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Home » Member News » Introducing Creative Writing Manager Marti McKenna

My first video game was standup Pong. I was ten, and I was instantly hooked. A few years later it was Space Invaders, Centipede, Galaga, and Pac Man that kept me standing in front of that devil machine feeding quarters I didn't have into its hungry maw. If you'd told me then that my addiction would lead to a 20-year (and counting) career in the game industry, well, I probably wouldn't have heard you over the waka-wakas. But I wouldn't have believed you if I had.

In 1988 or so I took a job at a little game company in a small mountain town. The company was Sierra Online, and in the dead of winter I arose before the sun and stood at an assembly line in a freezing warehouse placing floppy disks in boxes with gloved fingers. The games had titles like King's Quest, Police Quest, and Space Quest, and they looked way cooler than anything I'd played before. Before long I worked my way up to a customer service desk job, where I had the opportunity to play all those games end-to-end and answer questions for customers lucky enough to make it through the phone queue. Others wrote angry letters, and my humorous replies earned me a gig writing the monthly customer service article for the Sierra Newsmagazine (which went out to 500K+ players and was later renamed Interaction). From there it was only a quick trip across the hall to marketing, and I was a full-time professional games writer, along with my mom, Bridget McKenna. Together we wrote nearly every word that came out of that company from 1989 to 1991.

Next stop, Electronic Arts, where I spent four years writing and managing writers as we generated dozens and dozens of manuals and hundreds of thousands of words of marketing, public relations, and in-game text for EA games.

When I left EA it was to try the freelance life. I spent ten years as a freelancer working on game projects for Sony, Microsoft Game Studio, and a number of small developers, and during that time I discovered my true addiction: MMOs.

It was Asheron's Call that first sucked me in. My mom had worked on the game at MGS and had a free account for life. Between the two of us, it was not unusual to be in game 16 hours at a time, and the one who wasn't playing was watching.

Yes, it's true, Mom: I learned it from watching you.

I broke the habit for a while. I managed to avoid Everquest, and even World of Warcraft, for many years. Then ArenaNet hired me to work on Guild Wars and I fell off the wagon once again. That was my gateway to EQ and WoW, and really, there has never been a way out for me since then.

Recently I spent just under a year at NCsoft managing 17 writers rewriting 2.2 million translated words in Aion. When that project ended, I wondered what could possibly top that experience. Then I saw TERA, and the setup almost seemed too perfect. I jumped at the chance to manage the writing team at En Masse.

Because we've got more time, we've got a smaller team this time around, but it's a good one. We've got a much better idea of how best to Westernize a Korean MMO, and we're already working to revamp the existing TERA story with Westerners in mind. This means renaming many characters, items, and features as well as rewriting every word of dialog and quest text, breathing life back into characters whose lines--having been translated from one language to another--have lost their vital spark.

It also means creating a whole lot of content for you to enjoy as we continue working toward the launch of TERA. We've got some really fun stuff planned for you, including some experimental storytelling we'll announce in the next newsletter. Watch this space for updates, and be sure to let us know what you'd most like to hear about when it comes to TERA lore.

See you in the world!