"It showed what powers this character, Alex Mercer, would have: spikes coming out of his back, his arm transforming into a blade, all the physics, the crowd sizes," Ansell said. "It was really high-tech stuff. That was the first time I kind of had an inkling of the scope of the game, and it just seemed so cool."

Chris Ansell's first day as Radical Entertainment's marketing director was part orientation, part synthesis. The studio was at its peak in the spring of 2006, employing roughly 420 developers spread across multiple projects. As he made the rounds of his new studio, he laid eyes on an embryonic title called Prototype.

There was just one problem: Somebody else had the exact same idea.

Prototype was exactly the kind of thing that Radical needed Ansell, a veteran of the World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy ad campaigns, to market. It had a completely novel design that promised players a superhero experience that they'd never been able to have before. If Ansell could sell the idea, Radical could have one of the defining games of this new generation on their hands.

"Often, if you separate marketing from developers, you get different visions," Ansell explained. "I'm a strong believer that every voice should be heard, and marketing should reflect a game's strengths. Game developers live and breathe [their games] every minute of every day, so why would you not take the chance to feed off that energy and their ideas, and translate that into a strong consumer message? That was a big appeal."

Ansell's role as marketing director called for partnership between development and marketing—divisions that historically did not see eye to eye on the subject of how best to sell games to consumers.

But licensing Marvel's angry green hero had been relatively low risk. Players knew The Hulk; Prototype was unknown and untested. So, too, was Radical's approach to crafting a message to sell the game.

Ansell wouldn't discover that for a while, when he found himself fighting a marketing duel he'd never anticipated. At the beginning, the challenge seemed much more straightforward: Introducing audiences to a new franchise with a new kind of game design. The underlying tech powering the game was derived from Titanium, Radical's proprietary engine built for 2005's The Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, a similar style of action game lauded for its state-of-the-art graphics and calamitous superpowers that let players level buildings.

Eric Holmes, Prototype's director who had helmed the well-received Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, communicated to Ansell that despite the bloody thread of violence woven through most of Alex's powers, players should feel compelled to straddle the fine line between good and evil.

"This was the start of the hoodie era," Ansell recalled, laughing. "We'd been announced around the same time as Assassin's Creed, and they had this white hoodie. We had a unique vision for making [_Prototype_] very on-the-street. You were an everyman: As long as you had a hoodie, you could be Alex Mercer."

Ansell forged a marketing spear for Prototype consisting of three prongs. The first was to position Alex Mercer, the game's star, as the sort of character players would aspire to be.

"We were fighting for internal attention with sales managers," said Ansell. "You want to make sure you're putting your best foot forward within the organization, and that those people are thinking as much about your game as they are the big titles."

He watched them shuffle into meeting rooms, exhausted and careworn from days of attending meetings and feverishly writing game previews. Then the lights dimmed, and Prototype gameplay videos exploded onto screens.

For Radical, there was political dimension to Prototype as well. Vivendi had acquired Radical Entertainment one year earlier in 2005. By late 2007, news broke that Vivendi and Activision were in talks to merge, a fusion that produced a powerhouse in command of juggernauts such as Call of Duty and Guitar Hero in addition to World of Warcraft. Part of Ansell's job was to make sure Radical didn't get lost in the shuffle.

"It was so fun to watch them slowly reach down for their pens, slowly open their backpacks and grab their notebooks, leaning forward with their eyes wide," Ansell remembered.

By mid-2008, Prototype was generating buzz. Some of Ansell's fondest memories from his time at Radical are of journalists who booked appointments near the end of a trade show such as Gamescom and GDC. He watched them shuffle into meeting rooms, exhausted and careworn from days of attending meetings and feverishly writing game previews. Then the lights dimmed, and Prototype gameplay videos exploded onto screens.

"That was part of it: Give your team the assets they need to help them sell, and feel super proud and accomplished by having these amazing assets they're proud to show off to retailers," Ansell continued.

As Prototype evolved, Radical's marketing team rolled out the red carpet for higher-ups. As part of the internal campaign to win support and enthusiasm within Activision, game posters were personalized with the names of Activision's top regional sales managers. These were the people who would be making the pitch to retailers and game stores on behalf of Prototype, and their buy-in would be crucial. Within a few days, Ansell and his team would receive calls exclaiming over the posters, on full display over desks.

The second and third prongs of Prototype's marketing were its world and the emergent gameplay that stemmed from the world's ingredients. Prototype's streets teem with crowds of enemies and NPCs that players can conscript into their pandemonium. Crowds scatter when large-scale fights broke out. Helicopter rotor blades carve up zombies and send dismembered corpses flying. All the while, players deftly move through the chaos thanks to Alex's smooth handling.

"We wanted to paint the character with an air of mystery so the player could inject morality into the character," Ansell said. "You can play him how you like. We hadn't really seen many anti-heroes in games. It wasn't a popular thing yet, so we really played up that angle in the press."

"People had a hard time picturing an open-world game without a car, but it seemed like the right thing to do. It honors the [comic book] subject matter," said Fox.

Flying, Sucker Punch's designers agreed, was out of the question. Few if any superhero games had executed fun and intuitive flight. Besides, they had another idea. Teenagers in Russia had posted YouTube videos of themselves performing parkour, a style of movement where practitioners move from one point to another by running, climbing, rolling, and jumping as quickly as possible. Sucker Punch's character would incorporate parkour-style athleticism by seamlessly climbing up buildings and vaulting over obstacles.

"When you're making a video game, you're looking for things that work well inside of a game space. Aiming and shooting work well; jumping and climbing work well," Fox explained. "That works really well in a video game because it's very physically expressive, so we made a superhero game."

Donning a cape and tights seemed an exciting prospect for the Sucker Punch crew, who were as passionate about comics as they were games. In meetings, they described visions of cruising around a massive city ravaged by a disaster. They gleaned ideas from GTA III and graphic novels such as Batman: No Man's Land. However, their players would not traverse its boulevards in cars.

"At the time, Grand Theft Auto III was super popular," Fox remembered. "It kind of redefined people's expectations of what a video game [could be]. I remember playing GTA and thinking, Man, I wish I could fly."

By 2006, Nate Fox was tired of slinking through shadows. A game director at Sucker Punch Productions, Fox had been developing the Sly Cooper series of stealth games for six years. The team was ready to change course, and they knew just the route to take.

Ansell and Radical's developers felt confident they had created something wholly unique. But by sheer coincidence, a groundswell of anticipation was building around an uncannily similar type of game.

Superpowers would complement parkour for Cole MacGrath, their leading hero. At the beginning of their game, Infamous, Cole is caught in a blast that bestows the power of electricity. Players manifest their shocking powers in myriad ways, such as firing concentrated streams of energy to snipe far-off enemies, or lobbing crackling balls of electricity that explode like grenade. When Cole comes into contact with geometry, he automatically begins to climb or leap over it, letting players concentrate more on exploring and fighting and less on pressing buttons to move.

Per a standing agreement with Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sucker Punch developed Infamous exclusively for PS3. Sony's marketing department handled promotional work, riffing off videos, concept artwork, and materials from Sucker Punch so they were able to devise messaging that suited the game.

The centerpiece of a second marketing campaign was a video titled "The Beauty of Powers," a montage of gameplay footage that showed Cole pull off extraordinary stunts using his electricity powers and his effortless athleticism.

"When we watched it we thought, 'Oh my God. That's our game?'" Fox recalled. "And it's totally our game, it's just that when you slow down time to see all the detail and see just how expressive the hero can be, man, the game just looks awesome. When we saw that video, we said, 'We need to make a game that's equal to this video.'"

Sucker Punch mined other sources for influence. Like most developers they played games as much for fun as for research. "It's not like we were the first to do an open-world superhero game," Fox said. " Spider-Man 2 on PS2 was amazing, with really amazing locomotion. Another one was Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, which was actually the game that came out before Prototype that the same team worked on."