"Surprise! Rock Band is the ultimate role-playing game -- the only way to win is to completely commit as guitarist, bassist, drummer, or singer and do your part for the fellowship of meta-musicians sharing the virtual stage."
"No longer a covert operation, Epic’s sci-fi shooter Gears of War has finally emerged, and it’s pretty much everything we hoped it would be, as well as a few things we didn’t expect."
"Pick up the white plastic instrument of destruction that powers the six-string simulator Guitar Hero II, and you’ll feel like a bonafide rock star almost immediately. Really."
Keep reading:
1. Be your own public relations person.
2. Be confident in your clips, and employers just might believe you.
3. Write for the local and campus media so you can say you’ve been regionally published.
4. Save your editor's time -- follow the rules.
5. Be aware that you’re on assignment -- you’re not writing for your ego.
Dan Amrich '93 Makes a Writing Career in Video Games
Before Dan Amrich ’93 became a senior editor at the Official Xbox Magazine he was the writer, editor, and publisher of the 10th Floor Tabloid, a newsletter he produced during his freshman year to report the jokes, one-liners, and antics of him and his floormates in the West Tower.
“I started out as a journalist at Ithaca College just chronicling my friends’ lives,” he recalls. “It was like a dumb humor magazine that didn’t really go anywhere, but it was Towers' journalism.”
As an undergrad, he initially considered a career in radio, having enjoyed his work as a music director and student station manager at IC’s Internet radio station, 106 VIC. But he changed direction when he learned that a career in radio meant that he’d have to move frequently to keep a job.
Watch Dan strap on his proton pack to promote the new Ghostbusters video game:
A writing minor, Amrich says he always enjoyed writing, but the light went on in his head after discovering music journalism the Writing as a Critic course with Barbara Adams, associate professor of writing.
Professor Adams became one of Amrich’s most important mentors, he says, encouraging him to write freelance articles for the weekly campus newspaper, the Ithacan, and regional publications like the Ithaca Journal and 14850.
“The universe seemed to be pointing me to a career in writing,” he says.
As he nurtured his enthusiasm in Adams’s class, Amrich also learned how to apply his passion to impress editors.
“The single most important skill I picked up at Ithaca was learning how to edit myself,” he says. “A lot of new writers have trouble distancing themselves from their own copy because they’ve worked so hard on it and every word is precious.”
His ability to self-edit and stick to editors’ guidelines paid off big when a piece he wrote was accepted to Wired magazine. He was working on a personality profile of a sound designer he knew, but he was limited to 180 words.
“I didn’t know how was I going to edit it down to two quotes and my summary text in 180 words, but I had to do it,” he recalls.
Amrich says all aspiring writers should learn to be their own editors whether they want to freelance or join a staff. And they should be prepared to let their egos get a little bruised, at least when starting out.
Right out of Ithaca, Country Guitar magazine offered Amrich a staff position after he impressed its editors with a freelance piece he submitted on deadline. Working on staff there by day, he reviewed music for AOL Critic’s Choice by night. Although he wrote these articles for free, he gained national exposure because AOL had about 300,000 subscribers at the time.
AOL later offered him the job of writing video game reviews.
While accumulating published clips and experience, Amrich wrote video game articles for Slam, a basketball magazine, and Flux, a nerd’s lifestyle magazine, as he describes it. He also reviewed games for the website GamePro under the name Dan Electro.
Amrich came to the Official Xbox Magazine in 2006, but before he could call the shots there, he worked in the custom publishing department designing Xbox 360 sales brochures for retail gaming stores. When a feature editor position opened up, Amrich leapt at it. Now Amrich is responsible for 30 pages of the magazine; he divides his time between assigning, editing, and occasional feature writing and reviewing.
Amrich wears many hats, but don’t call him a journalist. “What I do is close to journalism, and I try to follow the ethics and the honor of being a journalist, but it’s entertainment journalism. I’m okay just being a game critic and reviewer. There are games' journalists out there, but I don’t think I deserve the title yet -- maybe I’ll earn it later.”
Looking back, Amrich recognizes how important his days at Ithaca College were in making the transition from a shy TV-R major and Towers' journalist to a successful freelancer and top magazine editor in California. Amrich says he will always see Ithaca as his launching pad.
“Ithaca’s a community where print is not dead -- between Ithaca and Cornell, the people like to read!” he says. “It was a great place to get my feet wet. I didn’t know I was going to transition to the national stage that quickly, but I felt ready for it.”
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Fuse is a student produced publication about the Ithaca College experience. All content in the print and web versions of Fuse is developed by current Ithaca College students in a breadth of different areas of study.
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