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Mila Kunis talks WoW and other gaming
Mila Kunis joined One of Swords podcast's Dan Amrich to talk to the hosts about her gaming life, including her time spent playing World of Warcraft, joining one of her ex-guildmates on the show. She chats about how she had to change her in-game name, as the title "Captain" in her mage's name "Captainpicard" wasn't allowed. She then discussed her gaming history, and how it led to her move into WoW, starting with co-host Hugh Sterbakov as their game night shifted from Settlers of Catan into WoW. She even talks about dragging her friends into the game, including the podcast's other guest, Lisa Sterbakov. They discuss playing all day sessions, questing together, killing mobs and wiping a "raid" in Black Morass while Mila went AFK for a bathroom break. Unfortunately, as her friends quit, Mila eventually lost interest. It's a fun listen, Mila's segment begins from 27 minutes in, and continues after the WoW chat, talking about other games.
Tony Hawk says iPhone game is 'dropping soon'
It would appear that finger skating is about to go "pro" with a Tony Hawk game for iPhone. The pro skater recently tweeted, "In the PR world, this is considered 'going rogue,' but I'm too excited. This is real & dropping soon." The attached picture, as you can see above, appears to be an iPhone version of his venerable skating series. The message has since been deleted, but as we saw it on the feed of an Activision employee, we feel pretty confident it's on the level. Man, Tony just couldn't be more of a rebel, could he? Not only is he a skateboarder, putting curb wax on church steps and listening to rock 'n' roll too loud ... on his boom box, now he's using his Twitter feed to take on the corporate fat cats! Is there such a thing as too extreme?
Activision's Guitar Hero CEO replaced
Activision's Guitar Hero business unit has a new boss, who's not the same as the old boss -- former COO David Haddad is taking over the post after CEO Dan Rosensweig left the company. Haddad was the head of Vivendi's Sierra Online division back in the day, but started working with the Guitar Hero group after Activision merged with Viviendi back in 2007. Rosensweig is off to join Chegg.com, a company that specializes in online textbook rentals and has recently put together more than $160 million in investor funding. There's a rumor going around that Rosensweig got fired (presumably for the recent decline in the genre's sales), but Activision's Dan Amrich says that's simply not true, and that the move was completely voluntary. Either way, there's a new sheriff in plastic guitar town, and we'll see how he deals with any bandits that come a-ridin' through.
Interview: Dan Amrich of Activision community site One of Swords
We don't envy Dan Amrich. From the moment we heard the former OXM editor was taking on the unenviable task of putting a human face on corporate monolith Activision -- through community site One of Swords -- we've been pressed to imagine how anyone could tackle such a Herculean task. It's a great compliment to Amrich, then, that after his first interview with us, he's almost convinced us that he'll be able to pull it off. What specifically is One of Swords? Are you One of Swords? One of Swords is my gamer identity. I had been thinking of changing my gamertag for a little while, and when I went looking around for something else that had personal meaning, I hit on this, and the new project came up around the same time. But then I realized, okay, this can also be the name of an editorial website; this can be my home on the web. So OneOfSwords is really its own bloggy entity, a platform/portal to all the podcasts and interviews and videos and journalistic style things I want to do here.
