Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier met with Don McGowan, a former lawyer for The Pokémon Company and Bungie, to discuss how the two companies investigated leakers during his time with them. Schreier started off by asking McGowan how an investigation at Bungie would start:
“I had a regular sync with our PR team. A lot of stuff came to me through them or the community team, which is usually the best way to find out about leaks, because they are plugged in. Bungie is fairly internally free with information, which led to certain challenges. Everybody had access to everything. If you hire fans, fans are interested and are getting clout inside their clans by talking about stuff. The problem is, our information is their currency.”
When going into detail about a specific case, regarding a leaker who leaked information about Bungie’s upcoming game, Marathon, to their clan, McGowan laid out the tracking process that they used to catch him:
“There is an interesting phenomenon, which is that a lot of people use the same online identity over and over again. My Bluesky handle is the same as my Twitter handle. It’s often also their email address, and they’ve registered an email address with us, and so we can figure out who the clan member is. And then it becomes a question of looking at server logs. Who is in the clan with this person? Do we know who the people are in that clan? That results in an internal person. That’s very likely to be our guy.”
Moving on from Bungie, McGowan looked back at the craziest experience he had while chasing leakers and that was when he was working with The Pokemon Company:
“Back when I was at Pokémon, some kid figured out how to extract the images from the card game. He found an icon from the developer and said ‘Holy s—-, I found a new Pokémon.’ This kid included his email, and because of the way Pokémon did account creation, when we got the child’s account, we got the parent information, which included a phone number.”
“So I called his mom and said, ‘Listen, I wanted to tell you some things that Andrew is doing on the computer.’ She says, ‘So you’re saying he hacked your game.’ And I hear in the background: ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ I start describing it more technically. She says, ‘Is this a problem?’ I say, ‘Hacking software, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’”
“The kid was live-tweeting it. The tweets were this:”
- Pokémon just called my house.
- What the hell is a general counsel?
- I now know what I did was wrong, and I’ll never do it again.
“Which was fantastic. Absolutely baked my legend in at Pokémon for like five years.”