Jessica Chobot: stepping into Daylight

Her first interview with games website IGN was atypical for the day. It wasn't the tone that was out of place for the website, which at the time featured racy pictures along with its video game coverage. What was strange is that she was a subject at all.

Chobot says it all started in 2005, when IGN writer Chris Carle found her roaming the halls of E3 and asked to interview her not for a job, but for a story. Back when the biggest convention in the games industry was bloated with half-naked models and glitzy displays, there were only a handful of women simply there to visit the convention.

The piece reads like a telegram sent back from a National Geographic expedition, or the calls of a barker at a freak show.

"Gentlemen, she exists. A woman who loves to play videogames ... a woman who has no problem with booth babes ... plays WoW and Silent Hill and Final Fantasy. ... This woman is the holy grail, the dream girl of all gamers and otaku."

In the interview, Chobot seems to enjoy the attention. Just weeks before, she emerged from obscurity after an image of her licking a PSP appeared on the games website Kotaku. Carle is writing for readers who have become infatuated with the mysterious woman, and his two-part interview finally puts a name to the face.

Early on Carle tells his readers to "start saving for that engagement ring, because this is the woman you're going to want to marry."

Funny thing is, Chobot was already married and living with her husband not far from where she grew up in Novi, Mich. She had met him at the real estate company where she took a job as a secretary, fresh out of college with a degree in fine arts. Chobot says she got married in part because she was never able make her passion for painting pay off.

"I knew even then that I was making the wrong choice."

It wasn't a loveless marriage, but Chobot never felt like an equal partner.

"I was only ever made to feel special when other people were around," she says. "I guess the silver lining to the whole thing was, despite ... the fact that the marriage was a bad marriage, it wasn't a hurtful marriage. Nobody hated each other. We never really fought. Nobody was screaming at each other. It just kind of devolved into living with a roommate."

In addition to her failing marriage, Chobot was soon gutted by a simple bureaucratic quirk. She had enrolled in a part-time graduate program to become an art teacher. Halfway through her course of study, the state of Michigan changed the requirements for teacher certification. It tacked nearly eight more years onto her studies.

"I basically had what I call a 'quarter-life crisis' and completely lost my mind," Chobot says.

She didn't feel comfortable sharing a bedroom with her husband any longer, so she used their finished basement as an apartment. Then came a deep depression. Her health started to fail. She began to play World of Warcraft all night, every night. In late 2004, as the Detroit housing market began to show signs of trouble and her husband's business declined, she defiantly took a job at the local EB Games.

A few months later she took her entire savings and bought a ticket to Japan.

One constant in Chobot's life growing up, aside from video games, was a love of all things Japanese. Her aunt lived in Japan teaching English for eight years and would send back trinkets, toys and oddities. Long before it was possible to stream anime to your tablet or buy Gundam at the mall, Chobot had a collection to put any Japanophile to shame.

In 2005, as her marriage began to slide, she told her husband that she was leaving for a trip and booked a three-week solo vacation to Japan. The experience was transformative.

"I remember I was in Kyoto walking towards the [subway] station," she says. "It's so silly, but the crosswalks there for the big intersections, when you push the button and it's ready for you to walk, instead of just showing the little man like it does here they play music. Really cute music."

Chobot sobs as she tells the story.

"For some reason that hit me hard, and I thought, 'This is awesome! I can't believe I did it! I'm here! I made it here all by myself!' It's my second week in and I'm starting to make my way around, and I'm visiting all these cool places, and I'm hanging out by the side of the river, and I've got my stop-over cafe I hit up on my way to the Gion District. I'm seeing geisha walking around."

She realized, for the first time in her life, that she was in control of her future. Chobot says that she knew at that moment that she could be an independent adult, and that she didn't have to be married to feel important.

When she made it back to the States she had a new goal: to get a job in the games industry. Her first challenge was to get to E3, so she fabricated a manager's business card from scraps of EB Games letterhead and mailed it in. The scam worked, and a few weeks later she was sent credentials. In her lead-up to E3 she began "hustling," as she calls it, emailing anyone she could in marketing, business development and media for a position. Any position.

All the while she was doing small modeling jobs around Detroit for extra money. It's work that she's not proud of.

"There's no such thing as modeling in Michigan," Chobot says. "Occasionally I would get sent out to do some sort of rap video, some sort of advertising here or there — usually for the state — and basically then be sent out to be a booth babe for their big, big event which was the [Detroit] Auto Show."

By day Chobot was a clerk selling games, by night a high-level WoW addict clumsily networking over the internet and on weekends a model for extra money. Months passed, and around that time her pre-ordered PSP came in. She took it to a photo shoot later that same day, and the rest of the crew gathered around as she unboxed it.

That's when the fateful "PSP lick" picture was taken, an image captured by the photographer as a joke that saw her lingering seductively on the new handheld. And it was Chobot herself that forwarded it on to Kotaku.

She figured it would be her 15 minutes of fame.

Just a few weeks later, as she marveled at the booths at her first E3, she says people began to recognize her from that photo. She did an interview with the cable outlet G4, and later the interview with IGN's Carle. Her image had spread virally across the internet, and she leveraged that attention into freelance writing gigs for both IGN and short-lived games website Red Assed Baboon.

For better or for worse, licking that PSP launched her career. But it also gave her detractors an embarrassing trump card to play every time they wanted to attack her credibility.

During her time at G4, Chobot met and fell in love with another presenter, G4's Blair Herter. They were married in 2012, and their son, Emerson, was born less than a year later. Meanwhile, IGN and G4 restructured. Soon she and her new husband were both jobless but, thanks to well-negotiated contracts, far from broke.

Today, Herter takes the subway from the home they recently bought in the LA suburbs to his 9-to-5 job as a television producer. Chobot stays at home with Emerson. It's been quite a change from their globetrotting days.

But Chobot hasn't stopped hustling. For her, work had become empowering, and sitting at home with the baby felt like a kind of failure.

Opportunity came through a friendship with Jared Gerritzen, the studio director at Zombie Studios in Seattle. Whenever he and his wife would come down to LA, Herter and Chobot would take them out to dinner and catch up. One evening they were talking about the success of a psychological horror game called Slender. Gerritzen was surprised by how well Chobot knew the genre, and eventually convinced her to spend a month writing up an outline for a horror game of her own. After years standing outside the games industry and looking in, this was Chobot's chance to be part of it.

Daylight will be released in 2014. The game began as a self-funded, independent project within Zombie Studios. Chobot and five developers were planning on an episodic release on Steam, but Gerritzen saw an opportunity and pitched it as a potential PlayStation 4 title to publisher Atlus. It loved the idea, and with a boost in funding, the team grew larger.

Images: Jessica Chobot, Jimmy Shelton, Tom Connors
Editing: Matt Leone, Russ Pitts
Design / Layout: Warren Schultheis, Matthew Sullivan