Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier sat down with Don McGowan, a former attorney for The Pokémon Company and Bungie, to discuss how the two companies investigated whistleblowers while he was with them. Schreier began by asking McGowan how the Bungie investigation would begin:
“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 a leak, since they’re involved. Bungie is pretty open with information internally, which has led to some challenges. Everyone had access to everything. If you engage fans, fans are interested and gain influence within their clans by talking about things. The problem is that our information is their currency.”
When going into detail about the specific case, regarding the leak of information about Bungie’s upcoming game, Marathon, their clan, McGowan outlined the tracking process they used to catch him:
“There is an interesting phenomenon, which is that many people use the same online identity over and over again. I Bluesky handle is the same as my Twitter handle. This is often their email address as well, and they have registered an email address with us, so we can find out who is a clan member. And then it becomes a matter of looking at the server logs. Who is in a clan with this person? Do we know who the people in that clan are? This results in an inner person. It’s very likely to be our guy.”
Moving on from Bungie, McGowan reflected on the craziest experience he’s had while chasing girls, which was when he worked with The Pokemon Company:
“When I was in Pokémon, some kid figured out how to get pictures out of a card game. He found an icon from the developer and said ‘Shit, I found a new Pokémon.’ This child included their email, and because of the way Pokémon created the account, when we got the child’s account, we got the parent’s information, which included a phone number.”
“So I called his mom and said, ‘Listen, I wanted to tell you some things that Andrew does 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’m starting to describe it more technically. She says, ‘Is that a problem?’ I say, ‘Software hacking, that’s a federal crime, but I don’t want to talk about it. Why don’t we talk about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’”
“The kid live-tweeted it. The tweets were as follows:”
- A Pokémon just called my house.
- What the hell is a general counsel?
- I know now that what I did was wrong and I will never do it again.
“Which was fantastic. I absolutely baked my legend in Pokémon for five years.”
You can see the entire interview here.