Louis: [00:00:00] But it's also pretty easy to get me excited about stuff. I think that's not necessarily true of everybody. I get excited about just about anything. When we wanna do a game about the Mars Song, I get really excited about astronomy and Mars and the history and all that. So I've always told people to be a great game designer, you have to be just committed to constant learning.

'cause everything you do is gonna be a new learning experience and you just need to dive in and just go. 

Alex: That was Louis Castle, one of the founders of Westwood Studios, makers of one of my favorite games. Command and conquer, red alert. You know what, Aaron? This podcast is so awesome. We get to meet all of my heroes.

Yeah. But I love that quote Lewis talking about how you kind of gotta dive in and learn constantly because this making games is always changing. Yeah. There's always something new. 

Aaron: It's crazy. I realized that when I got really comfortable with one of the engines I was working with back in the day, and it was, you know how everybody used to make their own engines?

So it was, [00:01:00] you know what I mean, Uhhuh? Yeah. So it was one of those engines, and then I went and like in one year I went to like five different engines from like different projects, like monolith, like Lith, tech, Uhhuh. I worked on the Halo engine that same year, Uhhuh, Uhhuh and like, you know, and just bouncing.

What'd you like better? The, the Lith Tech engine 

Alex: or the Halo engine? 

Aaron: The stuff I was doing on Lith Tech is not the same I was doing on Halo, but I really enjoyed the Halo one. I remember there was, uh, it was a lot of problem solving when you were doing, I think they were called cells, where we, you would slice up the map with these like planes, so Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Remember that? Yes, I do remember that. There was one little hole, like the whole game would crash, so like, it was, it was kind of like a puzzle game. So that was really fun. Using, 

Alex: using the engine was a puzzle game. 

Aaron: Yeah, great. Lift tech was a little bit hard 'cause it was, it was animation and there was a lot of like character rigs, skeleton [00:02:00] stuff for their, we had a laser in the game and you could like dismember, which is really gross now that I think about it.

But all that stuff had to be set up. So I did that and that was really, it was very difficult. But what I wanted to say was that there was a moment where I started grumbling and I had to make this decision where like you, you have to. Be willing to put your pants on, you know, and stop crying and learn.

It's because you have to keep learning like the words. It's intimidating. 

Alex: It's intimidating. Yeah. You get into a new tool and it's like there's this learning curve. You just, you kind of gotta get over before you feel like completely useless for, you know? Yeah. A while. Like you're afraid to ask questions.

'cause you're like, I should know this. I don't wanna out myself as an idiot. Yeah. And yeah, it just very uncomfortable. But you gotta, you just, and it happens kind of now, right? Yeah. You just gotta get in there and do it. 

Aaron: Well, what's happening now too with like UGC? 'cause all the UGC, it's like working with new engines again, you know, we're working with 

Alex: Yeah.[00:03:00] 

Aaron: Roblox engine, the UEFN and other secret projects that are using other, there's nothing 

Alex: secret. There's, there's no secrets. Secrets. No secrets are all no secrets. It is amazing how far things like, uh, the Unreal engine have, have come, you know? Since Oh, yeah. Yeah. It is amazing. It's a, 

Aaron: it's the best engine, in my opinion, to just, if someone was like, Hey, that kid wants to a game.

They're, they're all great, 

Alex: Aaron. They're all great. All the engines are great. Oh my god. No secrets. 

Aaron: All engines 

Alex: are great. 

Aaron: Alex is playing the politically correct game. Would you like 

Alex: to join the, the Unreal Engine is the best. Sure. Even the 

Aaron: ROBLOX one is good too. Like someone on our team was, was like, Hey, I just did the ROBLOX onboarding thing and it's amazing.

So it's good to hear stuff like that, you know? 

Alex: Oh yeah. Yeah. 

Aaron: So, I don't know. I, it, it's, it's not the same, but you're right, like getting in there and getting your hands dirty and not grumbling is the key. 

Alex: Right. [00:04:00] Before we kick off our conversation with Louis, how you doing buddy? How you know you got the expanding house?

Are you sleeping yet? Like how 

Aaron: you look? Good. You know, last night was, yeah, the last night was the first night where I slept heavy. You know when you wake up and you feel like you weigh 3000 tons, it's every morning. That was the first night. I'm like, wow. I actually got sleep and I had to carry my daughter upstairs.

The second to last one. She was so heavy, but she only weighs like 20 pounds or whatever, you know. But it was like the heaviest 20 pounds in the universe. It's 

Alex: like a bag of potatoes. Yeah, no, I remember that. Um, yeah. And I feel I, when I wake up, I feel like a, a, a bag of, uh, rocks. You know? It's like everything's kind of creaky.

It's like nothing really kind of like, oh, I gotta get, move around and drink some coffee. And then I sort of feel like, uh, coffee, really? I do water. I feel 

Aaron: better. 

Alex: Like a lot of water. All right. Well I know you're all not here to, to, uh, to listen to our morning routine. Uh, we had a great time catching up with Louis [00:05:00] Castle.

I had no idea. He spent some time and cycles working on casino games, which is really interesting. Yeah. To hear him talk about 

Aaron: that was cool. Yeah, that was my favorite part of the interview actually. 

Alex: Yeah. His experience there and how it relates to kind of traditional game design, where the industry's going.

Really insightful. Lots of really cool stuff here. So enjoy the conversation. We'll see you on the other side.

Hello listeners and welcome to this week's edition of The Fourth Curtain and oh, what an addition it is. Today we're joined by legend. I'm gonna embarrass you Louis. Louis Castle. Check out this impressive resume here. And I did put a little extra effort in here, Louis, because I have a list of top five games of all time and it's a side mission of mine to get the folks who have brought these games to life onto this program and command and conquer is on that list for me.

Awesome. I knew you were gonna 

Aaron: say that. 

Alex: I'm just so thrilled that you're here. Co-founder of Westwood Studios. I'm gonna say that def [00:06:00] facto inventors of the real time strategy game genre. Like I said, top five game for me with command and conquer. I think you have a lifetime achievement award. I saw this on your, on your two.

Two, two Lifetime Achievement Awards, BAFTA and the BAFTA is for working with Steven Spielberg on Boom Blocks. How cool is that? 

Louis: Yeah. 

Alex: In addition to Westwood was also CEO over at Garage Games, and I don't know if you know this, but when I was at Wide Load, we made this little game called Cycl Mite. It's actually probably my favorite game.

Yeah. One of my favorites, certainly that I've ever worked on. And we published that with you guys on, on the Instant Action Platform. I'd love to kind of hear how that all 

Louis: went. Yeah. Our goal, our goal with Garage Games was to do something a little different. I can get into later if you'd like, but it was to transition to company into a, uh, into kind of a multi-pronged, uh, entertainment.

Developer. So, uh, so, but the, but the guys did a great job creating that company and I was super excited to lead it when I was, um, 

Alex: yeah, I remember coming out to, I think, were [00:07:00] you guys in Eugene 

Louis: in Oregon? Yeah. Eugene. And then the IAC bought them. We opened offices in Portland and then I tried doing that for a little while and it just was obvious that I needed to be on the ground a little bit more often.

And for recruiting, I had a bunch of folks that I could get into Vegas, so we ended up moving the company to Vegas. I offered everybody in Eugene if they were willing to relocate and if we could work remotely to keep their jobs. Some, some we're 

Alex: still, we're still in the intro, but I gotta ask real quick, how many, what percentage of folks who lived in Portland said, yes, I will come and live in Las Vegas, 

Louis: mostly Eugene at the time.

And Eugene, Eugene, before you, before you answer, before you answer, let's say about half, something like that. I don't remember the exact number, but half 

Alex: I wanted Aaron to do the over under. You said half, huh? 

Aaron: Yeah, the over under. Well, I, I have a question on the intro. Do you have a nightmare on Elm Street on there?

Louis: Nightmare Street is definitely on there. I I did the splash spring on that one. So if you open up a nightmare on Elm Street, on the, uh, God, was it then by pc? It was a PC game. Okay. To know eight bit. I don't know. But definitely PC for sure because I remember [00:08:00] having to do the graphics to make the, the Freddie Kruger.

Uh, I was still the art director for the studio to kind of default to a art director 'cause we didn't really have one. So, and I also contributed still doing artwork back then, so I did artwork and technical direction all the way until like, kind of late nineties. So. 

Alex: Right on. All right. Also involved in Blade Runner.

Blade. Runner 

Louis: also had, um, I have six game of the years in different categories, so I don't know if any of them were overall game of the years, but, um, one was, um, I the beholder then I think do, do, might've gotten one, but I don't, I don't count that one. But, um, definitely command and conquer the Lion King, blade Runner, geez, I'm trying to remember the other ones now.

But anyways, it's six foot, so boom blocks Baby, uh, boom Blocks was another one. 'cause it got the bh Yeah, that was Family of the Year and might have been, I don't think it was June. I'm, I'm trying to learn out with the other one, but, but, but, uh, but tallied them up one time 'cause I had to build my little bio and my business buyer says I'm famously too humble.

So wait, 

Alex: so try to get, alright, we'll fix that. We. Okay. And we didn't even get to sort [00:09:00] of like, I don't know, I don't know which act you would put Zynga and Amazon, but you've been an exec at both of those companies as 

Louis: well. Yeah, I was vice president of studios for Zynga. I was the, uh, head of studios, uh, for Amazon for four years.

I've been a chief product officer and a, so just an incredible journey and range of experiences there. Yeah, the audit chair for a public company. I've got some very strange little bits to throw into the, uh, to throw into the resume audit company. I was an audit chair for a casino, worldwide casino gaming supplier casino.

Alex: Now, is that as high pressure as it 

Louis: sounds? Um, it's a strange industry because it moves at a glacial pace. I mean, you know, the, it really is incredible. Um, uh, but at the same time, you're always under a lot of intense pressure. There's a lot of very stiff, stiff regulations. There's a lot of, uh, kind of different kinds of pressure than, than video game development.

Uh, so it's a very challenging industry when people, I know that when [00:10:00] game designers try to trivialize things like slot machines, I said, let me give you a game design challenge. You're gonna make a game that has one button and you're gonna keep people entertained for hours and so much so that they're willing to pay you money to try it.

And it's not easy. That is not easy. Yeah. 

Alex: Yeah. Somebody introduced me to a book that they would study over at Machine Zone. And Machine Zone actually is a term machine that comes from the slot machine industry. Yeah. Which describes the, uh, addictive, it's, I think it's called Addictive by Design. Maybe that's the name of the book.

The book, uh, 

Aaron: yeah. It, it is Addiction by Design Machine Zone. Machine Gambling. Yeah. 

Louis: We don't, we don't see addiction in, in the casino gaming industry. It is a, you know, yeah. Probably. Well of the compulsion disorder, not an addiction. It's an important distinction, but that's a separate topic. 

Alex: But the book is fascinating.

The book was written by a psychologist, basically, you know, and it was almost like a PhD thesis on, you know, how effective game design can be and, and sort [00:11:00] of influencing behavior. And when you put it that way, hey, design a game's got one button. Yeah. That's got people planted in a chair for hours and it incentivize them to just spend money constantly.

That is 

Louis: nuts. And they, and they lose over time. So even the ones you could argue, well, I have a chance of winning, but nobody's that dense to realize after playing the same game. And many people will play the same game many, many times a a week for years. And there's no way they know they don't lose, they know that.

But it's the dopamine responses and it's about carefully pacing out the rewards. That's really difficult because you have to intentionally dumb down some of the graphics so that they're not too exciting, so that when they do have a, a win or a big win and you have to create all this stuff. And another thing that's really interesting from a game design point of view is the game is essentially not exactly stateless, but similar to that because you can walk away at any time and you can step up to it at any time.

So you can't keep track of it could, as individual players at least you couldn't back then. Oh yeah, yeah. An individual player, spouse who, or, so anything you wanna build in there, like bonus routes and things like that have to all be [00:12:00] based on probability and coming out over time versus something that is, is measuring people's, um, progress.

Like you can't even look at the previous. Game state to do the next state. 

Alex: Yeah. 

Louis: So it's really very challenging. Yeah. What 

Alex: do you think of the ethics there? I was gonna ask the same thing coming from like Yeah. You know, traditional games and then then going into casino games. Did you sit and say to yourself, how do I feel about 

Louis: Yeah, a lot.

Um, I'm, I'm really disappointed in the video game industry 'cause they have no ethics at all.

It's true. I'm not gonna pick any brands 'cause I don't wanna insult my, my peers, but the reality is the stuff that we do in the video game industry would never pass gaming regulation. They would, would just, they would ask really marvel over it. Expand on that, because that's, that's fascinating to hear.

Well, no, we do stuff in video games where we'll say, oh. This person, like in the beginning of a tui, we go, wow, you know, this person's not doing that well, let me juice the odds a little bit so that it looks a little bit better. So I keep them around. You know, there's a thing called a near miss [00:13:00] in, uh, slot machines where if the slot machine lines up it, it'll put a near miss on the bottom so that you feel like you've got close to getting a jackpot that is actually illegal in casino gambling.

But they do it in the video slots. Yeah. For video games all the time. So there's all these, all these techniques that are much more abusive and much more compulsive, I wouldn't say addictive. 'cause that's, that's a different kind of class. I'm not trying to cut errors, but it actually is different. So the compulsion, compulsion loops in video games are unrestrained and there's no regulation on 'em whatsoever.

And I'm not saying most actors are that way. Most of our video game people are, are more responsible and ul ultimately, if you want long-term customers, you, you don't want rage quitters, then you definitely should be responsible. But there is nobody regulating it. So, um, it's much more ethical in the casino gaming side because there's all this.

Uh, regulation and make sure you don't break the rules along those lines. And the rules are pretty reasonable. And then there's a, a big effort for people who do have a problem of reaching out and dealing with it, and there's no such thing in video games. 

Alex: That is, that is fascinating. And I've, I've been curious from time to time here how those rules in [00:14:00] casino gaming are enforced now that, you know, the industry has moved from mechanical devices to software devices, and I gotta imagine it's all the software, all the softwares 

Louis: review, you have to submit it to the gaming authorities and they review every line of code.

They review every 

Alex: line of code. 

Louis: Wow. Interesting. Are you doing this now? Is this what, what No, no, I did. I was on the board. Um, because I was into video games and video technologies, I was asked to join the board of Shuffle Master when they were looking into getting into digital technologies with, um, the machines and casinos basically for, you know, physical machines, but with software running them.

And while I was on the board, I became the, ultimately became the audit chair after being the audit chair and, um, being the lead that hired the CEO and the CFO for that matter, they asked me to come on board and be the chief strategy officer to build the digital gaming division. So I stepped out of the video game industry for about a year and a half.

But I was still contracting with some video game companies, so there was never been a, a, at least more than a quarter that I've not been making video games. Uh, did a good job. You know, we created, uh, the team created an amazing, uh, set of technologies to [00:15:00] deliver our table games and slot machines around the world to gain suppliers and ultimately allowed the company to get sold for $1.3 billion.

So, um, it was, it was a success. So it was just a little bit, yeah. Yeah. Congrats for the shareholders. I, there's a whole long story about that I did. Okay. But the big shareholders make a lot of money. Well, 

Alex: when, when, when it's measured in billions, lots of people will do. Okay. So 

Louis: yeah. Great. Executives do.

Okay. Yeah. The, yeah, the, the right people got the, the most, and there's a few of us that had to kind of take it in the shorts 'cause we were probably a little bit more aggressive, but whatever. That's okay. 

Alex: All right. Well that's a super interesting experience there. Um, but let's rewind, let's, let's kind of go in the the way back machine a little bit.

Sure. And when I was poking around online, looking at your Wikipedia and all that kind of stuff, and you mentioned it during the intro too, I was surprised. I didn't know that you were, at least you have credits that are like art. 

Louis: Yeah, 

Alex: lots of Did, did you uh, yeah. Are, so, are you, are you an artist? Are you artistic and do you have hard [00:16:00] That's why I got into 

Louis: the industry.

I, I started as, uh, fine arts and computer science, um, in the university. And we started Westwood in 85. So it was two years after I'd started, uh, college and actually how I got into video games in 82, 83 before I even graduated high school, I was into our architecture and I was looking to get an architectural degree.

Uh, I got a, got a personal computer 'cause I felt like they were gonna be really important in architecture. And I started doing hard work on computers and I found it really fascinating because I. If you're a fine artist, one of the most difficult things to do is to come up with a new idea because there's just so many people who have done art over the hundreds and hundreds of years.

And so everything, every time you think you have a new idea, you find out somebody who died already did that. You know, it's really fun with video games because like, there weren't any artists who use computers 'cause that just wasn't done yet. And even then you'll find somebody who did. So your idea, you know.

But, um, but, uh, that's how it started. And, um, a couple of my friends were like, we've started a video game company. And, um, I was, you know, I, I started getting into programming. One of my, one of my, uh, uh, [00:17:00] somebody I ended up hiring later had said to another friend, they said, yeah, you know, that Louis, he's, he's really ambitious about programming, but you know, he is really just an artist, so he's probably not gonna get around with.

So I ended up being the assembly language programmer in the beginning of the early Westwood days. And I wrote, um. I wrote our operating systems, I wrote our video ion tools. I wrote our speech recognition, speech synthesis tools. Um, so yeah, no, I got into both the art and it's computer science stuff pretty deep.

Wow. Many of the early Westwood games had my art in exclusively, or at least in part in the games. Um, once Rick Park joined our company, uh, we certainly leaned on Rick as much as possible to set the goal. But even games like Dragons Strike where Rick did the vast majority of the art, I still have a couple art pieces that are in there too.

Alex: That's, that's awesome. You're like vo triple threat. You are like, you've got the art talent and the code and you got a head for business too. Nvo, 

Louis: yeah. The design, design art, business finance programming. Yeah. Now, the only thing I, I really don't do is audio. You have a [00:18:00] VO 

Aaron: credit though? Yeah. 

Louis: Yeah, there's a few.

Um, we only a VO credit. I actually, um, before we had, uh, the great, you know, Paul Mutter and people like that to do, and Frank Acky to do our great audio and dw uh, Dwight Koha, those guys did. It was just so, such great work. But before we had them on board, the way I used to do audio for our games was I wrote the audio programs, the audio players, because the players that were out there just weren't that great yet.

And, um, I went down to the university, I pulled the sheet music for famous, um, music that was in the public domain. So we would pull the piece. I've learned to read sheet music well enough to convert it into the Hertz signals. And then I would actually, you know, literally hand type in the, uh, envelopes to create the music for the games.

So if the, if that qualifies as audio chops? I think so. Yeah. No, definitely not exactly really being a composer or anything like that. I don't, I don't clean that skill. 

Alex: Yeah. That's like, um, do you know Eugene Jarvis. Of course. Yeah. So Eugene was telling us, um, when he first started working at Midway, he was doing something similar, whereas he was [00:19:00] coding, like hard coding, you know, audio.

Well, you 

Louis: had to, you had to even the graphics back in the day for the Apple Games. Um, I used to have a big piece of glass, one millimeter graph paper, and I would sit there with, um, the little tiny video graph, pens, uh, pens. I would write in, I would scribble in or draw the, draw the picture, draw the character with, with pencil with blue line, and then go in and til it with black.

And then with a ruler landed up against it, I would hand and code the hexa decal off to the side and then type that in. That's how we used to do the graphics back in the day for things like, um, I think maybe even as long as the Disney games when we did alphabet chase, I think 

Alex: they, they should make the kids who are going to school now, they should make them do that exact thing.

Louis: Well, I don't know. I mean, it's, it's kind of a weird. I really love the tools nowadays. It's so fun that you can just drop into a, into a, a, an editor and put something together quickly and slot me, get a Prosecco. And that's really amazing. Like, that's, that's so far beyond, we didn't have art tools. Like literally the first, one of the first tools I used to write was, uh, we had paddles.

We didn't have mice, um, or joystick. Well, we had joysticks. They were like fiddly. So I have two paddles, [00:20:00] and you would use the paddles one for the x one for the Y axis. One button would draw, one button would erase, um, on the apple, because every pixel is basically just a bit. And then you, you would hit the space bar to shift between a high button a little bit.

So you'd have either, um, blue and orange or green and violet. And so you'd go through and you, I would sit there with these things and I would draw pictures, like, and basically it's Nche sketch. Oh, wow. So people would come in and I'd be drawing this thing and they'd be like. How the hell are you doing that?

I go, it's, it weirdly, you learn it really fast. Yeah. And um, in fact, Rick Parks, again, I have to brag, brag on Rick. He was such an amazing artist. He would do caricatures on an actual etches sketch and leave it in the office. Um, and Oh wow, amazing. They were so good and he loved it. He said, I love it. 'cause they're, if I screw up or something, I just shake it.

I'm like, oh, photos of all of those. 

Alex: That's incredible. That's incredible. Yeah, no, no doubt. The tools today are awesome, but like, I think there's definitely, there's something to be said for like assembly language programming like that, what you're talking about in coding Hex values for [00:21:00] pixel art. It's like, just like associating the creativity with the actual mechanics of the computer is, I think it's really good.

Interesting to understand how it, it all works, you know? 

Louis: Yeah. Well it's special effects and materials tech artists. Yeah. A tech artist is basically exactly what I was when I started. Um, you know, but, but there wasn't, there wasn't enough work on any of your project to be a full-time check artist. You had to do other stuff, so.

Alex: So you, I didn't catch whether, you said you, you basically started making games two years after you started college or ended college, like No, I 

Louis: started making my first game attempt, well actually my first published game, if you wanna call it, that was when I, um, I used to send in, I try to do a game a month, um, in basic code with, uh, sending language that was in data tables.

Um, I would send 'em into magazines 'cause that's how you published small games back then. Kind, we would call 'em Hacker Casual games now. And so you would send 'em into magazines and people would type in the code and run it on their computers because a lot of people didn't have Cass drives or dis drives to actually bring data off and there was no way to distribute them.

So I used to send 'em into a magazine to one called Apple [00:22:00] Orchard and they published my, I probably set I know four or five pretty terrible games to them. Uh, but finally they published one in 1982, I think it was March of 82 was the first game I ever got published. I got my three bucks for, or something like that.

So, um, technically that was a. Ping paid to make a game. So I call that my first commercial game. There you go. I kept trying to do that for the next few years, but I was constantly distracted because I was doing some artwork for a company Intel called Unicorn Software, and I was doing my own projects where I was trying to do, um, very large called half screen, um, animations of a character di similar to Dirk, the daring when he is running down the corridor of Dragon's Lear and the gates are falling.

So I thought, oh, would it be cool if you were in a dungeon and he was running and the blocks were coming at you? And now, okay, this is 1983 on an Apple tube. Like there was nothing like this, right? So, um, that's the stuff I was doing and it, it was all double buffered with, um, uh, deferred rendering. And so there's all sorts of shit that nowadays it would be old hat, but back then, uh, cutting in, not, not that hadn't been [00:23:00] invented, but it would've been invented by PhDs and there.

Never practicing. Complicated applied. Sorry. 

Alex: And, and where were, where were you in Las Vegas? 

Louis: Yeah. No, I was born, raised in Las Vegas. I've always had this as my primary residence. Um, although I've had, uh, apartments in various places where I've worked for companies where I pretty much lived there and visited Vegas.

And my wife would live in Vegas and visit me wherever I was. So, you know, San Francisco, London, um, Seattle, LA once, San Francisco, actually twice. So even New York. So I've been in other places as well. 

Aaron: You're in, you're 

Louis: in 

Aaron: Las Vegas right now? I'm 

Louis: right now, yeah. It's my where, my home. 

Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. I like Las Vegas.

Like if you go out from the strip, there's a lot of nice little Yeah. Pop up neighborhoods. And 

Louis: when I was growing up in Vegas, people don't realize this, but in Vegas, um. It was a cowboy town. So when I was growing up, the right around the corner from my house, less than a mile away, was ranch estate, where people had horses and sometimes a little livestock, but mostly just horses.

And you would just be able to walk over And, uh, we had El Dorado Day parades and people dressed up in cowboy outfits. And at the same time you had the rat pack down on [00:24:00] the, on the strip. So it was kind of like, uh, kinda like a Palm Springs vibe down on the strip. And then the rest of the town was either the Mormon kind of influence, very conservative or, uh, cowboys.

Um, and so it was very, very different. So I watched the city change from that, all the way to lean into kind of the entertainment method is now. And as it grew, the, um, the, the companies that built the suburbs were very much like the Irvine Company. I don't think they actually did Howard Jews and, um, the, the corporation and all those guys.

So they basically built Southern California in, in Las Vegas. So the suburbs of Las Vegas are very, very similar to Southern California or even some areas in Phoenix. Huh. 

Alex: Yeah, PA I didn't know 

Louis: that either. When I went there it was like, whoa. It was beautiful. Las Vegas is kind of a cool town and Vegas has some great outdoorsy stuff 'cause I was always an outdoorsy.

Yeah. The Red Mountains or what is it called? The Red Rock. And I used to climb rock. Yeah. Free climb all those rocks at Red Rock now where they have rock routes and all these warning signs that you might kill yourself. I used to just scramble those all the time. We have a mountain that's, um, almost 11,000 [00:25:00] feet that's within a 30 or 40 minute drive called Mount Charleston and Lee Canyon, a ski resort.

You can literally go snow skiing one day. It's not the greatest, but it's okay. And then you can, um, go water skiing the next day at Lake Mead. I mean, it's, it's a pretty crazy town for a lot of things. People just don't realize if you get out and about. 

Alex: Yeah. I Marty 

Aaron: lives 

Alex: there, by 

Aaron: the way. What's that, Marty from 

Alex: Mar Marty O'Donnell.

Yeah. Guy.

I think it was a spring break trip where we drove to Zion and we stopped in Vegas and took in a show and, and I took the whole family on a little side trip to the Hoover Dam. Oh yeah. Fun stuff. And this, this is now part of our family's apocryphal, you know, stories of this. It's a classic dad trip, but he was miserable except for me.

I loved it. 

Louis: Yeah. Engineering Marvel, it really is. Yeah. There's some 

Alex: really cool stuff there. Like if, yeah. Yeah. It's incredible. All right, so back back to you Lewis and games. Let's talk about the dam. I, I guess I was, I [00:26:00] was kind of meandering around. Did you graduate college? 

Louis: I didn't, no. Um, I spent, yeah, I, five years at university, see Alex, sorry, I University, um, pursuing fine arts at computer science.

Um, at the time they didn't offer the, the way, the way it would've worked is I would've finished my computer science degree and then had my MFA in the very next semester. Uh, but I had, we had just, we had seven employees at Westwood at that point. We were doing pretty well as a company. And, um, between, I.

Westwood Butch was a startup company. It takes all of your time, you know, I was still doing consulting on the side for some of the clients I had had when I was a salesman. I was still selling computers on the weekend. Um, and I had just done, um, 18 credit hours of, uh, upper division courses, four, 400 level courses, and got a 4.0 and I said, you know, I'm gonna die.

This is just too much. And so I, I had to cut something and I said, I'll always get back to school if I need to. It's only two semesters to finish it out, but I just never went back. Do you ever, do you ever think about, 

Alex: you know, 

Louis: yeah, I mean, I, there was a couple years [00:27:00] probably I. When we were acquired by Virgin in, in 92, I was, um, I, I went and spoke at the university a couple of times and they were like, why don't you come back for an MBA, we'll give you the honorary bachelor's degree.

And I go, yeah, I don't want an honorary degree. Thanks. I appreciate it. But you know, they would say, they would nominate me for it, what I gotten, and I don't know. But, but ultimately I'm like, nah, if I wanted, want the degree, I'll just earn it. I'll go get it. You know? Um, and uh, I thought I'd go back and finish that, but then things started happening, um, that now to put you, that's 19 93, 19 94.

So we're start, we're starting to talk about, you know, doing two, being successful, and, um, you know, I'm working on, I got a chance to work on Blade Runner. We're working on Monopoly, we're doing, um, blank King. I just, I just didn't have time. Just couldn't do it. 

Alex: Yeah. Okay. All right. That makes sense. All right, so Westwood, so Westwood, you were making games and submitting them to the magazines and things on your on site.

Oh, that's before 

Louis: Westwood. Yeah. So 

Alex: Westwood, but like with Westwood, your first like. 

Louis: Yeah, sure. I'll give you a little quick, the quick history. I'll try to be brief, but brevity is not my skill by, there's not my virtue, but I'll try. [00:28:00] Um, so the podcast, you don't have to 

Alex: be brief. 

Louis: Perfect. Love it. So the first things we did, I did personally was I did this magazine games where I was trying to make a game a month in.

When I got together with a bunch of friends, we tried a little company called Out of the Blue where I was just a programmer and artist. That one didn't work out. So it, but still counts as a trial for a trial run for a startup, at least being involved. And 

Aaron: then, can I, can I interrupt you there with the magazine a month?

What does that mean? We're trying to do a magazine a month. 

Louis: Oh. Trying to do a game for, for a magazine a month. Yeah. Trying to do a new, as a company, 

Aaron: you would 

Louis: submit it? No, it was just me personally. I was just trying to write a game, submit it to a magazine, get it published once a month. Uh, that was the goal.

And there were probably a couple, three months in a row that I could actually get that done. Most of the time it took three, two or three months to get something finished I could submit. Um, and I think I might have actually ended up with, I. Half a dozen or a dozen total. There weren't that many. The first one was called Squam.

It was basically a, um, snake surround game. That was the very first one. Let's see. So then what we outta the blue, I was, we were doing a graphics adventure game based on the holy grail. Um, [00:29:00] and then that didn't really go anywhere. And then one time I was at the store and, uh, I was working on, I. Some graphics for a local computer company called Unicorn Software Kids Games.

One of the program, one of the guys that, that came into the store all the time and ended up working there, Barry, who was our very first employee, he had said, Hey, would you do some graphics for me? Because I wanna have these little creatures animate and I, they just don't look good. They looked like a mess.

And so I animated these creatures and, you know, it was like 16 by 16 pixels. But, but they were super happy with the, the kind of, the quality of the movement and all that. And it does make a big difference. If you have an artist or an animator do even pixel art, it, it makes a big difference. Right. You know, because they understand movement.

So, uh, so that's what sort of started off my, my work in the, in local industry. I worked on some slot machine games with the a CT and stuff, and Brett Berry came in the store, wanted to print out, and I said, well, you can't print 'em out in the store, but I gotta printer at home, so just come over to my house tonight.

We'll print 'em out. We started talking. He said, I'd really like to start a company, um, and just start working on stuff. So we, we joined together. Um, we really didn't have a name or anything, but we started working together on [00:30:00] projects and we did three or four games for, um, a CT that were put together with Epics and EP YX, not AP IICX.

And, and then we, um, we did some stuff like fast lower cartridges. One, probably one of the first technical marbles that I did was a cartridge that you would put into a Commoner 64 that would allow you to load games faster. And the way it worked is it used compression basically. Uh, and then I, because I did that work later on, our color 64 games, I used the Dis Drive Pro processor as a, as a co-processor.

So way back in the day I was writing a Multiprocessor Pro processes in assembly language. So, uh, anyways, long story short, we, we ended up going through. During those games, Brett and I finally ended up breaking out on our own. We did our first game for Epics called Temple Abstract Trilogy, which was a remake of the, uh, John Freeman games from Freefall Associates.

And we did those for the Macintosh. And the funny little story there, we, we went in to have that meeting. Everything was impersonal on phone calls. We walked outta the office and uh, Brett goes, uh, you know, he said, well, you told him we could work on a make a [00:31:00] Macintosh and we could program a Macintosh. And I go, yeah, I got it.

And I go, he goes. You know how to program on the Mac. I go, eh, how hard can it be? Right? So, so we took the job, we got the Jack and I learned how to program on Mac, and it's fif 1700 pages of inside Macintosh. So it turns out it was a lot harder than I thought, but kind of my, if I had to have a, a, a eulogy on my tombstone, it's like, you know how hard, hard can, how hard can it be?

It's sort of like beer. It's eight 

Alex: 68,000, right? 68,000 assembly. Is that what, 

Louis: 68,000 assembly? Yeah. Uh, so you're going from 65 0 2 to 68,000. Phil. Very luxurious. Um, and the MAC was actually a, a, a, a joy to program. Once you understood Pascal and you understood how the interfaces all worked, the APIs were great.

Apple's very clean. I sold Apple computers. I mentioned that earlier, but I don't think it's on recorded. But I was, um, the salesman for Apple computers. I was the top salesman by hours worked, um, for, for one of the periods. I think they were quarterly for the entire West coast. That included, um, California, which was really extraordinary.

Um. And this the same or the next? The next quarter. Barry Green was our first employee, was the best by [00:32:00] volume. So the Century 23 had two great salesmen who were very technical guys. And I think probably that that had something to do with it because hobbyists were coming in and we knew our shit. Right. We could, we could tell 'em exactly, um, why they would want a computer.

One, one can over another computer. So Temple Map Trilogy. I did all the artwork for that. I did. All the programming. Brett did the game design and we made it real time. We remade the game instead of being turn base to be real time and Epic was freaking out. They said, oh my God, people will never be able to play this.

You need to be turn based, you know, the role playing games can't be real time. So, um, so we had to go back and retrofit it to make it all turn based to the original game. Uh, then years later, of course we put out call. I had the beholder, which was a realtime roleplay game with the d and d rules. Much more complex than what we did for Temple.

Of course, it was a huge hit. So that was kind of westwood's monikers. We took a lot of things like strategy games and made them realtime, realtime strategy. Right. Uh, back then. There was kind of a strong divide. Things that were serious and took a lot of [00:33:00] contemplative work were considered unplayable. If you put any kind of timer on it, timer clocks on chess games weren't really popular.

And then things that were really entertaining in, in people's minds couldn't be that complicated. And we were like, yeah, let's just fry those brain cells. Let's just go make it, let's go make people think really, really hard and fast, you know? And so that was kind of what Westwood did across the board.

Even in our venture games, we put a lot of, um, kind of action based pieces. 

Aaron: We'll be right back if you like, what you're hearing, like, and follow the show wherever you get your podcasts. Hey listeners, it's Alex from the Fourth Curtain and Darren here. We wanna give a quick shout out to the team at hi Vibe pr.

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They've helped us at Look North World, level up our messaging, connect to the right audiences, and stay ahead of the curve in this [00:34:00] ever changing industry. 

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Alex: give 'em a look.

You won't regret it. 

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Alex: Joining the IGDA is a great move for your career and as a nonprofit supporting everyone making games. It's a great move for the whole community. Join today and now. Back to the [00:37:00] show. I'm listening to you tell the, the story of these formative years and all the different things you were doing and how much of yourself you're putting into each of them.

Each of them all like all the stuff and, oh yeah. Would you think of yourself as a grinder? 

Louis: Yeah, I mean, I, I think I'm, um, well, I'm definitely a DHD, there's no question about that. And, you know, you know, people that are on the spectrum, ADHD are either hopelessly distracted until they have some sort of caffeine or something, and then, then they end up like, uh, darting around and if they fixate on something, they fix it on, so they fixate on something really aggressively.

So that's really me. I don't know if I'm a grinder as much as, um, I, I have a, I have an idea and I'm relentless in just pursuing that idea. So in that sense, I'm a grinder. Um, so, but, but it's also pretty easy to get me excited about stuff. I think that's not necessarily true of everybody. I get excited about just about anything that when we wanna do a game about the Mars Song, I got really excited about astronomy and Mars and the history and all that.

So [00:38:00] I've always told people to be a great game designer, you have to be. You have to be just committed to constant learning. 'cause you're gonna, everything you do is gonna be a new learning experience and you just need to dive in and just go, right. Uh, when you're working on somebody's franchise, you need to be the best fan of that franchise.

You need to work so damn hard to catch up to people that have devoted lives to, to following it. Otherwise you just won't have that authenticity. Yeah, that's true. 

Alex: Yeah. 

Louis: So like, we did Supercycle, right? I, I, I had a dirt bike when I was a kid, even though I wasn't supposed to. And I, you know, long since given up a motorcycle racing or motorcycle driving.

And then we had the opportunity to do supercycle for the, um, for the Omega and the st. And I was like, well, I. I'll ride it. But of course then the first thing I did was go out on a track and drive ride a hundred, 500 a minute interceptor, which was fricking amazing. I was like, I almost bought a bike, but I would've had to get a divorce at that point.

Why wasn't gonna have that? Uh, but so like while we're working on world Games, um, I programmed two of the Games of World Games and I wrote Supercycle all in the same six months span. And to do [00:39:00] that, I had to do something pretty extraordinary, which was actually, it was for tip of the abstract trilogy on the Omega.

The intuition was, uh, although really I think really well written at the end of the day, the documentation was just terrible and a lot of stuff was. Translate poorly translated Japanese. And so I decided early on that to get Temple of abstract trilogy working, it would be better since most of it was 68,000 anyways, to just have our own operating system.

So I basically booted intuition and ran our own operating system and then, um, directly programmed the drivers for the chips, for Agnes and all that. 'cause I had taken electrical engineering and had, could follow the chip designs well enough and play around with them enough to get things. So we were weird in the day, early days of our Omega and St games because, um, we wrote everything on the Omega and we took advantage of those chips really, really extensively.

So it was up to Barry to try to emulate some of that stuff on the, um, on the Atari. So basically I wrote my own operating system for the, for the, a various very simplified operating system for the media. And then wrote an interpreter that would create the gems based, um, tool, which was [00:40:00] basically at, uh, Atari T'S graphics interface, user, user graphic graphics will user interface, their gooey.

And so Barry could write in gems and new minimal assembly and I would actually write all the underlying code. So anyways, that led, that led to, that's a lot. Yeah, then I, I met the Supercycle a few years later, like two years later. Um, maybe the same year, I guess two years from when we started Supercycle.

Um, the game ran in the interrupt, so it ran in 60 frames a second, and then the graphics engine was all decoupled from it, so it was variable. Oh, 

Alex: wow. So in the space between frames, it would run all the game logic and then it just be ready to bl a frame, like, yeah, and 

Louis: I treated the interrupt as like A GPU basically, or no, sorry, like A CPU and then the actual CPU.

Basically all it did was draw, so it would have a game state, it would calculate the game state, put the pixel on the screen as fast as it possibly could, and then update the next game state. So when you went around the corners and there were lots of things happening, it, the, the frame rate would drop to 2015 frames a second, and then when you turn around and went on the straightaways with just things going by, especially if there were, um, incidents, [00:41:00] it would run back up to 50 or 60 frames a second.

And so there's something I learned early in my career, it was because psychologically when lots of things are happening, your brain is not processing as well. You tend to wanna look at things where, where you're under control to see frame rate. So people raved about the frame rate, not realizing that the frame rate was incredibly variable doing 

Alex: right, because they were distracted.

I I, well, what I'm, what I'm picking up Louis, is that you, there's no half measures for you. You're like, all in all the way something doesn't exist, you're gonna write it. What, what game is this? 

Louis: This is called Supercycle. Um, Supercycle. It's not on the Wiki. It was on the Omega And the S team were the ones that I did.

Yes, I found it. Okay. What year was this? Geez, I 

Alex: wanna say 86 all. We're still in the eighties. We're still, yeah, we're still in the 

Aaron: eighties. Almost like in the 2000, like, what are you doing now? I'm like, what is he doing now? 

Louis: So, 

Aaron: I'm doing right 

Louis: now, um, is really interesting. I think I, I'm not, I'm not pitching by the way, I don't like to pitch from cast, but, but I'm working on allowing players to use generative [00:42:00] AI to change game experiences.

Uh, so the game that I'm working on is a strategy game, not surprising with the history of Command and Conquer and War Commander on that, but it's, um, it's a, uh, very accessible, very deep strategy game. So people would probably call it. Like light or midco, but the underlying systems are incredibly dense.

They're just as dense as any strategy I've ever made. But I like the fact that games like US Pokemon Go where, which great Dan did, uh, where you can play this game very casually and not realize that underneath the hood there's a breeding system and all sorts of really great systems. And so I really like that.

In fact, more commander implemented a lot of that. So I'm working on a game that's a strategy team like that. And the idea that I had around, um, generative ai, I know there's a lot of, uh, there's a lot of kind of people drawing battle lines around it, which I think is silly. It's just a technology like anything else that can be used for good or bad.

But I, what I like about gen AI is the fact that we can empower players to be more creative and create a lot of their cosmetics and let them express their creativity that way. And so I want to create a game that has real meat, real bones to it, but then let the flesh, let the sizzle be something that players can [00:43:00] set up.

So, um, and it's running with a, a technology that was based on the stuff we did for Blade Runner. So it's, um, running some really crazy high frame rate, um, graphics that, uh, you know, eight millisecond updates on a mobile phone with graphics that are Oh, wow. 

Alex: As dancing. Awesome. Is, is this, um, do you have a studio or are you doing this with an existing, I'm 

Louis: just starting a new studio called Childlike Wonder Games.

Which was the, the name my, uh, my, my wife. Said, I submit it because I always talk about making games with those childlike wonder moments. So if I go back to The Lion King, I think the two childlike wonder moments was when he went from the first level, which was the pride lands to the I can't wait to be King.

The game completely changed visually, stylistically, the music changed just like the film did at that time. And then you think, okay, I'm, I've done that was it, that was the surprise. 'cause now you go back to a couple levels that feel kind of re not repetitive, but um, reflective of the first one. And then all of a sudden you get to the, the, the will base run.

And now you're running in 3D with Simba running at the camera like a, like a cha like case, uh, like a chase cam, basically out, [00:44:00] not a chase stand, but with the cameras in front of you looking thing and the will be coming from behind you. And like that had never been done before. And then that was the idea.

Then halfway through the game you think, okay, I've seen it all. And suddenly now you're the adult lion and it's an. Not just Lion King, but I could do, I could describe this on every game I've ever done. Blade Runner. You're watching the CG intro and you're going, okay, this is cool. It looks really good.

It's full screen audio video cg. Like, that's crazy. Nobody's doing that. And all of a sudden, you know, the cursor comes up and the character's standing there. You're like, you have this moment, this moment of just sort of freaking out, going, wait, what? And you click on the screen, the character starts walking around.

You go, oh my God, this looks like a cut scene. And it's a game. You know? So those childlike wonder moments, that's what I'm excited about. I wanna create those moments for people. And I think love that. The joy you get when you create something with generative ai and the feeling of creativity is awesome.

Um, it's just, it has almost no utility. So, so I wanna give utility to those things you create. That's cool. All right. So yeah. Something crazy again. Yeah. 

Alex: Yeah. I love that. And your high [00:45:00] level game pitch sounds super cool. Can't wait to see it. But if we go back to like, I. I don't know, I kind of really curious about the years around like Dune two and Command and Conquer and just like where the industry was, where you were.

Yeah, like what it was like when this new genre, I mean, I don't know what the last new genre really to kind of hit games, uh, is maybe we could say Battle Royale was the last big genre to probably call 

Louis: that, call that a game mode of a first person shooter. Yeah. Yeah. But like, I think genres, um, I mean there's some like mugs, I think you could call that a genre.

It was derivative of RTS for sure. 'cause it was, you know, built on, um, filter. 

Alex: But what was it like back in, back in those that, that like, 

Louis: when was thing? Okay, so I think people misunderstand this like, so Hills Far was probably a new genre. It just never became a thing. You know, blade Runner was a, uh, a simulated, um, adventure game with, with agents like that.

I wish I had AI back then. It would've been awesome. Right. But yeah. But this, these are [00:46:00] Westwood back then. Um. Even roleplaying games in some some extent, realtime roleplay games just weren't done before. So time and time again, Westwood was creating something that might become an entire genre, and sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't.

Uh, but we definitely created, I mean, the game monopoly to taking simple board games and adding 3D graphics to them, and, um, basically could, you could write your own AI in, in Monopoly, in, in a, in the, in any file, these kind of ideas. They weren't, they weren't done with the idea of creating a new genre. So it just wasn't, there wasn't enough e established art, so everything could be new, right?

There wasn't, everything was new. It didn't matter. You could go to any company, any guy that's been around as long as I have, or some of the great leaders and just say anybody that's been around that long, they probably worked on a game that was considered groundbreaking in its time because they all were.

That's right. 

Alex: It was, it was harder to be derivative because there wasn't a lot of existing art, prior art to derive from, 

Louis: even, even if you try, the technology was moving so fast and platforms are changing so quickly that [00:47:00] even if you were derivative, I mean, I, the holder was very derivative of game called Dungeon Master, but it was on different platforms and, and so we were able to do more with it, and it used the DD license, so it had a much more difficult, um, and probably much more rewarding, in my opinion, game balance here, which is why I think, you know, making games as accessible is not a mistake.

It's, it's the right thing to do. And having deep game systems and, and um, compulsion systems is also the right thing to do. You don't, they don't have to be mutually exclusive. Yeah, 

Alex: I usually write down a few questions of things that I'm particularly interested in. And I wrote down one question in particular for you, which is about that kind of era in time, which is basically the following.

We've had folks on the show before from like, um, like from Blizzard, like we've had Rod Ferguson on, we've had, um, Chris Taylor, uh, you know, total Annihilation. They all talk about games that you've made and have been involved in as [00:48:00] inspiration and, and just like change their way of thinking, like light bulb, aha moments.

And my question is, is is mostly like. Do you ever talk to them? Like did you talk, like you guys blizzard, uh, you know, Chris Taylor, whatever. Do you guys ever like, you know, end up a show together and just like have drinks? 

Louis: Yeah, it's been a few years since I talked to Chris, but I used to catch up with Chris all the time.

He was in Seattle and I cop with him personal things and he was too pretty on. So really cool tech wasn't visually exciting, but it was really cool tech around synchronizing, gameplay across the, uh, across networks. And uh, so we, we do talk there at the Game Developers conference. I catch up with folks that have been around, I think the qualification is 20 years, but most of us have been around for 30.

Um, and we talk about games all the time. Uh, the people that made the games like Ky that made my favorite games. So I've been inspired by their games as much as they've been inspired by mine. That was just the way it worked back then, you know, you, you would do something and somebody would riff off that and do something really amazing.

Go, oh my God, that's great. What if we did that? You know? And so there was this just really fun [00:49:00] back and forth. Um, and because cycles were much faster, you know, you could actually be playing a bunch of games. Come up with an idea, implement your game, and within a year or so, it would be out, you know, in the market and you could see how the market reacts and see how people and you play stuff that doesn't work.

Stuff that does work. And when you started getting bigger and games started becoming, you know, not just dozens of people, but hundreds of people and years and years of effort is kind of when it became more difficult to be reactive to other things because it just, just took too long. Right? Yeah. So I think that the golden age of mobile games when they first came out also had that the same thing as tic creativity.

Um, and the same thing with the indie revolution, when all the engines became capable of making, not anybody but a lot of people capable of making games, I think that happened. And I think generative AI with the tools that are happening now is going to have another round of that. Um, the, the, the plus side is that we're gonna get rampant innovation and get ideas that people just didn't think of before because the tech wasn't available.

Sometimes it's people just didn't think of it. Right. Sometimes it's like, wow, we could have done that 20 years ago. We just didn't [00:50:00] think of it. But I think the downside of the, of that is also when you have those births, you also have just a lot of crt, a lot of stuff out there that's just not very good.

Mm-hmm. And unfortunately, that makes discovery even harder and it makes the economics even harder. And so I think it puts more pressure on all game makers to be unique and to be doing something different. Yeah. I just don't think, no matter how well executed another extraction shooter is gonna be successful, you have to have something about it that's new and exciting.

Yeah. As players, why are they gonna switch what they've already played, you 

Alex: know? Yeah. I mean, like, you're, you, you're basically starting a new studio, a new game idea right now in this current environment. You know, every, we worked, everybody, you know, who, who's in this industry, who, who follows this industry, has, uh, seen the ups and downs.

Uh, and it's been, it's a pretty downtime. There's no doubt. It's been challenging. Yeah. I guess that that's a. That, that's a way to say it, as downtime. Like, like if starting something right now, like how do you, how do you think about that? Like the current environment and 

Louis: Yeah. I mean, it's 

Alex: hard. 

Louis: It's been hard getting the traction we want mostly, it's [00:51:00] hard because I have a vision for something that is more than I could do personally.

It's not like a solo game dev project is too big for that, but it's also not a hundred million dollar project. And so where we do tend to find ourselves in a, in a strange place where we're trying to raise millions, but not the kinds of dozens of millions that most people are trying to raise. And so that's hard to do, but it's the, it, it doesn't matter to me if it's the right time in the industry, it's the right time for me personally.

Um, I've been working on a bunch of stuff for the last few years that were about going into things that were maybe not hopeless, but challenging situations or. Things that became challenging to do, to know cause of mine. And, um, after a while, it's, uh, I, I call it trying to fix broken toys is less fun than trying to build toys, even though you break a lot of them.

And so it's, it's, uh, it's more fun to be creative. And so with generative ai, I just didn't want to pass this moment in time at a big company that, that was gonna use it in a way that I might not agree with. I just wouldn't do that as I don't need to do that. And I wouldn't wanna do it at a small startup company that somebody else is [00:52:00] driving because I have lots of opinions and they don't necessarily line up with what a lot of people, I, 

Alex: I don't follow.

We already know you don't do anything halfway. You Yeah. Agree with people a lot. 

Louis: So I mean, I, I, I, I find a lot of passion. I try to convince people. I tend to convince people that I, that I have a good idea, but I don't tend to agree with other people's ideas as much as I, I suppose I probably should at this point.

Um, I kind of haven't learned that. And so. I just see things a little bit differently and, um, in my experience, the, the kind of crazy ideas were the ones that I look back on very fondly riding. Agra Dragon Flight Simulator in 1989 was not a good idea. Um, the was not capable of it, especially one that fractally generated the world in real time.

Right. That's crazy. But I did, it sounds I was super proud of the game. Um, but just, you know, it wasn't the game experience. I probably needed five years to put that game out and have a game experience that customers would've really grind around. So it was kind of a little too dorky. So 

Alex: Cool. I [00:53:00] was curious about another thing.

I think eventually Westwood became part of ea, but That's right. Was that through Virgin? Did Virgin acquire Westwood ea acquire Virgin's like business? 

Louis: That's 

Alex: correct. 

Louis: Yeah. So in 1992, uh, Richard Branson called me personally and I was gonna 

Alex: ask if you had any interaction. Yeah. I pick 

Louis: up his phone and I Hello.

I'm Richard Branson on the phone for you and like. Right. Uh, and I go, hello Brett, this is Richard. And I go, uh, not Brett. This is Lewis. He goes, oh, Lewis. He goes, uh, my name is Richard. I'd like to buy your company. And I'm like. I didn't know we were for sale. 'cause I was kind of a smarts back then. He goes, oh my boy, my experience, everything's for sale.

My colleague Martin. And I just wanted to say, we'd love to have you as part of the Virgin family. And that was the conversation. I mean, almost four foot word, I'm sure. Crazy. So I know in Brett's office I'm like, Brett, the weirdest thing just happened. Some guy called and said he wanted to buy our company and back then he didn't have the internet like this was, and you couldn't go Google.

We're okay, well we'll [00:54:00] go on Lexi Nexus. And we search a bunch of stuff and we go, oh go crap. This guy probably is like a billionaire's. Like, so, so, uh, we then realized, oh wait, Virgin. Virgin, okay, that makes sense 'cause we were working for Virgin Master Trucks. So, um. I, and Martin did confess to this at one point, he had actually called, uh, uh, Robert Devereux and asked if Richard could give us a call to impress us.

So, of course, being a British guy, everybody's enamored with, with Branson, I'm a big fan now. Um, but I had no idea who he was. Right. So, so, uh, but he was right. It turned out that we were for sale because we had just finished a couple of games, uh, either Beholder two, and for either beholder and I, beholder two, Brett and I had to throw in, um, retained earnings from the company to finish those games to the quality level we wanted.

And honestly, we still didn't get to put as much in as we wanted to because the publishers just wouldn't pay for it. And so if you think about the economics of that, without getting too in the weeds, if you're only earning at that time 18 to 20%, you're basically, you're, you're your rev, you're using your revenue to fund development as a five X negative, right?

[00:55:00] That's right. And so it's really expensive. So we were like, look, our houses are already, you know, we're paying way, we fund the company. We, we've got mortgage on our houses. We, we can't afford to miss. Let's just sell to somebody. And actually it was, um, CR online that offered $6 million, which was a, I mean, Brett and I were making like $40,000 a year.

I mean, we were, we were not poor, but, you know, to have 3 million bucks a piece roughly. And then we'd give a bunch of staff, I'm sure, but something like that would've just been completely mind numbingly, game changing. Instead, we did something totally different. We sold to Bran, uh, Branson for like 1.5 and then had to defend a frivolous lawsuit, which we used up almost all the money.

So effectively almost gave the company to Branson. But we had a, um, earnout formula. So the next few years turned out to be very profitable for us and for everybody at Westwood. It was acquired partially by Hasbro, which triggered a re renegotiation for us. Then it was bought by Viacom. So we got to renegotiate again.

And each one of these things, we became closer to being a full publisher and we had a lot more control over the company and we kept taking the ride, basically doubling down in [00:56:00] terms of Vegas terms until finally in 1998, um, we were sold by Viacom out from underneath Virgin to, um, ea. Wow. I didn't know, I didn't know all of those.

We sold the same company four times. Uh, I sold the company four times 'cause I was doing all the negotiations. Brett didn't wanna deal with any of that, so I did all the financial stuff and multi, multi negotiations at the same time. That's where I learned kind of my legal liaison chops as well as lot of finance.

Congratulations. CCFO from a company where I was, it was 3 million bucks all the way to when we had, you know, $170 million in 11 countries. So I learned how to be a CFO on the job, so, 

Alex: wow. That's, that's awesome. Good for you and good for you. Good for you. 

Louis: Good fun. There's always my, my next game is the, you know, my, my greatest game is gonna be the next game I make and, uh, the next job is gonna be the most exciting and most challenging.

That's, that's always my attitude. So. 

Alex: Awesome. Uh, it's a completely like, sort of unrelated side note, but you just totally reminded me of this and I hope my general counsel's not listening to this [00:57:00] podcast, but, um, we like our studio now. We do a lot of projects and so there's a lot of sort of, um, you know, like contractual contracts and, and a legal thing.

And I've been feeding agreements into chat, GPT and chat. GPT is an outstanding legal analyst. 

Louis: It's, yeah, so chat, chat, gt all the, all the large language models, uh, they're, they're pretty good at distilling things down to the salient points, and they're really great as co-pilots. Like I think that, that the idea of using generative AI or large language model AI to help accelerate things is great.

In fact, actually our CTO was commenting, it makes him about five times more efficient because when he has a challenge or problem, it's like talking to an expert in that challenge or problem, what they aren't good at yet, uh, and I say yet is completely whole cloth creating something that actually, that is good.

Yeah. Even something that works. Right. It's don't think that works. Right. I legally, I would never use chat t to write a legal document Correct. But [00:58:00] using chat GPT to analyze the document, to point out the places where I might need to pay attention super fast and super good idea. 

Alex: Yeah. Yeah, just thought it is.

Yeah. 

Louis: I would never trust Chatt BT to review a document and sign it that I would always do myself. I would always read it myself and if I didn't understand it, I would seek legal counsel, uh, not use a a, an AI bot. That's a little too risky depending on your exposure. Of course, 

Alex: Alex, not just throw caution to that in, we're all gonna be working for the AI eventually, so it's all good.

Louis: Boilerplate. So I think boilerplates are even worse. I don't know if my legal friends would agree with me, but the problem with trying to take boilerplate or standard forms off the internet is that they're usually not customized, um, accurately for territories or your particular use case. And so you can actually get yourself into more trouble than you thought by thinking you're doing the right thing.

'cause it sounds legalese, but actually putting, you're painting yourself in some 

Alex: corner. Yeah. 

Louis: That happens more often than not. So, 

Alex: yeah. Yeah. Well, Louis, thank you so much for [00:59:00] spending a good chunk of your day with us. My pleasure. Such a, i I said it at the beginning. I'll say it again now. Uh, such a thrill to get to spend some time with you.

Yeah, likewise. I hope we can hang out. I'd love to do that 

Louis: next 20 years. 'cause I think we only covered, I'm 15 or so, 

Alex: I'm not clear. I know. It, it for folks like you have done so much. It's, it's, it's hard to get the whole Yeah. The whole thing. But, um, very excited about what you're working on now. 

Louis: Yeah, I'm excited too.

I'm, I'm, obviously, I'm always excited about the thing I'm diving into, but I hope that, uh, we'll be doing a follow up at some point going, wow, you did something really crazy and different and it really paid off 'cause people loved it. Now whether that's hugely successful financially, I, it usually is, but it doesn't always have to be.

Um, I'm very happy with, with highly rated games that don't sell a lot of copies. It's just much better if they do. 

Alex: That's right. That's right. Well, right on. Um, thanks again. We, we'll, uh, good luck and we'll see you around. Thank, thank you so 

Louis: much. I really appreciate it. 

Alex: So what do you think of that? But particularly, I almost picked this as the opening line, [01:00:00] but I want mm-hmm.

The more optimistic thing, his comment about being disappointed in the video game industry. 'cause the video game industry has no ethics at all. There's like comparing, like I thought about that some, some of the things in kind of like free to play tactics that are actually mm-hmm. Regulated in the casino gaming business 

Aaron: in China.

They're regulated too. And I remember there was a time where it was normal in other countries where they had to tell you the drop rates. Remember that that used to be hidden. Oh yeah. And then that became a, like, now they, and the operates are ous and there's still, 

Alex: yeah. I still think there's a couple jurisdictions where like loot box mechanics Gotcha.

Mm-hmm. You know, is not even allowed. But, but it was even more, you know, two things struck me about that comment. Like, one, the regulations are like real and, and casino games and the, it's, it's way more specific than just things like, you know. The gotcha mechanic. It's like even just highlighting the fact that you had a near [01:01:00] miss that he said that like in an app you can be like, oh, you got close, try again.

You can't do that in a casino game. 

Aaron: Yeah. 'cause it'll that's they'll drop more money. 

Alex: Yeah. 

Aaron: And they'll get like addicted to it. 

Alex: Yeah. When I ask like, so like how is this actually regulated? I'm thinking IRS right? Where it's like it's honor system, but you're kind of, you're rolling the dice that maybe you're gonna get audited so you don't wanna like lie 'cause the penalty super severe, go to jail.

Like, is that how it works? And it's like, no, they look at every line of code. 

Aaron: Yeah. 

Alex: It's like really? That's blew my mind. Could you imagine that? Yeah. I dunno how I feel about that. Could you imagine if you were working on a game for a publisher and they actually cracked open perforce and looked at every line of code, like.

Games would cost like 10 times as much. 

Aaron: Probably you're gonna have AI do it now, right? AI's gonna help with that. Oh, 

Alex: that's 

Aaron: a, that's a good point. I, I didn't even think about that. Whoever's programming the AI is defining the ethics there. Right. [01:02:00] 

Alex: You know, uh, this is a complete non sequitur, but our buddy brand told me about a project that he's working on that actually, I probably can't tell you what it does, 

Aaron: but 

Alex: it's super cool.

It's kind of like that, it's kind of like 

Aaron: that use ai. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I don't know how I feel about it by, by the way, I don't know how you feel about it, but the ethics thing is very confusing because there's a part of me that wants to be like, mad about it and like be against it. But then there's another part of me that's like, I don't think that's the problem.

You know what I mean? It's like, it's like alcohol usually isn't the problem, even though it's addictive. It's like there's something else underneath that. That's the problem. So I don't, I don't know like where like. You know what I mean? Are you talking about 

Alex: the person that chooses to have the drink or the establishment that serves them?

The whole circle? The whole circle. The whole circle. Well, you know, I keep coming back to our [01:03:00] conversation with Genova Chen, where he basically was saying, look, I don't want to make a gambling game and I think Luke Box is just gambling, so I just, I'm gonna go make something different. Yeah. And I think that's kind of like an artist's perspective.

He, he understands that. Like, and his peers will tell him, well, hey, I made this game and I can't survive. I gotta, I have to eat. You know, and if I implement this feature, I can eat. If I don't implement the feature, then I can't eat and I gotta go do something else. 

Aaron: Yeah. 

Alex: That's not part of his calculus.

Aaron: Right. But I guess what I'm saying is, you ever seen the movie with Wesley Snipes and Stallone, where they're like, in this utopia world? Yeah. Was it um, demolition Man or No? Demolition Man? Yeah, that one Demolition Man. So it's like, there is this like, never saw it. 

Alex: What's that? I never saw it. 

Aaron: Neither saw it.

Oh, it's really good. And it's almost like it's prophetic in a way. 

Alex: Hey, 

Aaron: what happened to Wesley Snipes? Did, 

Alex: did he get it like go to jail for taxation or something? Yeah, he was in the last 

Aaron: movie. He was in the last Deadpool movie, [01:04:00] actually. I dunno if you saw that. Really? Yeah. They brought a bunch of people back from like the other Marvel movies.

But you know what I mean? Like, do you want to put like gates like that on everybody and like could then enforce them, you know. So I don't know how I feel about, I used to be a fit, and now I'm like, that's a 

Alex: bigger question. You know, that's like, you know, you're kind of talking about like, Hey, should we all just, should we, should we all be just libertarians and let the, just let it go and see what happens?

Or should we have some regulation? And I, yeah, it's like, what is it? Where's the line? I gotta say, you know, my dad had this, he used to say this thing. It's like, I'm all for dictatorships, you know, as long as I get to be the dictator. You dictator, 

Louis: you said, 

Alex: you know, if you're Rockefeller or a Musk, you don't want any regulation at all because you want, you wanna have the monopoly, you want, have the control.

And, and any threat to that is like, you know, it's like what's happening with open ai? They're, they're raping and pillaging creativity [01:05:00] across the internet to create this defensible moat of a system. That is gonna become the windows of the future, of the internet of the future. Right. And that sucks. That's just shitty.

I don't like 

Aaron: it. Really? Yeah. I don't know. I actually don't know. I, I really think it comes down to the person, you know, and, and the person like gen know, like, you know what I mean? 

Alex: Yeah. That, that whole I know we're getting a maybe a little off, eh, I don't know. You brought it up. I'm saying this is on topic, but the whole, that whole meme when everybody was turning their pictures and their videos into a studio, Ojibwe, you know, in Zaki.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like you saw that. Yeah. Yeah. It was awesome. But it was horrible. Like, you know, you go and you, you see this post from Miyazaki talking about how it's an offense to humanity, you know? And, and I shed a tear. I literally, I was like, but so was the car. 

Aaron: Right. You know how, and like, like the, the horses are going, how the car, an offense.

Well, [01:06:00] because it's like the farmers, you know, I'm saying, oh no, 

Alex: the technology is amazing. The technology's. Oh yeah, it is. 

Aaron: Yeah. I don't know where the line is. I guess I'm just saying that like going back to what we were talking about, the ethics thing, I think it's cool what Las Vegas does, but it's like the same thing with alcohol.

It's the same thing with like violent movies and things like this. It's where's this Like, it gets to the point is if you're getting a hotdog, you should, you should visit a hotdog factory, you know? Well, you know what I'm saying? It's like where, where is wrong? 

Alex: I think, I think there's this, IM impression that capitalism and democracy are these great systems that tend to equilibrium, but the reality with the internet is that capitalism does not tend towards equilibrium.

You know, capitalism has created a negative feedback loop where just the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and I. I can't believe I'm saying these words 'cause I'm not a fucking [01:07:00] communist or whatever. I am the biggest fan of capitalism there is, but I mean, just, we don't have bookstores anymore.

Okay, fine. That's an old technology, but we have libraries. It means that instead of there being a million entrepreneurs that can create a successful, prosperous life for themselves and their communities, you have one mega rich guy who builds penis rocket ships to send his fiance into space.

It's bullshit. Um, all right, well thanks for sticking around to, no pun intended for, for, for rant Thursday. What do you think? Did we just lose all our listeners, right? 

Aaron: No, I think it's, we need to talk about this stuff. People are thinking it, you know, I guess, and it's in our industry and it's coming in like a wave and you cannot avoid what's happening.

And I think digesting it as a community is gonna have to happen, you know? 

Alex: Yeah. I don't know. Hopefully it is just like the car, you know, [01:08:00] like I'm just yelling at the horses. I like horses. This car sound funny. Yeah, it'll be good. All right. Thanks for hanging out everybody. 

Aaron: We shall See you next week. See you next week.

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