Thursday, Jan. 17, 2008
Playing for a living
Laurel man quits job to find success as video game reviewer
by Anath Hartmann | Staff Writer
Christopher Anderson⁄The Gazette Kyle Orland is a freelance video game reviewer. Orland’s love for video games dates led him to create a Web site on Super Mario Brothers.
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You could say Super Mario Brothers changed Kyle Orland’s life and he hasn’t put his joystick down since turning his childhood love into a full-fledged career.
In 1997, the then-14-year-old received a manual on the Web language HTML as a gift from his mother that he utilized to create a Web page about the digital, mustachioed Nintendo duo and their video games.
‘‘When I went into college, I planned to make video games,” said Orland, 25, a 2004 University of Maryland, College Park graduate. ‘‘But I didn’t quite have the skills, I think. So I went into journalism, which seemed kind of like a natural transition because I liked to write and I’m very passionate about [video games.]”
The Laurel resident writes 10-25 posts a week for joystiq.com, a video game-related site, and about five diary-type entries a week for his game-review Web blog, Games for Lunch (gamesforlunch.blogspot.com).
Orland is also a regular contributor to Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine, game-developer site Gamasutra.com and the NPR show Press Start, for which he produces biweekly video game-related podcasts with co-host Ralph Cooper.
‘‘It’s something I enjoy,” Orland said. ‘‘I get to play games for a large part of my living—who wouldn’t want that?”
Orland quit his job as an intranet specialist at National Public Radio in Washington, D.C., to do freelance video game journalism full-time in August 2006.
‘‘I’d been doing some [video game] freelance in my free time, but it was like having two jobs,” Orland said. ‘‘I really liked NPR but it wasn’t what I saw myself doing all my life.”
While he keeps busy with paid work most weeks, Orland admits that his isn’t the most secure line of employment.
‘‘It’s kind of a hot and cold business. There are times during the summer when no one wants any [articles] and no games are coming out,” he said.
Orland’s mother, Ruth, was initially worried about those leaner times.
‘‘Like any mother, when he first told me he was leaving a job with benefits, I said, ‘Oh, heavens!’” Ruth Orland said. ‘‘But then, I realized he has a level head, and I thought he should give it a try.”
Orland’s wife, Michelle Mazurek, 25, a full-time electrical engineer, got the couple through the financially difficult times.
‘‘[Game journalism] was a dream of his, so I felt I couldn’t do [anything] but support him,” Mazurek said. ‘‘If I had a dream like that, I knew he would support me. We talked about it, and we’re pretty young—we don’t have a mortgage or any kids ... He’s enjoying it tremendously.”
Still, working in an office again isn’t totally out of the question.
‘‘Right now I’m happy with the freelancer’s lifestyle,” he said. ‘‘But if the right job came along, writing for a magazine [full time], I’d have to consider taking that.”
E-mail Anath Hartmann at ahartmann@gazette.net.
