PixelVixen707

Here’s a thinker: where do fictional characters “live”? That is, when you’re not reading them on the page or watching them on the screen? Do they go back to a design document? Are they stuck in a sketchbook? Do they lumber around your subconscious? When nobody’s thinking about them, do they vanish, until a trade paperback or a lost film reel brings them back to mind?

We know what happens to Matt Hazard when nobody’s playing him. He sits on his couch and gets fat.

I didn’t expect much more than yuks from Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard when I grabbed it off the promo pile at the Journal-Ledger. You may remember the PR campaign, which invented a 25-year history for the title character - making up a series of retro games from the ’80s and ’90s that allegedly starred this lunky, shaved-headed action hero, from Doom knock-offs to survival horror to a gag where he squeezes himself into Mario Kart. Some years he’s a big shot; other years he’s hanging around his pad, denting the couch and waiting for his next gig. You could look through Hazard’s past and see every hit and dud that led to this game, his eventual return. (A guy pretending to be Hazard’s game designer even runs a blog that tells the whole tale.)

I thought this parallel reality, where Matt Hazard was the hottest thing since Mario and Link, was just a marketing joke. Turns out, it’s the premise of the whole game. In Eat Lead, Hazard gets a chance at a comeback, in a modern next-gen game – the very one you’re playing. Trouble is, somebody wants to kill him. And if he dies in this game, he’s dead.

I hate marketing - but I love a fake marketing campaign. By now you may have heard about the story of Matt Hazard, an action game with a twenty-five year history that spans The Adventures of Matt in Hazard Land, A Fistfull of Hazard, You Only Live 1,317 Times, and Choking Hazard: Candy Gramm.

The beauty of the whole thing is that the whole history is fake: to draw attention to the title, D3’s publicists invented the entire gaming franchise, with all the hits and flops to go with it. This is extra funny now that people are playing Mega Man 9 and then running around the web pretending they know everything about Mega Man 8, Mega Man 7, and so on. And if retro titles and inflating your childhood cred are big fads, why not play along by making it all up? Nobody who claims they beat Contra Hard Corps on the Sega Genesis ever has to prove it. So why stop there? We should all be inventing ridiculous lost games and rail about how we slapped them raw.

Another grace note: D3 invented a developer named Ralph Tokey and gave him a blog where he can rant and rave about the franchise and its true legacy. He even claims he invented the “As a policy, we do not comment on rumors” line so popular with games publishers today. I hope Tokey sticks around a while. He’s a little egomaniacal for a made-up man, but I like his style.

One question: can the real game possibly live up to its marketing campaign? This is the same publisher that brought us Dark Sector. Just saying.