Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Brian Altano's Gaming History - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 155

Episode Date: January 29, 2018

Tim and special guest Brain Altano sit down for a one-on-one going through Altano's history with video games. (Released first to http://www.Patreon.com/KindaFunnyGames Supporters on 01.26.17) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up guys? Welcome to the first ever episode 155 of the Kind of Funny Games cast. As always, I'm Tim Geddes joined by for the first time ever, Brian Altano. Thank you so much for having me. I want the brat. You got to give you the brad. There you go. I heard Greg's been doing that. What the fuck? I came down here specifically to kick his ass and he's in Canada hiding. Greg, I'm in your house ready to beat you up and you're not here. That's fucked up, man.

I don't know. Has he done it? I don't think you did. People are in my mentions. Maybe. He's taking it back. He's taking it back. He never had it. You can take it back. He never had it. That catchphrase stealing motherfucker. One of the coolest dudes in video games, Greg Miller, is actually up in the cold right now, up in Montreal with Jean-Viev Saint-Ange Miller. He'll be back next week.

So for this, we decided to do a really special episode of Gamescast. I was like, we don't have anything specific on the dock. Right. It's January. Yeah, it's a slow time of year. Yeah, it's not too much going on. So I was like, I want to do a nice little one-on-one with Brian Altano. I want to hear about his history and video games since he was a wee little lad back in Brooklyn.

You're from Brooklyn? I was born in Seacococcus, New Jersey. First of all, thank you again so much for having me. Of course. And if I haven't said it to you specifically, congrats on your success here. The studio is fantastic. Your crew is awesome.

I love all these people back here. It's good to be in the building. Yeah, man. Let's do this. Let's talk video games. Let's get right into it. Well, first off, this is the Kind of Funny Games cast each and every week right here on YouTube.com

slash Kind of Funny Games. We get together and talk about video games. And all the things that we love about them. You can get it early on Patreon.com Slash Kind of Funny Games. You get it a whole three days early on Friday or else you get it late on Monday, both at 9 a.m. It's a beautiful time to be alive for everybody. Get on that Patreon. Take care of these boys.

Yeah, please take care of us. And also, you can listen to it on podcast services around the globe. If you would rate and review them, especially on iTunes, that would mean a lot to us. So thank you for all of your continued support. And thank you to Tom Bach, our Patreon producer, who is a fantastic gentleman. He's a very good looking dude. He has a beautiful family. And I support his endeavors, especially with those endeavors, include support.

us on Patreon. He just won the sexiest man on Earth award for the seventh year in a row, which is insane. He has the most abs and he can crush an entire 12 pack of beer against his forehead without crying. Fucking amazing, too. It's pretty damn impressive. Just unbelievable. I want to jump right into it, Altona. Why did that get Kevin's circuit? Because Kevin, Kevin, he just needs a laugh every once in a while.

What have you been playing? Weirdly, I jumped back into Bloodbourne this year. I was not expecting to, but this is that time of year where, We're always like, we're going to catch up on the shit we missed last year, the year before. You know, everybody has that sort of like rainy day fund of video games they want to go back to. And you feel bad, especially, you know what it's like, man. Like we work in the industry and it's like, I never ever complained about my job because it's fantastic. But it's also a big specific part of our jobs is to stay up on shit.

And a lot of that really means that like kind of, it means like dipping one toe into a game for a couple hours and kind of getting your feet wet a little bit. And then saying like, all right, no, I got to move out to the next thing. So I'll really get into a game and then I'll have to stop because it's like, oh, this came out or this came out or this came out. And for some odd reason this year, I was like, Bloodbourne is one of my favorite games of all time. It's the game that I think has made me sort of like feel something the most from a video game. I never really played it because the whole, you know, Dark Souls like Soulsborn games like intimidate me. Right, yeah. I mean, I think that's like, first of all, they are intentionally obtuse and difficult.

and like as I've said before, the audience mantra around it is basically, fuck you, get better, you know, get good is what everyone says. Which is like, not really what you want to hear when you're not good.

You know, like when you're like, I want to get good. Everyone's like, but you got to get good. And you're like, but how do I fucking get good? And you're like,

well, that's like when you're five and someone's like, well, why is this like this? And like, well, because. I'm like, well,

that's not an argument. So I jump back into Bloodborn, I think looking to sort of, like feel something cool from a video game. And what I think BloodBorn does really well is it is terrifying. So there's that feeling. There's fear, right? And it's very different than say something like Super Mario Odyssey, which is like joy.

Yeah. Like you're playing Mario Odyssey. You're like, yeah. Yeah. And everyone's like, wahoo. And you know, they're jumping on shit. And everyone's your friend, even when you're not, you know, you steal their clothes and their hats and shit.

And it's great. You become the lizard. You do all the fucks up. Become the lizard. Bloodbord is like, they just kind of drop you in. and you wake up in a like a hospital and their wolf tries to kill you and you're like, I don't know what the fuck this is.

I don't remember what this is like. I finished that game before and playing it two years later made it feel entirely new. And it's weird to have like comfort food that pushes back. It's sort of just like one of your favorite things to do

like when you were sick was to have like the world's spiciest tortilla chip or something. You know? You're kind of like, like most people go for like chicken soup. and grilled cheese and stuff like that.

Like, you know, like you're linked to the past, your, your Grand The Fottos, your Mario 3. Like, some of us even play, like, the last of us a bunch of times. Bloodborm was one of those ones where I'm like, this is comfort food for me. Even though it's fucking devastatingly brutal and difficult, it's disgusting.

Like, everything you fight in that game is like a, it's like a wet horsewoman skeleton, and there's like, you turn the corner and there's just like fucking dudes with pitchforks and flames trying to kill you. And it's just an awful, gross, mean, shitty, cruel game. And I love fighting in it because I incrementally become better at it.

Yeah. And then you're all of a sudden kind of like, I'm, I'm accomplishing something, which I think when we sit down with our finite time to play video games, you can do something that sort of just waste some time and walk away, or you can get a little bit better at something. And I think that's what draws me to that game specifically. That's why I loved Cuphead so much last year,

where I mean, it has all the sensibilities that I love in a video game, but it does have that challenge factor where I feel like I was accomplishing something and I wasn't just wasting my time. I was going to ask you about that, Because you, like, really locked into that game, but you're, I, you're not somebody I would normally describe as somebody that moves, like, gravitates towards brutally difficult. Oh, I'm not the hard difficulty guy. I like just, like, getting through the experiences and just being happy with them. Yep.

Like, I'll take a journey any day. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with that, by the way. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. I love 2D platformers. And I don't play games on easy. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But I'm a normal guy, right?

I don't need to bump it up hard and whatever. I'm not down for that. But with Cuphead, I, I played it through on normal. and I did beat it to my Twitter bio for proof. But I love it, but it's like I, and I've said this before on the show, but that game, it made me feel like I was accomplishing something.

But I also, I wanted to give back to the developers by beating it. Right. Like they put so much work and effort into the designs and the look and the feel of the game that I was like, I owe it to them to get to that final boss and to see everything the game had to offer

because they designed it with, not only was the, did it look beautiful, but it was designed beautifully in terms of the progression and how each boss fed into the next one. And it's funny because I actually popped it in a couple days ago and spent a while and went back to some of the early bosses. I'm like, oh my God, these are so easy.

Oh, you just like flew through it? Yeah. And I'm just like, it's so funny that it's like, especially because you get the other weapons make some of the early boss fights really easy. Right. But it's rewarding. And that's what video games can do. That's the magic of them is they make you feel like a fucking badass.

I really like your attitude on that because I never really thought about. And like, you know, it's part of my job as a loud, stupid mouthpiece in the industry to figure out ways to give back to the creators and the creative people making games. And one of the ways I do that is to sort of like, you know, find weird indie games and small teams working on small things and talk about them at lengths and give them some spotlight. But I've never really heard it put like, I owe it to them to finish it because I think that's my best way of showing my gratitude. Like that's that's the way we sort of, and again, another metaphor, but the way we treat food. Yeah. It's like when you sit down at someone's house, if you like clear your plate, that's sort of like you showing them that you're, that you really love the dinner, right?

And in some cultures like Japan, you burp afterwards, which I guess for you is a podcasting about it. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that's like, that's a really, that's a really warm, really cool attitude to have. I mean, man, that game is so special. And for anybody that gave it a try and thinks it's too hard, I really think you should

just stick at it for a little longer and see if maybe you can put. through because it is designed that way. And I feel like that game, it is the perfect balance of amount of content because I feel like any more and it would have maybe outstayed its welcome. Right. But it was just the right amount for me to be like, wow, there's a lot here. And I took 30 attempts at this boss. But once you get to the new one, it's this fresh new feeling for another 30.

And then you just keep going through that cycle. But it's like at every point, I always felt like, oh, there's something I'm moving towards. There's something on the horizon that I can, I can overcome it's going to be something even cooler than this. So let me ask you this and like, there was obviously like controller throwing, I give up moments. Was there, was there any,

like a specific time where you were like, I'm done, I can't do this? So there was two moments playing through it, two specific bosses that at this point, I don't even remember which, what they were, where I had tried and tried and tried and tried and I couldn't beat it.

I was just like, maybe this is the point that I just can't get past. It wasn't so much me being like, fuck this game. It was more like, I don't know that I could do this. But then in classic video game fashion, you come back the next time

and on your second attempt, you beat it. You walk away for a bit, you put the controller down, and then you come back. Yeah, I did that. I had this whole rant on podcast Beyond where I did that with Bloodbourne. And it was basically like,

I titled the video like how I almost quit my game of the year. Because it's kind of like, I was like, fuck this shit. Fuck the cleric beast, this awful giant screaming wolf man. And then like I went back to the bridge and I just whooped this fucking dick and ass all over the street.

Just killed them. And that is video games. Yeah. And I was cool. Yeah, and I was shaking and screaming and I was like, yeah, and all my neighbors were like, what the fuck is wrong with this guy? But I did it and then I kept going and then you get killed on the next boss and the cycle continues. But there's something really, really special about that that you don't get from watching a movie. You don't get from reading a book because games are the only medium that like really push back.

You know, like a movie will happen without you. Like fucking Zod fell asleep watching Batman versus Superman. Yeah. And the movie just kept going on the plane. It didn't stop. Like a book, you can just be like, uh, and you just put it away, right? But like a video game will kill you. Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, you don't get to see the end. And that's kind of what I'm talking about with Cuphead is like, you don't get to see the brilliance of the, the cat and mouse boss fight if you didn't get there. You know, I mean, you can YouTube it. And granted, there's ways to raise around it. But it's like, when you earn it, it's like, oh, it's so rewarding. And to answer your question about the giving up points, like I will say, and I've said this before in the show, the king dice fight, did you beat cuphead? No.

Not yet. The second to last boss is this king dice thing. And it is the only point in the game that I think is not fairly balanced and is unnecessary. Because it's not just that it's hard. It's more just how long it takes because there's a lot of different forms for it. And like you roll the dice and instead of facing off against one boss, you have to face off against upwards of like maybe 10 bosses depending on what the dice rolls are. And the checkpointing gets crazy.

right? Yes. That's, that's, that's, that's to me, like, the one thing where I'll get into, like, the nitty-gritty about why that starts to, and I hate using the word, but it starts feeling cheap. Yeah. Where you're kind of just like, like, if I have to run like 20 minutes to get to the thing that's going to kill me. Exactly. And it's like, that's not necessarily, like, I'm not learning anything from that, you know, like. And I think that's the big problem is because it, while it was rewarding to replay the same boss 30 times when the boss fights are two minutes. Yep. You know, max. when you're facing a boss that takes 10 minutes total and you're failing over and over,

it gets to a point you're like, all right, I can do this. And then when you make stupid mistakes, you just get frustrated and it's not fun. And it's like, it's funny because, you know,

we've seen such a resurgence of retro games where at this point, retro games aren't even retro anymore. They're just kind of a modern style of game. Like pixel art. You're so right. It's sort of like the way like I've seen people do like, musicians who are like,

hey, my new album's like very stranger things. And I'm like, wait, what? Because like, Stranger Things is very, like, uh, evangelist. Yeah.

Like John Carpenter. And it's like, it's like you're, you're mimicking a style that's mimicking a style. And at this point it's just like, it's just a genre. So like super meat boy and, you know,

like all the million tower fall and all the game. Celeste, just came out. Oh my God. Like the IGN review totally sold. Yeah. Yeah. It looks cool,

but 10 out of 10. Yeah. Let's go. Yep. Yep. Um, but I just feel like that's just a style and it's, and it's,

and, uh, shovel night. to games of yesteryear. But in a lot of ways, it's like, it modernizes them in the right way. Yes. So Cophead is an example of, hey, there's challenge here. And these are, it's hard like video games used to be, except it's not because video games used

to be, if you failed at the boss, you have to start from the beginning of the level again. There's no save points. That's stupid. Dude, like we had, um, my friend, my friend had Ninja Turtles for the NES, the original one. Fuck that game. Fuck that game. And fuck that game. Like that game was remade now.

Yeah. It could be awesome. It could be awesome. there was a better save system, if there's a better way of progression. But when your four turtles die and you're fucking dead, and you have to start the whole game over? The whole game over and do the bomb diffusing stage again. My friend, I was at a sleepover and we had stayed up all night playing it.

And we got up to Shredder and my friend paused the game because we were like, bleary-eyed and we're like, we're going to wake up, eat pancakes and kill Shredder, like a perfect Saturday. And my friend's dad walked in and he's like, breakfast is ready and just kicked the NES by accident. And it just did that thing where it was just like, and all the characters pop up on the screen. Like you see Raphael's eye and it's like splinter's dick and they're just all like merged together. And it says like, and we're just like and just froze.

And what can you do? Nothing. You got to start over. That's it. Man, that that fucking game, it's so funny because that game has such intrinsic memories. Yeah. There's so many people of a certain generation. And like, man, me and Kevin played the fuck out of that game.

Yep. And no matter how many times. Did you guys play that recently or as kids? As kids. Oh, that's so. That's so funny. No matter how many times we played that damn game and loved that game. Because you're playing Ninja Turtles.

Are you fucking kidding me? No matter how many hours we sunk into nothing, no matter how many times we replayed it, we got past the dam. We did the whole fucking stupid ass bomb diffusal. Then you have to play that next level where you're in the dam. Then the next level is you're in the van, the turtle van. And you're going around, never made it past that. No, no one ever has.

Not once, man. It's just like you're talking about Shredder. Was Shredder in the game? I'll never know. Yeah, dude, I watch like, I watch like speed runs of that game every now and then just to watch like these fucking like daywalking neos take over that thing. And I'm just like, how the fuck? Like they're handling, they're handling stuff. They're speaking a language I just don't understand.

But the thing is when you're a kid, like you don't know, you don't know like if somebody's cooking is shitty because you haven't had great cooking. And you had, there was no reviews really back then. Like you knew you love the turtles. So fuck yeah, you're going to play the turtles video game. But you didn't understand that you were playing a not good video game based on the turtles. You just kept playing it because you're like, I love the turtles. I got to beat the shredder. That's my mission.

Yeah, dude. Hey, man, I'm here. April. I'm saving you. Yep, exactly. Poor woman never got saved, apparently. Oh, man. Well, I feel like this is a perfect segue.

Altono, what is your gaming history? I want to start at the very beginning. Like, what was the first games you played, the first consoles you own? And then kind of give me your story as you grew up and maybe the key games and memories. Sure, sure. Yeah. Thank you, man. I, my earliest memory playing a video game was I was born in Seacock as New Jersey.

Jersey, which is basically northern New Jersey, right next to Jersey City. Jersey City is like a grimier version of New Jersey, which is funny because people think of New Jersey, and they think of like a grimyer version of literally anywhere else. So it's like, no, this is a grimyer version of the grimyer version. Like, this was the armpit of the asshole of New Jersey. Good Lord. That is rough. It is rough. But we were known for a few things. One of them was probably killings, and number two was pizza. And so my dad took me to a pizza place on the corner, like an old pizza parlor and they had a Donkey Kong arcade cabinet. This is my first time seeing an arcade cabinet and also seeing like the weird thing about arcades was when you were a kid, it meant that you could

see a TV in a place that wouldn't normally have a TV like a laundromat, a restaurant. You'd be like, why is there a TV here and what does this TV do? And it's like, well, this TV does one thing, Donkey Kong. And you're like, well, what the fuck is that? So I asked my dad about it. That is such a great way. It's weird, right? It's so weird when you think about it. So my dad, he was like, my dad was really in a pinball. So he's like, do you want to check this out? And I was like, sure, what is it? Gave me a cord.

I put it in. I couldn't reach. So he picked me up. And I held the joystick and I put my fingers down. And I moved Mario to the right. And I hit the jump button. I'm like, oh, he'll do like what I tell him to do, which is video games. But I didn't know that, right?

Because you don't really have. Yeah. When your kid, you have toys, you have action figures. You have cartoons you watch on TV. Video games felt like action figures and toys that you could control, like, through a TV. And it made no sense. So I started playing it and I really liked it and I died immediately like everyone does a Donkey Kong. It's a brutally, brutally difficult game.

30 years later, I would have ended up rebuying a Donkey Kong and K cabinet to have in my apartment. That is amazing. Because it was the first game I ever like sort of interacted with. And I again, felt like I owed somebody something somewhere. Even though who made money off. That doesn't matter. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. So immediately I was like, I learned who Mario was. I learned who Donkey Kong was and I learned what Nintendo was. I learned that word. Seeing it on something meant that there was something magical and cool inside this box. And so a couple of years later, the Nintendo Entertainment System came out, the NES. And there were a bunch of... When you were you born?

I was born in 81. Yeah. So I think the NES came out in like 85. Yeah. In America. 85 in America, 86, 85, 86, something like that. And I got the version of the NES that had Super Mario Brothers, Track and Field and Duck Hunt on one game, which is, yeah, it's, that's fucking insane to hand that to a kid like when he's five or six

years old. Yeah. Because it's like, there's three here. Remember Donkey Kong where it was just one thing? Yeah. There's three. Three things. And it's like so here's,

and one has a gun. Yeah. One has a gun. Yeah. Where you fight animal men and like you chase, you chase a bobcat. So that was insane because it was sort of just like, you get a gun. You get a running pad, which I was not very happy about. And then you, and you get, I wasn't like a fat kid, but I was fat.

the inside that I didn't want to do anything like that. But then you get Super Mario Brothers, which is like, it's one of the first sort of zeitgeist video games that you could ever play where you would, you would again feel better the more you played it and the better you got it, but also you would go to school and there'd be this weird zeitgeist to it where people would be like, hey, like if you jump over the ceiling,

like you can go to the last world. You're like, what the fuck are you talking about? You know, like, and then everyone had an uncle that worked the Nintendo. Of course. Every kid you know is a liar. You know, I knew a guy once that said his cleaning lady was Chun Lee, which literally impossible. She's a car.

Literally impossible. Yeah, Blanca was the best man at my wedding. Good talk. So I, so, you know, like you would go to school and you would hear about it. And then there was something really cool about that where there was, there were trading cards. And it was a Super Mario Brothers TV show, like an animated show. And I found out that the guy, Captain Lou Albano, who played, sounds like my last name, played the Super Mario.

His brother taught Drivers Ed at my high school. And his brother ended up teaching me how to drive. So Super Mario's brother, not Luigi. The other one. Taught me to drive a car in New Jersey, which is, you know, if you can drive a car in New Jersey, you can drive a car anywhere.

So yeah, so I got the NES. I got it from this place called Crazy Eddies. Crazy Eddies. Crazy Eddies. I believe this is a tri-state area chain. The guy went out of business for like money laundering. He, super shady guy.

Crazy Eddie, man. Crazy Eddie. Like, right, how do you get in business with a guy like that? Yeah. Um, so he, uh, his whole thing was he would just go on TV and yell and screaming, but like, we got lamps. We got TVs. We got the other. And he was just like this coked out dude would just put appliances everywhere. And New Jersey had this thing called the Blue Law where you couldn't buy electronics or liquor, a bunch of other things, uh, in northern New Jersey. So we went to New York, we went to New York City, my dad and I. And he was like, it's your birthday. I'm going to get you a Nintendo. I'm going to get you a bunch of games. So I, I got.

got the Mario one. I got Kid Icarus. I got Lifeforce. I got Contra and I got Punch out. God. Looking back, I was like, oh my God, that's the best birthday of my entire life. Because that felt like, I mean, that felt like a hundred years worth of video games when you're a little kid. You know, so I went home and I basically now all of a sudden had this tremendous connection to what Nintendo was making. And I found out of- familiar with Lifeforce. So Lifeforce is made by Konami and it's running in the castle in the in the in the Contra engine it has the 30 man code in it and it's basically a top down or side scrolling because the levels alternate shooting game for two players. So like you and me

could sit down and play Life Force which we totally show because it's fucking awesome and uh just basically blast through levels and it's a schmop it's like Gradius or like Ikaruga or anything like that one of the first like schmops I've ever played super Japanese made no sense the first boss of the game is a brain with arms. It's weird. Early Konami. Yeah, early Konami, right? I don't know what the fuck those guys are doing.

The same Coke is Crazy Eddie. So I fell in love with these games all of a sudden and that the idea that there were like these big gray blocks that you could plug into something in your TV if you blew into them first. And they would take your way to these magical worlds where your friends would come over and play with you and it became like a social thing. And we would trade games with each other and all that stuff like that. And I became a Nintendo fan.

just immediately, right? And then the Super Nintendo came out. And my neighbor got one before me because my neighbor was Jewish and Hanukkah came before Christmas that year. And I wanted it, nothing more than any in the world, I wanted a Super Nintendo. And I didn't like this guy.

Not because he was Jewish, but because he was just a bad dude. To be clear, for any of you who are like, this one guy like, oh, what's this problem with Jewish people? I get called Jewish all the time. I love them. They're great.

I was like, I'm going over there. I'm going to play Super Mario World extensively until Christmas. And then I'm not going to hang out with this kid anymore. And I did. And we went over. We beat Mario World.

Like we found like all the secret exits to everything. Peace out. Then I got it for Christmas. I got that and super ghouls and ghosts eventually linked to the past, you know. And all of a sudden like those games sounded different than in. They had fucking orchestras. Like you played Super Nintendo games. Like what the fuck is this?

Yeah. Um, exactly. Sean Velasquez from who worked on shovel night did my show a couple years ago. And he told me a story about how he was. calling into the Nintendo Power Hotline. [phone]. Motherfucker, good shit. I'm a fucking nerd.

That's so good. And so those guys would sit there. They had basically binders of secrets on video games, like these tomes, these Bibles. And you would call them up and you'd be like, hey, so I'm stuck on like World Six, level two of like cake or Rico village. Like, how do I find the egg? And the guy would be like, hold on. You got to talk to the guy in the tree and then he'll give you the egg, but you got to

give him four bullets and then like you lose a life. And he's like, oh, okay, thanks. And you hang out the phone. That's how like we solved games back then. There was no internet. There's no internet, no Twitch or anything like that. Well, so I remember there was a eventually turned into a premium service. There was a one nine hundred.

Yeah, yeah. We got to pay. Because I think eventually they're like, we got to start trying to get. We got to figure out. And I had to pay to figure out the forest of illusion. Yeah. Because I was like, I'm going in fucking circles. It's these illusions.

So Sean called up the hotline and he, was like, I'm not stuck in any games. I just want to know about the Super Nintendo. And the lady was like, this is before I came out. And this lady was like, I'm actually playing Zelda for the Super Nintendo right now. And she was like, no way, can you put the phone up to the TV? And so she put the phone up to the TV and you play that game, right? Like to the past.

When you go in like the dungeons or underground levels in that game, it goes, da-na-na-na-na-na-na-no-no-no-no. And there's like water-dropping noises, which the NES couldn't do water-dropping noises. It was just like, just like gurgling garbage. And so he put the phone up. And he was like, was that water droplets? And she's like, yeah, you can hear the water droplets in the caves in this game. And he went to school and everyone was like, bullshit.

You can't hear the water in the caves. And then the fucking game comes out. Everyone plugs it in. They go underground for the first time. And it's like, da-na-na-na-na-no-no-no. And you hear them. And they were like, oh, shit. Oh, my God.

Video games. And so, like, just to point out, like, that was the level of like incremental joy that we got from evolutionary steps. Which is crazy to look at now. So look it now. We have the PlayStation 4. Yep. Which when you compare to the PlayStation 3, it's like, it sure is more HD. Yeah.

But it's like back in the day, the idea of bits. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that was an eight bit system. But this one is 16. Guess what? Nintendo 64. They put it in the name.

It's in the name. It meant something. Yeah. And so it was like, I remember thinking, like, what, what's going to be 128? I know. Really cared. And never. Yeah.

It never really. Yeah. It never really mattered. PlayStation was 32, but that didn't matter. I would love if like Nintendo came out and they were just like, Nintendo Switch is a 4,068-bit system. And people are like, that means nothing to me, but I'm glad you're sticking with those naming conventions.

So then I went back in time a little bit and the Game Boy came out. And the Game Boy was really interesting because, and it's a great reference to where we are now with the Nintendo Switch, technologically, it was a step back from what everyone else was doing, but you could bring it everywhere. And there was this magic to it where you would get on a plane and you would see adult businessmen playing, People you would never see with a portable video game system.

And back then we, yeah, holding this big block. And back then portable gaming systems were effectively game and watch, which Nintendo was making, or Tiger Electronics, which were shitty. They were not great. You might love them. You might remember them. They're bad. And they're not bad because, like, they didn't mean well, but they just, they were limited, right? I mean, they're essentially the equivalent of playing the games on the back of a cereal box.

Yeah. If the cereal box had one of those hologram things where when you turned it, it kind of looked like it did different things. My joke with the Tiger Electronics is, oh, is that when you put batteries in and you hit start, the screen would light up and it would show you everything that that game could possibly do it ever. At once. Which is like if you started The Last of Us and like in the window flickering, they showed you the ending of the last of us. You'd be like, what the fuck? The Last of Us? So like, yeah, those games throw them right out of the window.

But then a game came to the Nintendo Game Boy called Link's Awakening. And Link's Awakening is to me, my favorite Zelda game. game of all time. It is not the best sell at the game of all time. I don't think many people would even agree it is. Technically, it's sort of not aged well because you can only map items to two buttons because there's only two buttons on the Game Boy. So you're constantly hitting start to be like, sword, shield, bombs, boomerang, sword, boomerang. Like, you're just constantly micromanaging that. But there was this magic to the story and there was something really fascinating about having a massive, like world in a portable so that I could be in a bad mood. So that I could be in a

bad mood or my parents could be fighting with me and I could like go up to my room and they could be like, no TV tonight. I'm like, well, fuck the TV. Jokes on you. Yeah, I have a TV right here. It's green. I'm going to talk to a windfish. And so you would sit down and you'd play that game and there were secrets in it and they're all over the place. And I was like, I think this was like probably like sixth grade. And so by then I had I had a Super Nintendo. I had a Genesis. I had an NES and you know, you start decked out. Yeah, you're decked out. And I was like, I was like doing a lot of like, chores and yard work and like, you know, just doing everything I kind of get money to buy games. And you buy shitty games. You'd buy Echo the Dolphin. Not a good game. See me in the streets.

You would, you know, you'd buy great games like Super Ghouls and Ghosts, which are really hard and really fun. And then you get something like Link's Awakening, which just felt different. It just felt like this magical touch. It's like the difference between going to like Six Flags and going to like Disney. Yeah. Where you're like, they put some work in the animatronics here. There's some real shit going on. Yeah. There's a magic to this. Well, especially looking at at Link's Awakening. It was such a, I mean, that's just back to the glory days of video games where everyone's still kind of figuring it out. Yeah. But there was still this like drive to create and do something different and use your imagination and never just be cut in pace.

I mean, we've talked to death about the NES and how weird the sequels all were. Yeah. It's like you look at all the trilogies and it's like number two's were always fucking weird. But then when they did their game boy games, you know, Mario isn't the best example because Mario Land was fucking. kind of weird as well. Yeah, it was weird. It wasn't good. But again, it was, it was strange, you know.

And it was them saying like, like, you know, some of the best video game achievements of all time came from sort of the limitation of the technical. Exactly. And I think that that's where Link's Awakening really, I think Mario Land One failed in that they were just like, hey, let's take Mario and just put it portable. Yeah. And Mario Land 2, that was good.

But with Links Awakening, it was like, hey, okay, Zelda worked. You know, links of the past work. How do we translate that to something that's a portable experience with limited buttons? Yeah. And how do we, you know, make it feel different, but still have that special Nintendo, special Zelda feel? And I think their answer was, let's get weird. Yeah. Let's create characters that were unlike anything you've seen in the other thing.

Like let's have the objectives of the game not be what you'd expect and be based on like dungeon to dungeon, but have the world kind of speak for itself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It felt like a living, breathing world, which is really interesting to do on like a four-bit, handheld, right? And like, yeah, like we were saying, like, some of the best games came from that limitation. Like, Mario literally has a mustache because they were like, we don't know how to make a mouth. So they're like, we got to put something under his nose because otherwise he'll just look

like a psychopath. Yeah. So we'll give him a mustache and he still kind of looks like a psychopath, but it's like a lovable version. It's a cute psychopath. It's a cute psychopath. And so like that's an interesting thing because we don't really see that happen as much anymore. you know, with technical limitations sort of being removed in many ways, a lot of the stuff that we see now is draw distance, characters on screen, animation sets, how many hours of VO can we put into this. But back then it was sort of just like, we don't know how to make this look good until we like limit ourselves, you know, like how do we make a song with four notes?

How do you make a character with four colors? How do you make a puzzle game with like eight squares? You know, like, what do you do? Like, how do you solve for those things? And it's weird. It's sort of trying to, it's like trying to live in a small apartment and being like, well, we can make this work. You know, and now everyone has mansions.

Tetris, exactly. Just make shit disappear. So the Game Boy was huge for me because it, it represented something that I could bring anywhere. And it also introduced me to video game. A batteries. Yeah, double A batteries. Yeah, well, that was the game gear. The game gear let you burn through six of them in five minutes.

So you could play Ren and Stimpy or something bad like that. There's no good games for that system. Seriously. Like, there really aren't. There's ports of good games that you might remember as being good, but there's really not anything that great for the game gear. But I remember going on whatever the fuck the internet was back then and like reading about Link's Awakening.

And I read Craig Harris's review on IGN or IGN Pocket or whatever it was called, which is like, or IGN 60. So the Game Boy came after the Super Nintendo. and right and before the N64. But I mean, Game Boy came out way early. Yeah. Did it come out before Super Nintendo? Or after?

I think it's before. Wasn't Game Boy 1990? Yes, I think it was 90. And then I think Yes, I'm trying to remember when I was reading IGN. So you must have been reading the Game Boy Color. Yes. Yeah, I was reading the Game Boy Color version. Links away the deluxe that came out because, yeah, IGN didn't exist until a little bit later.

So I remember Craig Harris specifically was really in. the handheld gaming. And I was like, there's a guy in California whose job it is to review portable games, like pocket games.

I'm like, what does that even mean? And so that kind of blew my mind because between that and Nintendo Power, I was like, you can have a job where you talk about video games,

you write about video games. And I was like really into reading and really into writing. And the idea of going to school, I was also really into fucking up at school, you know, because I look like this. And like going into school

and writing and then going home being like I'm reading people writing about video games really inspired me and made me go like there's a there's a way to do this right it was the same thing like reading like the source magazine right i was like you can write about hip hop for a living like it's fucking awesome like the fact that people are getting paid to write about the shit that i loved blew my mind because it's it's completely unconventional in any sort of like school to sort of to let you think that like like most people it's like oh if you like writing you're going to become an author you'll work at the newspaper

you'll write a book, you know, maybe you'll work for like a magazine or something like that. I'm like, you're not really going to work for a magazine that has like a clay version of Mario on the cover of it. So that really, that really inspired me. And then, uh, then we get into the era of like the N64, right? And the N64 was, was tremendous because it had four control reports on the front. And I think what people really remember about that system is that it brought people together in a way that I don't think any other system ever had before.

Like you think about playing Mario. cart. Think about playing Golden Eye. Smash Bros. Mario Party, Diddy Kong, all those games that brought people together so they could fight and scream at each other. Like it was like this weird thing where it was like, we're all getting together to get our anger out on each other. I mean, really, there's something in human nature that loves competition. Yeah. And this was like, hey, all you people that aren't going to throw a ball around.

Yeah. You can, you can be good at something. You know, you can be better than someone else sitting next to you. Yeah. It's why I find, it's why I find a lot of like, esports so baffling because it's it's like dudes with jerseys in screaming arenas and I was like I signed up to hide from these things like this is not why I'm here like I got here to like huddle over like a small controller with three of my friends and I'm like I'll fucking kill you I'm I get to pick the fox and you're the woman and then we're going to fight the plumber and then like the badger and we're all going to kill each other in our cars and then I see this thing's like and the winner gets $50 million and a Red Bull sponsorship and I'm like video games are sports now what the

fuck happened. What the fuck happens? It's awesome. It's awesome to see, right? It's really cool to see. But so at the same time, the PlayStation had just come out. And I didn't really know much about it aside from that it was born from this scorned marriage divorce thing between Nintendo and Sony and that they had originally tried to make a Super Nintendo together and fell apart. Nintendo was kind of like, fuck you. Everyone should read the book Game Over, by the way, because it really gets into the nitty gritty of like how kind of gross Nintendo was as a company in the olden days. When you're winning. you're an asshole. They were doing the kind of shit

where like if you wanted to rent a game from a blockbuster like they were charging Blockbuster like $150 a game they were charging because their carts were proprietary. You could only buy a Nintendo or a Super Nintendo or N64 cartridge

through Nintendo. They were like, well the blank carts are 50 bucks. Like well the fucking game is 60. Yeah. It's like yeah well I mean I guess figure out what to do with that $10 you know break it up amongst yourselves.

It's like so you have to get 50 bucks to Nintendo for a car. And even more than that they would limit the publisher to a certain amount of games per year because of their quality assurance. So then Konami being like, fuck that. We're going to start ultra games. Yeah,

Ninja Turtles. Yeah, but on Ninja Turtles. Konami started like a shell organization to sort of be like, hey, this is me. Like it's basically a pen name, you know, which is fucking insane. It's fucking insane that that would happen.

So I remember going to my friend's house and seeing him play games like Metal Gear Solid Solid and Resident Evil for the PlayStation. And that blew my mind because that was sort of just like, I was like, first of all, games are on a CD. Like, how the hell is that work? Ceds were such novelties. Like, CDs went during the PlayStation 1 era, like, at least for me, I remember being like, this is the coolest thing. Yeah, it was so fucking cool. Like the fuck cassette tapes. Like,

what the fuck is this? Oh my God, man. And it's like the idea of like, like, first of all, CDs were just awesome looking. They're reflective. Um, like you could, you could, you could, yeah, it's just kind of, it wasn't like, yeah, it's shiny. It wasn't like this dull gray block, you know, CDs like CDs had warning labels in the corner. I would go to Tower Records and there'd be CDs that were just like, if your fucking parents hear this, like they're going to kill you. And I was like, I need to buy this. Let's go. Like I had friends that had like they would buy, it would suck, man. They would go to the hip hop section of Tower and they would buy Method Man's first album. And then they would also buy like,

now that's what I call music. And they would take now that's what I call music and make it, that's now what I call the garbage can. And they would put fucking Tikal into that's what I call music. So their parents would be like, oh, my good, wholesome son listening to some great music. And it's like, no, motherfucker. I'm listening to Method Man. It's great. So, like, I think that was like, there was something magical about CDs. Like, again, they had warning labels on them. And then Sony's entire attitude, the PlayStation attitude of coming in and being like, oh, you want blood? We got blood. Like, you want decapitations and murder? We got all that shit. And Nintendo's just like, we're a family friendly company. And the blood is green. And Mario rides on his friend,

the dinosaur. And they eat apples together. And it's great. And Sony was just like, you want to see a guy get killed? Come on down. So yeah, I fucking, I loved, I loved getting a PlayStation because it felt different. Yeah. It felt weird. It felt grown up. These games could be rated M.

Yeah. And it felt, it felt really mature in the way that like, Sega for the longest time was just like, you want mature, we're mature. I'll throw up on your aunt. And you're like, that's a weird thing to say in a commercial. It was the red and stimpy factor. It was that just kind of gross out. It was this gross out. Adult means nasty.

Yeah. And not even in a sex way. just in like a pimples. Just like pimples and puke and just like, yeah, shit like that. It was like sex and stuff. And it was just like not even like like great sex. It was just like,

it's like, yeah, jerking off like a real adult. They're like, you're fucking gross Sega. Like what are you doing? So they do shit like that and there'd be characters like it's bugger man, you know,

like a real adult. It's like that's something a four year old would come up with. So then Sony comes in with PlayStation and it blows my fucking mind. You know, like I'm there. I'm rocking the shirt right now. Like it's just one of those things where like

It felt different. It felt dangerous. The idea that games were so big that they were on multiple discs felt weird. I mean, I mean, memory cards alone.

Yeah. Right? In the same way that CDs are fucking cool, they somehow turned this thing where, hey, remember Nintendo when there was no load times? Yeah. And every game you could just save, not need to buy anything else.

Well, now you need to buy this other thing. But somehow, we're going to convince you that's cool. It's fucking nuts. You're going to tie this memory card to your personality. You can bring it to your friends house.

You can bring it to your friend's house. You can get everything. everything get deleted in an afternoon and you'll lose everything you've ever done it. It was great. bad. Yeah. It hurt so bad, dude. That was like, that was like the dog ate my homework of video games. It was just like, this is a fucking nightmare. Um, and then from then on, so the weird thing with me is like I started out as a Nintendo kid because I mean, that's, I think a lot of people my age did, uh, because you really didn't have a choice. I didn't know anyone that really had Atari. Um, that was, it was just before me. Like, and they also look, it looked weird. It was like these

wooden boxes where most of the games were kind of shitty. Um, and I know, like, Jared Petty will come on on the show one day and he'll be like, what was he talking about? Atari 2,800 is one of the best video games. Indiana Jones is one of the most revelatory games of all time. I love you, Jared. I just,

I didn't connect with it. So it was hard to really be a fanboy, fan boy, but I love Nintendo and then Sega came along and I love them and then PlayStation came along. Before you get into PlayStation, I want to read a couple ads. Let's do it.

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No, I ate them all. What? Oh, we got six of them. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you ate them all? Tell me about Sherry's berries. What is the Sherry's berry? They're so good.

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They're real good. So continuing along with your gaming history. Yes. PlayStation. PlayStation. So yeah, like we were saying, PlayStation was a really important system.

I think because it not only introduced this sort of like much more mature ecosystem, but also kind of reintroduced me to a lot of longer, more story-driven games, a lot of cool stuff from Japan. But it's also I kind of think, like it kind of made games cool again. I'm not saying that they weren't,

but like, I don't think they ever were though. Yeah, they kind of never were. Because that's the thing is like looking back on it during that generation. I mean, they were definitely like a fun different thing.

Yeah. I feel like the kind of strokes of coolness that might have happened were street fighter two in arcades for a moment, but even that nerdy as well. Mortal combat. But the cool kids still played it. But then there was that Mortal Kombat.

But I feel like once you got to that argument, then it's not cool anymore. Yeah. If you had to argue over which is better, it's like that's not cool. Exactly. But then Sonic the Headchalk being the cool version of Mario. But even that didn't reach mainstream cool.

It wasn't until PlayStation kind of first knocked that door down. It was like, yeah, it was Resident Evil and it was Metal Gear Solid that I think adults and really, I mean teenagers can look at and be like, I can like, I can like this and not look like a little kid. Yeah. Yeah. And that was like, you know, it was like really not like you should care what other people think, but the video game industry and you say it very well was like kind of a weird spot back then where we were like. like yearning to be legitimized, but we didn't really know how to do it. And we were mostly just a bunch of dorky kids with magazines and like funny Mario t-shirts being like, why don't they like us? You know? And the cool thing about Sony is that Sony has Trojan horse video games.

There's that boy. They've trojan horsed video games into basically entertainment devices for a very long time. Every generation, right? P.S1, my first CD player. PS2, my first DVD. player. PS3, my first Blu-ray player. It does Netflix. What is it? Yeah,

what is it? It doesn't even play 4K. It doesn't play 4K Ultra H2 Blu-ray. They really shit the bet on that one. That was bad. God damn it,

Shuhay. What the fuck, man. Figure it out. Figure it out. Add something. Fucking throw a Zoon in there or something. No, so that was huge,

right, that you could play your rap CDs on it. Yep. Or you're now, that's what I call music, probably volume four by then. Or you could play video games, right? You could play like Resident Evil,

which was the terrifying nightmare survival horror game, uh, where there were FnVs, you know, and you saw short movies with bad actors and people got swashed. Twisted metal. Twisted metal. Yeah. It's horrible, horrible, uh, live action cut. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. They're, and they're so bad, but they're so, like, we have this weird, like, we remember them fondly. We have a great nostalgia for them because they were just so, it was so iconic to us at the time, you know, and then that button layout and everything being different, how, how, like, uh, the console just felt like a different, a different machine than something Nintendo would make. And so then all of a sudden I was just like,

I'm on board with PlayStation too. And so then from then on out, I kind of bounced between the two. And then Microsoft came in. So before then, so not that this is surprising anyone, but Sega Saturn, not tickling your fancy at all. So I think I got burned out on, I think I took a wait and see approach with Sega stuff,

which in retrospect was a smart thing to do because most of their stuff within like two months, we knew this isn't really going to pan out. I had a dream cast, but famous Martin Luther King quote. But I specifically, I specifically was like, I bought the,

I think I got a Sega CD, and then I did that thing where I had like a Genesis plugged into a 32X into a Sega CD with Sonic 2. Sonic 3 with Sonic and Knuckles. And it was just this, called it like a Sega gangbang basically. It's just like six things that shouldn't be having sex with each other, just all really connected. And a lot of them didn't really pan out to be anything. Like I still don't really know what the 32X was or what it did. The Sega CD had a couple of

okay games, but nothing really like. Sonic CD, great. Sonic CD was great. Yeah, for sure. But then you had other stuff like, not so great. Not so great. C&C Music Factory video editor. Not really. Not really. So, like, I was sort of hesitant to see what Sega would do next. And I think by then, magazines were kind of on to the take. And journalists were sort of just like, these guys don't really know what they're doing and they're bleeding money. And you could sort of smell blood in the water with all of that shit. And I started getting worried for them.

And so instead of buying their systems on day one, I was like, I'm going to wait. So some of the later Sega stuff I kind of stayed away from it. I think I got a dreamcast when it was a little cheaper, but mostly kind of stayed away from that stuff because it just didn't feel like a good investment. And by this point, you know, like I'm in high school, my money is super limited. And I'm like, it's going to go to PlayStation. It's going to go to GoldenEye, Mario Kart, perfect dark games like that, you know, which I think came out when I was in college actually.

So yeah, it was weird because it's like a lot of your purchasing decisions back then were like, will I be able to get a long, like a lot of game out of this? Can I play this with my friends? Does I have a cool story? And will I be playing the system in a year? Which with Sega, that wasn't really a guarantee. Right. Like you're like, I could buy a 32x, but like, what the fuck?

The fuck. Like, what's this thing going to do? Like, I still don't know what it actually did. So, and I've been working in the industry for 10 years now. So it's, yeah, it's interesting. You were you into like the whole, did you get into the whole Sega, like, so. So, I mean, I was born in 89, which means I kind of came in, in what I believe is the perfect time to get into video games.

Because by the time I was old enough to play games. there was already a plethora of classics available. So immediately my journey began with the greatest introductory video games 101 of all time with my first console I owned was the Super Nintendo with the Mario All Stars Plus World Cart. Okay, so I was talking before about like the Mario Chackenfield duck hunt thing. The Mario All Stars Plus World literally has to be the single most incredible video game cartridge every man. Like there's no beating it. Yeah. Because it's like, hey, here's the old school HD remasters of Mario one, two, the real two, and three, and fucking world.

Like, I remember, like, playing that to me. That was just Mario. Like, I didn't really, like, need to differentiate. So to me, it was kind of just playing through all these Mario games back to back. And it's like, that is unbelievable. It's incredible to get that because it's like, the cool thing about that, too, is, like, you could get stuck in one and then jump into another one and, and kind of bounce around. I just bounce around.

And I did. And I love that and like, God, I love those games so much. But, you know, it was kind of to my detriment in some ways because while it was great for something like Mario, I feel it kind of hindered my experience with something like Zelda. Right. Where having Zelda 1, Zelda 2, links of the past all kind of available at the same time, Zelda 1 and 2 never really hit with me because I was like, the fuck is this. I don't understand what I'm doing. This is way too hard. Right.

And it wasn't until years later. I still never beat Zelda 2. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, it's a brutally hard game. I beat Zelda won a couple years ago when it came out on GBA, I guess, a decade ago. Yeah. When it came out on GVA.

But, you know, the links of the past was kind of like really me getting back into, or not getting back into, getting into Zelda. And those games never got 16-bit remakes. Yeah. So it was sort of just like they were stuck on old generation hardware, which is really weird, right? You would think they would have done like a Zelda All-Stars or something. At some point.

And, you know, who knows? And even with Mario All-Stars, it's weird because I, I originally played most of the games on the NES because Kevin had one. and like through garage sales and stuff we had. That's the other thing. It's like for us, like you talk about your dad taking you to the store and buy own games. That must have cost hundreds of dollars.

Yeah. For us, we go to a garage sale and with Kevin's bartering ass mom, we'd for $9 get an NES five controllers. Why would you even need that? A shoe box full of NES games. So we just had. Which is insane, right? Which it was kind of like the Netflix of video games back then.

So we're kind of just like, well, this lasts us forever. And it really did. It really does. Yeah, it's so cool. But Mario AllStars is weird because to me, those are the definitive versions of Mario one through three, which is blasphemy to so many people because they control a bit differently. And, you know, some people don't like the music or whatever, you know, the purest thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, when Mario gets hit, if he's fire Mario, he doesn't get small. He turns big and then small. Yes, yeah. And, like, you know, people get upset about that. People get really mad. That's my Mario. Like, that's what I knew.

And so. I love all that stuff, by the way. Because to me, they're all really fun. I totally understand where the purists are coming from, but also the people are just like, oh, Luigi's foot gets like. like it gets left behind in the pipe sometimes. And it's like, you don't notice that. He wasn't even really in the first game.

It's just a pallet swap. Yeah. No, that's like, that is such a, just a phenomenal treasure of a video game. And the fact that they put all of those on one car and just handed it to a kid. Like,

I don't know if they knew what they were doing with S&S. Yeah, it's fucking insane. I bought a Super Nintendo and it came with that thing. It's fucking insane. God. It's so hard to explain that now. Like,

it's like sort of like, if your first free month, the PlayStation Plus was like for the best video games ever made. Yeah, it's really, it's crazy. Yeah. So I had that and that really did last me forever. So I never had Genesis until years later, where I bought one for like $12 at Funkoland. Were you, did you feel like you were, Funkoland?

Shout out to Funko Land. Did you feel like you were part of like a console war back then where like there was an Nintendo versus Genesis thing? So that's, that's, that's, there totally wasn't my school. The funny thing for me is it's like, I think that because of the generation I grew up with, that didn't exist because to us it was just video games. Oh. We didn't need to choose because at that point, the Super Nintendo and Genesis were cheap enough that most people had both.

Because it was garage sales, you're buying it and stuff. I guess the thing was, like, it became a war more so with the N64 and PlayStation. But like, if you had one of those, you were great, you're a rich kid. Oh, yeah. We didn't really have those guys. I didn't know those guys. I knew one kid at school named Arnold who got a Neo Geo. and the Neo Geo was,

the original one was like $600 for the console and the games were like $150 to $200 each. And I specifically was just like, how did you get this? And he was like, my parents got divorced. And I was like, oh, fuck, man. Like, I mean, I have a Super Nintendo, but my parents are still married.

Yeah, so that was such a weird time because there was, there was a, there were wars at my school over this shit. Like, and it's the same way where people make one purchasing decision and they stick to it forever. The same way they vote for people, right? And they're just like, they're like, oh, he'll never do wrong because this is the way it is.

And I, I'm like, I'm sticking to my guns on this shit. Um, some people just got Sega and they were like, they were like, they were like, Greg. Miller. Yeah, Greg Miller. Got stuck being a second kid. Yeah, it was always, it was, it was, I love talking to him about this shit because, uh, it was, like, he talks about like, playing Ghostbusters for the, the original Sega, the master system and, and stuff like that. And like, which I didn't even know the master system was a thing.

I mean, I talked about this a lot because of Greg, but like, growing, but like, Growing up, to me, it was just the Genesis was the first Sega console. I didn't realize there was another one. No one really had a master's system that I knew, you know, like the same thing. I think I found out about it until late. I was like, wait, Sega had an NES basically? Because for me, a lot of my, uh, the history that came with video games and my kind of interest in, in learning about games as a industry and as this thing that I want to be a part

of was electronic gaming monthly issue 100, where they did a top 100 games of all timeless. This came out in like November 98 or something like that. And I might be totally off on that. But it was around that time period just for a frame of reference of like what games and consoles went out at that point. And I only knew about like my dad had a Commodore 64.

I grew up with a Super Nintendo, kind of went back to NES and had a Genesis and whatever. And I was aware of that 64 and PlayStation games happening. But to look at this list of 100 games, it was my Bible. I read through this thing every day. Reading about these games and these facts of

systems I've never even heard of and trying to piece together all of this shit. You see motherfuckers? That's why we make lists at IGN so we can create Tim Getty's of the future. It's going to happen. People always like, why is this a list? I'm like, well, because it's reader service because you can sit down and be like, what are the 20 best PlayStation 4 games? And then find out about 15 games you didn't know about it.

And even if you're not interested in the game, like you can look like, I didn't know about Final Fantasy. Yeah. And I haven't heard of it, but I didn't know what it was. And redo this list. I like got an idea of like, oh, people really like Final Fantasy 3, which is six. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, Final Fantasy 7 is a big deal.

And it's like, it makes you kind of go back and be like, to me, I was like, I need to give Zelda another shot. Like I wrote it off when I was young because it, I get scared and confused me. But like, I'm going to go fucking back and I did. That's so fucking cool that you went back and played that game. I, uh, I try to play through the original Legend of Zelda for NES about once a year, which is weird. We try to.

Well, yeah. I feel you though. I get it. It's like you hit a point where with some of those little games, you're like, I'm fucking, I'm fucking, like if you guys, if you ever someone to play that game, be like, you're a weird dude. Like, I walk into that world and I, like, I light a bush on fire. I bomb a door and I do this.

And, like, I have, like, you know, like the best sword and, like, $299 rupees and, like, five heart containers before I walk into the first level. And I'm just like, I walk into the first level, like, what's up? Come at me, bro. Let's fucking go. I got everything. Yeah, I'm just, I'm crazy with that game. But, yeah, I think that's, like, so interesting that, like, the fact that you are,

because you're, you're the same age as my youngest brother, which is really cool because It's like we, I sort of like had a second childhood through him and I got to do what magazines were doing for you and what yard sales were doing for you in that I used to be like, hey, like, try this. Yeah. Like this is, this is like a classic from like seven or eight years ago, but give this a shot. Yeah, it's so interesting because we had these neighbors that lived across the street and we were like, I didn't have any older brothers or anything. So like it was kind of just me bringing it into my brother and Kevin's lives in a lot of ways. but my friend had an older brother and he was a couple years older than me

and he was really into PC gaming so he was all like on Half-Life and on Starcraft and on all this stuff and that was a whole other fucking Diablo and this whole other world and it never quite transitioned us like we never like made that jump me neither but it was it was an interesting thing to see like man there's not only is there all

of this shit there's this whole other world where it's not just console wars then there's the war between console and PC gaming oh god yeah that's to this day that war will never end and it's weird because we always had a PC at home that could play, like, shitty games. You know, like, my dad didn't buy, he might, but dad bought PCs for what they used to call word processing, which is just typing.

Yeah, it's just typing word. But they call that word. He'd be like, I got a word processor in the den. I was like, a computer. Okay. We can use it for other shit, you know? So, like, you'd play, like, video games on it, but they wouldn't be great. It'd be like, like, the original Duke Nukem.

If you got lucky, you would play, like, Doom or something like that, right? Yeah. with like the WASD or whatever the fuck. And it's like, I just, it's just never really connected with me because it's also like, I felt weird about using the computer

that my dad used for work to play video games, whereas my TV was like specifically solely used for entertainment. And it's the same thing. I'm not into, I'm not into PC gaming now because PCs or my laptop is where I get emails. You know, it's like where work happens. It's also where I produce music or where I check Twitter.

There's all these things funneling into it. And it's why I, really love like the switch because it's just it's just games and hulu but most but mostly just games you know and there's no really there's no distractions or anything popping up on it it's it's solely a designated video game device um and it's also because it's a portable system and i've been connected to them for a long time so yeah so then you know PlayStation kid playing some pc games here and there playing a ton of n64 with my friends and stuff like that i'm sure you were the same way you got really into like all the four player multiplayer multiplayer

times on n64. Yeah. And that was like, what was really cool about that was I had an N64 in college and I had gotten one in 96 and I went to college in 99. So the N64 was basically like a couple years old by then, had a lot of games under its belt, but also like pretty much done.

Pretty much done. Yeah. That was right before the GameCube and a couple of years before, you know, Xbox, PS4 or PS3, PS2, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, thinking about it, PS2 was 2000. Yep. And GameCube and Xbox were 2001.

Yep. Yep. And so to still hold on to an N64 then was sort of antiquated, right? But I moved to New York City and I was at the college dorms at School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. And we would be playing video games really loudly. And people would walk down the hall and knock on the door and be like, hey man, like, sorry, like, but like I thought I heard Bowser and be like, yeah. You guys playing Mario Kart? Yeah, man. Oh, cool. Like I have like 40 beers and like a, pound of weed. Can I come in? We're like, yeah, man, come on in. Let's get fucked up and beat Mario Kart together, you know? And so people would come over and we'd play video games and became this like social thing where I met friends through video games, which I always thought it was weird that my parents' generation thought that video games were isolating and that they were keeping us from society and that it was like this sad thing that people did all alone, even though I do love that element of it. But video games also do bring people together

in a room, I don't know, bring, they bring us together today. They're bringing us together with the audience here. It's so cool that there's, you know, shared memories that we grew up a decade apart from each other on different sides of America. And like, we still have shared experiences in so many different ways. And then we can come at it from different angles. Like, it's, it's really weird because like one of my best friends in San Francisco now is a kid that I grew up near in New Jersey, but didn't know.

And we found out that in 1999, we were at the same fight at my high school. like two kids fought at high school and beat the shit out of each other and it was like one of the coolest days ever it was awesome great fight and my friend Tony's like he was at that fight

and he brought it up one day and I was like you were at that fight at my high school like behind the police station that's how bad the cops were like there was a fight going on and so I found out I was at that fight and he saw it from a different angle

and I saw it from a different angle and we connected on the fact that we saw two people beat the shit out of each other that we barely knew and I didn't know him but I know him now and it's because we had a shared experience having not known each other,

coming at it from different angles, and now we're like forever friends. And like I feel the same thing with you. It's sort of like, I can talk about video games with you forever. And we didn't grow up in the same school and same demographic, same age group,

but we have this thing that connects us because of that. I mean, dude, video games is such a special thing. I know the people listening know that. But like you talking about, you know, growing up with the games, that triggers memories for me

of just Smash Brothers as a series. Yeah. It's so fun. how my core friend group has stayed together over the years through the iterations of Smash Bros. It is a game that just no matter what happens, we drop everything and come together when the new one comes out. And then it'll keep going. And it'll just be like, to this day from 1998, when it was just me and my friends with, you know, eight playable characters in Smash Bros.

I guess 12 with the hidden ones. Yeah. Just beating the shadow of each other for hours and end all night to melee every night after high school going home to brawl after college we all get together on the weekend and fucking play to after work at IGN you did it for years and then with uh with smash four and it's just nuts that like that game just keeps coming back and keeps bringing us together where to this day at any point if i were to call one of my friends would be like hey come over we're going to play smash it'll be hours of us just doing it and like it's so fucking cool man with this franchise it's so fucking

cool i love that about that i remember looking up at like five o'clock and like most people at the end of the day, there's like a bell or a whistle. I don't know if you work like on the Flintstone's construction yard or something, there's a loud noise. But most people like the end of the day, they get up, they punch out and they rush to go home. But at IGN at the end of the day, I heard like the smashing of N64 controller buttons and GameCube controller buttons. And I would look up and it would be like you and Nick and Mike Pereira and Mark Ryan, a bunch of other people would get together in the corner on an old fat SDTV with like a big ass on the back. Yeah, a big CRT. Yeah, a big CRT.

TV and you play Smash Brothers. And I remember being like, I was like, this is how I met some of my best friends in college. This is how I'm like staying connected with people here is just like talking about it. Being in this room where this is happening. I mean, it's funny you bring that up because, you know, we, we often talk about how we're in the industry and how that affects things, whatever. And a lot of people are like, oh, you're in videos. You play video games all the time, whatever. There's a lot of misconceptions.

A lot of it is correct in this way or that. But what's funny is for being at IGN, it's not always video games that brings people to It's just, oh, we work together. You know, it's like in the same way anybody has friends at work and whatever. But Smash Bros at IGN, that forged friendships. It really did. Across teams. Across teams.

That brought people like, normally it was editorial team or video team or sales team. That was like, fuck it. Everyone is gonna be friends. Yeah. Dudes from engineering would come in and like, whoops a ass, you know? Yeah. Salespeople would come in like, it's fucking, it's really cool that like it brings, it doesn't just bring together people like you and me who are like sort of from the same ilk,

but different sides of the country. It brings together like all walks of life. And then it lets them beat the shit out of each other with like hammers and eggs and another another nonsense. So, okay, then getting into when Xbox joins the scene, what, what happened there? So I felt immediately like something's weird about this. Like it felt something about Xbox. And I think that like they have eventually, they've now capitalized on nostalgia because

it's been long enough. And in the same way Sony has, they're putting out like their own like sort of amoe and they have a PlayStation conference and they're doing shoes and stuff like that. it's when something goes on for long enough people have nostalgia for it but when xbox showed up to be completely frank it felt like um it felt like a bunch of rich people got together and they were like how do we make money off of these video games which that's how nintendo started i mean it was it's basically yamouchy being like how do we make money off of this shit this is a business let's get in there um when xbox came around there was something a that felt um not i guess not as not as

enticing because it wasn't foreign. Finding out that that was like from Seattle, it was like an American company. It lost a lot of the mystique of like the magic of Tokyo, you know, of like Japan is making these wonderful things. And they're getting them early. And there are three final fantasies ahead of you

and two Zelda's and four Mario's. And they have new consoles before we do. Microsoft just showed up and they were like, Generation X gets a box and it's called the Xbox. And you're like, oh, all right. Well, what does it do? it's huge and the controller's huge and there's a green man and he fights his friends and I was like I don't really get it like I don't really understand it and like they were trying to do mascots

they were trying to like a piece the the PC shooter crowd and stuff like that and it didn't really connect with me and then one of my friends had an Xbox had me over he's like you got to try just come over try Halo try this try that and we started playing gold yeah welcome the blood goals and we started playing and I was like oh Oh, I get it. This is where the golden eye kids went. Yep. They went here.

Yeah. And they fucking get it. And they're killing it. And this is awesome. And so I bought one. And it was weird because it's like all my favorite genres of like RPGs, platforming like weird 3D world adventure games, like the Aquarina of Times, the Super Mario Brothers, the Resident Evil and stuff like that weren't really on Xbox.

Yeah, no. Like it was like shooting games and racing games and sports games. The original Xbox had a pretty rough goal of it. Yeah. And I remember. See, I guess this is where the more console war part of my life came into play, where I remember getting into heated arguments with, with some of Alfredo's friends,

because Alfredo was very much an Xbox guy. But even he could understand the PS2 was clearly better. Yeah. And the GameCube, maybe not better, had classic games that like, they're Nintendo. Yeah, it was the little engine that could. That was kind of the beginning of them doing their own thing. Yeah.

You know, they were like, are, this are small. And like, it's got a purse handle. Yeah, and it's like Nintendo games. was kind of becoming a, that meant something. And same way like, Ubisoft game means something today. And I remember, like, Alfredo's other friend that worked at Best Buy would get into fight with me trying to tell me that the Xbox original had a better library than the PS2.

And I'm just like, you just can't argue that. Right. That doesn't make sense. And it's just so funny looking back, I'm like, why did I even, why did I engage? Well, yeah, I mean, well, because. Because, like, Xbox, it had some, like, Splitter Cell. And granted that ended up being multi-platform. But it was on Xbox.

That was a huge thing. Star Wars Cotor. Yeah. Halo, obviously. And things like that. Like Xbox did a lot of, if PlayStation brought mature games to the table, Xbox was kind of like, hey, we're going to really like push this. And we're going to like make this more of a thing of like grownups.

This is a grown up thing. Yeah. Yeah. No, you totally nailed it. And I think that's what like initially pushed me away from it. But then I had this like, I had this sort of renaissance. I was living in New York City. I was actually kind of burned on video games

because of the way the N64 panned out. I was like I don't like how this system sort of petered off and it stopped getting support it stopped getting games and there wasn't really I was watching other people play stuff and I was like maybe I'm done with video games maybe it's time to grow up. And I got an email from Nintendo

saying we're having a like a preview launch party I'd never been to a preview event right in New York City for the Nintendo GameCube. And they're like, come on down. Like our new guy, Reggie is going to be there, whatever the fuck. And so I get there and there's like just a bunch of people. There's an open bar. So I'm like, you know, this is great.

And there's all these game cubes in a row. And they had Smash Brothers. They had Wave Race. Wave Race. They had Pickman. They had Luigi's Mansion. They had like Rogue Squadron. Yeah.

And all these games where I'm like, whoa, this is fucking cool. Like Nintendo's doing something weird and different. And so I started paying attention to, video games again. And I took my N64 and a bunch of games over to GameStop in by the Manhattan Mall. And I traded them all in and I got a GameCube. Stupid idea. Never trade in your games. Like, because there's always going to be a day when you're going to want them. Yeah. And you're going to end up buying them again. I promise you. Um, the cycle. Yeah, exactly. So I got a GameCube and then, you know, Smash Brothers came out. And then I like, I, I, I think I was playing Monkey Ball,

which is like one of the fucking coolest games of all times. God, it's so funny. Like the GameCube launch lineup got shit on so hard when it was weird but looking back on it now it's like everything you just name like man there was some damn good fucking games there especially if you look at like the launch window of like the first three four months well because smash bros came out two weeks after they missed the actual launch but the game cube launched i want to say on the 15th of november yeah and then xbox was the 18th of november and then it wasn't until december third or whatever that smash yeah and it had it had weird games it had like i think it was like wave race and uh luigi's mansion and Rogue Squadron.

Rogue Squadron. Monkey Ball. It had like a weird. It was Rogue Squadron 2. Yeah. Because Roch Squadron was the original. It had like a universal studios game. Like it was just like, what are you guys doing?

This is really odd. But there were some gems in there, right? And I really got into them. And then so I saw the Xbox and I was like, I'm going to get that. And so I saved up money and I got that. And I think I had a PS2 at the time and stuff like that. So it was all of a sudden you're like, I have all the consoles again. And I'm really into this.

And then from there, like I found the same shit happening where friends would come together to play video games. And the GameCube, you know, four control reports in the front, like really inspired people to do that. And so you had your memory cards and people would come over. And the handle.

You could bring it anywhere, which I think we actually did. And so, like, people would come over and play Rogue Squadrum or you would play, you know, like, smash brothers together. Like, then it got a Mario card game. See, the irony for me about the,

about that generation of consoles was the GameCube had a handle. Yeah. I never brought my GameCube anywhere. If my friends had a game, if I was playing, Smash Bros. Chances are. My friends had one too. I would just bring my controller.

And we'd be good. The console that I did log around was the Xbox for Halo for all the fucking land parties and like us being in separate rooms playing after the flag. And that was the biggest fucking bulking console. You had like a radio flyer you're dragged with you everywhere. Yeah, that thing was a huge huge system. I don't think people

realize like just the controller and even like I remember like that was the first time I remember reading about a video game system like tanking in Japan. And sort of understanding. And that was a huge deal. Like that was like oh fucking like what you were bringing up earlier It was the first time that well first successful time that it wasn't this mystical thing of anything it happened My uncle works in Nintendo and you could actually believe somebody yeah because there's things out there that you wouldn't know yeah like they've been playing Mario three forever

Yeah you know what I mean or like I remember a Pokemon I I went into a store and I saw Pokemon gold yeah and I was like that's not out for a year What the fuck? And I convinced my dad to get it for me. And I got it. I was a dumb kid. Didn't realize it was in Japanese. Yeah.

I ended up beating it. Which is one of my, I beat Cop hit and I'm pretty proud of that. But a fucking eight-year-old Tim Geddies who can barely fucking read, you know, 28 years into my life. Somehow beat a RPG in Japanese. That is fucking tremendous, dude. That is incredible. I remember I went to the library because I didn't have a computer and I printed out a walkthrough that kind of translated what certain things meant.

God, God. My greatest achievements, but God, I love that game. Yeah, but Japan literally had this game. Yeah. So much ahead of time. Yeah, they had it ahead of time. And then they got the Xbox and they were like, it's too big. We don't want it.

I don't like the games. It's weird. And then I remember like the internet was a thing back then. You could read about how shit was doing. And I remember reading like it. It became a sort of meme, people taking pictures of what the Xbox looked like in Japan or the lack there of. Like there was no lines for it.

There's no excitement for it. But I ended up liking it. And, you know, to speed around through everything else, modern consoles, like, I ended up getting everyone. The only console or handheld that I haven't bought on day one in the last, probably 15 years, is the Xbox 1X. And it's only because I'm like, I'm going to wait. Yeah, and it doesn't really count, right?

Because if you bought an Xbox one. Yeah. So I have, I have like a day one edition, Xbox one. I have a PS4 Pro, got a Vita, got a PSP, got a PSP go, got every DS. I have a switch, which I fucking adore. And so, like, I'd say like of the last time. years. Some of my favorite games to come out were stuff like Resident Evil 4, which might be longer than 10 years now. Definitely longer than 10 years now.

Right. God. When did Winwaker come out? Like probably 13 years ago? 2002. Yeah. So let's go 15 years. Yeah. So Winwaker, Resident Evil 4, Killer 7. Yeah. Killer 7 was one of my favorite games. Killer 7. Yeah. Wow. Which is really, it's really fucking cool that I'm, like, I'm friends with the people who make that game. And it's just like I run into them all the time. Like when I'm at events, they specifically, like, look for me so we can, we can hang out and stuff like that. It blows my mind. And so, yeah, I've gotten every console since. And then around 2007, I started a website where I was writing about video games, but like doing comedy, like a comedy angle.

What was it called? It's called the minus world. And it's long gone now. You can probably find it like in some weird pockets. But it was a video game comedy website. And I did it for about a year and a half. And we ran ads with like Sega and Rockstar. And I snuck into Comic Con.

and like with with business cars I printed on my mom's computer and her word processor and I got to Comic Con and I went and we played games before they came out and me and my team of like three or four people and one video guy went home and like basically shot preview videos

where we were like hey we just got to play the new Sonic game like here's what we thought you know like we did we did like IGN an incredibly small scale and we started becoming cool people like good with like Kataku and joystick and all the other sites at the time. And I would email their weekend editors

and be like, hey, I don't know if you guys have any, like, if you're looking to cross-promote any content this weekend, but we just did a piece about how every character and punch out is racist. That's really funny. You should read it. We hired an illustrated to do the art piece for us and like, here's a preview we did at Comic-Con.

And they would, Owen Good and Brian Cresente and a bunch of other old school Kataku dudes would put our articles up down the weekend and our site blew up. And I got a call from Will Tuttle and Tal Blevins at IGN. And they're like, do you want to move to California and like work for IGN? And I was like, holy shit. Would you, were you at GameSpy for a while?

I was at GameSpy for a while. So GameSpy was basically GameSpy and Joystick or OneUp. GameSpy and OneUp were like the small like brother's sister, like sort of half sister of half sibling sites next to IGN. IGN was this big thing. And we were over in the corner like in the shadows. But we still got to go to the same parties and the same events. Yeah.

It was all all the same thing. Yeah. It was actually kind of cool because like when a new. game would come out, IGN would get three copies, and GameSpy would get three copies, and GameSpy had five people, and IGN had 50. So they'd be, like, Greg and Damon, all those guys would be fighting over, like, you know, the new Splinter Cell game, and I'd be like, I have my own copy, I get to take it home. Yeah. It was kind of great. And then so, like, you know, I just became even more connected to video games than I ever was. And you know what it's like working in the industry.

It's like, you never turn it off. It's just always there. And so, yeah, I, you know, I've covered now, I've covered every, I bought a Wii at launch. I've covered every launch. I've covered every launch. I've covered every launch since. I think like the DS or the Vito were some of the ones. So I started at IGN in 2009. Yeah. And so it's 2018 now. What blows my mind is I always thought you were there forever.

Yeah. I looked at you as one of the like OG motherfuckers. Like I started a year after you did. Yeah, that's crazy. Which is really weird to think about. I know. Like when I, like one up wasn't even there when I first started. Like one up was purchased later.

Right. GameSpite was. But that was when you guys were on the second floor. Yeah. Yeah. And we were on third. And then eventually. everyone moved to the fourth. Yeah. And I wasn't even on, um, I wasn't even on game spy at that point.

So I was just like IG improper. And I remember it being like when they had a huge round of layoffs and they got like, like, 120 people were laid off and I came into work and I'm like, do I have a job? And they're like, well, game spy is no longer what it used to be. And now you're going to IG. And I was like, so I got promoted. Yeah. I'm like, you laid off people and you promoted me. And I'm like, I don't, I don't feel like celebrating over this. Yeah. It was such a, such a weird time. And I remember when I first started, I was the first intern that IGN had, especially the video team had in years because there was this huge scandal with Fox and they weren't allowed to have interns. It's like a California thing.

For whatever reason, Eric Hart believed in me. It was like, we're fighting for this guy. And like, thank God he did. Because I'm here now because of that. But they didn't really teach me well what everyone did. Yep. That's the, and the IGN way is basically just like, it's just like you show up and they're like, there's your word processor.

Have fun. Like fucking do something. And like, I thrive in that type of environment. in terms of like figuring shit out and doing stuff. It's very sink or swim. But in terms of understanding who does what and why and how, like you really had to figure that out yourself. And it got weird because I remember, again, looking at you as like one of the dudes, like,

I thought that you ran shit. Right. And it's so funny because I was so wrong about so many things. I thought that Eric Hart fucking ran shit. I thought Nick Scarpito was just like a fucking like peon on the video team because he was just such a funny, goofy ass guy. Yeah. And then he ended up running shit.

But I found that out. I was jaw dropped. I was like, you? Yeah. You're the. manager. Well, it's funny because I ran. Yeah, he was a manager and it was like, what the fuck? He was like this chain smoking alcoholic shit talker who were just like, he would like, I would walk in. He'd be like, hey, hey, how's it going and smack my ass? Okay. All right. He still does that. There's a hashtag for that now, you guys. It was funny because I remember, uh, you know, you, I don't even remember what it was that you were doing, but like, people told me, Altato makes the art. Yeah. He does like, he does the funny stuff and he makes the art. If you need art, you, you, You go to him and ask him to make art.

Yeah, that was a way. I got sort of pigeonholed by people as like an art school as like an artist and like a comedian, which is great. But it's also like, no, it's like I have a serious side to me. I have a nuanced side to me. Like I will sit down and talk to you on any podcast about anything. And it took a lot to sort of break to break that. Right.

I mean, there was such a, especially when we were there at IGN in those days. Yeah. It was kind of the third class of IGN. Yep. And at that point, there's been an established daemon's on camera.

Yep. Chobot's on camera. Yep. You know, Greg Miller sometimes will let him say things as long as he's not on camera. He can say him on audio things. Yeah. And it was like that weird breakthrough point of things kind of changing where things changed.

The editorial team was actually starting to be allowed to say things and have opinions. Well, and like what they like, they were like, Tim films videos. And then you were like, no, motherfucker. Tim makes videos. Exactly. But there's the difference. And you came in. You're like, here's a video that does a million views.

And they were like. Yeah, but how do we do that? Yeah, but it got really weird. It's tough, yeah. But it was funny though, because then I remember I always, always connected with you because like you shared that vision of you, I grew up with the YouTube shit. You didn't get the YouTube shit, but you got the YouTube shit.

You believed in it, and you were like, hey, let's, we, there's content, let's do the content, and now we all get to do it. And now it's a different world. But I remember being like told to just, oh, go, if you need art, go to Altano. And I remember going, hey, can you make me a thumbnail? And I like, I felt so shitty doing that. Well, it was funny because, like, like, We have a design team that does that specifically.

But they're like, Brian will do it faster. And better. And to be fair, at that point, you did. Like, you made great shit for the dumb things we did. And we only made like one comedy video together. I know. And years. And like, we got separated in such different ways.

But we did the, um, the Mario is miserable. You worked on that. Yeah. Oh God. Yeah. Google Mario is miserable. IGN. Uh, that was, I can't believe we got away with that one.

I can't either. It's, I'm, I'm excruciatingly fat in the video. And I'm talking to Naomi Kyle who's just like she looks like a child like she's so young We're all we're both kids in this video and it's basically it was just all improv of me like talking to Me as Mario talking to peach like she's my girlfriend and being like hey like you fucking got to stop getting kidnapped. Yeah this is a tremendous like this is killing me like and she was just like I kind of like it like it's fun and I was like you have no idea like what happens every time I you get kidnapped like it is a fucking nightmare for me. God it was just such it was so funny because like I was still kind of the wide-eyed intern at IGN,

not really know what was going on, but getting opportunities to do things like, I was like, this is fucking, this is where it's at. It felt dangerous, right? And I remember one time walking into you in editing Bay 3 and it was like after work, and I was no, what do you do? And you're like, oh, like, we shot this stupid thing

and like it's not gonna ever happen, but like I, you know, we're just working on it. And it was bad news? Yeah, it was bad news. Which was like the early baby version of what would turn into up and noon. Into up and noon. And it was like, it was you

Scott Bromley. And like it was like the intro was you breaking into IGN and like doing the fucking show. And like I thought it was so fucking funny. It's still on Facebook somewhere. The pilot, it's and it's really bad because it's, uh, it's, it's us doing weekend update for video games. And there's three clocks behind us. And one of them says like, Raccoon City. One says high rule.

Yeah. It says like, you know, uh, fucking vice city or mushroom king or something like that. And it's us doing over our fucking laugh track. It's us doing like two camera joke reads of monologue jokes that we wrote. in Greg's old apartment. That's where this shit gets really fucked up because Bromley used to live in Greg's apartment before Greg moved in there.

Colin moved in with Scott, with Scott Bromley as his roommate. Scott moved out. Greg moved in. You guys started piloting Game Over Greg in there. Greg became the host of Up at Noon, which I became lead writer for, and co-host.

And so the thing I had piloted with Scott in that apartment then became the place for Greg lived where you guys had started your company, which then became kind of funny. So out of like those conversations came kind of funny, the comedy button up at noon, Greg Miller, like all of that came from this one like this one sort of group

of people that happened to be around at the same time. And all of this just being like, hey, IGN's awesome, but it could be more awesome. What if we did this? Yeah, it's so funny to see. Yeah, it's really cool. And it's so cool to see IGN now where it's like, that vision has been a reality.

It's become a reality of what you guys do on any of the podcast, on any of the shows. It's like it is now the irreverent thing that we wanted it to be for so long. Totally. Totally. And it's like what I moved across the country for because I always love comedy. I've always loved video games. I've always thought that they should go together more because video games are something

that I cherish and I love and they're goofy and endearing. And the way they bring friends together to like talk shit and fight and argue and laugh and joke. There are people out there that think that video games are only serious, and they only really play the tonally serious ones. And there's something wonderful about that. But not everything is the last of us. You know, there's a lot of games that are goofy. And even in The Last of Us, like, there's a giraffe.

And spoilers. And like, Ellie can't swim. And that's stupid. That's a joke. It's a running joke that she doesn't know how to swim in that game. And so I think there's a comedy to come from that. And it's like the fact that, like, that we can make kind of positive, exciting, uplifting shows that are all goofy and irreverent and bring together people, I think is sort of like

it's this perfect way of executing on this vision that I think we were always kind of destined to do and that are like the gamers have always wanted and always needed and always looked for. Not to like pat ourselves on the back, but it's like the way video games have brought everyone together in the world is is fucking awesome. Yeah. I mean to go off that point about the patting ourselves in our back, I don't think that it's that because, you know, I see this. all going back to what we were talking about with Cuphead of me wanting to be cupid to see all that was there. I see this as a tribute to EGM issue 100, you know, where it's just like me, us talking about this and showing our experience is showing me

the people, we're lucky that like patting ourselves on the back is just as much patting the listeners on the back because they're, they're part of this, right? What you were talking about playing video games where you need to play for it to keep going, if people aren't listening to us, we're not going to, we can't keep doing this. And it's like there's people out there. So many, so many people at our community have launched their own podcast, launch their own websites with, like, written articles, because that's still a thing. It's awesome.

Yeah. It's so cool that it's still happening. And it's crazy that I, I am now in a position where I'm becoming a fan of our people that we inspired when really, it's just like, it's a, you take some, you give it back, you take more, you give it someone else and just keep going. I interviewed Shigero Miyamoto at E3 a couple years ago. And I fucking, how cool is that? Yeah.

And it was just like, and it's one of those things where it's like, I could be having the worst day of my life. And there are like a few places in the, in the universe where I can go. and one of them is sitting in that room with Shigeru Miyamoto and Bill Trinan, who is translating, who's like, now a friend of mine, it's so cool.

He's so awesome. He's so awesome. Yeah, Bill's so great. And I said something that made Miyamoto laugh and Bill translated it. It was one of those, when you tell a joke with a translator,

it's super weird, because it's like, you tell a joke, the translator, hears the joke, laughs, tells the joke to the guy who's being translated to.

He hopefully laughs, because by then it's just sort, It's just sort of like echo, echo, echo. And then it comes back to you and then you hear the translation. And so I said something that made Miyamoto laugh. And afterwards I was like, hey, like, it felt really good to make you laugh because you have been making me smile for 30 years. And like he gave me this big handshake and this big warm smile.

Just this infectious smile. And yeah, and the thumbs up. And it just like totally made my life. You know, it's just one of those things where it's like, like, I could never begin to give back to you what you've given. in me, but if I, in four seconds can, like, make you smile for just the tiniest bit, then it's like, that's a little bit, you know, that's a little bit. Just like beating cup head or, you know. It's awesome, man.

Video games are cool. They're fucking great. You guys should check them out. Brian, thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for joining me for this. Thank you so much for having me. We need to have you back more.

Whenever you need me, I'll play hooky and come back. You need to get me for NBC. I would love to have you on NBC. We'll get back together. Let's do it. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us.

I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Until next week, I love you.