Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - From GTA to Absurd Ventures: Lazlow Interview - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

The voice of Chatterbox FM -- Lazlow Jones -- comes to Kinda Funny about working on Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, and Absurd Ventures! Run of Show - - Start & Lazlow Jones is Here! - Housekeeping - An Interview with Lazlow Jones - Absurd Ventures - How Did Lazlow Join Rockstar? - How Lazlow’s Role Evolved at Rockstar - When Did Lazlow Realize How Big GTA Was Getting? - Ads - Why Lazlow Left Rockstar - Restarting with Absurd Ventures & Writing Something New - The Artistic Success Post GTA IV - Dan and Lazlow’s Writing Partnership - Why Do Games Struggle to Be Funny? - When Will Absurd Ventures Make a Game? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up everybody? Welcome to the kind of funny games cast for Thursday, June 20th, 20th, 24. I'm one of your host, Greg Miller, alongside the man, the myth, the legend. Laslo Jones. Hello, Laslo! I don't have, uh, I don't have smoke machines. That was impressed. You know, in your office there? You don't have them to sit down in the background? Have something running real quick and vape. On the show earlier, I can't believe you said the line, I'm such a hugger, grown man saying that out loud. I am, man. You got to be who you are, Laslo. You got to be who you are. I'm a hugger. That's what I do.

I love it. I got thrown out of E3 for using that line. Laslo, this is a big deal for me. I want you to know. Of course, I met you in passing forever ago. This bum name Simon was walking me around Rockstar HQ. And they introduced us. I said hi. And I didn't at all get to tell you.

God damn, dude. Chatterbox at GTA3. you get it all the time, but like, when I brought GTA 3 to my college dorm, the door stayed open and people would just come in and gawk the entire time. And when I, multiple people would hear chatterbox and we would just drive around Liberty City listening to it because it was so freaking good. And on top of that, this is back in the day. So I had a computer that had lime wire on it. And it just searched. I remember for weeks looking for chatterbox. And the morning I woke up and had it ran across the hall of my friend John's dorm, pounded on it, let him know we had.

all of Chatterbox. Thank you for Chatterbox. Oh, no worries. Yeah, that, when we were making that, I hadn't actually really seen the game. I'd never had a controller in my hand. I saw it sort of in the distance, but then the day that the game came out, Terry Donovan drove a copy over to my house and I put it in and my head exploded because you hear actually head radio is the first thing that you hear when you get into a car. And yeah, I just sort of drove around scrolling through listening. Couldn't believe I was actually part of this thing. And you were a part of it for quite some time. I want to talk about all of that. I want to talk about GTA, Grand Theft Auto. I want to talk about Rockstar. I want to talk about absurd ventures. Your new thing. The new podcast,

there's so much to talk about. But first, I'll remind everybody and get the housekeeping out of way. This is kind of funny gamescast. Each and every weekday, we talk to you about the biggest topics in video games, whether it be reviews, previews, or just amazing guests. If you like that, you should check it out each and every day live on YouTube, Twitch, and podcast services around the globe. Of course, if you love it to that nth degree, get that kind of funny membership on Patreon.com slash Kind of Funny or YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny games so you could get all of our shows ad free.

You could watch us record our afternoon podcast lives. We record them like yesterday's Daredevil episode, yish. And of course, you could get my multimedia vlog. podcast Greg way each and every day. If you were once touched by an angel named Laslo, I want you to super chat your questions to me. YouTube.com. Tell me where it hurt.

Yeah. YouTube.com slash kind of funny games and your super chats to be part of the show. Of course, we're a small business, 11 people making all sorts of live talk shows. You've already gotten conjecture on games daily about what blue point is up to. You could catch that now. YouTube, of course, podcast services.

After this, it's going to be the boys playing video games. They said chain together, but I heard them talking about another game out there. So see what they'll be up to. If you're a kind of funny member, today's Greg Way is God bless Luchos. Thank you for making our dreams of reality, Patreon producers, Kieran Hovesapien, Carl Jacobs, Fargo Brady, and Delaney, twining. Today we're brought to you by Shady Ray's, Harry's, and a Better Paradise. But we'll tell you about that later.

For now, let's start with topic of the show. The topic's you. The topic's you, Laslo. All right, I am honored to have you in my presence. You are here. This is such a big deal. But really, I think, obviously, like I said, I want to talk about everything. I want to talk about Chatterbex.

I want to touch GTA. But for now, talk to me about absurd ventures. Because this is the new thing, of course. You, Dan Houser, breaking off on your own, going on. You know, I left a very successful place to start my own thing, too. So if you need advice, let me know. But what is absurd ventures? Well, so when you left IGN, was there a period in between where you just sort of set in a forest?

and cried or? No, we didn't have time for that. We had to immediately start making this or it was out of business. Fantastic. Yeah, so I left Rockstar in 2020 right before the pandemic. Spent a bunch of the pandemic

with a nail gun in my hand. What were you building? Hopefully. I was just sitting in the dark with a nail gun in my hand. Drinking whiskey, shooting at rodents. And then Dan reached out to me

and said, hey, I'm thinking about starting this new thing. and he told me some of his ideas for different universes that he wanted to make. One of them is a Better Paradise, which is set the future. And so many of the projects that we worked on were set in the 80s, 90s, current day, 1899 with Red Dead, and 1907 with the Red Dead before that. And so to do something in the future that's sci-fi was extremely compelling. And, you know, Dan and I were writing partners for 19 years at Rockstar.

Horatrageous. We have a great vibe. It's sort of London meets Oklahoma. So, yeah, so we started absurd ventures and got a great team. We're in Santa Monica. You know, I was in New York for 25 years. And the food in California is way better. Like the...

Come on, Laslo. Speak the truth. Let him know. Take him a church. The avocado fentanyl toast is amazing. It's top notch. So you branch off, you come here, you start this thing up. What I thought was so impressive but ambitious, right?

Because we've seen so many people screw this up, is the idea that when you start up to Sir Adventures, you talk very much about this is going to be for, I have a quote in front of me from the press release, right? For a diverse variety of genres without regard to medium to be produced for live action and animation, video games and other interactive content, books, graphic novels, scripted podcasts. That's a lot to bite off.

Yeah, it's a lot. But Dan and I were always making tons of media. You know, for the GTA games, we started just making radio. And then as the hardware got more robust, we said, well, if people are driving around just listening to the radio and not doing the missions, what if we added television so that they could go into their apartment in the game? game and watched their character watching television. So we started creating all these animated TV shows in the game. There was a spoof internet. There was news.

And we love creating all that content and, you know, love making television. All that existed inside the world. And, you know, in the case of Red Dead 2, you had like old tiny cartoons that you could watch. So we thought, well, what if we start a company and make games, but also make television and graphic novels and animated shows. And so it's, and creatively it's fun because you get to hop back and forth between them. And this project, you know, this universe that we just revealed a better paradise, it's a weird way to go about a franchise, an audio-only 12-episode story that's about a fictional

game team in the future, making an open-world game. so but it forced us to make a lot of creative decisions in a very quick time period because we have to we're basically deciding the lore of the of the entire world in six months rather than having no big deal in the dev cycle for five years you can make a lot of decisions along the way change things it's impressive and again to get to a better paradise right which i think's fascinating We always talk about, you know, when you work, I have this journalism background. I worked at newspapers, right, IGN, the wall between advertising and editorial. It was very funny in our editorial meeting here last week where I was like, and Laslo's coming on next week on the Gamescast to talk about absurd adventures and Better Paradise.

And Tim's like, hey, just so you know, a Better Paradise is sponsoring us next week. And I was like, oh, okay, interesting note. So I wanted to call out to our audience because we share everything, obviously, ethically, that's happening, but this isn't part of it. So this is an advertorial. This is just the fact that PR hit me up and was like, how about this? Because the show's going. And I said,

of course. And then that's happening too, which of course is cool then that you're supporting us. But I digress. What I like about a better paradise and what I find, again, fascinating, somebody who listens to so many audio podcasts and narrative podcasts,

is how much you allow your main character to monologue. I was listening to episode one, right? And it was like, it was 17 minutes of a monologue before we got to, like, what I think of as the usual. fictional fully staged footsteps, phone call, people are talking back and forth.

Did you look into what was going on in narrative podcast and say, I don't want to do that? Did you say this is going to be very strictly our own thing? How did you tackle what you wanted to do with a better paradise? No, we didn't look at anything else. And to be, to be honest, you know, some people, and this is with all the projects that Dan and I have worked on. Sure. People get outside of their comfort level.

They're like, this is not what I'm used to. And we decided from a storytelling standpoint to have two time periods. One is in the 2030s, and you're listening to scenes that are at this fictional video game company. And then there's monologues in the 2040s with people who are on the run possibly being manipulated and pursued by AI. And we thought it was just an interesting way to tell a story. And also there's several characters that do monologues. So it's interesting to get inside their heads. And it's also a quick way to give backstory about what's happening in the world.

Yeah, and it makes, you know, the characters seem completely unhinged as when they're going and they're talking about AI and are they watching me now and is this right seeing? So I think about where I want to go, but I go to the opposite place of that. So they won't. And I'm like, Jesus, man. This is a diary of a madman on the wall. Yeah. And, you know, it's that there's a lot of paranoia in it and trying to figure out, you know, you start to. piece together some things over the course of the series.

But one of the things that I love, the character, the AI character of Nigel Dave, is, there's been so many shows and movies about evil AI, and we thought, well, these things are making us completely neurotic, right? Yeah, our phones are being it, yes. So if an AI was inside a video game building a world and then escaped and was reading the internet every fraction of a second, it would be as neurotic as we are. So, and, you know, if you listen to episode one, there's a long monologue from the AI character who's rapidly reading the internet and trying to make sense of humans and how insanely confused and. miserable we are. And the other thing about, you know, doing something in sci-fi, we'd never done sci-fi before. But frankly, you know, these franchises where there's flying cars and jet packs and

all that, I mean, we're living sci-fi now. And I just, we imagine in 15 years from now, it's going to be, things are going to be even crazier and worse, right? So it's not going to, It's not going to be flying cars. It's, you know, going to be what we've got now, death or delivery by drone. You know, you can get a hamburger or you get a missile shot into your face. Maybe it's a two for one.

You never know. Exactly. Yeah, I think that, you know, that's always funny of like, I think, at least for me, and it sounds like for you, too, definitely that optimistic look to the future, flying cars, this will be so much better, be able to hydrate the pizza,

like in back to the future, too. That's long gone. Right now it is just going to be like, the phone will keep getting smaller until it's inside me. And that's the best I can, Yeah. And you know, one of the big things that we did in the Red Dead and GTA universes was advertising. You know, we would create a radio commercial. I mean, we're essentially like,

you know, I've called it a Demented Ad Agency. We would make a radio commercial. There'd be a TV commercial that you could see. There'd be billboards on the side of the road. And so advertising to us is the great manipulator, right? All of the, all of the TikTok, Instagram, all the algorithms, YouTube, are meant to, A, make you miserable, right? And to keep watching. All the things you're missing. Here's all the things you should buy and spend your money on. Stay good.

Right. If you buy these things, you'll be less miserable. And in a Better Paradise, they talk about how when you see advertising in the future, every one of those ads is specifically made by AI based on your algorithms. Right? So everybody sees a different commercial, gets a different, message and is constantly being manipulated. I mean, it happens now.

I can have a conversation with someone in another room, not even near my phone, and then I open up Instagram, and there's an ad for the thing I was just talking about. Oh, yeah. It's scary. It's exciting. It's exciting and terrifying. The two different choices we made there. Yeah, but I think what's fascinating then for me with you guys is somebody who has been, you know,

lucky enough to follow the lineage in GTA and Rockstar and. and, you know, talk to Mr. Hauser and interview him. I remember when GTA 5 had shipped and there was this conversation somewhere about like, well, what's next? And it was one of these where I remember someone, I think it was Dan saying, you know, where we're at already is a parody. Like how could we parody a parody of a parody? You know what I mean?

Like, what do we do? And I love that with this project, you're able to do something. And like you said, even though it's a new ballgame for you to have six months to do everything and make your lore and get it out there. There is this nimbleness to it, right? Where it feels like you're publishing so much quicker than you were before these ideas. Is that accurate from my outsider perspective?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, one of the struggles that we always had from a technology standpoint or a satire standpoint is with long game development cycles, it's hard to make evergreen content. Especially when you're, when you've got these worlds that you're trying to make,

a hyper, more insane version of. But then over the course of development, the world gets even crazier, right? And so how do you make that evergreen content? I mean, I remember in GTA3, we had a commercial for the Dormatron where you can lose weight while you sleep. And then a year and a half after the game comes out,

I hear a commercial for a product that lets you lose weight in your sleep. and I was like, wow. And there's been a bunch of times that Dan and I have done spoofs that actually become... Hit way too close. That hit way too close. Again, chatterbox,

I listened to some of it, you know what I mean, before this just, you know, refresh my memory in. But it's like that idea of like what seemed so absurd there are people who not only are on the radio anymore,

they have their own TV shows on network. You know what I mean? They're out there doing the most ridiculous thing. It's like, that's insane. Yeah, and I, you know, I'd worked at radio for several years before that and I always,

found talk radio super fascinating and the thing about working at a radio station that you quickly realize is the people that call in are not your fans they're they're maniacs and I say this as a person who was stopped by one of the listeners of the rock radio station that I worked at and so folks that actually take the time to you know call a radio station and call into a show a lot of times are completely bat-shit so Dan and I were having our weekly writing meeting and thought it would be fun to just have all these callers that are completely unhinged. And are referencing stuff you haven't even really heard. Like a caller would call and just like, hey, you guys were talking about chocolate donuts.

Like, no, we weren't. For me, the one that stuck with me all of these years. And there's lots of bits or whatever, but it was always the woman who was calling in about video games and her, She's like, the kid got run, the dog got run over. And she said, Mommy, Mommy, where's the reset button? I'm like, that's all. Mommy, Mommy, where's the reset button is always hung in my brain about that? But since we're transitioning back to, it's so hard to tell your story without all of it,

how does that happen? How do you go from being in radio, even though you were in radio and still are long after, but in radio to then making a radio station for Grand Theft Auto 3? What was the origin story? Yeah, how did that all come to be? I was on a side quest in life. No, I lived in Long Beach, New York, a couple blocks from the ocean, and I was literally surfing and met another guy in the ocean who I'd seen there before, and the waves were fantastic,

and I was complaining about having to go to L.A. Because I'd looked at the surf report, and the waves were garbage. And he's like, oh, yeah, I'm going to L.A. too. And I said, what are you going to L.A. for? He's like, oh, I'm going to E3. I said, I'm going to E3 as well. And he said, yeah, we just started a video game company recently. And I said, well, I do a nationally syndicated radio thing about technology and I review video games and all that.

And he's like, oh, you should come do a piece on us. Right. So got his info, came into the office, met Dan Houser, and he said, hey, we're, we have this idea about making fun of American radio. And you're like, I got ideas. And I said, I've, I've, you know, you should do this, you should do that. And he said, do you want to, do you want to work with us on it? I was like, wow. And, you know, as a kid growing up with gaming machines and, well, gaming computers, the TRS 80.

Yeah. And various, you know, old PCs, 286, 386, 486, 486, 486, all that. And as an aside, is this, you made a reference earlier. Is this in Oklahoma? Is that where you grew up? Yes, this is, this was in Oklahoma. So we had a computer in our house in the late 70s. Okay.

Shout to mom and dad. That's great. Dialing into a server in Kansas, you know, with like, and it was basically just a big typewriter. And so every time you typed in a command prompt, the electric typewriter would, you know, display it on paper. And then the server would send back stuff and then it would type. And so, and I, you know, would program games and play tons of games off a cassette and

and then the idea of actually getting to work on a game was, it was like a dream come true. And then so a month after GTA3 comes out, Dan calls me and says, hey, we're starting work on the next game. And I go, what are you talking about? We just finished out. Like, why don't we just chill and take a break? and he said, now we're doing another one, and we want everything to, we want it to be twice as big. No, maybe. Twice the map, twice as much radio content, and that was Vice City.

And then we rolled from that into San Andreas, and then I said, you know, this is a lot more fun than radio. So why don't, why don't I just come work here full time? That's awesome. And they said yes, and there you were. So how does that evolve, though, right? Because I obviously have done my research, but for the audience, you go from, you know, working on the radio stuff, making that happen. But then as time goes on, you become, you go well beyond the radio in terms of what you're doing for the Grand Theft Auto series and Red Dead.

Yeah, I was working on the trailers, you know, overseeing all the audio recording. One of the things that I'm really proud of is the level of authenticity that we would go for. So if you need specific accents or languages, we would travel to those places. You know, for instance, in Red Dead 2, we went to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Mexico so that we could record indigenous Americans. We flew to New Orleans and recorded tons of, you know, Creole individuals because those accents, you just can't get right with New York or L.A. actors. You want to record the real people. And even going back to San Andreas, we always had that ethic of the game, rather the gang members in the game.

Those were real gang members that they recruited and to come do voiceover. and we brought him in the studio and we'd show them the scripts and they're like, Jan, I wouldn't say that, I wouldn't say that, I'd say this, and we're like, well, say what you would say. We're burning tape, just go. Right. So, yeah, I loved that level of authenticity and then got involved with a lot of the motion capture. So in Red Dead 2, when you go to the campfire and people are telling stories or singing songs,

I wrote a lot of that dialogue and I wrote the songs and I directed all the talent. you know, while people are getting drunk and singing body songs. So, yeah, the role expanded. It was a blast. And, you know, those games I'm super proud of and got to work with some incredible people. Is there a moment? It's interesting, especially for you being a fan, like all of us, then moving to doing the radio show covering video games, then being involved in it, then going all the way through the looking glass, right? And being way more on that side.

is there a moment with GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, or beyond where you realize, is there like a night and day black and white, like, oh, wow, this is the biggest thing on Earth right now.

I think the turning point, I mean, it was exciting to be part of those groundbreaking earlier games, but I think the turning point was GTA4 when the new hardware allowed us to do something that looked a lot more cinematic. It was less cartoony.

And the press, you'll probably remember this, but the press changed around 2008, because all the press before that was video games are corrupting humanity. They're the worst things in the entire world. You know, there was movements to ban the games and not let stores sell them. And then in 2008, when we released GTA4, the press started saying, wow, this might actually be. art.

And, you know, I would have those moments where I would be at the airport and I would have something in my in my carry-on luggage. And the TSA guy would be like, you can't, you can't bring that on board. That could be used as a weapon. And he's like, hey, where'd you get that shirt? Where'd you get that GTA shirt? I was like, oh, you know, I worked on the game. And he was like, he said to the other guy, is like, oh, man.

he worked on Grand Theft Auto. He goes, yeah, just go on through. Fantastic. You're the one who just gets to chase it. You know what I mean? Like as long as you have this shirt, you can do whatever you want out there. That's amazing.

What about obviously the name GTA and the press and all that jazz? What about you? Because again, I can't imagine when you're doing the GTA3 chatterbox stuff, you have any concept of how much that is going to hit for people and how much that's going to mean to people. alone now to be 20-some years removed from it, right, and have it still be quotable and have people still be, I mean, even as soon as I announced it, the chat was popping off, you know, my Twitter mentions, everything about it is like, oh my God. And even it's crazy to me because

you're so GTA3, so chatterbox, that in the meeting out there when I mentioned it and then I started going through the other radio stations, I forget at which one Mike Howard, his eyes lit up because that's when he pieced it together who you were. Like, what about you as Laslo becoming something greater than just a man. Well, you know, that was, I don't know, we didn't have a lot of conversation in those writing meetings when we were doing the, when we were writing chatterbox, we said, you know, who should be the host? And Dan said, why don't you be the host?

And I'm like, okay, what do I, what am I named? He's like, just be Laslo. And I'm like, okay. And so over the years, as I, you know, appeared in multiple games as myself, Dan, Dan would sabotage me. Like, he'd send his version of a script over, and I would look through it. And I was like, really, you really want me to say this?

He really want me to sound this pathetic. And the same when he sent me the first pass of the script for the mocap scenes in GTA 5. I'm like, really? Dancing in my underwear. He's like, it's going to be great. I'm going to make you a star, Laz. That's amazing.

I think what's so cool about it is, like, what you're talking about and again what the rock star name meant and what Grand Theft Auto carried and importantly how that press changed everything right I got my start

writing a newspaper right after college and I'd always thought I'd go right to EGM, I'd go right to GamePro, I'd go right to IGM and I didn't and I worked there a year before I finally convinced them to let me do a video game column weekly and a video game blog and I did it

an article called Like a Bad Wedgy, bully game critics are too tight. And it was talking about how people were ragged on it. This is from February 2007. I know because I kept an email from Harry Allen from Rockstar Games who I don't know and never met, but emailed me, found it and just wrote, Dear Greg Miller, beautifully pointed and stated, thank you. And it was one of those things of like, that's an email I've held on to since 2007, right?

because it was for me not only the first real contact with the outside. Like I think I had contacts at Capcom. I was getting a game here or there, you know, begging EA to send me an NCAA game, right? But to have someone in the industry, let alone the people who make GTA make bully talking to me about what I wrote about it. Like that was such a huge touchstone in the same way it was for you to walk through TSA that one day. Yeah.

I was in London doing press for a Better Paradise and met a guy and I said, you know, I'm Laslo. And he's like, oh, you're Laslo from Chatterbox and starts quoting the caller who was talking about eating squirrels and possums. And he's like, where did you get the idea for that? I was like, that's my father. I called him. We did not eat squirrel and possum as children. We ate frog legs. Of course.

Delicious. Of course, as you do. Yeah. And if you can, you know, if you can murder it outside, throw it on the grill. But, you know, it's amazing how the comedy that Dan and I wrote for those games, even going through GTA5, those people will quote their favorite lines from it. Which has got to be so, I don't even know, right? I was going to say touching, but I also imagine it goes beyond that to being unbelievable. of like a game where there are so many moving pieces.

And GTA 3 or all the way up to GTA 5, right, in terms of voiceover, in terms of performance, in terms of what the character is doing in the scene versus what the player wants them to do versus, you know, if you're talking about GTA 5, moving between three characters, this very much L.A. recreation that there's so many people like,

oh, that's where E3 was or this is that. Like to be, I imagine what you would imagine, to think of at some point, a small part of that, but have it resonate so much with people, man. That's your legacy. That's amazing. Yeah, I was exciting. You know, and the team grew.

It was a scrappy startup, really. And, you know, you could pivot creatively quite easily. And, you know, Dan would come into my office since I have a great idea for Dutt-D-D-D-Dup. And we would knock a script out. And a week later, I'm recording it, you know, with an actor. And that, you know, that movie. being fast like that is super fun. And also just the, and I think one of the things I'm excited about with absurd ventures is moving

quick with a smaller team and doing all these different kinds of projects. You know, for a better paradise universe, it's to do it. When I, when Dan said, I want to do like an audio book that's acted out with a, a sound designer and composer and we actually hire actors to do all these scenes. I had no concept of how much work it was going to be. We, you know, we love audio, and that's how Dan and I started, is making interesting audio for people to listen to. And that's what I love about, like, the Nigel Dave character in this series is,

like, he's funny. His monologues are hysterical. and, you know, people around the office quote them. That's a great sign if it's in the office, the people who are making the thing are quoting it. Is, well, here, I'm going to give you this one to Stu on and then I'm going to kick it over to ads. All right, I'm ready to Stu.

I'm still ready. You talk about, you know, Stu ready, ready for the pot. You talk about GTA 3, you talk about being a rag tag bunch, and then obviously Rockstar becomes this phenomenon, GTA becomes this whole thing. I want to dig into that a little bit about then going to, starting this thing and having it be back to that. What you feel like you lost from GTA3 is the company got bigger and you lost that ability

to pivot versus what you have now, which is obviously far less bandwidth, right, but the ability to do whatever you want. But before that, I'll remind everybody that Kind of Funny can only do what they want because we broke away from a big thing and started our own small thing. That's not a medium-sized thing because of your support. If you could go pick up the Kind of Funny membership on Patreon.com slash Kind of Funny or YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny. That'd be great. You get each and every episode of the more than 20 shows we do a week ad-free. You'd get the ability to watch us record the afternoon podcast live as you record it. And of course,

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That's harries.com slash kind of funny for a $3 trial set. This episode is brought to you by A Better Paradise. From the writers of the Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto series comes the new immersive audio fiction podcast, A Better Paradise, Volume 1 and Aftermath. Set in the near future, A Better Paradise, tells the story of the ill-fated development

of an ambitious but addictive digital game world project led by inventor and psychologist Dr. Mark Tyburn. As the advanced software they developed began to deliver unexpected and disturbing results, the team fell apart under strange circumstances and the project was abandoned. The game world and the super intelligence within were discarded, left dormant and undiscovered. Until now. I listened to episode one on my way to work today and the thing that stood out, of course, are the performances, but then as an audio drama fan, it was the use of monologues.

There's a whole bunch of talking here as it sets up the world that is not that far from us in the timeline and also not that far from us in the technology, which is disturbing, but I'm quite interested to see where it goes. A Better Paradise is out now and available everywhere you get your podcasts. Go listen today. And don't forget to follow a better paradise on your platform of choice to make sure you never miss an episode. And don't ever talk to me that way again. We're back. Hey, everybody.

We're back. Thank you so much. Remember, of course, get your super chats in on YouTube.com slash kind of funny games to be part of the conversation with Laslo as we now double back. So, yeah, basically, do you feel like, you know, you leave Rockstar before GTA6 after the success of GTA 5 in 2020. Why that decision? Had it gotten too big? Had it lost what you liked about the GTA 3 thing?

Or am I just reading too much into it? No, I mean, all of those games were a unique challenge. And Red Dead 2, you know, is super proud of. We filled that world and made it alive. And after that came out and I was working on GTA online and Red Dead online, And then here we go, bummer alert. My sister came down with cancer. So I started interesting creative exercise.

Writing comedy from a chemo ward is interesting. The funniest place on earth. The funniest place on earth. And is she okay? Is your sister okay? No, she's dead. I apologize. So, yeah, so I spent a bunch of time taking care of her.

And then, you know, that kind of opened my eyes to, how long you're on the planet. And so I left. And then I was like, I was so excited because I thought, okay, I'm starting a new chapter. You know, I did 19 years at Rockstar. I did a bunch of years, a syndicated radio guy. And then I fly out to L.A. And I've got a bunch of meetings in the first week of March 2020.

And then all of a sudden, all the meetings are getting canceled. And then I get a notification from Delta that I've been up. upgraded to first class and I was like, something's not right. Something's a miss. Something's a miss. So, yeah. And then spent the pandemic doing home improvement and washing Amazon boxes and living in fear.

But then you snapped out of it. You came to absurd ventures. Exactly. Exactly. So then what is it like then to be back here? Because again, rock star, GTA, like that's the top of the mountain, right? You can do whatever you want. There's unlimited money, et cetera, et cetera, so on.

You recontextualized life and what it all means. Go have your little walk with your nail gun. Then you come back to this now. And like, again, I'm sure you guys are doing fine financially, but a smaller team, I assume you're trying to do all these bigger projects. Like, it's a weird one because you start this new business, but it's you guys. You got Dan Hauser, you got you.

It's like, okay, but they're doing a podcast, but Andrew Lincoln is on the podcast. It's like, wow, there's a lot of things going on here that's not like your traditional indie sphere. but I got to imagine it feels bootstraps again. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, it's starting anything new is terrifying. But I love the creative partnership with Dan. You know, we've had some of some of the other folks that we worked with have joined us.

Mike Unsworth, Adam Tedman, you know, long, longtime veterans. And mostly I'm just excited about making new IP, you know, making new universes. and, you know, worked on GTA for a long time, worked on Red Dead, and to be starting these universes from complete scratch is terrifying, but also super exciting. Do you feel like this is your chance to learn from previous mistakes? Like you're talking about, like, from scratch, right? You can do whatever you want.

And, like, obviously, at one point, that was the same way with GTA, whereas then, well, five games in, six games in, it's going to be X, Y, and Z. Are you looking at this one like, well, it's not paint ourselves into a corner with this IP that way? Well, that's one of the things that I really was nervous about with a better paradise is because while directing Andrew Lincoln and all these other folks and frankly working with the sound designer to, you know, there are scenes where they're playing the game or there are scenes where people are exploring the game world, all of that has got to have continuity. through all the other projects,

whether it's television show, a game. So I stayed up at night trying to figure out how does this thing sound, you know, what's the lore, and what everything we mentioned in this show has got to carry on through the other projects and have continuity. And it's great to start with a universe from scratch

Because when you have a legacy IP, right, you've got a lot of legacy lore, right? Of what's happened and brands and characters and all that. But we got to start that from complete scratch and also do what I think we do well, satire. And, you know, we've done satire of 1890 in the 80s and, you know, modern day Los Angeles and all that. It's like, well, let's do what does that? the world look like and how can we make fun of it in the future? I have two things to pull from that one, but I'll start with, you talk about a better paradise, you talk about the podcast, but you talk about it being one part of this new world,

this new IP. Is everything absurd ventures is starting being put through that well, it can be all of these things or is this a specific one where a better paradise we see as being part of this universe that we're building that we want to be these things, But this other thing we're noodling is just going to be a book, graphic novel, whatever, video game. All the universes that we're working on have plans or pre-production for other media. Okay. So, and they're all completely separate universes. The other one that we announced is American Caper, which we're going to be releasing some stuff, hopefully, later this year for people to check out.

and then there's a third universe that we haven't even announced that we've been working on for two and a half years. Very cool. I was working on the script for that this morning where I got to use the phrase christening the yak. Oh, I like that. I like where that one's going, Laslo. I like what that is. How big is absurd ventures right now in terms of people? Because this is a lot of stuff to be tackling at once.

Yeah, well, it's, I can tell you it's getting bigger every day because the, We've run out of parking spots. Okay, that's good. Which is a bit of a thing in Los Angeles. Sure. So, yeah, we've been hiring and recruiting. And, you know, when we announced, what was super exciting is tons of people reached out and said, I would love to work with you guys.

And even the, we always had that over the years. people love the work that we've done and the team at Rockstar did. So when you would reach out to people and say, hey, we're kind of thinking about you for this character. They're like, I'm totally in. I love your stuff. And that's a great way to start the conversation. I mean, Patterson Joseph, who plays Nigel Dave, the neurotic AI character.

You know, when we reached out to him, he was like, I. loved Red Dead too. I will do anything you guys want me to. And in the early days of Rockstar, that was hard when you said, hey, we'd like you to be in this video game. They're like, isn't that the one you can run around and shoot a bunch of people? Isn't that the one you kill the hookers in? The one thing people broke out. Even though I bet Ray Leotto is probably like, that sounds cool. I want to go be a part of that. There was, so one of my friends played a prostitute in GTA

or maybe it was vice C and she was at Christmas and her nephew was playing the game and she said oh you know I'm I'm in this game and the whole family was there. It's like oh go find her character went and found the character

and things ensued and said it was a very awkward holiday moment what was it like you know you mentioned it before but what was it like when the GTA 4 turn happened. And suddenly it wasn't that this was like something ruining the minds of the young people, but it was actually something that should be celebrated

and looked into. And, you know, the satire was elevated, right? And what the writing was and what the story was. Yeah, and a lot of people, like, you know, when I mentioned earlier that people were reacting to this format and saying this is not what I'm used to, a lot of people did the same thing with GTA4. You know, it was a bit more serious.

The graphics were way different than what people were used to with San Andreas and Vice City. And that ushered us into a new era, but I was mostly excited about more disc space because that meant that we could put in-game TV shows. Dan and I love making cartoons and came up with Republican Space Rangers and Princess Robot Bobblegum and Kungu Rainbow Laser Force. and all of those. And to have that, it gave you the flexibility of making the world feel more real. And then in GTA5, we said,

well, you should be able to watch stuff on your phone in the game, so you can actually watch animated shows or disappear into a fake Instagram or a fake Twitter. And, you know, as the games and the hardware advanced, then it's, It's amazing to me when we would release a trailer for Red Dead 2, and someone who doesn't play games would watch it. And they were like, this looks like a movie.

Yeah. And it got to that level of production quality. And I think we had over 500,000 lines of dialogue in Red Dead 2. It was a, you know, we were a writing and recording and production machine. And, you know, we've still got that, we've still got that ethic here, you know, of like, let's, let's make a ton of stuff because we love, I mean, you know, I, Dan and I have talked about it when we were launching this chapter of absurd ventures. Like, why don't want to just go, you know, fish for the rest of my life or work at a gas station

or something and take it easy? Like, we have to be making stuff or we'll go insane. Sure. Do you ever feel like you bit off more than you can chew, though? You're talking about these three. Every day. Every day. But that's the, you know, whenever Dan would come to me with an idea to have this idea and I've got these characters, my gut reaction was always, that's insane.

That's nuts. And I don't know how we're going to do that or I think that idea is crazy. And then as it progressed, I was like, oh, this actually makes sense. And, you know, with any of those projects, as like, you know, with any of those projects, as, like, you long as you chop everything into small pieces and just knock it out day by day, those small pieces, you can make something huge and amazing. For sure. I think as we start to wind down here, the one question I was thinking of as we've gone

through this and you talk so much about him is, what is Dan like as a writing partner, as a creative partner on this? You guys have been doing it for together so long. Is every conversation, whether you're just going to the taco? truck about like, what about this? And what about that? Well, it's the same as our first writing meetings about Chatterbox. We just sit and talk about our life, weird experiences, people that we've met, something weird

in the news. And we start making jokes. And, you know, we'll be walking to pick up lunch or something. And we're just having a conversation. And a few funny lines come out of it. And I pull my phone out and, you know, write them down. And a lot of the writing meetings are Dan's on the couch, you know, laying down on the couch, staring at the ceiling. I'm in front of a laptop and we're just riffing and I'm taking notes as fast as possible.

And then I send those notes to him and we divide up who's going to write what scripts. He was going to take the first pass. Interesting. And so, you know, like yesterday he sent me a page and a half from, one of the scripts that he'd started, and I add another page and a half and edit his stuff and send it back, and then we'd just go back and forth until we go, okay, this is funny. And then we'll get together and do a live read of it.

So I'll play one character. He plays another, read it out loud, and we'll punch it up, or we'll be like, that joke stinks, or that's going to offend Greg. Whatever. Don't offend me. So it's basically the same process, except, the first writing meetings for GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, those were with, you know, a 12-pack of Diet Coke and anchovy and onion pizza and packs of cigarettes.

And so now it's like, you know, Keenwa and Seltzer. What's it been like right now as, you know, we start to prep for GTA6 and we had that first trailer? Yeah. What's it like to be on the outside looking in on it? It's weird, but, you know, I have so many friends that I worked with over the years, you know, people that I hired or that joined the production team. And I'm excited for them, you know, because I know it's a ton of hard work. and, you know, there hasn't been a GTA since GTA 5 in 2013. So, you know, I know that my friends that I still talk to, they're super, super excited. Yeah, I think the world is pretty clearly, so that's exciting.

Laslo, my final question, actually, I have two final questions. But my first one final question for you is, I think, broader of you've been doing this so long, you've been writing comedy inside of these games for so long. Why do you think other games struggle with being funny? I think for a long time there was a belief video games couldn't be funny and this, that, the other. And then I think, you know, you saw it through chatterbox, but then in general the satire of GTA and how it's all evolved.

And there's been many successes now, but I still feel comedy is something that in terms of, oh, I can go find a horror game or an action game or this, you don't see that many comedy games or games that are really tackling satire like you guys do. Well, yeah, and I think it helps that each of those games was meant to satirize a specific location and time. I think there's a lot of games where comedy wouldn't make a ton of sense in them. But also, we always wanted to fill the world with as much stuff for people to be distracted by,

and you sort of forget that I'm supposed to be doing a mission. I ended up in the casino for an hour. And, you know, all of that content, tons of Easter eggs. We love when we'll see on YouTube, somebody found an Easter egg from Red Dead 2 that, you know, just discovered something that we put in there. Sure. We put a ton of Easter eggs in A Better Paradise. and even the video that we released when we announced the company.

I don't know if you... Yeah, the two-minute thing, yeah, you literally, it was absurd, right? Of this, the flash, the guy looking at the thing, yeah. But that's full of Easter eggs. And so those will become more apparent. And, you know, bearing that stuff, we did it with, frankly, with GTA3, people talk about, there's a guy calling in and I say, no, this isn't gardening with Maurice, right? that's another show.

And then in Vice City, we did a show called Gardening with Maurice. Yeah. So it's, we love to build huge worlds and tell stories in them. And that's what the idea was with A Better Paradise. This is the first story. And, you know, people can pick it apart and figure out about the game world that they're creating and the madness of, of AI and the future where there's no solar panels anymore. Oh, damn.

Final, final, final question, then, Laslo, is very simple. How long until we see a game from you guys? Oh, that's a good question. I hope, I hope soon. Okay. I hope soon. So you're working on a lot. You got, we're working on a lot of stuff.

Okay, okay. A lot of stuff. All right, fine, fine, fine. Well, right now, of course, you are working on a better paradise. It is getting a new episode each and every Monday. Three episodes are up right now. Like I said, starring Andrew Lincoln. Correct me if I'm wrong.

It's going to be a 12 episode run. It is 12 episodes. In fact, I'm in a Sony, Dolby Atmos studio tomorrow mixing episode 11. Oh, wow. So we've done, we're mixing all of them in Atmos, which is, you know, like 18 speakers surrounding you in madness, which was, again, a creative challenge.

because I had to block out all the scenes and all this, you know, Andrew Lincoln walks by on your right side and gets an argument with people over here. You know, what does the, what does the AI entity sound like? And what does the internet sound like? What does the void of the internet of things sound like? And so I've had some people say, well, I really dig the spatial audio that you guys have done. And it's, you know, I've mixed a lot of surround sound. in stereo projects over the years,

but mixing in Dolby Atmos is a whole, whole other level. You got speakers above your head, helicopters, it's bananas. Yeah, I know, Tim's obsessed with it.

I have to hear about it all the time. You know, he's just this sound, he's got the cinema room, and then we've got to go see the movie and the Dolby Theater. It's a whole thing. That's why I don't want to know.

Just keep giving me the shoddy AirPods and I'll be fine. That's why I'll just do that. It's like when, it's like when somebody says, oh, I got to show you some pictures on my phone on my phone from something that happened this week.

I was like, No, you don't. No, you don't. And also, they never find them fast enough. Yeah, yeah. You know, it's like, oh, let me scroll. Then they've got other photos that they want to show you. Yeah, no, it's enough already.

Nobody wants that experience at all. I asked my final question. The final, final, final, final, final question comes from the Uncharted Wolf who superchatted on YouTube and said, Massive fan of you, Laslow, you're a legend to me. I need to know, what do you think is the canon ending to GTA for? The canon ending? Who did you save? Oh, you mean in five?

No, four, right, where Nico has to make his choice? Well, I mean, I played through it every which way. The answer is Roman. You save Roman, all right? Save your cousin. I love Roman. Who did? You know what I mean?

Don't fall for love, fall for family. Go save Roman, everybody. I'm offended you even asked this question on Chartered World. if the answer is pretty simple. Laslo, thank you so much. A better paradise, like I said, you got three episodes up right now, new one every Monday,

and many more to come. And apparently, a lot more from absurd ventures. Congratulations on starting a new thing and getting out there, Lazzol. Yeah, it's wherever you get your podcast, there are episodes available now.

I hope people like what we've done. It's kind of weird. It is very weird, and that's why I like it. So I think you will too, ladies and gentlemen. Of course, I hope you've liked this episode of the Kind of Funny Gamescast. Remember each and every weekday

We come to you with live talk shows all day long I'm kind of funny You get games daily at 10 o'clock You can get the games cast at 11 And then when that wraps up You get some video game streaming Of course you can catch up on YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny Games and podcast services

Around the globe If you're watching live right now Twitch doesn't have to go anywhere YouTube will get a new link To go see the Gibroni boys play some video games Maybe chained together and then maybe something else They are doing Valerite now Breaking News everybody they're doing Valer

On console? Yes, that's the... They're doing the Valerun console thing, Laslo. I'll get you off. You can turn it on right away. You can watch and play this game. Laszlo, let's go. I'm in.

You can't... I'm in. Laslo, thank you. Yeah. After hearing you talk about how you're covered in perfume from some weird thing that happened to you this morning.

I appreciate you watching games daily. Again, I hugged a man's wife. He owns a restaurant. She helps run it. Don't make it weird. Does Jen know you hugged this man's wife? I hope she watched the show. Otherwise, we got a problem in our marriage,

Baird. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen! It's been our pleasure to serve you.