Fashion mogul Marc Ecko’s eponymous clothing company now brings in $1 billion a year in revenue. Recently, Ecko has branched out from rhino-emblazoned t-shirts, shoes, and underpants to popular media, including the consumer culture rag Complex Magazine, the extreme lifestyle YouTube knock-off eckotv.com, and the 2006 video game Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure.

Recently, a canned interview with Ecko ran in popular magazines like Wired, paid for by financial consultants CIT Group. It’s one of those “Special Advertising Sections” designed to integrate so seamlessly into the magazine that it’s easy to mistake it for editorial content. In the interview, Ecko explains “What’s next” for his growing media conglomerate:

I want to keep growing in the video-gaming space. I believe it’s the Wild West of media culture. There’s something magical and abstract about gaming. Games aren’t yet demystified — versus movies, for example; there are TV shows about the making of movies.

Ecko’s point is both insightful and ironic. It contains a rather complex observation about the current state of video games as a medium: television is so familiar, it’s not even startling to think about television programming produced solely to discuss other media forms.

Read the rest of this article online