Pwned: The John4356783 Story

A year ago we reached out to the gamer community at DreamHack in Sweden to find out what they wanted from their anti virus software and more specifically what they didn’t want. Their biggest request was for anti virus that didn’t use up precious PC resources.  They also asked for security software that wouldn’t interrupt them when they were gaming. Some of them even asked for anti virus that would automatically change its mode of operation to accommodate them appropriately when they were gaming versus when they were surfing. Of course we could have just walked down the hall and talked to some of the avid gamers that haunt our own halls…ah, yes, we did that too.

Fast forward one year.

We took the industry’s fastest and least resource intensive anti virus, skinned it and added a Gamer Mode to create our Norton AntiVirus 2009 Gaming Edition. In addition to suppressing alerts and notifications Gamer Mode also offers gamers the option to temporarily turn off additional real-time security processes so you can set your own balance of performance and protection when you are gaming. Gamer Mode kicks in automatically when you game in full screen mode on your PC or you can turn in on with a click on the Norton icon in your systray if you game in Windows mode.

Check out the tragic story of John4356783. It turns out our video production company has some hardcore gamers on staff too. We think it’s pretty funny.