We had been working on Path of Exile in secret for almost four years when we decided to announce it. We felt that the game was in a polished enough state that it was time to for a grand unveiling in order to build a community before our 2011 release. We're based in New Zealand, so we booked our founders on a flight to America, with the intention of meeting with journalists for a few days before announcing our game on September 1.

Our first stops were Los Angeles and San Francisco, where we visited various game publications in person. Our PR representative booked each appointment in advance and we generally spent around an hour in each interview.

Our goal was to give a brief outline of the game, show them a trailer and then let them play while they asked questions. We had two laptops with us and wanted to promote the multiplayer aspects of our game, so we encouraged the journalists to play with each other while they asked questions. It was pretty interesting seeing the competitive relationship some of the journalists had with each other.

Because time was constrained during the interviews, we wanted to demonstrate our Skill System to the journalists in a very efficient manner. Rather than fiddling around with dozens of skill gems in front of them, we decided it was best to make a video explaining the system in advance. This worked really well - they all appreciated it and wrote positively about that system.

The result of all of these interviews were writeups from: PCGamer, IGN, Game Revolution, G4TV, GamePro and IncGamers.

We scheduled the online announcement of the game to occur at time the journalists' articles went live. We turned our website on, sent out a press release and waited to see what the public would think. Working on something in secret for many years and then finally getting outside opinion is pretty scary. Thankfully, people's reactions were positive and we began to build a community around a loyal group of fans (we love you guys!)

Brian Weissman, the famous Magic: the Gathering player, is one of our founders and he lives in Seattle. The bi-annual PAX Expo was being held the following day in that city, so we decided to pay Brian a visit and promote Path of Exile at PAX. Our New Zealand contingent had never been to an event like PAX, so it was quite staggering to see the sheer number of gamers and games on display.

Our first task at PAX was to check out the games on the show floor. We reasoned that if we spent a few hours looking around initially, then we'd be able to focus on hunting journalists later without getting distracted by fancy new games we want to look at.

One of the first games that drew our eye was Darkspore. It's an online action RPG made by Maxis and is technically a competitor to Path of Exile. It has a very interesting system where you level up and equip a squad of three separate characters and can swap between them as you play. We played it for a while and had a chat to their senior producer, Mike Perry. He is a really nice guy and was eager to talk to us about our project as well. We scheduled a time to meet up with him later in the Expo where we showed him Path of Exile and had a great opportunity to chat.

On the first day of the convention, we received a tweet from Runic Games, the creators of Torchlight. They wanted to meet up while we were in town, so we visited their booth and had a look at Torchlight 2. Playing the peer-to-peer multiplayer was a lot of fun - it's looking like a great sequel to Torchlight.

We introduced ourselves to their team and got to meet Max Schaefer (one of the original founders of Blizzard North and Flagship Studios) and Travis Baldree (Project Director of Fate, Mythos, Torchlight). It was fascinating meeting such industry veterans and chatting about action RPG design. We met up with them again the following day to show them Path of Exile and to have a longer discussion. They offered some tips about things they've learnt over the years and regaled us with stories about their game development backgrounds.

One of our goals at PAX was to show our game to journalists. Once we'd had our fill of the show floor (and checked out all our competitors), we split up to find people with orange media passes to tell about Path of Exile. They were generally very polite and only refused a presentation if they were a non-journalist member of the media.

Because of our impromptu decision to attend PAX, we didn't have our own booth to demonstrate the game in. In order to show it to the journalists, we found an abandoned stage in the queuing room and set up our laptops there. We're definitely going to get a real booth next time!

Joystiq mentioned this in their writeup: "He starts pressing through the throng of people and I follow as best I can, stifling the fear that he's taking me to some remote corner of the convention to rob and murder me."

Over the course of the weekend, we showed Path of Exile to about ten groups of journalists. Later, it was interesting to see coverage crop in various places online. In one podcast, we were described by a journalist as "five guys from Norway".

On Saturday evening we met up with the Runic Games guys again for drinks and dinner. They gave us a tour of their offices. We had a great time hanging out with them.

Overall, the trip to America was a great success. The announcement of the game went without any problems and we got a lot of good feedback and publicity. It sowed the seeds of the community that we're still building. If you're interested in Path of Exile, please sign up for an account - it'll be eligible for selection into the upcoming beta.