Nine years before anyone described her as Adam Garcia’s wife, Nathalia Chubin was running the UK side of a $100 million Xbox marketing campaign spanning sixteen countries. It was 2010, and she was 26, working out of a desk at the advertising agency McCann Erickson in London. Michael Flatt, who led Xbox’s marketing across Europe at the time, later wrote that she pushed thousands of campaign assets through Microsoft’s complicated approval process while the launch stayed on schedule. That’s not a small campaign to have led at 26.
Chubin, a British marketing executive, studied English at Trinity College Dublin from 2003 to 2007, then took a master’s in international studies and diplomacy at SOAS, University of London, finishing in 2008. She joined McCann Erickson as a graduate trainee that same year and worked her way up to account manager by the time the Xbox campaign landed on her desk.
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Building a career at PlayStation
In 2011, Chubin left the agency world to join PlayStation directly as a product manager. Within a year she was running global marketing on Wonderbook: Book of Spells, an augmented reality game built around a book written by J.K. Rowling. She has described it as the biggest PlayStation software release of that year.
She stayed at PlayStation for five years, moving up to senior product marketing manager and working on titles including The Order: 1886 and Media Molecule’s Dreams.
A marriage, then a career change
In January 2015, Adam Garcia, the Australian actor known for Saturday Night Fever and Coyote Ugly, proposed to her during a family trip to Sydney. He got her out of bed before dawn, telling her they were going to spot bandicoots in a nearby national park, then proposed as the sun came up. They married at a London registry office on March 26, 2015.
Their daughter, Arya Storm Diana Garcia, was born later that year. A second child, a son whose name has never been made public, followed a few years after that. Garcia has spoken about the marriage in interviews since. Chubin hasn’t. Her Instagram is private, and neither child has appeared in anything she’s posted publicly.
Not long after her daughter was born, Chubin left PlayStation to co-found By Day, a company that connected parents with flexible, project based marketing work. In interviews from that period, she said she had hated the idea of a job that could stop her picking her daughter up from school or taking her to a doctor’s appointment without asking permission first.
Back in games, and a career-best win
By Day ran for a few years before Chubin returned to full time roles in games. She joined Square Enix in 2020, working on the mobile game Tomb Raider: Reloaded, then moved to Team17 in 2022.
At Team17, the British games publisher behind Worms and Overcooked, Chubin became global marketing director, leading a team of around 30 people responsible for the company’s brand and community work. Her time there included the launch of Dredge, a fishing horror game that won Best Indie Game at the IGN Awards in 2023. She also helped start The Purple Panel, a Team17 podcast on women in games leadership, with Xbox’s Sarah Bond as its first guest.
She has also gone back to her old school, Godolphin and Latymer, as a guest speaker, talking to pupils about working in the games industry.
What Chubin is doing now
Nathalia Chubin left Team17 in October 2024 and has worked independently since, taking on fractional and contract roles across the games industry. That included helping the Croatian studio Gamepires bring the survival game SCUM to its full release, and eight months covering a maternity leave as interim vice president of marketing at the writing software company ProWritingAid. She was still covering that role when Black Friday, the company’s busiest trading week, arrived. Its chief executive, Chris Banks, later wrote that she kept the marketing team steady through it.
At 42, she is now working as a fractional CMO with Maze Theory, a London studio building Project Hail Mary: Journey Among the Stars, a mixed reality game made with Amazon MGM Studios and based on the Andy Weir novel. It is set to launch across VR and mixed reality platforms before the end of the year.
