Jeff Hilbert, Master of the Game

Hilbert outside the Sega booth at the E3 video game conference in Los Angeles in June Emily Shur

By Devin Leonard

“Let’s say you have a werewolf, a vampire, and a human, and you all have to battle for survival,” Jeff Hilbert says as he drives to a meeting in Los Angeles. “The human needs armor and weapons. Otherwise, as soon as one of the other characters touches him—boom!—he’s dead. The vampire needs to have speed, agility, and smarts. Otherwise, the werewolf can just rip his head off. You see? Everybody’s powers have to be balanced really carefully or nobody wants to play this game.”

Hilbert knows something about the dynamics of a successful video game. His talent agency, Digital Development Management, represents some of the trade’s leading game creators, such as Slant Six Games, the Vancouver (B.C.) company working on the latest version of Resident Evil, a franchise that has sold 45 million units worldwide and has generated four movies starring actress-model Milla Jovovich as the game’s zombie-slaying heroine.

DDM also represents Vatra Games, a Czech developer which is completing the next iteration of Silent Hill, a gloomy “survival-horror” series, which has sold more than 4 million copies and inspired its own budding Hollywood franchise, and Turtle Rock Studios, a Southern California developer whose principals were part of the team that created Left 4 Dead, another man-vs.-zombie property, which has sold more than 6 million copies.

In other words, Hilbert, who founded DDM six years ago, is a fulcrum in an industry that makes enormous sums of money and is challenging the cultural primacy of action movies, edgy cable television, and Stieg Larsson novels. This is especially true for young men who have grown up with game controllers in hand.

Hilbert, 46, has slightly graying, shoulder-length hair that makes him look like an aging surfer. He’s always grinning, as if someone just told him a pretty good joke. He works from his home in Burlingame, outside of San Francisco, rather than a plush Los Angeles office.

Still, like a typical Hollywood agent, Hilbert has his manic moments. Heading to the meeting in L.A., he gets lost and steers his rented Kia sedan with his right hand while he charts the route on his BlackBerry with his left. He can’t make sense of the directions and scolds his smartphone for providing him with misinformation. “This is the wrong way to do this,” he says. “Stop, stop, Google Maps!”

It takes several abrupt U-turns before Hilbert gets his bearings. It’s a bit like a scene from one of the Need for Speed racing games, which have sold more than 100 million copies and generated over $2.7 billion in sales. The current edition, Shift 2 Unleashed, was developed by Slightly Mad Studios, a DDM client.

Hilbert’s days tend to be unpredictable. “I was at a Boy Scout meeting the other day with my sons,” he says. “I had these other dads pitching me IPhone apps. Everybody’s into games these days.”
Talent agents have long been part of the book, movie, and music industries. This wasn’t always so in video games, but the arrival of people such as Hilbert is a sure sign of a maturing and increasingly influential art form. Two decades ago developers made games in their garages, advertised them on the backs of comic books, and mailed them to customers in zip-lock bags. They saw themselves as software designers rather than as “talent,” a word traditionally used in the entertainment world to describe the likes of Tom Cruise, Jennifer Lopez, or anyone else who does something in front of a camera or microphone or on a keyboard.

Agents go where there’s money, and the video game industry is overflowing with it. Revenues reached $25 billion in the U.S. last year, according to the Entertainment Software Assn. That’s more than double Hollywood’s theatrical receipts. In November, Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty: Black Ops sold 5.6 million copies in the U.S. and the U.K. in its first day at a price of $59 each, plus special editions—a $360 million opening, according to the company. By comparison, Warner Bros. took in $125 million in ticket sales during the first weekend of the heavily promoted movie Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1. The New York Times’s video game critic, Seth Schiesel, approaches the industry’s products with as much gravitas as his Arts page colleagues do Jonathan Franzen novels. And in a 7-2 decision on June 27, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a California law that banned the sale of violent video games to minors. The court ruled that “like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas” and are thus entitled to the same First Amendment protections. No wonder developers view themselves as auteurs in need of professional handlers.

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