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,

 

 Life is complicated. I killed people, smuggled people, sold people. Perhaps here, things will be different.
--Niko Bellic, Grand Theft Auto IV

When Rockstar Games showed the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV, people marvelled over the detailed environments, thrilled to the series' return to Liberty City and speculated about just how next-gen Rockstar North's Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 debut would be. For us, our sense of anticipation was built around something entirely different: the prospect of an immigrant story. When MTV's Tracey John interviewed us for the Multiplayer blog, we spoke of ourselves as being liminal people, in the following exchange:

Multiplayer: Do you feel there are any advantages [to being black and covering videogames]? Do you feel you stand out more because of your race?

Croal: Well, there are relatively few of us. So I guess in that sense I stand out. But I think also I stand out because of my dreads. [laughs] I stand out because I work for Newsweek. … [Working for Newsweek] opened a lot of doors. I know that’s not really what you’re asking, but in terms of race I don’t think I found a particular advantage or disadvantage. Professionally I think there is a perspective I have but I wouldn’t attribute it solely to race. I would say that I’m--and I hate to use a big word--but I’d say that I’m a liminal person; people who exist along boundaries or lines sort of in between spaces.

My parents are from Guyana, South America. I was born in Canada. I lived a little bit of my life--when I was two to when I was five--in Guyana. I studied French for 10 years. I grew up in Canada. I moved to the United States for college. I’ve lived in California, D.C., and now in New York. I work at a mainstream magazine covering a niche subject within that magazine. So there’s a way in which I have all of these different perspectives. I’m a black, Canadian immigrant living in the United States of Guyanese descent, right? So there are all of these things that I’ve seen and done and by virtue of how I came into covering this, starting out writing about arts and entertainment, mostly movies, some music, some technology, and bringing that to covering games and being very inspired by everyone from Pauline Kael and John Simon and Stanley Kauffmann, Roger Ebert--to people who were writing for the Village Voice like Greg Tate and Lisa Jones and really strong cultural reporters who brought multiple perspectives to things. I try to bring that to games.

Now, we don't want to oversell the cultural differences between the English-speaking parts of Canada and the U.S.--let's face it, you export your Hollywood movies and rock/hip-hop while importing our comedians and news anchors, so pop culturally speaking, there are a lot of similarities--but take our word for it that being a double-immigrant has given us a unique-ish perspective on matters large and small. And because of that, we responded strongly to Niko Bellic in a way that certain others may have not.

We say this in search of a way to write thoughtfully about a subject that Rockstar Games is not yet allowing us to write about in any detail: the opening credits to Grand Theft Auto IV.

AOL's Robin Yang, Level Up's N'Gai Croal and Harmonix's John Drake play Rock Band

Our Twitter post of yesterday--"Playing Rock Band's Judas Priest album DLC at MTV's offices. Devil horns!"--pretty much said it all. MTV had originally planned to host journalists last Friday to play the first complete album available for download in its Rock Band videogame, Judas Priest's "Screaming For Vengeance," but it was cancelled at the last minute and moved to Monday. We arrived at 1633 Broadway shortly after 5:00 PM, at which point MTV publicist and skilled Rock Band guitarist Jeff Castaneda escorted us up to the room they call The Lab. Others in the room included MTV Games producer Marc Nesbitt and MTV flack Mariana Agathoklis, Harmonix PR guy John Drake and AOL GameDaily's Robin Yang, whose slender frame belied a zest for rock that would soon be unleashed. (MTV News' Stephen Totilo, displaying a stunning disinterest in corporate synergy, was nowhere to be found.)

Before we took the stage, we ribbed Castaneda for the absence of liquor and other stimulants. "Harmonix just went eight times platinum with the downloadable content--and we've seen the bonus schedule," we said. "So where's the Jim Beam? Where's the Cristal?" Castaneda laughed and volunteered to make a beer run. But we declined, because in truth, rock is the only sustenance we need. With Yang on lead guitar, Drake on vocals, ourselves on drums and a fourth, whose name escapes us, on bass, we kicked things of with "You've Got Another Thing Comin'." From there, we went into "Pain and Pleasure,"--a track whose deceptive simplicity concealed a drumbeat that initially caught us off guard before we recovered and settled into a stone cold groove--followed by the hand-wrecking challenge of "The Hellion" and "Electric Eye." Thankfully, our bandmates were there on two occasions to rescue us from the abyss.

To read the rest of Page 110's dispatch on rocking out at The Lab with MTV, click on the link below.

 The 1957 classic "The Sweet Smell of Success," courtesy of Film Forum 

For a while now, we've been meaning to find a proper home for some of the on-scene reportage that characterized Level Up's carefree infancy, when we would belly up to the VIP bar with Kaz Hirai and Sir Howard Stringer inside the Sony Style store on New York's Madison Avenue. Or firing a pump-action shotgun (the Serbu Super Shorty, if you must know) with Crytek founder Cevat Yerli at The Gun Store in Las Vegas. Or consuming steak and wine at the Morton's Steakhouse in downtown Los Angeles with Microsoft's own James "J" Allard, culminating in our infamous wager. Or playing Madden NFL 07 against Miss May 1998 Deanna Brooks--and losing--at the South Seas Hotel in Miami's South Beach during the runup to last year's Super Bowl. You know, the lighter side of being a videogame journalist.

So today, we're taking the wraps off of Page 110, our sometimes wry, sometimes breathless, but always observant occasional feature on the people, places and things we get to see as part of our job. The title has a double meaning; it's both an in-joke for the truly geeky and a reference to the pop cultural gap between the prominence of boldfaced names who appear on Page Six and those who can't get arrested there despite their stature in the world of videogames. The US Weeklys and the Gawkers of the world may not care about this stuff, but we do, and hopefully you will as well. Enjoy.

The headline says it all, folks: no more new posts from us until next week. It's time for us to recharge our batteries, eat some turkey and dig into the slew of games that have been arriving in stores in recent weeks. First up: Harmonix/MTV Games/Electronic Arts' Rock Band. We managed to get in some quality time last night, teaming up with a couple of industry luminaries and their friends in the process. Geoff Keighley, of "Game Head" and "Bonus Round" fame, proved that his dominance of all media extended to the virtual music sphere as he alternated with ease between drums and lead guitar, while Scarface: The World Is Yours producer Peter Wanat demonstrated equal comfort with lead and bass guitar. As for vocals, the only thing that nature might abhor more than a vacuum would be the aural assault that passes for the Level Up staff's singing ability; nevertheless, we did our best to replicate the distinctive voices of Karen O, Billy Corgan and Jon Bon Jovi, among others, over the course of the evening. By the time we finally shut it down (around 2 am, if you must know), we'd seen a million faces few hundred faces--and we'd rocked them all.

From the entire staff of Level Up, we wish you a Happy Thanksgiving, and the safest of travels.

To see a larger version of the image above, click here.

To see a larger version of the image shown above, click here.