Laguna Hills, CA – December 15, 2011 – Red 5 Studios™ announces the launch of its first professional cosplay program, aimed to encourage and inspire the cosplay community by sponsoring passionate and creative individuals. Well-known cosplayer, Crystal Graziano, has been selected for Red 5’s first yearlong sponsorship. She was chosen from a pool of top cosplayers for her previous quality work and passion for videogame roles.

As part of the sponsorship, Red 5 will pay for all of Crystal Graziano’s cosplay activities and unique costume creations for one year – along with supplying professional photography and photoshop sessions. In addition, Crystal Graziano will get to fill the role of Firefall’s heroic female protagonist, “Mourningstar”, at key conventions and promotions throughout 2012.

“Because Firefall’s sci-fi world and story are so rich and colorful, we see there being a lot of interest from artists and designers,” said Red 5 CEO and Chief Creative Officer, Mark Kern. “Developers should embrace these individuals because they add so much to the universe, both in-game and out. This program is our way of showing appreciation and support for what they contribute to the game and community.”

Red 5 has once again called upon the masterful craftsmanship of award-winning Hollywood FX artist, Steve Wang, to create the Mourningstar costume. Complete with lights and effects, this epic cosplay will bring an unprecedented level of realism and detail to Firefall’s Mourningstar character. Red 5 has released a video showing the initial fitting for Steve Wang’s costume at the follow link: http://bit.ly/firefallcosplay.

Red 5 Studios’ upcoming free-to-play open world shooter, Firefall, is currently running the first stage of its exclusive beta – planned to roll-out through 2012. Players can sign-up for the chance to be invited into the beta and meet Firefall’s enthusiastic community at the official homepage: http://www.firefallthegame.com.

About Red 5 Studios
Red 5 Studios is an online game developer located in California, founded by Mark Kern, former team lead for World of Warcraft. Red 5 Studios is dedicated to bringing together millions of gamers across the world by creating immersive worlds, intriguing stories and compelling characters. They believe that online games and persistent worlds are the future of video games. Visit www.red5studios.com for more information.

Firefall, Red 5 Studios and all associated logos and designs are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red 5 Studios, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

• We announced Firefall! (yes, you knew this already)
• Our Firefall community and beta signups has grown to over 80,000 people (you can register here).
• We visited China and got to show Firefall to tons of new people.
• We moved into a brand new office space where the company can grow.
• We’ve held multiple in-house play tests with external testers and got some great outside feedback on the game.
• We grew the company by nearly 15%

It has been a crazy few months and things are only going to get crazier as we creep closer and closer to the launch of Firefall at the end of this year. Be sure to keep your eye on our Twitter account, our Facebook page, this site, and Firefallthegame.com for more news, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you to all of our friends, family, and fans for their support as we move into the busiest time of a long development process.

With this new website, we also hope to bring you content on a more frequent basis. We realize that it’s been quiet for too long and we want to make changes on that front. Be sure to take a look at The Tribe page and get to know the people behind Red 5 Studios.

For those of you that are really on the ball, you’ll notice a new Media section. We’ve got some really nice concept work up there for you to enjoy. We’ll continue to update that with new shots as we can. As always, feel free to send your comments to contact@red5studios.com. See you soon.

Our very own Jeff Lawniczak is going to be wandering the floor up in San Francisco during the Game Developers Conference. If you see him, be sure to stop him and hand him a business card. Perhaps even take a photo with the man and submit it to us. Who knows what you might get in return…

That’s right. Red 5 took on Robotron 2084.

The Quiet Before the Storm

Life at Red 5 was, at one time, idyllic: developers and designers scampering through the hallways, drinking from crystalline brooks, designing a killer video game—you know, the typical pastoral idyll of a game studio.

But peace could not last. On a cold, gray morning in October of 2006, Aaron Hightower issued a challenge to the tribe: within the next twelve months, the first person to score one million points on Robotron’s maximum difficulty (see below) would receive one thousand dollars from him.

To sweeten the pot, Red 5 promptly matched the bounty. The game’s creator, Eugene Jarvis, even offered a bottle of wine from his own vineyard. Cash? Free alcohol? The temptation was too great. Cubicle gladiators hailing from as far away as, well, the reception area lined up to meet the challenge. Prospective heroes lined up to rescue Mommy, Daddy and Mikey from the scurrilous Hulks and Brains. Each effort was more valiant than the last, but in vain. The closest score was John Robinson’s impressive 600,000 points, but Hightower’s challenge was still unmet, and its prize still unclaimed. Hightower was beginning to fear that he would have to stand alone as a Robotron ‘millionaire’, doomed to eventually fall to the infinite Robotron hordes…

But in the eleventh hour, John Robinson re-entered the ring. His fingers moved like lightning, and countless bodies of Enforcers and Progs collected at his feet. When the dust settled, his score was 1,008,175, and Red 5 had found its champion. A champion who was two thousand dollars (and one giant check) richer.

Congratulations, John!

By “maximum difficulty” on Robotron 2084, we mean difficulty set to 10, three lives to start, and an extra life every 25,000 points.

Kneel before Zod, baby.

In the summer of 2006, Mark Kern, Bill Petras, and Taewon Yun met with advisor Jeff Loomans to discuss how to grow the Red 5 family. They all knew that recruiting in the game industry was crazy: people are constantly spammed by recruiters, and competition for quality talent is fierce. Still, the three Red 5ers were determined to hire the best and brightest minds in the industry, while communicating just how damned cool it is to work at Red 5 Studios.

A tall order? Maybe. But you’d be surprised what a few glasses of really good beer can do for your resolve.

Laying the Foundation

The more the group thought about it, they knew that just more of the same wasn’t going to work. Form emails and phone calls were overdone, passé: the gogo boots of the recruiting industry. They needed something that would be uniquely Red 5, something that would immediately grab a prospective applicant’s imagination.

Mark remembered that Steve Jobs took a uniquely active role when he started running Pixar. Jobs personally called the top fifty animators in the world, and extended an invitation to come and work for his new company. It’s that kind of rapport that the team most wanted to replicate, but they still needed a way to cut through the hype of traditional recruiting campaigns. So it was decided that instead of recruiting openly, the company would focus on personally meeting one hundred of the top people in the game industry. Red 5 would extend a singular, unique invitation to each of those one hundred people, and let them know that they were part of an event that happens once in a lifetime.

The project began by drafting a list of Red 5’s dream team, people whose work the studio admired. After the list was compiled, Red 5 researched each individual: they wanted to learn more about the type of work they liked doing, the game titles they had worked on, and what kept them inspired once they clocked off for the day. There was a lot of online research, as the studio read blog posts, played games, crawled through forum posts, even Amazon wish lists—all in order to get to know each person a little better.

Eventually, the list of a hundred names was complete. It was time to start work on the invitation, like the kind people who get to attend the Academy Awards. But, you know, without the swag bag. Or Joan Rivers.

It Takes a Village

With the list in hand, Red 5 started thinking about the best way to grab each recipient’s attention, to show them that they were being asked to be part of something unique, something exciting. Over the next few months, Red 5 interviewed countless studios until settling on Pool, a San Francisco-based design firm. Pool just got Red 5, and had some really fantastic ideas on how to turn Red 5’s work into a memorable campaign.

After testing a few versions, the idea quickly evolved from a mailing piece into a multimedia event. The packaging took on a more important role that would reveal a story as the recipient stripped away each layer. And once the recipient got to the center of the packaging, they’d find a brand new stamp-sized iPod Shuffle, which hadn’t yet been released in the US.

Custom-engraved with each recipient’s name and a unique code, each iPod was more than a special gift: it was the key to accessing the Red 5 website, where they could learn more about the company, as well as the job that Red 5 had cherry-picked them for.

While Pool continued work on the print design, Red 5 hired Airbag Industries to design a website that would match the ass-kickery of the invitation. Airbag had found a dream client in Red 5 Studios, and had a great time wrapping a compelling design around Red 5’s concept artwork and staff.

Under the hood, Airbag created a souped-up Ruby on Rails content management system that allowed Red 5 to manage all aspects of the site, from tracking new users to updating homepage copy. The CMS also presented a custom homepage to each prospective hire after they logged in, welcoming them to this one-of-a-kind opportunity. Users could also read individual team bios, see who else had joined the Red 5 family, and send website login codes to their friends so they could learn more about the company and their unique job opportunities.

Of course, Red 5’s employees were intimately involved in every step of the process: they helped test the campaign, continued researching invitees, wrote personalized greetings, wrote website copy, and recorded the personalized audio greetings for each iPod. And throughout the entire process, the team worked day (and sometimes night) to meet major milestones. Who needs sleep?

After a few months of work, the campaign was finally ready to ship: the site was up and running, and the iPods were wrapped oh-so-beautifully. From a brainstorming session to a beautifully designed campaign that spanned on- and off-line media, the recruiting project was finally ready to be unleashed upon one hundred very lucky folks.

But it would all be for naught unless the packages actually got to the intended recipient. Kind of a key step, that.

Off the Grid

When it came to shipping, the best approach was to send the invitations to the recipients’ places of work, as those addresses were easiest to find with a little online search. But Red 5 was enticing folks away from competing companies, and didn’t want prying corporate mail rooms to intercept their carefully designed invitations. After months of work, having a mail clerk net himself a free iPod Shuffle wasn’t the most appealing idea.

To add an extra layer of sneaky, the print invitation was specifically designed to fit inside plain FedEx boxes, which had a higher chance of slipping by the mail monitors. Furthermore, the shipping company could help ensure that the packages arrived to everyone nearly on the same day.

Whirlwind: Reaped

And it worked better than anyone could have predicted. The response rate was overwhelming. Red 5 had a nearly 100% response rate on their campaign; by comparison, most direct mail initiatives are considered “successful” if they hear back from two percent of their recipients. Furthermore, Red 5 got supremely viral: almost every person used the website to send invitations to their friends, spreading the word even more.

Since the campaign, the Red 5 offices have been busier than ever: the team in Orange County has been meeting new friends and showing them around the corporate offices. And the campaign has gotten ridiculous amounts of buzz, with many saying that Red 5 really raised the bar to new levels in recruiting, while making an impact on the game industry itself.

Convention booth, pffft. We brought our own lounge.

Even the website was brought to GDC. Bam!

So close, yet so far, far away.

Boothcrawl, 10AM. We kid, we kid!

Attack Formation

Fortunately, we had plenty Red 5 Squadron members manning the booth. It’s moments like this that make us proud: they all risked bodily harm by ably moving people to safety, while doing their best to keep any beer from going to waste. And despite this little eruption, we managed to turn potential disaster into a conference success story. It certainly helped that we bedecked our booth in full tiki bar splendor, complete with a live video conferencing system. Each day at five o’clock, we opened the Red 5 Tiki Bars at GDC and at Red 5’s office in Orange County. The two locations were linked through the unbridled awesomeness of a Tanberg Video Conference System. Not only did the video link-up make attendees feel like they were in Orange County, it gave them a chance to meet the developers and designers who couldn’t make the trip up north.

But it wasn’t all boozing and back-slapping: we managed to bring our game face to the show. Mark’s panel on “MMO: Past, Present and Future” went very well. Mark shared the stage with some real industry rockstars, and the room was completely packed. In case you couldn’t make the conference, you’re in luck: GDC Radio has a podcast of the panel available for purchase and IGN’s posted their notes on the panel. Though who these “Factor 5” guys are, we couldn’t say.

You Complete Us

So after a week of beer volcanos, Tiki Bars, and panels, we really want to extend a heartfelt thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth. We had such a blast meeting and talking with everyone. In hindsight, bringing our team of developers instead of recruiters to an event like GDC made such a big difference; the level of discussion goes to eleven when we can talk to you one on one, peer to peer, and we’re thrilled nearly the entire OC team joined us at the conference. All in all, we got the chance to meet and share beer with six hundred people in the industry, and we can’t wait to do it next year!

(Once, you know, we’re done recuperating.)