Aaron: [00:00:00] This special episode of The Fourth Curtain is brought to you by Hi Vibe PR, a boutique communications firm for companies building the future of gaming, entertainment, and culture. Get your message out in the world by visiting hi vibe pr. com. 

Alex: Welcome Fourth Curtain listeners. How are you? It's been a little while.

How are you, Aaron? I'm doing great. This is not video, right? This is only audio right now? Well, listener, viewer, if you're looking at this, then it is video. 

Aaron: Oh, snap. What? You just broke the fourth wall. The fourth curtain. Wow. Do you need to go comb your hair? If it's only audio, I actually have really long hair.

Yeah. You know, it's flowing. 

Alex: Welcome to this, uh, special episode. We're about to kick off season three and we thought we would Dip back into the archives and give you the season two recap to, uh, to, to warm everybody up. Well, but it has been a little while. Um, happy [00:01:00] holidays, happy new year, MLK day and, and, uh, Valentine's day, I guess it's like right around the corner.

You're doing anything for Valentine's day. Do you celebrate that? Nah, 

Aaron: it's a Hallmark holiday. I don't celebrate Hallmark. 

Alex: Yeah. You know, today is. Uh, Laura's birthday and so Laura's birthday, Valentine's day, one week apart, like right after Christmas too. So it's, um. Oh, it's expensive. Hey, I wasn't going to say that.

You know, she gets, she gets a good month or two. Yeah. But a lot's, lot's happened in our break. Yeah. We got a new president. My city burned. Your city 

Aaron: caught on fire. Yeah. There was like another thing that happened too. We got a producer for the podcast. See, you see how organized we are now? You know, what's crazy is we had a meeting the other day and there was like 15 people in there.

And it's like, Whoa, there's a lot of faces in here. 

Alex: You know, everything's more fun with friends. So it's nice to have a few more friends around the table. You ain't got nothing going on. I got lots 

Aaron: going on. I have stuff on my desk right [00:02:00] now that I don't know if I should show because it might spoil. The first episode, because we interviewed this person and it was an amazing interview.

I think that's fine. You can, 

Alex: you can tease it because it, that episode's coming out next week. In fact, actually, this is a great tease, Aaron, because if you're in our Patreon, you can listen to this episode a week early. Oh, 

Aaron: wow. Cool. That's right. We do have, that's something else that happened. We have a Patreon going, that's going up.

It's, is it, is it up by, by the time this episode goes out? Yes, if it is I'll hold them up, but I haven't I haven't yes, so Aaron's holding up two books From by Ian Livingstone 

Alex: legend, 

Aaron: sir, sir, Ian Livingstone, 

Alex: literal, sir, Ian Livingstone He wrote he wrote to the interview on his horse. That's what he told us 

Aaron: It was outside in the thing and there's a it's magic realms, which is the art book Uh, and Dicemen, which if you don't know who he is, he's one of the [00:03:00] original three founders of, uh, Games Workshop, which, um, and he talks a lot about that, and Dicemen is the story of that, and I've seen, there's a lot of documentaries on YouTube of people that just tell the story, like, this is, I think even before Dicemen came out.

And then there is Diceman, which tells the story. And then on the show, he says a lot of stuff that I didn't know. He even sent you something. Yeah, I guess we could save all that stuff. 

Alex: Yeah. 

Aaron: But it's a, it's a, it's a neat episode. And listeners, 

Alex: in case you're not aware, uh, Aaron, uh, has gone way, way down the Warhammer rabbit hole.

Aaron: Look behind me, dude. I just got that one. That's Cursed City. I went into the store like, I'm not buying anything. You can't walk in there and not buy anything. And that's what I was going to say about these books, is they look cool. Like, if I saw them at Barnes and Noble or something, you know, I'd pick it up.

Barnes and Noble still exist? Yeah, I went there the other day with my daughter to get a Dogman [00:04:00] book. And a Warhammer game. How much did that, um, uh, Cursed City set you back? Uh, I believe it's a w It was a 200 game. It's not just, um It's a board game. Okay, it's a whole board game. So, so yeah, so Games Workshop does They do a lot of stuff.

Board games, they do all kinds of stuff. 

Alex: So you know I like to read biographies. I started reading some music biographies. I read, um, Brothers by Alex Van Halen. Which, if you're a Van Halen fan, I thought it was so good. I actually, and I listened to it and I'm going to recommend listening to it because Alex Van Halen narrates it and he's got this What?

Does he play music? No. Well, the end credits have him and Eddie Van Halen playing together, which is very sweet. Um, but it's, uh, I thought it was a great listen. Of course that was my high school years. Um, and I'm, I'm reading a biography of Led Zeppelin right now and there, there's a biopic movie coming out about Led Zeppelin [00:05:00] this week.

Yeah, but that's 

Aaron: two though. What are you doing here? What's going on? 

Alex: Well, um, I you know, I I Biographies for me. I consume these on audible and I didn't have anything Sort of picked out in my list, so I was just kind of browsing and I guess the algorithm served this stuff up to me. Although I did This episode is brought to you by Audible.

com. I listened to, wouldn't that be nice, um, we, uh, I was listening to NPR and I think it was, um, Terry Gross was interviewing Alex Van Halen when his book came out. 

Aaron: I heard the Led Zeppelin story is pretty intense. 

Alex: Uh, in the beginning, whatever, I don't know how far through the book I am, but he just met Robert Plant in the book.

Um, he's pretty accomplished by this point. I mean, he's been working professionally as a studio musician. Then the songs that he played on as a studio [00:06:00] musician, he played on, uh, uh, Rolling Stone songs, the who, um, like just a ton of songs you would know that he actually was the session musician on, uh, he toured with the Yardbirds with Jeff Beck, um, it's like, I, I didn't know all the history, um, but big fan.

Aaron: All right, well, maybe it's time for us to get the lead out. Do you want to start? How are you going to, how are we going to go through these? Do you want to, um, we're going to listen to them as a group and then you want to talk about them? Yeah, let's do that. 

Alex: Let's listen to them. Um, we'll kick it off with, um, the OG of OG devs, John Romero, creator of Doom.

Have a listen and we'll meet you back here. And a few minutes. Let's go. There's a lot of stuff, 

John: not many interviews ever published. You know, I would love to read, I just love reading books about people that are in game dev. You know, their, how they grew up, their backgrounds, uh, the stuff that they Like how long it took [00:07:00] to get good before they actually made a game because that that usually is a long time I know me me too.

Alex: And this is kind of what this show is about. So like We're 

Aaron: not gonna do the whole book 

Alex: though. Yeah, but that the thing you just said like how long does it take to get good? I mean, I don't know that people are very familiar with Wolfenstein, you know You had a ton of games before that right? Certainly 

John: not your first Wolfenstein was my 87th game.

Yeah, I was going to say 86. Yeah, that's crazy. That 

Alex: is amazing. That is amazing. But like the first things that you were, you were working on, I mean, what were they like? Like the first, the first, like the first, remember the first game you made? 

John: Yeah, the first game I made was in 1979 on a mainframe. Um, I went to, well, you, you read the book, so, you know, I, I went to the local college when I was 11 years old and I taught myself how to program on the mainframe there.

Um, I was asking a [00:08:00] lot of questions, but eventually someone just gave me the HP basic book. And I could sit down and try to kind of create a game similar to adventure, Colossal Cave Adventure, which is what the, like that was the hot game back then. Um, and so I was just trying to make up. You know, a game where I could go from room to room and have it have a description and move around and that's, you know, in basic, um, that's pretty easy.

There weren't any graphics at that time because it was, it was a terminal, but as soon as I saw the apple 2 in 1980, that was the computer I really wanted to spend my time on. Finally got one in 1982 at home and that was like I was done being a normal kid going outside I was pretty much always on the computer Learning as much as I could and just making game after game after game and I started selling those games to various magazines or discs, you know, like on disc I would make games like In 1983 I made so many games and many of those were published years later in 1987 just because I made so [00:09:00] many that I then like would send them out later, um, and they would get published.

And I remember I wrote, I wrote, um, a two line program in 82, I think it was, and it got published in 83, but I didn't find out about it until a few years ago. So I thought my first game published, you know, my first published thing was in 84 in June of 84 in Insider Magazine. They published a game I made called Scout Search, and then I find out not that long ago that That there was a, there was a company called Beagle Brothers back in the early 80s that did programmers utilities and stuff.

They were, they were the best, you know, Bert Crosby was just a legend and I, I entered Uncle Louie's two liner contest and he published my two liner in his big tip book number one in 1983 and it's on, it's Silicon Salad too, which is a thing that he [00:10:00] did. So I found out like my first published thing was actually an 83 instead of 84.

Alex: What's a, what's a two liner, what's a two liner, like, you know, it's 

John: basically, you know, when you're typing in basic on an Apple two, the input buffer is from 100 hex to one FF. So it's only 255. You know, characters, cause the end, they don't let you do the last FF. So you have 255 characters. And what happens is basic takes your input and it tokenizes it down into.

You know, print the, you know, keywords and then, and then the, the data. So, two lines, that's basically 510 bytes. You know, type characters is what you can type in for two lines. Oh, so you can get multiple 

Alex: commands with like a semicolon or something? Yeah, colon. 

John: Yeah, you can do a colon and do another command, a colon command.

And, uh, and so you just do as much as you can. Some people, they might do a little assembler language thing by [00:11:00] having a for loop that does a Or a read of data and poking into memory or something. Some people do that. Most people just have like formulas and stuff in these two lines. And mine was basically, I knew that Burt Kersey was a comedian, that he was really funny.

He liked humor, so I wrote a two liner that was funny. And it basically was a two line program called Pulse Meter, and it said put your thumb on the spacebar. And as he held it, it went on the screen like it was like this is This is like, it was reading your pulse, which you couldn't do. Of course. Yeah.

Right. 

Alex: Right. I do remember, I remember reading about that in the book. It was a total, total, uh, ham. Yep.

Do you remember that conversation? That was the first episode from season two. And I remember Being kind of blown away that, what did he say? Uh, Wolfenstein was his 87th 

Aaron: game or something. He like, and [00:12:00] he like remembers them all too, like every single one. He was like explaining how he has like this unbelievable memory.

I, 

Alex: I read his book. He, he, yeah, he has a condition, like he's got like perfect memory, which he describes a few times as being, uh, a burden, you know. Oh, 

Aaron: wow. Interesting. 

Alex: Yeah, if 

Aaron: you can't forget things, maybe that's a burden. You know, what's interesting about that interview was he, we had the meeting while he was working overtime on a game, he's, he's like, or no, they had like, they had just had like an on site.

A milestone. 

Alex: Yeah, weren't they doing a milestone or something? 

Aaron: Yeah, they were doing something. So he, we, we had the, we did the interview while he was at work and at his desk working. You could see the computers in the background. 

Alex: He was, he was paying attention though. He wasn't, it wasn't like one of those Zoom calls where, you know, oh, no, no, no.

You, you could see they're not scanning. They're reading email while you're talking . 

Aaron: No, it wasn't like that at all. I was actually surprised at how, how nice he was. 'cause I [00:13:00] remember seeing super chill. Super chill. Yeah. And very nice. I remember seeing pictures of him. Like the ad stuff that they would do, you know, throughout like their, their thing and thinking he's probably really like tough and like, you know, like, like, you know what I'm saying?

Just like, cause he would do two pictures with like his muscles out. You've seen these pictures before. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Like ripped shirts. I know what you're talking about. It's just, it's funny. And it 

Alex: like doesn't match. Yeah. He's super down to earth. Very chill. It's a great guy. I, another one.

I read his book. Listened to it as well. I recommend the listen because he reads it. Oh, he does. I didn't know that. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. That's a good one. All right. Moving right along. Uh, we're going to fly. All Actually, we're not going to fly across the pond because John was in Ireland when we chatted with him.

So we're just going to kind of Oh, right. That's right. That's where the studio's at. 

Aaron: Yeah. 

Alex: We, uh, we got a chance to chat with Peter [00:14:00] Molyneux. Um, so have a listen. We'll be right back. So that was really the, the, the question that I was thinking about earlier was like, how do you, how do you, how does Peter Molyneux make a game?

And I don't know if it's similar every time you kind of like are starting up a project or if it's different every time, or you start with some tech, do you start with an idea or do you start with a player? Yeah. How, like what, how do you, how do your game sort of 

Peter: original? Yeah. I, I mean, generally speaking.

And I'm actually doing a blog about this, I'm working on a game at the moment called Note, and I thought wouldn't it be great to expose to the world exactly how I work, and it's slightly crazy. I think the efficient way of working, of designing a game, is to sit down and to write a game design bible, that's what it's called, there's a game design bible.

That's the [00:15:00] efficient. The sensible, the grown up way, the way I work is akin, I always think it's a bit like the way the Victorians used to explore the planet Earth, you know, they'd set out and say, well, we want to find the source of the Nile, they'd set out, they'd have all their equipment, they'd follow a path and they'd take wrong turnings and they'd go back on themselves and There are all sorts of pitfalls.

They have no idea how long it's going to take. They have no idea what's at the end. And that's the way I work. I start with an idea, and that idea can be as simple as a feeling that I want the player to have, the sensation of playing. And then it will be right. The first thing I'm going to do is some sort of prototype about the core mechanic, and then we want a prototype about the visual aspect to the game.

And then we're done. Then mix those two together and usually get to a state where [00:16:00] you're playing the game as soon as possible and then just play it and if you're bored, you add stuff and if stuff doesn't fit, you throw it away and that whole process goes on and on and on until you've got enough of the game where you think, well, this game can go into hope.

It can go, we can, you know, we can have an army of artists, we can have audio people, we can have scripters because they've got something to get their teeth into. But you know, that process of trying, failing, throwing away and trying again can take a very long time. And for team members that I work with, it can be very, very frustrating because.

You know someone like me or it's not just me you know other me and other designers can play a feature that may have taken a month or two months or even longer to make and we just say it doesn't fit and you know it gets thrown away in the port coda. All [00:17:00] the poor artists that worked on it has to grit their teeth and throw away all their hard work, but it is really an iterative process.

I don't say that I never look at any other games, but I try to avoid. Getting too much inspiration from playing other games, because I think it narrows your vision, you know, you start subconsciously to believe, right, this is the only way it should work. 

Aaron: Yeah, are you a designer first or a programmer first?

Like, how do you, how do you think? Is that a weird question? Well, that's a great question. 

Peter: I think it's a very good question. I mean, I, I, designers were programmers. That's where designers. started from, you know, if you think of that group of people I met down the pub, David Braben, Jez Zahn, uh, Archer McClain, they were all coders.

And, but they were also designers. They were [00:18:00] thinking of. The design of the game with their codings and then as time went on the games industry, suddenly people realize, well, actually design is a job. You don't have to be a programmer, you don't have to be an artist. I mean, it's obviously beneficial to have those skills, but you can just be a designer.

But I think of myself now more recently as. A designer who loves to code as opposed to a coder who loves to design and that I started as a coder who loves to play around with design, but I think myself more of us as a designer now, and, you know, the skills of a designer nowadays are so much more about inspiring other people to do truly great work and that that that that's the job of a designer, I think, is Is to inspire the people that you work with to do the best [00:19:00] work of their lives.

Alex: Yeah. Do you think that sort of transition of like how you think about your role has come about because games have like your teams have gotten bigger games have gotten more complicated to make and a lot of a lot of making something good is about, yeah, rallying a team around an idea kind of thing? 

Peter: Well, that's, that's right.

I mean, it's so much more complex. You know, when I started, you know, Populous was just me and Glet. And that was it. That was the entire team. And if you look at fable, I mean, fable had almost 300 people on it and you know, you can't think in the same way you can't work in the same way you've got to adapt yourself, you know, so yeah, I did.

Virtually no coding on Fable, you know, I did a lot of design and a lot of talking to people to do great work. But, you know, nowadays I think it's completely wrong to [00:20:00] attach a game to an individual because All I think of myself as is someone who likes the blue touch paper, the real genius of a game like Fable was the team members on that team, and they did some incredible and amazing work.

Alex: Yeah, amazing. All right, well, so if we go back, Populous, was that your first successful game? Was that the beginning of Bullfrog? 

Peter: Yes, Populous was the first successful game. I mean, prior to that, I was Deeply, deeply in debt. I had no money at all. My credit cards were maxed out. I did this game, Populous, tried to get a publisher to publish it, but no publisher was interested, because at that time, shoot 'em ups were the flavor of the month, and, you know, they, you know, said, oh, can you get, you know, can you get Shoot a map element [00:21:00] into it.

And I kind of said no. And then electronic arts would just setting up in Europe. They were just established an office, a tiny little office in Europe. And so we went to. We'll see them. And because they were just setting up, they didn't really have a catalog and they took on Populous and we finished Populous for them.

And then this chap called David Garbaugh, who's one of the most Wonderful people in the industry, he phoned me up a couple of days after launch and he said, how does it feel to be a millionaire? And, you know, I said, what the hell are you talking about? And he said, well, the game has sold incredibly well in his first week.

Um. You're going to be super successful he didn't quite tell me that it would take another nine months for any money to come through but[00:22:00] 

hello yeah okay changing. That was a life changing moment. 

Aaron: Another super chill guy. Very super chill. It's like so motivating, you know, because we're always stressed. Aaron, we need this file by 3 p. m. And it's like, 

Alex: what? You know what I remember most about this one? What's that? He made a point to say how we were being polite and not raking him over the coals over his, you know, he, he had, he had issues with like, like we're, I think we're asking him about what he was working on now or something.

And he was like, well, you know, I have history with talking about upcoming features and getting in trouble. You guys are too polite, you know, to not bring it up. Um, But, uh, I could, you know, I could totally relate to like his style. He doesn't design a game and then make it. He like has [00:23:00] an idea, starts building.

Yeah. And he iterates to find, I think a lot of really good games are made that way. Not all. Yeah. Some, some games are, are very much like there's a real solid blueprint, you know, that is put down on paper, but I think a lot of interesting stuff is 

Aaron: built that way. 

Alex: Yeah. 

Aaron: Yeah. Like pivoting, like on, like on a daily basis, like do it, like playing the game, like when you do play tests, like, Ooh, you know, that doesn't feel good.

And like letting the game kind of make itself in a way. I was just going to say, Peter. Came across as a real artist. Artist. And 

Alex: he has a very good sense of humor. It's very deep. Now we're going to go across the pond. We're going to come back across the pond, um, and chat with Mike Wilson. I met Mike back in the gathering of developers days.

Um, yeah, this was, uh What game were 

Aaron: you on at the time? What were you making at the time when you met him? 

Alex: Probably Myth. Oh [00:24:00] man, I don't think we talked about this on the, on that episode. But, um, in the late 90s, so right around when, uh, We were just starting to show early Halo stuff. Um, I remember, um, I was in San Jose at our studio.

They're probably working on Oni or something. Mike Wilson gives me a call and he says, Hey, can we have it? Chat because there's a company that wants to buy us, uh, who wants to buy gathering developers and we would buy Bungie too, and some other companies. And it'd be worth hundreds of millions of dollars or whatever.

It was like, it was like this big, like, Oh my gosh, whatever. What, what, what crazy is like, uh, I'm in LA. Can you come down and have a meeting? I flew down to LA. And we had a meeting at the, um, at LAX, it's not [00:25:00] open anymore, but there's this, uh, restaurant that's on, I forget what it's called, but it's like this, it's like the structure, uh, it's like I got three legs to it and it's like floating up in the air.

Yeah, like very Jetson y. And it rotates, you know, it's got some rotating restaurants. Oh, I've, yeah, I've seen videos of that. I think it's called the Encounter Bar or something like that. 

Aaron: I know that place. When I first moved to LA, I, it's the first thing I saw. Because you, you see it when you go outside.

Yeah, you can see it on the terminal scan. 

Alex: Yeah, yeah, and 

Aaron: I 

Alex: remember. It's got a very mod kind of 60s vibe to it. Yeah, yeah, it closed in 2013. Yeah, that's too bad. Well, in any case, um, enough about that. Let's hear from Mike. Mike has gone on to do quite a few things. Another shielding. Yeah. Another chill 

Aaron: dude, by the way.

Tricky. Which who? You might 

Alex: not think from his history either because he's, you know, I think had his reputation for really being a hustler of like, you know, making deals happen and doing these crazy marketing stuff in a very chill way. Yeah. When we did hail to the, we did Hail to the Chimp with him, he was the [00:26:00] one who would dress up in the, in the furry costume to go to the right conventions.

Aaron: Didn't they like, I dunno if you remember that. They, I do. I remember they also went onto a, uh, game awards. Well, someone was dressed up in trouble for that, 

Alex: but Mike's pretty awesome. Um, um, probably most famous now for, uh, starting Devolver Digital, um, gone on an incredible run there. Um, in any case, uh, we caught up with him.

Have a listen. And we'll be back. What you just said, I think is a super, it's a really interesting observation. Like you're heading up to New York. I assume this is GT interactive. We're talking about, and you're like, you're a little intimidated. You're like, you have these assumptions that, Oh, these guys run this big public company.

They've been publishing games forever. They they're big. They're in New York. They must be like really good, you know, imposter syndrome, et cetera, all that. And you discovered that. [00:27:00] It wasn't true, and I think it's just a good story about how just because you think somebody is smart or doesn't mean they're smart, you know, I mean, just because somebody is like off in the, in the tower, it doesn't mean that they're better than you.

Mke: Absolutely. And thank goodness. That was one of my first lessons. Because if. Id's publisher had been Activision at the time, or even EA or somebody. That imposter syndrome would have carried on a little bit longer, because these guys were more established and smarter and, you know. GT interactive at the time had literally just stepped in shit.

Like their other two products were Richard Simmons, deal, a meal, CD ROM and Fabio screensaver.

They 

Alex: had those two and they had doom. Oh, wow. Hey, they had the triple crown right there. Yeah. Fabio screensaver. 

Mke: I'm not, I wish I was kidding. 

Aaron: That's the guy with the long hair, right? [00:28:00] 

Mke: Yeah. Oh yeah. It's like an Italian model or something most famous for a bird crashing into his face on a roller coaster. I think it's a good video.

Look it up. That was early internet stuff. Because these guys clearly had no prowess, right, they didn't have a bunch of gold records on the wall, you know, but Ron Chamowicz, who was the CEO at the time, did totally give me the have a cigar experience, you know, and told me within the first five minutes that he had discovered Gloria Estefan when he was with CBS Records, and I was just like, it was reinforcing my guess Already, that these were just the same slimy fucking bastards that come swarming around every time there's a new breakthrough in art, you know, art meets commerce and they're like, Oh, I got these guys, we just did this, you know, in the music industry, that was who was in charge.

And thank goodness they were not impressive, because I might have left there less fortified and feeling like [00:29:00] I could deal with these guys. But I had already figured out what they were doing, and again, meeting them only reinforced that. But you're right, Alex, it's a huge just Regardless of your industry or your life path, realizing that everyone else is just faking it too, and that they're not just because they're already in this high level position doesn't mean that they're smarter than you or they somehow inherently deserve that and you don't, right?

Because you're not there yet. Yeah. Yeah. It's big, just, just human development 

Alex: stuff. Yes, exactly. At the very least, nobody's going to care more about you than you. That, I would characterize that as the ultimate debunking of imposter syndrome. 

Aaron: Yeah. Maybe it's like eternal. Maybe you just always have it. And that's actually the thing you need to have.

Do you get motivation out of that? Yeah, because like, seriously, whenever you act like that, man, you burn quick. I've seen it happen so many times. Everyone I know that has that chip that like, you know, they [00:30:00] burn out, man, they just crash always. It's like when you're constantly in that humbled, maybe I'm not good enough.

You know, it makes you hang out with like, You, you talk to people that, you know, in a certain way, I think so, at least, you know, like, like you, you never like talk down to people is what I'm saying. You always talk level, you know? Oh 

Alex: yeah, humility. That's just being humble. Yeah. 

Aaron: Yeah. 

Alex: Here, let's, let's just, let's just package up the That lesson for everybody just because somebody's wearing a suit doesn't mean they're smart.

Hey. But if they're wearing glasses, they probably know something. Hey, our next, our next guest has wore glasses. Yeah, Frank. Frank Jabeau. Frank Jabeau. Yeah. I never really got to spend much time with Frank until we did this interview. I've only met him a couple of times before, but, um, Uh, also had just incredible run.

They sold Zynga to take two for $12 billion. . [00:31:00] That's, that's a lot of money. I remember him saying how when they sold to take two, it was the biggest deal in video game history for a week. Yeah. for a week. . Yeah. Right, right. Because Microsoft tech division deal was announced the ne the next week. Um, but, uh, yeah, so.

Here's some, here's some Frank Jubeau for your ears and we'll be back in a minute. 

Frank: And we were voted, I think, worst company in the world. Two years in a row we lost Exxon, or we beat Exxon, I guess is the way to, really way to say it. Remember when Exxon blew up an oil rig in, in the Golden Mexico? I do kind 

Alex: of remember this, the Exxon Valdez too.

It like, you know, poisoned Alaska or so yeah, it was 

Frank: Mobil, or I think it was Exxon, but they, they killed like billions of life forms in them. But we were the worst company in the world because of our business practices and Commander Shepard got killed. So it was one of those things where where now in defense [00:32:00] of the voters who picked us, uh, we were terrible.

We were putting business before games and quality at that time. And we paid the price and what was, you know, actually just freeing you for it was we're at our bottom at our worst. And we all went in a room and just said, this is going to sound amusing to people who didn't like EA at the time and still don't, but we literally went in there and said, obviously we're doing something really wrong.

And we wrote down on a board, everything that people hate about us and shipping games early, we had this online business model against used games, you name it, we wrote it down. And it was like, uh, you know, we have to hit rock bottom to get sober that, you know, that was kind of it, we hit rock bottom and we kind of reengaged with, you know, the reason we're here is high quality games.

And that was, as I found in my career, my biggest mistakes were always made when I got far from product. Felt more in love with the business model and why we were doing something from a business standpoint and forgot that, hey, you know, the core loop sucks. This is not fun. Or, you know, [00:33:00] the Metacritic's like a 75 and it needs another quarter to get to, you know, an 85 90.

That was always consistent for me in my careers. If I made a mistake, it is invariably because I had kind of lost touch with the game and was more focused on something else. As a corporation, went through that and just started putting back the foundation blocks. To kind of rebuild and go from the zero back to the hero.

And for me and my entire course of my career, while I loved a lot of the early days and the fun stories. For me, that moment where the chips are down, the execs were bailing. They're all going to Zynga at the time, if I remember, and they were leaving, starting their own companies. There's just very few of us left.

And we all basically had a chip on our shoulder that look, we love this company. We have amazing IP and really talented teams, and we're not really getting the most out of our potential. And that's when the leadership team rallied. And starting to bring it back. And so I found that to be the most enjoyable and rewarding part of my career was that going from the zero back to the hero when everybody counts you out.

And [00:34:00] so, so as I was building my career, you had that as a backdrop as well. And it was really hard, but it was rewarding ultimately in the end. 

Alex: Was that also around the time, do you remember the EA spouse? I don't know, was it a lawsuit? I don't even know if it was actually a lawsuit, but it was definitely a news item.

It was a thing. 

Frank: I think it was out of our EALA office, and they were crunching the teams pretty hard down there, and one of the same time frame? It was, yeah, it was around the same time frame. Was that 

Alex: part of what ended up on the 

Frank: whiteboard? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Look, Rome didn't fall in a day. So there was a few things starting to emerge at the peak where, you know, you were running the company really hot and stuff was starting to break culturally from a talent management standpoint, from a, just a structural standpoint, in addition to some of the other things that were happening.

So that was one of the things that was. Very much, you know, a focus as well. 

Alex: Yeah. Kind of maybe related question, which is just curiosity for me. I've seen, and I've been involved in conversations and I've [00:35:00] had games that have. Suffered from, I think some of what ended up on that whiteboard, maybe, which is at a public company where there's this quarterly pressure every quarter, there's a moment with the investors, with the market, with the street, where you're kind of judged.

And when your product gets to a point where it's sort of has some public visibility, the timing of a release is material to the company's performance. And it can be at odds with the quality of the game, you know, because the game needs more time, but more time means we're in trouble with the market. I've thought about from a developer's perspective, like that's the worst thing that can happen to me is.

If I know what I have to do, but I can't have the time to do it. Like from your perspective is having been sort of in the decision making capacity of navigating through those kinds of decisions. Like, have you come up with a [00:36:00] thesis, you know, around that? Or here's how we avoid that. 

Frank: Yeah, absolutely. I, uh.

You know, it's, it's kind of like the song and Hamilton and I was in the room when it happened. Right. So, so it definitely was around, uh, uh, more than a few brands that got killed, just died because of a quarterly financial decision. And I can tell you what I learned and what I was a part of there on the positive and on the negative side.

So. Ultimately the right answer I'll jump to the end is you do not deliver the game in the quarter because of a short term financial pressure, you take it on the chin from your investors and from the market. And you have to believe that what is true is that if that game team gets another quarter or two, that they're going to turn it around, that they're going to hit their day and that the quality is going to be there.

Cause that's, it's not always clear that if you give one more quarter or another quarter, you might be chasing. It might be done, right? The game team might just be tired. You might have a technical issue in there that you're just not able to get to the performance you need. So you have to be confident that [00:37:00] yes, I have confidence in the leadership of that game.

I believe that yes, if we do give them another three to four months, there's a clear path to the win. If you believe that to be true, then the right decision every time is. You know, Hey, Mr. Analyst, Investor, uh, we're not going to make this quarter's numbers because game X isn't ready. It's going to be ready in the future.

And it's important for the long term value of the company to make that decision. So that's actually one of the things that Strylus and Take Two really does a good job with. They, they will, I was just going to say, I think they're the best. He is probably the best in the industry at just saying, you know what?

It's all about the games. First and foremost, it's about the quality of the entertainment. And if it's not there, So be it, if you're going to be an investor in this company, the point is you're a long term shareholder, not a short term or a, somebody who's just going to own it for a quarter or two. So it really ultimately comes down to the courage of leadership.

It comes down to faith and belief that the game team can actually turn it around, which isn't always true. And so that's where you get into these really [00:38:00] tough decisions around, you know, do we go with the game in this window or do we go later now, one nuance is if you've kind of primed the channel, This is back in the package goods days.

It's totally irrelevant now, but you buy end caps and ads at Walmart and target, and you know, millions and millions of dollars are going to be lost if we don't put the game in the shelf at that point. And that was always a consideration as well, which is, you know, we just blew the Walmart programming.

And you know what, what happens is they don't give it to you again. And so if, yeah, they don't 

Alex: give you your money back. No, but what do they do? Do they, they sell it to somebody else and they'll cash two checks. I don't miss that part of the business. No, I don't miss 

Frank: it. You were locked in like 18 weeks out.

You had preprinted catalogs, preprinted ads, you know, whatever it was. It was really, uh, things are so nimble and fast now that, you know, a lot of the issues we had on these big set piece launches aren't relevant anymore. So you have a lot more flexibility from that standpoint. But, [00:39:00] uh, yeah, no, that was, uh, that's ultimately how you go through it.

And whoever's CEO at the time, the studio leader walks in, the publishing leader walks in. And says, you know, here's the deal boss, you know, I need another two quarters on the game in order to get into position to be quality. Publishing person comes in and says, here's what your forecast hit is. Here's what happens to the channel.

And then the individual weighs it and they make the call. And, um, you know, like I said before, I, my most recent experience as part of take two is, you know, they're very, very focused on long term shareholder. Value their investor base is oriented that way. And that's also important, right? Who owns your company and putting pressure on you and the board dynamics are also elements that the chief executive officer has to figure out.

Can I survive this? You know, if this game, if this game moves. Or misses on quality is a bomb. I, you know, it's existential. I might be out of a job. So those are all the elements that are in this stew that you kind of try and figure out how do I get through it? 

Alex: I totally agree with you. I think take two has [00:40:00] done an exceptional job of managing the quality of the properties that they built over time.

And I would say Zynga has as well. I mean, the brands that you guys have built over decades. We'll be right 

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Aaron: And now back to the show. I think I said it to him when, when I can't remember if the call was still recording, but that Star Wars game, they had just released it. Is it the Zynga one? Yeah, you did mention that. Yeah. Yeah, my kids and I played it and they loved it and it's it's kind of like a But yeah, it kind of goes to the like being hated What was it?

Like they were the most hated company to the more than Exxon. Is that what he said? They beat Exxon. 

Alex: Gamers love to hate, you know, does that bother you? Like did you do you ever read reviews? I mean Look, I'd like to say I don't, but of course I do. How would that make you feel? You know, I've been fortunate to have been involved in some, um, successful games, uh, but not everything's successful.

And I remember after a, one game released, which somebody on the team coming up to me and telling me, Uh, have you seen, uh, I think it was probably Game Informer. I don't know. Have you seen the Game Informer review? They gave, they gave it a four and I, I could, I just, I couldn't [00:44:00] believe it. In some ways, some of those, uh, you know, some of the magazines would, would, would, would shoot for one end or the other to get attention, you know?

Yeah. All right. Well, so let's. Let's keep going. Let's keep going. Yeah, let's not get too somber here. Come on. Yeah. We're a 

Aaron: happy podcast. We're a happy podcast. 

Alex: I like Mitch a lot. And we got to hang out a little bit after we did this episode. He is a total chill guy. Super generous. Really nice guy.

Incredibly successful. You went to his game, right? I did go to a football match. Oh. 

Aaron: You wanna, you know, football. Not soccer, 

Alex: huh? Come on. Let's, let's be classy. Let's be classy. Um. We talked about like how you do a good deal. He has a very high hit rate, you know, and yeah. Do you think he uses AI now and stuff like that?

Wouldn't surprise 

Aaron: me. I'm sure he's using AI for something. You know, after that, the first, I think we talked, did we talk about this on the pre post? But I remember thinking of the movie Moneyball after I After uh huh. I know we talked about what's the name of the guy [00:45:00] that's in Moneyball the Bobby Kotick.

Yeah, Bobby Kotick. Thank you. He's in there. He has a scene with Brad Pitt. That's right. That's right I thought about that like he that's like all data like that's 

Alex: what he's doing. Right? He's he Ask the question, what can go right where everybody else was asking what could go wrong, but we're unpacking and the before the quote.

So have a listen. Do you have any idea how many investments you've done through your, um, tenure at Benchmark? I 

Mitch: do. I think I've done, I think I did 15 and 14 or 15 in the, in the 12 years. Which is pretty normal for a benchmark partner about what we usually average about one a year. So, which is kind of crazy when you think about it, it's like I probably looked at 150 opportunities to do one.

Wow. And how would you, yeah, how do you decide? It's, it's a practice that you learn, right? And you sort of learn what makes a good venture investment. When I came in, [00:46:00] I had no idea. None. I was terrible at the job for the first couple of years. Uh, I, I, my, as they say, my yardstick wasn't appropriately calibrated.

So I was, I thought it was kind of, I mean, it is a needle in a haystack kind of business, but I thought it was even, you know, I, I, so I came in with that idea and then I started to hear pitches, but I was hearing them through the ears of an operator, somebody who ran businesses. And so I, they, people would pitch me stuff and I'd be like, okay.

Oh, that's kind of cool. Like I could see how that might work, right? Like if you change this and change this and whatever. And my partners were like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're not allowed to think that way. You're not allowed to think about companies that like would work if you fix them, right? You're not the CEO of these companies.

There's another person who's the CEO. And so you really have to be narrowing your focus down to those things that have that magic combination of great market, great product, great founder. And those are remarkably rare. 

Alex: That makes it sound fairly simple. 

Mitch: It's not. [00:47:00] I wish it was. It looks simple from the outside.

I have to say, I had the same impression when I first, I was like, well, how hard could this be? Um, and it turns out it's really hard. It's really hard to do it consistently over time, right? Yeah, there's plenty of broken clocks in the venture business where a partner, you know, is, has a successful. Has one successful investment out of 10 and thankfully the scale of some of these wins is so large that they can coast on that one win for a really long time, right?

But the, the, the, what really separates the great investors from the, the, the, the merely good investors is the, is the repeatability. 

Alex: Yeah. 

Mitch: The is having done it multiple times over a period of years. 

Alex: Yeah. So, I mean, just in the intro, you know, I rattled off many, many companies that you've been involved with and invested in that have been very successful.

So my, my assumption is that your hit rate is higher than average. What do you do differently? 

Mitch: So on the one hand I [00:48:00] had the games business more or less to myself with bing gordon for a long period of time There were not a lot of investors who were willing to to to to do it and so There were really good returns to be made in the games business in that period and so um, I had a couple of those that worked and then um You know, I, I listen, I, I try and keep an open mind.

And so something like Snapchat, for example, which when we invested, uh, was extremely early, right. Um, I was, I was really the first outside board member, uh, of the company. They were still all, uh, When I first went to visit Eben, he was running it out of his dad's house in L. A. And the entire team was sitting around the dining room table in his, in the house with their computers kind of back to back.

Um, so it was like 12 people. Wow. Um, so, you know, you just have to be really open minded and, and again, benchmark was had a, had a very interesting ethos, which was to ask the question, what could go right? [00:49:00] Right. It's so easy in venture to say, no, when you're saying no 125 times to say yes, once, um, you kind of get in the habit of talking yourself out of things.

And so we, we had a real discipline around trying to talk ourselves into things. Um, because you know, you, you, you had to maintain a level of kind of almost childlike optimism in order to do it successfully. And look, we, the one I benefited tremendously from being around some of the smartest people I've ever worked with in my life during that period when we were at our heyday.

But we did the first round in. Instagram, the second round in Twitter, the first round in Uber, the first round in Snapchat, the first round in Discord, the first round in Riot, and five other things you've never heard of that were multi billion dollar enterprise software exits. Right. So like, it was crazy.

Um, but again, it's that what could go right question. 

Aaron: So what [00:50:00] my, what was it? My favorite fruit or food for my favorite fruit. Yeah. What's your favorite fruit? Banana. Really? 

Alex: Bananas 

Aaron: make my 

Alex: breath stink. 

Aaron: Apples? Apples are pretty good. 

Alex: Yeah. I, I, I like oranges too. I like a lot, I like all the fruits. All the fruits?

I really like 

Aaron: strawberries and salads. 

Alex: I can say I'm not a big fan of raspberries or blackberries because the seeds get stuck in my teeth, you know. I'm just not into that. You can see them. Not into that. Um, all right. We, well, we kind of talked about, uh, Mitch a bunch before we played his quote. Um, so let's, let's give him.

Multi billion 

Aaron: dollar deals. 

Alex: Yeah, let's give a skip over to, 

Aaron: uh, your Ninja Turtle friend. Yeah, I'm s I don't wanna I don't want You You're You got really good at saying his last name. Sergastrala. Which Sergastrala. 

Alex: You should be good at that because, like, you spent all that time living in in Germany. Yeah, but he's not German.

Isn't that, like, Danish or something? 

Aaron: Christian Sergastrala. Nailed 

Alex: it. Nailed it. [00:51:00] 

Aaron: Good job. Okay. Yeah, 

Alex: he's I think I mean, he's not here to tell you he nailed 

Aaron: it, so I'll do that for him. His games, though. The games they've been putting out. Really good, 

Alex: really good stuff. I think that's a really good story because Super Evil Megacorp got started at the same time that we started Industrial Toys and they spent 10 years, 15 years.

Building this competitive MOBA on, on mobile. And I mean, it must've done decently well, but I, I know from talking to Christian that eventually they pretty much had to kind of pivot and sort of figure out what to do next, how to, how to build a future. And the future looked pretty different from the plan at the beginning.

And I know a lot, you know, when you run a company, you have startup and you're, you've got a mission and a plan doing a pivot. It's not easy, uh, reconfiguring your company. Like I think they, I think they've reduced their size a [00:52:00] bunch, you know, before they kind of scaled up again, all that stuff. Oh yeah.

Yeah. He talks about that in the episode. 

Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. You had to do that too with, uh, when we were almost got into VR, remember that? 

Alex: Yeah, 

Aaron: there was like a moment where you almost got in the VR, the whole studio pivoted to VR. And I remember, I remember we did like a prototype of, um, of, of the, the horse jousting.

Yeah. That was 

Alex: me. I couldn't, I couldn't do two runs with the, on the horse. It was. Yeah. All right, look, if you're in VR, I don't recommend doing a horse movement with 

Aaron: trying to aim at something. But that's, you know, that's that's a crazy pivot, too, right? It's like so they went from mobile. They stayed in mobile, though, because TMNT, their first version of TMNT.

Yeah, it was Apple Arcade. It was Apple Arcade. Yeah, that's where I played it. 

Alex: But, you know, even just thinking like fiercely independent, building their own original IP, like their own game, they control the whole stack, going from [00:53:00] that to, okay, well, we're going to do a deal with Apple for an Apple arcade game on a license that we don't own.

We don't own the IP for this. Emotionally, as a founder, that's a big pivot. Um, but. I will say pretty much in anything, this is a life lesson, not just a video game lesson. Things rarely go exactly the way you plan. I mean, maybe sometimes they do. If you're like making spaghetti and meatballs for the 50th time, you probably can get it on the table right when everybody shows up to eat dinner.

But if you're starting a company for the first time or doing something, You haven't done before. It's not going to go the way you planned. Yeah. You 

Aaron: better have appetizers because then meatballs. Have a pivot in your back pocket. 

Alex: Yeah. All right. Um, so here's, uh, here's Christian way more interesting than us.

Have a listen. Super smart guy. 

Aaron: Yeah. 

Kristian: Yeah. We just over 110 right now. Pushing 120 at the moment. 

Alex: Right on. How, how do you make it work? Like [00:54:00] this is, and this is a personal question because my, you know, our team is about 10 and we all know each other, have known each other for decades. So it's, I think it's easy for us right now because we're small and we have a lot of trust for each other.

Give me some advice as, uh, as I grow. What's. The most important thing to get right, to make a larger team that's distributed, you know, at, you know, perform at the highest level. 

Kristian: Yes, we've been at this for some time and we've been fortunate. I think that, I think we would say that it works reasonably well so far, although we, of course, we are also growing, uh, we expect to be north of 200 by the end of next year.

And so we are also paranoid about what about this next phase of growth? But so far, I would say the single most important thing. is to make it a core part of everyone's job to figure it out ongoing and iterate on it. It's like treating the company and the company's culture and operating system a bit like you would treat a product.

[00:55:00] So one, write it down. So write down the design doc, you know, how are you intending for this thing to work? Then actually implement it with the, with the team saying, okay, we can have these standup meetings and these things, and this is how feedback works. And these are all those things then instrumented.

Measure. Is it working? Figure out ways to get feedback. We use a feedback tool called office by, but there's, you know, lots of them, different kinds of pulse survey and anonymous feedback tools and whatever. And then iterate. So two weeks later, four weeks later, whatever, have a meeting going, Hey, here are our scores.

Clearly we score very well on this. So we don't score so well on this. What can we do? What is the next patch release? If you like, or the internal operating system. You go back to write it, write that down and then implement it and then iterate on it. So it literally is just taking it super seriously. If you're 10 people in an office, you don't have to think about culture very much.

If you're 10 people distributed, you do have to think about culture. And if you're 100 people distributed, you really have to think about culture. Culture persists, as you know. So getting it right from the start and iterating all the time is pretty important. 

Alex: I'm listening to you say that and I'm like, that is really excellent advice.[00:56:00] 

Seems. Like, you know, you've got a game to make, you've got all these other like things, you're probably always thinking about the next stage of growth and funding and all that stuff. How, like, how do you keep that part, uh, top priority, you know, that part, meaning that cycle you just described. 

Kristian: When I think of like, what is the job of the CEO of a game company?

It's true. You make games and making good games is really important, but, but ultimately, actually, for me, I always like I show it as a, um, as a sort of pie chart, if you like, where first and foremost, it's about talent, making sure we have the right people working for the company and that we find the most bestest talent in the world, because ultimately the best, the most inspired, the right talent for your project ultimately will produce the best game.

So like talent is the single most important thing. Like as a, as a founder and as a CEO, in my mind, second, most important thing is culture because you don't get out of the talent. If the talent cannot shine, if they can't stand on their stage and be a rockstar, [00:57:00] I doing the things that they do because they don't feel that they have the context to get the information or know how to work with their colleagues, or if you don't have a good feedback culture.

Those kind of diminish the talent, if you like. So like talent and culture are the two things, you know, two most important things. Then there are more like the supporting things in my mind, stuff like making sure that you have a good strategy. I, you know, you have a smart way of thinking about what kind of games you will make that fit the strategy.

So that fit the talent and fit the market and fit all of these sort of these things. But typically, frankly, if you get the right talent, the strategy sorts itself out. So I actually view that only as a curating function, making sure that you've together agreed on it and you hold yourself responsible for it.

For sticking to it. And then there's the boring bits, like the money, if you like, and making sure you get finance somehow, and then that you execute, hold yourself accountable. So like, so long as you, at least to me, like that's sort of the pie chart of my job, those five things and literally talent and culture are at the top and I simply have to.

Spend the time accordingly. That makes 

Aaron: a lot of [00:58:00] sense. Does everybody meet online? Like, are you doing like huge zoom calls with like the, the hundreds of people? And do you all do any like events together? 

Kristian: Yeah. So if you actually, I mean, if you want to read the current documented state of our design doc as to how we operate, it actually is online to purple megacorp.

com slash handbook. And that is literally how we run the company. Right. So, so it literally has what, what meetings we have, what, what we do. So in practice we have once a week. Monday morning, specific time, there's a 15 minute all company stand up where we go super quickly through what every team is doing, as well as create some space for any announcements for anybody that needs anything, anyone who's really badly stuck or whatever it might be that wants to announce something.

And that's just to have this sort of ticking weekly heartbeat. So people get a sense of what's happening. We play some music in the background, we read some facts of history or whatever else, something else, you know, we try to make it into a 15 minute fun little sort of operative heartbeat, if you like, of the company, we then.

Uh, in addition to that, we have playtests for every game, every week together, which are typically time zone specific as opposed to being [00:59:00] the whole company at the same time. Uh, but then we have the other whole company at the same time slot is on Thursdays, uh, is a town hall. Where we look at, uh, typically either deep dives, a show and tell about what a game is doing, or something about how we're building the company together, just some shared context.

A lot of those we try to make as interactive as possible with breakout groups and feedback docs and all that kind of stuff. So those are the sorts of things that we do and we, we've iterated like every, every six months or so we talk about, hey, is this still working? It used to be literally every month we talk about, is this still working?

Now it's every six months. Um, and. We then try out new things. Like we used to have two weekly meeting slots and we've decided that now with times on cross servers and whatnot, we only need one because also we have three game teams and they need more time to sort of talk about just the games. 

Alex: He's an economist, right?

Yeah. He's got like a PhD in finance or something, or he, he went to the London school of economics. Very fancy. 

Aaron: Yeah. 

Alex: Let's move along. Ed Fries is gonna tell you [01:00:00] the story of how the Xbox got green lit. Funnily enough, he told me he tells the story a lot, but I had never heard it before. It's a good story.

Here you go. 

Ed: We Had to have a big meeting with Bill and Steve to decide which group was going to get to make this console or at least get to Figure out a plan to potentially make it and so we go and we have this big meeting It's wall to wall vice presidents. We have a bunch of vice presidents on our side They have a bunch of vice presidents on their side.

They go first and they present this thing. That's like it's Basically like a PlayStation clone. It's custom hardware, custom software, blah, blah, blah. And then we go next. And, um, I'm just there for moral support when I say we, so it was, you know, it's the direct X guys, but they get up there and they just do this amazing job and this is like all Microsoft speak, but they're like, you know, it's like, Oh, well, it wasn't that an interesting [01:01:00] presentation, you know, it's like, it's like, it's so.

But it's so off strategy. This is like the most insulting thing you can say to a plan. At Microsoft. It's so off strategy. So what off strategy means at Microsoft is it means you're not taking advantage of all the other parts of Microsoft. They're like, they're gonna make their own hardware? Microsoft doesn't make hardware.

You know, and they're They're going to make their own software? I mean, system software? What about Windows? I mean, let's, let's look at a plan that's on strategy, you know, and then they present, you know, we're going to make these, you know, ours is based on, you know, existing PCs. We're going to work with our OEM partners that we already have.

They're going to make the machines for us. We're going to run Windows, the existing software. It's all on strategy, you know, and so, and, and Bill said, I like it. Bill said, I like it. And we walked out of that meeting and we won. And all those guys, like, I mean, like half of them [01:02:00] had to join the Xbox team to keep working on games.

They like, cause their thing went away. Um, and so, um, so then out of that meeting, we were granted a year to come up with the real plan for, okay, come, come back to us in a year with the. Big plan for this and we did a bunch of stuff during that year We actually had a meeting with nintendo to see if there was a way we could cooperate with with them because that's something bill Wanted us to look into bill, uh met with cos foray and talked about whether we could work, you know Cooperate with sony, you know from their point of view.

What do you why would we cooperate with you? You know, it's like um uh So those meetings didn't get very far, but we at least tried So after that meeting or kind of as part of that, um, Rick Thompson, the head of the hardware group came over and to run the group, um, and he, anyway, a lot of great things about Rick.

I'll try to make this story faster, but, but, [01:03:00] um, Rick goes around and he talks to all the OEMs and the OEMs are just like laughing him out of the meetings, you know, um, And, you know, they're like, we're not stupid. You know, we, we know how the console business works. You know, you lose money on the hardware and then you make money on the software and you're coming in and you're saying you want us to make the hardware.

It's like, yeah, that was what we wanted. You know, um, So Rick, Rick comes back from this road trip. It's just like, that is not going to work. You know, no, no one said yes. No one thought that was good. So, so bit by bit, our plan started to shift and it started to shift and it started to look over that year more and more and more like the other guys that we laughed 

Aaron: at.

Ed: So 

Alex: at the end of the year, you basically, you pitched the other guy's plan at the end of the year. Exactly. You're going to make the hardware. Exactly. So they must, they must've been pissed. The other team must. [01:04:00] It's totally like a movie. Like, they're like, yeah. 

Ed: That's why when I tell the story of Xbox, I think it's important to go back to this beginning part and talk about that meeting because it's really ironic what ended up happening and you know, they, I mean, they, they were not dumb guys.

They were like X3DO guys and they had worked with Dreamcast and stuff, you know, so, you know, they just kind of got outmaneuvered in that meeting, but anyway. And yeah. Yeah, maybe they're happy now that they can say, I told you so, but anyway, um, so a year goes by and then we, um, and our plan is like now, I mean, it hasn't gone all the way to their plan.

It's like, um, the, the design of the hardware still looks kind of like a PC. It's got a North bridge and a South bridge. I mean, stuff that only technical. People would really care about it. It's it does have a hard disk still, um, which theirs didn't have. Um, but, [01:05:00] you know, in the months leading up to this final meeting, the biggest change was to take the windows out and And that's because we went around and talked to game developers and they're like, and we're like, how much memory do you need?

And they're like, we need all the memory. Like, no, no, seriously, like how much? No, all of it. We want all the memory. If you don't give us all the memory, your competitors are giving us all the memory. Sony's giving us all the memory. We need all the memory. Um, unless you're going to put in twice as much memory as Sony's and make it unaffordable.

Um, So, okay, you ready for the Valentine's Day Massacre? I've told this story so many times. I can do it in, uh, seven minutes. Uh, all right. No. All right. So we go and we have this big meeting with Bill and Steve. Um, this is Valentine's Day, four o'clock on Valentine's Day. 

Alex: Oh, it literally was a Valentine's Day meeting.

Yes. Called the 

Ed: Valentine's Day Massacre. Later dubbed the Valentine's Day Massacre. [01:06:00] Uh, I don't think I know this story. Oh, then you're in for a treat. So we walk in, so this is February 2000, okay? The plan is to ship in November 2001, as Alex knows quite well. 

Alex: Oh yeah. 

Ed: And so February 2000, we're walking in to meet with Bill and Steve to get buy off on this plan we spent a year putting together.

And we suspect there's going to be some controversy, you know, cause we, it's a little different than what we told them we were going to do a year ago. But anyway, um, and this is like the most high stakes meeting you could have a Microsoft in the Microsoft boardroom. It's all vice presidents plus Bill and Steve.

So Steve's in there kind of early joking around with people as they're coming in and making them feel comfortable. You know, everybody's there, but Bill. The way I remember it, Bill walks in, he's holding a printed copy of our PowerPoint presentation, and um, and he throws it down on the desk, and [01:07:00] there's probably 30 people in this room, all very, very senior people, throws it down on the desk along, you know, conference room desk, and says, this is a fucking insult to everything I've accomplished at this company.

Good opener. Yeah, so that was the start. Yeah, he looked at the thing. Well, he had looked at it ahead of time, and then he came in and let us know what he felt, which is a common thing with Bill. And he was, he didn't have a lot of filters. So, you know, you could, you used to like hearing what he really, sometimes it's helpful to hear what someone really thinks.

Alex: So you're kind of on your back foot to start this off. 

Ed: Exactly. So, so. It's Robby, me, and Jay Allard, who run system software. So Robby and I turned to look at Jay, who's in charge of system software, because we know why he's mad. We know why Bill's mad. It's because it's not running Windows anymore. So, and Jay is just like, Jay is normally actually really good with standing up to Bill.

But for this, at this moment, it was just like the true [01:08:00] dramatic. He's like, he's like, words are not coming out of his mouth. And so, so I'm like, fine, I'll do it. So, so I, so I like. Step up and, you know, start to make the arguments of why we made the decisions we made and why it was important to make them this way and why this is the best plan that, you know.

You may not like the plan, but it's the best plan. Um, and, um, and, uh, yeah, Bill just like shoots me down and, you know, so I go down in flames and then Robbie steps up and he tries and then, you know, he gets shot down and Jay steps up. He's by then he's like found his tongue and he's argues and he gets shot down and, um, and it goes on like this for hours.

It's five o'clock on Valentine's day. It's six o'clock on Valentine's day. It's seven o'clock on Valentine's day. And every time bill would get tired of yelling at us, then Balmer would take over because, you know, Balmer by then is like, looked through the spreadsheets on, in the, on these documents, you know, it's like, [01:09:00] you're going to lose a billion and a half dollars.

And we're like, yeah, that's the plan. We're going to, the plan is to lose a billion and a half dollars over the next five years. And it's like. What? You know, 

Aaron: and, 

Ed: and, you know, we're like, yeah, this is the best plan though. You should have seen the bad ones, 

Aaron: you know, 

Ed: um, and so, you know, it goes, and so it's just going bomber and bill bomber and bill, you know, for hours and by seven o'clock we, you know, we're like.

We're, you know, not only are we having a bad day at work, but we're in trouble at home, right? Like we've missed our Valentine's Day, you know, dinners or whatever we were going to do. You know, this is a really bad, this is shaping up to be a bad day. Um, and, um, and then there's like, you know, maybe between 7 and 7.

30, somewhere in there, there's like kind of this lull. For a moment, and um, there was a guy in the room who had been writing for months, maybe years, these sort of [01:10:00] conspiratorial memos about the threat that Sony represented to Microsoft. He was kind of one of Bill's senior advisor guys, and the memos are basically said, went something like this, you know, Microsoft, our whole goal of our company is a computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software.

But look at what Sony's doing. You know, they've put a DVR in the people's living rooms. You know, it has a hard disk in it. They've put a PlayStation and it has a CPU. You know, really you just have to add a mouse and a keyboard and, you know, glue those other things together and you'd have a in home competitor to Microsoft.

That would be really formidable. I mean, Sony is the number one consumer electronics company in the world at that time. And PlayStation represent 40%. Of the profit of Sony. So anyway, he didn't have to say all this cause he'd been writing [01:11:00] these memos. You know, all he said was he just said this one thing.

He said, what about Sony?

And Bill and Steve look at each other and they're like, Bill says, what about Sony? And then Balmer looks and says, yeah, what about Sony? And then Bill says. I think we should do this and then Balmer's like, yeah, we should do this. And so then, I mean, my head is spinning. I mean, we've been literally yelled out for three plus hours.

And then, and then, and Bill is saying, we're going to give you guys everything you want, you know, you want the 500 million marketing campaign. You got it. You want to go move off campus to an own set of buildings. You know, you want everything you asked for in this plan. We're giving it to you. We want you to be successful with this project.

Go ahead and do it. You have our [01:12:00] full blessing. 100%. Great job. And that was the end of the meeting. And that part took about five minutes. Oh, my God. And so. So I walk out of there and I turn to look at Robbie and I'm like, that was the weirdest meeting I've been in in 15 years at this company. You know, um, and that was, so that was our official approval, uh, February, yeah.

Valentine's day. 

Alex: Wow. 

Ed: 2000. 

Aaron: He's a good storyteller. He is. He had me locked in. 

Alex: It's somebody who I actually got a chance to work with. How did you work with him? 

Aaron: Like when you say you got to work with him, like was he? He was my boss. What does that mean? He was my boss. Oh, so you, would you have like dailies?

Like would you meet him daily or like weekly? No, we 

Alex: probably, we had a regular one on one. It might have been weekly. It might not have been weekly. 

Aaron: Was he funny with you? Ed's 

Alex: a very [01:13:00] funny guy. Sure, yeah, he's a funny guy, but was he funny with you when he was your boss? He's, he has a better sense of humor now, I think.

He's more chill now. But he's 

Aaron: retired now, right? 

Alex: Isn't he like He's not retired. Well, 

Aaron: you 

Alex: know, you're like But he's not like, he's not like, you know, operating a business day to day, you know. He's an investor now. Yeah, he's helping like, probably 50 companies now. 

Aaron: I think we've interviewed a few people that retire, air quotes, and they do that.

Right. Right. 

Alex: So it's like, is that what, is that what you do when you retire? So it's like having grandkids, I guess. Yeah. It's like, I guess you, you are going to have a lot of grandkids. I'm going to have like 500, 500 grandkids. Yeah. Army. Let's move on to Lauren Lanning. Good friend. Very influential in my career.

Yeah, here you go. Listen to this. We'll connect in a minute when we come back. Hey, Lauren, here's a question for you that I, I am really curious your opinion on, cause you were, you were [01:14:00] sort of at the very beginning of, um, when computers started to be used for creating art, you know, um, You know, like, like Gordon became a real thing.

Like, what, what do you think, um, the trajectory is going to be with all these AI tools that are, that are out and are coming, et cetera? Like, like, what, what's that going to do to the craft? Um, and what's your kind of like view? Are you excited about it? Are you like nervous about it? Both? What? I was in a situation 

Lorne: as we were starting to, uh, go into this current venture.

Where, um, uh, you know, I, I, I needed to visualize stuff. I didn't have the artistic talent, you know, I didn't have the, the triple a production designers and, um, and some of where we did hire some, it was just taking too long, you know, to, uh, manifest deals. So, um, started using some tools with, uh, Some, some really talented [01:15:00] folks that we had built relationships with because we started doing distributed development and really figured that out over the last 13 years, like really figured it out and I was equally excited.

And probably more terrified because I, I, I'll give you an example. I sat in, um, I was at the Lightbox Expo recently, you know, the Lightbox Expo is like where all the professional artists and production designers from movies and films and they're flocking to Bobby, Bobby Chu's, uh, conference in Pasadena.

It's great. If for artists, go. Go, you'll just be blown away. It's like what Comic Con used to be in the 80s, right? So all the artists and almost, almost it. And um, and I'm sitting in the audience listening to big production designers, you know, who, who I have tremendous respect for, right? Um, they're saying, don't worry.

It's never going to replace. These roles, and I'm sitting there with almost [01:16:00] tears in my eyes going, it already has, you just don't know yet, because, um, the output, and this is what I find so terrifying, and I feel like, I feel like it's a similar discussion as, um, the one we were hearing back with 3D animation, and the Disney editors were saying, It will never make a 90 minute movie that people care about.

It will never have the integrity of a Disney animated film. We will never do it. They all wound up out of work. Pixar becomes the most successful film studio in history. And, and so the ones who adapted though, John Lasseter. Right? He was a traditional animator out at Disney, a few other people, they became kings of a new industry.

And it was very similar to those arguments then, except with a much deeper consequence now. And so, um, I found us having to start to utilize aspects of it. And at the time I was thinking it will be, this is going to get me in trouble, [01:17:00] but I'm saying like, be afraid. And, uh, and I find no joy in this. Um, but I'm, you know, we're, we're still looking at deals and financing and, and stuff of that nature.

And I can tell you the financial community, that's all they want to hear. If it's an optimization in a, in a standard, a way to do things faster, better, cheaper, we'll usually only get two. Now it's three and all three, right? They said better, faster, cheaper. Pick two. Yeah, that's right. Well, AI, , that's all three.

Alex: Now, I, I can say I was in a VC pitch a ma a month ago talking about something that I'm working on and it's not a AI related, and the investor stopped me in the middle and said, you haven't mentioned AI yet, and basically hung up on me.

I kind of shared that sentiment. I, it, my, my, my view has started to, to move that way. Though I, I I'm just, I'm just such an optimist. I, I gotta believe that with better tools, we'll be able to do more things, which will create [01:18:00] more opportunities, but that could be naive. I don't know, but that's how, that's where I hope things will go.

If you know, it's like you say, some, some roles may become less, uh, um, I guess, valuable, but new, lots of new roles will open up, but who knows. Who knows? 

Lorne: Well, I think, you know, if you'd say who's really benefiting, you know, aside from financial powers. Right. Um, who, who's really benefiting is like, look at how many, uh, little short stories we're watching on TikTok, YouTube now, you know, Instagram and all of a sudden now they all have even Joe Rogan's shorts, you know, they have AI imagery generating to help visualize the story.

His voice too. Yeah. I'm sure he's not happy about that, but like what that, what that's done, and this is like, I tried to put my. I try to see the future clearly, regardless of my bias, and I got a strong bias being someone who leveraged craftsmanship all along the way. And I know, uh, a number of things that are going on there, [01:19:00] and what you just said, there's not one.

Venture capitalists that you're going to talk to, um, or a big equity fund that's not going to qualify you on how you're optimizing the business model that you're proposing without AI. It, it does not exist. And so when people say our company will never, you go, yeah, they will because the shareholder is going to make you and the board's going to make you and all you're going to need is one flop and someone else smokes you.

And then that's the writing on the wall. And I don't like that world. I don't. Um, I think it's really sad. I'm eye aligned with Elon. We should be pausing and really understanding the ramifications because it's huge. And, uh, but I, but you look at it, you go, well, who's benefiting? Well, the people who are making short stories, influencers, things like this, and they could never afford to have those made as traditional pieces of art.

Now they'll spend one to two days and they generate it all. And so it's kind of like a next dimension of desktop publishing where you get. illustrators for the price of your account, right? And you, now, [01:20:00] what happened to me was, uh, I, I believed that it was going to be, it could provide inspirational, um, artwork.

So you had kind of like, you know, here, here's what I'm thinking, right? And you could produce that. And you didn't have two months to wait for an, uh, a production designer, you know, to deliver, and they're all in high demand. So, you know, how, High demand creates certain laxes and you take what you can get and all of a sudden, uh, with some of the people I'm working with, um, we understood, you know, AI is like adopting or having a child and you need to be very particular with how you're training it because it's going to become something else under your account and, uh, but I started seeing, um, And I thought, but it's not going to do production design.

So we started doing stuff and I'm starting to see like, I'll say, this is, this is what I'm looking for. And then as a painter, I can go in and I can modify something. So I'm [01:21:00] getting drafts. I consider it drafts, right? But I would wake up in the morning and have 60, 70 images in my box that looked like they were fully complete productions off a movie.

And that was my scrap heap. To now use as photoshop fodder and it's like, Whoa, and, and that was the beginning. And then we got like, you know, versions would come out new and I wanted to understand this from multiple perspectives, you know, philosophical, um, Societal, civilization wise, and then practically, and what do you need to do if you want to go out and raise millions of dollars for a project today?

Good luck! Good luck! Because I can tell you, the finance community has no interest if you're not embracing these kinds of tools, and that will dictate what comes. And I'm sorry, like, My heart breaks. So to the artists, I say you gotta start looking at this because like CG, um, it's not gonna go away. You can resist, but, but you, you can be a leader as well.

You can be a John Lasseter in this [01:22:00] space. Um, and I'm not I'm not a proponent, I'm, I'm being dragged along. You're a realist. 

Alex: You're a realist. Uh, I think so. I think so. I think it's a really good point of view to hear, like to, for you to say it, people to hear it, you could be that, you could be a John Lasseter and embrace this technology or you can deny it, but deny it's not really going to get you anywhere.

Lorne: It might last for a little while. You might work with a company that has a position that's a big company, filmmaking company, and they say, we're not going to use that. Don't worry. Your jobs are secure. You can buy into that for now, but the way the world works, Wall Street will dictate it. And, uh, and I find that heartbreaking.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

Alex: So I know you really enjoyed this conversation with Mark. I did. Yeah. Because you told me. And then I think he 

Aaron: emailed Loren and told him too. Yeah, it's, it's very influential what he, uh, it's hard to explain, for those, anybody listening to this that's in college, and I'm sure you remember this too when you were in college, [01:23:00] when you're like learning how something is made.

And then in the culture, there is something that's pushing the envelope, you know? Yeah. And those two things, like, kind of combine in your life. It's, it's a really special thing, you know? Well, I mean, 

Alex: right now, that's AI, right? You know, like, my son's in college studying computer science, and AI is the, the cult Mmm.

The cultural movement that's gonna intersect his 

Aaron: trajectory, you know? AI's pretty, uh 

Alex: I thought it was, you know, his, his comparison of, uh, Lasseter to 3D animation, what you could aspire to today, to AI, I think is interesting. You know, you could, you could reject it and get left behind or you can embrace it and, and uh, try to blaze a trail.

Aaron: Yeah. I see it all the time. I see it now. I see it now too on the day to day with AI coming in. Like in my day to day, I have seen people that are [01:24:00] rejecting AI as a supplement to their, to their work, their, you know, their, how do I like the, how they progress in their moment to moment. Uh, and the ones that are rejecting it.

Are, I'm gonna say it, they're, they're slowing down, you know, and it's kind of scary because it's like, wow, like I, I can see it in real time. Um, and the last time I saw this was whenever Photoshop took a really big leap, uh, with digital art. And you just saw how, how faster things got and you can see the, you know, but now it's like, it's scary.

Like you, like you sent me stuff sometimes, they're like, like, check this out. And it's like, it took you three minutes and like something that would normally take longer is like. 

Alex: I know what you're talking about there. And that, uh, that was for like an asset that just would, would, wouldn't have ever gotten made.

Um, but yeah, I made it possible for me to put something together to communicate an [01:25:00] idea where otherwise just wouldn't happen, but I, there's two things that I'm using AI for right now that I actually find super useful. One is I. I bounce ideas off of the AI. Like I will, like I'm working on like a story idea or something.

I will tell the story to AI and the AI will put it in its whatever. And then, then I'll ask it questions about what I just told it. And it will free associate with me, which 

Aaron: you're, you're playing with fire. Now you're really close, really close to like worshiping it. Yeah. It's like getting married to it.

That's where it's going. It's really, 

Alex: it's really interesting. Uh, it's not, not just interesting. It's, it's actually very effective to, uh, yeah. Collaborate to have a bigger idea space. Like, 

Aaron: yeah, 

Alex: like I say a few things. I say three things and it [01:26:00] says five things back and the extra two things, eh, maybe it's useless, but every once in a while, Hey, let's talk more about this, blah, blah, blah.

Um, and the other thing I've started using it for is just search. Like, uh, which one do you 

Aaron: use to search? Bing or chat 

Alex: GPT? I go into chat GPT. It's like, I'm working on a pitch for a potential partner and I don't, uh, have their logo. And. They're, they're, they're a part of a larger company. They've got their own very specific name and logo, whatever.

I just said, Hey, Chachi Boutique. Can you find the logo for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Done. Whereas Google image search, pretty noisy. All right. Well, so that's enough of pining about AI, although a good segue, um, to, uh, Jesse Schell, who's, um, at the forefront. He was an imagineer. 

Aaron: Let's kick it off with Jesse.

I have a question for you earlier. You mentioned that you get these little glimpses every once [01:27:00] in a while. What do you, what do you see now? Oh, in terms of, in terms of stuff that's coming. Oh yeah. That's like 10 

Jesse: years out. Like, what are you thinking? If you had to make a, in the year 2034, if you're going to look back and be like, wow, how did games change over the last 10 years?

The big thing is going to be AI. Um, we are going to look back and we're gonna be like, wow, can you, can you, you know, wow, games before AI, that was so different. Um, That's going to be the biggest one. The presence of intelligent characters in games is going to radically change the nature of games. Um, the way I often think of it is games up till now, You know, games are about action, about doing things, about verbs.

Most of the verbs are below the neck verbs. I'm running, I'm jumping, I'm punching, I'm kicking, you know, whatever. Talking, you're kind of hitting a button in a kind of fake way, is how it is. Suddenly, we're gonna have this world where [01:28:00] talking matters, right? You're gonna have characters that need to be persuaded, characters that have emotion, characters that remember.

Um, that's It's games are going to move more into a realm that's, you know, games are often trying to be like movies, but they're never quite like movies because you just, you just can't do the level of conversation and intimacy and emotional interaction that's suddenly going to be here. Um, uh, talking about predictions as a professor, Chris Swain from USC, remember he said this thing like 15 years ago and it's always stuck with me because I think he's absolutely right.

He, he talked about how. When silent films came out, people didn't really take them seriously. They were kind of silly, goofy, um. kind of a niche thing, kind of for kids, kind of for people who weren't very intelligent. It wasn't considered a form of any kind of high culture, any part of anything [01:29:00] important.

It was considered just popular culture, disposable, unimportant. Um, which of course nowadays we've, you know, we've lost 90 percent of those silent films because that is, that was the attitude. But then as soon as they learned to talk, everything changed. And the phrase he used was that film became the literature of the 20th century, became the dominant medium that changed everything.

And his argument is games right now are in that same place. They're an important part of popular culture, but they're not considered high culture. They're not really considered important, transformative. They're just considered kind of fluff for kids, for people who weren't very smart. And his suggestion is, yep, games already know how to talk.

That's not the problem. Games haven't learned to listen. And his argument is that as soon as games learn to listen, everything changes and games become the most important medium of the 21st century. And I think that's true because I think we are going to be moving [01:30:00] to a situation meaningfully powerful transformative emotional experience, one where you have characters who Actually can think, remember, and emote, like it's a, it's a whole new medium.

So that's, that's I think the biggest change that's coming at us. There's a lot of stuff happening with VR and mixed reality that I think is going to fit in really well with that, honestly. Um. Uh, I've been, I, you know, as a GDC, I was talking about, I believe we have a new medium coming very soon, which I call in home adaptive storytelling, right?

Cause you're going to have these, these headsets. You look at the vision pro, you look at the quest three, these things are going to know the inside of your house. You're going to teach it. Here's my rooms. Here's my hallways. Here's where the kitchen, here's where everything is. They're going to parse the furniture.

They're going to understand what your house is. Right? So imagine a game you put on the headset. The doorbell rings. [01:31:00] And you go to your real door, open the real door, virtual character standing outside. And they say, Hey, Hey, I got some groceries. I got it. This is important. Follow me. They know where your kitchen is.

They walk into your kitchen, put the groceries on the counter, start unpacking them, help me cook this stuff. So now you're in there in your own kitchen. Working with these virtual groceries, getting this stuff ready. He's putting stuff in the real oven, starting at cooking. He says, look, we need to make these things because up in your attic, there are some creatures and we're going to have to deal with it.

So we're going to need these baits. And I brought these weapons. You and I are going up there. We are going to go up there and we are going to fight those things. And. And you'll be able to have these dramas and these adventures, like, that use your house as the stage and platform. And that stuff's gonna be happening easily within five years.

So there's a lot of fun and exciting stuff, uh, coming our way, but I, I would say I think the mixed reality and the AI are really gonna change games over the next decade. [01:32:00] 

Alex: I liked Jesse's, um, view of a potential future. 

Aaron: I, I predict that I will have a friend that I play games with before the decade's over.

No one will know this person but me. You mean an AI friend? Yeah. You're laughing but it's gonna happen. You didn't say 

Alex: AI. 

Aaron: No, you're not gonna say that anymore. AI is gonna leave. It's gonna be a derogatory term. Are you AI? Haven't you seen The Matrix? Like the animatrix? It's gonna get like that soon.

Alex: Alright, we have arrived at the last quote that we're gonna share. Uh, which is from Our buddy Warren Spector. So enjoy this and we'll wrap things up when we come back. So, but you were kind of like in, in, in that early, you, you worked in that part of the business. What's. What do you think of? Like, what do you think of first?

How do you make a game? How does Warren make a game and and how [01:33:00] does how has your sort of like your journey like Starting through like film and role playing and writing and and like how is that maybe giving you a unique process? It's different from 

Warren: yeah, my process is total chaos Now there are a bunch of different ways to start a game.

You can start with a role You can start with, uh, an experience you want to provide for players. Uh, you can start with a relationship you want to have with players. Uh, you can start with a world you want to explore. Uh, you can start with a mechanic that you think would be interesting. Um, I've done all of those.

Um, on, on Deus Ex, I wanted to empower players to tell stories. Uh, their unique stories with me, I mean, like, I, I, I wasn't kidding earlier when I said I've been trying to recreate the D and D experience for, for 40, well, for 35 years in digital games. Um, and [01:34:00] the, the things about D and D that, that are most compelling are, um.

The dialogue between players and the dungeon master the dungeon master provides. I mean, this is so cliche, but it's true. The dungeon master provides the skeleton and the, the party, you know, the players put the meat on the bones, right? And that, that exchange of ideas is really powerful. And, you know, the, the DM, this is how much power players have.

The DM might construct, um, Scenario that's all combating and the players come in and say, yeah, we don't feel like fighting and the dungeon master adjusts on the fly to what the players want to do and that's, that's what I always try to do. That's what every game I've worked on has been about. It's about that, that dialogue.

I think about my games as I'm having a conversation with players. They don't even realize it. I'm laying out, um, [01:35:00] Situations that players can interact with however they want and, and, and having unique experiences, you can buy a dnd module and play it with your friends and I can play that same module with my friends and we will have radically different experiences.

And, and that's what I want to do in a game. That's the most important thing to me. After that it's finding something people already care about. I'm not a big believer in convincing people to be interested in something. So, um, you know, on Deus Ex it was before Y2K. Everybody's into conspiracy theories. Uh, bioengineering was just becoming a thing.

Pandemics were just becoming a thing. Terrorism was just becoming a thing. Engaging players and forcing them very subtly to think about those things was what I wanted to do. And I always tell my [01:36:00] teams, if two players describe the same experience of an encounter, of a mission. Or of a game we've failed. Uh, I want players saying stuff like, wasn't it cool when, when you freed that prisoner from the prison under UNACO, Ed, and another player says what prison.

That's that's for me. And, but think about it. Most other games, I'm overstating a little bit, but just to make the point, I'm. I, okay, no filters time. I hate games that are like you're standing on the edge of a chasm and you have to get to the other side and you leap across the chasm and you barely catch on by your fingertips and you look up and there's a Tyrannosaurus Rex looking down and you've got a gun in your hand and you shoot him in the mouth and you climb up and then you're on the other side and another player says, yeah, that was cool.

Like screw that it's interactive in that you have to, you have [01:37:00] to show some Twitch skills, I guess. And you have to, you have to outsmart the designer. But what I want is I'm not jumping across that chasm. I'm going to find another way. I mean, one of the rules in my games is there's always another way. Um, I got a lot of rules by the way, my teams, they have to buy into those rules or we're going to be a bad fit and it's time for them to vote with their feet.

I, if people who don't buy into my mission have to go. And, and I have a mission. I, I wrote a 12 page version of it that no one on the planet has ever read. And so I did an eight page version and a four page, by the way, developers don't read. And I finally got it down to, I said, screw it. It's two words.

PlayStyle matters. Your experience is driven. It's driven by how you paint a 

Alex: bed on the wall of your studio. I remember very much remember reading that. And that's what that means. Okay. That's 

Warren: what that means. It's about empowering players to tell their stories [01:38:00] in, in collaboration with me. My job is only to, um, to provide context and significance.

to what they're doing. They, the players have to own, I did this and I did that. And then this happened. They own that. But I say you have to rescue your brother from terrorists who are holding him hostage behind this door. And I don't care how you get through the door. It's like, why do games care how you get through a door?

You know, what's interesting is what's on the other side of the door. 

Alex: Right? Yeah. So when you, when you approach like design, this, maybe this is getting a little in the weeds, but it like, do you like. Think about, okay, here's the scenario and let's think about this, like, I don't know, five ways that a player can get through this.

Or do you think, Hey, here's, we're going to make this toolbox. There's a bunch of systems and let's just make sure that scenarios we design work with each of the elements of the toolbox. 

Warren: Yeah, it's. I, I'm not a big fan of scripting, um, [01:39:00] uh, I'm a systems guy. I mean, like, I mean, I believe in systemic design.

Let's put it that way. I'm right. I'm the least technical human on the planet, but, um, no. So it's all about creating systems, small systems that, that interlock. It's like, um, one example I use a lot is in, in a lot of games, you have a flask full of oil. And it has one use. It could be the oil can be set on fire or, um, the oil makes the floor slippery or, you know, one of those things.

And in my mind, oil has a bunch of properties. Like, you've got a flask, a clay flask full of oil. You throw it on the ground, the clay flask breaks, makes noise, attracting attention. But also, the oil spreads on the ground, and that can make the world slippery, so characters that are coming might slip on the oil.

Or you can set the oil on fire, and it will create a smoke screen, and if something walks into it, [01:40:00] it'll damage it, but it also provides cover so you can get away from the bad guys. Um, it also creates heat, which might burn a piece of paper. Um, so you build in the properties of the objects and the stems that affect those properties.

And you've got a system that players can exploit. I'm going to overstate to make my point, however they want. Yeah. That's where you start. But here's the, here's the truth that dare not be spoken. You have to make sure that every problem, we don't create puzzles. You're not allowed to say the word puzzle.

We create problems and challenges and you have to make sure that every problem and challenge is solvable. Right? So typically what I learned this from Richard Garriott actually come up with two ways to To solve each problem just to make sure you can get past it. Right. Right. It's another, another Richard store, Ultima 6.

Um, we, we did that, you know, there would be a couple of [01:41:00] solutions to every, every puzzle at the time and. There was one time I was watching a tester, uh, play a particular part of the game and there was a portcullis that was down, uh, and there was a lever on the other side and you had to flip the lever to raise the portcullis so you could keep making progress.

And you needed the telekinesis spell to do that. Okay. And he didn't have the telekinesis spell. So I'm thinking. He's screwed. He's going to have to stay over there and get the telekinesis spell. But instead what he did was he took Sherry, the mouse who was in his party, who was mouse sized, had her go under the portcullis, flip the lever and open the portcullis so he could go through.

That was not planned. Okay. Okay. And that was the first time it's like I fell on the floor and just I said, I'm going to do that on purpose for the rest of my life. 

Aaron: Yeah, you know, this guy. 

Alex: Yeah. Well, um, I think I [01:42:00] mentioned that maybe I don't know if it was in the quote, but, um, like going over to his studio in Austin, he had.

Uh, Stenciled up on the walls, play style matters, you know, in that Disney font. Um, and, uh, that whole sort of design 

Aaron: philosophy really permeates everything he does. Yeah, and you, I think you have a philosophy too, right? When you do stuff, like it's like, just figure it out as you go. Show me the money. That's my philosophy.

You know what mine is? Don't cuss. Like I just have that on my wall. Don't cuss. No, play style does matter. It does. Yeah. And it's, it's. His new game was announced too like after we recorded and Mickey came out afterwards Yeah, and a lot of people streamed that and you're excited about the new game, right?

His new his new game looks really good, man. We're at the end. It's I'm trying to like, you know, like you're saying goodbye You know, I kind of [01:43:00] feel it right now. We're done. It's like, okay, I actually, you know, this is the end of the year episode or the beginning of a new year. End of 

Alex: let's just think about it.

Like, yeah, this is, this is, this is your, um, Your recap, season two recap, get y'all ready for season three. We've got an incredible lineup. We're going to kick things off with Sir Ian Livingstone. Um, we have, uh, we have a Patreon that we just launched. So we would love to have you come over and help support the show.

Lots of exclusive behind the scenes stuff that we'll, uh, be posting up on our Patreon page. 

Aaron: Yeah. And we have to rerecord that episode, by the way, Alex and I did a prototype. Oh, let me tell you, that needs to get done again. You know, practice makes perfect, 

Alex: you know what they say. Yeah. All right. Well, great to be back with you all again.

for listening. And, uh, we look forward to [01:44:00] a full season of game developers and makers and creators and, uh, those that are passionate about bringing video games, uh, to your computer. Doorstep, and, uh, spend some time with, uh, y'all. Thanks everyone for listening. See you at the next one. 

Aaron: See you next time.

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