I’ll do a blow by blow of seventeen years in Hollywood for ya someday.
No thanks. Look man, I'm not saying you're a fraud or anything, but if you say things like these:
I’ve spent more hours in a lead or executive capacity in video games (roughly 30,000 hours of professional experience) in games than any single other game developer on the planet who started working in the business in ~2007.
and then the best info that I could find on you is what I posted above, and you don't even have a linkedin profile (that I could find at least) that's a red flag or two.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/montgomerymarkland
(Won’t list everything — everything is 3 careers, 25 years, 20 pages if it was a CV that listed all items — everything confuses people I might do business with so it’s better to curate it)
I spent most time running game studios & companies, sometimes with distribution capacity. And advising peers on running their studios and companies.
Some execs / founders like a credit on the game, if they are focused on building a personal brand and especially if they started out in creative & design.
Most c-level execs who were producers first don’t take credits and put the credit focus on the creative leads, lead producer, whoever drove the successes of a project, because then it’s both a reward and it builds the brands of multiple people at your company.
That way you can turn a designer into a name you can put in the key people list in the pitch deck for another project, for example.
Additionally, sometimes there’s a huge financial incentive to “white label” a product. Your company makes it — another company pays +200% or more to have exclusive credits, so it is marketed as their game (even though another company made the game).
As for searching me, posting anything public, that’s not doxing. I’m a member of SAG with an IMDB profile, highly public and controversial interviews (rarely) such as with Breitbart, and so on. There isn’t any way for me to make private most information about me, except things I intentionally never spoke about.
Google and whatnot create the search output for people after they are searched enough to generate a knowledge panel and are identified as a “verified individual” in a business.
I don’t have any control over what the search results are unless I go spend money on a search focused PR company to lobby, SEO and otherwise alter the search results. Which I don’t care to do, so my work in politics won’t ever show up in search, game related interviews I gave (which were rare, I generally didn’t want to speak to press) are suppressed past many pages because most people search in relation to the movie these days.
It works like an A/B test — whatever people click the most on in the results gets pushed high and whatever people don’t gets pushed low.
And the results constantly change, sometimes google will say I am an actor, sometimes it will say I am a producer, and so on.
As for the hours thing, after 17 years of working 70+ hours a week and being in the c-suite within a year of starting at Obsidian, 30K hours is not abnormal. I also still consulted on non game things, politics, toys, other technology, dating apps. And made a movie, which took a fair amount of time.
My only point was, since I leapfrogged into an executive role nearly immediately, all of the hours of XP in games in the past 17 years have been in senior+ positions.
The Killspace corporate bio is nearly 99% fake news, but I’ve started 7 companies or joint ventures/partnerships since then, so it’s not worth getting someone to fix it.
Let it be a curious black box where no one knows what really happened.
And all good regarding anything, I don’t care even if you did call me a fraud.
I do come across pretty agro in writing because there’s zero chance you get anywhere in Hollywood unless you operate as an exec.
But check with the thousands of people I’ve employed — 96% of them (at least the talented ones and the ones I didn’t fire or layoff) would automatically come work with me again. I never punch down or yell at people in the office or on a set.
I have been in some gnarly battles with exec peers (one involved a Louisville slugger and a computer).
But if you’re in business with people like Harvey Weinstein, and you are not a sociopath, you better learn how to tango.
Between a few projects I’ve been on, I’ve been called every name in the book online and on social media at some point — that sort of thing is water off a ducks back once you experience it at scale (especially worldwide scale).
What’s probably strange is me being transparent about things here — most people will not do that, and lots of peers in the businesses I am in REALLY don’t like that I do that.
But I was just an RPG player in law school when I first lurked here, so it seems natural to me, when I stop back by, to just act like I’ve always acted, instead of putting on a front and being fake aloof.
Which would be lame and boring — unlike the bull in a china shop show that is just my default style.
And don’t sleep on the inside story of the merger of Hollywood and game business — it’s probably movie worthy.
