Imagine this guy, right? He's probably a real guy.
He's a movies guy, and he's relatively well-known inside the movie industry. Not an actor or filmmaker, just someone who's adjacent to some media businesses which are adjacent to film. Not a critic or a commentator, just like, a guy who knows a guy at Butterkist and might be able to get a sponsorship.
It's good for his business if he appears to be friends with Tarantino, and he idolises Spielberg, but his main function is brokering licencing deals between Dreamworks and Cineworld, or something, so he puts on an annual dinner show for Hollywood people. They pay him for an opportunity to shoot their shot at other Hollywood people, and he MC's a little, in between. He's not very good at it, but it makes him feel like he's part of something cultural, and not just, like, a marketing chump.
That could be true. He could well be a real person. But I wouldn't fucking know. I've never heard of him, and nor should I, because I'm not involved, and even though the movie industry is clearly quite insane, it's not so far up its own hype-hole as to frantically, fanatically celebrate industry messaging and make a circus out of what should be B2B hospitality.
So who the fuck is Geoff Keighley?
Promoters exist across entertainment, and they often have Geoff's exact arc, I just don't think a lot of people remember what that arc actually was.
Long before he was the guy who found careful euphemisms that allowed him to nod at industry-shaking layoffs and chronic worker abuse without ever saying anything real at all, Geoff had a whole career around the turn of the century as an freelance journalist whose work carried a certain prestige. His byline appeared across a bunch of sites, but his articles for Gamespot, typified by the "Final Hours of [X New Game]" series, were often show stopping deep dives into development in an era where there was next to no coverage on what "making a game" actually looked like.
A lot of folks saw him as a sharp, independent writer, separate from the harsh content cycle that the major blogs and sites were driven by, and embedded in ways that regular critics and journalists couldn't be in order to do their jobs. Of course, part of that is that the coverage he gave generally was positive, even when it was about the "fall" of a studio. But it was also some of the earliest popular writing that helped to elucidate that "being a game developer" often meant dogshit work/life balance, at best. (As an bonus example for those who've been paying attention to the last year I've had (or were right there with me), take a peek at how his "Eyes of the Storm: Behind Closed Doors at Blizzard" article begins to get jumpscared by a few names.)
Looking back on it now, you can read that work a few ways. you can see that he was drawing a blueprint for an entire style of more contemporary, access-driven embedded coverage--with all of the requisite caveats about framing attached to that.
And with that context, I think it becomes clear that Keighley is not odd at all. Sports, music, film, comedy... a lot of these areas have folks who went from prestigae press, unremembered amateur participation, even distant and boring academia to running award shows and festivals, promoting album listening parties and boxing matches, and standing hand in hand with the latest and greatest in non-endemic sponsors and whichever just-barely-still-cool entertainer would be willing to go on stage.
What is sort of surprising is that there aren't more Keighleys in our industry; its that he takes up so much air in the room that makes him stand out. But just give it another few years. The "Guy who hung around and made some connections" to "guy who is on stage with a microphone" pipeline is huge in every other industry. Here, it's just getting rolling.
The last ten years have seen a huge move to blur the line between "journalist," "critic," and "presenter." Groups like Kinda Funny picked up the Keighley ball and started running with it, realizing that you didn't need to stop doing your regular gig talking about your game opinions to also be the well paid hosts for a trailer-filled advertise-event from a major publisher. Folks like Anthony Carboni found roles straddling games and broader "nerd culture" IP and events because there are so many more opportunities for a Keighley-minded-sort to work in those places.
Truly, I think the only thing that makes Keighley so unique a role in this industry is that games publishers remain dedicated to owning as much of their own airtime as they can. This is part of why Summer Games Fest was so dry this year, and why it seems E3 really is dead.. What do these huge publishers need from Geoff that they can't pay a freelance Greg Miller-alike for?
(Edit: Just to be clear, I am not dragging OP. I get it! A lot of this has been elided, and he DOES stick out like a sore thumb here!)
