Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - GDC 2016 Super - Sized Special! - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 64

Episode Date: April 7, 2016

At GDC 2016 we had a chance to chat with Cliff Bleszinski, Mike Bithell, Nina Freeman, Steve Gaynor, and Donald Mustard! (Released to Patreon Supporters on 04.01.16) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, hello there, Greg. Oh, hey there. Welcome to the first ever episode, 64 of the kind of funny games cast. We're doing something a little bit differently. A little bit different one. I'll shake it up as the kids. We only have some of the coolest dudes in video games here.

Half of the coolest dudes in video games are here. But you'll be seeing them all together throughout the week. This episode's different because we did a bunch of interviews at GDC. Right. 2016. We interviewed a whole bunch of cool people and we're like, let's make this a games cast. An extra long games cast.

The biggest thing we took away from GDC 2015, which is kind of funny's first GDC, is that we did all this awesome content on Twitch live, and then it went into the ether, and not everybody saw these interviews. So this time around, we went in and approached the way we approached all the streams we did for kind of funny the animated series, where we did it

and we're alive the entire day, but broke the day up and these interviews packaged them as, what's up, everybody, welcome to YouTube.com. You know what I mean? Like, this is something that'll live in the annals of history. But it means five topics for you guys rather than your regular four. Yeah. Because you're getting five starting on Sunday today. But if they want

the whole episode early. Broken up day by day, but now it's Sunday through Thursday instead of Monday through Thursday over at YouTube.com slash kind of funny games. You know, got to get the rigmarol.

Right. Gotta get it out. If they want it early, they go to. They go to Patreon.com slash kind of funny games. There was some money our way and they can get stuff early

and that would be great. You're probably one of those people that did that. Is this one worth the dollar? Yeah, this one's totally worth it. This is definitely worth it. Five topics from the biggest names in video game development.

Yeah. It's worth the dollar, you punks. This one's going to be awesome. So we can start off with Greg. I figured we'd go big and start with what was the final interview of GDC, Cliff Plasinski from Boskey. Yeah, there you are part of that one. It was me and Colin talking to him.

And honestly, I think what you guys are about to see will change you. No jokes. One of the best interviews I've ever been a part of. Oh, sure. Clips is awesome. Very fascinating motherfucker. Yeah. He knows his shit and his ideas of where the industry's at and VR and all the stuff.

Enjoy. What's up guys? I'm Tim Getty's this is Colin Moriarty. And over there, the one and only, Cliff Blasinski. Yay. I'm gonna, since Greg's out here, I'm gonna have to do the Greg lean back. I'm kind of happy Greg's on here. He's just so fucking intense.

He's super. He's just like, he's just, I'm like, winning awards and shit. And I'm like, yeah, no. Cliffy, how's it going? It's going great, man. We had a panel today. How did it go? Well, we announced not to plug too much and too quickly that our new game Law Breakers is coming to Steam exclusively,

which is kind of a no-brainer when you really think about it. Like, we're going to put it on an origin, no offense. And then we also announced for Rockinidad to do free to play with the game. Really? So that's a huge change. We were initially thinking free to play and the more we dug in and the more we realized

we weren't thinking about how to make the best game possible. We're always just worried about how we're going to monetize this. How we're going to monetize this? I'm just like, dude, I want to make a great game that hopefully people want to throw some money at

and they enjoy, right? So I'm looking, there's got to be a gray area between, you know, free to play, sleasiness, and $60 disc based. Maybe there's an impulse, you know, initial gate in there

and maybe some interesting microtrans inside the game, but, you know, we're kind of rethinking and upending that whole model because I announced the same thing, studio. And first off, people are like, Nexon, really Nexon. And I'm like, well, you know, yeah, they make

cart rider, but, you know, they have some money and they want to make Western games. And that's what I do. I make shooty, shooty Western games. And, um, well, not like, wow, West, West, anyway. And so the, um, and then, uh, the other thing was free to play. And like, you lost me a free to play. And I'm like, well, league is free. Like, come on, man. Um, and so, you know, we want to have a halfway point with it.

Yeah, so, I mean, that's interesting. That's kind of an honest moment, like, right about, like, reflection to be like this, maybe you benefit more from selling It's kind of a meta statement on developing in 2016 and beyond where you kind of, I mean, I stopped lying when I hit like 25 because I realized like I couldn't keep up with what I told anybody. So I might as well just be myself and be fucking honest with everyone. And so it's the same thing with game development. It's like just be you. You know, be straight up, you know, be as honest as you can be with your community.

And they'll trust you back. And occasionally they'll still yell at you because they care. They'll call you horrible names on social media. But, you know, if they show up and they play the game, they're talking about it, that mean, you're doing something right. Absolutely. What's the, for people that aren't familiar with the lawbreakers, what kind of what's the elevator pitch for it? So it takes place in the near future where there's been a massive earthquake and, you know, the people have managed to rebuild, however, and gravity just gets funky. There's areas with no gravity.

There's areas with increased gravity, areas with, you know, inverted gravity, as well as humanity learning how to kind of harness these powers. So it's a character-based first-person shooter that's probably going to be like emrated. You know, right now the trend is for kind of these Overwatch and Battleboring games that are very colorful and they're cool. I'll play this shit out of them. Yeah. And so, you know, I'm not saying we're going to go full war as hell, kind of gears in. kill zone in era from 10 years ago, but there's got to be a halfway point where we're going to be the grown-up version of that. They're going to be like kind of the G-rated ones and we're

going to be like the R-rated one in that version. And basically, you know, all these questions that asked about the verbs you're doing the game as you're playing as these characters, you know, grappling hooks and jet packs and double jumps and side dodges and inverting gravity yourself and creating zero-g pockets and basically just what verbs can you do in the environment with game types that yield maximum drama to make just a fun team-based 5-5 first-person shooter. That's kind of the Super, super high level. Awesome. Of course, more to it.

There always is. And you said the game's coming exclusively to Steam. Yep. Your heritage obviously is on PC, but you've been more well known. My heritage is actually Polish. Literal, yes, your literal heritage.

Well, that's the thing is when I was doing, you know, so the PC was always in a state of flux. That's the beauty of the PC. Right. So back in the day, you know, we started on PC with Epic and whatnot and share where days, I'm old. And then, you know, you decided to do console stuff

for a while with gears. And then I decided to return to PC. And when Gears was out, Steam wasn't the juggernaut that it is. And PC games are making the transition from boxed to all digital, which was a bit of a bumpy one and piracy was relatively high. I saw the numbers. And so at that point, I was like,

yeah, I know there's too much piracy in the PC and which PC gamers get very defensive, rightfully, because everyone always attacks their platform, even though it's pretty much the shit. It's amazing. And it's all I play things on right now is my PC. And so and then deciding to do something on PC because Steam has how many people installed based now?

Like, you know, it's huge. And, you know, Valve, you know, we've been talking to Valve and, you know, Valve could use a shooter like this on their platform to kind of supplement the tremendous juggernauts that are, you know, Dota and, you know, CSGO and all that, right? So it's like, you know, if you can find somebody like a Valve that you can kind of get an agreement with, you know, and hopefully get all sorts of VIV dev kits to play with. Have you seen, have you been over there at all? You just, the guy's been nonstop over here. No, we have not been in the portal. So Jet from Valve is like this like Cyrus from the Warriors of VR. but like by this very soft way about him

and he's like this kind of like VR in a good way cult leader where like there's all these indie devs doing all these awesome things with the vibe and he's kind of like leading the charge and like you know Oculus and Palmer also and there's these like figureheads of this new world order of what VR could be and I just I personally love it I think it's great

they're all sharing dev secrets and how to do traversal in VR and how to deal with motion sickness or how can you move around and seated versus standing VR you know what are the best you know techniques and ways to solve these kinds of problems. It feels very communal in a good way. And that's what's cool about GDC. It's different than all the other

shows because that's what it's about. All I keep hearing from everybody is that all the VR shit specifically with the vibe, everyone's just like you got to try this Star Wars thing. You got to try this thing. It's going to blow your mind. And it's cool. Have you seen it any of it yet? Well, I mean, we went to the PlayStation VR.

The PlayStation VR solid too, man. They have a very good shot at doing well. It's one of those things like, you know, the biggest mistake that, you know, Chet and the crew made with the Vibe was assuming you needed an entire room for it, which you don't. You can just have it set up at your desk, just like Oculus. So that's one of the issues with it. The other main thing is like for Case and Point, you know, I was visiting. I have a friend who has both the Crescent Bay and the Vive setup.

And one of my wife's friends was free on a Saturday. And, you know, she's not into games or anything, right? She's not really into tech. She's just a friend of ours. And so we brought her in, sat her down on the floor and showed her Henry, which is the Oculus Story Studio kind of a movie. we're about the hedgehog where you're in the house and you don't even interact with them right but just the sheer delight in to look around and see henry's bed behind you where you can see his

quills sticking on he's just this little hedgehog who has no friends and he just wants a hug for his birthday and he makes a birthday wish and maybe something magical will happen right and you can tell this is done by like x-pixar dreamworks folks because the animation's just on point and then put her in lucky's tail which third person VR games work surprisingly well and like i felt like the first time i played mario 64 in lucky's tail and then you put her in tilt brush as well as job simulator and then just once that those goggles come off I mean I had there's this thing that I don't even know if they've termed it in VR it's like VR dissonance where you spend a little while in VR when you come back to the real world it's like you know coming coming

out of the Matrix you're like holy shit where was I it's really cool and what the other experience I got to do we posted on social my friend Tom Hamm over the create ad agency they made this VR experience to promote the Robert Zemeckis movie the walk about the which was based on man on wire which is based on that awesome French dude who fired an arrow with the cable and made it top between the World Trade Center towers and tight rope walk the damn things. Oh my God. And so basically what they do is they tape like a cord on the ground and you put the

vibe on and you know they have the headphones on and they have fans even blowing on you, right? It's like, okay. Oh no. Can you do it? That sounds horrifying. I made it three steps and I had to stop. And I know I've played with the vibe extensively.

I've done a ton of VR. But like when you're standing at the top of a hundred story building and the wind's blowing, you hear the cars all the way down below. It goes against every part of her lizard brain to put your fucking foot up. out there. That sounds awesome. I want to do that right now. It's really cool. And so my my wife of course is you know she's a little freaked out but she did that just great. You know brought a couple friends over and varying degrees of success with it. But it's like it's so convincing and you know there's still a little bit of that screen door effect.

It's not as high res as it can be. It's going to get better. Yeah. And better and better. And humanity is doomed. Did you make it across? Lauren. It's not called the run. And of course in the back of everyone's head is a, thinking about what happened back in the day with those buildings and everything. It's just this very surreal experience. And it was, it was moving and dark and scary.

And, you know, that's the thing is, you know, I was talking earlier about when I had a chance when Brendan and Reby came to Epic's office years ago with this device that was duct taped together and that Palmer made with with Carmack. And I'm like, okay, this is going to be big. I just felt something. Wait, so this just blew my mind for a second. So you're actually, you physically are walking? Yeah.

So since it's the vibe, it's room size VR. So you're actually, you know, they had the cord tape down. And so it's only about, you know, 10 to 15 feet, you know, but you walk, you know, you feel the cord beneath you. You look down. You see completely below you. You can actually tell, I shouldn't look down. That was my problem. And you walk to the other side and you turn around and you walk back.

And like, people can't do, they can't do it. You know, I mean, I'm not even that much of afraid of heights. I'm more like an arachnaphob guy. Yeah. But this just got me, man. Oh, can you imagine? Can you imagine what they're going to do with that? The biggest thing about VR

That's, you know, there's a lot of things I could go all day about VR But one of the things that'll screw VR first is bad and cheap VR Like people like, we got one too and then you know, if it's not VR's not perfect It'll just make you sick and like there's always gonna be a small percentage of people that it might hit you know Like there's people who get sick in cars all the time and things like that People get sick playing portal Yeah, exactly. So you know the inner ear and whatnot It's a very complicated thing and but it's all gotten good enough now that you're the majority of people can use it and you know

It's worth you know fucking up your hair and having a viewers for a couple hours because it's really that interesting. And the other thing is, like, dumb VR experiences. That's why Oculus has a store that's curated. So it's not just some vomit roller coaster, or it's not just some, like, big, dumb, cheap scare. Because, you know, when you're next to a big robot who looks at you in VR, you know, you feel it's right next to you.

You know, I did one of these multiplayer games with my wife. I can't remember what it was called on the Vive. We're, like, you know, we're back to back, and we're shooting robots together. And she's in the other room. But I turn around, I see her, like, her avatar, like, moving around behind me, shooting, and like, of course, you know, first thing we kind of do is trying to shoot each other in the head.

Yeah, of course. Marriage. And then, well, the other people I put in there, they try to try to grab the other person and just, like, make out their avatar, like, ah. Yeah, I'm more of that type of person. Yeah, make lover war. Depends on how it is. And so, but, like, feeling her, like, right there in my back, it was like, oh, I'm in

your bubble. I'm sorry. And it's just, it wasn't even a very well-rendered avatar. It was like some stock unity thing or something. But it was just there, or you're there. And that's the big thing about VR. There's going to be solter experiences. there's going to be the social experience

is what I think Zuckerberg believes in in regards to, you know, imagine, you know, I'm at my house in Raleigh and we're all sitting here talking and, you know, via the internet, you have an avatar and you have an avatar and all that. Like, it's, you know, if I can play ball with my niece who lives in Orange County and I live in Raleigh, you know, or if I can play hide and go seek with our niece

in New Orleans, you know, they're nowhere in Raleigh, like, virtually, I mean, it's going to be pretty magical, you know. How do you think this is all going to shake out with these kind of three major competitors? We were talking to Warren Lannning earlier. He's of the mind. And I brought it up specifically because at E3, he said PlayStation was going to do it.

And that was when I thought it was unintuitive to say, like, PlayStation's the one that's going to succeed. But with the price point, being more affordable, the device that you need, the PS4 being probably way more affordable than the rig you need to run. Ockels, how do you see it all shaking out? Well, the first thing people always ask me is 2016 going to be the year of VR. And I said it'll be the year your rich friend has VR. And it's also one of those situations. PlayStation has a great shot at it. I've used the system myself.

London Heist is awesome. They've got a lot of great experiences. It's really good stuff. It's a great gateway. Right, but very, very quickly, you know, the resolutions the next year or two are just going to get higher and higher res, the sensitivity of the calibration, the rendering of your avatars, you know, and it's one of those things. It's, I think it'll be a short-term winner, but I think long-term you look at Vive and Oculus, five, I think, is going to do very, very well. If they can shed their, you know, you need an entire room, you know, like, good luck for the person who spends $4,000 a month at San Francisco having a spare room for this, or at first even in, like, New York or Tokyo, right, versus Oculus, I think. awesome. If I was a betting man,

I think it'll go Sony short term, Oculus long term, and I've got some and HCC somewhere in the middle. More of a specialty thing. Yeah, well, I mean, it's one of those things like, you know, I'm a big fan of VR, as I said, I'll defend it to the nines, but if you're like, oh, you know, assuming

you have the room, if you assume, and this is a big assumption depending on, you know, person's socioeconomic status where they live, there's a lot of factors. There's significant other. What the fuck is this in my house? It's one of those things where like, we didn't have a TV room. many years ago. You know, even before,

even when radio really came about, you see those old black and white photos with people with that big ass radio listening to War of the Worlds. That was like the center of their living room. If it's as good as it can be, which I honestly believe it will be, people will find a way.

You know, if you're in a small apartment, the thing installed where the bed can go up in the wall, like, you know, in the classic movie where the person always winds up into the bed and, you know, or the old, like, loony tunes cartoons. And at the end of the day,

and this is going to sound really dumb and sad for humanity, porn. Oh yeah. I mean, it's so obvious to say that, but it's really like, really, like, this is what's going to drive this, but it's like there's a lot of lonely people out there,

you know, an entire generation who grew up online that may or not have to, like, socially interact as well as the earlier generation, that's just going to be like, this is all I need now. Vib's doing it already. That's the thing is I don't think, my gut is saying,

from what I know about Sony, I don't think Sony's device will have porn. Yeah. You know, and I, you know, Facebook's really careful about what you see on Facebook, Facebook's feed. However, you know, when it comes to the VR setup, people will find a way for that one. And I just think it's funny that people having sex right now with 360 cameras on their

foreheads. Yeah. I mean, it's, it makes me happy to know that somewhere out there. They're thinking of the little people, you know? I don't know. It's a buddy mine was telling me a story about he had a friend who had the Oculus DK2 setup. And he said his spouse came home and he had the headphones on and the headset and pants all the way down, just going to town. And I was like, if I was his his wife, I just would have taken my phone and just, Chh, holiday Christmas card, and then punched him

in the nuts. But, yeah, it's one of those things, though. The other thing I want to do is, you know, just play with, like, you know, take my friends with the gear VR and find some sort of VR porn. And, you know, for instance,

some of the guy friends that are heterosexual that I'm friends with, you know, take them and put it on where they're like, oh, I'm female. I have boobs. And what's, hey, who's, wait, what's he doing? Oh my God, right?

Like, because there's reaction videos and everything in between, right? Just to kind of mess with people. people's heads a little bit. And again, horror has to be subtle in VR. It has to be just very gentle. Like how you jump from that to horror. I didn't know if I stay in the porn thing too long, it gets weird, man. Then we're talking about, yeah, you know, all that. It's just, it is what it is. But that's the sad fact is porn drives technology for humanity half the time. So back to horror is a jump scares in VR. Terrible idea. You know, one of my friends made a little VR experience

a while back where you're in this creepy environment kind of hanging out and there's a wall full of creepy dolls you know like the old ones missing an eyeball and stuff like the little spider one from toy story right and um they're all just sitting there and you look away and you hear a sound behind you and there's nothing there you look at the wall and one of the very obvious dolls for those in the front is just gone and then you turn around at the end of the hallway the dolls are standing there just little things like that are so easy in VR to kind of make the back of your neck stand up as opposed to just you know boo giant you know monster from the ring pops in your face and then makes you tear the headset off and throw in the ground it's like they have a paranormal activity one that's supposed to be

pretty good. And I'm like, no, I'm good. Because there's apparently a story. Some woman was using it, and she literally tore the Vive headset off and threw it in the ground and smashed it and broke it. Oh, no. Yeah. So, anyway, short term, PC, Law Breakers. Long term, we'll see review our goes.

Yeah. Yeah, so I'm interested, one of the things we were talking about with Donald Mustard yesterday from Chair. I have Shannon Studsill this from Sony Santa Monica, too. And I just, I like, you have a great brain for the, for the industry. Like, you just, you see things and you have a good analytical mind for this stuff.

And I know this is kind of a random left term, but I'm curious about what you think about this. We were talking about pricing, and we were talking about how many games exist now. And I'm curious, do you, you know, having in general or VR in general? Just in general. Everyone's stack of shame. Yeah, but just even if you want PSN,

there's like 10 new games a week. And you never heard of anyone. As someone like with a mind for this kind of stuff, and someone who kind of experimented with the free to play and it kind of, you know, the idea of doing it anyway and then kind of going back to a pricing model, Do you think games are too cheap or too expensive? Do you think that we have a sweet spot with like a $60 retail game?

Well, I think it's a hugely complicated thing. You know, first off, there's there's too many damn games out there right now. When it comes to my personal taste, what I like is little VR experiences or little like personal games on Steam that are like, you know, 20 to $30 that are, you know, very experimental and cool. The whole $60 like disc-based thing, I'm kind of over it. Like all the games just feel like they're screaming, please don't trade me in. And as a developer who's who made a mantra for some of our games, keep the digital. disc and tray so they don't trade it in. I can see, oh, collect 100 of these things.

I'm like, this is just busy work. Like, you're just trying to keep me in your game instead of experiencing something else. In regards to pricing, digital will save us all. That's the funny thing about it all, you know? It's like, you know, you can have something that's 1499. That's kind of a bite-sized experience. Or you can have, you know, the witness, which is, you know, John, John Bull is like $39.99.

People are like, all right, makes millions. Like, good for him, right? So the thing is, you know, the free market can be a good thing and a bad thing. But in this instance, I think it's a good thing. But the big X factor in all of this is YouTubers and streamers, obviously set on stream. And the fact that, you know, there's this weird tail wagging the dog thing that's happening right now

where people are deliberately making the most absurd video games imaginable and putting it out there just to see if it'll go viral because the YouTubers and the Twitch streamers are trying to find wacky shit to play to have a funny reaction to so that the kids who barely even play games and just watch them online have something funny to watch. It's like this weird, like the putipiification of the world that's happened. And it's so funny, like, you know, when you look at, you know, these, these platforms, they're the new MTV that's crowdsourcing their celebrities by way of, you know, the fun things that they get to do with all these unique video games as well as, you know, cosplayers and that whole ecosystem.

So it used to just be make a great game, put it out there and have your publisher spend a bazillion dollars to market it at NCAA commercials. Now it's like 15 different factors coming together in order to hopefully make something that goes somewhat viral and actually like sell and make money instead of just getting lost in the ether of everything else that's out there. Yeah. Yeah, I'll pick Cliffey's brain all day. Can you tell espresso's kicking it? Vane's right here. What about you brought up because I agree with you 100% of way too many games? What, like, I'm surprised economic realities haven't stopped this from happening already, but why do you, like, why are, like, obviously there's a market imperative to make a game and make money.

It's not an altruistic thing, but like, do you ever think there'll be like a correction that it seems to have been a bleed over from maybe the app store? door and then maybe a little bit with Steamware. There's just a lot of shit. And I don't understand where this is all coming from and how people just continue to raise capital and make these games. I think you're going to see a bit of a bubble in the traditional disc-based AAA space

because people, you know, and you already saw this like Titanfall did pretty well, but it seemed to hit a bit of a brick wall in regards to longevity. Evolve did okay, right? And gamers, they can smell value. And when you put out a multiplayer-only experience for $60 day one with a fake campaign

that's just bots or something, gamers with DLC, and gamers are like, really? You know, I don't buy it. You know, like, in my opinion, you know, those games could have been free to play or some sort of mid-tier model. You know, a lot of the ones that I like to cite are the examples is like a counter-strike go.

You know, small price of admission, like a, you know, like a cover at a bar to keep the idiots out, and everyone who's there paid a little small chunk of money to be there, with an interesting key crate system for microtrans and wrapped around a super airtight, one of the greatest first-person shooters still today of all time. So that, you know, that's why Val's been steadily grooming that, and it's just keeps going, and it's still a great game. So in regards to your average disc-based game, though, you know, you've heard me rant about used games before. You know, when I was younger and a lot broker, you know, I would have bought the shit out of a 39-99 used game that used to be $60.

You're damn right, I would. I wouldn't care if the developers didn't make any money off that. But the ecosystem cannot sustain the feature set that gamers expect, the fidelity of the graphics, the amount of money, the marketing campaigns cost, and developers actually getting paid and keeping their doors open. There's a hole in the bucket, which is, of course, used in rentals. And that's, you know, I cite the game I worked on with people who can fly bullet store. that I was, you know, helping out with when I was at Epic, it was a great kind of, you know, in hindsight, everyone's like, man, that was a great shooter. I'm like, yeah, the problem was, was, A, I approved a shitty marketing campaign for it.

I thought it was just funny and it was stupid. And B, the fact that it was kind of a campaign rental, you know, it was like an eight-hour play through the campaign without co-op or anything, and you're like, it had a tacked on kind of light co-op multiplayer, but it wasn't very good. So it was just once you play through that thing, you're like, okay, well, I'm just going to trade this in for the next game. And the cycle continues. It's a revolving door.

And so in that space, you know, you know, Google Fiber is even, coming to Raleigh. Like, there's still plenty of parts of the world that don't have the internet, but so many of these games now are always online. Like, you know, can you even play Destiny without internet connection right now? I don't know. I know you can't play the division without it, without an internet connection. You know, and it's, you know, it's coming sooner or later, no matter how much people were kicking and screaming when, you know, Microsoft attempted to do, like, the digital sharing and all that stuff. And I want to say, I told you so. But, you know, I got a lot of heat back then when I wrote blogs about it, but, you know, it's all these,

you know, online games are, they're here now, you know, and like, Netflix, look how big fucking Netflix is, you know, and everyone watches Netflix, you know, and, you know, the world, you know, there's always places that lag behind with shitty internet connection, rural areas, people in the military don't have a good signal, that absolutely is a case. So, you know, there's a case for actually downloading and having the stuff on whatever device. But, you know, sooner or later, you know, most of the world's going to be connected. That's one of, you know, Facebook's hairy, hairbrain schemes is to have, like, balloons in areas that don't have internet, to bring internet there so Zuck can grow his user base for Facebook

and continue to take over the world, which is what he's doing. I think the problem is it's not there yet, even for the well-connected places. You know, like even here in San Francisco, like at my house, I have great, my mom's house. I mean, I have great internet. And then the house I'm living at now, not so great internet. And that's just because of where it is. Infrastructure.

And all the whole conversation about infrastructure in this country as well. I'm like, watch John Oliver if you want to see something interesting about that. But I mean, eventually it'll all just be wireless and just be super fast and we'll probably get brain tumors or something. It'll be worth it, though. For my, for my VR experiences from the, from the cloud. Yeah, I mean, we have, you know, I think we're on Time Warner Cable for our internet at the house and, like, with Google Fiber coming, suddenly

I'm getting these calls from like, hey, we've upped your your blah, blah, blah. I'm like, oh, really? Now, motherfucker. Oh, I see how it is. Uh-huh, because fibers come and I'm warning you, fibers coming. It's not the person's fault in the phone, but I can't help a little bit. It's like getting mad of your pharmacist. You're just like, these drugs are too expensive. I knew. And it's like,

the person's like, I didn't make set the price. Talk to your fucking pharmaceutical company and your health care provider. Jesus Christ. One of the last questions I want to ask because I'm always been intrigued even before I met you about this about you is that you are well known for being to some people brash or to some people just to me I've always thought

that you just tell the truth and I'm wondering like and I've had the pleasure to speak to you and know you in person over the last few years to know that you're not just saying the shit you say to say it like to be fair I can be an asshole on the internet I mean and when you have a culture that doesn't know where a person's coming from

they take something out of context it's really really easy to be like you said what I hate you without actually like reading what was actually said because clickbait culture and you know, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, I mean, I just, I speak what's on my mind. I don't like my fucking time wasted and life's too short, you know. And I mean, if, you know, I get by bus tomorrow, I think those who've known me in person find them an okay person, you know, and I have, you know, I have plenty of friends in the industry and whatnot. And, you know, I don't like kick cats in my spare time.

But, you know, I do talk a little bit of shit, but it comes from the heart. You know, I usually say what I think. And it's one thing to be on a side note, like, for a case and point on Twitter the other day, I got owned by a community manager from Ubisoft because I was complaining about Rianna's new song, work, work, work, whack, whack, and how I felt like there's this mumbleification of hip hop that's been happening lately. And I say this as a 41-year-old kid who's raised in the suburbs of Boston, but I've always loved, like, good rap and hip-hop. I just, I just fucking love it. And so I was like, wow, you know, rap's turning in a full mumble fest. I don't know what's going on out there. You know, I can't even understand a word in this thing.

And this guy's like, well, actually, it's, um, Rihanna's background mixed with this kind of cultural, uh, kind of way of speaking that the song's actually about this, that, and the other. And I'm like, I quoted it. I was like, well, shit, I look ignorant now and I apologize. Now I know. And it's like one of the biggest things is, you know, if you know something, be confident in the fact you know it. If you're fucking wrong, be willing to be like, oh, I'm sorry. You know, like, it's even in my relationship with my wife, it's like, um, did you leave the, you know, a little stupid, like, did you move my slippers? Uh, no.

Well, I can't find my fucking slippers. And then later on, oh, yeah, I left him in the bathroom. You know like it's important to be like a bit when you're fucking wrong that way when you're right people will know like that you're not invincible and you're fucking human being you know I just like to curse too like Jeff yeah no it's fun I also really enjoy the mumblefication that's like such a good just a good word Or the not you were right in that case I believe in it too I won't stand for no bullshit that trap queen shit needs to go dude give me a little dicky any day to the week Thank you. I'll think he's awesome. I asked that question or just bring that up only because I wonder if you know

is the like I I feel like the gaming industry is like so full of shit sometimes, like, or a lot of times. I feel like it's, like, it's just, it's like politics. And maybe it's like any industry, which is I've never been in any other. Well, I mean, the problem is it's like the stock market perception is reality in the world. Same thing with game design. If you're rendering engine is showing some sort of reflections in the wall and they think it's actually reflecting the water, then you have reflections even though it's a hacked texture.

So it's like, it's, you know, Randy Pitchford does this whole talk where he says video games are magic. Because Randy's a, he's a magician. He's on the board of the Magic Castle. And, you know, if I do this whole thing and reach behind your air, you know, and find a quarter and you think I actually found a quarter behind your ear, then you believe it. And so it's a misdirection. It's also, it's also the incredibly short-term memory of humanity in regards to, you know, if the internet comes down on you for some shit, just wait a week, you know, and it'll blow over and they'll be on to the next, you know, and so what you have is

instant gratification culture, uh, people that now have a platform and a voice, uh, things taken out of context, uh, as well as people looking for a reason to get upset about things. And so when you add in all that together, you get assholes like Trump, you know, because, He's willing to say what I'm thinking. I'm like, no, he's an asshole. You know, but like when you have this world of this clickbait culture and people who are, you know, like, you get this guy. So I'm not going to get in too much politics, but that's, I tweeted about that earlier, which is why I think you see this kind of thing. Well, Cliff, thank you very, very, very much.

This was a great, great interview. I'm excited about it. So Greg, yeah. We're coming up today on topic two of the kind of funny games cast. The supersized GDC special. Exactly. You guys are probably familiar with how this is going by now. Topic two is.

Mike Biffel. The one and only Mike Biffel, of course, made Thomas was alone, found an enormous success, put out volume. It came to some platform on the PlayStation 4 and stuff. Nobody cared about it. Then it came to Vita. Everyone went wild for it. And then to make it even crazier for Mike Biffel. He's taken to the next dimension. He is. Wow. Good one. He announced that, yeah, the PlayStation Vita version, Volume Coda is coming as well and is free add-on to regular volume. So we brought him in, of course, during GDC to talk to him about Volume Coda. And of course, volume, getting a little physical packaging. That's exciting. We had our best talk to him about it, Colin Moriarty and Nick Scarpino. What they have to see. So we had

our best talk to him and Nick. Yeah. How's GDC treat you? I held this hand wrong. Really good. It's a weird GDC. Usually a GDC I'm here like, you know, demoing, showing the games to press. Obviously, as volumes out,

we're not doing that this year. And the volume coda wasn't quite where I wanted it, frame rate-wise, specifically, because VR, obviously, you want that great frame rate. So we're holding back for now, but that will be at future events. So it's this weird situation where we're just, you know, we're in and out of meetings. This is literally the only, like, thing I'm doing that isn't a meeting or a party this whole week.

So it's really nice, actually, to not, like, be trying to convince a publisher that I'm good. We didn't tell you, but we actually brought a disco ball in. We're going to drink later. So this is actually a party. This is a party of three. Kevin's not invited. It's a party getting started. That's what it is.

Yeah, I know. It's cool. So, yeah, it's been. Um, so my voice obviously is like croaky because I went to, I tried, I, I did three parties last night, which was optimistic to say that least. I'm not really a party guy. So I was just like, uh, but it was, it was fun. And, uh, I got to see a load of, uh, a load of buddies. So it's nice.

Um, oh, sorry. No, no, please, please. I've already, I've asked all the questions so far. I was going to ask him about, about which parties he went to last night. Cause I did not go to any party. Last night, I fell asleep like an elder at eight o'clock. See, I've been doing that over and Nick fall asleep. I did that.

I've done that like two nights in a row and last night. I was like, no, I'm going to some damn parties. So last night was a humble bundle party, which was really cool, had loads of like indie games playable and stuff. So drinking and looking at stuff. Then the Sony party, which was awesome. They always throw really cool parties, which was where just kind of, I was just wandering around, meeting, basically seeing all the indies.

And then IGF finished. So all of the guys who'd won came along and we were all chatting. It was a lovely evening. And then I went to Epic. All of it sounds horrible. So, no, those were cool. And what I liked about the, so, so the Humble Pie was cool because it was quite quiet. And, like, it wasn't very loud music.

It was just people playing video games. It felt cool. Right. Sony one, there was like an outdoors area that was quite quiet, which suited me. You've just fine, kind of stood there with my Coke having a chat, Coca-Cola. Important distinction of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The problem is.

It's hilarious if you were just holding a mirror the entire time. There's no flat surfaces outside. I did work. Me, my Coke alone. And then I went to the epic party, which was just like loud and bright lights and just terrifying. That one was like, that was a big, I was like, I've not been clubbing since I was like 18. Like I did all that when I was very young and now I'm just too old for that stuff. No, I feel the same way.

No. All right. So we have, first of all, the big announcement in case you're just tuning in volume coming boxed, limited run. Yes, on the Vita. On the Vita. We're just doing the Vita version for now. We're going to see how that goes. and who knows, but, but yeah,

and that's will you'll get, so you actually do get, like, the little, the little disc for the Vita. It's a, it's a proper box release. Well, I'm glad you're able to enjoy yourself for GDC not having to show the game. Like, you know, like, it's nice. Like, you're not having the same conversation every 20 minutes.

That's the thing, right? Like, I get it, like, I'm, you know, press have the hardest time at these events because they are running from room to room. I get to, who am I to moan about seeing in a room showing off for, like, four days, right? But, like, the one thing that's hiring is, like, if you're showing a game,

you have, like, these are the things. I need to make sure I show. This is the stuff that, like, I have to get through, and you just have that same conversation over and over. It's very tiring. Whereas with this, like, we're having meetings with platform holders, publishers, other devs that we're helping, other devs that are helping us.

And it's just a really nice flow of different conversations and getting to see some cool, like, tech and secret things as well. So that's good. That's awesome. I noticed that, you know, because you don't have to show the game off, the young Japanese boy that was assisting you last year. So he's apparently. like something's going on with him. He's really busy. I guess there's like, I don't know. He got a job. I forget where

like this little Japanese company and he's doing this. It's like glasses or something. I don't know. Yeah, special glasses. The young Japanese boy working on special glasses. But yeah, I'll get him on another day. I'll get him on another day. And the other thing is I don't have any to demo. So what would he do? Right. He would just, he would just, he would just, he's not. He's not. He's not. He's not. He's not he's not. He's not. He's not he's not. He's not. He's not. He's not. He's not. For he's not he's not. For people I didn't see it. He just showed up. So he DMed me like that morning on Twitter, just saying, and had we met at that point? I feel like we'd had dinner like a while before. And he just had me going, hey, I saw your own kind of funny. And I'm not going on this morning. Do you want me to come and demo your game with you?

And it's just like, and we met like, met on a corner outside just before coming in. It's just like, that's Shire Yoshida. And then he just totally played along. I think I'd met him like in a big thing with lots of people. but like, you know, we got to hang out and stuff, and we've hung out since quite a few times. He's lovely. But, like, you know, he was just, uh, he was just great. And he totally, as we were walking in, like, I was like, it would be really funny if, like,

we pretended we didn't know who you were. He's like, that's really good. So we actually, I think we managed to last for, I think Greg messed it up if I remember right. Like, I feel like he just kind of was like, he just like, he said shoe by mistake, but we managed to keep this thing going for a while that none of us knew who this guy was. It's just never going to go. It's great. It's really fun.

Yeah, he was just playing the game. and wasn't there for any Sony related business at all and then just left. It was awesome. And also took $50 from you as well, I think. Which he then proceeded to go around the rest of GDC, like photographing himself, holding the $50 and tweeting at me. So it's cool. No, I love Shoe.

I've enjoyed many in the evening with Shoe since. He's a cool guy. And he's just, he has a sense of fun, which is great. And obviously he should, right? In the industry he works. But like, it's real. Like, it's real when he is, he loves what he. does. He loves the medium and I just, yeah, he's great. He's, uh, it's my kind of people.

So, uh, I'm kind of curious. I was wondering this with volume because volume, you, you tweeted out a while ago, um, that, you know, volume obviously exceeding the sales of Thomas was alone pretty significantly. Does volume, does a high tide raise all boat for you, or does a high tide raise all boats for your games in terms of like, has, have, have you look back at Thomas was alone sales to see that those have. Yeah. Yeah. It does. And it's incredibly cool. Like, it's, it's this thing that when, because, because it was a surprise to me. And then I've talked to like publishers about this and they're like yeah catalog that's how it works you know you bring out the new game the old game does better but it was a surprise to me and yeah no so thomas was alone

um and we're still finding weird opportunities to do cool stuff with thomas was alone we've done some some weird different bundles and sales and things recently just experimenting with it um but yeah people people people go back because we find people there's a lot of people um who like you know who have played volume who've never played thomas was alone so they finished that and hopefully they'll like I want to try something else by this guy and see what's gone before. So yeah, so it's Thomas Was Alone continues just to do really nicely. And that's, again, like, my job is to make video. My job is to make video games, and that's amazing.

And I still like, still like the idea that, like, I make stuff and people bother to play it. And then because they play it, I get to keep making more stuff is just mind-blown to me. So I'm incredibly grateful. Every copy of Thomas-Wis-Lone I sell, like literally lets me keep making games. And same with volume now. so it's really cool. Awesome. Now I know Coda is kind of like you're focused now.

But I did respect the jump from Thomas was alone to volume in terms of they're just totally different games. I mean it's totally different style. You made basically like a kind of a puzzler and then you made like a stealth like a Metal Gear Solid VR kind of game, which I think. And I think volume is fantastic. Thank you. It's great again on Vita. I waited for it on Vita. It's working really well with those short play sessions, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. And there's a nice little story in there and all, you know, like, there's a lot to find. But, like, where's your head at in terms of, like, once you're past all this and once VR, I know this is like in your focus until the end of the year, maybe beyond that. But do you have any ideas for like what's next? Is it a totally radically different idea again? I mean, the problem is we have too many ideas. I mean, that's the big challenge is that, you know, because of, because we've released two games now and they've been well received and that,

like, there's lots of opportunity for us to do sort of whatever we want next, which I'm finding incredibly difficult. like speaking completely candidly because it just opened so many doors and it's scary and weird because so I always have to explain this to people like Thomas was alone was like the reason it's rectangle was I literally was making it my evenings and weekends I had no time no resources no money I just had to like make something and then that came out and that did okay and you know Thomas took a while to kind of build and do stuff so volume was very much okay I have like a year salary in my bank account I can make something a bit bigger maybe but like I have to be you know oh you're you know, maybe stealth, but like more puzzly stealth.

I can get that done in the year. Obviously, it end up taking three years. But like, but like at every turn, it's always been that constraint and kind of thing. And now that we don't have the constraint, that's tough. So the honest answer is I have like four or five ideas and we're just trying, that's a big part of GDC, it's just talking about those ideas with people and seeing which things people react well to. I've had one person laugh in my face at one of the ideas. That might not be the next game.

plus it's a comedy game in which case oh there you go you crushed it so it's cool and we're just kind of so we're going through that process we're also in the process of kind of structuring everything better Alexander my new business partner is kind of really like

organizing everything and like building a business which was never something I did because I make video games and I just wasn't thinking in that way and I will now plug actually we're doing a podcast which we're focusing on that stuff because we notice there's a lot of games podcasts about game development but they're all kind of about the fun stuff and the kind of the game creation stuff.

So we have the Bithel Games podcast, uh, uh, which is like, it's all on iTunes and YouTube and stuff. And that is, that is really focused on like like literally we did with the most recent episode we did had uploaded was literally an hour interview with our lawyer.

Like basically just like talking about like fair use and what that is right. Right. And how legally that all works. Just the really kind of the nerdy business side of stuff. We talk about game dev and the fun stuff as well. But like it's been really fun kind of exploring that and talking about that. So we're trying to organize, be more professional, and then just work out which of those cool ideas to do. I assume you're attracting attention and maybe even before volume from publishers, right?

I mean, do you want to work with anyone, or do you kind of want to remain independent and kind of chart your own course? It's a tough one because, yeah, I mean, that's the thing is without trying to be, you know, too boastful. Like, we've shipped two solid games and that gets certain people's attentions and you start to be attractive to those people. So we're having the conversations and we're saying, I think for me it's like it has to be something that it has to be something that we would make on our own as well. Like I don't want it to be something that we feel like we're doing because we have to because I mean the players can tell. You know, I've worked on those kind of games in the past and players, not my independent ones, but like I've worked on those games. Players know. Players know like if you're faking it, right?

They know if you're not into the thing you're making. So I don't ever want to do that kind of project. But yeah, we're talking to everyone at the moment because there are these opportunities. but we'll see, ma'am. But it will always be something that I want to make. It will always be something that I would have made on my own anyway. It's just nice to have the help, you know? Yeah, I mean, is the perfect middle ground for you,

kind of the situation you have with Sony, where it was with volume, where it was like it's coming to PS4 and Vita first in the console space? And then, I mean, is that kind of like the perfect middle ground to give you, like, kind of a little bit of a voice and a little bit of a stage? And they helped us, you know, and Sony have been just the most, you know,

I know I'm wrong kind of funny, So this might sound empty, but it's true. Like Sony have been like just amazing partners and collaborators on the stuff that people see, you know, in terms of like, yes, got to go out on stage, which like for me is just mind blowing again. And like, you know, support with marketing and all that stuff. But then in private as well, like having, you know, chats showing them stuff, you know, working on them with with Coda, the VR expansion, like just like getting like the guys making PlayStation VR to play the game and find problems or find stuff. stuff that works. And we found these weird situations where, like, there's stuff that's in Coda, which is now being put into other VR games because it's a nice solution. And we're also fixing loads of things in Coda, which other developers have solved better. So it's like this whole

kind of collaborative and VR in general is super collaborative, but Sony have been awesome at kind of sharing that information around and making sure that all of us are producing really cool stuff. Can you tell us a little bit? Like, what is the nature of Coda going to be? I don't know how much you've talked about it, but I mean, can you tell us a little bit about it without obviously being able to show it? Yeah, so we're not showing it. I don't want to like over overstate it. So it's the best game ever. No. It's like, you plant, you plant an acorn and it grows into a tree in VR. No, it's so it's still top down. It's still, it's still, you're viewing kind of an isometric space. So if you've played volume, you know it's kind of that,

like you say, like Melga's solid VR kind of top down camera. But it takes place in this kind of cool VR environment, you're sat with a controller or stood with a controller and it's a hologram in in front of you of the level. You can make the level bigger, in times like in the real world, you can make it bigger, smaller, rotate it so it's comfortable. And you can, and to be honest, like, just for fun, right? So, like, you can be playing it on like a, and it's like the size of like a, like a travel chest kind of thing. And that's kind of cool, like really close to your face. Or you can like scale up to like GI Joe's kind of walking around and you can poke your head into it and kind of look around. It's a really, it's a really what it's, you know, it's, you know,

It's taking that... Sounds twisted. It is weird and cool, and it's a fun toy. I remember when we were talking, like, very early on, like, just kind of working out the high-level design of it. We were, like, I always used the reference of, like, I want people to be able to, like, play with the window of a car. Like, you know, when you're a kid,

you're, like, just fiddling with the window and, like, making it go up and down. Exactly. Yeah. And I'm like, when I get VR for the first time, I want games that let me kind of fiddle and just, like, do things and be silly. with it and come up, you know, work out ways of, uh, of playing the game their way.

And this was the kind of solution of like, let them like, because we had like versions where like it auto did its thing and it was all dynamic and blah, blah. It's like, no, people want to fiddle with the windows. They want to kind of mess around with stuff. Um, so this feels like a good way of taking the volume gameplay we have and kind of putting into a VR context and then doing like, you know, new VO. It continues the story with some new characters. It's cool.

So it's safe to, I mean, you're kind of experimenting with VR. I think as everyone is. I don't know. No one knows what it's going to, what the future is going to hold. But my assumption is that you're kind of a believer in the potential of it. Because I talked to a lot of developers that, you know, that actually shocked me. We had Steve Gainer on the kind of funny games cast. Or maybe it was the game over a show.

I don't know which one. Gamescast. And by the way, he is like, he is looking great. I was chatting to him last night. Like, he is like, he's grued. Oh, yeah. He's very handsome. Very handsome.

He's looking great. You're great, Steve. You look great. And I was shocked. Like, he was the one where I was like, I know he's going to be a believer in VR. but he was actually like, I don't really care. And I was like, because his games are like, I was like, oh, Tacoma in VR. It'd be awesome.

Not that it's coming to Xbox one first, but assume it would come to other things eventually. So what are you finding with your dev friends? Like, are you finding like a lot of support or kind of a lot of skepticism? I think it's like, well, I think it's like anything. It's like, and it's like anything like down the pub with your mates, right? Like there's people who think like, this is awful. It's rubbish. It doesn't count.

Like other people who like, this is the future of everything. And I think I fall kind of in the middle personally. But I think there's a lot of support. out there. There's a lot of people, I mean, there's a lot of people who see as a really cool toy to play with and something interesting to me. I'm a believer in that I think it's, I think it's badass. I think you put it on and it just feels great and it's fresh and its own thing. But, you know, I also, like, we've not sold one yet. So, like, there's a lot of unknowns on a business level. So I always have to kind of balance those two parts of my brain. But, like, no, for me, I think VR's magical. I have all the headsets and stuff and I play with them way too much. And it's just, it's, it's super cool. It's, it's something that, the, the biggest challenge I think it has is explaining that coolness, because I think if you look at a trailer, you're like, okay, I get it's a first person game. Okay, I've played those.

I get this. I get the, but the, but, but like conveying to people, like, these are going to have to be in, like, shopping malls and you're going to have to play them around your friends' houses and, like, those first VR experiences, like, no one's played one. So it's, uh, that's going to be a tricky problem, but no, I, I would love to make games in VR forever and ever, but we'll see how that works. And also, it's worth saying that there are games that don't suit VR. There are, there are experiences that I want to make that, you know, some of the stuff we're talking about where it's like, okay, that I can see in VR, but that would be awful.

That would be, people would die. How about you guys? Like, where are you both at? I'm a, I'm a firm believer in it. I think it, I've said it many times, so I'm sorry for our audience, but I feel like it's, it's, it's religious, you know, my head. Greg's not, right? Greg, it's more on the fence. Yeah, Greg, Greg likes it, but he's more on the fence and, I don't know how you feel, but I'm a lead adopted to everything. So I mean, I just am. I, you know, for me, I'm, I'm the most casual gamer in all of our group, obviously, by far, by a huge margin. So for me to actually rectify putting that on at night would just be, it's just too far of a stretch for me.

It's like everything else that really just depends on what the experience can be. What's the game that's going to sell it for me? What's going to be that addictive thing that I have to have? But I mean, it has the capacity to be as impactful to the, to the industry as like, say, a dual anal-analytic control, right? Like, it really does if the experience is there. I think the price is going to really help with that. Like, it is a, it's placed at that console level. Yeah.

Especially for early adopters. Like, if you're, if you're someone who, like me, went out and bought PS4 on launch day, then you might be ready for, like, another big hardware investment. And I think it kind of, that scale makes sense. I think the price for me, like that's, I think that's the perfect price for it from a like, obviously free would be amazing, but like in terms of reality, like I think it's definitely, it suits what the, what the device is. And it's, yeah, they've, I think they've said it's profitable, right? Like it's, yeah, which I didn't know until yesterday that they said that, yeah, which is amazing.

That unit price will be profitable for them. That's what they said. Wow. Which is amazing. That's what you want. Yeah, we're, we're wrapping it up. We're wrapping it up. Kevin, we got you.

All right. So let's wrap, let's wrap things up by saying, all right, Thomas was the loan is on everything. You can buy that on pretty much every console and PC. Too many, if anything. Volumes on PS4 PC and Vita, right? That's correct. Are you having any Xbox One plans? I guess that will come.

We'll talk about that later. We'll see. Yeah. And then CODA will be... Code is coming up. And that's PSVR only, or is that Oculus as well? That's PSVR only. And then we have our podcast, which I already mentioned.

We have the limited run games. You should go to the website and get on the mailing list. You can buy volume on Vita when it comes out. I don't think we have a specific day, It'll be in the next couple of months. We just need to work out the exact date, but I won't mention it here because I thought you guys might like it. Absolutely. And then, and yeah, just following me on Twitter at Mike Bithel.

And I will promise I'm reasonably interesting on there, I think. I'm okay. Oh, no, you're great. I'm okay. You're a quality Twitter user. Fascinating. No, it's what you said that is. It's really fascinating.

It is intriguing the stuff you come out with Mike. You can tell the level of your humor when you play a volume. And you've got that really kind of twisted, dry. sense of humor, which I like a lot, which is good. I think that's probably the English thing, right? I think 90% English, the accent, actually. Truth be told, the rest of it is. If you had an American accent, you'd be boring as shit.

That's fair. That's fair. That's fair. Mike Bithel, thank you for joining us. You're welcome with us anytime. You know that. All right. Let's see. Greg will be on next, I think, with Tim, with Nina Freeman. So we should skedaddle. Gamescast, episode 64, topic three.

We're starting it right now. Who is it, Greg? Nina Freeman. She, of course, works right now. works right now at Fulbright. She's working on Tacoma. I make fun of Tacoma and Steve Ginner a lot during this interview. But we're also talking a little bit about Sybel or Sybil, if you want to pronounce it correctly, which I never do because I played the game, loved the game. And I call it Sybell. And if Nina wanted to pronounce the correct way, she probably should have just written it a normal way.

More importantly, I'm spoiling what you're about to see. But there's a moment in this where I am mind blown that she is the one that created, how do you do it? Yeah. The hit sensation that there's a let's play of over at YouTube.com slash kind of funny games where me and Nick figure out, how do you do it? Nina's a very special game developer and I was excited to talk to her. Hey, everybody. It's me, Greg. This is Tim and this is Nina.

How about her game? Now, here's the thing out there you're in this, we're live, obviously. The camera never cuts. We're going to break these up as little conversations and whatnot. So I'm going to do a full blown intro here. Totally. Sybil. Right? Yes. I was calling it Cybell forever. Everyone pronounces it in different ways and I'm like,

like, wow, I'm a bad game developer for naming my game something like so weird to spell and say. Sybil is because the pizza place. Yes, exactly. That is exactly why I do it. Which is classic and really good. You might want to reconsider making it Saibol because people like Cybil. Yeah. Yeah, if you could get a Sybil pizza sponsorship, that would be really good.

That I would take. What's up everybody? It's me, Greg. This is Tim and this is Nina Freeman. Nina, you made a game that reached out and touched my heart this year. I want you to know that. It's called Sybil, not Seibel, not to be cute. Either any way you spell it, you're going to find the game and get it.

And it's spelled C-I-B-E-L-E. I've learned to say that in everything. Because no one, everyone's like, I can't find it on Google. And I'm like, you're spelling you're wrong. Yeah, we went in the hard way too where it's like, oh, you're kind of funny. It's like, no, kind-da. Yeah. Spell it this way.

But it's still a good name. It's good name. Now, the fun thing is, I feel like we have a connection because I've played this deeply personal game. And we've tweeted a few times about it. Yeah. And then you know this hack I know named Steve Gainer who doesn't put platinum trophies in his games. But we've never actually met.

So this is an interview where we're getting to know each other. Tim, of course, hasn't played this game. I brought Tim along because this is a game Tim should play. And I want him to know more about it. What's more important than that is your Twitter. Yes. I did not know that your Twitter was a hentai PhD. That is my Twitter.

I like that a lot. I don't have a PhD in hentai for the record. So you're a liar. I'm a liar. I'm masters. Not a hentai, though. I just thought it was funny. And even when I started being like a real professional person,

I was like, I can't change it. Like, people are just going to have to accept me for who I am. I appreciate that a lot. As someone who didn't know anything about you and then found you through, I think, probably Steve retweeting you and doing some stuff and then played the game and then started following. I think it all fits pretty well with who Nina Freeman is. You got the hair.

You got the hentai PhD. You got this game. You take sleeping bags and make them into dresses sometimes. Yes. I love to do that. I like you. You're my type of person. I know.

I know. I'm a big fan of sleeping bags. Just in general. Like the children sleeping bags With like, you know, bell on them and stuff like that. Is there any other type of sleeping bag? That's the only one that you want to get. My sleeping bag has bell on it too.

Have you done a real Ghostbusters one yet? Because I'll send you a real Ghostbusters one if you'll do it. All right, I'll do it. Let's talk about Seibel though. Sibyl. Also, I made it with Star Made games. Shout out to the team. And that's the whole thing.

So let's dial me back to the beginning of like, how did this game come to be? Sure. So I guess for people who haven't played it want to know what it is. It's a game about two young people who met in an online game, kind of like a World of Warcraft or something, and they have this relationship, and it's about

how they decide to meet up to have sex in real life. Told you like this game. I really like this game. And you play from Nina's perspective, the character who is based on me, thus the name. But yeah, so it started as actually,

I made the prototype in a prototyping class at NYU when I was a grad student, so it was originally a student game, which is kind of cool. Yeah. And then I made part of it for my master's thesis and then continued to work on it after school. I'm a level designer at Fulbright right now in Tacoma. And when I started working there, I was kind of finishing it up. Sure.

And that's why Tacoma's delayed. It's because you had to put out your own game. Actually, I don't know. I managed to finish it and do a lot of work on Tacoma all at once. I just worked all the time. I went a little crazy there. But it was good. And I had a lot of support from them, which was really nice.

And yeah, we made it all on weekends and at night. So that was about a year and a half of work. So, yeah, when did you graduate school? And when you graduated at NYU, did you immediately move out to work at Fulbright? Yep. Yeah, I literally defended my thesis and like a week later was on a plane headed to Portland. Wow. It's crazy.

So when you say the character's based on you, personality-wise and stuff, but is it the look? Does it also look like you? Yeah. Actually, in the game, there's each act, the three acts, three conversations between the two of them that sort of contextualize why and how they meet later in the game. And each of them is bookended by short films to sort of remind the player that, hey, this is a game about this character. You play most of it in first person,

but it brings you out of the game to show you her and I play her. So that's kind of like weird that I'm like talking about it is my game, but I treat her more like a character. But she's based on me and I play her as well. And that's, it's hard to wrap your head around this one. And I didn't want to show it because it wouldn't show well or whatever. But it's almost, you can correct me if I'm on, but give me a second before you immediately slash me on. Think of it, bless you, in a similar way to her story, except we're not getting the reflection of us in the monitor.

Like we're at the computer, we turn on the computer and then we, our mouse is her mouse. And so we get to open up stuff on our desktop and see what's happening in our life that way, like photos, this, that, and the other. And then double click on the game to go into the game and then play the game and click around. And you're playing the game inside of her game, like the game, like the game, you know, you're. Nina in real life made, but you're playing as Nina in the game while you play that. And then the conversations are happening over like a voiceover IP deal.

So even though we're playing, we're hearing the things we, the character are saying, without making any choices ourselves. And so then this relationship starts to develop. So it's kind of like Emily is away that we play it. Sure, except yeah, yeah, exactly. It's talking. Exactly, exactly. And there's no choice at all. But I mean, so like the story's just playing

out as we go and do all this stuff. And it's this weird thing where like at the end when I was like, and he broke our, well, in the spoilers, but, you know, like, how do you think this is going to end? You know, having these conversations with you about the character you play in the game, about the game you made, but then also it's from your life as well, right? So, that's what's mind-boggling about the whole thing, and not to mention in this day and age and the internet and everything else and how toxic the climate can be to go tell a story this personal rip from your real life, but put into, like, at any point did you think,

maybe I shouldn't do this? No, so like my background, I started out in poetry, actually. When I was in undergrad, I worked in the New York poetry scene for a little while, I was an intern at the poetry project and all that stuff. And in poetry, it's like pretty common practice for people to draw in their personal lives. And that is actually what my mentor back then, Charles North, sort of urged me to do and taught me in that way. So for me, it's been pretty natural to take that kind of stuff into games because it's sort of how I learned to write. So, I mean, I guess also practice makes perfect.

like almost all the things I've worked on prior to Sibble have been drawn from my own life. So I've kind of gotten used to that feeling of putting myself out there. But it was definitely fun like going back through my old live journals and old photos and stuff to like draw from them to put them in the game. Because a lot of that stuff is really like taken from actual source material that I like did make when I was like a teen. Jeez Louise. This is great. So then the question I mean becomes like. So let's say with the personal part of it first, I guess.

How do you then deal with people reacting? Because I have to imagine, as with anything on the internet, people are then criticizing the choices in the game. But then in a way they're criticizing you because you really made those choices or some version of them. Yeah. So the way I think about it with this personal stuff is like I really treat it like a story. Like it is saying like a lot. Sorry. It is based on my own life.

But I kind of treat my own memories as like source material that's like separate from me. It's sort of this like mental exercise that I have to do. Because I don't want these games to be like my diary. I'm more interested in the craft of it in storytelling. So, you know, I might not do personal games forever. I just really like the storytelling aspect of it. And I love telling ordinary human stories, and I have to be an ordinary person.

So my life is like a good source to draw on for that kind of story material. So when people criticize like the character or whatever, that's just normal. Like I take it like any game developer would, you know, just like listen to what people say and take that as feedback, hopefully do better next time. And I don't try not to take too personally. Gotcha.

And then what about, so you put this out there and not open an old wound, but I mean, you're talking about this personal thing. Has there been any reaction from the guy? We actually did chat about it. No shit, really? Yeah, yeah. We hadn't talked in like years. Oh, no.

Tell me all about it. It's weird because I feel like it's gossipy, but it's like I lived this and I want to know what this motherfucker's saying. What's the bad in story here? We all love gossip. So I'm glad. that my game can promote that in a way. Yes.

This is your director's cut can be the epilogue. Yeah. Yeah, we chatted. It was cool. I didn't know if I could get in touch with them at first because I kind of wanted to be like, hey, is this cool with you? But also, no one really knows.

You know, I didn't put any real names in the game other than my own. Sure. And that's a practice. You know, I've had to get good at that making all these personal games. I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable, you know. But I still, you know,

I have the right to tell my stories. So I go ahead and do it anyways. But I got to chat with him and be like, hey, are you chill with this? Like, how you do it? And he was like totally okay with it. So that was a very nice interaction to have. And it's surprising that a game can bring that out, I guess. It does so often, though.

I think that's the thing is like we all know people that have some story that at some point relates to. We met over a game or whatever. Have you ever done that? Met people through a game? Yeah. I have friends like that. Not real life friends because they live far away. but I've met them at events and stuff since then.

Okay, I mean, that's enough. Real life and video games was the difference. Sure. No, I'm with you. I'm with you. I'm just saying like, you know, her story's a lot different than my stories. Okay.

That's all I'm saying. I don't know her story yet. I'll have to play this because this sounds cool. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent work. Thank you. Now, how many, so it's you, obviously.

Did you do everything? Like what? How does this work for you? So I, I am the designer and writer and sort of project manager and lead. I made the original project manager. and basically just asked a bunch of my friends to work on it with me because that's my style. I just like working with friends on these sort of personal side projects. So Emmett Butler, Rebecca Dunlap, Deke-Coss, same at the Corey, a bunch of my friends came together.

They did, Emma did programming, Rebecca did art, Decky did music, and I sort of was managing all of this and doing all the writing and sort of like putting things into the game and deciding how it would flow. So managing all of that sort of in a creative lead capacity. Gotcha. And so then, like, you, you put this game out. You hit your date. Is it just soul-crusting to go into Fulbright and just like, the dates keep moving and there's no trophies in any of the game and your boss is an idiot and doesn't know.

Steve, oh, hey. Steve, how you're getting a old? Oh, wow. Hey, how, how are you doing? Oh, hello there. Hey, I'll want. She loves working for us. Yeah.

It's true. Thank you. Hi, Steve. You're ruining my life, Steve. You're ruining my life. So when you're working on this game and deeply personal, it's something I feel is really different, you know,

in terms of games that I get to play and go on and do, actually sit down and play something. We talk about all the time. Like, who's doing new stuff? This is new. You know what I mean? In terms of storytelling.

Thanks. Did you expect it to hit? I mean, you just won an award last night. Did you expect it to do what it's doing? Or did you just think this is something you're going to put out and then it'll be the end of it. Yeah. I didn't expect the award.

That's for sure. sure that was a big honor um yeah i don't know it's interesting because it really did just start in school like i actually have only been making games for three or four years now um i'm relatively fresh so you're a wonder kinned i'm a little kid in terms of game developer experience years um so it's been cool to like do well and have people be excited about ordinary human stories and video games. I know that more and more of that is happening these days and it feels really cool to be part of games and to be making that kind of stuff when other developers are getting really into it too. It feels like there's a wave of that kind of thing right now. And I feel

good about contributing to that because it's really important to me. And I just feel so great that Sibyl can sort of like be leading the way with these kinds of games and being a part of that movement. And it's hugely inspired by Gone Home, which obviously Steve and the rest of Pulprivile. Yeah. What's that game? That was like the one of the main inspirations for the game. So, you know, I'm kind of trying to follow in their footsteps. So then how does that work where you get to go work for them then? Yeah, it's actually, I don't know, it was like kind of my dream job.

And I just met Steve and Carla at GDC like a couple years ago. Met him at a party. We kept in touch. And actually, Steve and the rest of the team at Fulbright, but particularly Steve, I've been going back and forth with for a really long time before. I even knew I was going to work with them about Sibyl. You met him playing a game. and the game is bad.

Yeah. Well, actually, I met him because he came up and played the game I worked on how do you do it about the doll. You did that? Yeah. You did how do you do it? Oh, my God. Go check out the let's play at YouTube.com slash kind of funny games where me and Nick

loved that game. Oh, thank you so much. Oh, yeah, we had a lot of fun with that. Thank you. You're my type of person. This is, this is good. You're my type of person. I like that you like these games.

That's awesome. Very cool. Thank you. Yeah. So Steve liked that game. And then I was like, will you try my game, Sybil and give me feedback. I loved your work. And so we sort of have had that relationship ever since.

So it's cool. It's cool to work with them now. It's like really a huge honor and amazing. So I hate doing this. And it's a hackneyed question. But stick with me because I want to drive to the point. Let's do it. Is it getting better?

You're a female game dev. We always talk about that there's not enough of that. Is it getting more inclusive? Why are you? How are you able to do it when it seems like it's such a hard thing to do? Yeah. it's definitely getting better. I mean, a lot of people are talking about it now

and thinking about it and actively doing things to change that. I mean, I feel really happy to be at Fulbright because the company is like, I think half or more than half women at this point, which is amazing. You don't see that every day, obviously. And for me, what I've been learning lately is that, you know, obviously there's a lot of, in culture in general, there's systemic sexism in a lot of ways,

and that's just the reality of our lives. So like how can I do my work and just sort of like live with that and help change it? And I have been trying to help mentor young women getting into games and doing that sort of one-on-one thing. That's been good for me. And also I've learned that it's really hard because, yeah, this question comes up a lot. But for me, like I hate asking you, but I feel like it's neat. How do you solve the problem without addressing the issue? And for me personally, what I've learned is that, you know, to answer that question, I just mentor and try and help other women get into it so that we don't have to keep

asking that question every year. And also, I want to be known as a designer and not like a woman in games. You know, I want to be known for my work as a game developer. So I think it's important. I always am trying to like change the conversation around my games and trying to direct it into more about the craft rather than, oh, like, cool, a woman made a game. Like, I always want to be like, there's more to it than that. 100%.

I understand that. And I just think that working to change that conversation is really important in addition to mentoring and just being really open to new voices. And one of the things I like about you is that you're, is that you, I guess the way I, we always talk about it right, that the best part about being kind of funny now and being independent is that if somebody pops up in the chat and they're a dick, we say, get out. We don't want you. We don't want you to be a subscriber. If you don't, if you're not chilling, whatever, then fuck off. You know what I mean. And so what I like about that is in that same vein of just like, this is who we are unapologetically. I feel that's who you are too. Like I was talking about it earlier with, you know, you're coming at this personal story in a time where people are very mean. at times. You know what I mean? Granted, it's a very vocal minority.

I know that, but they can be, but you're in there. There's this game about sex. There's this game about you. You're putting your, these live action cutscenes or whatever are in some various states of undress and there's photos and there's all these different things that like could easily be used as

ammunition against you, but you're like, well, if you want to, there it is. But that's not what this is about. And so by acknowledging that and putting that out there and saying, this is who I am,

you make yourself invulnerable to it. And in the same way I saw you tweet recently, probably within the last month or something. about the fact that you were sick at conventions of people coming up and be like, oh, did you do the art for this game? Yeah. And you're like, no, motherfucker, I made this game. Yeah, I know.

I do always feel really good coming back at people like that and being like, I was the lead. I also wrote a ton of code in this game. So I did a little bit of everything. And I feel really good about that. Good. Yeah, and that's what it should be. And that's why I'm excited that it's not like that. Kevin says there's 10 minutes left.

Cool. What do you want to do with your final 10 minutes? I think, you know, on that topic, I'm happy to have made a game. game that is sort of very feminine and very pink and all that stuff because I don't think we see many games like that. I think of actually like Splatoon was a huge inspiration for me when that came out. I was like, not for Sybil directly, but just as a game developer. I was like, whoa, like, look at this color palette. Like this is just a different look for games. And I just saw it appealing to so many different kinds of people and a lot of people that don't normally play lots of games.

And I just feel like, you know, introducing more feminine games or games like Splatoon that just have fashion and stuff like that, I think that's really amazing and I'm glad to see a company as big as Nintendo doing something as progressive as that. I've been impressed by Splatoon and that kind of stuff. I like seeing those different kinds of games, not only from indies, but from like big developers as well. And that's what's exciting. We talk about it in waves and the fact of like, you know, right, this last year, right, it was, oh my God, there's all these open world games, right? Which are a knee jerk reaction to three years ago, this open world game hit. And so here, all these other ones. And so now, like, I always talk about it, you know, is our walking simulator is games.

I fucking hate that question too or whatever. They're games. I agree. But I love that genre and I love the fact that now, you know, you've seen it now with Gone Home, you've seen it with Firewatch, which everybody had something to say about. And then even with Tacoma, like, that will continue to go and you will see other, not only developers try to tell a story that way, but I mean other big developers, not other, just other Indies. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I like seeing how like Indies can do something like a gone home and you can see that sort of like trickling through the industry and other people trying to do stuff inspired by that. And it's cool how we can all like be in conversation with each other as game developers. I like that about making games. It's good. I think it's, you know, game development and we always talk about the spectrum of AAA now and indie. Triple A with how much money gets involved, they can't afford not to have a success. Right. Whereas Indies can't come out and like it's like kind of funny. Right. Where we put up a video and it gets 30,000 to 50,000 of years. We're like, yeah, that's awesome. Because it doesn't, like, that's a fine number for us, whereas a big site or a big YouTube

corporation, whatever, that'd be a huge issue for. Indies can take the chances, find out what the audience is willing to do, and then you can see that reflected somewhere else. Yeah. And that is what exciting. Like, I'll never forget coming home and playing Sybil. Yes. And sitting there and I was a little drunk and I was like, I had heard good things.

And Steve had sold me on it. And I sat down and played it all in one sitting at like two in the morning. And it was like, this is great because this is something different. It's what Colin's always talking about when he's talking about PlayStation VR or the fact that everything's on PlayStation 4 right now could be on PS3. It's not like we have this. I want different experiences and I want to see different voices like that.

Yeah. Also, a recommendation for playing Sybil light a candle and pour yourself a glass of wine. That is basically how I made it. I always had those two things. For the full experience. Yeah. That's awesome. You just reminded me of that. I'm glad you played it while you had to have a drink. It's creepier, though, that I lit a candle.

I mean, candles are great. It makes them smell good, so then you're in a good mood. and that makes a better experience. It was that weekend where we went and bought all those candles. Remember that? Kevin and I bought a bunch of candles. I do remember that. Yeah, we went to Sir Latob and then we went to IKEA and they had a great sale on candles.

Yeah, I'm not a big candle guy. How can you not like candles? I think I'm just doing it wrong. I don't know. I can get down on some wine though. Wine I get. I mean, you need more than one candle, you know? Like one candle is like lame.

So you need candles. Yeah, candles. Yeah, plural. That's what I'm doing wrong. I've only been lining one candle. So maybe if I get a couple candles, we'll see. You get them all mixed around. Yeah, you're doing pretty good.

Okay. Okay. I'll try that. Okay, good. Red or white for the line? Red. Yeah. Nobody wants white.

Yeah, it's a little weird, unless it's a hot day. Yeah. Because white's colder. Yeah, it should be chilled. It should be chilled. It's a day drinking thing. I think white wine is. Sure.

Is your game a day game or a night game? A night game. I mean, it's all like about sex and a lot of it, it takes place in dark rooms. So it feels like maybe not totally night, but like with some dim lights. Yeah, let's not limit ourselves. Yeah. I don't want to live myself to only night sex. Like, it's actually available at any time.

I was wondering why you're in the bathroom salon. No, that's the thing about the game is that it's weird because you think about games and setting a scene and doing all these different things. And you think about, okay, well, the last of us and beautiful vistas and this, that and the other. Whereas your game is staring at a computer monitor. But being there, I wanted to play it in the dark, dimly lit because, like, I'm envisioning how, and the characters are in college for part of it. The whole thing or just part of it? It's been a while.

The whole thing, yeah. Great. But I remember when I would play games in college, right? And I was hunched over my little desk sitting there do it and talk about other people. And it is supposed to be like you're sitting there embodying Nina as you're playing it. So you're like her sitting in the chair at your computer clicking around. It's kind of like the game tries to connect your hands to her hands basically. Which is, it's funny.

Like her story also does that. Like a lot of these desks, the people are calling them desktop simulators. Oh my God. Is that a thing now too? I think that's a thing now. And I actually kind of love it. I like that. I mean, nobody is a way.

Sure, but you understand, don't, don't take the, it's okay if we grab it and we adopt it. Yeah. But people use walking simulators say it's not a game. That's true. Just throwing it out there. I'm taking it back. Walking simulators are awesome. Yeah.

Desktop simulators? Awesome. Any simulator. We're always talking about the kind of funny game, but that could be it. Yeah. It's just a desktop simulator where you go to an Excel, you go to an Excel grid and you fill in metadata. Oh, no.

And then you make the, you make Photoshop thumbs and we like, you got a percentage on how great it is. Up the vibrancy on all. all the thumbnails. Yep. I'd play that. Maximum points. Okay.

You go to Google the search, whatever it's about it. If it's about, we're doing a video about Oreos, you put in Oreos and then hits, and then you only get 50% of the points. But if you put in sexy Oreos, as Tim would hit search,

you get all the points. It works. I like this. Anyway, we're taking it back. Do you want to make this? Do you want this to be your next game? You want to make the kind of funny?

Yeah, let's do it. It's not worth it. Trust me. So that is a good jumping off point. So Sybil's out. Sibble is out. You can get it now. It's been out forever. How long has it been out?

I ran into it, you know, a few months ago. It came out like in February. I can't even remember anymore. It's all a blur. But yeah, a couple months ago. You're hard at work on Tacoma with the Steve Gainer guy. And I'm sure he's not just leading you off into the ether, this game that'll never come out. Do you start working on another one on your own?

Like how do you balance your time? Right now I'm totally focused on Tacoma and doing my level design work. air. But, you know, I find making games fun and I like do it on the weekend sometimes, like a game jam or something like that. Sure. I recently was commissioned for this event in No Quarter in New York City, or called No Quarter. And I made a game for that. Actually, while we were finishing Civil Up, which was crazy. I don't know why I did that to myself. But hopefully we'll release it at some point in the future. It's an eight player car combat dating sim racing games. Jesus fucking Christ, Christ, I love you. Walking simulator. Yeah. Well, like, I wanted, so, you know, when you make a game like Sybil, people, it's easy for people to expect you to make more games like that in the future. And sometimes that's really cool if you're iterating on an idea that you're really passionate about. But I like, you know, going and doing something totally different just to keep myself feeling fresh.

So I was like, I'm going to make a racing game and like to see how that works. And it's still kind of about like, it's about sexiling your roommates, basically. So it's still got that narrative twist. Sexiling? Yeah, like. What sexying? You know when you live with people and you're like going on a date and you want to take your date home, but like you don't want to like me doing it while your roommates are in the room, so you got to lock them out. I'm making a note of this.

This is great. Sex Island. Sexiling is the best. That needs to be a loving sex off topic. Yeah. Oh yeah. I have two questions that you might have already answered, but I want to make sure that I, that I had on them. So what award did you win?

Nuevo. What does that mean? It is category for games that basically don't fit neatly into the other categories. so often like more experimental leaning games, games that are doing stuff that's like really different. So that's pretty cool. I'm excited to be considered someone doing something very different. That's awesome. That's great.

And the second thing is why is it called Sybil? So the name of the game is actually the name of my real avatar from when I was playing Final Fantasy Online, which is sort of when I had this experience in my actual life. So shoutouts to the SILF server. When I'm Final Fantasy Online, that's where I played. and my character was called Sybil and I actually stole that name from a girl I really admired in high school

it was her AIM username and this is the spelling she used and she pronounced it Sybil and I've been using it as my handle in online games ever since Now there's a game Yeah now there's a game About it, that's awesome

Very cool Nina Thank you so much for coming by Sybil's available now Everyone go get it Follow her on Twitter Pentai PhD Look for Tacoma soon

did I plug everything? Yeah, Sybil's at Sybilgame.com. Sure. And there's a cool trailer for Tacoma at Tacoma dash game.com. There you can check those out. Okay. Until next time. It's been a pleasure to serve you.

Bye. Oh, hi. Oh, shit. I talked over your, oh, hi. It's okay. You can do that? Can I do that? There's no fucking rules, Greg.

Cool. This is a game cast. We don't even. We're making this up as we go. Topic four. It's on topic fours days. Usually on topic three days because this is a super sized episode of the games. This is a weird, weird world that we live it in.

Steve Gator is back. he was on the games cast a couple weeks ago. Sure. But now you have new questions for him, except you don't, because you weren't on this one. I wasn't? Maybe you were. No, I think I was.

I'm pretty sure I was on this one. You know what? Yeah. In fact, you were. Because I think Nick tapped out at the last second, right? That's what it was. He was terrified. He was terrified.

He saw Steve come in, he got all scared of him. Steve Gainer, of course, ladies and gentlemen, founder of Fulbright, made gone home, now working on Tacoma. We give him a lot of shit in this interview's two reasons. Number one, he delayed Tacoma. That I'm not upset about. Number two, he didn't put a platinum

trophy and gone home. So right now, I'm going to finish a sentence or two. Then you're going to hit pause on this and you're going to tweet it Steve Gainer. I love you Steve Gainer and he's at Fulbright. I love you at Fulbright on Twitter. Even though you didn't put a platinum and gone home. Don't make this a thing. It's too late. Once it's said is a thing. I love you at Fulbright. Even though you didn't put a platinum and gone home period XOXO Gossip Girl parentheses Greg. At game over Greggie. Period. I mean Greg Miller. And I'm sure you're going to Trending Gamer 2015. Trending gamer 2015

South by Southwest Most entertaining online personality of 2016 Toys a Life ambassador of the year 2016 You might want to just write all this On your phone and notepad Screencap that and tweet that

at Fullbright Leave a couple Leave a couple blanks like underlined spaces Because we know Greg's gonna keep winning more shit It's true I'm gonna keep winning more awards Thank you Kevin thanks No more 9-11s Minorities are good

That's my presidential thing. If you don't watch, I guess if you don't watch Conner Greg Live out of context, that seems kind of weird. To be fair, Greg, I left out the part where I'm like, in context,

it is weird. I left out the part about burning people alive. Don't do that. I thought we were done with that. Enjoy the interview. Steve Gainer. What's up, everybody?

It's me, Greg Miller. That's Nick. that's Steve Gainer from Fulbright. We are here on YouTube. com slash kind of funny games. Talk to Steve and see what's happening. See,

I was pretty. I thought there were two Greg Miller's in the room for a second. But before we do that. It's like, start with lightning reaction game of the year. Now, are you familiar with lightning reaction game of the year? No, and I feel like I'm about to enter hell. You're ready to play?

I don't want to play this again. I know you don't want to, but that's not how, that's not how lightning reaction works. All right, so you want, I'm going to hit the button. I'm pretty sure this is going to lead to arthritis later in life. Oh, I'm going to hit the button.

It's going to turn red and play a creepy song. Yeah. When the song stops, it'll turn green. You want to buzz in on your thing. It'll be the first person to buzz in. If you are not the first person to buzz in, you will be penalized. Right.

If you buzz in early, you are penalized. Okay. Penalized. So wait. That's like, this thing turns green? Yeah, you'll see it. Okay. Greg always wins.

Not always. Most of the time. Damn it. I hate this game. I fucking hate it. Fucking damn it. You got my head saying I always win. Nice try, Greg.

Thank you. I will say the batteries on this are going. Because that shock wasn't nearly as bad as the first time I did it. But my entire arm went numb for about a half an hour. Holy shit. Do we have more batteries, Kev? Kevin's on it. Don't worry.

Well, I shouldn't miss anything. Yep, you shouldn't enough. You screwed that one. So wait, did both you guys get shocked? Yeah. Oh, everyone who doesn't win gets shocked. Okay. They can only ever be one winner.

There you go. Fix that guy up for me, please. Since, it'll just one on one v. one, Nick. See, he can get, whatever. YouTube.com slash kind of funny games. There you go. You nailed it. Tacoma.

Hey, everybody. The game that's never coming out. Before we get into that, I told you this earlier off camera, but I want to say it again. I actually finally got a chance to sit down and play it gone home and it fucking blew me away. And I loved it. And I was like, I'm, I just, I can't, I just wanted to thank you for making that game. It was really, really fun. If anyone out there has not played it, I can go get it.

It is great. You have no excuse anymore. No excuse. Yeah. Unless you respect trophies. Shots fired. That worked for Kev. Yeah, I know.

If I can get Kev, I get the audience. Yeah, because, like, you hadn't played it because you, you, you've, you've, don't play PC games as much. No, yeah, that's that's why. So when it came to PS4, I was like, oh, okay, I'll give this a shot. So, yeah, if you've heard of it or whatever, you haven't gotten a chance to play it,

it's on Xbox and PS4 now, so yeah, give it a shot. Thank you so much for taking the time to check it out. It was my pleasure. I'm really going to do like it. Absolutely, my pleasure. I don't think we've ever really talked about it. We haven't? No, I know that you liked it.

Yeah, but did you go in not knowing anything? Zero. So, what did you think for the first part of the game? I think that means that you empirically don't watch Greg's content. Oh, no, he, no. No, I mean, I knew, I knew enough about it to know kind of, I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't played out in the audience, but... Seriously, if you haven't played it yet, fuck you.

I don't know how many times I gotta talk about this game. I'm buying this game for kids. Come on, I clearly I like it. Is everybody's Christmas game? That was the one, did you see when I broke this kid's heart on Twitter? I just, one of our fans tweeted at me, and it was like, I see gone homes on PS4? I tweeted out of the gone home's on PS4 and I, yeah, and he's like,

I see it's on there. Is it worth my time? And I'm like, no, I've just been talking about it for three. years because it's a piece of garbage. And he deleted his Twitter and then it became a whole thing. No. Yeah. Well, that's what he gets.

No, I knew, I knew sort of the rough, like, character dynamics of it. Okay. What it was going to be based off of. But going into it, I was like, well, this has a, at first I'm like, this is a really kind of kooky, not kooky, a spooky, a, yeah. It's like, it's a comedy. It's a goofy. It's their hand out with Jack Tripper.

No, I didn't really know what to make of it, but the ambience that it says, right we're off the bat and the tone that it says is really awesome and it kind of draws you into the mystery of what's happening at first I'm like okay is this going to be a mystery or is I think it's more about the relationship dynamics from these two people and then you just get sucked in and then by the end of it it really is just a nice like I don't want to say payoff because that seems like the wrong term for it sure yeah it's just a nice

sort of you you just feel oh god it's the end of a journey it is a bittersweet end of the journey it's very bittersweet and it was and it was cool and I actually went I went I think I played it and then was like wait a minute no I got it I got it wait what like the ending kind of like it kind of had such an impact on me that I'm like I'm gonna I'm gonna go back and do it again I kind of went back and like I can change this I can change this well because if I get to the room faster because I wasn't paying attention to the beginning to some of the things that you find in the front in the front room that you

come in so I'm gonna restart this and and I think actually if I remember correctly it resets you and I kind of went back to the yeah you go like me man yeah yeah kind of went back um so it was cool just to kind of tie that and I was like oh this is such good really it's good writing when you look at it because a lot of the setup was there for you and you don't get that and it comes full circle and all those threads come together at the end which that's the thing I admire

most about it was I was like God it's like Gator. He waved a good tail. That was the funny thing and I don't think we talked about this about me when I went back and did the playthew on PlayStation 4 that was my first time playing it again since PC it was one of those games the first time I finished it I was like that was my story and that's awesome Right.

But I remember, and it kind of sounds funny. It kind of feels like when you go back to like your elementary school and you're like, I remember these desks being so much bigger. When I went back and was playing it this time knowing everything, like I remember there being so much clutter of so many things I picked up that didn't matter. When in reality, everything I pick up in that game matters. But in the beginning on my PC play through, I had no idea. Right.

I remember, you know, I remember picking up the photo of Lonnie and just like whatever. This isn't, what am I looking for? You know what I mean? And then to play through it again, you're like, oh, fuck, right. Like from the beginning, you've been telling me all these things. Yeah. you know, the game is the same, like, it's the same stuff in it every time you play. It's not like randomized or anything, but I don't think I've ever talked to anybody

who played it more than once and didn't, like, discover new things the second time they're either because they just missed it the first time or because they're like, oh, I didn't realize that that, like, had a connection to something. And it's cool to hear people, you know, kind of like go back through with some foreign knowledge and get what the implications are. So, yeah, thanks for playing through it for the second time in three years. No problem. It's a pleasure.

Having we play through it now, I'm going to rock Tacoma. Yeah. I'm going to beep the shit out of that game when it comes out because now I know what to expect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're going to overanalyze everything in Tacoma looking around and doing everything. Talk to us about Tacoma. All right. You delayed it this week and I'm giving you joshing.

I don't mind. Take your time with it. Make it great. Yeah. How hard of a... Well, it's because, I mean, so, okay, I'm just going to... You're going to put it out there. No, I mean, we came.

Talk to you guys. Yeah. It's going to take us a while to get that platinum trophy in. Thank you. Thank you. We couldn't do it this year with that. And I was like, I was like, we're going to ship. I was like, we're going to ship it 2016.

We can't get the platinum. I'm going to shit. And then I was like, but Greg will be so sad. Yep. If you can hold off and get it. I mean, you can push it to 2019 if you get on the PlayStation Vita. I'm just, you do whatever you need to do to make that happen. Well, because the thing is we're launching on Xbox.

So like figuring out how to get a platinum trophy on Xbox is like hard. But we're going to be the first. You're going to be the first to do it. They're talking about connecting the networks. Oh my God. So it could just be the. all of a sudden you ping your and you got it you figured out you've did the way to do it uh yeah no we we were uh we basically you know we were showing it last year uh came around

and and showed the the stuff we were working on and between then and now you know we had people that we know play it we had you know people in the press play it and there were things that we were like okay we've pushed what we're doing you know this far and if we just take that and and be like, okay, well, that's the game. Let's just finish it. It was like pointing towards the stuff we really wanted to talk about, but wasn't really addressing it fully.

You know what I mean? It was sort of like we got it as far as we did and we were like, okay, we're doing this like augmented reality stuff. We're doing like stuff with gravity. What do we like, now it's clear. This is actually what's important about it. And we need to figure out how to like push further on like

what you do as a player and how the game works to support like actually what we're trying to say about those things and not just have be like our first idea for what we were going to put on screen. And so like that means, you know, it's the kind of thing where it's like, if we had been at a point where we were like, oh, our first idea is good enough, just finish it. Yeah. That would have been great. Uh, we're not always the case that. You're not always lucky enough to have that. So we gave at the time it needed to be like, what are we really doing with like these augmented reality scenes and how you relate to them,

et cetera, et cetera. And now we're at a point where we're like, this is the thing that the, this is this is what the game is wants to be like what's trying what's trying to get us to make and now we're making it and we got to make the rest of it so yeah spring 2017 what i what i what i liked about your announcement and maybe i was just reading between the lines too much and you can correct me if i'm wrong but was you talked about the fact that yeah you you know shared it with friends and other devs and whatever and they had played it and you want you took the feedback and we're going this way with it and what i loved about that statement is that it's a snapshot that you can compare to gone home because you talked about it in your interview with me over on youtube dot com such kind of funny games. Oh yeah. Where you said that I was like, when did you know you had something with gone home?

And you're like, well, we sent it out to our friends and devs and they all wanted more. Yeah. And so to see that now, not that this is like, see that you're not got the opposite reaction

or not maybe the opposite of like, fuck this game, I want to play it. No, but you know, there was something there on those play tests where you're like, well, now I know that I want to pump the brakes.

Yeah. I mean, there's a certain point where, you know, some of it is, is, we had a lot of very, um,

you know positive like public reaction when we put stuff out and like that's and that's awesome but there were also points like yeah so so we had we had developers and stuff that played tested and gave us feedback you know one-on-one but also when we took the game around um depressed and showed it to them you know we'd be able to have hands on time with it they played it and then afterwards you know we did like an interview kind of thing and like a few different people played it and then like one of their first questions was like so uh you know what what do you guys uh want to do to really differentiate what you're doing from gone home. And I'm like, you shouldn't be asking.

The game should tell you that. If that's what you're wondering, then like, we aren't pushing ourselves hard enough. You know what I mean? And so the good thing is, I think that when we take what we're working on now, get it polished up to a point where we can, you know, take it out into the light of day. I think when people put their hands on it, they will not be thinking about, well, how is this different? It'll be like, this is a different thing.

And let's talk about that. You know what I mean? So we're excited about it. Going to be showing more of it later this year. Let people get hands on it. Give everyone the elevator pitch for it because we haven't done that. We're just walking all over. Hey, everybody.

Hey, everybody. You ever heard of this video game, Tacoma? One of your little bit. You're there you go. We gave those away in the prize bin last year. Thank you so much. So Tacoma is a first person story exploration game that's set on a space station. So it's set in the year, 288.

and you are a character that is sent to this space station basically to do a job, like a very like sort of like, just kind of do your job. Don't worry about what's going on here. And as you explore this station, you're finding these kind of digital records of things that happened to the crew before you got there. And you as the player are able to interact with them, move through the timeline of what happened in these different parts of the station, move yourself through it, and connect all these threads to effective.

you know, rebuild a picture of like, oh, so this is what led to the station being the way it is. This is why I was sent here. This is what's really going on under the surface.

And that's a big part of what two of the biggest things we pushed on were last time we showed the game. The whole station was zero gravity, but you used magnetic boots to walk around and you could like transfer between surfaces and stuff. And like, that's theoretically cool.

And it's cool to do and everything. but um the a it requires really big spaces for that to be cool and like really big huge spaces are not actually great for like making gone home kind of like explored yeah yeah and like the density it's just like that's a lot of floor space and then the other part of it is like as we played it were like it's a cool idea but like it doesn't really talk about what it would be like to be in a situation like this or how this thing would probably be built you know what I mean because it's like a place that people have to live for like years at a time I mean you know they they're they get like shore leave or whatever but we're like this doesn't we want the player to feel like

oh i feel like i'm on a space station i feel like i'm i'm like gravity in ways that i can understand is like relevant here so one of the big things that we did is we rebuilt the station to be more of like a um 2001 style central hub that's full zero g just like float you're just free floating around the zero g and then you transfer out to the arms to the habitable wings and you're in like Earth gravity. And so there's this real contrast between like, oh, I like, it makes it tangible that you're like, I can feel how this station is constructed. I'm in the middle and I'm floating and now I'm walking and I can contrast like maybe this is kind of like what it would be like to be on a facility like this. And like I am living that through the character. And then the other side of it is, yeah, when we were showing stuff last time, we had those AR scenes, the figures that, you know, that were recordings. But for the most part, they were. were a pretty localized you know sort of like here's a little scene and b you didn't really you're an observer like you know you're still an observer you're not like whatever there's not one character who looks over and's like why is he here you're like yeah you're not like talking to them

and doing you know changing what happens but we have pushed ourselves further to make those scenes much more like kind of uh robust in terms of there's more characters involved in a single scene and you as the player because the cool thing is so like sorry part of the the what we were pushing ourselves towards was like we're in a futuristic setting right so like how does this futuristic technology actually affect like what I do as the player and what my relationship to the game is and so at some way we were like these are digital recordings of what happened to these characters why like why don't we just let the player have control over like fast forward rewind, oh, I think I miss something.

I'm going to pull it back and pause. And I'm going to walk over here. Okay, these two things are happening at the same time, unpause. And like, give you the tools to really pull all those threads together instead of just like, okay, it's cool that I'm watching like a visual audio diary, but that's all that's happening. It's like, no, this is like in dialogue with how this technology might work and and what your involvement with it would be. So anyway, that's the elevator pitch. We just went about 800 stories. no I mean that's what gets me so excited about is when you were talking about that fast forward rewind when you were on the one-on-one interview before with me where even right now like are you playing the division I haven't gotten to play yet in the division you'll walk through and you'll find echo locations and you can echo and then it's around you but it's like it's very localized and it's not moving you know what I mean and that's like I always talk about it when I think when I've mentioned it to you or other people who are for that fans of like it's similar to the one of the favorite I thought the

underutilized part of Arkham night of rebuilding a crime scene and playing it back. But again, super small. I can't wait to be there and be listening to this conversation and notice somebody walks away and be like, all right, cool, play the conversation out, stop,

rewind, play it and then just follow that dude. Where does he go? What is he up to that? People have told us that they're these really satisfying moments where it's sort of, because like, you know,

it basically, the scenes are still localized to a part of the station. So you're like, okay, when I'm in this area, this is what was going on here. It has kind of like a snapshot of a thing that happened there. but it's still like branching enough that yeah you're like okay I'm following these people we got here I watched the rest of the scene I'm gonna pull it back and follow those people and like that moment where you follow them back and you just realize like they're sabotaging the space station when they're putting rats into the vents that is the

I mean the rat vent moment that's a little bit of a spoiler Greg I was I was looking forward to that moment again just letting you know I know that there is a rat now we're just going to have to change the rat vent Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to ruin it. Does that mean you get rid of my mocap? No, that means we add another fucking year on the schedule. No, sorry. Well, if it gets a divita. But, you know, yeah, those moments of like being like, oh, I, okay, I'm back at that point. These things have, like, reconverged and, like, just having that kind of, like, light bulb moment.

It's really cool to see. So, you know, still a ways to go, but we're excited about the stuff that's been going on in the background. Sure. What is Kevin? I don't know. What do you know there, Kevin? Got it into some of the Morios? No.

Cheetos. Are they flaming hot? They don't have it here. Just talking about here. These are really good though. I haven't had like regular Cheetos in a long time. Yeah. You guys want some? Because you only eat hot cheos exclusively. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. He does only not she's. Did you see that article the other day about the invention of hot Cheetos and the guy who did it? No. It was a really inspiring thing where the, the, the, the, the, at the corporation or whatever he put the, like, the, like, CEO put out like, everybody's part of this team. You're all part. We're all collaborative here and we know, we, I want ideas and stuff and da, da, da. And I'm going to, I'm going to. I'm going to. I'm going to. I'm going to. I'm going to. I'm going to. I'm going. I'm get some of this wrong. I believe he was just a maintenance worker or whatever. Wow. And they, they fucked up some Cheetos that day and they had chitos that had none of

the powder on them. They made too many. They were, so he took them home and put him down. And then he had like a hot sauce there and he put some spice on him. And it was really good. And so he brought him in. He put together a presentation and he got a suit and like they fucking did it and took the idea and like used it. Well, you find gold like that. Yeah. Yeah. Behooves you to actually take the idea. Yeah. I'm waiting for Kevin to come up with the idea for kind of funny soon. I hope that that guy got to, got to benefit from that aside from a shout out. He got an article written about him. All the flaming hot chitos he could eat in an article about him.

You've watched The Wire. No, I haven't. The Showtime show? HBO show. Yeah, yeah. You've watched it. Yeah. So there's the whole thing in the first, okay.

Hey, I don't watch it. I'm busy. And then, yeah, the whole thing in the full season. All these Supergirl episodes aren't going to watch themselves. They won't? I don't know about that. There's a conversation in the first season where he's talking about the guy that invented chicken nuggets. Mr. Nugget is like stuck down on the base. Do you remember this?

No, I don't know. One of the guys on the corner is basically, it's DeAngelo, I think. Yeah, yeah, is saying like, there's a conversation where they're eating chicken nuggets and one of the kids is like, oh, whoever invented these must be rich. And the guy's like, no, that's somebody who works in the basement of McDonald's. He came up with them. They're like, nice work. Come over something else, Mr. Nuggett. So I hope that guy actually is not just Mr. Nuggett. basement. He's not just like, okay, I guess we'll go back and keep doing maintenance. Thanks, guys. That's cool, though. I mean, that's, that's,

that is awesome. It was somebody who wasn't like, I'm a food scientist, how do we maximize this? It's weird that I think that everyone that works at the Cheetos factory wears like a white coat, but then it's always pissed off when they get the Cheetos on the white coat. Yeah, because Kevin's lifting up his filthy little paw

covered in Cheetos dust right now. And then he slams out on his pants. On his white pants. I mean, where did you get those all white skinny jeans. I licked my fingers first. Great. I'm glad to touch all of your... Here's the next thing I'm going to toss out. Yeah. You get sick a lot,

Kevin. Yeah. I don't get sick a lot. Are you sick right now? Were you sick last? Two weeks ago? I was sick last week. It was last week. It was last week. Do you do a lot of licking your fingers than touching your pants than licking your fingers again? I certainly do. He likes to also touch like park benches

and bus benches. Yeah. But anything he has a little hands on. I was walking, I was walking back to the place I'm staying last night and I was on Valencia Street and I dropped something and it rolled like like, you know, just like off to the side of whatever. And I got down like, I crouched down to like find it. And I just, I had that moment where I was like, I put my hands down. And I was like, I just put both my hands on all of Valencia Street sidewalk. Okay. I am not touching. I'm going to the closest place that has soap and water right now. Bad idea. Bad idea. But if you live through it, you become stronger. Exactly. That's what it goes. It's great.

for your immune system. It is. It took me one Comic-Con. It was like my second Comic-Con, I think, for IGN, where I woke up and, like, couldn't speak and my throat and I was like, never again. And ever since then, any, once you leave the house at a convention, like, your hands are by-housers. So I just realized so I'm, I did the thing

just now. So, I said I dropped something I was looking for it. I thought I saw a rat run under a car and I wanted to see if it was really there. I said the, the fake part because I was self-conscious and I was like, no, I was, I was, I. You're in a safe place. kind of funny as a judge. I thought I saw a rat and I wanted to see if it was under there.

That was actually why I touched on it. See, the other reason why I wouldn't do that and I'm with you on that. I have a morbid curiosity of like critters as well. But I have that fear of like the 80s movie where it's like the 80s movie and it just goes, ha, like, you lose it. Like night of the creeps. It like jumps out of the dog's mouth into your mouth. It jumps out of the dog's mouth into your mouth. Not of the creeps. Remember nine of the creeps? No. Oh, you got to go watch nine of the creeps. It's a movie where it's like a body snatchers kind of thing where these aliens crash whatever and they all look like. Was it? A Rottweiler? Was that the dog? No, it was a super small dog. It's all these little worm,

wormy alien creatures. And so they, like, they take over. They jump into your, your mouth and then breed inside you, and then eventually you explode, but they also can spit out of people

and get in their mouths or whatever. And so at the end, it looks like they beat them all. And like, the girl, like who the guy saved or whatever, like, no one's watching out of the creeps. I'm not ruining this move. But she,

she like, oh, you survived. What, portillo? And it goes, blah. And it shoots it into her mouth. And then the credits roll. It's also where that great line, the guy opens the blinds and he goes, good news, girls, your dates are here.

Bad news? They're dead. They're all like walking out. I do actually remember that. Yeah. That's funny. That sounds like a good movie. Yeah. I'm into it. Tacoma sounds like a good game. See how I brought it all back around. But that's something like an extreme ice burn.

Like you were just like, that sounds like, oh, did it? No, I thought I was like, up like, that's how I would like, no, no. You were like, Night of the Creeps. And I was like, that sounds like a good movie. and you're like, well, Tacoma sounds like a good game. Oh. That's what I mean like that.

I think Tacoma's a really good game. You know that. I know that's true. How many your fans got walls full of arts and crap at home? Probably one or two, but you're like the best one. Thank you. We had Max Landis over the other day for a podcast. You know this guy?

I mean, I know. Director. Okay. And he was talking about Firewatch. He just played Firewatch. He was disappointed in Firewatch. And I was like, well, Firewatch is one of these games. It's a lot like this game gone home and you need to play Gone Home.

Yeah, I've been playing Gone Home. You got to play Gone Home. And he looks at the wall. I was like, oh yeah, gone home. He's like, what is this other thing from? Like, nothing, don't worry. Never, nobody say it. I was like, nobody say anything.

So he knows, kind of, but he doesn't know. Yeah, right. And I think I asked you for a code that I then gave to him. Oh, really? Nice. There you go. All right. I'm doing it.

I'm doing God's work out. I read the word. It's gospel. One code at a time. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I saw a movie, um, oh my God.

It's, I, Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters, too. Ghostbusters. Man of Steel. Superman 1. No, no. Superman 2. Oh, fuck, yes, Return to Living Dead.

Me and Michael Rosenmom love this movie. Yes. Yeah, so you know all the shit. Do you want to party? It's party time. Yeah. They just play this song over and over again. Is this the only song you could afford?

Yeah. No, I mean, as far as like Night of the Creeps just made me think about, like, movies that are like, so here's a, so Return the Living Dead. Yeah. I didn't know about it. A friend of mine brought it over and we watched it last Halloween. Do you know about it? No, I mean, I've heard them talk about it.

This is one that's not a American. film. Right, right. Exactly. And it's a totally different direction. And it's like a kind of like punk rock like it reminds me of like repo man. Okay. With zombies. Okay. And it was written and directed by the writer of alien. The first alien. No. And it's it it it's a it's a crazy movie. It's good. It's really trashy, but actually good. Like it's like in the first 20 minutes there's one of the female characters just like likes to take all her clothes off and she's naked for most of the movie. It's like it's like it's like. It's like. It's like. it's not a classic but to avoid the NC17 they had to give her a pasty for her vagina really? Yeah.

So she looks like a Ken doll a little bit just like you know And so But but yeah Written by it up Shut up Kevin Written by the writer of Alien

And you can kind of feel it Because like So that movie was the movie That was the movie that established That zombies want brains Like it was the first movie Where zombies are like brains And then it became a thing

And it's because like The weird thing is You can really feel it Because the whole movie is about like the plot of the movie is based around like basically going through the steps of how a zombie works and how it becomes a zombie and then what it wants after it's a zombie and like why and stuff and it's like oh yeah alien was about the life cycle of how does this alien work and what stages does it go through and then you really see it in this movie but it's also

this weird ridiculous punk rock like you know midnight movie kind of like be movie everybody go watch it the soundtrack is fucking good it's it's a weird movie and it's totally totally worth watching. Yeah. Probably like Tacoma, will be totally worth playing when it comes out this spring.

Right? Next spring. Well, I guess it is still this spring. You know what I mean? I'm thinking already so far ahead. You're wishing. No,

I'm thinking that we're already in spring. It's already popping here. Right. When it comes out next year. It's March. A year from now, Steve Gander's going to be back here. We'll be talking about this game.

We'll be saying it'll be out in the fall. We'll be stressed. Now that's just being a hater. It's just being a realist about game development. Steve, thank you for coming. Absolutely. Thank you very much. It's always great being here.

I'll shake your hand as well. Thanks everybody. It's a lot of fun. So Greg, we're rounding out our kind of funny games cast adventures. You know, just for tradition, as always, the final topic brought to you by the Kind of Funny forums. Go to kind of funny.com slash gamescast topic.

We'll get to eventually. We didn't do that for this one, but I felt the need to put that in there. Today, we're talking to one at Donald Mustard. Correct. That was you and I. Yes, it was. It was.

It was. No, it wasn't. No, it wasn't. No, it wasn't. Yeah. I was going to roll. thing because I was a role with things. Man, if I could just be frank with you, ladies and gentlemen,

Tim's very tired. Because Tim's been busting his ass for this company. I'm a ass buster. On a business deal that I cannot talk about right now because it won't be live in time for when this goes live on Patreon. But. Oh, yeah, well. Oh, right, because this is next week.

Oh, because the rooster teeth stuff. Tim's living his dream and getting us to work with rooster teeth. It's fucking awesome. But it's a lot of emails and a lot of him staying up late and him talking to this. And not showering so my hair doesn't. this thing. Exactly. And there's this one like disgusting fan. Tim has to keep working with named Andy Cortez who's just

healthy. You mean Andy Cortez from Roosterty? I do mean Andy Cortez from Roosterty who keeps making us awesome shirt designs that we keep selling that. We're selling right now over on our brand new store at kind of funny.com slash store. But it's not on the Roosterty site. So shipping is really quick. So Donald Mustard. Donald mustard, ladies gentlemen. Chair, which means Shadow Complex, which means Shadow Complex 2,

which he has entirely laid out and they have a block for it, but they've never done anything with. And we talked about that. It means Infinity Blade and now it means Shadow Complex remastered and it means that JJ Abrams joint he's working on we talk about that basically if you don't know Donald Mustard and Cher this is one of the OGGs in the industry

one of the coolest dudes one of the most important people going so we had to get him in here yeah if you don't know Donald Mustard now it's time to catch up I fucking hate you God damn it Tim what's up everybody welcome to your very special Kind of Funny Games cast here on YouTube.com slash kind of funny games time for one of our segments

with the one and only Donald Mustard from Chair. How are you? I'm so good. How are you guys? I'm excellent. Thank you. Yes. It's Colin and I here here here here to talk to you about this. Now Colin is here because this man loves Shadow Complex. And I love him. Oh, there you go. That works out great. That's why it came.

Very symbiotic. Today, as of our recording, Shadow Complex Remastered out on Xbox 1. Yep. It came out a few hours ago on Xbox 1. You can go get it right now. Congratulations. Great job. When's it coming to PlayStation 4? So it is coming to PlayStation 4 and Steam in May.

Okay. I don't know the exact day yet, but as of this morning, like we just, like I just got an email a few months ago saying that we're at ZBR, which means we have zero bugs. Like we're ready to submit it into cert. So it will definitely be in May. Awesome. Congratulations on that. How big is that?

I mean, when you look back at chair and lineage and like, I think right now, so many people know you for Infinity Blade, right? But then I feel like there's so many console gamers who know you guys for Shadow Complex. Like what does shadow complex mean to you now? Oh man, that's a good question. So, I mean, I desperately love shadow complex. I mean, for me it was, and for the whole team. Like this was, it was not that all of our games aren't,

but this was an absolute labor of love for us. And especially when, you know, when we set out to make shadow complex, there just weren't, there weren't, not only were there not a lot of side scrollers being made, but there was absolutely not, you know, a non-linear Metroid-esque

side-scrollers being made at all and anyone we talk to about it are like you're crazy if you're not first person shooter or like

a cover based third person action game like you're done and we're like no we just really believe that if we make it they will come right there will be an audience

for this type of a game and it's just been so immensely satisfying to just not only make that game but to have have it win you know like over 50 game in the year awards

and be so critically acclaimed, but also just sell to so many people. Like, there's a huge audience for those kind of games. And I think, you know, for the, and then we made,

Infinity Blade. Yeah, exactly. We'll get to that eventually. Yeah, you left it behind, you hung it out to dry. You never made a sequel.

I hear you got maps for it, though, you got everything planned out. You just got to sit out and, no, it's okay. But for shadow complex, I mean, like,

to think back to when that came out, when it came out on Xbox 360, that was still when downloadable games were like, look down upon. And it was, It's pretty good for a downloadable game. And like, oh, we'll do these games the year, but we'll do download XBL game of the year and stuff like that.

No, and it was interesting because I hadn't really revisited child complex at all until we started redoing this. I actually went back and read some of the reviews. And it was interesting. Like, it was almost this theme through the reviews that like, it's weird because I, I feel like I have to give this game a nine or nine point five. But I almost, I almost think it should be a $60 retail. I don't understand this game. It doesn't, I don't, it doesn't fit into this category that we've, we've, we've, presupposed a digital title should be.

And it's so crazy to even think that nowadays, like that there's this weird line between downloadable or not. And I hope that Shadow Complex played at least a small part and kind of changing the viewpoint of what a game should even be classified as. I think it did. I mean, Colin, do you agree?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Shadow Comics is still my favorite Xbox 360 game. And thematically, it's fantastic. Obviously, the gameplay is fantastic. I mean, you guys kind of, You made Infinity Blade, and obviously this game must have been by volume and by revenue, a much even bigger success than Shadow Complex, which of course changed maybe the direction of where Cher was going. But it surprised me now that we're seven years or so removed from Shadow Complex. You guys really haven't made a sequel to it.

It's almost, for a lot of Shadow Complex fans out there like me, it's almost frustrating because the game clearly was a huge hit. And I think warranted a sequel. And there has always been rumors that you guys wanted to do it or had ideas about it. but like where is your head at now? Are you kind of putting out the remaster versions of the Shadow Complex to kind of see is that interest still there? Is it latent? I mean, I wouldn't say that that's not one of the reasons where we're doing.

Yeah, no, I mean, that's definitely part of it. I mean, we loved making Shadow Complex. And the truth is, so in, in, we did, you know, intense study of what we thought made the Metroid games work so well, and some of the Castlevania games worked so well. And, you know, could we put our own spin on that, but really kind of find the vibe and the soul of what made those things work. And to me, by the end of making Shadow Complex was when I'm like,

all right, I actually know how to make one of these games. Like now I could actually go make a really good one. And so for me, Shadow Complex was like, you know, our warm up. And then you just shut it all down and push it. Yeah, no, like we really know how to do it. And we did. We immediately went into developing Shadow Complex 2. And we worked on that for about nine months.

Greg's not wrong. and we did we did we laid out we had the whole we have the whole game designed on paper um we even yeah i mean we blocked the whole game in and and bsp just think of it as like just like rough like gray box everything and yeah i mean we can you know i've i can play through shadow complex too not in its time not with all the a i and it's not beautiful at all it's as blocks but you can play through the whole thing from start to finish and it's amazing like it is probably one of the best things I think that we've designed. But as we were doing that,

you know, Steve Jobs called and said, hey, do you want to do this little thing? And we're like, oh, yeah, I'll pause Shadow Comics for a little bit and go do this thing with Apple that became Infinity Blade. And yeah, it became just this huge thing. And I, again, we love Infinity Blade. Like, I think there's some of the innovations we are able to bring to mobile and the design space there that are so innovative and we've been so fortunate to be

successful there. But yeah, I mean, we really want to get back to Shadow comics if it warrants it and so um if you want more shadow comics do you know get the remaster and see if you guys tell us you want it you know i don't know if i'm just furious right now or really happy that shallow complex too exists and you can play it and it's been just sitting there it's not it's not just that i mean there's massive amounts of work to do but the rough shell of it yeah i mean is is pretty awesome thematically i mean do you guys have you know i know that you know And there were some controversy with Orson Scott Card kind of, you know, being a evolved with

the theme or whatever with the story of the original. Would you want to revisit that kind of empire based story and like continue that? Or would he still be involved? Or would you? Well, so one of the awesome things about Shalhan, like, so maybe, maybe this isn't clear to everyone. It was actually written by Peter David. Oh, okay. Yeah. And so. So why was the controversy? Why was the controversy around that then? So when we, so, you know, we, not that I agree with the contrary. No, no, I think this is over.

No, I mean, it's just the way things get communicated and whatever. But, no, we, I love working with great storytellers. That's why we love working with like JJ Abrams. I'm always interested in finding great partners to work with. And I, I was, you know, a huge fan of Peter David and his work on, on all sorts of comic books. Supergirl. Yeah. No, yes, super, but specifically, like, I loved his early work on Wolverine in the early 90s for any of you that, you know, want to go look up some of that stuff or, you know, whatever, like some awesome stuff.

And so when the opportunity came up that were like, oh, man, we could get like someone like a Peter David to write with us, that'd be made. So we, he was amazing and we convinced him to work with us on the script and he wrote Shadow Complex. And he wrote Shadow Complex too, like, that script, the script's done. and while that was happening, Orson Scott Cart, we knew Orson Scott Card, and he was like, hey, I would love to write a book in your universe, so he licensed the rights from us. So it went the other way around.

What's the other way around? We own shadow license, it's ours. He licensed it from us, he wrote a book, and there you go. And the book is Empire, right? The book is Empire. Okay, because I read Empire. Yep. But yeah, it was based on our universe,

not the other way around. That's interesting. Oh, so, okay, so that's where the controversy stems from as well. So, okay, so the story is also written by this gentleman, for Shadow Complex 2 and it's just sitting there along with the kind of the shell of the game as well as this kind of enticing stuff.

Peter David's awesome. Peter David's awesome. You should read his Supergirl run. You should read his Young Justice run. Dunn would tell you about Hulk. Yeah, Dunn't tell you to Hulk. Yeah, I mean, yeah, no. Colin hates comics because he sucks.

And he even made Aquaman cool. Like, he made Aquaman cool somehow. Like, it's crazy. I don't know that. Peter David's awesome. That was ever a thing. All right, you can stop talking about that. Anyway, don't worry about that.

Well, this is, I mean, that's so exciting to know because I, I know that, you know, Infinity Blades seem to be an amazing distraction for your studio, and it vaulted you guys into this. That's not a distraction. I mean, we bled for that. I mean, that was like, I'm not saying from Shadow Complex specifically. And so that's a great direction for you guys to go.

It's not like you guys are struggling to, you know, having to do contract work or figure out how you're going to make ends meet. I know that that was a great direction for you guys to go and you'd choose that path 100 out of 100 times. It's just great to know. It was great to see you at the Game Awards talking about, you know, Shadow Comics, because it really is a game that I adore. and I would like to think there are hundreds of thousands of us out there.

You'll see them come out in droves, I'm sure. That's what's got to be so excited about the remaster is putting it out and getting it to PlayStation audience, getting it to the PC audience. Yeah, I mean, and with any, I mean, even with the work you guys do, I mean, we,

I, our, our intent is to bring delight and to bring joy to people in their lives, right? And if, if the work we make can even delight or entertain you at all, like, that's amazing to us. And so the opportunity to bring that to,

more people is all we really want. And so it's so awesome to be bringing it to PlayStation and Xbox One and the PC. Like it's a dream country. Now, I should call out, you've given us five codes for Shadow Complex, remaster on Xbox One. And we're going to do it like we did with those indie developers last night. So right now, Twitter.com slash Shadow Complex has 737 followers. If we can get it to 1,200, we'll give away all five.

That way it'll be one by one by one by one. And so this is interesting because we actually just started. started at Shadow Complex on Twitter. Surprise you got it. Because here's how crazy it is. When Shadow Comics came out in 2009, Twitter wasn't even really a thing. So they didn't have Twitter accounts. So this is like a whole new thing for Shadowcom.

Yeah, how the hell did you even get that? Did you have to buy that off someone? Or did you take Shadows? Or did you have some savvy person just sit on it for five years? You know, I don't even ask how we can come back. You know, I don't want to know how the sausage gets made. I just want to get there and have it there. So in terms of the Charis' timeline, we've started.

talking about Infinity Blade. I mean, when Steve Jobs calls, was that a hard vision to wrap your head around? Were you guys like, eh? Like, it's a cool opportunity, but do we care? Is this going to work? Does mobile and touch gaming matter? Well, it was interesting because,

I mean, because we just want to make great stuff. And while we were, you know, we're working on ShaoClex 2. It was amazing. But I found myself personally, like earlier that year, Mass Effect 2 had come out,

which is one of my, favorite games in the last generation. And while I was playing through Mass Effect 2, I was sitting on my couch one day watching a football game. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, I actually have some time right now. I could go play a game. And I'm like, oh, I could go upstairs and play Mass Effect 2. I was like, or I could play field runners on my phone.

It was this little like tower defense game. And I picked field, like, in my own brain, I'm like, I'm going to play field runners. I'm going to play that instead of Mass Effect. And there was like this crazy moment for me. like, what have I just done? What have I become? What's wrong with me? You know, but this little light went off in my head where I'm like, oh my goodness, like,

this mobile stuff is going to be a thing. You know, it's going to be a big deal. And so it was a part of not just my brain, but everyone at chair, you started switching our brain a little bit going, hmm, if mobile, if mobile, what would we do? And so that was like kind of already happening. So when Apple called and when Steve Jobs was like, hey, I actually have this new thing that is pretty powerful. I think it can run 3D.

It can run on real. like do you guys want to try and do something together? It wasn't that hard for us to say. I mean, whereas like, because again, initially we're like, you know,

is it worth pausing shadow complex for three or four months to do try in this little thing? And we're like, yeah, a few months. Let's, let's see what the future is going to be. And we had no idea.

Like, we had no idea that Infinity Blade was going to become so huge that mobile is going to become so huge. We just kind of were in the right place at the right time. How was that introduction made? I mean, how did Apple, come upon, you know, do you have a personal relationship with people there?

Or did someone kind of send you, send your name up? I mean, so chair is part of Epic. So we're part of Epic games, which makes Unreal Engine technology. And at the time, it was Unreal Engine 3. And we had a little part of the engine team secretly working on getting Unreal Engine working on mobile. And they had got like a little version spun up on an earlier version of Apple hardware. And I think some of the Apple folks had seen that. And so they knew that was happening.

And so they knew our technology. technology was, I mean, Unreal Engine Technology is incredible, right? Power is such amazing games. And so that, I think, is how some of the early relationship formed. And, and then, you know, Steve, right, he wanted, you need, it's not just technology that shows off. It's, it's, you know, something visual to show that. And, and so I think that's where, um, we got, we got invited to participate in that. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. That's, that's the right men for the right, and women for the right job, I guess. Shadow Complex Twitter, the push has begun.

You've crossed 800, are closing in on 900. So the first winner of Shadow Complex Remastered is from the Twitch chat by the random number generator and it's Panzerg 2. So when I get the codes, I will send them to you and you'll have it on Xbox 1. Nice. Congrats. So as Infinity Blade keeps going, what's happening? Who's talking about that?

What are you doing? The codes are sent to your email. Thank you very much, Kevin. You're a good guy, Kevin. Snappy dresser too. Thank you. Infinity Blade's going. You guys see so much.

success with it was that it was that just the no brainer to keep going there and continue to you know indefinitely polish out of complex too no i mean like uh you know as you've probably seen right like we don't just immediately like yeah let's just make a sequel it's not really our thing no i mean it to me it's more about is is there more that we feel like we need to say design wise in a genre and and it was i mean truthfully when we finish shadow complex we're like there now we've learned how to do this we have more to say. There's more, there's innovation we think we could bring here. With Infinity Blade, we in a lot of ways, had kind of invented this new genre, right? They're just, I mean, now there's,

you know, hundreds, if not thousands of Infinity Blade like games. Yeah, of course. But at the time, there was nothing like that. And so at the end of Infinity Blade 1, it took off so huge. And even for us, we're like, this is just the cusp of what we think a mobile game could be, of what the design relationships could be, like, of what we could even see. And, and, and even for us, say in this space and it did. I mean we very much felt obligated to flesh out this genre that we had kind of invented in some ways and so it required and again for us even though it had an infinity made one a two and a three on it for us it was more it was the same code base we just we basically worked on that for two and a half years you know from the beginning of infinity to the end of

infamid three and it took us that amount of time to fully express that design and so to me what Infinity Blade 3 is now is the full representation of what we thought a full-featured triple A mobile game could look like. And we're done now. Like for me, I'm like, I have fulfilled what we think we need that to be and now we could move on. And we moved on to spy jinx. But yeah.

Yeah, you move on to something else called spy jinks. Because we had this awesome crazy idea. Explain the idea to everybody. I'll tell you later. I'm not going to tell you yet. Tell everybody right right now. It's already been leaked. JJ's been talking about it left.

Oh, yeah. Well, if JJ's saying, no, no, we had, again, we had this really,

what we thought was a cool idea for a new intellectual property and a new game and, and we'll talk more about it soon,

but we've been working on it for a while. It's, it's gonna be really cool. But how does the collaboration then with JJ Abrams come to be? Because you get a call

from Steve Jobs. Does this time, does Abrams call you, or you calling Abrams? No, no, no. So, so, again,

it kind of all feeds together, right? So JJ is a fan of Apple products, right? And so he, I think, happened to be watching some of the keynote stuff. And I happen to be on stage with Steve Jobs being like, boop do, do, look at Infinity Blade and whatever. And then Infinity Blade 2 comes out and it's, you know, it gets like a 10 from IGN and it was like winning all these awards. And I think JJ at that time is like, oh, you know, he was aware of us. The real thing that happened, though, was his son started playing Infinity Blade. And his son is like super into it and yet would get to these bosses that he couldn't beat.

So he'd be like, Dad, you got to beat this for me. And so JJ had to get good at Infinity Blade. Right. But then he started getting into the story and he started seeing it. So that was kind of happening. And then on the side of that, like, I'm a huge Jay J.J. Abrams fan. Right. And again, like part of our thing at chair is, you know, when we identify people that we really

respect like a Peter David or a Brandon Sanderson. We're like, we've got to work with these people. And forever we're like, we got to work with the JJ. We got to just meet him. Mostly so I can just be like ask them all my loss questions. Sure, of course. Right. And that's really what it was.

It was like I have like a whole like notebook of like, man, you and college get coffee after this. And so and so yeah, it came an opportunity where through Apple we were able to get kind of introduced. And I really thought it was going to be that. Just like I can meet him. I could bow down and I could be like, I love you. And then that would be it. Right. But we got talking and, you know, what was supposed to just be like a 15, 20 minute say hi thing turned into three or four hours.

And by the end of it, we were like, we have to work together. Right. And so it kind of went from there. Amazing. We're so lucky. I'm curious about, you know, we have you only for a few more minutes. And it's more, I guess, an Infinity Blade related question. But how do you feel, I don't want to say you're, you know, like you helped pioneer a specific niche and a very respected.

and hardcore core niche on mobile gaming. But we've been very critical of mobile gaming, as it seems like only 1% of 1% of games even are relevant, everything else kind of falls to the wayside as a race to the bottom in terms of pricing. The landscape seems to have changed a great deal since you released Infinity Blade. Yes, for sure.

How do you feel about mobile as a platform now? Because it seems like for most developers, unless you are, what, a game of war, whatever these commercials you see. Sure, yeah. Like, you're kind of have no prayer. Like, you see thousands of these guys just going out of business, you know, one, two, three person studios making these games.

So how do you feel about the way that it's evolved now? Do you think it's like a positive place to still be for games today? I think it depends on the game. Right. I mean, it's definitely, it's definitely hard. I mean, I think we're, and I think it's, I think you can see it in its most, I'll use the word pure, it's the most pure form on mobile, but I kind of think that's indicative of the whole industry right now,

where making a game is very, very hard, but the tools to make games and the platforms that games are available on have just become so wide that, There's millions of people making games right now. There's probably hundreds of thousands of games released a year. And if you looked at like across all platforms, the ones that make it, it's a very small number. It's not just mobile, right? On console, on PC, on Steam, like very few of the games actually get released.

Yeah. Like become viable commercial products. And so it's a, it's an interesting time. I'm interested to see like how over the next few years all of us kind of navigate. this again I think mobile is it's in it you see it in its most you know pure capitalistic you know kind of expression um but I do think I mean as a designer you have to look at different business models and I look at free to play as a business model I I look at that and I go I think there are ways and I think there's just trying to see games now games like hearthstone and games like even like supercells new

game clash royale and stuff that that are like actually really really really good games They have a really smart design. There's really good gameplay inherent in them. And I think they're finding ways to make money on those games that is an exploit, you know, that is a clear, like, value to players. And so I think there's so much design innovation that can come through that business model if we're more smart about it. But I don't know.

It's, we're no interesting time period right now. Saturation, right? It is. It's interesting. So we'll see. I don't know. What do you guys think? I mean, I don't know.

To me, I stay away from it because I just, I feel like, and we've talked about even PSN. I mean, Steam's already kind of gone on the other side of the paradigm now where I think it's getting too flooded with just, there's no quality control. Like, I don't think there's any shame in that having, you know, I think that there's a subjective nature to reviewing games for 95% of it. But there is a 5% objective. Is this game even worth anyone's time? Does it run? Is it, you know, is it decent?

Is someone going to feel like they're ripped off when they put? And I just feel like there's not enough of that even on console. Now you're seeing it on PSN when we read the blog every week. I'm like, did you read, are half these games even relevant? Yeah, did you read the description of these games?

Yeah, like even 30 million PS4s out there. Are these half these games even selling 10,000 copies? Like, is it even worth flooding? Yeah, exactly. Are you flooding the PSN and making the good stuff harder to find? I think that that's unfortunately bleeding into the console space. So I think it's actually the mobile kind of infection as a war with that kind of race to the bottom

is starting to infect everything. And I think that's a negative kind of thing personally. I don't know if I'd blame mobile for it as much as I just blame the tools. becoming more and more accessible. It seems like that to me. I think it's just the tools are so ubiquitous now that it's just it's. If your mobile was the first one, that was a huge shift, right? When it was like for $99 you are developing for your Apple and you're like, what?

Okay. And then that's when you got all these weird games. And now with PSN or in how the, you know, usability to make something in unity and put it on Steam, put it to Xbox and put it to PlayStation. Yeah, no. I mean, I'm from again, the capitalistic viewpoint. It makes perfect sense to proliferate. All I'm wondering is if the stakeholders need to have a little bit more

control because it lowers the value of PSN. I feel like PSN is more powerful on the PS4 in terms of the games that are there, but I feel like the PSN actually quality-wise was way better on PS3, like on an average basis. Well, and I think, again, like, I mean, if this is getting way boring, we can just change a subject, but I think, yeah, like, the technology curve. This is the shit we love, don't right. The technology curve of like how, again, not like making a game as easy by any means,

again, which is why the huge quality disparity is not easy to make a good quality product, right? but the curve of being able to make that and then the curve of user experience from a store standpoint, I don't know that any of the people that designed the storefronts and any of the platforms

have, I don't know if anyone even had the opportunity to think through like how do you service hundreds of thousands of things in a way that can actually be organized and sorted. Like the stores are just behind the technology and it's going to take some time

for people to figure it out. Sure. This is easy stuff to solve. No, of course that. I promise there's probably people out there who are very motivated to like solve it so that the good stuff, the cream can rise, right? Yeah, exactly. To me, it's, and it's probably such a simplistic and ignorant way of looking at it from my point of view. But like, could PlayStation, for instance, have just a number of people, 20 people that are just like, these are the games that are insert right now.

Like, would any of you even buy this? Like, like, is it worth, you know, because they really lose nothing by putting the game up getting a 30% rip on the game. I mean, I understand them. but at the same time, say, you know, three games start with, you know, PES or something when you're searching for it. And it's like, well, maybe we can knock that down to two to make to, you know, like so when someone's using the slider to search, the games are actually worth a damn.

Yeah, yeah. Come up and they're not hidden. And then maybe that increases our sales type of. In other words, a very convoluted way of looking at it. And I don't know if it's accurate. I don't know if anyone would even agree, but I just wonder if less is more. And I'm seeing that with, you know, with obviously mobiles, it's tens and tens and tens of thousands of games on there.

Yeah. But, like, are more than a thousand of them even, you know, fun. And so I wonder, like, it seems like the consumer suffers ultimately, and that's why the race to the bottom to not pay anything, then hurts all the developers. But that's a philosophical argument for another time. I'm confident we'll solve it, right? Like, I mean, that's, if, of course it's going to get solved. Everyone is motivated to solve that. I hope so.

I think you're right. And you're way smarter than I am. No, no. You would know. No, it's true. It's true. I know him and I know you. It's 100% true.

Donald, thank you for coming through. We got Shadow Complex on Twitter up another 100 followers. was you're a little over 900 right now. So we'll give away another code. This one going to Patreon user, Kevin. Not our Kevin. It's not you, Kevin. It's a different Kevin.

Another Kevin has won a code for the Xbox one version of Shadow Complex Remastered, which is coming to PC and PS4 in May. Yeah, so it's on Xbox One today, PS4 and Steam in May. And then also we started to hint it. I know I didn't tell you much about SpyJinks, but SpyJinks, we are starting to, if you go to SpyGinks.com,

we're starting to take people registering for a beta that we will be announcing at some point and that we will be telling you more about the game a few months from now and it's going to be crazy awesome so you want to go check it out check it out and for the love of all that is holy buy shadow complex. We want to send the right message.

It's pretty much all done. He could easily just ship all these documents to BluPoint or somebody and they would just do it. Yeah, that totally works and makes it totally awesome and refined and it's exactly what you want. Ship it off to a third party. They'll do it for you. You'll find something.

Kevin will do it for you. Just send it to Kevin. It would be amazing, I'm sure. Yeah. Donald, thank you so much for coming by. Thank you. Have a great GDC, man.

Thanks, guys. Good to see you. Whoa, Greg. That was a fascinating interview. It was. I don't want a lot. I'm pretty good at this. You are.

You're really good at this. I just keep, I like just being, I like being the second fiddle. I like just being there and having someone actually know what they're doing and I can just kind of say

like stupid shit every once in a while. I like you being, I like you being my second fiddle because I'm not going to name names. I've had a broken out of tune fiddle for a long time now. And he's right a lot though. Yeah, but I mean, a broken fiddle's right twice a day.

It's like, you didn't, I'm playing the fiddle now. Oh, you didn't, you didn't thank me in your award. It's like, all right,

buddy, you know, I don't see you thanking me all the time in your tweets. He's pretty good at tweets. He is. That second film. Yeah, if you want some really heady tweets that are about like the Republican Party.

It's great, I guess. Co- Islanders. It's like, I keep, you know, I keep walking this taco joint, expecting tacos, and he just keeps giving me rice errone. And I'm like, this doesn't make any sense. I fucking love rice errone. That's the San Francisco treat.

You grew up on it out here. Are you aware that for real, like that's, when you talk to the rest of the country about San Francisco, the place you're from, and now that I've been here for nine years, my place too, you talk to, you talk to anybody else. It's rice erroney they talk about, and then it's about, gay. That's all anyone, and the Golden Gay Bridge, but nobody talks about that. Really? I mean, they talk about it. of the town. You're telling me people are sitting around the street corners like, hey, what's up with that

rice errone in the gaze? But not they're not talking about our beautiful bridge, our big beautiful bridge. They talk enough about it. But like, yeah, it's not isn't, no, it's really all about rice errone. And then how progressive we are. I'm going to be real. And we're amazing. About this. Yeah. I love

the city that I'm from. Yeah. City by the way. Last, yesterday, I saw a picture on the internet where it was one of those before and after and it was like 10 years ago this cop stopped this guy. from jumping off the bridge. Yeah. And this is him 10 years later.

And it was like the cop seeing him for the first time of 10 years. And the guy has like two kids now. And he's like, has a great ass life and stuff. And I was like, hell yeah, I'm taking credit for this for some reason. I was going to say, I'm from Chicago. And if somebody, if you're about to jump off a bridge in Chicago,

the cops push you. They're like, we don't have time for this. We have to get to Portillo's. And we're really upset about the bears. Holy shit. It's a depressing, windy place. Well, ladies and gentlemen, this has been the first ever episode, 64 of the Kind of Funny Games cast

Join us on our You know, at WrestleMania, there's the road to WrestleMania Yeah. With the kind of funny games cast, we're on the road to episode 69. We're on the way. Are you gonna have anything up your sleeve for 69? I haven't planned it yet.

Have you laid it out? Is it? No, who knows when it's happening. So I'm saying something will happen now. Probably won't. But at the very least, I can promise you, I'll be really excited when I say it. You scared me because we had a moment there

where I thought our minds were in perfect sync. Because I was literally thinking right before you started talking and I was finishing it my thing about how cool it would be. if the mic's hung like this, like we were in rings, and then you're like,

you started talking about WrestleMania. And I was like, oh my God. Are we becoming one right now? Kevin, get on it. Until next time,

I love you. For episode 69, I want it like this. That would make sense. I know. I like it. I thought that these are going up as one stitch together podcast.

So fuck you, Kevin. That's my outro. And if you need one, fuck Kevin Coelho. Tweet at, I'm at, I'm at kind of funny Kevin.

and tell him, fuck you. So Kevin, future Kevin, not real Kevin. I'm sorry, future Kevin that I did this to you. There you go. Fuck you, future Kevin. I hope you're not dead. That'd be sad if future Kevin is dead. But I mean future Kevin wouldn't be watching him this.

I hope everything's great. I hope Paul didn't dump you, future Kevin. I hope you have both hands still, future Kevin. Future Kevin. She's not going to dump you. I hope you got a new belt by now, future Kevin. Yeah, you're doing this bit that no one will see. All right, here we go.

Sorry.