Alex Irvine: [00:00:00] I used to tell my students this all the time, I was like, you know, just, just keep at it, just keep at it. Eventually, somebody told me once, and I wish I remembered who it was, so I could give them credit. He told me, to be a successful writer, there are three qualities to be a successful writer, talent, persistence, and luck.
You need two of them, any two. That makes a lot of sense to me, actually.
Alex: That was Alex Irvine, uh, writer on many things, including the new Marvel Rivals, if you've been playing that. I'm talking about, I love that quote, talent. Persistence, luck, pick two out of the three and you got it. I love that.
Aaron: It is a good quote. I believe it. And it, there's another quote that's similar. Like, I like those quotes that make you think and they're like pieces.
And the other one is, it's one that you see a lot of people that have like clients, you know, like graphic designers and things like this, they'll say you could either get it really fast, very cheap or very good. Right. [00:01:00] And it's like, you have to pick, you have to pick two. You
Alex: got to prioritize. Two or one?
One or two? Two? No, it's two. It's fast. Yeah, that's a triangle. That's a production triangle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like the same thing. It's like, you know why I like, um, that the Alex Irvine quote is because one of them is free. Persistence. I mean, no, it's a lot of work and maybe it's not free because maybe, um, I guess not everybody has the, either the support network around to like really You know, go, go, go, go, go, go.
And not, and never give up. But I don't know. Mm-hmm . I've always thought persistence is a, a, you know, well, it, I am a persistent person, , you know? Yeah. I, I, uh, I am willing to, uh, try really hard and not give up. And in some ways I think that's a choice, but maybe it's not a choice for everybody.
Aaron: No. There's a, there's a little bit of genetic predisposition to that, I think.
Or maybe upbringing or maybe like there was a, you know what I mean? Yeah.
Alex: I think there's definitely a. Uh, that aspect to it. But I think there's also, you know, [00:02:00] when I got out of college and I started Bungie, uh, Laura and I were living together and she had a job, you know, if I didn't have her support, I don't know that I would have been able, I, you know, what was I going to do?
I was going to go move back in with my parents. I probably was gonna have to get a job. Um, so not everybody has that.
Aaron: Yeah, I had the same thing. It's like, I remember there, there were times where I like. Was living in a friend's basement or, um, yeah, you know how, you
Alex: know, that sounds sad when you say it like that, dude,
Aaron: he had, he, you know, those bugs they have in Chicago, the, the millipedes, the creepy ones, the ones
Alex: that, that the legs look like the hair, like they're like super,
Aaron: oh, those are so creepy, there were tons of those in this basement, I freaking hate that bug anyways, and I know they're really good, apparently they're like really good for the, really, yeah, they eat other stuff, eat other bugs, okay, yeah, six biters, so, you know.
What I was going to tell you is that the, the persistence thing, I believe that is the most important one because I think persistence, and I know you could do it with the other [00:03:00] two, but it's like when you're constantly, you're put, you're just taking shots. Like if you don't take shots, you'll never know.
So it's like, it's like the opposite of persistence. It's like, Oh, you know what, man, I wish I want to make a game. And then like, if you'd never do. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.
Alex: Yeah. If you, if you don't ask, the answer is no. That's another good one. Yeah. And then growing up, the New York state lottery, I think it was the New York state lottery.
Their advertising campaign was, you got to be in it to win it. We're going to win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket. If you don't buy a ticket. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Okay. Do you ever buy lottery tickets? You know, every time it gets to a billion, I always stop over at the gas station over here. The only time I ever go to a gas station is to buy lottery tickets.
Aaron: Yeah, I don't buy lottery tickets. I, I think that would be, you know, I don't give you an example. They're, they're, this happened to me while playing Doom, the original Doom. So I was young. I finally got a computer that could handle Doom. I'm playing [00:04:00] Doom and it's hard. I'm like, man, this is cool. And then I went, you know, at school, like we would, the way we would get the games where the DBS is, you know, so we would be trading discs and like.
My friend would be like, Oh, check out rise of the triad. It's like doom and you know, that stuff anyways. Oh no, it was actually not doom. It was the rise of the triad where I learned this. So I was playing rise of the triad and my friend was like, there's this code you could type that gives you this power where you could shoot like this.
You become like a god, you know, and I typed the code in and I became so powerful that the game instantly got boring. Like, I was like, I didn't play it anymore. And then knowing I could use the code, I was like, I don't want to do it because, you know.
Alex: Yeah, that's right. That's what happens. Sometimes the grind is the fun, right?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you for joining us, everybody. We had a great conversation with Alex Irvine. If you don't know, Alex, um, super talented writer. He's written probably a lot of stuff that you've read or [00:05:00] experienced. I love bees. He was part of, uh, like I said, Marvel rivals. He's done a lot of, uh, comics and graphic novels.
We may or may not be working on a secret thing together. Who knows? I don't know. Maybe. Um, but enjoy the conversation. It's a good one. We'll see you on the other side. Buckle up listeners because today's guest is an absolute. Juggernaut of storytelling. With a career spanning books, comics, games. He has a Ph.
D. He has a Ph. D. And get this, he's a Jeopardy champion. So folks, we know he's smart. He's fresh off of writing for Marvel Rivals. If you've played that, Aaron, have you played that?
Aaron: Yeah,
Alex: it's fantastic.
Aaron: I sent it to all the artists I'm working with and I was like, Load this up, look at it.
Alex: That's like the first thing I did.
No, no, wait, you're supposed to say you loaded it up and sent it to all of our writers and said, Check out this dialogue. I'm on the art team. He has [00:06:00] worked on some of the most iconic franchises, Marvel, DC, Transformers, Halo. I didn't know all the Halo stuff you had done until I started doing a little bit of research.
Just a wee bit, yeah. Yeah, um, I love bees. We had, uh, Jordan Weissman on, uh, a little while ago, so I'm guessing you probably worked with Jordan and Ilan Lee. Um, also wrote a couple of graphic novel stories, uh, in Halo universe. Um. And it's no, none other than, I didn't even say your name yet, Aaron, you want to guess who it is?
It's Alex Irvine. Thank you for being here, Alex. So great, uh, to have you on the show. How are you? It's great to
Alex Irvine: be here. Thanks. I'm, I'm, I'm feeling fine. It's a sunny day here and I got nothing to complain about. Where are you? Are you in Maine? I live in Maine. Yeah.
Aaron: Oh, nice. You're like close to Stephen King.
Alex Irvine: Is that where all the writers live? Yeah, he's about two hours up the road.
Alex: Okay. [00:07:00] Maine's a pretty big state.
Alex Irvine: Yeah, for an eastern state, it is. Um, there's, uh, something I learned shortly after I moved here was that you can fit all five of the other New England states in Maine.
Alex: Hmm.
Alex Irvine: Huh. And, um, but Maine is, I mean, if you compare it to states west of the Mississippi, it's still pretty tiny.
Alex: I guess it looks big because it's on that part of the
Alex Irvine: It's also more main trivia, we'll kick this off. Um, Maine is the only state with a one syllable name and it is also the only state that only borders one other state.
Alex: Oh,
Alex Irvine: wait, wait, wait. If you want to get out of Maine, you have to go through New Hampshire.
And then it's the
Aaron: ocean in Canada,
Alex: huh?
Alex Irvine: Right.
Alex: Wait, does it connect to Canada? It does. Yeah, yeah. Scotia?
Alex Irvine: Yeah. Nova Scotia and Quebec.
Alex: That's amazing.
Alex Irvine: Or actually New Brunswick. I think it's the direct connections are to New Brunswick You have to go through New Brunswick to get to Nova Scotia.
Alex: Okay, so what is it like four degrees outside?
Alex Irvine: It was I think when I started my car this morning. It was 12 [00:08:00] But and we're about to get a cold snap. So
Alex: that's pretty cold snap.
Alex Irvine: Yeah. Yeah,
Alex: it's chilly right now, but
Alex Irvine: Yeah, it's going to get actually, actually cold next week, although we're going to get a warm snap before that. It's going to get up into the forties briefly and rain for a minute and then, then get really cold.
Alex: All right. Well, we, we didn't invite you here to talk about the weather. We got
Aaron: nothing else to talk about.
Alex: Yeah. Um, but so, uh, maybe, uh. Let's talk about Marvel Rivals. They like that's your most recent press. Mm hmm a project How was how was that? And how was how does I am? You know, I'm always fascinated by the different kinds of Um, game structures and how narrative is, uh, deployed, you know, like coming from, you know, like I, I got my start by working on basically single player campaign games where it's pretty linear and you can write a story.
Sometimes you do gameplay first and you [00:09:00] have all these ideas about setting and then you start to develop the story that goes through it, but for a game like rivals, like how, how is narrative actually built?
Alex Irvine: Yeah, it's, um. It can be tricky. I mean, every game is different. You guys know that, that, uh, that, you know, every game you have to go through that sort of narrative design and imagination phase where you figure out like, where does the story belong in this game?
How is the game going to deliver the story? How's the story going to interact with the gameplay? Um, and, uh, so with rivals, you know, it was, it was the same thing. Um. But even before all that happened, um, there was a lot of, of world building and, and, um, and backstory to be created. Um, because the whole story of the time stream entanglement and, uh, the first appearances of Chronovium and, um, which different, uh, maps and areas and realms we're going to end up in the game and which we're going to, uh, just kind of stay in the backstories, uh, You know, we, we worked on all that stuff [00:10:00] for probably close to a year.
And then, um, while the programmers and then, you know, the gameplay engineers and the artists were all do off doing their own thing too. And so there's a, there's a whole lot of lore in the game that as you're playing it, you don't run across much of it. Except for what's theirs told primarily in two ways in game and that is through the locations themselves, you know What you see there's there's an environmental storytelling aspect to all that.
So when you're in Tokyo, you know This is not the Tokyo that you could actually get on an airplane and fly to right? Then then the dialogue in a game like rivals where the gameplay is so fast And you know there's not a lot of cutscenes where people stand around and talk about what the next quest is gonna be and there's not a lot of NPC conversations and things like that You have to deliver story and character mostly through occasional dialogue.
So it's a matter of, you know, deciding which characters do you want to have occasional dialogue with each other? And, um, you know, how are those character pairings going to be fruitful? Are they going to convey a lot of [00:11:00] lore? Are they just going to be bantering for the purpose of, you know, snappy banter during combat, cause that's fun.
And all this thinking is happening kind of behind the scenes. And we're making choices about what kinds of, uh, character work the players are going to encounter while they're playing and what kinds of lore they're going to encounter late between missions. When you see the stories on the character cards and, and, and the other background stuff that comes out.
That was a long winded answer.
Aaron: No, that was awesome. That's good. It's like,
Alex Irvine: it's so pieced out, you
Aaron: know, there's
Alex Irvine: like
Aaron: little story bits everywhere. Yeah. Yeah.
Alex: I love the world building stuff. Um, yeah. How does that go with a partner like Marvel where this is fitting into, you know, it's like perhaps from their perspective, it's one piece to a bigger puzzle.
Alex Irvine: Yeah, that's always an interesting thing working with Marvel because, uh, when I first started working on Marvel games, there was this idea that they were going to create like a Marvel gaming universe that was going to exist in the same way that the MCU [00:12:00] does. That
Alex: sounds familiar. You'll, you'll know
Alex Irvine: something about that.
And, uh, it never really happened as you also know. That also sounds familiar. Wait, did you two work together on that? When I was
Alex: at Disney, that was, that was, uh, you know, that was my initiative was, hey, let's tie these that. The, these games together, it was pre MCU, but it didn't get funded.
Alex Irvine: Well, that, and that was, oh, it was so frustrating.
Cause we had, we came up with all these great ideas about how to do it. And I was coming out of ARGs at that point and thinking like, wouldn't it be cool if we had some ARG aspects that we could, you know, there would be a place where players could go that all the games touched and we could move them back and forth from game to game.
We could link in comics. We could loop in anything we could do original stuff. And then as Alex said, it didn't get funded, but, uh, so we made a bunch of games, but even back then we were trying to figure out like, if there's going to be this MBU, like how's it different from the comics? How is it different from the movies?
Um, how are we going to decide if it stays consistent? And, [00:13:00] uh, and I think some of those questions got complex enough that there were people at Disney that didn't really want to deal with them. Right. And not you, Alex, but, uh, I was just like, I ain't got time for this, man. Um, but then, so all the other Marvel games I worked on, you know, it's, it's a similar thing.
You have to decide like what relationship. Does this particular game universe have to the MCU or to the comics? Um, is it trying to incorporate elements of both? If so, what do you do when they're contradictory? Which one do you choose? And what if that breaks something else somewhere else in your story?
And it's a real tap dance in some of these games, especially as they get big kind of sprawly stories. Like when I was working on Avengers Alliance, that was our first game that we were doing. Um. You know, I worked on that game for six years and, uh, and over that time, uh, there were a lot of story points where.
You know, we had to decide what were we going to be consistent with, you know, was it going to be the comics or was it going to be with this new movie stuff? Or was it going to be with stuff [00:14:00] we'd already done in the game? And did we have to figure out a way to retcon that or tap dance around it? And so with Rivals, it was kind of the same thing.
And our get out of jail free card was basically the time stream entanglement. Like, um, there was. The original idea of the game when I was brought on was just that they, they wanted lots of different locations that would be sort of interesting. And one of the things that came to me for was like a story mechanic that would make that happen.
And they wanted Dr. Doom involved for sure. And so, uh, we went back and forth and kicked various ideas around. And then, uh, I came up with this idea that You know, like what if doom was trying to master time the way that he, you know, is always trying to master space. And so he comes up with the machine and this crazy machine, and then he, uh, accidentally breaks time.
And, uh, and what happens is, uh, in the act of doing that, all these different time streams kind of overlap and scramble each other. And I had this idea that this would all happen in one geographic place. Like you'd be walking down the street and all of a sudden you would snap from universe to universe.
And, uh, but there's, [00:15:00] um, I think that would have a
Alex: programmer said, Whoa, Hey, that was too many lines of code. Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Irvine: Um, ideas are free, you know, but actually making them isn't. And, uh, so, so, uh, They came up with more practical ideas that still incorporated all the cool stuff about the time stream entanglement.
And then how long was that?
Aaron: How long were you on the project? How long were you on the project?
Alex Irvine: Oh, I worked on rivals for about four years.
Aaron: Okay.
Alex Irvine: And yeah, um, that's a long time. Yeah, it was, it was, there was a lot of world building to do and all that kind of stuff. And then I wrote a ton of dialogue and then lots of backstories and, and, um, And I came up with, uh, you know, there, there was Neddy's was coming up with location ideas and I was coming up with location ideas and Marvel had some location ideas and we scrambled them all together.
And, um, and, and came up with, uh, the,
Alex: what's that, what's that like work life? Like, you know, it's like four years. I imagine that's not, it's kind of in fits and spurts a little bit, or is it just [00:16:00] four years, heads down, I'm just cranking stuff out every day.
Alex Irvine: So. Rivals was like the fourth game I had done that was with Marvel and NetEase.
They, they sort of tended to overlap in some interesting ways. Like I was, I started working on the first one and, and, uh, got pretty buried in that for a while. And then, um, as that one was getting sort of mature and ready to go, they were like, Oh, here's this other game. And so I was working on that one.
And, and so as one would wind down, another one would ramp up and rivals came along as, uh, some other stuff was, was winding down and, and, and so. Early on there was a period of time when I started working on rivals where I was actually still I was working on four Different marvel and netty's games at once.
Alex: Huh? Wait, which were the other ones?
Alex Irvine: Uh marvel duel, uh, one of them hasn't been released yet. I don't think And, um, what are the, I still, the problem with asking me what these games are called is that we called them by their project codenames for so long that I've actually, it's uh, [00:17:00] um, but one of them is Duel, one of them is, uh, um, not War of Heroes, that was years ago, um.
Geez.
Alex: That's cool.
Alex Irvine: I just want to stop and look this up, but I don't want to break up the
Alex: conversation. We
Alex Irvine: got an editor. Yeah. Yeah. It's uh, someone will know. Um, but it was codenamed Chima. No, that was, that was a different one. Um, yeah. See, we call these games codenames forever. And then at the last second they get named and then I'm supposed to remember the name.
Yeah. And we have the same. But so you had like
Alex: four. Uh, four projects, Marvel and Knitties that you're working on. So that's kind of keeping you pretty occupied throughout that period of time.
Alex Irvine: Yeah. For a while, Danny Koo was joking that I was Knitties Marvel staff writer. And, uh, so it was, uh, well, I last I knew he's doing pretty well.
Yeah. He's a
Alex: good guy. So Dan, so Danny Koo was at Disney with us, um, back [00:18:00] in the day. And he's, he's Marvel, right? He's
Alex Irvine: part of Marvel
Alex: now.
Alex Irvine: Yep. And, uh, he's doing some music and, and, and in addition to overseeing lots of game projects and everything. So, uh, he's a cool cat.
Alex: Right on, right on. Okay. So, and with the whole time stream is, did that kind of get started with the Loki TV show?
Or was that, does that kind of go back to like, Older parts of the comic canon that it's kind of got resurrected for this iteration of the universe. Spider verse and all that.
Alex Irvine: Yeah. Marvel has always had fun with different universes, but they've usually kept most of them in bubbles and separate from the main 616 continuity, you know, and then when the MCU really started leaning into multiverse stuff that I think freed up people to think about multiverse stuff a different way in the games.
And. And the fun thing about Rivals was we didn't just say, okay, we're going to do the Ultimates universe here. We're going to do zombies here. We're going to do this other stuff here. We were taking locations and saying, okay, let's make them different. [00:19:00] Like, like how let's make this different from anything that we've seen before.
And so it felt almost like, uh, the multiverse stuff that was happening in the movies and occasionally in the comics too, with, uh, you know, the whole incursion storylines and all that, that like created the space. But then when we stepped into the space, we could do a bunch of different things. Which was really fun.
There's some great locations that, uh, that are still coming and I'll be excited for people to see them. And then there are a bunch of other ones that I don't know if they'll ever get made, but they're awesome. Anyway, do you work
Aaron: with the environment team on the story stuff? Like, do you, like, you know, there's storytelling inside the level.
Like, is it
Alex Irvine: like, uh, early on? Yeah. Usually what happens is we talk early on about like, you know, what, what we would like this level to accomplish. I mean, they know what they want it to do. Gameplay wise, what kind of missions they want to have there and things like that. But then If there's story stuff that I'm hoping will get accomplished, then we talk about that early on.
And then, and then after those early conversations, it's, it's usually pretty much out of my hands after that. It's all designers and artists and gameplay engineers [00:20:00] and whatnot who take it over from there.
Alex: Right on, right on. Um, all right, well, here, here's a different sort of kind of question for you, which is, I'm sort of curious how the PhD.
No, no. Well, I guess, I guess part of it is on one end of it, which is like, like, where do writers come from? You know, it's like, like when, when did you realize that maybe you were, when did you realize you were good at it? Like how, like it was, did somebody encourage you? Was it, were you always like, you know, what, when, when I was like.
I don't know what I was doing, adding numbers in my head. And Aaron was doodling in the side of his notebook. Were you just like moving letters around on the fridge? You're like, I made a word. Where do, where do writers, yeah. Where, where, how did, how does it, how did that happen for you?
Alex Irvine: Well, it's, um, I mean, I, I read very early as a kid and I could read before I was three.
And
Alex: that's young, that's young for reading.
Alex Irvine: Yeah.
Aaron: Yeah.
Alex: Yeah. That's [00:21:00] young. Yeah.
Aaron: Yeah. That's very young.
Alex: Can your, can your kids. Can your kids read, Aaron? Can they all read?
Aaron: This morning I was doing the week, like Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Yeah, I was doing that and she's two. I mean,
Alex Irvine: I wasn't reading like, you know, philosophy and stuff when I was three, but I, but I could, you know, I could, I could sound out words and stuff like that.
And so I was, and I've just always loved to read, you know, I was one of those kids who sit there and read in the back of a cereal box while I'm, you know, eating Raisin Bran. My parents were readers. They, you know, told us stories. And so I just grew up like all soaked in stories. I think another critical stage of my development came when I was about seven and my dad brought home this little box.
It was, uh, about. Six by nine cream colored, and it said dungeons and dragons on, on the, on the box and opened it up and there were these little parchment books. So he [00:22:00] taught me how to play D and D, um, with him and all, all of his hippie friends. Um, and so they, they'd sit around, we had this giant oak table in, in the dining room of the house we were living in then, and they would all.
Sit around the table and smoke weed, listen to Steve Miller and play D& D. And, uh, and I would sit there at the edge of the table, you know, watching her and, uh, and then, um, and then, you know, I, one day they let me roll up a character and, and, uh, and I started playing and so to speak, I still have those books, uh, this was in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which is where I grew up mostly.
Um, okay.
Alex: Right on. Right on.
Alex Irvine: Yeah. Right next door to Ann Arbor. Good.
Alex: Uh, yeah. Good on your dad for getting, getting you into d and d.
Alex Irvine: Yeah. Uh, and, uh, and it was great. I, and so I immediately started like drawing up dungeons and, and coming up with adventures. And so when you know this group of [00:23:00] kids, we kind of.
Accreted like Stardust or something. And then we started playing D& D. I was always the DM. And so I got, you know, I got a lot of storytelling in that way. Then high school came along and I read somewhere that girls like poetry. And so I started writing poems.
And it turned out the girls did like poetry. So this is great. And then all the, all this stuff kind of came together. And then when I was in college, I started fooling around with writing a little bit, but not too much. Cause I was so involved in theater at the time. Were you acting in theater or writing?
Alex: Yeah.
Alex Irvine: I, when I started college, I went to the university of Michigan to study aerospace engineering and I did that for about a year and a half. And, and I, I remember, you're
Aaron: adjacent for sure.
Alex Irvine: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a natural progression. Different. Well, I saw, I saw, I went to do this because when I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut.
And then, uh, I had glasses and you couldn't be an astronaut if you [00:24:00] had glasses. And so then I, I said to myself, well, if I can't fly spaceships, I'll build them. And so I, I went to college for aerospace and then I was sitting in a fluid dynamics class, my sophomore year, early in my sophomore year, and I was modeling a wing.
And I remember saying to myself, I had this like Paul on the road to Damascus scales fell from my eyes, kind of like. Oh, moment. Um, and I said to myself, I'm never going to build spaceships. I'm going to model this wing for the rest of my life. This vision was, was, uh, awful. Um, and I was already doing plays and everything.
I had started doing theater and stuff, uh, late in high school. And so. I left the engineering school and then I like hopscotch through like five or six different majors in the liberal arts school of Michigan. I was German for a minute and English for a minute and anthropology for a minute. And then I landed in theater and that was where I got my degree.
I did a bunch of plays, did 30 some plays while I was in college, I think, because, uh, Michigan at that time, it's, it's a, it's a. Big and really prominent theater and musical theater program. And it did some musicals too, but it also had, uh, this [00:25:00] little black box theater in the basement of this old building where the theater department was and every year student groups could sign up to use it like, so there were 14 weeks in a semester.
And so there were 14 signup periods. So you got a week of rehearsal time. And then the weekend to put on your show, you can do anything you wanted. And they gave you like a hundred bucks to buy props. So we did all kinds of crazy plays down there. And then, you know, and then after college, I did some touring theater and some commercials and whatnot.
And then I moved to Colorado cause I had a friend out there and I didn't want to go to LA. I just, I wasn't ready, you know, to just like make a jump to a place like LA. And I remember thinking one day while I was sitting on the porch of my. Place I was living in, in Boulder, I was like, plays are cool.
Maybe I'll try to write one. So I wrote a couple of plays and they were terrible, but, uh, the, uh, but the writing thing, I was like, this is fun. I like this writing thing. And cause it was hearkening back to like D and D storytelling and all this stuff. And so I started trying [00:26:00] to write short stories.
Aaron: What year is this?
What year is the,
Alex Irvine: this is 1990. Two. So this is when short stories were like a thing. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. They still are. Yeah. I still write lots of short stories. Alright. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I, I mean, I like to think so anyway, , because I still like to write 'em. Um,
Alex: wait, this is 92 and this is post college or you Yeah,
Alex Irvine: I graduated in 91.
Alex: Ah, me too.
Aaron: Okay.
Alex: All right. At the same age.
Aaron: Yeah. I, I'm thinking about like the, there was like an era when that was like 16. You look younger
Alex Irvine: than me. I think we look about the same age.
Alex: No, you look really good. I
Alex Irvine: want to
Alex: talk about the short story thing. Cause I remember in 91, 92, there was like
Aaron: a vibe where there was like sci fi magazines you could get that had like, you know, it was just short stories.
There were a lot of book, like you'd go to the grocery store and Stephen King was writing. Just books with short stories in it. [00:27:00] Yeah, it felt like a vibe in the air.
Alex Irvine: Yeah, I mean, and those magazines were where I broke in. Okay. Where I first started publishing.
Alex: Yeah, what was your first published work? Was it one of those?
Alex Irvine: Um, if you don't count college magazines, it was a story called Rossetti Song in FNSF, the magazine of fantasy and science fiction.
Aaron: Yeah, okay.
Alex Irvine: And, uh, That story came out in 2000. I wrote it in 98.
Alex: Do you remember, do you remember like holding it in your hands published? And was that, was that a thing where like, Oh shit, look at this.
Alex Irvine: Yeah. When you get your copies. Yeah. It was before everything was digital. You know, I mean, I think I still have copies of that magazine. Um, you know, landmarks that like that milestones, you don't want to let go of them. But I mean that, that's, I, that took, I started seriously trying to write in 93, I heard about this workshop called Clarion that a lot of science fiction writers had gone to, and I had been fooling around with short stories, not really finishing anything, and I was like, okay.
Well, I'll apply to clarion and you needed to send two short stories to apply to clarion. And so I sat down and I [00:28:00] was late because I found out about it when the registration deadline or the application deadline was like in three days or something. And so I sat down with my typewriter and, um, and ripped out two short stories.
Yeah, I didn't have a computer at the time and sent off these two short stories that I had written basically, uh, in one day and overnight. And, uh, and I got in. So, I went to Clarion, I met some cool writers there, and one thing that Clarion does is If you're a guy like me who didn't really grow up around writers, it introduces you to the idea that writers are actually just people and that, and that maybe you can do this, you know, it's, it's not some kind of sorcery.
It's just the thing that people do. Um, so then I started seriously trying to write and, um, I put stuff in the mail for five years before anybody bought anything. And then, yeah. It was, uh, the year after that, well, two years after that, that I sold my first novel. Um,
Alex: That's awesome. You know, we hear that kind of thing a lot, you know, that just that [00:29:00] like things are made by people and.
When you're younger, you haven't done that thing before that it's at, that's actually a revelation that it is
Alex Irvine: totally is
Alex: like, Oh, that's that thing that I like, I could, I could, somebody did that. I could do that. You know, it's like, that's actually a pretty important revelation and the persistence
Aaron: thing too.
Yeah. Five years not getting picked up. And then like some people give up a month too, you know?
Alex Irvine: Yeah. Yeah, they do. And, and, um, when I was teaching, I used to tell my students this all the time. I was like, you know, just, just keep at it. Just keep at it. Eventually somebody told me once, and I wish I remembered who it was so I could give them credit.
He told me to be a successful writer. There are three qualities to be a successful writer, talent, persistence, and luck. You need two of them, any two. And, um, and, and that, that makes a lot of sense to me, actually, because if you have persistence and luck, eventually somebody's you're going to catch a break somewhere, you know, even if you're not especially talented.
[00:30:00] If you have talent and persistence, eventually you'll get there. If you have talent luck, then geez, you know, you don't need persistence. Cause it's
Aaron: going to fall out and fall into your lap. I thought you were going to say, there are a lot of talentless writers out there, right? Well, I mean,
Alex Irvine: who am I to judge?
It's everybody's out there. Everybody's out there doing their best.
Alex: Well, apparently you can solve the formula without talent. So maybe yeah, that's that was maybe What was your first novel
Alex Irvine: my first novel was called a scattering of jades it's a uh, kind of a secret History with monsters, it, uh, it won a couple of horror awards when it came out, which surprised me because I hadn't thought about it as a horror novel, but I guess it was, but yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's a story about, well, PT Barnum and Aztec mythology and slavery and New York in the 1830s and 40s.
So, cause just a couple of teams. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, everybody does that. I know, but, uh, [00:31:00] yeah, that was the first one. And you want another persistent story? I started, I started writing this book and, um. 93, right after I got home from Clarion because I went to that workshop in the summer of 93 and I sent it off.
I had some advice, like at that time you didn't send whole novel manuscripts off and I don't, and I think a lot of people still don't want you to, but I wrote, you know, basically you wrote three chapters in an outline and a cover letter boasting about all the kinds of stuff that you've never actually done.
And then you send it off to a publisher and, and, and hope. So I had met this editor at a conventions. And so I, I sent it to him and he, uh, kept stringing me along, stringing me along for like ever. And then I found out that he'd actually left the publisher. And so I called somebody else there and tried to find out like what was going on with my book.
And they were like, Oh, we'll get somebody else to read it. And I said, terrific. And another, like six months or whatever went by, by this time, I was already in grad school. And right when I was supposed to be working on my master's thesis, I got a call. From this [00:32:00] publisher this new editor, and she said hey, I read your partial I'd really love to see the rest of the book problem was I hadn't written the rest of the book I
Alex: was like all
Alex Irvine: right.
Give me a minute
And I wrote the rest of the book In like three or four months while I was also finishing my master's thesis and sent it off to her and she was like, great. And then she left and the book ended up in a corner again, and I, um, I was in Maine, I was in Maine at this time, I was in. Grad school at the university of Maine, getting my master's and then went out to Colorado to get a PhD.
And so after I got all settled in Colorado, I got in contact with the publisher again. And I said, Hey, so what about my book? And they were like, Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Send us another copy. I'll make sure it gets decent attention and, and all this. And so I did that for another three years. With different editors, and then [00:33:00] I finished all my PhD coursework and came back East because my wife at the time was from Massachusetts and so I was at this convention in Boston and I was at this party at this convention and got talking to this guy who was an editor at the same publisher and I said, buddy, if I got a story for you, uh, and I, and I, I told him the whole story.
And he said, that's awful. Send me another copy of the book and I promise you that, that I'll, I'll at least get you an answer. And I was, I said, okay. So for like the fifth time, I sent off a copy of this book to the same publisher. I'm sure that there's still copies of it everywhere in their office. I'm sure
Um, and, uh, like everyone's reading. Yeah, I know. And um, and so that was February. And in August, or early September, he, uh, called me up and bought it, which was amazing.
Alex: What's the, what's the, what's the moral here? What's the, what's the lesson? Yeah, the moral here,
Alex Irvine: like to me, the lesson was, [00:34:00] you know, stay the course because it took me, the first person who ever read that book all the way through bought it.
But it took me six years to get someone to read it all the way through.
Alex: Yeah,
Alex Irvine: and so the same with short stories in the end, I put them in the mail forever and then eventually someone bought one. Yeah, and then, you know, I was off and running after that.
Alex: Okay. Um, I think if you, if you reverse engineer the formula, that's talent and persistence.
You didn't, there wasn't a lot of luck there.
Aaron: I don't feel like I had a lot of luck. It was all three because you were at the convention talking to the guy. Yeah, I
Alex Irvine: mean there is that, and actually to tease that out a little bit more. The reason he was interested in talking to me is because I mentioned that I had just published a short story in FNSF.
That was the first story that I was mentioning. And so that first story unlocked a conversation with this editor that led somebody to finally read the fricking novel that I've been sending to him for like six years. And, uh, it all came together.
Alex: Yeah. Yeah, that's, uh, um, yes. I like Aaron. I could feel the anxiety.
[00:35:00] So. So you, so you get a PhD and what was your, your PhD was in what?
Alex Irvine: Uh, English. It's a, well, that's a, there's a story there too, but, um, yeah, I, I did all my PhD coursework mostly in medieval and Renaissance stuff with a side of postmodernism, but I was going to do a dissertation on Philip K. Dick. And so I had radio lined up and everything.
I did my master's thesis on him too, on information theory and a couple of his novels. So then I was, I was actually. Working on my dissertation when I got that call that I had sold a novel and then I was like, oh, so do I finish my test or do I write another novel? So I wrote another novel and, uh, and things went from there.
And I was, so I was, you know, writing novels and doing this and doing that. And I was actually working at a newspaper at all weekly here in Portland. And I, uh, I found out that. That university of Maine was hiring a creative writing professor, which was where I'd gotten my master's degree. And I was like, ah, it'd be nice to go back up there.
So I [00:36:00] applied for the job and I got it contingent on finishing my PhD. I was like, Oh no, I have to, now I have to finish my PhD this summer. And there was no way to do this original dissertation idea that I'd had before in like the four months between when I, when I got the offer and when I would've had to start, so I called up.
Uh, university of Denver, which is where I had done all my PhD coursework. And, and, uh, I was like, so here's my situation. And they said, well, we do have a creative dissertation option. They never would let me do it before, but, but, but they, but they didn't want to stop me from getting a job, you know? So, um, so they, uh, so I put together a creative disc committee and it was great.
The, the, the writers at DU really helped me a lot. Brian Evanson was one and Laird Hunt. Um, they were, they were great. And so that was how I wrote, uh, a creative dissertation, which was a short story collection, basically to come back with, we're talking about her and more short story collections and, uh, and then I had to do like a, an introduction that was kind of my, you know, [00:37:00] theory of fiction.
Um, and so, and that was my dissertation. And then I taught at university of Maine for six years and then, uh. Pull the plug to write full time
Alex: cool. Let's go. So you did a master's studies on Philip K Dick
Alex Irvine: Well, my master's degree was also mostly on Renaissance stuff
Alex: Okay
Alex Irvine: but I really wanted to write about Phil Dick and so I just had to find somebody on the faculty who would let me do It and so there's this this one professor Naomi Jacobs who had done a lot of work on utopian stuff And I thought she'll work with science fiction, right?
And she hadn't read Phil Dick. So I gave her a bunch of books Yeah, I was gonna
Alex: ask like recommend a What's your favorite Dick book? Oh, that's a funny sentence to say, but I didn't even think about that.
Alex Irvine: Um, there's,
Alex: I just read Ubik.
Alex Irvine: I love Ubik. Um, Ubik is great. Uh, the bit with the coins. Uh, so good. And, and those, I, I stole the, the thing he does where there's the little [00:38:00] advertising slogans as the headers for every chapter.
I've borrowed that a couple of times.
Alex: That's called creative inspiration.
Alex Irvine: Yeah. Ubik would be top five. Yeah, I, I can give you a top five probably, I can't give you a favorite field deck. Okay, top
Alex: five, this is good. Here we go.
Alex Irvine: Ubik would be one. Valis, I think is, is a brilliant, brave, frightening book. And one of the last ones he, he wrote before he died.
Man in the High Castle, obviously. Um, even though I don't really love the TV series. Let's see, uh, Martian Timeslip, which was the book that I mostly wrote my master's thesis on.
Alex: Huh, Martian Timeslip, I haven't read that.
Alex Irvine: Yeah, it's a good one. Um, it's, uh, it has, it's, it's, you can really tell that Dick was a Faulkner fan when you read it because, uh, there's, there are huge bits of Martian timeslip that read like bits from Sound and the Fury and then probably the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge.
So I guess I'm going to land really hard on the 60s Phil Dick stuff. Um, dude, you didn't say any of the ones I've read.
Aaron: I literally have not [00:39:00] read any one of those.
Alex Irvine: Well, Dwayne Roy's Dream is a great one too. Yeah, that would be the first one. Yeah. Um, and I'm
Alex: putting Martian Timeslip on my reading list.
Thank you. Appreciate that. You can get the best of. All right. Well, so how did you get connected? How do you start writing for video games? And, and for Marvel, like, was there a gateway here that from, you know, original, like novels and things like that to working with sort of IP and games?
Alex Irvine: Yeah, well, so working with Marvel, I, I, I had a novel coming out and so I was, um.
I was in New York doing a reading, reading at KGB, which, um, I don't know if you know it, it's this bar, um, that, uh, has several different reading series, and one of them is a science fiction reading series. And so, and I've read there a few times over the years, and, and so I was doing this reading, and then After the reading, a friend of my editors said, um, Hey, there's a buddy of mine who works at Marvel.
He's at a bar across the street. Let's go say hi to him. And [00:40:00] I went and said, hi to him and he was, and we got to talking and he said, Hey, have you ever thought about writing comics? And I said, as a matter of fact, yes, I have thought about writing comics. Um, and, uh, and that led to me writing some comics for Marvel.
So that was cool. And then, uh, not too long after that, I got an email from, uh, Mark Laidlaw. You know, who's the famous game writer, but I knew Mark through science fiction conventions and, and, and science fiction, cause we've been in some of the same magazines and I'd see him at a convention once in a while.
I didn't even know he wrote games. And, uh, so Mark said, you've done some work for Marvel, right? And at that time I had written a few comics for Marvel and, um, and he knew I'd worked on AIGs and he said, uh, I got this buddy who is working on a, a Marvel game and he needs a writer. And do you want me to put you in touch with him?
And I was like, sure, let's, you know, I'll have that conversation. And uh, then that's how I got introduced to Cha Chan Lee and ended up working on, um, Avengers Alliance, which at the time was called Agents of Shield. But then the TV show came out and they had to change the name. [00:41:00] So, so that's that story.
Aaron: What were the first comics? What were the first comics you worked on?
Alex Irvine: The first comic I did was a, uh, a Hellstorm, uh, miniseries. Because Marvel had this adult Max imprint. And, um, and it struck me that, uh, a character like Damon Hellstrom was, uh, was perfect for a max book. So I wrote like this super gory Hellstorm horror book set in New Orleans right after Katrina.
Um, yeah. It's also about
Alex: Was this before or after the Disney acquisition of Marvel? This was before?
Alex Irvine: This was, yeah, this was before.
Alex: Yeah.
Alex Irvine: Yeah, the Disney acquisition was what, in 2010?
Alex: 2009. Okay. Nine.
Alex Irvine: Yeah.
Alex: I think end of 2009. It was the first, the first day I walked into Disney, my, as an employee, the, like my first day was the day they announced the closed the, the.
Yeah, I know. Oh, weird. Huh? Yeah. Um, so you were working with folks at a New York.
Alex Irvine: Yeah, yeah, my [00:42:00] first editor there was Axel Alonzo, who was later editor in chief, and then he left and he started his own comic company. Um, but I did, uh, with Axel, I did that Max book, and then I did Daredevil Noir, and
Alex: Like, how was that different, like, what was that like for you, writing for comics versus, you know, writing a novel or a short story?
Alex Irvine: Well, the big difference is that it's collaborative. Um, and, uh, when you're writing a novel or a short story, it's just you banging your head against your notebook or, or your, or the keyboard until you either figure it out or just abandon the story and go off and write something else. But comic scripts are interesting in that you're, what you're writing is like a recipe for.
Someone else to help make so you have to figure out you got a story you want to tell but you also have to tell It in such a way that your artist partner can then join in and the two of you together can figure out how to Make the script into an actual comic and that's um That process is a learning curve, you know, it takes a minute to [00:43:00] figure it out.
Do you
Alex: have to like think visually, like as you're writing, like, I'm writing it, I'm writing for an image, I'm writing for a scene.
Alex Irvine: Yeah, yeah. And, and the thing that, that is really hard to keep in mind for a lot of people starting writing comics is that each, each panel in a comic is, Yeah. A frozen moment in time.
So it's the stop motion storytelling, right? And the, the time only passes in the gutters between panels. There are ways to fake that you can do like diptychs and have like overlaid images and stuff like that. People try to flex that in different ways, but by and large, each panel is a single moment in time.
And so you have to think really carefully about how you pace that and which moments you want to select and then what you want them to look like. And then the flip side of that is you don't want to give too much art direction because. Then your artist gets all irritated and, uh, and it's like, get up, leave me alone.
I'll give you an example of this on the Daredevil book. So it's Daredevil in prohibition era, New York. It's just like alternate Daredevil. And I know that one. Oh, do you?
Aaron: Yeah.
Alex Irvine: Um, I had fun writing that book. There's a, there's a big, a big [00:44:00] stagey fight scene where Daredevil takes out a bunch of the Kingpin's goons in this brewery.
You know, this illicit brewery and I wrote, I choreographed this beautifully in my mind. Um, and so I wrote this long, long, long panel descriptions for this double page splash that would have all this stuff in it. And my phone rings and it's the artist, this guy, Tom Coker, he's a great artist and we've worked on other stuff together too, uh, since then.
But he was like, yeah, so, uh, I'm reading through the script and a lot of times when there's a scene like this one in the brewery here, um, a writer will just write. They fight and I shrank, I shrank on the phone and I was like, ah, okay. That was a, that was an educational moment for me. So ever since then, I've tried to, um, you know, uh, be real conscious about the amount of art direction I'm giving when I'm writing a comic.
Alex: [00:45:00] Focus on the dialogue.
Alex Irvine: Yeah. And just, uh, and, and, um, you know, choose the moments, right? Because, um, but then, but then leave the artist alone to figure out what they're, what they're going to look like on the page. That's cool.
Alex: And how did, how did you get connected with I love bees?
Alex Irvine: Well, um, so at the same science fiction convention where.
Uh,
Alex: going to conventions really pays off,
Alex Irvine: especially small ones, um, in science fiction, um, in comic conventions have also done me a lot of good, but, um, only the big ones. I've never really gone to any small ones when I was first starting out, you know, you went to conventions just to talk to people, you know, and you can't be constantly on the make cause that turns people off.
Right. But, uh, but if you're at a science fiction convention and you love these books and these stories, then you're just talking to a bunch of other people who also love these books and these stories and then. You know, the conversations go places and then you send them a story and you're a face. You're not just a name on a piece of paper.[00:46:00]
So the world fantasy convention in 1998 was in Monterey, California. And I had been corresponding with this, uh, novelist named Sean Stewart. Um. And Sean lived in Monterey at the time. And he said, why don't you come out for world fantasy? You can crash at my house. And, and so I came out and he was great.
And, and that was the convention where I sold my first short story to FNSF. Um, uh, although I, well, I almost did cause the editor was looking for me the whole time at the convention to tell me this, but I never actually saw him in person, but everybody told me, but when I, when I did talk to him afterwards, he was like, I was going to, I was going to tell you so.
I would have. Um, but so Sean and I were friends after that. And then through some other connection that Sean had, he started working with Jordan and Ilan on the beast, the first ARG.
Alex: Right.
Alex Irvine: I think the term ARG was coined to describe the beast actually. Yeah. And
Alex: that was for the movie AI, right? Yeah.
Spielberg. Yeah.
Alex Irvine: Um, and so [00:47:00] Sean pretty quickly figured out that it was more than one guy could write. And so he called a couple of people to come in and be the writing team. And I was one of them. And so we worked on the beast, which was an awesome and also utterly insane experience. And then what was the insane part?
So, um, so I, there's, I could tell a lot of stories, but one, so we, we, we spent all this time. Building all these fake websites, because you guys know that's how the game worked. It was delivered through fake websites, and then there was this rabbit hole that was one line on the movie poster that said, Sentient Machine Therapist, Janine Sala.
And, uh, some, you know, sharp eyed people who saw the movie poster were like, Sentient Machine Therapist? And somebody looked up Janine Sala, and once you did that, you were down the rabbit hole into the game. So there are all these fake websites. And then if you looked at the source code or there was puzzles, you could solve through these websites that would lead you to different ones and, and unlock all this different stuff and different elements of the story.
And it was supposed to be all staged out over time. And so we got [00:48:00] all this stuff written and then pressed send and we're like, okay, that's great. Now we got a couple of weeks to relax and write other stuff because it's going to take the, it's going to take whoever reads this and plays this game, uh, like weeks to solve all these puzzles, which they, the players immediately formed into these hive mind groups and solved all the puzzles in like, it was something like 18 hours.
And, um, and so then there was this period where the game became like live theater, man, like every time a new thing went live, um, we were, we, um, we had to figure out like how fast were they going to solve it and how were the, how were we going to fix it if they solved it too fast and what were we going to have to have ready?
And so, I mean, there was, there was this one time I got a call from. I can't remember if it was from Sean or from Pete Fenlon, who's a game designer, uh, worked on all kinds of video and tabletop stuff, but it was midnight and either Sean or Pete said, okay, we need a website for a hat shop in [00:49:00] Pittsburgh during the game timeframe, like 2140 or whatever, and we need pointers to this and that, and here's going to be the nature of the puzzle, so we need you to write part of that, it's got to go live at two.
And so, and so the, so I was like, Okay, and, uh, and so that's what this game was like for the first, you know, few weeks after it launched until we started to figure out the rhythm of how the players solve stuff and until we started figuring out other ways to, uh, pace out the, the, the new parts of the story and everything.
After that, it was just a really cool exploration of, of like this new way of storytelling, you know, um, yeah, yeah, it's really cool,
Alex: but it's, it's, it's interesting where it's very much that was very much. I don't know. I gotta imagine when you were, you guys were making that you had no idea if it was a, if it was gonna work.
Mm-hmm . B like, Hey, what order are people gonna find things in? Like, how do you tell this? Yeah. How do you tell a story where you have no, you have no control over how it's actually consumed? I mean, you [00:50:00] basically just have to like world, world build, you know, like out in the, on the web.
Alex Irvine: Yeah. You, you just, you, you put all this stuff out there and then you figure, um.
You know, they're going to find it all. And obviously they're going to find it all a lot faster than we thought they would. And so then we have to, you have to gate it in a certain way by, and you see this more in Isle of Bees, you have to be rigorous about how you let people unlock things. So when we were working on Isle of Bees, the first thing Sean calls me up and he was like, so here's this next thing that we're going to do.
And, and, uh, do you want in? I was like, yeah. And. So the big pre production thing for I love bees was all of us on, there were like four or five of us writers working on it and we all had to go out and call everybody we knew and get them to go walk around their neighborhoods and find pay phones that would accept incoming calls.
This is a different era, right? Like, I mean, you can ask somebody to do that now.
Alex: And I mean, okay, kids, there used to be these things like a landline just on the corner. [00:51:00]
Alex Irvine: Yeah, yeah. You put a quarter in it and you can talk to someone. And so I was like, you know, I was emailing my mom's old friends in Australia and people everywhere.
And so we, and so we got all these, uh, all these phone numbers. And so one of the ways that the game narrative was delivered there was through this radio play. And, uh, And so I love that play.
Aaron: I would listen to it. I had it on my zoo. Did you really? Yeah. And I was just thinking, dude, there
Alex: were,
Aaron: what was awesome is no one could figure out the order of them and it didn't really matter what order you listened to them in.
I loved it. It was so good. That's awesome to
Alex Irvine: hear. Yeah. I had a blast writing that. It's uh, um, so good. Yeah. And, and, uh, and so. Did you ever do the payphone thing?
Aaron: No, I was, I was reading other people would do it and you'd like, you would hear what they would like, they would, they would write out their experience.
And yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Irvine: So, so what, what would happen was when you solved, when you solve some puzzles, one of the solutions would be a set of latitude and longitude coordinates in a time. [00:52:00] And if you got to a payphone at that time. And you had a password, then you would, uh, unlock part of this radio play. And as soon as, I think, five people did it in the real world, it would go live online.
And other people could listen to it and download it and whatever else. Oh, okay, cool. Um, that's the way I remember it. This was 20 years ago, so I, I might not have all the details exactly right. Um, You can find people have uploaded it
Aaron: and have like, yeah, yeah, you can still find most of the
Alex Irvine: beast, like it's hosted on the cloud makers website.
That was the big fan. Yeah. Um, but I mean, but then people got Alex, this is back to your question of how do you know whether people are going to like, like, like it or want to do it? There was this one time where there was a hurricane coming in in Florida. And so, of course, one of our puzzle solutions, you know, was this payphone somewhere in Florida at this exact time when the hurricane is bearing down.
And sure enough, some guy solves the puzzle and is standing out there in the middle of the hurricane at a payphone, you know, like screaming the password into the [00:53:00] payphone.
Aaron: My goodness. And
Alex Irvine: I think what happened was that the actor who was supposed to be on the other side. Actually broke and said, dude, you have to go home.
You're going to die.
And anyway, you know, he survived and the game was, and, and that section of the radio play was, was, uh, was released and the whole thing went on. Um, But those, those were such a blast to work on. They were my first game experiences, you know? And so it was for, for them, it was all about like exploring, like, how do we do this?
Nobody's done this before. And, and, uh, how does it work? Uh, and it was, uh, it was so great. I loved working on those.
Alex: That's, that's super cool. I, I, um, obviously love that it, it actually happened, but just like it's its own kind of. Medium, you know, it's like, and I don't think people are really doing that so much anymore.
Alex Irvine: Not in the same way. I mean, there was a while Sean went on and, um, became a partner in this company called 42 [00:54:00] entertainment, um, him and, uh, a lot. And I think Jordan was involved in that too. Um, and they did all kinds of stuff. And now Sean is, um, he's, he's at another company that does some similar things.
So like. A lot of the stuff that people learn from ARGs has now been exported into other different kinds of hybrid, creative marketing things. But, uh, I haven't really kept up on the, on the space. Uh, yeah. So be interesting to go back and check it out. So we have,
Alex: um, uh, our community manager, Doug Zartman, who's able to turn around those projects, uh, runs.
He runs a small ARG on our discord. Oh, fun. Yeah, that's cool. You should come on over, check it out. I will. Listeners, you should come on over and check it out. There's a little plug for our,
Aaron: our dis Did you, did you work on the Nine Inch Nails one that was after the I Live? I didn't. I didn't work on
Alex Irvine: that one.
No, but Sean, I think Sean, Sean mostly did that one.
Alex: Yeah. Aaron, are you a big fan? Of the ARGs? Or [00:55:00] Nine Inch Nails? Nine Inch Nails. Nine Inch Nails. Yeah. I know you're a big fan. I know you're a big fan. Um, what's next? What's next? What's coming up next for you, Alex?
Alex Irvine: Oh, well, um, I've been working on a game that, uh, is not announced yet, that I hope will come out someday.
Um, I spent the last year and a half or so also working on that. And I've been writing a lot of fiction again. I'm in this weird spot where, you know, rivals came out and, um, and everything else I'm doing is either in super early unannounced stages or, you know, it's, uh, or it's my own personal stuff that I'm kind of fiddling around with.
So no big marketing bombshells at the moment, but, uh, yeah, brightly crazy. It's been one of the things that happens when you stop working on a project that's as big as rivals. Is that all these other things that have been building up in the back of your mind, like they all went out at once, you know, and so, uh, um, so I've been trying to, uh, to catch up on all this stuff that I have not been writing for the last five years [00:56:00] and, uh, or just trying to, it's like, it's like, you know, drinking from a firehose.
That's
Alex: not, that sounds like a good thing. Is that a good thing? Do you like, you like that where it's kind of like, okay, that big, huge thing. I'm done with that. Now I can kind of. Explore all this other stuff that's been,
Alex Irvine: yeah, yeah. It's great. I mean, I mean, that said, I'd be happy if another big thing came along, cause it's nice to get like really stuck into something and really, uh, um, get into it for a while, but, um, yeah, it's nice to be, uh, To be working on stuff that I've been wanting to work on for a while.
I liked it, you know, this past fall, I finished this kind of all ages, graphic novel called pocket guide to space monsters. And so, uh, we'll see what happens with that. And I have, I have high hopes for it and then, uh, working on a couple of other books and, you know, maybe some other game projects. So,
Alex: okay.
Are you still playing D and D?
Alex Irvine: Yes. I play D and D with my kids and my brother in law. Um, And, um, no, my brother in law always wants to DM. So, uh, so I [00:57:00] just get, I get to just play, which is fun. Um, I was,
Alex: I was going to ask if you guys are all smoking weed, but
Alex Irvine: rolling up new characters, that's an expression, Aaron.
It's, but even, even like the, every time I think of D and D honestly, I still, I associate D and D with like. Oak, because that's the, that's what the table was made out of and the sound of Steve Miller and, uh, and, and weed smoke. Those are my sense memories. My sense memories of D& D.
Alex: Okay. All right. Two out of the three there.
I'm, I'm, I'm with you on and, and, uh, you can just
Alex Irvine: Don't tell me which two. Yeah, man. He's allergic to oak. That's right. I'm
Alex: a woodworker, so. Uh, yeah. All right, Alex. Thank you so much for hanging out with us. Uh, thanks for having me. So
Alex Irvine: I really enjoyed this conversation.
Alex: Yeah, no, it's awesome. Um, and [00:58:00] man, I, we should get a chance to work together sometime.
I hope we do. Super cool. Yeah. Yeah. Let's make it happen. That'd be awesome. Yeah. All right. Well, good luck with, uh, your projects that you're coming up with next. And, um, we'll see you around.
Alex Irvine: Yes, you will.
Alex: Thanks guys. Nice meeting you. Take it easy. He's such a cool chill guy. Um, and writers usually are right?
Yeah, I had no idea that Maine is the only one syllable state It's a good trivia question Have you ever eaten there? Have you ever gone to Maine? I've never been to Maine I you know, I grew up on the East Coast and never went further north than Massachusetts. Really? Yeah I mean here is It's beautiful up there in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine.
Yeah.
Aaron: Yeah. Fun fact. Did you know that? If you're in Detroit and you go south, you end up in, like, directly south, you end up in Canada. Wait, from Detroit? Yeah, isn't that crazy? Really? Does
Alex: [00:59:00] Detroit, you have to go through Canada and then you get back to the U.
Aaron: S.? Well, it goes, like, Canada kind of dips into the U.
S. there and then goes out. Huh. I'm gonna fact check you on that. Yeah, that's cool. Fact check. You got AI now. Ask the AI. Yeah, the rider thing. I think you and I Have you ever, I think I've, I rec, I think I recommended this one to you, Stephen King's On Writing. Yes, you did recommend that to me, and it is a fan, it's an excellent read.
Yes, and he talks about this thing about writers, and every time I meet a writer, you have this like, and I, I can't remember if we talked about this during the podcast. I know it has come up before, but there is this ideal, ideology, what is it, not ideology, this idealized, like, view of writers that they're like, yeah.
Cozy and just sitting there and like, I have, I have
Alex: that idealized view of what are right. I, and I think I probably said this to him, like the writer lifestyle, like, but I mean, we're kind of living that right now. Cause we work from home, you know, we, we, [01:00:00] we can, we can work. But we can, you know, if we get into the zone and flow, we could have the headphones on and we can just jam.
And if we're like hungry, we get up and go to the kitchen and eat lunch. Yeah, that's ideal. That's not really what
Aaron: happens though. No. No. The other day I was like, why does my back hurts? Oh, I haven't stood up in three hours. You know, it's like I should probably get up and move.
Alex: Yeah, yeah, you gotta do that.
Aaron: Yeah,
Alex: there is. That's my, you know, that's my problem. I, I do get up. Pro at least once an hour. And I go to the kitchen and I eat something. So I just, yeah, that's good. No, it's not good. I'm just constantly eating. Yeah,
Aaron: you're moving , you're constantly, okay, so back to the writer thing. He, when you, when you in the book, he talks about how that, that's not real.
Like when he was, when Stephen King started his writing career, that he had crying kids in the house and like, he, it was just like chaos. He was working like, you know, tons of hours and he could only write and like, when he was [01:01:00] exhausted. So it like. He makes this argument, how that. That idealized thing is actually like, not good, like it's a bad thing or something, you know,
Alex: like it's not really the way you want it to be.
I think great comes from comfort, right? You know, it's like, art comes from pain, you know?
Aaron: Have you, have you, do you still read comics now? Are you reading any comics? I remember when we were at IT, you were reading a lot, very often. Uh, yeah.
Alex: Or it seemed like you were reading a lot. I, well, I went through, I don't know.
100, 120 issues of Walking Dead. Um, and then, Oh, really?
Aaron: Did you like it? Yeah,
Alex: I did. But you know, it kind of, it kind of got, I mean, it's, it's gross, you know, it's like, not like gross, like, but it's, you know, it's, it's gory and violent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, so I was, I remember reading that one. Why the last man I really liked, um, Saga is so, everybody likes that one.
Saga is [01:02:00] so good and if they took a break and they, they, they came back, I gotta check and see if there's new issues now, they did come back, um, really good. Um, there's a bunch, you know, um, our degenerate friend Tim Harris is, uh, has a comic book shop, so he's, uh, always making recommendations. Yeah, okay. Yeah.
Yeah, probably the last thing that I've been reading was Saga Okay, are you on anything? Is there there's got to be a good Warhammer graphic novel, right?
Aaron: No, I don't think so. What? I I haven't been yeah, you know lately this is kind of what I like about comic books Is that like, if you kind of, if there isn't anything that you want to read at the time, you know, or there isn't any, and I think there is like going to be a lot of stuff, like, I think we're in a good eight, like, I think there's going to be a resurgence, like a new golden age of, I feel it, like, I feel it's in the air, you know, and one of the things, comics and just entertainment in general, I, and I think that [01:03:00] the thing I like about him is that like, I'm playing Marvel snap and I just like, The characters.
Yeah. Like I'm doing stuff with the characters, you know what I mean?
Alex: Yeah.
Aaron: And there's something about that, and I, you know, I was, I was watching the Mr. Mc McCone McMahon documentary on Netflix. Have you seen this?
Alex: No. I'm
Aaron: not sure if Ire, it's the guy that started the WWF. Oh, okay. I know who you're talking about.
Yeah. I did not know all that stuff went down, by the way. I had, I, I didn't watch wrestling at that time. And holy moly, was it gross? But when he was gonna buy the UFC. Cause his son was like, you know, this is such a good deal, you know, um, which would have been a good deal at the time, but he didn't want to buy it because the WWF, their whole thing is they make characters.
So they make a character and that's like what he's really good at. He's really good at promoting these characters and then those characters are become products. You know, so like, you know how Spider Man it's like, [01:04:00] okay, there's a comic. Yeah. But there's more, there's movies, there's cereal, there's like t shirts, there's toys, there's stickers, there's, you know, everything.
And that's what wrestling is. It's like, it's like a comic book. And it kind of all clicked in my head, like I knew it, but I didn't really put it together. You know what I mean? That's right,
Alex: there's a whole backstory, and it's like a soap opera, but it's fighting. Yeah, yeah.
Aaron: Yeah, it's really interesting. The documentary though, I did not know all that stuff was going on.
There's an era. Of that, of that show that is so gross, dude. Yeah, it's like, that was on TV? You gotta be kidding me. Yeah, pretty interesting documentary, though.
Alex: All right, well, maybe, uh, you know, I have seen the documentary come up and, um, I thought maybe I should check it out, but It's
Aaron: very interesting.
Worth watching? Yeah. I think it is. I think there's stuff in there that I did not know. But one of my favorite things of the show is they talk about kayfabe. Which is a word I learned [01:05:00] very recently, you know, like maybe like eight years ago or something when I say recently, it's you know what I mean, like I didn't know, I'd never heard the word before.
Do you know what kayfabe means?
Alex: No.
Aaron: Okay, so kayfabe is, it's what's going on in wrestling. So it's It's a, it's a soap opera. Like you said, it really is. It's a, it's a whole theatric. They're really fighting in a way, but it's there. They're still a theatric. The people that are wrestling, they usually know who's going to win like 99 percent of the time, you know?
And then the other thing is, is that the audience. Knows that what they're watching is fake, but then they buy into the lie together and they they they like they uphold the lie as a group So there's like this and that that is everybody's
Alex: along for the ride
Aaron: Everybody's in on it. And and that word is like it actually connects to like politics and stuff, you know Like, you know, like the party could never do anything wrong, you know what I mean?
But they see it and they're kind of going along with it's very [01:06:00] 1984 in a way. It's a cool word Anyways, that, that, that, that show kind of topical.
Alex: Yeah.
Aaron: Yeah. It's really neat. It's the, and then the whole documentary is like watching an episode because Mr. Mr. McMahon is the care is the it's about him. And they kind of put you in this arc of like where he's a heel or where he's a hero, you know, and, and they, they're dragging you.
It's so, it's very well done, but it's very gross. Like you're going to feel. Kind of nasty at the end of it. It's like, man, why did that happen? I didn't know that that was
Alex: called right on All right, well, thank you everybody for joining us this week, uh, for our conversation with Alex Irvine. Hope you enjoyed it.
It was a good one. I
Aaron: did. And we'll see you next time. See you later. Thank you for listening to the Fourth Curtain Podcast. Visit us at thefourthcurtain. com to find our monthly newsletter and support the show via Patreon. The 4th Curtain Podcast is a production of 4th Curtain Media. Lovingly [01:07:00] edited by Brian Hensley of Noise Floor Sound Solutions.
Production support by May Lee with community management by Doug Zartman and art production by Paul Russell. Thanks again for listening.