LM: Tell me a little bit about yourself. I know you used to work with the German press and then you came to work with dtp?

CK: Yeah, that’s right. I studied history and political science, and then worked as a junior reporter with the German Press Agency. The media business is very difficult to get into in Germany, and there weren’t many jobs for journalists. So I thought, why not do something else? I ended up combining my love for adventure games with what I had learned. And here I am PR Manager for dtp and responsible for their adventures. It is a fun job, because you can actually live the dream of a kid who wants to make a computer game. I am not a developer, but I have some influence over the games and what titles we pick up. It is something I dreamed of when I was around 15 or 16—getting into the games business. Creating games. The first titles I played, and my favorite, are the Broken Sword games.

LM: So let’s talk a bit about dtp. I have to ask, why focus on adventure games and why now?

CK: Well, there are several reasons. The first is that two years ago, the adventure was dead in Germany. All the people who loved adventure games in the past thought, "That can’t be right. They just can’t be gone like that." So someone had to find a really good adventure, take it, and see how it would sell. We did this with Runaway, which was a huge success in Germany. With this title, we just kicked things off. Now, adventures are coming back to a form of their old glory. It’s a development that I think we started in Germany.

LM: dtp has been described as guerilla marketers. In other words, you rely more on creative marketing tactics in promoting your titles over the standard money-intensive old school methods. Is this accurate? What do you do that is different than most publishers?

CK: I think we do more than almost any would do for an adventure title. We always watch the campaigns of our competitors to see what they do for their adventure games. For example, for Syberia II in Germany, we thought they did virtually nothing. Adventures are not that big; you can’t just sit back and say, “Well okay… they will sell no matter how few press releases we do or preview versions we send out.” That’s just wrong. You really have to bang a drum for adventures and go all out. Send press releases every week and tell people what they want to know about them, what the game is like, send off screen shots, send off wallpapers, do interviews. You have to do more and more and try to reach people every way that you can. You have to be creative about the channels you put your information into. We just don’t go out and say, “Okay, here’s an ad for the game and adventure magazines.” Perhaps we say, for this game we need the mystery magazines on the Internet who report on mystery books and related stories.