo's media event in San Francisco a few weeks ago, we made the acquaintance of The Game Factory publicist Damien Sarrazin. He was there to show off the first of an intriguing series of relaxation games for Nintendo's DS handheld. But as we chatted, Sarrazin casually mentioned another title that had yet to be revealed, this one involving the Rubik's Cube license. The combination of a mainstream brand and an unannounced title was too intoxicating for the Level Up staff to resist, so like Activision and Aerosmith, we locked up this announcement exclusively. We've also scored an interview with the game's developer (Two Tribes) and the owners of the Rubik's Cube intellectual property (Seven Towns), which you can peruse by clicking here.

To read the Game Factory press release that will be crossing the wires tomorrow, click on the link below.

 Bing Gordon (far right) pictured with Jeff Bezos, Will Wright and Robin Williams,  courtesy valleywag.com 

The renowned venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers has just announced something that we learned late last week. Electronic Arts chief creative officer William 'Bing' Gordon will join Kleiner Perkins as a partner in June, serving alongside such luminaries as John Doerr, Bill Joy and Al Gore. According to Gordon, with whom we spoke by phone on Sunday evening, the first week of June will be his last at EA before starting at Kleiner Perkins on June 9th. "Being on campus with young people in videogame classes; seeing what they're interested in; seeing what's going on with the Internet turning into new kinds of platforms, from iPhone to Facebook and Amazon Web Services--I've gotten fired up about an all-new ride," Gordon told us when we asked why he was moving on from the company that he helped build into a global power.

That's not all the generally outspoken Gordon had to say. To read our Just the FAQs post with chunks of our conversation, click here. To read Kleiner Perkins' press release announcing his joining the firm, click on the link below.

 

Whether it's the Knicks and the Lakers, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the L.A. Dodgers or Biggie and Tupac, there's always been a rivalry between New York and California. But when it comes to videogames, NY might as well be bringing a knife to a gunfight. Sure, we've got Take-Two, or as we like to call it, The House That Rockstar Built. There's Vicarious Visions, those masters of handheld development. Kaos Studios, which worked on Battlefield for EA and just did Frontlines: Fuel of War for THQ, is also located in our fair state, as are smaller developers like Gamelab, which brought us Diner Dash.

But compared to Northern California (Electronic Arts, Lucasarts, Sega and Namco's U.S. HQs, etc.), which even stole 2K Games from us, and Southern California (Activision, THQ, Warner Bros Interactive, Disney Interactive, Brash Entertainment and more) and, well, it's clear where NYC's interactive inferiority complex comes from. So when we got wind that a brand new publisher was debuting not only in our adoptive state, but a mere subway ride away from Level Up's midtown HQ, we pulled out all the stops to bring you this news--and an exclusive interview with the company's CEO--first.

The publisher in question is GreenScreen Interactive. "It was initially founded by Ryan Brant, Mark Seremet and Susan Cummings," CEO Ron Chaimowitz told us yesterday during an exclusive interview at his SoHo offices. "Mark and Ryan were founders of take-Two Interactive, and Susan was at Take-Two and actually worked with Ryan to build the 2K label very successfully from zero to $400 million over four years." Chaimowitz is himself no slouch, having co-founded GT Interactive Software in 1993 and published such well-known titles as Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem and Unreal.

To read the rest of our post on GreenScreen Interactive as well as the full text of the company's press release, click on the link below.