Braid Marketing
Sophie,Paige and Tayla

Microsoft Marketing Braid…
Blow signed with Microsoft to release the game on
Xbox Live mid-2007.
Game Announced at the ‘Tokyo Game Show’ in
2007.
Microsoft requested changes to the game. Blow
threatened to stop the release if the changed went
ahead.
Microsoft promoted it by doing “deal of the Week”
on Xbox live.
Was given many good reviews which boosted
sales.

Where and how can you play
Braid?
Play Braid on your Or, play it on your Braid is not a portable game, it
XBOX 360 through Windows PC. You can is mainly played on the XBOX
XBOX live arcade. download it from any of and PC.
these fine retailers:
Steam * Impulse *
Gamers Gate

The Most Dangerous Gamer
• LIKE MANY WEALTHY people, Jonathan Blow vividly remembers the moment he
became rich. At the time, in late 2008, he was $40,000 in debt and living in a modest
San Francisco apartment, having just spent more than three years meticulously
refining his video game, Braid—an innovative time-warping platformer (think Super
Mario Bros. meets Borges), whose $200,000 development Blow funded himself.
Although Braid had been released, to lavish praise from the video-game press, on
Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade service that August, Blow didn’t see a cent from the
game until one autumn day when he sat down at a café in the city’s Mission district. “I
opened up my Web browser and Holy fuck, I’m rich now,” he recalled. “There were a
lot of zeros in my bank account.”
• Blow’s similarities to the average millionaire end right there, however, because unlike
most wealthy people, he seems faintly irritated by his memory of striking it rich. When
Blow told me, during a typically metaphysical conversation in a park near his Berkeley
office, that his windfall was “absurd,” he didn’t mean it in the whimsical “Can you
believe my luck?” sense; he meant it in the philosophical, Camus-puffing-a-cigarette
sense of a deeply ridiculous cosmic joke. “It just drives home how fictional money is,”
Blow said, squinting against the unseasonably bright December sun. “One day I’m
looking at my bank account and there’s not much money, and the next day there’s a
large number in there and I’m rich. In both cases, it’s a fictional number on the
computer screen, and the only reason that I’m rich is because somebody typed a
number into my bank account.” For the world’s most existentially obsessed game
developer, coming into seven figures just provided another opportunity to ponder the
nature of meaning in the universe.

• Which is not to say that Blow has forsaken his wealth. As Braid grew into a
bona fide phenomenon in its first year—selling several hundred thousand
copies, winning armloads of industry awards, and becoming Exhibit A in the
case for the video game as a legitimate artistic medium—Blow made
several upgrades to his austere lifestyle. In place of his old Honda, he now
drives a $150,000 crimson Tesla Roadster, a low-slung all-electric
automotive dynamo that offers a highly realistic simulation of being shot out
of a cannon whenever Blow clamps down on the accelerator. And after a
yearlong victory lap filled with lectures and laurels, he moved into a
spacious hilltop condo that overlooks the eastern half of the city.

Reviews on Braid

News articles on Braid
Video game developer designs thoughtful new game
By Jeff Glor