Alex (00:01.106)
Hello good friends and welcome to this week's edition of the fourth curtain We are so so lucky to have with us longtime friend long ago friend legendary game designer

Mike Pondsmith (00:04.788)
Okay. Okay. Okay, I'm there.

Aaron (00:20.003)
first person to wear sunglasses on the show.

Mike Pondsmith (00:20.061)
Yeah.

Alex (00:23.148)
Yeah, well, he and he looks super cool with those glasses on legendary game designer whose career has spanned pen and paper RPG all the way up through the biggest, most modern of console RPGs. He's known by many names. Tell me if I if I if I research these correctly. Steel Omni Kismet, Maximum Mike. That's you. Also the founder of our Telsorian Games.

Mike Pondsmith (00:23.399)
Yeah, yeah.

Aaron (00:24.411)
you

Aaron (00:49.371)
Deal's cool.

Alex (00:50.134)
Mr. Mike Pondsmith, hey Mike, how are you?

Mike Pondsmith (00:53.778)
I am fine Alex. Been a long time since we've had a chance to talk so tell me all about yourself now.

Alex (01:00.242)
Yeah. Well, I usually take a long time to get through the intro. it's usually like half the episode is just kind of meandering through the intro. But you and I work together in the the kind of the formative years of Xbox that launch that launch cycle. I think you worked on Med Commander to maybe Blood Wake, also Crimson Skies. Is that right? Did you touch all those games?

Mike Pondsmith (01:10.89)
Okay.

Mike Pondsmith (01:15.388)
Mm-hmm. yeah

Mike Pondsmith (01:25.024)
I worked on all three of those. worked on all three of those. Each one was kind of a different experience, but I had already worked in video games way back in a company called California Pacific. that was way back. Richard Garfield was in there at the same time I was. I think it was 17 or 18. I was like 23.

Aaron (01:25.861)
in skies.

Aaron (01:44.891)
Eww.

Mike Pondsmith (01:49.554)
Ever so often we run across each other in conferences and he kind of goes, hey, and I go, hey, and we people go, did you guys were I said, yeah, so far back, you can't even imagine it. So, yeah, I discovered I have a history in both both paper and digital. So here I am now.

Alex (01:55.182)
You

Alex (02:02.638)
That's a.

Alex (02:08.438)
Yeah. Well, and on that, on the pic, go ahead, Aaron.

Aaron (02:10.532)
Did Crimson's, well I was just gonna say going back to Crimson's Skies real quick, that one had a really good book, right, that it came with? Or am I confusing it with a different game? Like a manual?

Mike Pondsmith (02:12.938)
Hmm?

Mike Pondsmith (02:19.872)
yeah, it actually, what happened with Crimson was Crimson had, Crimson was something that Jordan had come up with long time ago. And I ended up basically picking it up because Jordan got swamped and what he was doing. And, the first one was kind of interesting because an outside studio did it and they were having a lot of problems and I kind of got sent in to work on it with them. So, you know, we got it out and.

It was interesting because I got to watch it evolve. And then when Crimson 2 came up, the studio was just crazy. So, you know, in that one, eventually I got jumped out of that one and I went to another project. It basically the thing I've realized about digital is that nothing's ever locked down. Everything moves around constantly. And I, you know,

When I dealt with the guys at CD Projekt, I still deal with them. Basically, I was kind of surprised at how kind of organized they really were because I went in there expecting the usual chaos that we see. You know, know this Alex, people shifting things. OK, you know, we're adding this. We've got another feature. my God, the feature didn't work. You know, we've pulled it out. We've redone the whatever. And they were like.

Okay, we know what we are going to do and they knew what they were going to do. I came in when they were doing Witcher and Witcher 3 and I went, these guys actually have their stuff together. I did not expect that.

Alex (03:57.518)
We had Michael Novakowski on. yeah, me how. and we got to mention in the intro portion here that you invented cyberpunk. So the game, maybe not the concept, maybe the concept. I don't know.

Mike Pondsmith (04:04.126)
Ha! Mi Hao! Yeah!

Mike Pondsmith (04:14.164)
You

Mike Pondsmith (04:17.984)
No, I was around in the very early days. I think they just named it cyberpunk. So I got and took the name.

Aaron (04:19.95)
Yeah.

Alex (04:25.454)
Right on. then, and obviously you worked with CD Projekt on the game. How did you get connected with them?

Aaron (04:25.871)
nice.

Mike Pondsmith (04:32.574)
Yeah, yeah, my go boys.

Mike Pondsmith (04:38.624)
They were fans. fact, Michal probably could tell you that. Back when they were still, you know, selling things at swap meets and communism had just gotten thrown out. Basically, they were cyberpunk fans and we had actually done cyberpunk in Polish. And I remember when Lisa, who's our business manager, came to me and said, we've got these guys.

Aaron (04:49.274)
You

Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (05:04.692)
who wanted to oppose the addition of cyberpunk. This is just about the time the wall was coming down and everything and I said, okay, so I guess we'll sell about five copies in Poland, you know, and the joke has always been a Talsorian that those five copies went to the guys who were the founders of CD Projekt.

Alex (05:23.118)
Those are good five copies, right?

Mike Pondsmith (05:25.64)
And so a good five copies though. Yeah, I mean it was worth it, you know, and so they actually played. They knew it. They liked it and they said, you know, have you gotten anybody to do it? And we haven't. The problem is that cyberpunk had at that point been picked up by a lot of people. And so the cycle was always we want to do cyberpunk. They pay you a ridiculous amount of money for the rights and then you don't get it pulled together.

Aaron (05:27.32)
Yeah, a good investment there. Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (05:55.692)
And you go, OK, didn't get there. And the big thing about this was that CD Projekt's crew, because they had played it, knew it. wasn't like I had a bunch of guys who saw the name and thought they'd file it off. They got in and they're going, yeah, we have to have Johnny in because Silverhound is really great. we have to do alt. You know, we have to say they know this stuff. OK, I'm good. And so a lot of what.

I did the first year was kind of helping the story team make it feel right and you know dropping you know like well yeah the weapons don't look like this it look more like that and you know you don't get no no no laser guns you know you kind of had to work them through and the result however was that when it hit the screen I looked at and said yep that's it it's it's what I had in my head they actually got something I

always had wanted people to understand about cyberpunk as we do it over at TAL, which was it's not just Blade Runner reskin. There's Blade Runner elements, but there's a certain amount of what I used to call Vegas in there as well, just like an assault on your senses of neon and sound and gunfire and random violence out of nothing.

And that sense that you were always under a kind of mental and physical assault. And it wasn't like Blade Runner where, you know, they just didn't have the room to go there, you know, and it's more of a post. Billionaire is almost post-Holocaust. It's my favorite movie. I love Blade Runner over on that bookshelf over there. I probably have about six different copies in different versions of it, but it was very different than the animal that we ended up building.

and yet CD got how that worked.

Alex (07:52.408)
Wow. Yeah, that's very cool. Because I mean, that's got to be there's got to be a lot of, you know, imagination, assumption, extrapolation going from paper to, you know, fully realized, you know, world that they're translating that world building. Sounds like you got you got lucky and or smart that you answered the call to do the Polish translation and that the like you said the team was they're actually players. Yeah. What year was that?

Mike Pondsmith (08:01.802)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (08:09.013)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Pondsmith (08:15.943)
Yeah.

Aaron (08:16.549)
What year was that, by the way? What year was that?

Mike Pondsmith (08:18.848)
boy, I think that was probably 89 maybe that they were playing it. That's when we did the Polish version. I think we'd done Cyberpunk and we were like, at that time, everybody was doing translations. I don't even know how many translation versions there are of it. They would just show up on my desk and I go, I don't even speak that language, you know, the German version came up and I said, I can read this, you know, but,

Aaron (08:25.467)
89

Alex (08:26.067)
wow.

Aaron (08:41.955)
you

Mike Pondsmith (08:48.308)
Basically, this would have been around 2010 maybe. And as a matter of fact, I was just informed by one of my crew, Rob, who handles all my kind of appointments and where am I supposed to be and what are we supposed to be doing. And Rob said, yeah, they're doing the fifth anniversary of the game coming out. And I looked and said, OK, it took about nine years just to get there from.

first concept and I kind of went God this has been 14 years. You know most of them and so basically from I'd say 2009 onward we were you dealing with CD and then my son got interested in Witcher and he did a proposal to me how that actually me I looked and said this is really good. I like it. You know go ahead and do it. I want you to do this.

So at 18, he walked out and basically did a kick-ass tabletop game. And I went, okay, you know, how did you learn how to do this? He said, well, I've been listening to you all these years and said, okay.

Aaron (09:54.33)
Alex (09:59.854)
Is that a proud papa moment?

Aaron (10:01.388)
That's cool. What's the name of it?

Mike Pondsmith (10:05.09)
God, you can you have no idea how proud I am of my kids. My my son is a rocket scientist when it comes to doing games. He just looks at it, gets it. And, you know, he and I both are guilty of bringing in tons and tons of games not to play them, but to read them and figure out how they work and what we can steal or whatever. And my daughter is an artist. And so her stuff is.

They've just finished a joint project together called Shadow Scar. And it's yeah, Shadow Scar is basically as somebody said, you know, you're taking something like Naruto and you're crossing it with. what was that movie? Yeah, God, God. I think at any rate, you're crossing dimensions, fighting Yokai monsters from Japanese mythology.

Aaron (10:37.627)
Shadow Scar.

Mike Pondsmith (11:01.162)
who are going across the multiverse destroying various civilizations ranging from steampunk to high level space.

Alex (11:12.974)
That sounds like, that's an expensive video game translation right there. I'm gonna tell you that, just Ravtop,

Aaron (11:13.167)
Yeah, this looks cool.

Mike Pondsmith (11:17.28)
Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah. And so it was fascinating because he came out with this news, 10, and he just had time to, you know, work on it and work on it and work on it. And it's, you know, basically what he's got is. His his sister's basically doing the art, so the combination is kind of like the whole family's going, yeah, you guys are actually pretty good, you know, that's why we pay you. Yeah, so, you know.

Aaron (11:18.201)
So.

Aaron (11:42.915)
It looks fantastic. Was the Witcher game the Witcher Old World Board Game? Is that what it's called?

Mike Pondsmith (11:47.264)
Mm-hmm.

No, no, this was Witcher, the T.R.P.G. It's actually an RPG game and it actually was. Yeah, you kind of copy. OK, yeah, it actually was based off of the Witcher of that time. And he kind of got eventually sidetracked from there because they were doing some setup for the next Witcher, which we're now seeing now.

Aaron (12:01.33)
there it is.

Yeah, yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (12:17.664)
And they said, it's going to be a while. We're going to be changing things. So he stepped off leading that project after he got everything established and handed it over to some of the other crew. And he went off and did Shadow Scar. And Shadow Scar just came out. Well, the test version of it just came out about six weeks ago at PAX, I believe. wasn't Gen Con. I think it was PAX. Any rate. So, yeah.

It's been really interesting, but I'm meandering.

Alex (12:49.838)
How was the, yeah, the tabletop business these days? How was it? Is it good? Is it still strong? it, know, video and game business has gone through crazy ups and downs, you know, it's like, mm.

Aaron (13:00.227)
Is it crazy?

Aaron (13:04.634)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (13:04.96)
Yeah, but I don't think tabletop ever gets as crazy as video games. You know, I I work in them, but I always, you know, as I used to say to my wife, I'm always looking at my shoulder waiting for the project to blow up, you know, because they are they're like Hollywood, you know, basically studios rise, studios fall, things blow up. Somebody says something stupid, you know, whatever. But. Video games.

Aaron (13:31.429)
Wait, was that video games or is that tabletop? Video games, okay, yeah.

Alex (13:34.776)
Yeah, yeah, video games, yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (13:35.018)
video games. Tabletop is amazingly straightforward and it has had a real renaissance. People have discovered it and there's just a ton of really good games out there. And we're proud to be in a pack with these guys because there's an amazing amount of talent and people are recognizing it. Card games are longer dominating the market.

Aaron (13:42.543)
Yeah.

Aaron (13:50.0)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (14:00.948)
Board games no longer dominating the market. Everybody was kind of evened out. so Tabletop has gotten a whole new life. And at this point, if there's any problem in the industry, it's more working out distribution because distribution hasn't figured out how to get into a modern distribution cycle. They're still kind of doing it the old way. So this means that my wife comes back.

Alex (14:26.951)
What's the old way? Is the old way just like in a store? Is that what you mean?

Mike Pondsmith (14:31.825)
Well, they're trying to get it. Distribution is trying to get things into stores, but even the stores are like using extremely, you know, computerized inventory systems and things like that. And they're not hooked up into the lot of that. So, you know, it's actually funny because, you know, my wife runs the business side of it.

And, know, she'll come home at night and be tearing her hair because she'll go, well, I talked to this guy over here and he said, yeah, I think we ordered it. Yeah. OK, let me go. You know, he's kind of looking around. You hear papers moving. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex (15:04.304)
He's looking for the piece of paper the piece of paper where he wrote it down. no

Aaron (15:07.227)
You know, I was gonna say there's a lot going on, Like game found, you ever use that or the fact that there's its own thing?

Mike Pondsmith (15:13.84)
Mm-hmm. yeah, we have not We have I know that My guys right now are getting us onto a whole bunch of systems like that I know that They're looking at a bunch of well, we did let's plays we did a bunch of the stuff and now they're doing God, I can't even think of how many of the ones I mean Rob knows

But we're now dealing with a lot of the online games and basically pushing those forward because people want to see it and what we do in cyberpunk is like perfect for it, the visuals for and all that. So, Game Found in that area is more the sort of thing Rob is dealing with or James is dealing with.

I kind of monitor it, but I have to monitor so many things that I more look at it. I come into production meeting and go, what are we doing this week? You know, what do we got? And thank God Dave knows. Dave is my production manager and Dave's Dave and I have been hanging together as friends and damn your brothers for God's pushing 30 years is getting ridiculous.

Alex (16:23.032)
Yeah.

Alex (16:35.15)
30 years. Well, Mike, that's a good segue. I'm really I'd love to hear how you got into this. Like what were what was your like the early years apart that like the little pondsmith in the in in the, you know, growing up like, did you have I mean, Blade Runner wasn't out yet. Like, what were you what were you watching? Like, how'd you get into like, were you did you go up to Gary Guyjacks house to buy a copy of D &D like Jordan Weisman did?

Mike Pondsmith (16:38.4)
Uh-huh.

Aaron (16:44.635)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (16:48.362)
Hmm.

Aaron (16:51.438)
Hahaha!

Mike Pondsmith (16:56.584)
Yeah, yeah, I know.

Mike Pondsmith (17:03.744)
No.

Alex (17:05.15)
Or do you have a formative introduction story to world building or RPGs or all

Mike Pondsmith (17:10.128)
I it's kind of weird what well the first step was I ended up getting an RPGs because many years ago when I was in college, I had a friend who used to go to the Merchant Marine Academy, which was up in Milwaukee or something, you know, basically the Midwest. And he came back with a copy of original ancient

D &D we're talking he had copied chain mail and he had a first edition copy of D &D and He had I guess gone to one of the early early get-together in Gary's basement kind of things and So he brought it back and we would play it Basically my first character pet about ten feet away from here I actually found the miniature of my first character was a Paladin sword And I saw the miniature

Alex (17:59.758)
no way. Can you send us a picture of that? They'll totally send us a picture of that.

Aaron (18:03.215)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (18:05.352)
Okay, I'll have to, you know, get over there and to get a picture but. Yeah, it's it's it's in terrible shape. mean, the silver is all worn off and everything like that. I mean, back then, you know, you look at a miniature and now it's like a lump of lead. But then it was like, man, they they did a dwarf. This is awesome. And everybody's showing like this horrible, you know, what we go horrible now and going, yeah, this is and then Ralph Parth came along and everybody said, my God, look at this. Anyway.

Alex (18:07.222)
If you're willing to, send us a picture. We'll put it on our Discord.

Aaron (18:24.763)
Yeah

Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (18:35.676)
So he got me started. And you wanted weird stories. One of the weird stories was that where he had his house and where my good friend Greg lived with him, it was on Telegraph Avenue, which was also where the ladies of the night plied their trade. OK. And we were making noise. so eventually, one of them

Alex (18:58.335)
okay.

Mike Pondsmith (19:04.616)
came up while we're in middle of a game and she's going you know I hear you guys yelling and laughing all what are you guys doing in here and we start explaining it and she decided that well she was up anyway she decided that she would join the game occasionally so we had essentially a lady of the evening playing our cleric I don't know that she thought that was absolution or not but at any rate so she's playing her cleric

Alex (19:22.91)
Yes!

Aaron (19:28.406)
Wow.

Alex (19:28.642)
Ha ha ha!

Aaron (19:31.599)
Hahaha!

Alex (19:33.352)
I was gonna ask what class what character class and so they make that tracks that tracks, okay

Mike Pondsmith (19:34.168)
And Claire, she played. Yeah, I played I played what would have been at those days. They just had paladins. I played paladins and then after that, I always played bards. And so.

Aaron (19:35.707)
Yeah, she's like, you know.

Alex (19:44.704)
Okay. How's your singing voice? Your radio voice is amazing.

Mike Pondsmith (19:52.128)
I think it's not too bad. My daughter, who has a beautiful singing voice, does not say, dad, God, shut up. So we actually do it together. But the upshot was I played, but I didn't play often because I had to wait till my my friend Charlie would come back from Great Lakes Naval Academy. Where the hell he went to? And and so this was Berkeley. Berkeley, Berkeley, California. OK.

Alex (20:13.142)
Okay, where was this? Where were you? Okay, you're in Berkeley. Okay, gotcha.

Mike Pondsmith (20:21.248)
And so, and my girlfriend wasn't into it at the time and, you know, it was kind of, we knew about it, you know, but I was not doing it regularly. And then I came to Davis or back to Davis to get my degree in design. And there was a girl who was living in an old friend of mine's group house, because in college you always end up, you know, 10 guys all living in same place, but in rent. And

So I came in and he said, you got to meet this girl Lisa, man. You know, she plays this D &D stuff you do and she's great, you know, and you should she's one of our roommates and all that. And meanwhile, John's telling her, you know, yeah, this guy is, you know, like you got to meet him. He's a friend of mine. He plays D &D too and all that. She and I had met. And this was back when I was this. This is back when I was.

Aaron (21:13.797)
she the cleric? No.

Mike Pondsmith (21:18.182)
actually I like to call my Landau-Kelrissian phase where you truly belong among us in the stars,

Alex (21:22.569)
Ha ha ha ha!

Alex (21:26.83)
Yes

Aaron (21:27.909)
Okay.

Mike Pondsmith (21:30.388)
Hey, you got a voice like this. You got to use it. All right. So so she's going here. Her comment was. Is he really tall and kind of really black and kind of slick? And I was not making a good impression here, but we ended up actually meeting and we liked each other and we both had boyfriends and girlfriends. So that was interesting. But eventually.

Alex (21:32.248)
Yep.

Alex (21:45.848)
Hehe.

Mike Pondsmith (21:57.16)
it evolved that I was I got into the game that she was in. OK, so this is the first Bard I'm playing and the game is being run by one of her ex-boyfriends. And the thing is that I'm probably about a half a foot taller than he is. It was like I said during my my weird dangerous space. I got an afro out to here. Mirror shades. I'm wearing leather jackets and.

Alex (22:07.566)
Mike Pondsmith (22:23.904)
you know, black t-shirts and motorcycle boots. So I don't look like a nice guy. so he's I think decided he's not going to try to beat me up at least, you know. So he decided instead to kill my character and kill my character and kill. So my favorite scene, my favorite scene was that, yeah, it's a D &D game he was running. And so, yeah, different than before.

Alex (22:32.974)
You

Aaron (22:38.075)
But this is a different game,

Aaron (22:47.621)
But a different one though, different one than the other one that you were playing. Okay, yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (22:51.422)
Yeah, this is not Charlie's game. This was basically another guy's game. At least, like I said, Lisa's old boyfriend, her ex. And so, you know, if you like, we'd be on this battlements somewhere battling and they're like fighting off orcs and then the Balrog would land in front of me. And there I am with all these guys with orcs in a line and then I've got a Balrog. And I've gone, wait a minute, he said, well, the Balrog had to attack somewhere. I'm going, you're right, you know.

Aaron (22:56.558)
Okay.

Alex (22:57.41)
Lisa's ex. Yeah. Okay.

Aaron (22:59.28)
Okay.

Alex (23:21.23)
You

Mike Pondsmith (23:21.244)
So based on all that, make a long story short, yeah, to, he's actually a really nice guy, but you know, he had figured it out. yeah, years ago there was to be a science fiction series called Dream Park that a couple of minutes of my wartime. And I remember Larry Niven saying when I told him this story, said, I got to find a way to fit that in.

Alex (23:24.75)
What a piece of work, this guy. Yeah.

Alex (23:31.15)
You

Aaron (23:31.691)
He killed you!

Mike Pondsmith (23:50.398)
You know, I mean, it's the whole thing's about doing kind of D &D games. Yeah, let's fit that in somewhere. you know, it's the one of the D &D, one of the guys who running the game will be trying to kill the other guy for real and in the game. I said, OK, you know, what the hell? So.

We basically started, we hooked up, started dating. In fact, it was incredibly fast that we got together. I remember there was a time when I was kind of going, wait, how fast did this happen? And all of our friends thought this was an absolutely terrible idea because at that point, like I said, I had kind of a reputation. So, know, hey baby, he's being too slick. So they thought this was going to be a terrible thing, but

This is Lisa who was not impressed by much of anything. You know, so she actually decided I was worthwhile because when I wasn't trying to be slick at her, I guess I was a pretty nice guy. So we ended up together and eventually five years later, we ended up married and we all, all my friends said, well, you can kill each other. So it must've been a good idea.

Aaron (25:00.377)
Okay.

Aaron (25:05.092)
Hahaha

Alex (25:05.454)
And still married.

Mike Pondsmith (25:07.776)
yeah, yeah, I'm surprised she hasn't wandered in now from the office.

Aaron (25:09.059)
And then two kids.

Alex (25:15.182)
Well, that's awesome. Usually we hear about folks making life decisions to go follow a girl somewhere, but you two were united by your shared love of D &D. That's awesome. I love that.

Mike Pondsmith (25:27.251)
Yes.

Mike Pondsmith (25:32.094)
Yeah, and what's interesting is over the years we've had a lot of people who've come to us and said like, yeah, I met so and so when we were playing cyberpunk and we've had people even name their kids after cyberpunk characters. And I'm kind of looking at going, well, I can die knowing that I've influenced somebody. And there's a guy out there named Johnny Silverhand who's going to want to find me and beat me up for that name.

Aaron (25:41.285)
Huh.

Aaron (25:45.199)
Well...

Mike Pondsmith (25:58.728)
My parents did this to me and it's your fault. crap.

Alex (26:05.294)
That's funny.

Mike Pondsmith (26:05.898)
So at any rate, yeah, we got together and it's been 40 years when I added all up around 40 years and we have, you know, lovely bunch of kids and a game company, which was as Lisa says, our first child. so, you know, Telsorian for a while, right around 2000, the game industry collapsed.

Alex (26:24.619)
Ha

Mike Pondsmith (26:34.984)
So we basically laid everybody off, gave them a big severance and said good luck. And we went into hibernation for a while and I was working at Microsoft. They showed up one day, mean somebody called me up from Microsoft and they said, hi, hey, we'd like to hire you. And I went, what? I already have a job. I worked for, and they said, yeah, you can keep your company. We don't care about that. We'll work out some paperwork.

But yeah, we really have you because we're doing this new thing called an Xbox. And I said, what? And he said, yeah, it's it's a new system. We're going to be doing a new platform. And it's you know, and I'm going. How often do you get a chance to work on a new console? OK, I'm there. I don't think I even looked at like how much they were paying me or anything like that. was like console. I can work on a console.

Aaron (27:21.337)
Hahaha

Aaron (27:25.253)
Yeah.

Alex (27:26.574)
I was going to say I had a similar conversation with them, but I did look at how much they were paying me. was I did look at that.

Mike Pondsmith (27:31.328)
I will see you I was kind of whoa but you know you're smarter than I am

Aaron (27:34.629)
You

Alex (27:40.259)
no, so, okay

Mike Pondsmith (27:44.916)
Well, you were you were at Bungie at that point, right? Yeah.

Alex (27:47.886)
Yes. Yeah, that's how we ended up in the same building because we were in Chicago and I got the same phone call and we had a similar reaction. It's like, how often do you get a chance to launch a new console?

Mike Pondsmith (27:51.742)
Yeah, exactly. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Mike Pondsmith (28:02.1)
Yeah, I know, I know. And so that was that was fascinating because, know, I got to see it from ground up and figure out all these things. And, know, I just I loved it. You know, I I even like the hours, which, you know, nobody else in the family did. But, yeah, it was it was great. And I had already been experienced a bit because during my early college years, before I started

playing D &D, I'd actually worked at this place called California Pacific, which did video games. We're talking Apple IIEs here. Ancient. so, basically I ended up back in video games for the next 10 odd years. at that point, I kind of decided, yeah, I'm going to do this for a few more years because the industry doesn't appear to be getting going.

Alex (28:36.589)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (28:58.974)
And so I actually was working in video games when CD guys called me up and they didn't know that they just knew about, you know, my my tabletop. So.

Alex (29:07.2)
Right. Yeah. How does your experience doing tabletop stuff? how did that compare, translate, prepare you or train or untrain or whatever? know, like when you're just working on a video game team and you're, you know, don't know exactly which parts of the process you were working on. In my head, I'm imagining you're helping with world building and system design and some of the kind of things that probably you spend a lot of time thinking about in paper.

Mike Pondsmith (29:24.106)
Yeah

Mike Pondsmith (29:36.16)
And yeah, couple of them, a couple of times. Yeah, a couple of times I was actually lead on a couple of things. And, you know, that's actually frightening because you have to know everybody's job to a certain percentage so you can know what you can get away with. You you do not want to walk into somebody who's coding and say, hey, I had this great idea. And he looks at you goes, that is a nontrivial task. And then he beats you to death. And. Yeah, yeah. So.

Alex (29:37.282)
But is that sort of how it is? Yeah.

Aaron (29:41.219)
Okay.

Aaron (29:44.763)
.

Aaron (29:59.995)
I get caught. I'm the scope creep.

Alex (30:00.014)
Aaron's not afraid to do that. He does that all the time. Aaron's favorite thing to say is let's just add a big boss character right here.

Aaron (30:09.249)
Yeah, I'm the scope creep.

Mike Pondsmith (30:09.376)
Yeah, exactly, exactly. so, yeah, the difference is for a while I actually taught video game design for a couple of years. And one of things I tried to explain to my students was basically think of a tabletop game as the skeleton for what you would use to build a video game, because you have the same elements, but they're visible. So

when you decide someone goes down a hall somewhere, you know, you are having to figure out how big the hall is. But you had to do that in a standard RPG as well, because you had to know how fast and then you had to tell the animator how you wanted the walk cycle and you had, and you didn't want them to zip. You wanted them to, you know, get stalled here. So I'm going to put a block there and I'm going to kind of put a trap there.

You know, so they have a chance to move up and fight to that end of the level. know, and so what Tabletop did was it trained me in how to look at the guts of what would eventually be a video game. And I think that really helped because what it meant was I would a lot of times just go, you know, if I'm working a game, I tear it apart and I make a tabletop out of it. And that tells me what people will use, what they'll notice, you know.

how much time it takes to work to a particular, you level in real time and, you know, what's going to confuse them. So, yeah, they didn't get that when I put that trap there, they didn't get that. But now I know that and so the next time I'll do it, I'll put it over here or I'll make it obvious or I'll teach them, you know, how this frame works. So, yeah, I learned a lot how to take what I already did and to make it fit.

Alex (31:54.84)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (32:05.864)
And so it was like a culmination of everything I'd learned, but now shooting up in a video game.

Alex (32:12.012)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like a tabletop makes an excellent framework for a video game. Because yeah, you have to design the rules and the systems.

Mike Pondsmith (32:17.152)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Pondsmith (32:22.032)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, you even end up doing a lot of the same math when you get down to it because you you're you're working out essentially algebraic statements of how things work and then you're going into the coders and going okay when you're building the engine I need to be able to do these things and you want to be able to know enough what they have to do so you don't come up and say I've got this idea and they go God dang that's stupid because they know what's gonna take

Aaron (32:23.113)
Do you have?

Alex (32:39.246)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Pondsmith (32:49.842)
I actually had a great time. I had a great time when we were first doing cyberpunk. Adam, who's the Badowski, Adam Badowski is now the head of all the studio action and he was leading cyberpunk. So he came out for like a week. I think it was to tell Sorian and he and I basically got the biggest white board in the world and we started going through what we would want to have happen in cyberpunk.

Aaron (32:50.203)
Do you have?

Mike Pondsmith (33:19.84)
You know, and you know, we combine this and we look at it and go, well, you have this rule here in tabletop. But I'd say, yeah, well, that will work. But this will be much harder to do. That's why the first version of Cyberpunk 2077 did not allow you to fly AV4s because, you know, the flying cars. And the reason was I said, no, we don't want to do AV4s because I worked on flight sim.

And I'm going, you have no idea how much work you're going to have to build to figure out things like position relative to the buildings and how you're going to deal with it. know, if everybody can fly, then you don't really have a cyberpunk game. You have a flight game. And that's a whole other animal. And so, you know, we went through and decided that, you know, originally I thought, yeah, that'd be great. Now, you know, I looked down and went, no, that

won't work because of these reasons. So he and I would do a lot of really interesting stuff. had a great time. Adam is really fun to work with anyway. He's very quiet, but he's very incisive and his mind works like all the time. So we're having a great time. And then what would happen is he'd come over and then I would fly over to Poland and we'd spend another week

going over stuff and then, you know, back and forth. And it was fun because, you know, unlike a lot of systems in situations where I'm dealing with marketing, wants it to be like this or whatever, CD was so integrated at the time that I didn't have to go, well, what's, you know, the front office going to do? What's somebody, you know, I'm going to get in here and somebody's going to change something, right? Because that's what I was used to. And instead they went,

Alex (35:15.918)
Right.

Mike Pondsmith (35:19.036)
Okay, we want to do this. What do think we should do? You know, or we did this. What do you think about it? And I, you know, be able to say, yeah, this works. This doesn't feel right. You know, and that is why when we got 77 glitches that did show up beyond that, I looked at it and said, yeah, this is what I would have done. You know, this is pretty damn close. So I did not feel, you know,

Alex (35:42.19)
Yeah, I mean very productive very product-focused and I think that's why they were able to kind of you know, they had kind of a rocky launch but Really turn things around in a in pretty profound way Probably for similar reason I'm guessing

Mike Pondsmith (35:52.276)
Yeah, well, it's funny when we got clobbered and they pulled it off of, you know, Steam and all the other various places, Sony and so forth. I remember talking to Adam, I said, you know, and he's kind of expecting to be really pissed. I said, just. You're going to fix that, right? And he said, yes, you know, and I said, good, I know you will. And, you know, I left it at that because I knew they would and they just

Aaron (35:53.647)
Yeah.

Alex (36:14.123)
you

Mike Pondsmith (36:22.112)
got back to it because nobody in that building wanted to, you know, produce a bad game. They wanted a really good game, but under the time constraints and the fact that they were getting death threats from people, that's a long story. But yeah, some of the fans are so like they want it. They want it. They're saying, you know, if you don't give it to us, you will kill you. And I used to say, if they kill them, then how is the game going to get?

Alex (36:50.35)
you can't apply logic to the internet.

Mike Pondsmith (36:51.136)
You didn't think this out, did you man? Yeah

Aaron (36:55.063)
Yeah, you can't do that.

Mike Pondsmith (36:57.638)
Yeah, the internet, yeah, another universe. So at any rate, yeah, I found that what my background was tied back into it really well because I could look at something and look at it from the mechanics and go, yeah, that's going to be good, but this is going to be a problem. And it wasn't like I don't like this. It was that I could look at it and I could say, OK, this is going to be difficult to do. This will be

Aaron (37:03.076)
I was going to ask you a

Mike Pondsmith (37:26.56)
easier to do. This might be another way to do what we wanted to get, you know.

Alex (37:31.256)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, Aaron, I know Aaron's been trying to ask a question. His poor microphone is letting him down. Lean in, Aaron, just lean right in. Come on, just lean in, there you go.

Mike Pondsmith (37:35.296)
Hi Aaron.

Aaron (37:38.437)
Can you hear Harry?

Mike Pondsmith (37:41.407)
Yeah.

Aaron (37:41.529)
Well, I just want to know, like you were saying you were teaching game design and you spoke about the skeletal, like having the skeleton. Did you have games that you would suggest that the students like check out as good examples?

Mike Pondsmith (37:49.427)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Pondsmith (37:56.448)
I had some actually at the time Halo was pretty big and I knew it anyway because I'd worked a bit with the team in a more of a weird management kind of way. But at any rate, I ended up being a design manager for a lot of weird projects, some of which you probably never heard of. But it was I used it as a reference because they would know it to a point where one of my students actually drew a picture of me.

in front of the class wearing like, you know, part of the Master Chief's outfit. And I sort of said, and I think he thought I was going to be mad. And I said, hey, that's not bad. Can I keep it? You know, but basically what I found was more useful was not to go back to a game because it was harder to dissect what had happened to get there. So what I did was in a couple of the projects I gave students,

Aaron (38:31.141)
Hahaha.

Aaron (38:36.357)
you

Alex (38:36.566)
You

Mike Pondsmith (38:54.482)
was to set up things that they had to build and then find out whether they didn't work or not. Case in point, Avatar was about to come out, but no one knew really what was going to be in Avatar other than the people were blue. So I brought in toys from Avatar. I brought in a couple of the dragon-like creatures. I brought in some of the people and so on like that. And I said, okay, so once you guys sit down, start working out like

how a game would work for this. And so they started working on it. And then after I got some of the group's answers, I'd say like, did you really stop and think about how fast these things you're doing really move? And how are they going to interact with things they're attacking? And have you thought about the control model for it? And you've got

You you're talking about people leaping off these things and attacking people. know, how is that? How do they know where they're landing on a mesh to know where they're going to be? You know, so that was a really good exercise. And the next time we did it, you know, I found something else and I had said, how do you build this? Because that's a hands on thing as opposed to saying they over there did it and, you know, try to figure it out. No, you do it.

and I'm going to give you the same kind of tools that those people building that game would have had. And then you get to figure out for yourself how to walk from A to B. And, you know, particularly since I got into a class I had, it was basically a second level sophomore class I was teaching. And I had 30 people there.

And I said, how many of you have ever played a tabletop RPG and four people raise their hands? And I went, great. And a lot of them were going, well, why would we want to do that? And I'm going, it's not because I worked in them. It's because, you know, you need to be able to understand certain principles that you won't be able to, you know, in a a engine, you know, you may have to build the engine. You may have to figure out what it does, you know, what the tool set is, all these things.

Alex (40:54.862)
You

Mike Pondsmith (41:16.261)
And you're going to have to start it somewhere and that's where the skeleton comes in. You know, these are the all the questions.

Alex (41:19.586)
Yeah, yeah. How do you do that? How does Mike Pondsmith create a tabletop game? What do you start with? Like a story? Or this would be a cool kind of universe to explore? Or some weird kind of game mechanic? Or how do you go about it?

Mike Pondsmith (41:40.032)
Usually, it's a really interesting idea I've got of a world. I like building worlds. And so what I'll do is I'll look at the world and I'll ask, what can I do in the world? What are my possibilities in here? Many, many years ago, Jordan Weisman told me something that I thought really worked well. She said, you've got to be able to describe what you do in the game in a certain amount of words. I think it was like,

12 to 18 words like that. I've got it written down. But anyway, you know, yeah, Jordan is Jordan is freaking brilliant. And so, you working with him was fun because Jordan would like, you know, tell me something. I go, OK, that's cool. What about this? And basically. What I look at is, OK, this is the fun thing you can do in the game. You know, these are the this is the list, you know.

Aaron (42:12.45)
that's cool.

Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (42:37.62)
how many of those are difficult or how will you implement them? And as you're going through, you know, where does this thing fit in the world? So what the what you're doing in the world is driving how you're going to build things in the world. I used to get into a big argument with another designer I know about story and I said your story serves the world, not the other way around. He always thought, you know,

it worked that you had a story and then you you built the world around it I said no you can do that but then you have to figure out if everything's going to work as opposed to I'm going to figure out what the world does and what's fun in it and then I'm going to wrap the story around it so that I get to do it a lot so you know so cyberpunk is like basically I wanted to have heist films because those were perfect

Aaron (43:26.147)
That's good. Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (43:33.534)
descriptions of most cyberpunk things. You're stealing, you're killing, you're finding, you're bringing back, you're doing a FedEx quest, whatever. And that's what you're doing. basically, what cyberpunk in some ways was I've got a world where violence and weapons and different competing forces are out there and there are no cops to stop you.

Alex (43:46.274)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Pondsmith (44:02.72)
and everyone's kind of afraid of you and you're the badass. And so I get to do these things. I, you know, if I do a heist, I'm not worried about the cops. I'm worried about the corporate security and the cybered up guy that I'm going to be dealing with. You know, if I'm cybered up, I don't get to just walk around like I'm Mr. Badass all the time because around the corner, Adam Smasher is sitting around. Yeah, I haven't killed anybody today. I think I'll go kill someone.

Alex (44:32.27)
the

Mike Pondsmith (44:32.37)
So basically, basically what again in Cyberpunk you do a certain thing and you enjoy it. And, you know, I think that was one of the success points that we reached was we know what you want to do. We're just going to give you a place you can do it in. And one of the things. Yeah, you need a super cool place. And, you know, I've always been really proud of Night City because, you know, when I spent a lot of time building it and it's a

Alex (44:51.278)
Like a super cool place.

Mike Pondsmith (45:01.92)
You know I built Night City on Disneyland. Night City was based, Night City was Disneyland. You would have different areas that were basically different parts of the park so to speak. So this is the Asian area and these things happen here. This is the Italian area and this is the warehouse area. This is the mall, you know, and you basically broke it all up. And then you'd say, okay, so in the mall,

Alex (45:06.478)
Hehehehehe

Aaron (45:06.824)
that's interesting.

Mike Pondsmith (45:31.954)
I have a three dimensional space with a lot of people who might be blocking me. But if I can go into buildings and I can get things like weapons or gear or change clothes. So the mall is different than if I were, let's say, in the warehouse district where everything's locked up and I'm in bare streets and I have not a lot of cover. So, you you look at each one, you go, what do I get out of this? What's interesting about it? What can people do with it?

So that's how I build them. look at, know, basically this is the framework of a world, but now I got to figure out what's fun in 18 words. And then I have to figure out how to get people to do that in a world that lets them do it a lot, you know.

Alex (46:12.066)
Yeah. Yeah.

Alex (46:22.412)
Yeah, I think it's really interesting that little nugget you said about Basie Night City on Disneyland or Disney World is like, I don't know, I think a lot of folks maybe sometimes feel like they have to invent things out of thin air, but a lot of creativity is about kind of iterating something forward or taking some inspiration and putting your own spin on it. Is that kind of like, I mean, do you think that too? Or like, is that how you approach some things?

Mike Pondsmith (46:28.137)
Yes.

Mike Pondsmith (46:43.487)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Pondsmith (46:49.972)
Yeah, well, I'm a great believer. Yeah, I'm a great believer in saying that one of my friends came up with, which was, you know, steal from the best. So basically, if you were going to paint, you know, you're you're Leonardo da Vinci, you're to paint. Starting by designing and making your paints is not the way to start. Somebody else should make your paints. Somebody else is taking those

Alex (46:59.022)
Hehehehehe

Aaron (47:01.187)
Ahem.

Mike Pondsmith (47:18.622)
mirror excels and grinding them to get you that blue. You you don't do that. And the same thing with building worlds and you should take things that you learn. For example, once I got the basics of Night City, I went out and got the old version of Sim City and I proceeded to build a city that literally was always going to have traffic jams and didn't work. And I actually thought about doing that again sometime, but

Alex (47:41.486)
You

Aaron (47:45.989)
Ha ha ha.

Mike Pondsmith (47:46.378)
Basically, yeah, I designed it so that, you know, this city I built in Sim City was just a mess. And in fact, years later, I told Will, like, yeah, I used Sim City, I'll design Night City, and I really screwed it up. And he laughed.

Alex (48:01.389)
It's amazing. you think, yeah, you, if I remember correctly, because I did a little, you know, a little research here for this episode. Well, maybe it's a fact, I don't know. But did you get a degree in graphic design? Is that like what you studied?

Mike Pondsmith (48:05.064)
I said I was going to give you a credit.

Mike Pondsmith (48:12.576)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Pondsmith (48:17.695)
God, there are facts about me out there, yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (48:25.588)
Yes, I actually have two degrees.

Alex (48:27.264)
Which is fascinating to me. You have two degrees. Okay. Graphic design. What's the other one?

Mike Pondsmith (48:30.816)
I have two. I have a degree in clinical psychology and I have a degree in graphic design. Actually, it's overall design, not just graphic. And as my mother said years ago, you have now put together the two degrees you would need to become a pretty good game designer. And the reason was that as a designer, you need to be able to climb into people's head to find out what's fun. But graphics allow you to render it

Alex (48:41.112)
Okay.

Aaron (48:51.738)
Hmm.

Mike Pondsmith (49:00.576)
and figure out how it would look fun or you know what's missing. Okay, for example, most of the in Cyberpunk, a large number of the corporate logos that you see like Arasaka, I did. And yeah, I'm sitting there on my Mac and I'm saying, hmm, Arasaka, okay, so Will told me it was a Holly Hawk like thing and I don't really want to draw it. So I'm going to do...

Aaron (49:15.999)
cool.

Alex (49:16.613)
Nice.

Mike Pondsmith (49:27.754)
three balls and I'm going to link them like this and I'll put in a circle and then you're like Biotechnica. Well, Biotechnica is a company that deals in life forms. So it's like a stylized leaf that comes up and then it goes into like this. And I literally went through and designed corporate logos for about 30 corporations of which I'd say about roughly half of them are still there. And I got to tell you, it's weird sometimes.

Alex (49:49.538)
That's awesome.

Mike Pondsmith (49:55.712)
You you go to a show or something like that, or just on the street, you see somebody wearing this logo like Arasaka and you go, well, wait, wait. But and I have to admit, I'm very proud that they like the logos enough to, you know, like keep them around. And they, you know, they had to a lot more to and my my art director, she's kind of driven crazy by that occasionally.

Aaron (50:12.846)
That's cool.

Aaron (50:17.508)
Heh, right.

Mike Pondsmith (50:21.744)
She's going, they should have done it like this. I'm going, I didn't do it 20 years ago like that. So they had to do it like this. the yeah, basically all of those things come together. And, know, knowing enough site to be able to figure out kind of why do people find things fun? You know, you can't just say it's a fun factor. You know, that's what they always used to say about

Aaron (50:25.115)
you

Mike Pondsmith (50:49.92)
20 years ago, you have to get the fun factor, you know. Yeah, but do you know how people have fun? Do you know the things that give them that dopamine trip? You need to know something about how people work first before you do it.

Aaron (51:04.432)
Yeah.

Alex (51:05.57)
Yeah. What is it? What is it, Mike? What is it? We we would talk about that all the time, you know, and the marketing people would always say, like, number one thing, make the game fun. It's like, well, what the heck does that mean? Like, fun was just like the worst word to use because it meant nothing or everything at the same time. Like, how do you like what is the psychology? What's what's fun?

Mike Pondsmith (51:12.352)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Pondsmith (51:19.996)
Exactly. And yeah, and and none of that, but it's it's fun in a context. What's contextually fun. So, you know, what I can do in Night City is very different than I have a game I did many years ago that was based on an underwater setup. And I had to figure out essentially I would have done it, but, you know, other people have done a

Alex (51:31.822)
Mmm.

Mike Pondsmith (51:48.084)
better game of it. Subnautica is kind of what I was headed for. And, you when I saw Subnautica, I said, yeah, they figured out what would be fun about this. You know, you you're not like laser blasting everything in Subnautica. You're exploring to find stuff kind of in under the rocks, you know. And I remember, you know, I played Subnautica through and I went, yeah, OK. And I got to like the alien and he knew more. And I went, OK, so this is not

the typical boss. This is the boss that if I make friends with him, I open up all these other things that he knows because he'd been here longer, you know, and fun is basically both figuring out the context of that fun as well as, you can't just say it's fun. You know, you have to figure out why is it fun? Why do people do this? Why do they have a good time? And psych really, you know,

It gives you again the ground rules for what people enjoy to get that first dopamine hit. And then you can start figuring out I'm going to apply it. You know, what am I going to do to make this really interesting based on what I know about what people get off on? You know, you do not build cyberpunk and put a chess design in it. But you could build cyberpunk with a chess design for a net runner that is trap laden.

Aaron (53:05.275)
You

Alex (53:05.39)
You

Mike Pondsmith (53:13.628)
and does look like a chessboard, but you know has elements of know destruction based on the things on the board. Then it's fun. But if it's just a bunch of tiles on the ground, you know, your soul is going look at it go God these guys have terrible, you know, ideas for interior design.

Alex (53:34.05)
Context matters.

Aaron (53:35.682)
you

Aaron (53:39.611)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (53:39.86)
Context, yeah.

Alex (53:41.206)
Yeah. I also read that you named your company after a raisin farmer. that true?

Mike Pondsmith (53:51.808)
Okay, you can blame more inspector for this Seriously, can blame Warren. Okay, I'll have to tell the story We were next to Warren when we were first starting out. We didn't even have a name I wanted to name us Bonzo Fury and my symbol was going to be a rabbit chimpanzee Okay, this did not go over with anybody at town at that point, know, so we are not Bonzo Fury games. Damn it but

Alex (53:52.078)
You

Alex (53:57.258)
Okay.

Aaron (53:58.715)
Okay, Dallas.

Alex (54:19.692)
Ha!

Mike Pondsmith (54:20.2)
Warren's sitting next to me and we're talking, you know, and this is way back.

Alex (54:23.16)
Wait, wait, hold on a second, timeout. How are you sitting next to Warren? Was this at TSR, or was this at Steve Jackson, or somewhere else?

Mike Pondsmith (54:28.794)
No, this is Steve Jackson. He's manning a booth at Dundrakhan next door to me or next door to Tal. And you he's doing it. And at some point he says, whatever you do, don't name the company after yourself. And I went, OK, you know, because he's working for Steve Jackson Games, you know. And yeah, which. Yeah, so, you know, I mean.

Alex (54:32.621)
Okay.

Alex (54:37.172)
Okay, okay.

Alex (54:51.397)
Okay.

Aaron (54:51.802)
I see, okay. So there's context there.

Mike Pondsmith (54:58.112)
Basically, so I said, you know, I back and I said, I'm going to name this company then after you like the one person who's so in unconnected because all he did is gave us $500 for a start to make this and we are tax write off. So I'll name it after him. OK, so I went ahead and I guess I said, who's ever going to care? You know.

TSR is Tactical Studies Research, FAS is Fredonian Aerospace Administration. You know, no one's got to look under that. So it was RTG, you know, or as I call it, Ross Talsorian Games. So basically we did that and we really expect it would stay RTG. We never thought anybody would bother to look underneath it. And, you know, we thought and for most of world, we probably are RTG. Actually, we're usually Talsorian for some

Alex (55:35.502)
you

Mike Pondsmith (55:52.196)
I think they like the name. at any rate, that's how that

Alex (55:54.796)
A Telsorian is a cool sounding name. know, it's a, yeah, it does.

Aaron (55:56.153)
Yeah, it sounds cosmic. Yeah, it sounds cosmic and fantasy.

Mike Pondsmith (55:58.144)
Well, unfortunately, unfortunately, unfortunately, he's passed on to the next universe now. So we're conquering another reason feel, I guess. I remember that the.

Alex (56:07.79)
Okay. but literally, literally a raisin farmer, literally.

Mike Pondsmith (56:12.274)
Well, you got to understand you talk in Fresno. So you're not talking to a guy who goes out and does raisins. We're talking, you know, miles of grape vines producing green grapes that are made into raisins, you know, sort of thing. And his son and I knew each other. And basically the whole idea was that we were supposed to be a tax write off. We were a sub chapter. Yes, was it?

Alex (56:16.811)
Okay, yeah.

Alex (56:24.707)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (56:40.606)
Subtact, I think was SubtactRS. Any rate where, you know, we lose money, the investors lose money and they can write it off. And so we made money and he would say, you were supposed to lose me money, you know, and now I've got to pay more taxes. And I'm like, yeah, I know. So so, yeah, basically, I never thought anybody looked underneath the name, you know, and that that worked out, I guess. I guess it sounded cool.

Alex (56:46.478)
Great, yes, yeah.

Aaron (56:54.874)
Yeah

Alex (56:58.712)
Sorry, sorry buddy.

Alex (57:05.016)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (57:09.652)
But and at one point, Ross actually came to I think it was yeah, it was an origins and I was gamma president. So it was happening in Los Angeles, which, you know, near Fresno enough. So, you know, he came on down and wander around. I was fascinated by the fact that back in those days, you know, the ladies running around at the con were not wearing a lot of clothing. And he thought that was a really great idea.

Alex (57:35.601)
Hahaha!

Aaron (57:35.675)
You

the princess layout fits.

Mike Pondsmith (57:41.19)
yeah, there were, you could line up Princess Leia's all over the place.

Aaron (57:44.717)
Hahaha!

Alex (57:45.224)
my God, my goodness. Yeah, that's amazing. I'm always fascinated by naming, know, it's like, like, where do you wear like your company name or like, even when you're talking about Night City and just some of the names of the corporations in the game and that kind of thing. Like, there's just so much so much detail that goes into building a fully realized rich world. And, you know, like creating that internal logic that makes all of those things kind of make sense and follow some sort of

Mike Pondsmith (57:47.583)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (57:52.106)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Pondsmith (58:03.251)
Yeah.

Alex (58:13.514)
rules or just, you know, like, make sense. Like, I'm guessing you really like that because you're really good at it.

Mike Pondsmith (58:16.447)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (58:23.008)
Well, I really enjoy figuring out why does it work this way. you know, a lot of it is instinct. It's like I did not sit down and go, hmm, I'm going to this company Biotechnica, you know, and think about it in terms of like it will do this. I went biotech, it's biological technology. Yeah, that'll work. And so I get Biotechnica. That one of the things that cracks me up is over the years, I run across companies

Alex (58:26.434)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (58:52.106)
who now have like Militech who've named themselves those things. So somewhere out there, there's a company we ran across named Militech and luckily they did something we didn't do so we didn't have a legal fight. But it was logical that you would get Military Technology Corporation Militech because it made sense.

Aaron (59:15.355)
you

Alex (59:16.333)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (59:17.876)
You know, a lot of what I build is, you know, basically, does it make sense, you know, in this world? It's like I have a world, Algal, which is the mekton world, which is my giant robot game. And I've been working on that the last couple of years because I actually come up with more knowledge about how to build it. And I asked the question there, which was, what would happen if anybody with enough money could buy a giant robot?

You know, and they were ubiquitous. They were everywhere. And my favorite Mekton image is one I actually had the artist do, which is there's this mecca, glass top. And basically through the top, you see this woman, obviously a housewife, and she's trying to quiet a bunch of screaming kids in the back seat of this mecca. And she's, and there's.

grocery bags around her and a whole bit like that and the kids are screaming and all that and down below, you know, about 10 feet below, there's a cop riding in her ticket for a no-mecha parking zone. And I loved it because I said, this is what happens, you know, and I could kind of extend it and go, that little kid over there is screaming. Yeah, Johnny grows up and when he's 17, this mecha that's

Alex (01:00:27.438)
You

Aaron (01:00:27.716)
That's cool.

Mike Pondsmith (01:00:42.432)
Mom used to have, she's gotten a better one now. This is sitting in the garage and he's going to go soup it up and go back out again. And, you know, it's going to be running around, you know, a giant robot running around with his teenage friends. may have giant robot fights and giant robot races and they can explore with giant robots, you know, because if you had a giant robot, the cool part is you have a giant robot, you know, it's it's.

Alex (01:01:02.424)
Yeah.

Alex (01:01:07.785)
Hahaha

Mike Pondsmith (01:01:09.352)
Somebody said that once in something I read where they said, you know, you could have a giant robot build your house. Of course, the cool thing about that, it's just giant robot build your house. Yeah, giant robot. That's, know.

Aaron (01:01:19.236)
You

Alex (01:01:19.415)
You

That's the cool part. But it's super cool. You could like, could make it paint. You could paint a picture, know, it's like a picture is worth a thousand words, like a corny metaphor, whatever, whatever that is, it's not a metaphor. But you know what I mean? Yeah, it does hold up. You could tell a real story and then you could like go into the details and extrapolate all these tendrils that is that what you're working on now? What like what are you focusing on now? Is it Mekton or?

Mike Pondsmith (01:01:34.29)
Yeah, it holds up.

Mike Pondsmith (01:01:41.492)
Yeah, exactly.

Aaron (01:01:43.299)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (01:01:46.784)
Actually, I'm working on another project I can't really talk about now and I'm also we're gearing up for the next cyberpunk iteration. So, you know, we're sort of figuring out, OK, what do you guys want to do? You know, and I'm trying to get a team together to handle mech time or sorry, handle Witcher because, know, we're still doing that license. But Cody is now going to be doing Ninja running around the multiverse.

for the next few years, you know, and I figure I got to end. Actually, the person would be perfect for it would be my wife. I would have to get her out of being business manager and convince her that she could write, which she can, but she doesn't believe. My wife, my wife once years ago wrote a Star Wars pastiche and just on a joke, she sent it in to fantasy and science fiction FNSF. And they said, if you make it a little longer, we'll buy it. And around her, all of us have been writings

Alex (01:02:16.942)
Nice nice

Mike Pondsmith (01:02:45.44)
furiously to get in science fiction magazines and she just threw it off, sent it and got an acceptance. So we're like, we hate you. Yeah, why? So, yeah, she can write and she's she's written a bunch. It's like a lot of the best gangs in cyberpunk. The Bozos, everyone loves the Bozos. She invented the Bozos, you know, which I told somebody that and they said, you had that woman sleeping next to you in a bed.

Alex (01:02:49.363)
hahahaha

What? Yeah.

Aaron (01:02:54.691)
That's awesome.

Alex (01:03:07.864)
Right on.

Aaron (01:03:08.731)
That's cool.

Mike Pondsmith (01:03:13.626)
She's never actually put on any white face paint and tried to kill me, so I guess I'm good.

Aaron (01:03:18.743)
Hahaha!

Alex (01:03:20.174)
Well, that's awesome that you're able to work with your family, create, be creative, and sort of have this whole, whole melange of family, business, creativity, and it all works. That's very impressive.

Mike Pondsmith (01:03:22.377)
At rate,

Mike Pondsmith (01:03:46.304)
Well, you have to balance it out because, you know, it's like if you tell somebody that they screwed up as the boss and they're your kid, you know, you have to kind of figure out how are you going to live with this and how are we going to separate it, you know, come the next family dinner get together. And that is tough. But and that's one reason why I usually have a separate person like, you know, Dave, for example, who is the production manager so that I don't have to do that and therefore have those problems.

Alex (01:04:14.712)
There you go. Yeah, I should do that at home. I should do that in the house. I get somebody who could just be the, know, give the kids the bad news. Go tell my kid to clean his room. That'd be great. I asked a, yo, go ahead, go ahead, Aaron.

Mike Pondsmith (01:04:16.596)
you know, I know, I know, yeah.

Aaron (01:04:22.005)
Yeah

Mike Pondsmith (01:04:24.437)
Yeah.

that I can do, but it's not it's not something you know.

Aaron (01:04:30.639)
Hey Mike, do you, do you, well I was gonna say, what do you think, what do you think about, so you were mentioning you had an artist do this image and you know, it like really like spurred a lot of like ideas and stuff. What do you think about like the current age? I've been hearing a lot of, or reading about a lot of game designers that now because they have all this AI.

Mike Pondsmith (01:04:33.61)
Yeah, Alex or Aaron.

Mike Pondsmith (01:04:42.194)
Uh-huh.

Aaron (01:04:55.867)
at their finger, you know, like now it's like more accessible to create these cool books and there's all the publish on demand and things like this. What do you think about that? Like how that's like, are you excited about that or is that does that feel like it's not like, I don't know how to explain it, like not fair or, know, cause you had to use.

Mike Pondsmith (01:04:56.148)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (01:05:03.584)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (01:05:14.876)
I don't think it was unfair, you have to if okay, if somebody comes up with a really great tool, you still have to know how to use it. And that's the thing. You have to figure out the best way to apply it if you're going to have it. And so I think, you know, AI so far as you know, they they describe it, you know, AI art, for example, Talsorian has a rule. don't use AI art because right now part of it is it's

encouraging bad art to go into the art stream. But people are going to learn eventually how to model and work with it. And then we'll start getting better stuff. And I think they'll eventually work up to where it won't be a question of AI art. It'll be human guided, AI supported art. You know, I need an orange background over there. And that's the same as when I worked in graphic design and people were starting to use Macs to do layout.

you know, were we cheating? You know, we didn't have to get out a lecture set to do a background or anything like that. So, you know, in the end, we ended up all doing it. But, you know, for about five, 10 years there, there was a lot of really bad graphic design out there because people could use, know, you see something like 40 fonts on it, you know, comic book sans everywhere. And and you would look at it just go, Yeah. And

Alex (01:06:19.342)
You

Aaron (01:06:20.539)
You

Alex (01:06:33.816)
Yeah, right, I remember that. Yeah, I remember that. It's like the font barf on the page. Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Aaron (01:06:34.395)
Yeah

Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (01:06:42.516)
People eventually learn how to do that so that you are no longer tearing your eyes out. So I think a lot of these tools are going to come to fruition if people are willing to do the work to learn how to really use them. Because the tool does not make you really good. You have to know what to do with the tool. For example, this is all really great. The graphic side, some of the design stuff.

But for example, the big explosion I see that I love is happening in 3D modeling, things of resin kit based stuff and so forth like that, where somebody can have an idea for how a figure should look and make it. Just basically say, OK, I want to have this happen over here. I wish to hell I'd had that access back when I was working on the first mekton.

I would have said, okay, the robot looks like this. And I would have started drawing it putting it together. And then I would have been able to go out and make that robot. It would be a little bitty robot. fact, actually, I'll show you something.

Aaron (01:07:53.556)
you did you print that yourself?

Mike Pondsmith (01:07:53.802)
This bad boy. Yeah, so that was, no, actually I sent it over to a 3D company. We have a 3D printer, but it can't do quite this. But yeah, basically I said, you I want to have a mechon figure I can, you know, look at and see and get proportions for it. So I have whole set of these. Actually, I have more than these, but my daughter has stolen all of them. Yeah, and she's.

Alex (01:07:53.836)
nice. Yeah.

Alex (01:08:18.958)
For the listener, Mike's holding up a, is that resin? Is that a resin print? Yeah, it's a resin print of one of his Meccas. Yeah, super cool, super cool.

Mike Pondsmith (01:08:24.48)
Yeah, it's resin. Yeah, it's a resin print. Yeah, a mauler. Yeah. Yeah, she's she's actually stolen a bunch of because she's doing a mech ton comic book right now. So, you know, I said, OK, you can do this, but you better give me back that, you know, because one of them actually is the mecha that the housewife is sitting in. And I had that actually done as a mecha. Little cop next to it.

Aaron (01:08:32.741)
That's cool.

Alex (01:08:39.202)
Ha ha ha.

Alex (01:08:52.142)
You know, if if the Mecha minivans were available when my kids were little, definitely would have gone for one of those. But Mike, we've kept you way over. Yeah. Thank you so much for hanging out with us.

Aaron (01:08:58.587)
Mecha Media Vance. That's good.

Mike Pondsmith (01:08:59.678)
Yeah

Mike Pondsmith (01:09:05.456)
no, that's okay.

You don't, yeah, but...

Well, I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for putting up with me, you telling all these stupid stories.

Aaron (01:09:11.663)
Yeah, thanks Mike.

Alex (01:09:16.642)
They're amazing. Yeah.

Aaron (01:09:19.333)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (01:09:19.951)
Eh, not really.

Aaron (01:09:21.883)
They are. You actually, it's very inspiring, you know, like to get like to get into the paper stuff, you know, like seeing everything you have and like everything you're doing. It's really, really inspiring.

Alex (01:09:32.362)
We've done a couple things, and I think we were doing this more at WideLoad back, so this was like early 2000s. When we would come up with game ideas, we would paper prototype them, like literally on paper with game rules. And then we would also do this, like when we would interview game designers, one of the things that we would do is we would hand them over a kit of toys, a chest of like,

Mike Pondsmith (01:09:44.724)
Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (01:09:54.784)
Mm-hmm.

Alex (01:10:01.93)
know, dice, cards, string, know, popsicle sticks, whatever, a bunch of stuff, you know, figures, and just let them spend some time, you know, creating something. And then we'd come back and either, you know, they'd show and play, you know, whatever, talk through some of the choices. And it was a really interesting way to kind of get inside somebody's head about how they think about design.

Mike Pondsmith (01:10:05.024)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mike Pondsmith (01:10:26.848)
Yeah, actually, I used to do that with my students. We had a section that I got set up in the school store where we had, you know, little planes and boats and figures and meeples and different types of dice and all these things. And I would go, OK, so part of your project right now is you're to build a board game and you can use anything that's down there in the store because, you know, it's really cheap. You know, they're charging three cents for, you know, a little plane or something.

It's you building the prototypes is is really interesting. For example, remember I mentioned the underwater game that I was messing with that was actually a design I was putting together for Microsoft way the heck back. And what I did at one point, everybody's talking about, well, I have a coral reef, we'll do these things. So I built a coral reef. I just got out foam core and I basically cut in the notches and I raised it and I had different levels and a whole bit like that.

Alex (01:11:11.182)
You

Mike Pondsmith (01:11:25.672)
And then I just very, I gridded the entire thing so that I knew where everything was and then I would place things within and you would go to an area and I'd have a card and I'd say, okay, well, you see something, there's a flash of yellow there, do you want to go investigate? And the whole point was that your POV was of a diver going down a reef. And instead of trying to actually simulate a real reef, the idea was,

How do I use this reef? Is it fun? Am I looking for just trigger fish? Funny Nemo hadn't come out yet, but it would have been a sort of thing of like, go down and see how many clownfish you can find. And they're going underneath things and the clownfish are running away and then you get bit by a moray eel. It just gets interesting. I actually set that up and one of the higher end guys

Aaron (01:12:14.267)
Just casually.

Mike Pondsmith (01:12:23.208)
came down, he was in charge of our unit and I ran him through it. He thought, okay, that's kind of interesting. But unfortunately, you know, we did not get financed for it. And somebody else went out and they said, let's put spaceships in it. We'll call it Subnautica and it'll be great. And I said, I hate you, but thank you for letting me have this game. You know, I'm like, I hate it. You did the game all I want to do. But on the other hand, I'm really having a good time. So I'm going to forgive you.

Aaron (01:12:38.245)
Yeah.

Aaron (01:12:42.661)
Yeah.

Alex (01:12:49.36)
Yeah, there you go. Right on, Mike. Well, now we've kept you way, way, way over.

Aaron (01:12:49.647)
Yeah

Mike Pondsmith (01:12:55.584)
that's okay. You're going to have to go change your, your, you know, show is going to have to be cut a lot. So sorry.

Aaron (01:12:55.643)
Yeah

Aaron (01:13:01.529)
Hahaha

Alex (01:13:01.646)
No, we just we just let it roll if it gets too long, we'll put it in two parts. But this was fantastic. It was fantastic. Thank you for hanging out with us. Really great to yet. Do you? Yeah, right. Cool. Cool, cool. And I hope we get to see you around. I don't know if you still go to any of the cons or anything, but like, you know, GDC or any of that will hit you up.

Mike Pondsmith (01:13:07.101)
Aaron (01:13:11.931)
Yeah, thanks Mike. Nice meeting you.

Mike Pondsmith (01:13:12.564)
Hey, it was great. It was great. I having fun.