Video Games as Art with AJ of Official Electric

I stumbled on Official Electric from watching a youtube video on unique and artistic video games, and I immediately was blown away. I've loved weird and interesting video games and game design in general my whole life. But the feeling of traveling in a strange land is something that, as games got more polished and graphically enhanced, I felt like had been lost. This absolutely nailed something I've been looking for for years, and I was pumped he wanted to come on my podcast and chat!

Check out https://officialelectric.com/ and on instagram @off.electric

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:23

For this podcast. But that's what it is that's what the theme of this podcast is. Obviously, I talk mostly about music, but today, as you'll see, I'm going to keep them waiting a little bit while I do my ad read. But this one is not going to be hyper music specific. It's actually going to be about games. Speaking of games, uh, if you've been listening to any of my content recently, you've been listening to the podcast, you will know that everything I do online is part of what I call the worst marketing strategy of all time to get people to play my fantasy football game, which is based off the logic of Mario Kart, where the better you're doing, the harder it is, the worse you're doing, the easier it is. The biggest problem I've always had with fantasy football was that trades were impossible. Trades don't work the way they do in real sports. In real sports, you have players being traded for packages of assets from contending teams to rebuilding teams. Our system by combining with the Mario Kart aspect of it. We actually have teams that are in a rebuild mode. We have teams that are in win now mode that creates trade narratives. We have over 70 trades a season. It's a lot more fun. Go check it out. Clubhouse.ggl s e dot G G. I worked really, really hard on it. I really want you guys to play it and sign up and it made me really happy. And uh yeah, but speaking of games, I have AJ Gonzalez here, who's a guy I found online because I I love watching video game essays, and somebody was like, oh, you have to check out uh this website called Official Electric. This guy's making these really interesting weirdo games. I'm sorry to call them weirdo games, but they are kind of weirdo games. I mean, there's a yeah, they are. So AJ, uh say hi, say what's up, introduce yourself to uh the listeners. By the way, also, real quick, we already recorded this podcast. We recorded it about a month ago. I was doing a thing where I walked around and talked to him, and it was a technical disaster. We had to throw the whole thing out. So this is actually the second time we've talked about this. But luckily for you, luckily for the audience, I forget everything to talk about as soon as I finish speaking. So it's gonna be a brand new conversation to me at least. So AJ, say hi, say what's up, introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Uh hello, I'm AJ. I'm a graphic designer by trade, game designer by uh sheer force of will. Um I'm um you know, uh everything's kind of exploding, but I'm just trying to make games and art and music uh to escape at all and uh and never have to uh deal with the with the reality of the world that we live in currently.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

Hey, one way to do that, just create some virtual worlds, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Yeah, Jordan Lucas said it. He said he said you can't change the world, you can just make your own and hope people live in it or something. He probably didn't say that, but someone told me that he said that.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

So Why let the truth get in the way of a good story? Like that's great. I'll I'll attribute that quote to him, you know?

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:03

But yeah, uh I love uh I've always been a huge fan of like the indie game scene, even though I don't necessarily play that many of them. Um I like I remember specifically watching Matthew Matosis do videos on uh Ocarina of Time and like the original 3D Mario games and stuff like that. But that eventually got me to this guy, Aaron Signal, who also makes YouTube videos, and he would just talk about uh as the indie game sort of started to explode, this is where the concept of games as pieces of art, as like auteur theory, starts to come into play in this indie sphere. I am technically very bad at making games. I've thought about trying to make games my entire life, and what I really enjoyed about the official electric stuff that I've played of yours is like a lot of it was like, oh man, if I was better at coding, I would make something that feels like this. This feels weird and uh and like memorable in a way that I try to do in music a lot of the times, or I try to do in in sort of whatever kind of art I try to make, but like what got you started on game development?

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Um let's see. I guess like uh I I did also always want to make games as a kid. I mean, I wanted to be a lot of things as a kid. I was very like all over the place with like deciding what I wanted to do. Um I played a lot of games. I mean, I started with an Atari because my dad refused to get me a nice, a good console. Or I mean, you know, this is you know, this is 1993 or something, so the yeah, Atari had been out for like 20 years almost at this point. Um but that's what I played growing up, and uh, if you played my games, you can see the influence there. But um, as I got older, uh you know my dad was a programmer um when I when I was a kid, and uh he he abandoned it, he hated it so much that not only did he abandon it and become a PE teacher, the complete opposite of a programmer, um he didn't ever like teach me how to code, even though he knew he was a programmer for like 10 years in the 80s. Yeah. Um, but he never taught me anything programming. We just played games together, and uh so I just always assumed that I was like too stupid to learn how to code or too complicated, or I was like already like way behind you know the bus or whatever. Like I would have to be catching up. I don't know, C. I'm 14, you know.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Um it's too late for me, man. I've gotten all the way to 14.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

I mean who learns anything at 15, you know? I really I really thought that I was like behind in everything for some reason. Like I always thought like I wasn't in time for poke, even Pokemon was like, I felt like I was behind everything. Um dude, I felt that way.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Uh I got a guitar for the first time right around 14, and I remember thinking at the time, it's like, man, I really wish I could learn how to play guitar and like play in bands and do anything with music, but like I'm 14. I needed to start when I was 12, and it's like at the time it felt like a big deal. But now looking back at it, it's like that two years meant nothing, you know?

SPEAKER_01 5:52

Exactly. I mean, I think about it now when I ever see like uh musician influencers because I think musicians is easier to tell because um you can see they're like, Yeah, I started back in 2019 and now I'm here, and I was like, 2019, wasn't that like yesterday?

SPEAKER_00 6:07

That is yeah, it's 2020 right now.

SPEAKER_01 6:08

Like, do not know it's never the future to me, you know?

SPEAKER_00 6:16

It's like 2018 is still like Blade Runner, you know?

SPEAKER_01 6:18

Right, that's when they're gonna have flying cars, right? 2018, that's what I that's easily. That's what I mean.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Uh I remember I saw like a Twitter post once that was like, hey, everyone's saying like uh whether or not we should have flying cars by now. It's like we do have flying cars, they're called helicopters, they're called single passenger airplanes, they're just incredibly dangerous. You don't want everybody driving or hunting flying cars. Every fender better becomes a life or death incident for you and everyone below you. It's like, but we have them, they're there, you just don't have one, you know?

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Right. I mean that and Brave that was the prediction in Brave New World was everyone's gonna have how little little I forget what they called, unicopters or something. I forget.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:56

But that's exactly what they were.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

But um, no, so we're so you're 14 years old, you're like, alright, the world's already passed me by, but I do like gaming, so maybe just for funsies, I'll look into it.

SPEAKER_01 7:07

Yeah, no, and I definitely at that time was when piracy started becoming a cool new thing. So I was pirating every piece of software I could find on LimeWire or whatever, or whatever was I don't I don't know if LimeWire let you torrent games. I think it did.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Or or I never used it for games, but like all of the music I got uh you know was originally from Kazah, Limewire. I have a Napster, like I have Napster downloads. I know I want to still use Napster as like my primary form of getting music because I liked I liked pirating things. I thought it was a fun way to like find new music. Getting the wrong file sometimes was like a wild experience. You would think that's the song that you were trying to listen to for years, you know?

SPEAKER_01 7:52

No, for no, so speaking of that, my dad pirated a lot of music and it was like all like he would download like 13 songs and it would take all day. But he he pirated um From Under the Cork Tree by Fallout Boy for me, and I had that scene. I listened to it religiously because I was a little scene kid, you know. Yeah, I was all about Fallout Boy. I listened to that album a million times, and that album has the wrong version of Dance Dance, like a version that is that has an extra pre-chorus. It had an acoustic version of a song that on the actual album was in like a regular, regular song. I guess it's still whatever. And then like also is missing a whole song. So like I like my relationship with that that CD is just like marginally different than like everybody else's, just because I loved that though.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

I had the same deal with Lonesome Crowded West, where it's like I had I got a copy of Lonesome Crowded West that had a song that was not on Lonesome Crowded West. It was missing two songs that were on Lonesome Crowded West. So, but like that was the version I had for all of college. Like I listened to that all the time. None of the songs had titles, I didn't know the names of any of that. It was just song one, song two, song three, song four. Like, I just I didn't bother going in and changing any of it. But like now, when I listen to the Spotify, the actual version of it, there the songs that weren't on my version of it will pop out, and I'm like, oh, that's not I wasn't expecting this. Like, still, and that was like, you know, 15 years ago I stopped listening to my pirated version. But like I love the little surprise versions, the personalization of piracy.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Yeah, I was actually just uh I was just thinking about that because um because why? Um oh just because like the Blu-ray thing, like PlayStation is getting rid of Blu-rays, and nothing physical will ever exist again. I mean that's what everybody's saying. Of course, if if I if I have any say in the next five years, I we will have physical uh media again. Like I want like discs and like things that you plug in, and I want like things that you put in a case. I'm tired of just ones and zeros being the things that I own, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 9:53

Like Yeah. I also just uh especially like with gaming, there's like not a better memory I have of gaming than like my brother and I would get, you know, we had like when we had like the Nintendo 64, we would get, you know, Christmas, we'd get a couple of games, we'd each probably get one, and then like at some point during the year, we would get like one more as like a reward for something. I don't know. My parents would dangle some carrot in front of the stick, and now they have to go buy us wave race or some shit like that. But like the drive back from the video game store from like Toys Are Us, where we had the box, and like one of us had to hold uh the game itself and just was tossing the cartridge. Then the other one was reading the instruction booklet. My brother used to like steal the instruction booklet the day and like read it cover to cover in bed before like going to sleep. Well, you got it. And I'd be furious at him because he was older, so obviously he got to do whatever the fuck he wanted to do. But I wanted to read it, you know? It's like I missed that. There's not the same when you go to Steam and you just download a game for five bucks that you mean never play ever again, you know?

SPEAKER_01 10:55

Exactly. Yeah, some of my formative memory, like I have still like the vivid memory of getting Pokemon Gold and like looking at the looking at the thing, and it was like shiny, and I was like, dang, this is like a powerful thing. And then like I can remember the pages of the book because on the ride home, like sitting in the back of the van, you know, my sister has like whatever, she has like a magic wand or something, and I'm there with my little booklet, and I'm like, like that is a formative, like that is like a monumental memory for me, though. Like, encouraged me to in fact, it actually encouraged me. Speaking of ruin, we haven't talked about it yet on the podcast, but I have a booklet of all the lore, well, all the lore for part of ruin. Um, that is sick. And I did print it myself on my printer that is in my closet over there, and then my sister um uh put them together. I mean, I I figured out the like uh the method, but you know, we were like a little team, we were making them for uh a little project, and then we're probably gonna make them again. But that's exactly why I made that.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

Let's get into that then. Uh Ruin is the is the game that I have been that was the first thing that popped up on this like video essay that I was watching that was telling me to go play your games and stuff like that. I checked out a couple other games. Some of them are like uh I think it I believe it's called hurt is the one that's like very Atari-esque, where you just push the hurt button until the little guy on the screen he just gets zapped until he dies. And then the genius part about it, the part that made me start going, like, oh my god, this guy is uh this guy is like smart here. Like, this is an intelligent artistic representation, is once you kill the little guy on the screen, you can exit out of that game. When you come back, he's still dead. He never gets revived. So you just hurt him until he dies, and then he stays permanently dead. And I'm like, oh, that's fucked up. That's cool. I like that. But yeah, tell me about Ruin, tell me about Official Electric, about your project.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

Um, yeah. Uh I guess I'll work backwards because that'll be easier, I think. Yeah, whatever was that guy. That guy, that game, the hurt game, spawned specifically because I was making another game called Spire, and this is before Slay the Spire became popular, so I was like, um, you know, whatever. It doesn't matter what the name was. The point is I made a demo and I sent it to a bunch of people, and like one of the first levels, you you're like a little it's a very small like very Atari-esque graphics, like very s small amount of pictures. Oh yeah. But you can go up to some guy who's just standing at the front of the um at the front of the cave, and if you kill him, you can take his bow. But you can also he also just says like, hey, here take this bow, and if you walk close to him, you'll get the bow without killing him. Um I like that. But then you just keep going. And I kind of not that I didn't think much of it, but I also was just thinking, like, there's always like NPCs and things. He says something like I can't make it through. Um, but since you could I just made it so you could kill the guy, because like makes sense. You there's a guy in a cave, he has a bow, you can take it or kill him. But everyone is always asking, like, what happens when you kill him? Like, does something happen? And I was like, if there was a guy in a cave that was like trapped in there and you killed him, nothing would change. He's already trapped in the cave.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

He'd be a skeleton eventually.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

Yeah, he would just be dead later. Like, you know, so it it got me thinking a lot about like choices and like what it means to have like that kind of um what's there's a word for this, not uh like act like uh choice in games, you know. This choice in games is a good idea.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

Right? Right. But it reflects on the nature of choice in reality, which is just that like if you make the concept of a choice, the what makes something a choice and not just nothing, just a thought or whatever, is the ramifications of it, right? Right. You could have a thought, but it has no ramifications. If you make a choice, there's something downstream as a programmer, you have to systematize that like uh eventuality, you know. This happens, so then this happens, so then this happens, you know.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

It's sort of like seeing, like, man, I I wish I like stayed with that girl 10 years ago, like my life would be so much better. It's like uncalculable. You would have no your life would be so much different, it wouldn't even be like the same world. Um would you be you, you know? Who are you, you know? Exactly. So so yeah, you know, just thinking about like have choice having consequence like that in like a 10-hour experience, right? Or even like a 40-hour experience or something, it's still like nothing close to like, you know, man, I should have like taken that job, or man, I should have like the real choices in life are like, you know, man, I wish I didn't move to this city, you know, like and that kind of thing isn't something you can really like. You can't like I guess maybe Minecraft might be the closest place you can be like, I'm just gonna move to like the other side of the map and start over. But like, yeah, but that's really a choice.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Even Minecraft, right? Like, there's this whole concept where like uh somebody somebody made like a Minecraft clone where instead of just there being a flat plane that endlessly expands, there's little uh planetoids that you're on. And so like you can start walking and eventually you'll loop back around to the beginning. And you said, like, what I didn't like about Minecraft is if you just walk far enough out, it is exactly the same as just starting a new world. There's no difference whatsoever. I mean you can come back to where you came from and there's something different there, but it's like wherever I am, there's just this is a brand new world, it's just been auto-generated, and it's like so that's one of those things that becomes difficult with choice in video games, is like at a certain point, what you want the choice to be has to reflect against the systems in which that choice is implemented in, and you end up with these externalities that you're not necessarily like prepared for, you know.

SPEAKER_01 16:19

Alright, yeah. I mean, it's exactly like I mean, I think that maybe probably what got me started philosophically thinking about that was Fallout 3. When it's like, do you want to blow up a whole city of people or not? Like what the moral quandary, it's like, how could you possibly decide? And I think that like realizing like that, I think that was like the start of it, especially because I never I didn't even play the story in Fallout. I played like 300 hours of Fallout 3, probably, and I never played the story, I never beat it because to me the game was just about like fucking around, you know?

SPEAKER_00 16:51

Like I I've always found the same thing with a lot of video games where it's like I actually don't really give a shit about story most of the time at all. Like Breath of the Wild being the most recent example of like I literally did none of the story missions.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

I just I played the go with the story of Breath of the Wild.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

It didn't matter, and I liked that, I thought that was cool. I kind of figured like if I want to learn the story, like re this is the other part that is very different than when we were growing up. Is like back in the day, if you didn't look up the story in the game, you just didn't get the story. Now I knew uh instinctively after watching the first little cutscene, I'm like, if I actually want to know the story, the easiest way for me to do this is just to go on YouTube and see somebody will have made a compilation of all the cutscenes and like I can watch that if I'm interested. Exact. I mean, yeah, you can get people to break it down, they'll give you the lore, or you can just watch the screens. I think that's been a weird thing with my relation to video games, is like a lot of the really popular games these days, I just watched uh Twitch streams of them. It's kind of what I liked about your games, is that like uh there was something inviting about the fact that everything that I played that you had was kind of weird and off-putting. I didn't want to watch somebody else have that experience because it wasn't gonna have the same impact of me like walking around in these strange I don't know, how would you describe the art style of the worlds for somebody that is listening to this on a podcast?

SPEAKER_01 18:07

Right, right. You know? I have a I have a friend who works in marketing. One time I asked him what my style w was, and he said that it was process artifact chroma something. I don't know. So uh it's basically I mean the the the result the art that you see the result is uh from uh a series of brushes that I made for Procreate for PixelArt because I was trying to make regular brushes for Procreate for Pixel Art because I didn't have them when it first came out, and they had they uh uh at some point released a brush editor, so I was like, I'm gonna figure it out. And so, but because the editor had like a couple bugs in it, I kept like trying to make like perfect um like patterns and stuff, and there was always like a pixel missing, or it didn't line up quite right, or like whatever. And then I was I just leaned into it, I was like, fuck it, we're gonna go the other way. We're just gonna go full like weirdest brushes you could possibly use. And um, and so I made all these random brushes. I use a lot of them. I mean, like it's I have a huge list of them, and there's some that I don't use, but like a lot of them have like a pr like a pretty decent amount of use use cases. Um but the style that it's emulating is sort of like in the 80s and then in the 90s subsequently, just because the software was still around. I played a bunch of these weird games from like on a on an old PC from you know late 80s, early 90s. Yeah. And these were like my formative like video game, like I'm playing a video game. Like I'm on a computer and I'm pressing these buttons and things are happening. Um and so a lot of these games though, like my dad got because he would go to like computer fairs and he had all these like techie friends, so a lot of it was like shareware or like pirated stuff. And so you would start up these programs and it would say, like, you know, the game, like you know, Madhat or uh math game or whatever it was, because it was obviously a lot of um of uh game and then underneath it would say like cracked by like super pirate 9000, because like they would go in and like remove the DRM and they would leave a signature on it and it would like leave it on the press. Um so a lot like and you can find that if you look at I don't I don't know how how easy it is to find, but I've seen it before where there's like these like old games that are for like Commerce 64, like ZX Spectrum or something like that, where there's like this like tag of like cracked by you know uh I love that man or something.

SPEAKER_00 20:32

Um there's this early internet thing that I uh uh I miss uh these days where like uh I think part of it is just that nobody really thinks they're anonymous online anymore, but like there was a real sense of anonymity at some point online, so everybody went by like these aliases. I think I don't I don't know if I can prove this one way or the other, but like one thing I've noticed is I watch a lot of uh professional Super Smash Brothers melee, and like the names of the players used to be like it was Mewtwo King, Armada, Mango. You went by your gamer tag, and now like the two best players in Smash both go by their name. It's Cody Schwab and Zayn. And it's like and I'm like, oh yeah, I feel like that's a that's a cultural shift of like it used to be seen as kind of lame to go by your your real you know, your uh your government name.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

Government name. I kinda I kinda like the um because I watch a lot of well, I mean I l I watch a lot of esports mostly Dota right now.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

Um I just I kinda wanna get into that at some point, but I feel like I need to like I'm like worried that I'm gonna like watching Dota so much that it's gonna end up like costing me months of my life.

SPEAKER_01 21:36

Yeah, I mean everyone that is into Dota enough will tell you don't. Um and I think that's a good one. Oh yeah, I'm never gonna play it. Yeah, I'm never gonna play the right choice.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Um That and Counter Strike are the ones that I'm like, I I know enough about myself to know this like genuinely could ruin parts of my life.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Yeah. Yeah. No, uh yeah. Definitely Valve games, um, they have a way. They have a way with you. Um but uh but what was I saying?

SPEAKER_00 22:04

Um But yeah, anyway, like your let's get back to your project because what I like about it is like one, when you go with that old Atari style, right? It reminds me of when I was a young kid playing video games, like every once in a while a video game would legitimately scare me in a way that like I had to put it down and go get my older brother to like come get me through a part. I'd have to like turn all the lights on in the house. Because the the game, there's something about an old game. I think part of it is just like art style of like Atari, regular Nintendo, early Nintendo 64, where the graphics were a vague representation of what they wanted it to be, which is a lot scarier in your mind. Like your your brain played like the fog effect in a lot of early 3D stuff created this very eerie, ethereal space that was accidental, like it was just a a rendering issue that they solved by throwing fog in there, but like it sits in my memory. What I liked about your games is it felt like playing the memory of the things that scared me playing games back in the day, because like you're saying, you're trying to make a brush, you're leaning into the imperfections, you're leading into like the uncanniness of video game graphics.

SPEAKER_01 23:10

Right, right, yeah, yeah. Um, no, definitely. I mean, honestly, that like that I think one of the things that I've decided I would say about it was like, you know, ruin is the echo of a game that I played as a child, kind of thing. Um because it's like echo there. Yeah, yeah. Because to again, it's not trying to like, I'm not trying to like stick within the confines of the Atari system. Like that is a common thing. A lot of people there's people I know that have made like Atari 2600 games in 2015 and you know stuff like that. So like um that is a thing and and it's cool. Like, I like you know, especially with like Game Boy Studio now, it actually you can upload that to a cartridge and put it in a real Game Boy and stuff. Yeah, now that that's m closer to being like a reality, but yeah. But I just wanted to make something that felt like that, but I didn't want to make like, oh, this could have been played on the Atari, you know, 5800 or 5200 or anything like that.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

Well um I think there's uh there's advantages to like that art through limitation, especially with programming, uh, by being like, alright, I have to do something that is like within the confines of this general system. There's a guy, uh I can't remember, MU Kaze or something like that, uh, who does Mario 64 ROM hacks for the Nintendo 64, and he is kind of obsessed with cranking as much graphical fidelity, as much uh like level as he can out of it. And like if you look at what he's able to get running on an actual N64, it almost looks like a GameCube game. It's like that's his thing, is like he wants to squeeze out of that. You're more like, no, no, there's like a vibe here, a reference that I want to uh attach myself to.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

Yeah, I think that yeah, I think that like a lot of the early projects were just about kind of like making something interactable that was like in a style that I was developing because of these brushes, but like because of the brushes in combination with also having the experience of like growing up with these these old consoles. But also, I mean, one of the like you said, where like the old NES and N64 games come to mind for you, for me, it's these old point-and-click adventure games that I was playing with my dad in the early 90s, and like Lighthouse and Rama are two that I still have somewhere, and those games terrified me. Like there I I have a memory like of a nightmare of like in Rama, there's these like metal birds, these like automatons. Automatons were pretty popular for some reason at that time. It was this like automatic. It's probably easy to take it.

SPEAKER_00 25:39

It'll probably easy to like graphically represent in a video game form. Like you could you you had the joints in the autonomous uh automaton line up pretty well with how you would like program something to move in a graphics engine.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

Yeah, no, it actually that I mean now that you're saying that it makes toy it actually is making it.

SPEAKER_00 25:55

It's why Toy Story is the first Pixar movie, it's because it's toys, you know, that's easier to animate a toy, right?

SPEAKER_01 26:01

You know, right, it's all coming together. Um but but yeah, um uh there's like yeah, those the birds scared the shit out of me. At the beginning of Lighthouse, it's like crazy alien steals a baby out of a carriage, and it's like nightmare. It's nightmarish because it's like so like stark. You know, like in yeah, you know, like in signs, for example, like you only ever see the alien like in the dark or like on top of a little building, or like scared the shit out of me when the alien walked across in the Mexican birthday party.

SPEAKER_00 26:30

Ooh!

SPEAKER_01 26:34

That was one of the scariest things of my childhood was that like that exact scene in science in science. But yeah, but in Lighthouse, it's like this like green alien, and he's like stealing a baby, and it's like so like it's I mean it's so 90s like 3D animated that it's funny now looking at it, but it was terrifying as a kid. That's it.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

I think that's the the what you just were talking about, is like the fact that it's like, oh, in the 90s, this like really scared the shit out of me, but like looking back on it, it's kind of laughable and cartoony, but like uh it's hard to express uh to I guess anybody that's around now because everything now kind of feels like it's echoing something else. So many things about video games have been figured out and replicated, right? Yeah, but like back in the early 90s, like everyone was trying to figure out how do you program a game that's entertaining? What is a game? What are these things? So everyone's just kind of throwing stuff at the wall. So, like, even like thinking of point and quick adventures, that game Mist, right, where you go through the island, they have all these weird 3D rendered, like there's like a spaceship, and it's uh this mix of anachronistic old timey stuff and new stuff or whatever, and they're like, Yeah, well, we already had the models already made for all those, so we just kind of stuck them in, and then we crafted a world around that. It's like, oh dude, that's that's weird, but it created this totally unique atmosphere of like I don't really know what's gonna happen next. And that's like what I appreciate. You it feels like you're trying to attach yourself to something like that, you know.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

Oh, definitely. I mean, Mist was like one of my formative, I mean everything's my formative memory, apparently, but Mist was like the game I remember sitting on my dad's lap, he was playing it, and I had no idea what was happening. Like, I remember it visually, like I you know I mean I I've played it since, like I remember it now, but like for a long time it was this kind of like weird world, and that's what I liked about it. Like you were saying, it's it's not like natural, it's like the result of like having 3D assets and needing to like place them in this like kind of place and kind of create a world around that, and I I I love that. I was playing I played a lot of like CAD programs when I was a kid, like Kid CAD or these like 3D programs where you made houses, but um, I was always making houses in that.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Um well another thing too is like uh I feel like with the advent of the internet, there's this massive amount of like fan culture that is very vibrant online. Everything that you like has these like fandoms to it, and like you can go and look up on YouTube, you know. I love Ocarina of Time. I have seen some videos that are like, why the Gorado had this secret mission or something like that that you didn't know was happening? It's like they have all this fan lore about stuff that was like a line that was thrown in. I think back in the day, back in like when Mist is coming out, they could just stick something in Mist that was unexplainable so that you, the person exploring it, you're like, what the hell is this thing? Why is this here? I don't really get this. And there was never an explanation for it. There was never a need for an explanation for it. It just added to the sense of like maybe you would talk with your friend about it and you'd like come up with your own lore, but there was no official narrative, there was no need to provide that official narrative, and so then it just it swims around in your brain for years, you know. I I I missed that thing, that sort of exploration of the unknown through video games, you know.

SPEAKER_01 29:48

There is this um this video that I had been looking for for years and I found it, and it's called um it's called I forget, I forget what it's called. Beyond the Mind's Eye, I think Beyond the Mind's Eye. It was like this VHS tape of like all these 3D experiments from the 90s and 80s. Oh, no, I've seen this. Have you seen it? It's like I've seen this, this is awesome. It's like music videos, sort of, but like some of them are like a bee, you're like following a bee flying through like an area, and then there's like these crazy like creatures that are like twirling and like creating like a all this like very strange, like just pure visual, like not noise, but like just nothing, like nothing discernible. Like it was just like monsters and magic and hand blowing up and all this stuff, and I watched that VHS tape 1,000 times, and that that oh go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 30:43

I was just gonna say it's like there's something in that tape, like I've seen the online thing, because I I'm also a big fan of like I watch uh you know, not histories of animation, but uh just like YouTube, like early early animation or early early film back when it was like black and white and they could do it for like 90 seconds or something like that. And the thing you realize, the thing that kind of strikes you over and over again is like there's the same level of creativity, but the language of 3D animation, nobody knows how to speak 3D animation. There's no Pixar for you to model anything off of. So like these are just everybody's best attempt at trying to figure out how to use this new technology, and like a lot of it doesn't work, like most of it kind of doesn't work, most of it comes off as uncanny, as weird, as like disjointed, but like because of that, one when something does work, it seems like way more like meaningful, uh, and two, it it creates a sense to it that you can't really replicate because nowadays, even if you were to try to re recreate that sense, that idea of like nobody really knows what they're doing, you can't recreate that sense of it, you know.

SPEAKER_01 31:46

That's that's the key, is like not knowing what you're doing and being kind of more isolated. I feel like we're we're so connected now. Like, you know, I have tons of friends on Discord, and if I made it make a song, I have like four people that I send it to because I they're like people that I trust. If I have like whatever, a a sprite or a game or whatever, I have all these people to like check, you know, be like, hey, is this cool? Am I doing it the right way? Like, what would you change or whatever, right? But you know, in the 90s and the 80s, there was no you didn't know, you just had a you had a disc and you had like a thick manual, or maybe two or three, and uh, and you just had a go, you just that's what that's what you had. You maybe you had a guy that at work who was sort of into the same stuff, or so you know what I mean? Like, none of that was like how it is now. So, again, like you're saying, where it's like everything was different, it was different also because like uh different people had to come up with different solutions to these weird problems. Well, I can't make fire because I can't animate every single flame. So, what am I gonna how what am I gonna put textures around a cone? Am I gonna like do a particle effect? You know, and like everyone's picking different things because there's no standard.

SPEAKER_00 32:52

Oh yeah. I think one of my favorite examples of this that uh you know uh a little bit farther on down the line is like the GoldenEye 007 uh N64 video game, the team was famous because they were like brand new to video game making. The the team that worked on that game had never really done anything for rare. And nowadays, when like somebody goes to create a level for a shooter, they create a shooter level with like places you duck behind and like places to like funnel people in for a multiplayer thing, and then they stylize it to look like an office building or something like that. But it's a shooter's level with all the knowledge of how to make a good shooting level. Goldeneye 0007, part of the charm of it is that they just did buildings. They like were like, alright, we got the schematics for the building, they build the whole thing out, so there's rooms in the multiplayer thing that like literally nobody ever goes into because it had serves no function to like you're never gonna find anybody in there to kill. So it's just this office on the corner, but it gave you this weird sense of like almost like being in a building after hours. It was a real building. This is where people actually work. Things make sense from like an office perspective, whereas nowadays everything makes sense in a like Call of Duty perspective, like Loop Town in Call of Duty. That's a level, it's designed as a level to get you to shoot people. The old version of that might have been to like literally just take a town, reconstruct it, then maybe the gameplay will express itself differently. But like, I don't know that that to me, I missed that sense of exploration. Why is this here? Without the answer being, well, because the developer wants me to do this. It's like, why is this here? It's like, well, because they made it and this is where the room is. Somebody might have lived here, you know. I don't know. But that sense of exploration, part of it is being a kid, but like part of it was just how it was designed, you know?

SPEAKER_01 34:32

Yeah, no, totally. I mean, level design was something that I was super interested young because I was really into Ratchet and Clink, and all the all the Ratchet and Clink levels all kind of like uh circled back in on each other, so you could like do the missions in any order, but when you're finished, you're back in the main hub thing. And um, and then I remember, and maybe this is kind of a tangent, but um, one of the reasons why I loved Ratchet and Clank so much was because they had this like secret level that was like a museum that you could walk around and there was like concept art, there was like early animations, early models for things before they like they're like, Oh, we tried to make like Ratchet so that he did a double jump, but like it was all the players were like fucking up and like you know, doing this stuff, and and it would explain all that, and um, and that the I mean stuff like that was like the dream to me. Like, I loved seeing like behind the scenes stuff and just seeing like how everything was made because like yeah, for me, I mean, especially like even when I was younger, like for me a lot of everything was like, How did they do this? How can I do it? You know, like what was what is going on in this thing? Like, and I wasn't even thinking about it technologically exactly, I was thinking it more just like practically, like, if I wanted to do this, like what would I do? And a lot of the times it was like no idea. I have no idea, but I might as well like watch a bunch of people try to explain it. Um, but it is the reason why I do everything I do now, is just because like you got to a point where I was like, I just need to make a song for this, I need to figure it out, and I then I did, and I would just have the the I don't know, drive, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 36:04

I love that as uh a lot of people wonder how to learn something, right? And I think the general way that it's sort of assumed that you learn something is like if you want to learn game design, you learn the foundations of game design first, and then you learn this thing, and you learn this thing, and once you get skilled at all the individual skills, then you go make a game, right? And then doing that you have the foundation, but it's like that's never how I've ever learned something. I learned how to play guitar because it's like I listened to uh Nirvana and I like wanted to play Smells Like Teen Spirit, and I didn't know how to do anything, but I end up having to learn how to like do a bar chord or something like that. And eventually you you learn from starting at the end goal and then working your way backwards as opposed to starting at the beginning and working towards the end goal. I just think it's a different way some people approach things, and I think it comes across because the stuff that you make, there is an element of creativity towards everything. The mute like you're talking about, the music, the there like I mentioned earlier, the indie game sphere space these days, there's a very strong sense of like autorship. Autorship. I don't know if that's really the problem. No, I I know what you mean. I think maybe that is like exactly, yeah. But uh, you know, for the most part, it's like uh I don't know, I've never done that with video games, but I I I'm fascinated by video games because I watched them develop in my life. We had a Nintendo, then we had a Super Nintendo, then we had an N64, then we had a GameCube, and like watching this development, uh it honestly made me more interested in like the developmental history of music, the developmental history of movies and stuff like that, because I saw it go from A to B to C to D, and those things all being very distinct, as opposed to like I kind of worry about kids nowadays, like they've come in, video games are already there, they're already like developed, you know?

SPEAKER_01 37:46

Yeah, well, you know, I mean so like you know, to talk about to get to coding, for example, like like I said, like I never learned, I thought I was too stupid, I thought I was. I tried several times to do like uh code academy, if you know what that is. Oh yeah, yeah. I've looked into it. I tried a bunch of those things back in the day and I just never clicked. Um, and uh, and then um uh I found this like software called construct too, and it was like uh it was like plug-in play kind of coding. Like you weren't typing like if car whatever, blah blah blah. But you would just put in like you would like double click and it'd be like if car is going fast, click on that, double click, boom, like move pixel one one over, right? And you kind of just like slot everything in, but you can still read it, still reads the same way as code just in English rather than like in code. Um but like once I like once that clicked, where I was like, oh, I don't have to worry about like all these like names of variables and all the syntax and like how to properly format a for loop in this particular language, once you strip all that away, it's so obvious what how to do everything. It really is just like as simple as being like if key is down, move right 10 pixels like every 0.1 seconds. And after after I think I've uh so I learned construct, I made my first game um prog one, and I really sit on Steam to nothing, to no one. But by the time by the time I had done those things, I was good enough that I started making tutorials, and a year later I got a job making tutorials for that engine. And I was literally working at a game school um in LA where like I would make all the all the uh the videos, like all the there's a word for curriculum. I was trying to be using the word. All the curriculum. Um I would make all that, and then like um I would go into the office like once a week to like meet up with my boss or whatever, but I was pretty much just making tutorials the whole time. And yeah, and like that was like a three or four-year period where like I went from like literally not knowing how to make a game at all, like not even getting it, like not even it making sense at all, to like working on teaching kids how to make games. And all I'm saying is what I'm getting at is that like there is this weird barrier, the syntax barrier, that like computer science majors want you to keep like want to keep you out of. They don't want you to know that it's actually so easy what they're doing, all you have to do is memorize like 500 things, like which is like sounds like a lot, but it really isn't.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

Yeah. Oh no, that's uh I mean, uh it's somebody who's been trying to learn a language uh a little bit because I'm worried that you know my brain's getting mushy. Uh and I've I've been trying to learn Mandarin for a little bit. Uh it's like 500 words uh in Mandarin or whatever. I remember thinking, like, oh my god, that's so many words. I'll be so good at speaking to other people at 500 words. And I got to 500 words, I'm like, one, I cannot communicate a single thing, and this didn't take very long, you know. It's like it was pretty easy to get to 500, but like I I still can't like put sentences together. It's really not that much, you know. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 40:49

No, I mean, like, I was like that too. I could go through the whole codomat academy thing and get every single question right, and then when it's like, okay, now write a program, I'm like, what do you mean?

SPEAKER_00 40:57

Like, I I that was the other thing too, with trying to learn a lot of stuff. It's like, all right, well, it reminded me of like learning a how to drive a car. I went to you know, driver's ed for however long you're supposed to be you're there for like weeks. And I remember I got out of driver's ed, I got the license, I got in the car, and within like 20 minutes, I'm like, all right, I feel like I'm learning everything right now. Like I feel like just in the first week of my license, I learned as much and if not more than I did in weeks of driver's ed. And it's like, all right, so why did I have to do like that? Didn't work for me. The school thing didn't work for me, but like the I think some people just need that necessity. It's like I oh I have to I wanna do this so badly that sure I'll learn how to do the syntax for that. I'll do it, I'll learn now, you know.

SPEAKER_01 41:40

I do kind of think that learning is a little bit of procrastination as far as like book learning. Um, because like for again for me, like everything and school never worked for me. I was never good at anything that I wasn't gonna be good at just by like starting it. For example, geometry, I was terrible at I got a D in geometry because I couldn't memorize the formulas. I had no idea what any of the formula was, I couldn't memorize it, and my dad wouldn't buy me the expensive calculator where you could type in the algorithms or the formulas in there and it can just remember it for you.

SPEAKER_00 42:12

Um yeah, he wanted you to suffer.

SPEAKER_01 42:14

Yeah, so I quit math after that. And that was another thing. I was like, I'm too stupid to know math. But like algebra was aced without I didn't even think, I didn't even do any homework, I just could just do it. So, like, again, a lot of these things are just these weird barriers of like people like saying, like, hey, this is how you learn how to do this. Start here and then do this and then do this and do this, and by the time you're done with all that, you'll have a thing, and that just doesn't work for me. I have to start here and be like, okay, now I have to figure out how to get how to do this. And it's like, okay, now I gotta go back and figure out how to do this and stuff. And I guess I need to see the use for it, you know.

SPEAKER_00 42:48

I need to see the use for it in my hands, uh, like immediately. Otherwise, like when I'm doing it, I'm like, I just I don't know. Maybe it's a lack of faith, to be honest with you. Of like, I just don't trust myself, but like I I hate that feeling of like, well, I wanted to do this. You made me learn four or five other things. This is the one thing that I need to do. And the four or five other things, like I can feel myself forgetting how to do those as well. So, like, what was the point of all that? Like, I just learned all the stuff and now I forgot it, and it's like maybe it'll come back later, but it's like, well, if it's gonna come back later, why didn't I just wait until it came and was necessary? Like, I want I don't know, but and I I do want to emphasize a lot of that I think is a personal flaw of my own. Like, I should just learn things and be better at it, you know. I think this is my fault, but it's it's true, it's it's how it works.

SPEAKER_01 43:35

You're you're a performing musician, right?

SPEAKER_00 43:37

Like, um Yeah, that's uh let's put it in a heavy quotation, Marks, but yeah, sure. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 43:41

But I mean, you know, like I I I know I I'm out there, I'm on stage. Yeah, but like for me to like, you know, when I was learning music, I was never like playing what I was gonna play on stage at home. And then when I when I would get on stage was when like it all like matched up. It was the it was like the the Test, you know, the t like, hey, you like you're noodling with an idea, you're getting your friends to sing the songs and play the drums, and you're getting it all working, and then it's like the performance is when you do it to me. And that was like how learning was for me with school. It was like, oh, kind of like noodling around with what the ideas were talked about in class. I'm not really doing the homework, but I'm you know, I'm figuring out whatever. And then the test is when it's like, okay, like down to the wire. But I think that like, I don't know, I think that maybe there's just a different approach of like when to me it's like a performance. It's like when I'm making the art, it's like now I'm taking now I'm doing it right now, like at this moment, taking what I know, taking what I remember, and doing it literally right now, rather than sort of like I don't know, kind of mushing it around. I just feel like if I just get a bunch of facts, they just kind of like I just kind of mush them around and I'm like, I don't know which ones to remember, which ones that are relevant, you know.

SPEAKER_00 44:48

I've always got like a million thoughts in my head at any point in a given time. And the reason I make all the videos that I make where I walk around and shoot myself talking is because if I'm not walking, I can't focus on anything. If I'm walking for whatever reason, it helps me like stay on track of like my thoughts or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 45:05

But I feel that I always I always have big plans when I'm driving. I'm always like, when I get home, I'm gonna make a playlist perfect or whatever, and then by the time you get home, you're like, never mind.

SPEAKER_00 45:13

What's weird is like driving is where I make I think about the future, but like when I actually need to like figure out what I need to do in a day, like I'll go just take a shower sometimes because it's like I don't know what the fuck I'm supposed to do today. And like for some reason the clarity in the shower is uh it's unbelievable. I don't know how brains work, man. They're a fascinating spot.

SPEAKER_01 45:30

So as humans, the humans are weird creatures. Weird, man. What we do, like it's so weird to just think like look around your your studio right now and just think like a badger doing that, you know. Like, just think that like like it's like a dolphin, you know. Imagine like we went down to the ocean and dolphins had like recordings to you know, like their own versions. It's like, why do we have like all this? Like, why do I have like a cup? Like, no other animal has a cup with like Korean written on it. Like, it's just not like a we're just so I know I'm saying better, I don't even think we're better than animals, uh, necessarily.

SPEAKER_00 46:04

Um that distinguishes man from beast or whatever, where it's like, you know, uh there are like rats. Uh the there's a specific type of desert, like muskrat or something like that, that will like collect shiny things and decorate their den. So it's like there's there's some similarities to it, but like I think the thing that I find the most fascinating, uh, having started this podcast, so I can talk to people that are working on stuff that I think is cool, is how many people one uh are working on these creative projects. And like the people that are doing the my favorite thing that I like uh that I've learned from this is the people that are doing creative projects, they never really worry about the why of it. They don't they think about the why, they try to figure out like why am I doing this, why am I spending so much time, but like they're not worried about it. It is self-evident that they should be doing it, even if they can't articulate exactly why. The thing that's I think is fascinating is just like uh especially with music or something like that. We have people that they both make music, they both make music that I enjoy listening to, but their approach to it is vastly different, it's completely different from start to finish. Every part of the process is different. The result is still enjoyable, and it's like for me, I I love that. I love the idea that it's like, oh my god, I can never know the right way because there is no right way. You just keep making stuff, you know.

SPEAKER_01 47:22

Well, that goes back to exactly about where it's like learning stuff. It's like, yeah, you learn stuff, and it's sort of like uh like you you learn stuff to be able to like break the rules and do whatever you want. You're like, oh yeah, it's most of the time for me, it's almost like uh like even recently I was doing the logo and there was a guy and he was like, I noticed the O goes below the um you know the baseline. Like, you should you line that up? And I'm like, that's actually like a typographical technique, like you're supposed to have the S's and the O's like below the baseline slightly and above. Um but like that's all that kind of stuff, like but I literally to that client, I was like, I've seen it work without it, but I like doing it because you know I just like following some typographic rules sometimes, especially typography is typography is more rule heavy. Anyway, the point I was getting at is it's like it's like uh it's like training wheels, right? Like you learn you need the training wheels so you can ride the bike, but you can't do the back flip off the ramp with the training wheels on. You gotta take them off. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's what people get wrong about it, is that they keep building the scaffolding and then they're like building something on top of it, and the scaffolding is for you to get there, but you need to get rid of it. So like you need to like shed that, like all those. Oh, the reason like I've been in bands where like I was always playing the this stupid, like that. Well, I don't know what the note is called, but the middle between the four and the five, that blues note right there. I was like doing all this Well, yeah, whatever, it doesn't matter. I was playing with that, and just like you can't do that every time, it doesn't even like match, it's not even in the right key. And I'm like, but it sounds cool, like that's like the whole point of playing this. It's not about like no one's gonna be testing us, like, ah, you played a D flat there and it was supposed to be an E sharp. And not that those I don't even that might have been the same thing, but you know what I mean? Like no one's testing it. No one's like, ah, this is unless it's bad, unless it sounds bad. And then you can and then you can attribute like why does it sound bad? It might sound bad because it's out of key, but it might sound bad just because you want it to sound bad, you know, like right, yeah, exactly. You want it to be fucked up and not, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:17

So so I think uh one of the things I think about with that is like uh if you look at like Pablo Picasso, obviously abstract painter, if you look at his early work though, he learned all the rules. He learned classical painting, he was classically trained, and it's like so there's this element of this is how I can kind of reflect this back to what you're working on video game-wise, right? There are rules that you do have to know in order to tastefully and accurately break those rules, right? Unless you know the forms of video games, the language of video games now, so you can play around with them. You kind of have to understand the basic rules. But what we were talking about earlier is like at the dawn, at the creation of this, mist, there's no rules for mist. They're the so their job was to create what would eventually become the rules of the medium. Your job now is to take what they've created and now figure out all right, you know, like you're saying, oh, I want this to drop below the baseline, the oh dropping below the baseline, because it looks cool in this specific context, but like you understand this is the basic rule, this is how I'm going against it. In a video game now, it's like, oh, I can take the rules that Mist has done, but like I still want to steal some of the stuff that they got wrong because that worked in the wrong way, you know. It's like exactly. But like it's a different task for you than it was for the early game designers, and that's what I think is very interesting. It's like there are rules now to video games, but because there are rules, now it opens up this uh the negation of the negation. You know, somebody's gotta negate the rules themselves to create the new rules, you know?

SPEAKER_01 50:40

I mean, yeah, it's like taping the banana to the wall and then being like that's not art, art is like Rothko, or and then it's like, no, that's not our Brillo box is art. And it's I mean, it obviously always is constantly evolving, but it is kind of a back and forth a lot of the time of like strict uh adherence to the rules and like you know, uh tradition and and all that stuff, and then the 90s fucking who cares, green and pink and triangles and squirrels and whatever, and then it was like Facebook, like stark, like perfect web design calculated everything.

SPEAKER_00 51:12

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:12

You know what I'm saying? It just does that.

SPEAKER_00 51:14

I mean, honestly, I feel like you're getting now there was this big push towards minimalism, and now the push is going back to more to uh eclectic styles. But it's like the way that I like it is like uh you know uh these things rhyme, they repeat themselves, these trends like things become retro and then they come regurgitate back later on in the future, but not exactly the same way, right? Uh you can never step in the same river twice. So even though it's like you could try to make right now, you could try to make a 90s design for something, but in doing so, it would still be somebody from 2026 making a 90s design, meaning it's not a 90s design, because 90s designs were made by people in the 90s, and that's like honestly, that's kind of the fun of art because like even if you make the same stuff, it's still new. As soon as it gets to the point where you can't make new art, that's where I I'd actually be nervous, you know.

SPEAKER_01 52:03

I'm like I'm so behind actually, dude. I have like stacks and stacks of things that I still need to do. I have no problem. I have I have no um I I have no problem with with uh not having enough material, but yeah, you're but you're right. Like um I think I think the thing about um art is just it's always evolving and you just have to evolve with it. I think there's people who like try to like stick adhere to like oh I'm only gonna do this, and you don't realize that it it it cycles out because like not just because it's bad or you're bad or whatever, or people got tired of you specifically, but that you know it like for example, I remember when the 80s were back in and like everything was like 8-bit and retro, and I remember being like kind of a purist about pixel art, being like 8-bit doesn't mean pixelated, and people be like, 8-bit, whatever, and I'm like, it's not just 8, it's not pixelated, it's about the memory allocation of the you know, whatever. Um, but yeah, but I mean it it it's exactly the same. And and and I'm not even lying about like this being my version of that for the 90s. Like, obviously, games didn't look like this in the 90s, but again, to bring to pull back the echo thing to echo, echoing, to me, it's it's about like introducing someone to something that I really enjoyed or thought was weird in a way that you can enjoy it, you know, right? Like, yeah, like in the same way. Because that's the other thing too.

SPEAKER_00 53:25

Yeah, a lot of the early stuff that we were talking about, like a lot of those early games, like even Mist, you get to a point where like it actually just isn't fun. Like the game would just have something that's like, oh, this is actually just such bad design that you just want to look it up and get it over with. And it's like, well, that's the that's the advantage you have now. It's like when you run into one of those problems, now you can go online and be like, hey, uh my players are being forced into this uh bottleneck. Does anybody have a solution to this that doesn't suck because I can't think of something? Right. Somebody might have that. Like, that's the advantage that we have, and you know, yeah, I I like it. I like when the games aren't I like when games don't come to game armor, it just fucking sucks, you know?

SPEAKER_01 54:01

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and and you know, that can be on purpose, right? Like you have you've ever watched H Bomberguy's video on Pathologic where he's like that whole thing. Oh, one of the great videos, yeah. One of the great videos. I watch all his videos all the time. I rewatch them all the time. But oh yeah, Pathologic is a great one because what I like about specifically the video essay of it is because the video essay is the medium that which most people are experiencing this game, which is interesting because H bomber guy can like insists continually, like the game sucks, you don't want to play it, it makes it everything awful, you feel awful the whole time you're playing it. And it's funny because it's like I needed like a almost like a reality show. I needed to watch him play it for me to be able to enjoy it because otherwise I would just give up and be like, this sucks, I can't handle it, I don't want to I hate playing games where I don't have a lot of life or whatever, you know, whatever. But oh yeah, you know, but it's just interesting. I've tried to play Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:58

Oh, I was gonna say I've tried to play Pathologic uh at least twice because it fascinates me. The idea of a game that is uh rewarding, even though everyone that says it says it's like it's genuinely one of the worst games to play ever. But I've never stopped. Uh I I think about this a lot with uh you know Roger Ebert, the movie critic on the movie Freddie Got Finger, was like when that movie came out, I gave it the I bombed it. I thought it was awful. I gave it a but I have to say, I think I talk about this movie. This movie came out seven years ago, and I think I talk about it once a month, ever since it came out. So like even though it's bad, it did something that no other movie has ever done. So uh like Pathologic it exists in this realm. It's another thing too, is like people talk about like food as art a lot of the times, but like you would never eat a meal that tastes awful. You would never eat a meal that like in intentionally like will make your stomach upset, right? But like you'll watch a movie that will make you feel bad, you'll see a painting that'll make you feel uncomfortable. Pathologic is one of those things where I'm like, alright, well, this is a game as art because it's a game that frustrates you, it's not fun to play, but it's still worth playing. It's like, so what is that? What does that mean? Especially with the term game, you know? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:09

I mean, yeah, of course. I mean, I've been thinking about I've I've written several uh essays about the Stanley Parable that I that are sitting in my notes. Um uh I'm always kind of thinking about that, especially because like I grew up in like a creative home. So there was always like art around, there was always like things about art. I knew I was making art, my parents both made art. And so there was and and specifically about that um was that I was always kind of designing stuff for like events. My parents were teachers, so it was like, hey, we need to make posters for the event, or we need to like make a thing so that the kids know what to make, or whatever. And I was always doing that kind of stuff. So there's always been this really nice for me, luckily, balance of like art as work and art as expression. I was always doing both. I was always like, oh, I have to spray paint this whole thing and it's gonna suck, but it's gonna be cool because it's gonna go in my movie or whatever. Um and so I think a lot of people think of art as like this pure expression thing where like you can't pure art isn't about commercialism, but I mean, and again, we can talk about Andy Warhol till the till the cows come home, if you will. But yeah, but I mean I think that like the only really way the only way to really make it as an artist nowadays is to be able to balance. I know plenty of artists who who are like, I I'm not inspired, and I'm like, it's not about being inspired. If you want to do this as a job, you gotta just do it, and you gotta figure out a way to find the inspiration to do it. Um, and uh, and I I think I I went off topic about it, but the the point I was getting.

SPEAKER_00 57:42

No, no, I I actually you're touching on something that I again I've I talked to a lot of people that are doing this professionally now, like doing music professionally that are artistic about it. But like this uh I view this this sort of this dialectic between the performer and the audience, right? If you make stuff that's just for you and it's not for any audience whatsoever, it's kind of masturbatory. It's it's not really gonna have the full effect of something that is made for an audience. If you make something that is entirely for an audience, though, right? Right now it has none of you in it, and it's kind of not worth making. But it's the there's something in the in the middle of it that you aren't gonna be able to like intellectualize yourself to. The only way you can get to like that beautiful blend of the authentic self and the enjoyment of the audience, something that like is worthwhile to the not necessarily enjoyment, but worthwhile to an audience and authentic to the self. You have to participate in that dialogue between artist and uh and audience, which might mean suck it up, fucking crank something out that you don't really care about, and just ship it. You gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta make it, you know. Yeah, I think uh I was gonna say Philip K. Dick, the uh author who like every Hollywood movie is based off of, was he was just cranking out pulp fiction as much as he could because he had the fucking bills to pay. He didn't have time to think about it too much.

SPEAKER_01 59:00

Dude, that's like that's the problem I think that too people, you know. I see I see people are like, Oh, I'm a struggling artist and like you know, uh like I can't sell a painting or something, and I'm like, dude, we just don't live in a world where that's a thing. Like, you know, like maybe at some point, maybe in the 60s or the 70s, if you knew the right people, maybe, maybe. Um, like super maybe.

SPEAKER_00 59:24

I mean that's that's a whole thing that especially with like uh musicians I find all the time is like there are people that are here in 2026 playing shows thinking that like an AR rep is gonna come and give them a record deal. And it's like, dude, there are no record deals. Like, if you want to make money off of this, you gotta go make a TikTok video of your song and hope it blows up and then go on tour and and sell t-shirts. Like, yeah, if you are if you're gonna make money as an artist, as like an independent artist, you gotta realize like you're selling t-shirts and you're basically a traveling booze salesman, yeah. You're going to bars getting people to drink. That and you gotta do that, and if you do it the right way, you'll be able to play your music, right? That's like the trade-off, but you have to find that balance between the two. You can't tell the reality of the world to shape around your whims, you have to engage with the world as it is, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:13

Yeah, no, definitely. I knew a guy who I helped him build a studio in his house, and he built all this stuff, and I was like, hey man, like we should get just whoever off the street into here. Like, let's go to the local um, you know, open mic session, pick a 16-year-old kid that's playing neo emo stuff, record him for two hours, give him a free CD just to like dial it in, right? But the guy was like, he was like, No, it's gotta be perfect. Like, I need to put up the wall panels and the ground is too echoey and stuff. And I'm like, dude, that's like the point of doing the thing is like getting people to come in, listening and being like, ah yeah, the floor is too reflective, like we need to put a carpet there or whatever. And like, and months and months of going by of like writing a song for three months, and I'm like, dude, you need to be writing a song every day. Like, what are you doing? Yes, you know, crank it out, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:04

Come on, put it out there. Yeah, and somebody else, yeah. Just uh uh it's it's a strange mentality, I think, that people have. Uh it's just like an idealistic version vision of how the world should work. It's like, oh, if I get the perfect recording studio, it's like, yeah, all right, how the fuck are you gonna get the perfect recording studio without testing out the recording equipment and recording somebody? Exactly. And like I think a lot of it comes from a fear of looking ridiculous. They don't want to like have a recording and it has this weird echo in the background. They're like, oh my god, it's so embarrassing that I have this bad recording. It's like, well, the only way to get past is make another one and fix the issue and make another one. And then there'll be another issue, and you gotta fix that and make the next one.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:41

Don't be afraid of embarrassing yourself, right? And if you don't focus on that and think of every project as something that happened behind you and that you've moved forward from, you can still enjoy it. You can be like, oh man, this like sounds so terrible, but I like the idea that I had in this one particular thing. I know it's a good idea. I see the vision, man. I see the vision, you know? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:58

But no, but like you were saying, your first uh game that came out on Steam or or whatever, like it didn't do much. No, but like you now look at the stuff that you are making that does start to turn heads a little bit, and you go, Oh, it was necessary for me to do that to make this, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:13

Exactly. And and and to like to be honest, there's been plenty of people who have asked me, like, hey, like, what do you what have you made? And I can be like, Oh, I made a game on Steam, and like that's enough for them to be like, Oh, you're a real you know thing, and even though I didn't make any money off of it, no one cared about it, it's still like it's a it's an accomplishment as as much as anything. Like, your smallest trophy on your shelf is still on your shelf, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:36

Like, oh yeah, I remember a big difference for me between before I put an album, and it was just an album that I stuck on bandcamp, and like just personally, not even telling anyone else, but it's like I had this album on Bandcamp, it's called Orange Lazarus. Go check it out. I love it. Uh, but like it's super fucking rough, it's super weird, it's super lo-fi. But like in my my heart of hearts, there was this thing was like I have an album, I am a musician. Now, before then, I thought I could play music, I thought I was a musician. After that, it's like, no, I have a band now. It's called Smiling Strange. That band is now a guy who makes TikToks and reels. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, we've pivoted, but yeah, yeah, that's like what the name came comes from, you know?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:16

Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, exactly. That you just have to do stuff. I think that's like the main thing. There's so many people just don't do stuff. Yeah, they win or want to do the right thing. Exactly. Yeah, and and and it is a f it's for it's for sure a fear thing, especially because the the that same guy though there was the mixing room was like mathematically like there was he used trigonometry to like figure out where the speaker should be and everything. And I'm like, and he the stuff he would produce, I'm like, dude, this sounds exactly like something I produced in the another room, like in my bedroom, like over there. Yeah with just like a shitty mic, you know, like but you can do all the math you want, and it's not gonna make your song sell. And so, and yeah, so I again like the I think the training wheels thing where it's like, yeah, obviously, like of course, technically this and this, and technically you should have this, and sound proofing, and technically all this stuff, but at the end of the day, most of the reason why your art is interesting is not because of the technical reasons why you did certain things, it's because of the unique, specific things that you did specific to you personally, because you made those decisions, not some YouTube video that you watched in 2018.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:24

Oh, yeah. Also, shout out 2018 YouTube videos and stuff like those things.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:28

Videos back then actually teaching you stuff and not just being like whatever they do.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:32

Oh, dude, even who knows I I my algorithm is pretty dialed in on what I want it to be at this point, but AJ, uh, I want to thank you, man. That's about an hour. That's how I usually like to keep these things. Uh plug anything, plug everything that you do. Where can people find you? Where can people follow you? Where can they play your games? Where can they buy your merch? All that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:52

Oh, you can do all of that stuff on officialeelectric.com. It's exactly how it's spelled. Officialectric.com. Many people have tried to steal this from me. They asked me, they sent me.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:03

I can't believe you got that website. That's that's the whole reason why it's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:07

I mean, like, the story always existed, but when I found out that I could get officialeelectric.com, it ch it's and this is like eight years ago or something that I got it. Maybe not that long ago, but the point I'm making is everything's on there. You can find pretty much everything. Some of my music is there too, I think. Um but yeah, uh, you can follow me on AJ Generated on Instagram and Twitter, and on Blue Sky, I'm clone. And I think that that and then you and you'll be able to figure it out from there, I think. That's a good start.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:37

Nice! Awesome, and yeah, I I highly suggest anybody that wants to uh you know play a cool game. I like cool, weird games. Uh AJ, I think you're a really interesting guy. I've really enjoyed uh our double chats now. They'll never hear the first one.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:51

No, but they heard of this one, and uh we'll remember.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:53

We'll stay in touch, man. Uh uh, this was great. Uh, thanks again for doing this. 100%, dude. This is great. And uh yeah, um, yeah.