Michealene Cristini Risley

From Sega Retro

MichaeleneCristiniRisley.png
Michealene Cristini Risley
Place of birth: Clawson, Michigan, United States
Employment history:
Sega of America[2][1] (1993 – 1995)
Divisions:
Nike (1995 – 199x)
Role(s): Executive
Education: Michigan State University (Telecommunications, English and Advertising)

Michealene Cristini Risley (née Cristini) is an American businesswoman and former head licensing executive with Sega of America's Entertainment & Consumer Products division, responsible for establishing the company's Hollywood licensing capabilities, as well as being a founding member of the Sega Girls Task Force. Employed with the company from early 1993 to the Winter of 1995, she was crucial in working out the deals needed to bring Sonic the Hedgehog to television, eventually creating many of the policies and procedures that Sega of America uses in their licensing to this very day.[3][1]

Career

Background

Born to an Italian Catholic family[4] in Clawson, Michigan, Michealene Cristini first fell in love with video games at a young age, developing a fascination with pinball and proving to be a skilled arcade game player.[2] She began her career proper while attending Michigan State University, acting as a television reporter while earning her Telecommunications degree. Following this, she was employed with the Detroit Free Press, and had a side gig as a writer. Once she graduated, both her and a close friend moved out to California, looking for employment. Thankfully, she was able to land a role with Ronnie Greenberg, working in the television game show sector as an assistant - her first introduction to the entertainment industry.[1]

Once in Los Angeles, Cristini soon migrated from working with Greenberg to a job at KTTV, one of the cities' top television stations. During this time, she recalls a desire to work with high-profile entertainment companies, particularly Disney, sending the company a repeated stream of employment requests. "Literally, I even have letters from the head of production saying, “your interest in Disney is duly noted.” Okay. Like, stop sending me notes." Her perseverance would pay off, and she was eventually hired by Disney's Steve McBeth in a licensing role. She remembers being brought onboard to establish a public relations arm for the company's then 6 licensing divisions; in her own words, "I really got my feet wet in licensing."[1]

She was also briefly employed in a licensing with Mattel, where she was asked to help develop a film based on the popular Barbie franchise, as well as working on the animated short included with the company's P.J. Sparkles doll. As a result of this connection, the producers overseeing the short's animation recommended Cristini for recruitment to Marvel Entertainment. Here, she was employed as their vice president of production, managing the animated television series' that the company was running at the time - such as working with McDonald's on their Magic Paintbrush short film, or planning the production of Biker Mike from Mars. She was also currently in talks with Stan Lee to adapt one of her favorite childhood comics to the silver screen. Further, she had recently met her husband, and the two were set to be engaged soon, with Cristini having "no interest in leaving."[1]

Entertainment & Consumer Products

Main article: Entertainment & Consumer Products.

Regardless of Cristini expressing no desire to leave Marvel, both Tom Kalinske and Shinobu Toyoda of Sega of America reached out to Cristini in the hopes of using her expertise to expand the company's licensing capabilities. To this effort, the two sent her virtually every Sega consumer product they had access to, including boxes of video games. "It was like a toy store." Looking into the company, she found that Sega had just enacted a deal with Andy Heyward at DIC and Allen Bohbot at Bohbot Entertainment to take Sonic the Hedgehog to television, purchasing the Japanese animation studio TMS Entertainment to this end. Despite this, the company had less than a 4% share of the video game market at the time, and was so unknown to Cristini that she didn't even know how to pronounce the company's name. Still, they made a very tempting offer, including to pay for Cristini's wedding assistant, alongside a number of smaller gratuities. More appealing was their location in the relatively safer city of San Francisco; "honestly, my husband and I didn't want to raise kids in LA. It was a personal choice on my part."[1]

To prepare for her interview with Toyoda, Cristini had one of her Japanese friends record the phrase dozo yoroshiku onegaishimasu (lit, "pleased to meet you") for her to practice reciting, which she used upon first meeting the man. To her surprise, he responded and spoke to her in Japanese, to which she quickly had to explain it was the only phrase she knew. She eventually accepted their offer, and was soon brought onboard. "When I went to Sega, there were three executives: It was Tom Kalinske, Shinobu Toyoda, and Paul Rioux. And they were on one side of the building. And when I came in, they brought me on the same side of the building. So I was on the executive side." Having her office alongside the company's central executive team afforded her the protection to follow through on later ideas like the Sega Girls Task Force, but also resulted in her acting as the go-to executive anytime anyone in the company had a licensing deal which needed handling.[1]


“ When Doug Glen and the executive team wanted to do Sega Channel, it was like, “oh, great, Michealene, go get all these rights.” [sarcastically] Wait, let me… I'm going to go to Haim Saban and say, “you know, we want to do Sega Channel and we don't want to pay you for Power Rangers.” But it gave me a lot of experience because now, entertainment licensing, and licensing out in all new entities that involved contracts and negotiation and licensing, came to me. „

— Michealene Cristini Risley[1]


One of Cristini Risley's first tasks at Sega of America was the establishment of a dedicated licensing division, Entertainment & Consumer Products. "They had no idea [how to license]. We had no idea. So I had to sort of put the systems in place." She set up an office in Beverly Hills, California and began working closely with the Creative Artists Agency, one of America's most renowned talent agencies, to establish a relationship with Hollywood and celebrity talent. Her and her team in Beverly Hills established many of the company's licensing practices with little prior research to go off, especially when it came to integrating Hollywood licenses in the realm of video games. These practices include things like processes for developing video games into feature films, and reaching out to license holders to bring franchises to Sega platforms, among others.[1] Entertainment & Consumer Products was also responsible for many of the company's merchandising deals, such as managing requests from outside companies to license Sonic for use in dedicated merchandise, and is credited as one of the American forces which made Sonic the Hedgehog into the multi-billion dollar franchise that it is today.[2]

In her own words, one of the more notable differences between the film and game industries was the perception that the latter was practically the "bastard stepchild" to the former in terms of respectability. She particularly recalls the Creative Artists Agency had been pressuring her for some time to hire them to represent Sega as a company, under the premise that this difference in perceived respectability was enough to cause Sega to require their services. In one instance, CAA representatives had traveled to Sega of America headquarters in Redwood City, California in another attempt to persuade Cristini Risley to hire them, but by sheer coincidence had done so on the very same day that the trade journals had published the news that video games had outgrossed motion pictures and television in terms of revenue. "Like you need us. [sarcastically] Right." Regardless, she states that some of her coworkers truly understood a licensing and entertainment connection, such as Gale Anne Hurd, and uses the example of having the foresight to develop tie-in games alongside the filming of their movies for more optimal release schedules (where most video game tie-ins happened after the success of the film).[1]

As one of the company's main executives, Cristini Risley also had a direct hand in what software was imported from the Japanese Sega Enterprises, Ltd. During one of the company's Product Development Reviews (in which the executives are shown footage of in-progress games and potential Japanese imports)[2] recalls an instance where she vetoed the localization Japanese first-party Sega title[2] which featured a schoolgirl in a game of strip poker, citing the damage it could do to Sega's brand in America. Looking to the example set by Disney's Touchstone Pictures (a separate brand operated by Disney in order to release more adult-oriented films), she entertained the notion that the company could have released more adult games under a different branding in the same manner. To this extent, she wrote a white paper on the subject of a possible analog for a similar venture operated by Sega of America.[1] Cristini Risley says she felt management found her insight as a woman useful in these Product Development Reviews, and while she always appreciated the opportunity to help, she quickly became the impromptu moral compass for what the company would and wouldn't release. "At that time, we didn't even have the Ratings Board yet... and I was sort of Sega's code of conduct."[2]

Sega Girls Task Force

Main article: Sega Girls Task Force.


“ When I looked at all of our games, I said, “well wait a minute, why are we not getting girls?” Half the population, over half of the population is not playing games. And so, not only from a career directory, from a cultural trajectory, there are so many elements of this that were really poor for girls. „

— Michealene Cristini Risley[1]


As a self-described humanist, Cristini Risley was always concerned with the inclusion and representation of women in entertainment. While at Sega of America, she found herself in a position to change that. She set up a meeting with the company's senior management, with practically all the key executive players in attendance: Tom Kalinske, Shinobu Toyoda, Paul Rioux, and Joe Miller, among others. Inspired by the Judith Rossner book America's Secret Weapon, Cristini Risley pitched the concept that the company could actively develop and market games to young girls, but importantly did through so through the idea that female gamers were an otherwise untapped market. "And so I went into that meeting saying, okay, how do I turn this to where we look at it as a missed opportunity? And I'm showing them the numbers, and even if we captured 10% of this market, what kind of volume it was; but I didn't talk about it from a “we're leaving girls out” [perspective]. ...because it was all about - how do we turn this into a model that they're all gonna want a piece of that market?" She also pointed out that Nintendo of America had taken similar steps in the past, and that by not aggressively going after this market, they were falling behind Nintendo without cause.[2] The meeting was successful, with Joe Miller being very pleased with Cristini Risley's initiative, and resulted in her being given the go-ahead to create the Sega Girls Task Force in 1993.[1]

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Product Development Team's Cindy Claveran

In addition to the prominent support of Joe Miller, the Task Force chiefly consisted of Cynthia Modders (who worked with Cristini Risley in Entertainment & Consumer Products), Lydia Brichta (from the company's toy division), Roberta Jacobs (also with a background in toys), Cindy Claveran (from the Product Development Team, who already had experience producing Sega Pico girls' games), and Diane Fornasier (from marketing), all working alongside Cristini Risley to bring young girls into gaming. Above all, there were very few scientific studies done in the field of girls-oriented video games, meaning outside of the group's personal experiences, they were required to research and create much of this data themselves; "there was no data. And the whole process was like walking into holes all the time; like putting my foot in a hole and tripping." To this end, she would call the likes of Jill Barad (CEO of Mattel and the woman "who built Barbie") and Margaret Loesch (of Hanna-Barbera, Marvel, and Fox Kids) for advice on how best to proceed, and for any existing data they might already have.[1]

Regardless, she recalls that Sega of America was a different place at the time, with many in the company's upper management being women - and being supportive to the Task Force as a result. To her, much of modern toxicity around female participation in gaming had not quite manifested yet. "The senior management was really great. I think my challenge had always been with Japan." As possibly the highest-ranking female executive in a Japanese-owned company before the hiring of Roberta Jacobs, she frequently had to interact with executives from Japan. To her dismay, she discovered that none of the Japanese executives would look at or interact with her, and eventually hired a male assistant to speak for her when in the country.[2] In one instance, she recalls growing so frustrated with their lack of eye contact that she taped a photograph of herself alongside an upward-facing arrow on the tops of her shoes, as if to humorously remind these executives to speak with her directly.[1] "Most of the time I didn't take it personally, because it was cultural."[2]

Cristini Risley persisted in her work with the Girls Task Force, work which most visibly manifested itself in the forms of inclusive marketing and games developed for young girls, as well as making appearances on news programs like Good Morning America - even being surprised and somewhat anxious at her photo appearing in newspapers of the time. Looking at previous studies about the differences in which girls and boys learn, she sought to use this information in the creation of a Sega commercial aimed specifically at young girls. Working with Jeff Goodby (the head of Sega of America's advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners), Cristini Risley and the Girls Task Force set to work in bringing this to reality.[1]

Despite this, the process wasn't entirely without its difficulties. In particular, she found that those she worked with occasionally defaulted to their own preferences as men, even when marketing directly to women. "It was challenging, because I think people want to program from their area of comfort... It's really important because I think, how do I say this nicely? I think that some men tend to believe that their perspective is universal, and it's not."[1] In her time in the industry, Cristini Risley says that one of the biggest challenges facing the inclusion of young girls in entertainment of the time was the lack of role models. "All the [role] models were male. I would love to sit with young students or kids and talk about games; girls weren't having those conversations... It's a pretty common thing if you look at the number of role models for females: there weren't any. Which is why Princess Sally was so important. And Tails too, because Tails was more effeminate."[1]

In addition to larger fronts like marketing and sales changes, the Girls Task Force had its hand in the production of three Genesis games: Berenstain Bears’ Camping Adventure, Crystal's Pony Tale, and the unreleased Baby Boom. Cristini Risley recalls Sega of America performing their own focus testing with young girls for Crystal's Pony Tale, something likely carried out by Diane Fornasier and Cindy Claveran.[1]

Later career

Michealene Cristini Risley left Sega of America in Winter of 1995, turning down an offer by Rocket Science Games[1] and instead departing for a much more lucrative position at Nike. According to her, the company had hired her to establish a dedicated internal video game division. She instead persuaded them to let her license out their stable of athletes, most notably resulting in bringing golfer Tiger Woods to video games - one of the largest celebrity game deals of the time. She attributes much of her success in celebrity licensing to her time with Sega ("I had such a great training there") and continued to work with Sega of America for some time after leaving. She was also supported by many of her former executive team, including Tom Kalinske, who personally accompanied Cristini Risley upon her successful interview with Don Mattrick for an creative executive role at Zynga.[1]

She currently acts as co-founder and CEO of Imbibe Lifestyles, an upscale pillow brand specializing in consumer wellness, and owns a dog named Jaxx.[4]

Activism

“ I believe the social contract we have here in America is broken. I think it's broken through many sectors of business and government. Video games is just one sector. But it's a sector that has a high degree of influence on our culture. „

— Michealene Cristini Risley[2]


Cristini Risley traces her activism all the way back to her family. Born into a family of Italian Catholics, she understood from an early age that gender inequality could be baked into someone's culture, citing a general familial preference towards boys as perhaps what kickstarted a desire in her to counteract that. "I rebelled against that since the day I was born."[4]

Following her time in the game industry, Cristini Risley recalls a story upon which she took her two young sons to a nearby arcade. Seeing their excitement to play a full-body Sega motorcycle racing game, she noticed that, despite her efforts to ensure her children are not exposed to sexism, the arcade game was eager to display images of eroticized flag girls and borderline nudity. "So here I was, as the mom of a 4 and a 5 year old, and I could not protect them from their indoctrination into the world of sexism. I could not protect them from the beginning of objectification of women.... Objectification happens earlier and earlier."[2]

A noted activist and human rights speaker, she remaining passionate in the area of international women's rights. Through her many charities and foundations (including Girl Child Network, Tapestries of Hope, and Freshwater Haven), Cristini Risley raises awareness and money on a number of issues, and is known for her direct involvement in charity work. In particular, her and her assistant were imprisoned by the government of Zimbabwean in 2007 for working with Makoni for the Girl Child Network, accused of being spies. Without receiving any help from the U.S. State Department and with humanitarian lawyers reportedly barred from helping the two women, a fan and former war correspondent from Facebook used his connections to inform the CIA of their situation. They were later deported to South Africa and released safely.[5] Later in 2019, during Operation Big Sister, her Lyft vehicle was hijacked by a human trafficking game, causing her to immediately flee for her life. While she escaped to safety, she no longer works at the grassroots level as a result of the experience. "I want to be here for my family."[4]

Production history

Interviews

Photographs

Main article: Photos of Michealene Cristini Risley

External links

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22 1.23 1.24 1.25 Interview: Michealene Cristini Risley (2025-01-21) by Alexander Rojas
  2. ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVwkBApEKTM
  3. ↑ https://www.polygon.com/features/2019/5/27/18526122/sega-girls-task-force-female-players (Wayback Machine: 2022-11-29 00:26)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjnsUmMAKOA
  5. ↑ http://makingof.com/insiders/artist/400/michealene-risley (Wayback Machine: 2010-10-09 04:22)
  6. ↑ File:MMPR gg us manual.pdf, page 14
  7. ↑ File:Garfield Caught in the Act GG US Manual.pdf, page 19
  8. ↑ File:VR Troopers MD credits.pdf
  9. ↑ File:VR Troopers GG credits.pdf
  10. ↑ File:Pebblebeach sat us manual.pdf, page 22
  11. ↑ File:Fahrenheit MCD JP SSCredits.pdf
  12. ↑ File:Garfield Caught in the Act MD credits.pdf
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