🎮 Ever wondered how video games made it to the Smithsonian? What does it mean to be a Game Evangelist? How do you figure out what gamers really want?

In this episode of the Here's Waldo Podcast, Chris Melissinos, the Principal Evangelist for Video Games at AWS, shares his profound passion, rooted in the belief that video games are among the most significant art forms of our time, offering immersive, interactive experiences that connect people, convey powerful stories, and explore complex themes. Melissinos' work, from his role as Chief Gaming Officer at Sun Microsystems to his involvement with the Smithsonian on 'The Art of Video Games Exhibition', showcases his dedication to highlighting the cultural, technological, and educational value of video games.

Every play counts, every story matters, and every game can leave a lasting imprint on human experience. Tune in to discover insights shedding light on the past, present, and promising future of video gaming as a creative and impactful medium.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Understanding the role of a Principal Evangelist in Gaming
• Understanding Market Needs and Building for Success
• Embracing Guerrilla Marketing and Finding Your Audience
• Rethinking Strategy: The Shift from Consoles to Cross-Platform Development
• Career Growth Insights on Setting Expectations and The Grit Behind Success
• The Art of Making People Understand
• Chris' Involvement in Building the Art of Video Games Exhibition at the Smithsonian

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Chris Melissinos and Boss Rush Weekly Video Game Industry News on LinkedIn
• AWS for Games Youtube and Twitch
• Games Industry Legends Podcast
• Video Game History Foundation

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together, we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, Founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Welder Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. Before introducing today's guest, I want to thank you, send a thank you out to GamesBeat. They host wonderful events, and that is where we met. So if you haven't been to one, sign up. There are so many. 

Today we have Chris Melissinos with us. Chris is the Principal Evangelist for video games at AWS, where he influences the next generation of game technology and offerings from AWS, while also acting as a developer advocate ensuring the needs of the game developers are met.

Prior to AWS, he was the chief gaming officer at Sun Microsystems, creator of the Smithsonian American Art Museum's The Art of Video Games Exhibition, director of media and entertainment strategy for Verizon, and a founding board member of the Video Game History Foundation. He also hosts a variety of video game programming on the AWS for Games channels on YouTube and Twitch. Let's get started. 

Thank you for being here. I'm glad we could finally make it work. 

Chris Melissinos: Yeah. Thank you so much for having it. I'm glad we are too. I'm glad we are too. So this is great. Thank you for having me.

Lizzie Mintus: And Chris has some wonderful sound effects that she may put on during the show. 

Chris Melissinos: Oh yeah. If we need to add a little one up in there or, you know, a little air horn because we're finally going ahead and getting our discussion, recorded for posterity. So it's wonderful to see.

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you. So for any of our listeners who aren't familiar. Tell us about what it means to be a Principal Evangelist for video games at Amazon. 

Chris Melissinos: Wow. Yeah. How long do we have? So, really what the evangelism title carries, there's a lot of breadth to it, right? A lot of surface area that can cover. And part of my earlier career when I was at Sun Microsystems, I also left the company as kind of the chief evangelist for the company. And what that really means is, applying the things that a company does to problems that need to be solved out in the world, out with our customers, out for consumers. And being able to kind of tie all those pieces together and tell the story about why these technologies can make a positive impact on the technology that you're creating, the services that you're developing for the people that use them. So it's really about understanding the big picture story and how you can bring all of those things together.

That also means having a good enough, technical depth of expertise to understand how these pieces fit together so everything is done kind of correctly. And so, part of it is that. Part of it is also framing all of this technology and the work that we do around the importance of In my example of the video games industry, how do we take the things that we do at AWS and in the broader Amazon and make sure that they are right for developers to help them create more art, create more games, create more connection, and do so in a way that allows them to continue making those things?

How can we do this? Cost effectively. How do we do this at scale? How do we do this securely? And so, it's kind of a mix of those things. Part of it is directed right at the core developer. This is how we're going to put these pieces together. And then this is how it's going to impact you positively going forward.

Then the other piece of that is inside the company, making sure that my colleagues and the rest of the organizations understand how the video game industry is kind of set up. Why it looks the way it does. What do developers actually think about the work that they're creating? Is it to just make money or is it bigger than that? It is about telling stories, about creating connection, about putting something positive out in the world and make sure that those voices have a seat at the table, when we are developing those technologies and solutions. 

So the evangelism covers that whole wide spectrum of. technology meeting need to create better impact, more positive things in the world.

Lizzie Mintus: Can you talk about what you have accomplished so far at Amazon? Sounds like you have a lot going on. 

Chris Melissinos: Oh my goodness. Well, I happen to work with just extraordinary colleagues, the people that have worked on a lot of the projects and things that I've worked on in coming to the company. So I've been here for three and a half years. And I came in during the time of COVID, right? When everything was up in the air. And so I wound up being on a variety of different projects, until I finally landed in the evangelism role about a year ago. 

But one such example is the Open3D engine. So, Amazon decided to go ahead and invest in building a game engine, which is known as Lumberyard to most people. And this was a fork of the Crytek engine back in the day. And then it was rebuilt into this really awesome game engine that was connected back to AWS services. And that's how you went and got access to it. And then the team said, look, there were wonderful lessons learned here, but what if we took the good, threw out the bad, and rebuilt everything from the ground up to create a new engine, that we're then going to put into the open source community?

So we're going to allow for the developer community to take advantage and have access to the breadth of investment and institutional knowledge that we've had, and have access to a game engine. And so I joined that team to be able to provide kind of a game developer perspective. Not that they weren't, because the architects of this all come from game development, from very large, very well established companies, and you all know who they are, the biggest of the big. But also to provide a quality of life type of framing around those. 

So I'll give you a perfect example. When I joined the team, they were like, Hey, you said you're going to help us find opportunities. And I said, oh no. But before I did that, I went through your demo project. So I built the demo game that you did. By the way, here's stuff that I found broke. Here's stuff that worked really well. Here's stuff that we can improve on. And they were like, but are you, but you're not engineering this. I'm like, no, but if I can't use it, I can't go out and talk about why people should. 

And so I was able to kind of help bring some of that perspective to the team. basically leaned into quality of life improvements and performance improvements and these sorts of things.

And so my, my impact is one of a team member, but it's bringing in again, that game developer point of view and institutional knowledge just from being in the games industry for so long. And then, of course, working the principal evangelist role, I started doing a weekly retro video game show every Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. on YouTube and Twitch called Rewind, where I'll sit down and just go through the history of the Atari 400. 

And when people say, but that doesn't really have anything to do with AWS. I said, well, no, not directly, but it is important to communicate that when we come to you with this solution for you. It's because we understand the industry because we're from the industry, right? We're now though, in a place with the resources and the momentum to help build those tools and technologies that we wish we had sitting on the other side. 

And so that's really where I get the most joy is just making sure that the things we bring to people really help them and making sure that the stuff we put out in the world is awesome, right? Because at the end of the day, my friends, and I always say this, my friends that work in the games industry, they chose to become game developers, not to become cloud practitioners, right? And so my job is to get the technology out of the way so they can just build more games, make more connections, put more art in the world. And that's the way I view everything that I do, right, is how do I achieve that? 

Lizzie Mintus: Your passion is so contagious. 

Chris Melissinos: Thank you. Thank you. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, you have your perfect job. So it's fun to talk to you. So looking at the evolution of gaming platforms from consoles to mobile to cloud, what do you think is the next major shift in gaming infrastructure?

Chris Melissinos: Wow. We're Right now we're at this, this point where a lot of technologies are kind of cycling through and spinning up. Everything that we've seen from web3 and the slate of solutions, services and technologies to understanding how that applies to broader frameworks or ways of thinking like the metaverse concept, which isn't even a concept. It is a tethered together set of frameworks around a whole variety of things. And then of course, AI and how is AI and machine learning going to make game development easier, better, faster for game developers. Not to replace people in there, but to make what they create, again, better for all parties involved.

And so I think, it's really a dangerous, risk. It's a dangerous territory to tread into, and we're going to kind of predict the future, right? Because the future is not written yet. So we get to write that future, collectively as an industry. But here's where I think it's going to be, I think, a really amazing opportunity for us as an industry.

When we start to think about shifting from video games to play, right? And if you think about what that means, for me, and it could mean something different to everybody that hears the statement, right? But for me, what it means is, I want meaningful moments of interaction with the things that I care about, from anywhere I happen to be, in a contextually relevant way. So if you kind of pare all of that down, there are Spielbergian experiences that require a big screen TV and three hours of undistracted attention. But then there are moments where as we were talking before we started recording here, right, I have three kids that are all into adulthood and they're kind of, you know, all over the place. But being able to jump in and be able to play something, even for just minutes at a time with them, the meaningfulness of that interaction cannot be overstated.

And it doesn't mean that I needed a massive, again, 120 hour experience. What I needed is an interactive framework that allowed us to play together, right? That allowed us to come together, even at distance, to have that interaction. And, you know, when I break down what games mean for me, and, and the power that they have, you know, if you're able to help people forget about increasingly complex world, even for a moment, or to align themselves to the things that are important to them from wherever they are, that's a noble thing to do. And that's really at the core of what the games industry is, right? Is bringing people together through stories and interaction. 

But again, when you start to think about the future, It's not just going to be about continued advancements in VR and XR. Which, yes, we're going to have it. And it's not just more performant mobile phones. It's not just cloud streaming. I look at that as all components of things that we can bring together to create new experiences that we haven't even really tried to build yet, that's going to change the way we think about video games.

It's no longer about those, again, isolated, verticalized moments. It's about meaningful interaction across all of that content, wherever I happen to be. And that's what I wantin my life. I hope other people do too. 

Lizzie Mintus: It is. How do you figure out what people really want in your role? Because that's really what you're doing. And I feel like what people say they want is not always what they actually want. 

Chris Melissinos: Once again, I have to be careful as we all do, because mine is a particular point of view. And I will have my biases, and we all have our own bias. And so it's important to constantly challenge those bias and understanding that what you may think the industry wants, is not what they're asking for. 

And I often say, don't listen to the words, listen to what people are saying, right? I'll give you a perfect example of how you try to kind of answer that question. AWS and Meta had done a web XR hackathon, last fall, which was great. And we had all of these developers that came in from all sorts of backgrounds to create mixed reality sort of experiences on the Quest 3. And this one young developer said, Hey, you know, I would love a piece of advice. I've got this studio that I've started and I'm having some. friction with one of the founders because this is really what I want to build. But, you know, they're saying this is the way we should go. And, how do you deal with that? 

And I said, well, the question is, what is it that you want to build? Do you want to build something for yourself or do you want to build something for an audience? And that could be what you're facing. Part of that friction can be, no, no, no. I know this is what the market is saying, but this is what I want to create. And both of those are completely valid and awesome, but they're ultimately end up as two different sides of the business. What do you want to be? What is your ultimate goal?

Now, if you are an auteur and you've kind of proven yourself over time, you can create your own kind of bespoke experiences that the audience and says, okay, this is done by this particular person. And so when you're charting the future, as an evangelist, you have to be really careful there because I have a perspective about where I see the industry going and that's backed up by data, and that's backed up by history, but I don't know all those answers.

So the important thing is to listen to what the market is saying, kind of figure out where those next pivots are going to be. How do you align your efforts and development to meet where the market demand is going to be? And if you find gaps that your customers, that developer friends are missing. You surface those and say, have you considered this? So it's always a yes and, not a never, right? 

Okay, yes, you want to do this and have you considered that this may be the way you're going to get there and not the way that you're walking down right now. And so it requires a nuanced hand and patience, I would say, to make sure that we are finding the best path forward for great ideas to make their way out in the world.

I know that is really a non answer. It's a very, it's a very open answer that I'm giving you, because this is not a science, right? This is a qualitative pursuit, not necessarily a quantitative one. But there are things you can point to and go, this is probably going to happen, right, versus not.

And I always say, look, the art of the possible is always at the end of the road of the probable. What's probably going to have to happen for you to get there, right? So let's focus on what those things are going to be, regardless of what the end point's going to be. These are the core things that you will need, regardless of what that end point's going to be.

How do we build that? How do we build it to scale? How do we build it securely? How do we build it for performance, for reach, so you can go ahead and bring your ideas to the world? That's the way I kind of view the future and the stuff that I work on. 

Lizzie Mintus: What core things do people really need to consider when they're thinking about building something brand new?

Chris Melissinos: Scope and scale are two big ones, right? You have this grand idea, but you only have limited amount of resources. Where are you gonna spend your time to maximize the amount of adoption or acceptance of your idea, so you can then add the other pieces that you want to down the road? A lot of times it's like, no, I have this baked in my head and this is the experience I'm going to bring to the world and I'm not deviating from it, dammit. Okay, but you may be the one or two people that want this and other people don't. So make sure that the scope of what you're doing doesn't exceed the means of you to get there. That's one of the things that we see happen all the time in creating companies is refusing to pivot, refusing to understand where the market is moving and kind of doing the things you need to do so you get to do the things you want to do. So that's number one. 

And number two, I would say like, especially in today's industry with the amount of tools and technologies and services that are available to anybody is what do you absolutely have to create? And what do you not have to create? Focus on the things that truly differentiate you and not the things that don't.

I don't believe Peter Jackson, when doing Lord of the Rings, ever said, I'm going to build my cameras from the ground up because this is the tool I'm going to use to, you know, it'll be my eye that sees through it. No, he used the technology of the day that other people created. He didn't have to put the resources and effort into doing that.

So when it comes to building an engine, there's plenty of technology out there. You don't necessarily have to build your own engine to go ahead and bring your game or your vision to market. People that deliver web apps, nobody writes their own app server anymore. Like nobody does that because that's already been settled and sorted. So those are the two things I would make sure that you focus on. Number one, make sure your scope doesn't outscale your means to get there. And number two, focus on the things that truly differentiate you and your game, not to the undifferentiated pieces. Find partners, find ways to go ahead and use the things that are already made. That'll accelerate your time to market and let you put more money, time and effort into the game itself and not into the underlying technology. 

Lizzie Mintus: It is an amazing time to be in games. 

Chris Melissinos: It is the best time to be in games. The best. 

Lizzie Mintus: From a tech perspective, why do you think that? 

Chris Melissinos: Because we are, we have three big forces that, that have driven me to that belief, right? First, you have democratization of information. We have access to more information and game development resources than at any other point in history. So when I started learning to program in the 1980s, you had magazines and you took them to school and you talked about them in the schoolyard and you kind of fumbled your way through it.

We didn't have access. And then eventually we had BBSs and stuff like that. You get information, but people weren't necessarily getting on there to talk about game development. Today you have everything from hundreds of thousands of Discord communities to resources like the International Game Developers Association, or forums and free documentation. So learning the information about game development is all out there for you, from technology to design.

The second is commoditization of hardware. It's become really so cheap for virtually anybody, right? That's a big one, right? But to be able to acquire equipment that you can start building your games on, right? And it doesn't always have to be the cutting edge system. In fact, one of the things I'm doing right now is I'm playing around with this environment called Pico 8, which is all done using Lua and its little 8 bit games.

And I'm going back and I'm rewriting the very first video game I ever wrote when I was like nine years old, right, called space debris. And it is so joyous to be doing this, right? And I'm like, it doesn't need to be this blockbuster thing. It's this little tiny thing that has so much meaning packed into it. And it doesn't require an expensive system to run on. It runs on a Raspberry Pi. 

So you have the democratization information, you have commoditization of the hardware and the tools, and then you have access. So we now have the greatest amount of speed and connectivity at the lowest price point than ever before. So you have a world of game developers that you can reach out to and communities. You have a world of free or near free tools and technology, and the cost to connect has never been lower. Like, and that just keeps getting better year after year. So yeah, there's nothing holding you back really from wanting to create. Right? Sometimes people just need to be pointed at the starting line. And that's what myself, you, those of us in this community are there to help other people with. 

Lizzie Mintus: There's a lot of new studios starting. On the flip side, studios are getting larger and larger. To produce a massive AAA game costs, sometimes, hundreds of millions of dollars, a thousand people. But then we see these little studios, and they had this crazy runaway hit. 

What are your thoughts on just gaming, building tiny games versus large teams and how to find what is right for you? 

Chris Melissinos: Yeah. I think you articulated that perfectly. It costs so much to build these big games. There's a lot of risk that comes with that. And even if you're the big company that has the wherewithal to do it, doesn't mean you're going to be successful. And we've seen how many AAA games with, tens if not hundreds of million dollars dropped into it that just fail in market. Then Vampire Survivors shows up and you're like, this is insane.

Like Vamp, last year it was the most played game on my Steam library in terms of time. In this little amazing game, right? Because they found this little, kind of nugget of interaction that was specific to it and they built this thing around it and it just kind of caught that viral pop, right? 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Chris Melissinos: And so again, I've run into game developers just starting out and they're like, I'm going to build the biggest massive multiplayer open world that anyone's... and I'm like, I love that ambition. Start making something really tiny, right? Because nobody hits it out of the park on their first one. Nobody. And nobody does it by themselves. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Chris Melissinos: Nobody. I don't care what it is. You have benefited from others teaching you along the way. You benefit from others amplifying it when you get to market, right?

Just remember that this is a team sport, right? And your team may not be directly involved in the actual development of the game, but you're certainly not getting it out there and learning and all those other things without it. You the team around you, right? 

So, again, I would say if you're just starting out, start realistically. What's within the balance of your capabilities, right? Listen to what the market is saying. Where are people leaning into? What are the big trends, the types of games people are playing right now? And how do you align that resource constraint that you have, in terms of time, experience, so on and so forth, to match what's happening in the market?

Start there. And, again, if you hit it out of the park, fantastic! I'll be the first one to scream about it. Chances are you're not going to, and that's okay. Just keep making games, because eventually you will hit that one. The other thing I'd also recommend to people is, look for alternative marketplaces in which to launch your game, right?

We talk about the big ones, the predict ones. But what about Itch? Like, yeah, get on itch. Make sure that people can go and discover through there. Like, what are the secondary places that may have a significant audience that you're not looking at because you're so enamored with just the one, two, three biggest ones. 

So find alternate pathing, right? Find ways to go ahead and kind of guerrilla marketing style. Amplify your content. And there are resources out there to help you understand how to do that too. Setting the right expectations for success in the beginning is the key to all of it. What can you realistically do? 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Know yourself. What are the resources that you have? 

Chris Melissinos: Yes. Know thyself. That's right. 

Lizzie Mintus: You mentioned guerrilla marketing. What do you recommend? 

Chris Melissinos: I mean, are you leaning into TikTok? Are you leaning into X? Are you leaning into social media? Are you going and talking about the games you're doing with the IGDA? There's Things that really doesn't, don't cost you hard dollars. It costs time, right? It costs effort, which is a cost.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. 

Chris Melissinos: 100 percent that's a cost. I mean, think about it for ourselves. When you hear about a mobile game, a new mobile game, where's typically do you really first hear about it?

Probably from your friends, right? Now, of course, they're going to hear about it because they're sifting through content on a mobile phone and all that stuff. And then they come across it and then they're going to tell. 50 people about it, right? So you don't, again, necessarily need to be in the top of those lists to be able to find an audience, right? Go to where your audience is, right? 

Use the Nike method, right? Which is, you know, Nike is a company that makes rubber shoes. And then they go to the CrossFit community and go, oh, here's our rubber shoe that meets the things you want. And soccer players, here you go. And basketball players, here you go. They're not asking you to come into their rubber shoe factory. They go and deliver rubber shoes based on the needs of that whole market. So go and have those conversations. Ask those questions. Going, again, on Discord service, going and finding online resources to use. Forums and things of that nature.

 Avail yourself of, again, the commoditization, or democratization rather, of information out there to find where you can be, you can find some visibility with less competition for that messaging than maybe some of the other avenues you were pursuing. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. It's sort of like finding a job. You talk to any new grad, you talk to any young person and they're like, oh, I want to work for Nintendo. I want to work for Epic. I want to work for whatever. I've got more, right? It's like, okay, those are fine places to work, but there's many great places that you don't know about. And same thing with competition. You might actually have a lot more luck and a lot more impact at somewhere that is not one of the famous ones.

Chris Melissinos: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: So I'll recommend starting there. 

Chris Melissinos: Yeah, and I love that you brought up that point. During the Game Developer Conference, I was asked to actually go give the opening keynote for an event that was happening, it had nothing to do with GDC, just happened to coincide at the same time, and it's with an organization called Junior Achievers of America.

They're an organization that kind of serves a bunch of, communities, and this group happened to be high school and college kids, and this was the very first video game event that they were doing. This organization, I believe, is like a hundred years old, right? And they're an international organization.

And, you're standing there and you're talking to people that want to get in, but, or may want to get in the industry, but don't know how. And so I came up with a couple of lessons. And the one thing that I reminded them of, or I informed them of was when I joined Sun Microsystems, I joined as the district sales support representative.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes, this, yes. 

Chris Melissinos: Yes, I was literally the, I picked up dry cleaning for the sales team. I made sure coffee was made every morning for everyone. I made copies of their present. Now this is back folks when we had copy machines in the office to make paper copies of presentation decks that would be used, right? This is 94.

I'd make copies of presentations. I'd put together binders, all these things because I knew that wasn't going to be my career, but it was any foot in the door. And in this position, which was supposed to be for two years, in 11 months, they promoted me to sales. And I did well enough in sales that I got promoted into a channel management position, a marketing position.

And that's where I came up with the idea for using Java for cross platform game development. I wrote a business plan. I shopped it inside the company for two and a half years, and nobody would listen. Until finally one day I just said, I'm going right to the CEO of the company, skipping over everybody and explaining why I thought this was the path. 

At that time, Sun was the dot in dot com. Literally, it was like 90 percent of the world's internet traffic went through Sun computers. Everybody was like, good work. Go sell more web servers. And I just kept pressing the issue with the CEO. And to his credit, after calling his admin and saying, look, I'm coming out for a corporate visit and I just need 10 minutes. And if it's walking him to the toilet and back, I'll take it. And she's like, no, no, no, we can do better than that. 

To his credit, he called me at my desk that afternoon. And he said, great work. Scott McNeely is his name. He would go by Scooter. That was his nickname. He's like, Hey, it's Scooter. I understand you want to talk about your game proposal. And I was like, what? Okay. I was on the phone with the customer at the time and I just literally said, I have to go and just hung up on them. I didn't know what to do. 

And he said, hey, this is really good work, but we're going in this direction. And this is why. Thank you. And we'd been developing a processor called the Magic Processor. And it was a media processor. Oh, we want to get into consoles. 

And it was that moment I said, Scooter, I don't think that's the right strategy. I think it's the wrong strategy. And he just said, why? And I was like, that is the most powerful word. And I explained why. Dreamcast had already shipped. It had a Windows CE logo on it. I'm like, that's a closed box for five years. PlayStation 2 dev kits have already shipped. That's a closed box for 10 years. What chips are you going to sell them? So let's look at what's happening in the industry. Mobile phones are becoming capable of playing games. People are playing games on the internet now.

What if we leaned into Java as a platform for cross development games? So that way, a game developer could write their game once, get it onto multiple platforms at the same time. Just like they do with video, just like they do with audio and text and images. Games don't work that way. So let's help game developers get on many platforms simultaneously.

And we had like a 20 or 25 minute conversation. And about a month passed and they called me and said, okay. You're the guy come to corporate. You're going to be our games guy. And I left the company after 16 year tenure as the chief gaming officer and the chief evangelist of the company. So again, it wasn't, I want to go work here and be the chief gaming officer at this company.

No, no. I want to get into the place that gives me the opportunity to grow into that place. So set the expectations correctly, right? So that way you can grow into the position that you want and build the things that you want with the people you want. But it takes time, right? Setting the right expectations. That's how you get in. And that's how you succeed. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's such a good story. I have a similar story. When I started recruiting, I made 75 cold calls per day. It was awful. I drove in heavy traffic. The environment was unpleasant, maybe is a nice way of saying it. Sure. My CEO would sit right next to me and listen to me and, but I knew if I worked really, really hard, I could work my way up, and I could make money. And they rejected me for the job and I called the CEO. Same thing. I told 'em, I'll be your best employee if you give me a shot. And then I was. And I worked my way up and then I was a director, quit, and started my own business, but it was awful for a while until I figured out the system and I figured out how to work my way up.

But yeah, like from my podcast, anybody that has had any level of success always has that photocopy, dry cleaning, gritty, make no money, unpleasant job to begin. 

Chris Melissinos: Right, because it's belief in yourself. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Chris Melissinos: Belief in your ideas and another lesson that I discussed in this keynote was, the worst somebody is going to tell you is no.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Chris Melissinos: That is the worst thing. That's it. And no just means that this is not the path I need to walk. So find another path to walk, right? To achieve what you want to achieve. That's it. Just ask. Just ask the question. And don't be afraid of no. 

Lizzie Mintus: That is like my life motto. I ask for all sorts of things. And one of my really brilliant friends told me a couple of weeks ago, she was having a challenging time in her business and she was getting really discouraged by all the no's.

And she said she was working with a coach and the coach suggested gamifying the no's because she's really competitive. Like how many no's can you get per day? Can you get 50 per day? Can you get 60 per day or whatever it is? So now she said she gets like this dopamine hit when she hits her goal, even though she's still getting a rejection. And I really like that. And I feel like you could apply that to a lot of different things. 

Chris Melissinos: Well, sure. But here's the other thing too. When you're talking about vision, right? And you're talking about evangelism, which when you're in that mode, you are evangelizing who you are. You're evangelizing why a company should do business with you or not, right?

Sometimes you'll take a step back and go, why don't they understand? Like, what did they not get? That's not their job. That's your job. They are not understanding because you are not explaining in a way that they can understand. So don't think about it as, how do I get people to understand what I'm saying?

It's, how do I change what I'm saying so they understand it, right? It is incumbent upon you to sell that vision for it. And so that means listening. Like I said before, don't listen to words, listen to what they're saying about the market, about where they want to be. Because even though it's for you, it's not about you, right? It's about delivering XyZ out to the world. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. It's modulating your customers in the Amazon term. 

Chris Melissinos: That's right. Very good. Leaning into those leadership principles. I love it. Working back from the customer. Yes. Being customer obsessed is what we say. 

Lizzie Mintus: There you go. 

Chris Melissinos: Of course. 

Lizzie Mintus: You can apply that to a lot of businesses.

Okay, what a great story about Sun Microsystems. So you're in sales and how did you figure out how to make this business plan and get the courage to share it with the CEO, Scooter? 

Chris Melissinos: Yes, with Scooter McNeely, who is a fantastic leader. So again, I said, nobody gets anywhere by themselves. Park that for a second.

So I was literally, I was out at a sales event, for the company. And, there was about four or 5,000 of us in this kind of like arena type of environment. And Bill Joy, one of the most brilliant computer scientists of our generation, we don't have the internet working the way we do without Bill Joy. And he got on stage and he was demonstrating technology called Jini, J I N I, made the front cover of Wired in Jini shoes. And what Jini allowed you to do was take devices and plug them into a network and then those devices could discover each other without needing drivers to understand what those devices were.

So if you plugged a projector in, it wouldn't be, oh, this is a Panasonic such and such. It's, this is a display device with this resolution and this much color. Do you want to use it? It was like magic back then. You plug all this stuff in, it just shows up and you can interact with it. And you unplug them and they just disappear. Brilliant. 

Being a gamer, I went, I could plug a PlayStation and a Sega Saturn into the same network. I could double the market for developer. That was the origin of the thought. And so I said, how feasible is this really going to be, right? PlayStation really wasn't connected. It wasn't internet enabled or network enabled. But the Saturn was, and I figured that was going to happen. So probably, right, because we're watching other game companies already try to do this, or we're starting to play games online. So this feels like an inevitability. 

Again, I'm not asking what the PlayStation was doing. I was listening to what the market was doing. And so I said, how do we go ahead and make that happen? Well, we have this cross platform language called Java. We can do some really cool things there. What if we made that really good for game development? That's where I started. Let's take the things we're already doing, make it better for game development, and lean into where the market is going.

So I started doing my research. I started pulling down reports and listening to interviews and reading newspaper articles and all this other kind of stuff and started to build this. And then it would go to colleagues in the company that I could trust that were like, okay, yeah, you should probably be doing this, but all right, I got an hour for you.

Let's talk about this thing. And they would help me refine that messaging. They would bang on the problem and ask me questions and would go, oh, I haven't even thought about that. Let me go back and answer that first. So I relied upon the help of my colleagues, my friends, to help me refine this thought. I also happen to be working for a guy who became a very close friend of mine, still very close friend of mine to this day, that said, look, you need to get this out of your system.

So just book time in California, sign up for some training there, but go knock on doors. So I had a boss who was like, you just need to do this. So we'll cover for you here. Get out to California, get into headquarters, start doing this. So again, without the generosity and the brilliance of colleagues around me, I would not be doing what I'm doing today.

And it was their support and encouragement that let me be more courageous about what I was doing. And I've often said throughout my career, I promise I will never tell you, like when I was at Verizon, right? It's like, I promise I will never tell you where to put a 5G cell tower. But if you want to understand this industry, that I know cold, right, type of thing. So know what you know, right? And lean into that. But that's what kind of did it for me was being able to refine my thoughts and ideas, be challenged in a way that I didn't take offense to. I took it as a way to grow. Oh, they're telling me this isn't going to work. Maybe I'm wrong. Let me go check those assumptions, right?

And it turned out, in some cases, I was completely wrong. And we flipped it in the other direction, and it worked. And you can say, what really happened with that? Well, you know, Minecraft, biggest game in the world, is written entirely in Java. Right? You look at big games that have lasted a long time, RuneScape, Java. There are still people playing the Java version of RuneScape today, right? And so from mobile phones and mobile games all the way to back end infrastructure, the work that we did had a positive impact on the growth of the industry. Kind of cool. 

Lizzie Mintus: Super cool. 

Chris Melissinos: Yeah, but not by yourself. Yeah. Nobody gets there by themselves. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's very true. I feel like you played by your own rules too. And a thread that I've noticed, you feel responsible for everything. You take accountability for a hundred percent of your own actions. You're very low on the victim score, I bet. And I think that's the most important thing, or one of the most important things in getting through challenges. Once you think, okay, I'm responsible for all of this.

Chris Melissinos: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: What do I do now. 

Chris Melissinos: Yeah. Because then you start going, well, how come if I think I'm so brilliant with an idea, nobody gets it. Hmm, maybe it's me. Yeah. Maybe it's the idea, right? 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And then if you're having that issue, which I imagine is pretty common, and I think brilliant people sometimes have a hard time distilling down their idea to a way where other people can understand it, especially in the engineering side. So how can people communicate their ideas properly so other people or audiences get them? 

Chris Melissinos: So something that's been very helpful to me is doing what we call a pre mortem analysis, right? We're used to hearing post mortem analysis. Did a company, failed. Here's the nine lessons we learned.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Chris Melissinos: So start with your pre mortem analysis. At the end of whatever it is you're wanting to do, what do you want the effect to be? Start there, and then work backwards from that positive state. I want X to happen in the world, right? X, Y, Z happen in the world. And for that to happen, more than likely this thing is going to have to happen.

And for that to happen, more than likely this thing. And you work back to where you're starting now. And that gives you a roadmap to say, again, the path of the probable ends in the art of the possible. So you have to work back the way. If you're always working from the end state, the problem is then the message is so big and you have to communicate every facet of those steps to the person trying to absorb this new thing, this new radical idea.

It's not just your idea, it's every possible step in between. And that's when it becomes too big. So you have to make your ideas consumable for the people that need to hear them to get behind you. So break them down simply. 

And I always say, look, Guy Kawasaki has this great pattern for delivering pitch decks, right? And I think it was, now I'm blanking on the title of the book. Anyway, it's called the 10 20 30 rule, right? 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font. That's all you have. And I modified that when I would be leading my teams and say, if you have executives in the room that have to make a decision, you have 10 20 30, you have 10 slides. They're going to hear three, and they're going to remember one. What's the one? What's the one slide that they're going to walk away with and go, oh, how can we possibly ignore this? 

Bob Iger just went ahead and did that big deal, I think it was like a five billion dollar deal, putting it into UEFN based games and everything. And when you read the article, it's like, once they showed me the demographics of who was playing, how could we not be there? That's the one thing that he remembered. And that's what allowed the pivot to happen, right? So, again, think about your story. What's the one thing that, The people that you need to support.

You need to remember walking away from your pitch. If you make it too big, then it's your vision. It's not everybody's vision. You have to figure out how to bring them along, work back from the end state, and that'll tell you where to start. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's great advice. Okay. I want to hear more about how you got the Art Of video Games Exhibition into the Smithsonian Art Museum.

Chris Melissinos: Sure. Again, it's another, the long line of you don't do anything great by yourself, type of thing. So, back in 2009, I was dual enrolled at Sun as the Chief Gaming Officer and the Chief Evangelist. So that was also about all the underlying technology and how we're impacting everything from the medical industry to government and that kind of stuff.

And I live in the Washington, D.C. area. And then the incoming new Secretary for the Smithsonian, which people think, oh, the Smithsonian, like the Air and Space Museum. No, it's like 26 different museums and institutions that make up the Smithsonian. And so he was coming in, he said, I want to rethink how we use technology at the Smithsonian.

So he had an event called Smithsonian 2. 0, and there were about 20 or 25 technologists from across the industries, various technology industries, that were invited to participate in this three day event. So I was one of them and it was, colleagues, MySpace at the time and Microsoft and everybody there. And we spent three days with the curators across all of these different museums and it was awesome. It was so amazing. I held a fossilized bacteria moon rock, Mars rock in my hand and a stegosaurus skull, like the actual fossil. It's like, what? It was ridiculous, you know?

And so at the end of the three days, we're all in the plenary session, and all right, so how do our curators meet with the public and blah, blah, blah. And everyone's like, write more blog posts and shoot videos and dah, dah, dah. And they get to me and I tend to be not a contrarian just to be a contrarian, but to provide a different point of view if I can, I said, I respectfully disagree with just about every one of my colleagues. I said, look, I've just spent three days with you curators. What do you know how to do is to curate. Your role is to discern what is worth preserving, why we should preserve this, telling the stories that we don't know as the public. You want to curate, not just get opinions from those of us that don't understand this stuff. I said, but the problem you have is that every week you have hundreds of buses of school kids that come into your museums. And they all live on their Nintendo DS, and they all live on their iPhone, and they all live right on, at the time, at PSP. And you're asking them to play in your playground, but you refuse to play in theirs. Why? And they were like, we don't know why. And I'm like, that's what we have to figure out.

And so there was a discussion that started in this woman at the American Art Museum had done an alternate reality game at the museum and the head of the museum asked her, what about video games? And she, Georgina Goodlander said, well, I don't know about video games, but we know somebody that does because he was just here.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Chris Melissinos: So they said, hey, come in for a 30 minute meeting. We'd love to introduce you to the head of museum. Let's talk about video games. That turned into a three hour conversation on the first day. And so I spent six months going back to the museum and continuing to build out this idea of, explaining how video games truly are, not only an art form, but I believe one of the most important art forms we have ever had at our disposal.

And I know exactly what it was that flipped that bit from no to yes, right? 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, the one thing. 

Chris Melissinos: Okay, here's the one thing. I was giving the final overview. All right, let's do this presentation. And I had put up a video of David Thurr, who created the game Missile Command, and he was explaining that when he was asked by Atari to make this game, he said, I'll do so.

So Missile Command, let me take a step back. For those of you that may not know the game, It is a game released in like 1981 or 82, as six cities at the bottom and three missile silos and missiles come raining down, you have to blow the missiles out of the sky before they blow up your cities. The fewer missiles you use, the more cities you save, the more points, and it gets faster and faster until the screen just explodes and it says the end.

And so he said, okay, I'll make this type of game, but first it will be a game of defense because I refuse to make a game where we're firing nuclear missiles at the USSR. Secondly, the six cities at the bottom of the screen were meant to represent the six major cities in California where he lived and he suffered from night terror for almost three years because he internalized the futility of nuclear war to such a degree that it impacted him.

And I said, how can anybody that makes a moral statement about the world around them, it's personal to them and they suffer for it, how is that different than any other artist that has ever purported to bring art into the world? They didn't have anything to say. I mean, it was silent, you know. So I went through this whole, this is how we construct it, and this is why it's important, and this is what you need to see that you may not be seeing.

We get to the end of the presentation, and this one curator says, I understand what you're saying, but I think it's entirely wrong. Now remember, I have no fine arts degree, right? I've never curated a museum exhibition before. And these are professional curators who spend decades doing this stuff. And so this person says, I understand what you did, but I would rather focus on artists that draw inspiration from video games and create these new forms of art. And she was naming several different artists. And I said, well, if I may, I said, I understand what you've just said, but I disagree with it. I said, how could a derivative work be more important than the artwork that inspired it? And there was no answer. And the head of the museum looked at me and went, okay, let's go.

And so they commissioned me to build this. But we built it not by myself, but with this incredible team that came together to build all the pieces that were in there and to help film all the interviews that we did and to help me whittle down the narration and the concepts behind this stuff. So while I captured all the footage that's in the exhibition and all the screenshots are actually screenshots of me playing those games. So it's a very personal exhibition. I didn't do that by myself. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Chris Melissinos: They're not my games. They're the games of my friends and heroes that we were then able to bring into this narrative and have it established, right, as the first video game exhibition by the American Art Museum.

And it was incredible. It was just, it was amazing. And I've always said, I want people to see games the way I see them because they're more than just video games. These are the stories of our generation. This is stories of our society and they provide inspiration and they provide comfort and they provide the opportunity to explore difficult spaces that we occupy as human beings in a way that is safe, can be collaborative, can express different points of view, show you different cultures. All of it's in video games and there's no other art form that allows us to do this in such a tangible, immersive way. It's extraordinary.

And as a result, it became one of the most trafficked exhibitions in the history of the museum. It traveled for three and a half years to 10 other museums. It was breaking attendance records at virtually every museum it went to. 

And I'll sum it up by this. There was this person, this gentleman who worked for Blizzard and Georgina, my colleague at the museum told me about this. He came up to her at the opening event in the evening and he said, look, I am a classically trained artist. I've actually gone to school at some of the finest art schools in the world, but I chose video games because it's the medium that means the most to me. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that my art would hang in the Smithsonian, let alone my video game art. And then he just started to cry. And he said the validation that this gave to my family and to these other artists, I mean, it's just unimaginable. That's what it's about, folks. This is not about this trivial sort of thing. It is about the reflection of who we are, backed through this incredible interactive medium. And we're just getting started. We're only 50 years old as an industry, right? It's the best. It's the best. 

Lizzie Mintus: You're so inspiring. 

Chris Melissinos: Oh, oh, thank you. Thank you. Yes. 

Lizzie Mintus: One last question. 

Chris Melissinos: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: When is your next exhibit? When is your next curation? 

Chris Melissinos: So knowing your limitations, right? So I like to get involved in other avenues of preservation or amplification of this industry. So I sit on the board of the Video Game History Foundation. They're doing incredible work to preserve not the games, but the history of our industry. So make sure you go check them out. gamehistoryorg, fantastic organization. And at the time that we were doing the art of video games, I had a conversation with my family and I was also working as an executive at another company and I went from an organization where I had four employees. When I started in 18 months, I had a 46 person organization. I was also spending time going to the museum. working with the staff, working with production, working with rights management, all of these things, working with fundraising. Then I was also capturing all the footage, writing all of the components, sourcing the hardware, and then getting it back to friends who graciously lent it. Then I was also writing a 240 page book with my best friend. And it was too much. It was too much. 

And so I promised my family I would never do that again. Because it's my wife this year, we're celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary, which is amazing. Without her and the gift that she and my kids gave me of time and patience to let me get through this, I couldn't have done it. And, there were conversations where it was like, just get this done. 

Lizzie Mintus: Right. 

Chris Melissinos: So we can get you back, type of thing. And so, I will continue to lean in to this industry and continue to espouse the virtues of it and why it's so important in the world, and will always be an advocate for us as an industry and as protected speech and art and all the amazing things that we are.

But now I know. You know, I went through that whole thing and so I will do this in a way that is fair and equitable for myself, my family and the industry at large. So no plans yet, but you know, we'll see. 

Lizzie Mintus: It seems like you like to keep busy. 

Chris Melissinos: Oh, yeah. I mean, it's video games. The best. The best. 

Lizzie Mintus: It's the best.

We've been talking to Chris Melissinos, who is Principal Evangelist for Video Games at AWS. Chris, where can people go to learn more about you, work for AWS, or maybe check out your YouTube, listen to Boss Rush? 

Chris Melissinos: Oh, yes. Thank you so much. Yes. You can go ahead and find me on LinkedIn. It's where I spend a lot of my time these days.

You can also go to the AWS for Games channels on YouTube and Twitch and to find all the programming that we're doing there, including the weekly retro video game show and the Game Industry Legends, where I go back and I interview people. legends from our industry. The last one we just did was Alex Seropian, which we also did a talk at GDC, and he's amazing. And his podcast, Forth Current, is also amazing. So you can go there to find out that information as well and listen to all the program that we're bringing out. 

And then, of course, we do Boss Rush every Friday afternoon or most Friday afternoons on LinkedIn, where we just talk about the games industry and dissect news of the week. And that's with my colleagues, Dean Takahashi, Susan Cummings, and Mark Delora. So yeah, but LinkedIn is the primary one. Hit me up on LinkedIn and, happy to help any way that I can. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you so much. 

Chris Melissinos: Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much. 

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.