UK Press Tour - August 2003

With the release of the game we've all worked so hard on for what seems years, not too far away, it was time to collect up the material with the rolling demo and in hand with the publishers (Koch Media UK), go out and convince the gaming community that X² was the best space game ever!

After a few diversions early in the week (South Wales (never made it - called off en-route), Birmingham, Home, Birmingham) to fulfil my "day" job commitments, I was off to Basingstoke to meet up with Dave from Koch.

I arrived at the wrong hotel (not my fault I hasten to add ;-) and after a scenic tour of Basingstoke finally got settled for the night. Next day: London and Dennis publishing (PC Zone etc.). We parked up near Hyde Park and got the tube across town. Zone loved it. When can we have the review code? What's the release date? and so on. A near two hours showing off the game and then a nice lunch in an Italian. These "journos" live the high life Y'know ;-)

PC Zone below.

Back to Basingstoke and Koch Media to check emails and setup for the presentation the next day. This had two purposes. Firstly to show the game to invited games journalists and secondly to present to Koch Media themselves. Another enjoyable time was had (how can it not be fun showing off your game?) and it's always great to find one of the journalists is an X fan! We could have talked all day...

A shot from the presentation. Nice big projector and surround sound too! Can I just stay here and play please...?

And a few of the people in shot.

A picture from the PR/Marketing office at Koch Media with some of their titles on display and the "concept" work already underway on the X² box art and manual. The chosen package isn't in the shot - sorry ;-)

Then to Bath for a meeting with Future Publishing (PC Gamer, PC Format, SFx etc). Probably the hardest of the them all due to the fact that we forgot to plug the laptop in at first and battery power doesn't tend to give the best performance, but with that rectified we concluded an in-depth discussion of the game and Dave (Koch) did his "publisher" bit as normal to secure further coverage.

Friday: Bournemouth and Paragon publishing. Successful again and you can tell the game is attracting interest when editors from other magazines stop by the desk and start asking questions :-)

So all in all, I think a successful trip and although I could have done better at certain times, we have certainly put Egosoft on the map and secured a great deal of coverage in UK magazines/websites. 

Roll on X Online ;-)

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