Hello everyone, and welcome to another wonderful edition of the Null Newsletter! As May comes to an end, we have a recap of the goings-on in Null this month, as well as a look forward to a very busy June to come.
New Game Announcement At IGN Live
After our adventures at PAX East in March, we went back to the drawing board and took a look at events that made sense for Null to attend over the rest of the year. Three of those events are on the very near horizon in June: The Guerilla Collective, IGN Live, and the X Games. We’re very happy to announce that a brand new, as-yet-unrevealed game that Null is publishing will debut for the very first time at IGN Live on June 7th! If you’re attending the event, you can play the game on the show floor (as well as get a shot at Demon Spore if you haven’t tried its demo yet); if not, tune into IGN’s livestream on the morning of June 7th to see the launch trailer, or check Null’s YouTube channel later in the day for more details. We’ve been working on this announcement for quite a while now, and we’re looking forward to seeing your reactions to the fifth game in the Null family.
It’s been interesting to see the planning for IGN Live come about, if only from an interested observer’s prospective. When I worked at GameSpot back in the mid-2000s, both my company and IGN were really interested in figuring out how to make live events work (and be profitable). The rapid rise of PAX in Seattle took a lot of people by surprise, if I recall, and with E3 still being industry-only it was clear there was an appetite for live events based around gaming in America that was being underserved. Neither of our companies really figured out how to compete with PAX back in the day, but now that E3 is more or less history, IGN Live looks to fill some of the void that it left behind by inviting thousands of gamers to LA during the week of Summer Games Fest to play games, watch stage presentations, and hopefully get some cool giveaways. Null will be a part of the event, and we’re bringing both Demon Spore and an unannounced game (!) to LA the weekend of June 7th. If you’re in the area, hopefully you’ll be able to swing by and get some games in!
Later in the month, we’re bringing Streetdog BMX to the X Games in Ventura, California. Obviously this kind of event is a bit out of the ordinary for us as a games publisher, but it felt like a natural fit to show Streetdog BMX off to an interested crowd. It’s probably going to be hot, but we’ll hopefully get a nice shady spot on one of the media rows, so hop on your BMX bike and ride on down if you’re nearby!
Athena Crisis Speedrun Challenge
I have never been a speedrunner myself, but I’ve always enjoyed watching people attempt to break games in incredibly weird ways. I am enough of an old head to have been around for a lot of the early Quake Done Quick videos that were formative in the early days of the speedrunning scene, and now the scene is bigger than ever, with GDQ events raising millions of dollars for charity and people still finding ways to clip out of bounds in any engine they get their hands on.
As an amused onlooker I doubt I’d have the patience to perfect a speedrun myself, which is why the official Speedrun.com Athena Crisis speed run challenge has been so fun to watch. The challenge involves speeding through the game’s prequel campaign, then finishing up with two (much harder) secret maps to cap off the run. This would likely take me an hour or so to get through (those last maps are tough!) but as of this writing, one of the contestants has managed to rip through them in just over 13 minutes. Seeing the Discord come together to discuss strats has been fun to watch, even if they sometimes go over even my head, and I’ve played the game for dozens of hours at this point.
There are still a few days left to enter the contest, which has a grand total of $1,000 in prizes, so if you want to try your hand at turn-based strategy done quick, click here and put your thinking cap on. Thanks to speedrun.com for partnering with us for this event, and hopefully we’ll have more speedrunning competitions to promote in the future.
Welcome Ashley Oh
Please welcome Ashley Oh to the Null team as our Head of Social Media! Ashley comes to us by way of Rooster Teeth, Hard Drive, and inverse.com. She’ll be leading up the charge to populate not just all of the various Null social media channels with #content but also supporting the social media profiles of the games that we publish. Follow the Null social channels to see more of her work in the coming months!
Etcetera
I’ve been to somewhere between ten or fifteen E3s in my life (they blur together after you get a few under your belt, honestly, aside from landmark events like seeing 15-minute long Metal Gear Solid trailers at the event before they were easily accessible online), and while I miss the event itself, it definitely seems like there’s a germ of something new forming in LA this year between Summer Games Fest, IGN Live, and a few other events/streams that are happening at the same time. Obviously the economics of spending millions of dollars to do a single hour-long event was falling out of fashion for the big publishers, and quarantine definitely made it difficult to reconvene E3 after a couple of years off, but I’m hoping that this year’s cluster of events starts up something like a new GamesCom for the American audience where a bunch of press, developers, and fans of games can come together for a few days to celebrate the medium.
IGN Live is certainly a bold swing and it’s exciting to be a part of the very first one. It sounds like I’ll be a part of the event stream at some point to show off Demon Spore to a wider audience, so look for me if you happen to be watching the IGN stream during the show. If not, we’ll be sure to have the archive of all of our event activities in the newsletter next month and on our website as well. -rorie
