Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Jeremy Dunham (Special Guest) - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep 59

Episode Date: March 4, 2016

Special guest Jeremy Dunham joins us to discuss the 2016 video games we are most excited for, the runaway hit Rocket League, and the orgin days of Beyond! (Released to Patreon Supporters on 02.26.16) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up guys, welcome to the first ever, episode 59 of The Kind of Funny Games cast. As always, I'm Tim Getty's joined by the coolest dudes in video games, Colin Moriarty and Greg Miller. And for the first time ever on this show, we have the one and only, Jeremy Dunham. Hey, thank you. Thank you. I feel really, like, honored right now. I feel like I'm in the presence of, like, some legacy shit going on. Sure.

Dunham gave me my job. Got me started on all this. You wouldn't even be in the spare bedroom, if not for him. Tim. It's like grandpa has come home. It's great. And Nick's not even here. That's weird. Today's going to be a good show. This one's definitely going to be worth a dollar. And if you believe that,

you would know, because you're over at patreon.com slash kind of funny games where you get all this stuff early. And if not, YouTube.com slash kind of funny games every week. This show will be broken up topic by topic day by day until the full thing is released on Friday. You're doing me proud. Thank you. I felt pretty good about that. One day you'll have someone in your spare bedroom. Yeah. And they'll give that speech.

I've had you. That's Kevin. Kevin's given that speech before in your spare bedroom. Yeah. Okay. Kevin said a lot of things in my spare bedroom, Greg. I don't want to know about any of them. No.

So we're going to get right into this. We don't even need a rigmarole. People know what the show is. Yeah. Video games. We do all that stuff. What are your most anticipated video games? Oh,

that's where we're starting today. Yeah, that's right where we're starting. We want to do the top five most anticipated games for 2016. Let's start with you. Jeremy Dunnell. Oh, man. Creator of Rocket League. Not creator of Rocket League.

We made Rocket League. We should do one of the top. and go around the table. I think that would be more fun. That's a good call. I don't have them in particular order, so. Yeah, are we in ordering them? No, let's just throw them out there.

Because I feel it's going to be a lot of overlap. And if there is overlap, Colin had the idea that we should come up with more than five. I have 10, so there's no overlap. Okay, I got a whole lot. Personally, we'll be fine. Well, the first one for me is the division. I've been waiting for that game for a long time. It looks great.

A lot of people at work are anxious to play it. They're involved in the beta. I just love the atmosphere. It's basically like the last of us in a giant multiplayer setting. So I think for me that that is the most intriguing multiplayer game Outside of Rocket League that I've seen in a while I just like because there's there's that undertone of Of story going on even though it doesn't really have a story

Which by the way it's a Tom Clancy game Story would be good There's a story you get to play single player Yeah but it's I don't know it's there's a certain point and again I'm old But there's a point in my life where I just expected a lot of narrative Sure that's faded away that You know what I mean?

That is you and I be in old school. I mean, yeah, that's not how it is anymore. My number one was the division as well. And I think it's stupid that we can't do it. So I'm just going to talk with Jeremy during his. You can talk. You can do that. No, no, it's fine.

Give five honorable mentions as always. I will. I will give honorable mentions to anything that's not mentioned. And I like that. You have 10 on your list. You're going to go through all 10 of them, of course. Well, maybe. We'll see what happens.

No. I mean, that's what I'm stoked about for the division is the ability to go in there and and play by myself and earn XP and grind out this character. and then, yeah, take them into the dark zone and go play with friends and go see what Scott Lowe's up to or whatever, you know, kick it around. Yeah, I just like the fact that it's yet another

post-apocalyptic game, but it's a different take on it. And I actually like, I like games that take familiar tropes and then try to do them in a different way, especially bringing in something as fun as multiplayer is if you have the right group of people. Sure. And that's what it is for me. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I think

when I look at this, it seems like the destiny I would have wanted. Third person on Earth. You know what I mean? I don't like space. You know what I mean? All these fake purple people, whatever. But in New York, in this post-spaclyactic world. Sure, of course, I'm in for that. And the third person.

You know what I'm going to remember that you don't like space when one of these games comes up that inevitably has to. You know it. Oh, I've said this before. There's exceptions to the rule. I'm sure that's just, I'll never understand that. I get people not liking certain things and you're not liking fantasy or not like this. But not liking space just as a general idea is kind of weird. It just takes it out of you.

Oh, look at this guy who speaks my language, but isn't is a floating squid. Cool. But your favorite superhero is an alien who came to Earth and adopted the United States in middle of America values and identifies himself more Clark Kevin Superman. When Superman's an alien and Kryptonian, that's when I lose interest. You wouldn't like my game idea then. One of the game ideas that I've been half joking pitching around the office is to do a real-time space travel game. So it takes nine years to get somewhere. Exactly.

So it's really just stars and just launching from the Earth and you're taking off and getting off and getting. as far as you can, but it's real time. Okay. So it's basically a race to see you can get to the moon first and then Mars and keep going. It's a terrible idea, but it's so... Sounds a little like Darces. Yeah, well, but terrible. Like how even you don't like the idea.

I don't. I just like to bring it up because a part of me thinks that somewhere out there, somebody actually might be interested in that kind of game, especially if you made it kind of social and you put some leaderboards. How far did you make it? the awesome thing would be I say awesome in quotes is that if you made a certain point and you get hit by space

debris you have to start over again that to me I think would be the ultimate in improving people's dedication and to see just how nuts they are it's probably just me next level permanent by the way the division I think is a great choice I'm excited to get our codes and start playing it as soon as possible I don't know when they're coming through but

the game looks awesome I will not probably be playing it online very much I might try it a little bit online see like how it is but I agree with you I think the setting in the story or at least the perceived story or the suggested story is very cool in New York City in perpetual Christmas

because of the Black Friday played or whatever and it's yeah it's looks like it's all Midtown Manhattan so it's several miles and I don't know I think it's cool

I mean a lot of games when you really when you really step back and think about it a lot of games actually don't take place in New York so it's like

you know it's cool to have postpollocin New York post-apocalyptic New York is ripe for storytelling and so I'm excited about it too I hope it's good

and I think it's going to be for years Exactly. Yeah. Your turn. I mean, I'm just going to steal you all motherfuckers. I'm charted four. Of course.

The thing is, you know, making my list, it is the number one that I'm most anticipating. And I think it's because it's, it's soon. We know that it's actually coming. So it's like, yeah, I can talk about Kingdom Hearts or I can talk about these games that I've been waiting for for fucking years. But it's like, yeah, right. You know, this is something that I know is going to come and I know I'm going to love. Like, I feel like I watched the story show today? Yeah, I did.

And I'm super stoked to that. It looked awesome, right? Yeah, it's like, this is, that's exactly what I want. It's what I want. As bad as that game can be, that's still amazing. Like, I can't imagine the game not being, you know. It's going to be exceptional. Everyone is exceptional.

Like, that's the thing is like, at worst, it's exceptional. So I'm like, I'm super, super stoked for it. I'm excited that it's soon and that like, we're getting to the point where it's like, what, two months away now? Yeah, April. That's like, man, we're about to hit that. It's been a while since I've had a game that I've been like a trip playing that I've been like

super stoked and super excited for. That's why I was so sad. I'm like, I'm sad, you know what I mean? Like today during the trailer, like when it kicks up with the music like haunting, like a single whisper on the wind. Like it got me like not choked up, but I, you know, sad that

it's almost over that this is the end of Nathan's story and that we've been around this long and you watch the thing and I thought it was, you know, surprising they put Elena with the baby and they showed her with the baby on her hip. But it was exciting. It was what I want. You spoke a golden abyss for me. You're going to do that? Yeah, sure.

I like seeing all the I like that there was so many characters that we don't know who they are. Yeah, exactly. Something that Uncharted is so good at is each game has its kind of cast and everyone loves Uncharted for the characters. And I think that that's not just the main characters,

but it's also the supporting and the... Yeah, your cutters, your Chloe's in this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that it's not just the same people. Again, maybe they'll make appearances here and there. But I like that there seems to be a new cast. It looks like it's a hook up to Drake's old life, right? What's even Sam were up to before?

And of course, it looks beautiful. You know what I mean? Like even those quick montage moments today. I was like, shit, that looks better than you'd expect it to and you expect it to look awesome. Exactly. What about you, Greg? Opening my list here.

I can't, I can't double up on anything. You could double up and I'm already growing. I'm just trying to introduce more games. Number one was the division. Number two was uncharted for. But wouldn't it be more interesting to talk about more games? Number three, which is my number one is persona five. My number one pick now is persona five.

Can't wait for persona five. Got a little tuxedo mask. Got to run around. Because that's the thing. Love persona 4, of course. Jeff Haynes, of course, started me down this path with Persona 3. Yeah, yeah. Literally.

And now to see it build, build, build to this point where persona 5 is going to be fucking huge. It's going to be insane to watch this game come out and dominate people and have them be so into it. But even when we saw that first trailer for Persona 5, it wasn't what I was expecting it to look like, right? I'm so used to persona 4. I'm so used to persona 3 to see it when you're running around and you're jumping around and you jump from chandelier to chandelier. And it's like this mix of Catherine's visuals, but obviously up res and this, that. and the other and you're running around like the style of the trailer and it's i'm like fuck yeah this is going to be amazing because that's another thing like i like i'm i can't wait for uncharted obviously

uncharted's more of what i want persona's more than what i want and the thing about it is like uncharted's going to be done in a weekend if that you know what i mean like we're probably going to get it and i'm just going to destroy that game yeah then i'll come back and destroy it for the platinum or whatever and then you know be sad that it's all over whereas persona is going to be with me for weeks and weeks and weeks and you know what i mean because it's going to be long yeah as always i feel like the game's been really quiet we haven't heard anything for which is good I want that. I don't need to know anymore.

You know what I mean? It's persona. It looks cool. All right, great. Hit the date this year. Yeah. They'll hit it. They'll come out this year.

I know. All right, Colin. Busted out. My glasses. It's time. It's my favorite part of the show. Mass Effect Andromeda, which Greg is not allowed to be into because he doesn't like space games.

I'm calling. I don't like superheroes. Batman. We made the caveat that I like Batman. You know that I like Mass Effect. You know that. Mass Effect Andromeda was number five on my list. Now, I'm not convinced that Mass Effect Andromeda is actually going to come out this year.

I hope it does. Of course not. But I'm super excited to see what they do with Mass Effect. I think Mass Effect 3 was a fantastic game. I think the games got better. I know that's not a very popular opinion. But I do miss the role-playing components of the original Mass Effect. I think that there were a lot of babies out there that complained way too much about the original Mass Effect.

and had a lot of that shit stripped out of Mass Effect from Mass Effect 2. Mass Effect was a game all about the minutia. It was all about the little things. And that stuff was really removed. And we know that the make goes back in the game. And we know all this kind of stuff that's different now. I think. I think we've heard a bunch of interesting things about it.

So early those were the compelling rumors. So I want to see how the game does and what the story is going to be. And ultimately, as I've said before, I am convinced this trilogy. We'll connect back to the original Mass Effect and back to this galaxy. And there will be some sort of story component that will connect the two series, whether or not saves can be crossed over or whatever. I don't know like what's going to happen.

I don't think saves can't because that would be the telltale sign. You know what I mean? Right. But they might not do that kind of stuff until maybe the third game. And then say like, go back and maybe carve out some other shit or what choices did you make similar to the Wii U version of the game when you couldn't, or the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2

because we didn't get Mass Effect 1 until later. But I'm super interested to see like how the series evolves but how it also goes back to its roots and really gets back to being a role-playing game again because that was one of the unfortunate thing is that even though the game I think mechanically got better, I think the story was very good. I loved how the game, the original Mass Effect 3 started on Earth and you go to a lot of familiar places and Earth being destroyed basically in the very beginning of the game. Spoilers for anyone who's played Mass Effect 3. You've had plenty of time. I want them to get back to the roots of what made it a role-playing game and not having a finite amount of experience as you did in Mass Effect 3 and not having kind of stripped out systems that I think cater to more of a casual gamer and I don't think that's what Mass Effect was about. I don't mean that as an insult. I just mean that we need it to be a role-playing game again. And I hope that they they, they, they

do that. So I'm super interested to see how it's been incubating for a long time. I think the game's going to be very vast. I think it's going to be very grand. Super excited about just hoping it hits this year, but I just don't know if it's really going to or not. First Mass Effect is still my favorite one. It was the close, it was, it was such a traditional BioWare RPG when it came out. It was just reminded me of all the other ones that they had done just in space, your favorite place. But I don't know. Andromeda, I think even though I'm looking forward to it doesn't make my top five list simply because I'm so far behind. I still haven't even played three. And so I want to get in...

Oh, sorry, I spoiled it for it. It's all right. I was ignoring it. It's on earth. But there's this weird part of my brain that shuts off that if I haven't played a game in the series that I'm not allowed to look forward to the next one. Sure. Because I'm afraid that I'll ruin the experience that I haven't had yet. As bizarre as that sounds.

So I want to look forward to that game because I've always liked the universe and I like the characters. And I think those guys make fantastic RPGs. But I just, I've got to wait. So I probably won't be able to catch up with you until two years from that or so. I'll have to play three. Mass Effect 3. I'll be interested to see what you think. A very divisive game. Two are so fantastic, I think, from a storytelling perspective that I think some people were really hard on three. But I do think it's a situation where it's a hard game to follow up.

But I think if you really look at it, like, from a bird's eye view, it's a better game. It's just on a systems level, it's not a role-playing game anymore at all. Mass Effect 2 is the best, I thought. And I hope they go for that for the Indromeda. What's next on your list, Jeremy? Outlasts 2. Ooh. That's a good choice.

I love horror games in general. I just, they take me to another place that other games usually don't. And those guys really know how to make horror games very, very well. A part of me wishes I was saying PT. Yeah. But fantastic of the atmosphere. I love the fact that they're going to a more traditional, scary place, like outside in the woods. That's really interesting to me.

I love the style they have. And even though it's sort of established all the night vision and all that's been used in a lot of other games, they do it very, very well. And I love the fact that they, even me, someone who's been watching horror films since I, before I could talk literally the second film I ever saw was Halloween first in the Star Wars second was Halloween my God yeah explains a lot but that even that

has me feel moments of tension and genuine jump scares I think that's the sign of a really good horror game so that's one of the games I'm really looking forward to you simply because it's one of the games that actually works yeah just like until dawn worked for me last year it was a fantastic game I'm really looking forward to that one this that's great man outlast one it's

it got the pacing right to horror and to the jump scares into the actual the mix of gameplay versus just kind of like atmosphere and I definitely it's on I'm excited for outlast dude as well it's not on my list but yeah the original outlast that was clever um which is the best word I can think of it I think to explain it because you're right like that using the the night vision mechanic through the camera I think was kind of a really cool thing and capturing scenes that you didn't know you're supposed to see for trophies or just to be a completion so I read that was really cool the story components were cool it did suffer from a lot of what I think a lot of

horror and good thrillers, stuff from, which is a bad ending. Of course. I don't, it's hard for them to wrap the shit up in a way that's compelling to people. Like, the buildup is always, you know, even until Don's suffered from that, but like, you know, I just wish it ended differently, but I don't know how I would have ended it any differently. All horror games, in my opinion, and most horror movies, if not all of them, are always going to have that

problem forever. Because one of the things that works really well with horror is the less you know, the more effective it is. And in games where you're forced to give people some context and background to keep them involved for longer than an hour, you keep having to explain things and show things that now your imagination is no longer filling in the blanks. Now you're finding out specifically what the creator wanted and if it doesn't jive with what you wanted in your head,

it kind of takes away from that experience. So I think that that's always going to be, that's one of the things that I go in with all horror games is knowing like, well, they're probably going to have some moment in the game where I'm ruined by the fact that whatever direction they went isn't the way that I would go. But I just love the fact that I can still be caught up in a particular moment, and at that moment,

the memory of that moment overshadows everything. The first time and the first at last, when you're first going up the window, and you get in, and a couple seconds later, you turn that hall, and there's that jump scare. You're not expecting because up into that point, it's quiet and eerie. That one little moment still is memorable to me, even though there's much bigger game

beyond that, just simply because of that one way that it hooked me. And so I think that's the way I approach horror games, is what are the moments that really kept me coming back, like the dog through the window and Resident Evil. And the first Silent Hill when you're walking down that alley and the camera changes just so uncomfortably and you're like, what the hell's

going on? Right before the babies start running out. So yeah, that's what it is about horror games that I enjoy. My favorite genre is, and will always be platformers, specifically 2D platformers. So Cuphead. It was a race between that and Uncharted for number one because I'm really excited

for Cuphead. The one thing that I'm waiting to see is if it's only boss battles or if there is more actual platforming to it and like I people keep telling me like oh they show platformers up but I haven't seen any of it anywhere so I think it is just boss fights but even if that's true like I'm still so stoked for it I love the look at that game I love the like the whole the whole the whole what their their goals are that it seems like they're just kneeling so I'm very very excited to finally actually play through that thing I like how it love the style looks way I from the playing of it I'm just like this is way too hard

like I just won't enjoy this. I'll get frustrated and stop really really. See, I think it's going to be a good level of frustrating. I think it's going to be like the type of, because I'm not calling when it comes to games where I don't want like the hardest thing in the world. But I think the cup head it's going to be very trial and error. Yeah. And you're going to play the boss fight 20 times before you win. But that is the gameplay. And I think that they're going to because they know that they're going to really focus on making sure that it's fun.

And then it's the good frustrating, not the bad frustrate. So it's the type of frustrating that you, you, you, you, lose 15 times, turn it off, come back the next day, and your third time and beat it. And you're like, yes. It all clicked. Yeah. So, I'm very excited for that. Yeah, what's more sad? I mean, first of all, Cubhead's art is awesome. What a great novel idea

for a game. And I think that, even though games weren't around the 30s, which is in the 20s when this is really kind of based or like this art style's base, it does seem congruent with a hard game. I don't think Cuphead can be anything but brutally hard. That's why I like, I like it. I do like games that are hard. I like boss fights. You know, I remember being a kid in playing some platformers like where the game would I bring you to tears.

It was so hard. Like, and I like that kind of shit like where I'm like, because it's satisfying. Who wants to play a game that's easy? Who fucking likes easy games? It's so boring, you know?

Like, like, like, give me a game that's, that's hard. Ramp up the difficulty and challenge me. I'm not here to like, you know,

fucking twiddle my thumbs, you know, like, annoy me a little bit if you have to. You know, but just, but you're right, the satisfaction of getting through a difficult 2D

side squirrel at boss fight. I'll never forget, um, especially at the end of Castlevania 3, The boss fights get insane. And when you're fighting Dracula at the end, you're like, how the fuck can you even beat this? You know?

And like, but like you continue on it. Then you beat Dracula. Then you realize you have to fight him again. And you like lose your mind. But like when you finally see that ending, it's just satisfying. You know, it's like,

compare that to Castlevania 2 where you're fighting Dracula at the end and you just destroy them in two seconds with the flame weapon. It's like very anticlimactic. And the game's all about speed running, basically. Different type of game though,

because Castlevania 2 was sort of effects energy like where you're collecting all these different items and powering your character up over a lot of exploration. So the idea behind that game was you've already paid your dues or just spinning a lot of time, powering yourself up and getting there. But I actually,

I used to be at the same mind, but then as I get older and I have less time, I now, I don't want hard games anymore. Now I want games that I can sit down and enjoy in a small amount of time and feel like I progressed somewhere. Like in the past,

when we were still in the media together, I loved hard games. I reviewed Devil May Cry 3. And that game on Hard Mode was crazy. And I loved that stuff. But now, when I only have an hour of playtime, I want to be able to sit down

and feel like I've gone through an entire chapter of something or two levels of something. So to me, time is the great enemy of a difficult game. And that's why when it first came out, I love something like Alien Hominid. And now when I sit down, and my daughter's show interest in wanting to play Alien Hominid

because I see it in my library, I don't want to play this right now. Because we're not going to get very far. And I just feel like the time is so valuable now that hard is is in the way. But Cuphead, ironically, Cuphead was also on my top line. That's great.

I mean, it reminds me of Shovel Night a lot. Where Shovel Night's hard, but it's not hard. Yeah, shovel night could have been and should have been way harder, I think. But yeah, I enjoyed what it was. Like, to me, that's perfect. I think Cuphead's going to be a similar vibe to that, where maybe a little more challenging because it's more boss-focused than, you know, just platforming.

But I like it where it's challenging, not brutal. Right. Yeah, no, I respect that. And every game has to be like that. You're not playing gone home for any different. You're playing it from the experience. So I think that there's something different to that. And I like games out of scaling difficulty so that you don't have to worry about those kinds of things.

I always ramp up my Call of Duty campaigns to Veterans because I think it's the most interesting that way. But to your point, this year I haven't even played the new Call of Duty yet. And I'm actually just played on normal or just to get it out of the way. Because I know I don't have the extra 10 hours that that's going to add on to it as I crawl pixel by pixel or frame by frame through these fucking stages because I can only get hit once. You know, so it's like, so, you know, I get you. But like for this kind of game particularly, like I just think that 2D side scrollers and difficult to go hand in hand. And I want them. I want them as hard as you can make them.

You know, like, that's good stuff. I want a game, I want a game that I know, that I think I can't beat. And that just doesn't happen anymore. I know I can beat these games. And I want a game where it's like, I don't know, man. Like I haven't, I haven't encountered a game like that in a long time. Like we always talk about like Battletoads or something. A World at War, called Duty World at War on Veteran was a fucking impossible.

You know, like it was just impossible. Well, people have done it, but like, I did it. The grenade spam in that game and the monster closets in that game are insane. Yeah, I hate it. And the videos of people on YouTube just running through the stages to hit the next checkpoint, not even fighting anything. It's the funniest shit I've ever seen in my life. It's so hard.

I have OCD in, someone would say severely. But I have to get all the achievements in a game or trophies in a game if I'm playing it, or at least attempt to. And that was one of them. So that was me. I kept trying to run through the checkpoints when I was going for that in World of War. And I never got them because they had, they had online achievements that were messed up.

So I never even got it. But in my head, I was going through it. And it was a nightmare. I hated it. And that was one of the games that pushed me over the edge. That's the last game I think I played for trophies where I'm like, I can't. I can't. Like, I remember like the grenade icon would appear and then like five more grenade icons would appear.

And then like another green. And then everything just exposed. I'm like, what are you supposed to be? You couldn't move. It was so badly programmed in that respect. But I digress. Greg. Number five.

Which is really my number. two. Got it. Okay. Because of your restrictions. Yes. Do you see? Uh-huh.

Lego dimensions the next generation. Whatever comes after May 10th. That's all we know. May 10th, wave 5 comes out. What's wave 6? Is it Lego dimensions 2? What else is happening? We've been promised that our portals will work for three years.

I am ready to see what happens next. Harry Potter. Guarantee. It has to be. You know what I mean? But do they put out another disc or is it just more level packs with Harry Potter? and stuff in there. How are they going to play this one? Very interested at the business model.

You know, and you... You know what I'm here? I'm going to say. Clearly, Ghostbusters is a huge Lego success. I got the firehouse in the room. I got the Ecto one out there. I got the level pack out there. Kevin and I dressed his Ghostbusters and played it. They were in the game, right? What does this mean for this female Ghostbusters group?

We've already seen the little mini figs of them out there. We've seen their Kevin, not our Kevin. They're Kevin riding the little Ecto 2. What does that mean for Lego dimensions? Or any Lego game, period. What does Star Wars mean for Lego's dimensions? I thought when Disney bought up all this stuff, put out Disney Infinity, put Star Wars in Disney Infinity.

I'm like, well, no more Star Wars on Lego ever again. And then here we are, Force Awakens, Lego Game. So what does that mean now for getting them in the Lego Dimensions? Is it possible? Am I allowed to dream that that might happen? You want that BB8? I want BB 88. You said it wrong.

I want Wado. I want Kyle Loren. I want all of my favorite Star Trek guys in this game ready to go and do their thing. And I don't mind if they're just level. packs, that's fine. It's just, what could possibly be coming is the excitement here. You know what I mean? What the fuck could else happen? Because we've had so many good things. It was successful. We saw it do well. What does it mean now? What's the next level pack? I'm excited for the future of Lego Dimensions in 2016. Well, it's, it's Warner Brothers. They have a lot of stuff in there. Yeah, but I mean,

like the thing is, I'm surprised. Like the big thing is, and I saw, if you saw this on Twitter, Neil Druckman was playing Lego Dimensions and said, how do I get uncharted? And I hooked him up with TT games. Will that go anywhere? Who the fuck knows? But uncharted in, in, like, like dimensions? Come the fuck on. You kidding me? That'd be cool. Yeah. I think you'll see Suicide Squad. Something because it's WV or at least

some of the characters, they might not want to use the phrase Suicide Squad on a kids game, but you might see like Harley Quinn. Harley's already in it, not movie version. That's the big thing. Being a big comic book nerd and everything, DC nerd in particular, is that yeah, I hope they do where, all right, cool. And there's also

we already have the DC Universe. There's already a DC portal to get to, but now here's the DC Cinematic Universe and yeah, that's when you can put Aquaman, Batman, all these different guys. All that stuff. Yeah. Armored Batman stuff. Yeah. I will fucking lose my mind. Call on him.

Horizon Zero Dawn. Yep. Is definitely a game. I think this will hit in 2016. I think this is going to be the big fall game on PS4. And what can be said about it? They've been real quiet about it. I think that's good.

We have a little bit more to learn about it. We don't know how the systems work. We don't know how customization works and what the world really looks like and how the flow of the game goes. But the combat that we've seen so far is dynamic. the story is very interesting, a synthesis of a world that has died with a world that is like reverted back to like almost a caveman or stone age technology. But they have like these metal robots walking around. No one can explain what the hell is going on.

It looks awesome. It looks fucking really dope. I think that this is going to be guerrillas really coming out party in terms of like what they're really capable of because I think kill zone is fine. But I think it's, um, it's held them back. I think that there's a lot of stagnation at that studio. I think that there was probably a lot of energy to do something different. They have not made a game that is not kill zone since like NAM 67, which I think came out like 12 years ago. So it's like, you know, let them breathe a little bit

and let them do the thing. I don't think we've seen the last to kill zone, but I think that we are going to see something super interesting from them. And they hired the writer of New Vegas, so it's clearly going to be very quest-based, which I think is very exciting. And I'm interested to see if this game's long. I'm interested to see if this game's dense.

My assumption that this is going to be a very far cry-like game in terms of its size and its scope, which I think is going to be just fine. So it's not going to be like the Witcher or Fallout, which is fine. But, you know, we only saw one portion of the game those little dinosaurs that you have to like kind of get some scrap off of and then you fight that big dinosaur creature. And I saw behind closed doors and they showed it, you know, to everyone in Paris and and an E3 and like they show you just different ways to do that part. And I think that they're really cool.

And I hope the whole game plays like that. So that I think that like so I think Horizon's going to be really big. Like I think that if Horizon turns out the way it should turn out and is what it is in this period of open world games and this period of third person role playing games being very big. This could be the next uncharted in terms of like a huge franchise for them. If it is as good as it seems like it's going to be. And they have to really nail that. And so I think that they should take their time and not hit 2016 if they don't think they're going to be able to do that. But I'm so excited about Horizon.

I think that this is like this is a huge trump card for them over at Sony. Looks fantastic. I love the art style. And I like the fact that they are doing something other than Killzone. Because you get stuck when you get stuck doing the same game for too long and you just feel like you're creatively stifled. at Zipper when I was there we had the studio had been working

on nothing but Socom games for a long time and then we moved on and did MAG and even though MAG wasn't a huge departure from Socom it was different enough to where it felt like a completely completely different game and it was in a lot of respects but it's still military base and theme and shooter but just being able to stretch

your legs in any creative sense whatsoever after working on a franchise so long usually brings such an excitement to it that it's hard to hold it back and that usually gives you really good results in the type of game that you get. So I'm really excited to see what they're going to bring forth. The game looks awesome.

I'm really excited about it too. When I saw that trailer, when they first revealed, I was like, I want that game. I want to play that game. I'm not an open world guy. I'm like, that doesn't look like my type of game, but that looks like my type of game,

which excites me. Because I remember seeing the trail and I was like, this looks fucking cool. And it also doesn't look too big. I'm like, this looks manageable, and I like it. It's going to be interesting to see when you get on that map and get Quest and how it all

works and where it goes, yeah. What's next on your list? I don't know if it qualifies because I don't know if it's coming out to see or not But because you know I don't I don't have not up to day on the release dates as it used to be but Detroit walking database. Yeah, yeah, I used to know all of them before but that's because I looked at them all the time Sure. I would create the list for you guys like a weirdo But Detroit becoming human or become human shit to me looks really cool. I love story-based games. I love

I love games that put you in a character and say now experience it through their eyes. It's because a lot of games nowadays, they put you, like, fall out, and they put you in a world where you're essentially the character and you're changing how everything happens. And this one, in that game, I have some really good storytellers putting you in a very good looking environment telling you to experience this, albeit familiar story,

of the robots versus the humans. But it just looks really intriguing to me. I like the fact that they're, I don't know, they pulled on the right heartstrings from me when I've watched the trailer, the extended trailer that they released last week. I brought my wife on my check, take a look at this. This is that demo we saw of Carr from... Yeah, yeah, forever ago.

Yeah, however long on PS3. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that game to me, I think, especially coming off of Beyond Two Souls, which I thought was not the strongest game compared to heavy rain. Yeah. I would really like to see where that game goes because those guys know what they're doing.

Way back when I reviewed Amacron, the David Bowie game that they worked on. And I was a fan of that. And so they definitely know what they're doing. And I'd like to see what they can do, what they've learned from beyond and what they've also taken from the success of heavy rain and see if they could put those two things together

and come up with... It looks like a great idea. I hope it's a return to form. You know what I mean? Because from the Cara trailer, right? We were all like, that was a cool idea. And they're like, oh, not even maybe it's a game. Maybe it's not.

We don't know what you're like, okay, well, make that game. And then they did and here we are. And I hope it delivers on what we want it to be. It's proof that David, Cage knows how to pull the right emotions, though, because for the original Kara demo, the seven minutes, eight minutes, however long it was,

he did a great job of putting you in this character's shoes and understanding her fear of getting disassembled and realizing that she's alive and coming back again. To me, that seven minutes shows that guy knows what he's doing and that team knows what they're doing. So I have confidence until I'm proven otherwise, and I'm also hoping that it's this year. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think it is. I don't think. I don't know. I don't know that it'll even be next year. I don't know. I don't know that they're quiet about it. I agree with you that they have something to prove. I think Beyond Two Souls by most accounts is a huge disappointment.

Like I think that that game let me down. That game let a lot of people down. It's too confusing. Yeah. And it was kind of nonsensical. And I agree with you in comparison to heavy rain, which I think is one of PS3's greatest games. It was surprising how it didn't resonate with me.

So I think that they know that. And I think they have something to prove. And, you know, I'm excited to see what it plays like. And I'm also excited to see as we've talked about in the past. I do think that, super massive with Untall Dawn out Quantic Dream, Quantic Dream in many ways. And I think that they, if they're smart,

they'll swallow their pride and look at newer ways to make narrative-based, choice-based games like that, that are a little more dynamic and a little more playable. Because I don't think anyone's going to say that Heavy Rain was the most playable game in the world. It was just, it was so good that we overlooked a lot of the mechanical shortcomings of it.

So I think that it'll be, 2017 at the earliest. I don't know, but I do think that they have something to prove. And I like the setting in Detroit. I like, yeah, the machine versus human thing, old, but this game, like X Malacana, the movie, deals exclusively with what is reality and what

is consciousness. And that's, that's, that's not something that is necessarily as played in fiction as just the humans versus the machines, Skynet or Sylons or something like that. It's not, that's not what it seems like it's really about. It seems like it's about consciousness. It's like the Isaac Asimov approach. Yeah, exactly. And I think that that's going to be a super exciting way to explore that story. So I hope it's good. And I will say, by the way, even though it's talking about games this year, until dawn, I love that. game. It was fantastic. I played through it multiple times and watched my wife play through it. It's such a good game. Those guys, and it was horror too, so it really brought me in. And

those guys, I just, I hope that they do something soon with Until Dawn. I would love to see until Dawn to a completely different setting. Not the VR thing. The VR thing, I think, is more of a tech thing. It's not shitty. It's just not what. It's just more of a tech. I don't say, I'm sorry, like a shooter. Because I enjoy, my favorite VR thing I've done so far has been until dawn, Rush of Blood or whatever the hell is called. But I agree with you, they have something special there. They have to capitalize soon. Yeah.

And the game, I think there's a lot of potential there. And I would love to play it. And the VR thing, I think, is cool. It's just not that sort of until dawn thing I'm looking for. Yeah, exactly. It's just spin-off shit. Speaking of spin-off shit, Pokemon Go. Man, I am so anticipating this.

I hope that it's what I want it to be. I don't think it's going to. But I you know as someone that travels a lot It's really exciting someone that has their phone on them all the time Like it's exciting to think about what that game could be and just like trying to capture Pokemon going to all these different places and like seeing Seeing what the actual gameplay of it is I think I'm most excited for Because that could instantly go completely off my list like the moment I actually see some stuff Which supposedly is at GDC in a couple weeks. We'll see that

That really changed stuff but also there's a Pokemon direct coming up on Friday that we're recording the show so By the time this post, like, we'll know what happens. So right now I don't know what happens. I'm hoping that they announce red and blue two or some form of anniversary game. Like it'll be on the 3DS. I'm hoping that it has multiple regions. And it's not just, if they had just announced Pokemon Z or like Pokemon X and Y too or whatever, I'd be so disappointed. And I'm just really like, God damn.

Like that is. But at the same time, it's like I also want them to stop putting resources into the 3DS and stuff. I would just go to the NX and just like, you know, start there and do something. right there. But, uh, Pokemon Go, you know, they're saying 2016 and they, they've said that since the first trailer and they're sticking to it. So I'm hoping that we hear a lot more soon and I'm hoping

that it's as good as I wish it will be. Go for it. Number three for me. I'm going to put No Man Sky on there. I want to know what this is. I want to know how it's going to play out. I want to know when it's coming out. I want to know, is it VR related? As my prediction once said, uh, in general, I just want to see this game come out. It's had so much hype for so long. And I think at E3, this year, past E3, was the one where they came on stage, did the demo.

And I was just like, what the fuck is this game? Stop doing this. And then we got to go behind closed doors and aloft and play it for like 30 minutes and talk to the team about what the game is. And I left that one and be like, okay, like I get it now. And if you can deliver what you're talking about, that's going to be awesome. And that's going to be like I always talk about whether it's VR or not. It's going to be the cool. All right.

I have 30 minutes before I want to go. go to bed 45 minutes. I'm going to jump in here and chill out and just fly through the galaxy and land and see this planet and do this and find that or da-da-da and go off and then keep getting closer and closer to the center. And they keep talking about adding to it, you know, a la Minecraft where, all right, this won't be there when we launch, but down the road, we want to do this. We want to do this. We want to do that. So if it is one of those things, it's an ever-evolving platform in a way, right? That can be really cool. Will it come together? I don't know. Will it, you know what be totally boring? Will it be that, man, I want to play for 30 minutes. I turn it on.

It's like, land on a planet. Everything here's been discovered. Go to the next plane. All right, this is, keep, you know what I mean? Like, okay, everybody's fucking found everything. This sucks. I doubt it, but maybe that's a possibility. Mainly I'm just excited. Based on the little taste they gave me, I do want more. But what it's going to be in the end, I don't know.

I'm looking forward to that game. I think the challenge they're up against is the one that you cited exactly. It's that there's been so much buildup for it for so long that there's already these unrealistic expectations about what this game should be. And it can still end up being a very, very great game. which is not proper English, but it could still end up being incredible and just because it's had so much hype

and build up that it wasn't enough. And that's the problem that you kind of run into with talking about a game for too long as expectations get ahead of reality. I'm wishing those guys the best because I want to play that game too. But from my standpoint as part of a game developer,

I'd be worried that doesn't matter how good it gets that people aren't just going to, that they're going to say it didn't live up to its potential matter what. Yeah. Yeah, it looks good. I agree with you. It's going to be a victim of hype though. Yep, I think. Next up for me, Homefront, the Revolution. We love the original home front in terms of storytelling

in terms of its setting. This game isn't just tangentially, if not even really at all related. That's why it's not home front too. Different studio chaos, obviously made the first one in there. They're not together anymore. Dan Buster is the one that's doing this one in the UK. Game takes place in Philadelphia, which I think is a really cool setting. I can't think of a single game that takes place in Philadelphia.

So I like that setting. It also, I think, is a connection to the American Revolution. Rocky Legends. Rocky Legends. Thank you. That takes place in Philadelphia. That's a good point.

I like the contained open world nature of the game. The original home front was short. The campaign was short. They obviously ran out of time and had a lot of internal dissension when they were making the game. So the campaign was only about five hours long. But there was this moment,

these moments of weird greatness in the game that I think were really cool, like when you're fighting through basically like a Costco. Like I was like, this is kind of funny. like, you know, like, these guys like set up shop here because there's like so much shit here. It makes sense, you know? Or, you know, you're fighting just in the streets or across like a bridge and I don't know. I liked it.

It was hokey and weird. It reminded me a lot of Red Dawn, you know, John Milius was involved in some way with the game. But this particular one takes more of a step-by-step approach in terms of like you're going to take over this part of the city and then you're going to do these side quests and you have to destroy these cameras and these patrols and do all these kinds of things and play like it's a far cry game. like it's a Ubisoft game basically. And I think that's exciting. I think it looks fucking cool. And the thing is that this game has been in development for a long time. It's there's,

you know, Crytech was working on this game and they kind of fell apart. And so who knows what's going to happen. But after what happened with South Park, to stick of truth and all the stuff that happened with THQ and with obsidian making that game and it was in development hell and it was going to be like shit and something it came out and was fucking awesome. You have to kind of keep an open mind that these situations do sometimes work out.

They don't often work out, but they sometimes do. So I'm hoping for the best for this game. and we'll kind of see what happens but I'm super jazzed about that game good pick fourth pick fourth oh that is

Lego Star Wars Force Awakens I love that movie so much I saw it twice I know it has its issues because of how close it is to the first film but I didn't care I enjoyed it my family's chicks

Ew and it's a good game that I can play with my daughters who love Star Wars and they really liked Ray and Finn everywhere I go they're asking me for Ray and Finn stuff. And I like, they won't make Ray stuff.

We have, we have, we have to Disneyland and bought some Ray stuff. But the fact that I can actually play these games with my kids now that they're getting to the age to where they can play the games that I used to play, because way back in the day, I'd play Lego games like crazy. And the first one was Lego Star Wars. The first time they showed it was at Comic-Con 2004, maybe. A long time ago. Yeah, yeah.

And I would play those games religiously, and now that I can bring my kids into it with a movie that we saw multiple times together. And have them be good at it. Yeah. Not just be some dumb kid running off the corner. You help me with this switch. We both need to stand on this. Exactly. But like right now they're playing goat simulator, which is also a really good game.

Yeah. But they're looking for sort of something that they're also familiar with. And Star Wars, when I showed them the trailer that that's coming, it was Legos and Star Wars. They went nuts. and that as a parent made me really excited. Yeah, yeah. You're doing something right. That's one I'm looking forward to.

Fall Fantasy 15. Oh, yes. It's finally happening. Oh, my God. This year. This year. Yes. Yeah.

I mean, that's me. At this point, at this point, I'm just excited to play through it. You know, I have an opinion on it. Like, just see whether I like it or not.

I'm interested in that. I'm interested in knowing what it is. Yeah. Like, the more that I've seen recently of it, the more and more excited I get, and the more I'm like, this looks like what I want from it.

You know, kind of went through a weird phase where it was drifting away from that. And I just wanted to get back to what it originally was and was versus 13, those original trailers. And I'm starting to get the sense that that stuff's going to be in it and it's modern. And it's all these other things. So I'm, you know, thinking it's going to be good. Great. I don't know.

Will it be my favorite Final Fantasy? Probably not. But will it be up there? I hope. I mean, like, you know, full disclosure, we're hosting that reveal event March 30th. Go to Final Fantasyxv.com. Uncovered. Uncovered.

Just Google Final Fantasy 15 event. We're hosting that event and so I mean like that's it. But it's like since you guys have first talked about it, and then I'm driving around in a car with your bros. I can get behind that. And then I watch them like, oh, are these gods coming down? I don't know what's happening. But it's interesting.

You know what I mean? It's awesome to see your excitement with it. The other people's excitement with it. I do think I'm going to try it because I try just about every Final Fantasy. Will I stick with it? Who knows? Yeah. I think there's more of a chance you'll stick with this than ever before.

Because now you know how much I love that underwater soccer game. Oh my God. Don't hit on bliss ball, bro. All right. This ball is life. Sorry, bro. Alterative soccer games have their place. Yeah,

at this point, it's so, it's looming. You know what I mean? It's there and it's like we've been waiting for so long. It's time to put up or shut up is the main thing. Exactly. So I'm like,

all right, cool. Give it to me. Yeah, I think that, I think this might be the opposite of No Man's sky. that I think this game is going to suffer from some I don't say blowback, but a lot of sarcasm,

a lot of sardonic kind of like bullshit, including for me because I'm like, who even cares? You know, like, this game has been developed for so long. I just don't even care anymore. Like, I'm intrigued by what it is, but I don't even know that I care enough to play it, you know, but I will because I have, you know, a morbid curiosity about it.

But there are things about it like that just bother me but I know shouldn't bother me. Like, you know, like, you see Magicitech, armor and I'm like, how dare you fucking invoke that game? Just to just to get me, just to like, hit at people like me and something like that but I was like Matt you know I'm sure like I've said many times I'm sure it's going to be nothing less than good yeah I don't know that it's going to be any more than that happens I well you know for everyone they excited about it then you know I want every game to

be good and there's a lot of people that are yeah you know what I'm interested to see is the sales of persona 5 compared to the sales of Final Fantasy 15 because I think very much so because I I do think that final fans 15 won't necessarily be out sold by persona persona 5 but it's going to be close. Like, I just think all of the goodwill that Square has whittled away over the years with Final Fantasy 13 and Final Fantasy 12 and 32 and 33.

And like, so definitely 12 and definitely 13 and definitely what's going on with versus 13 and 15. And then all of the goodwill that Atlas has scooped up with persona and all the goodwill even that Band Dynamco has scooped up with tails. The situation is somewhat different for Final Fantasy

now for the first time really since they've released a main line game that Final fantasy just isn't the shit anymore, you know? And I think people are just looking at Square Annex's Japanese outlet or operation with a little bit of a more skeptical eye after what they did the Dragon Quest and what they, and what they have done to Final Fantasy. And Dragon Quest 11 seems like it's going to be a return the form. Thank God. And I just want Final Fantasy 16 to just be a return the form. Be what a Final Fantasy game is. Please. We're begging you. I have mixed feelings on this because I have unrealistic expectations for Final Fantasy games in general. My

favorite two games of all time are Final Fantasy Six and Four. Those are the games. that I that really made me fall in love with RPGs it's why I play RPGs I was why I used to review them all the time at IGN because it was my favorite genre but the I was at Tokyo Game Show when they announced Final Fantasy 13 versus you know I was it's been a long time coming to this and now there's it's been so long and my expectations of a Final Fantasy game are so high that I'm curious that if I'm my own enemy in X and my expectations for that game is is it going to live up to it especially since there's a lot of exploration at least

from the trailers that I've seen so far, a lot of walking around. And you've always had that in Final Fantasy, but it always felt like as a means to get somewhere else in between these big story points, but so far a lot of the Final Fantasy 15 trailers have been, we're here, we're just exploring in battle, and I'm not getting a lot of what's actually going on in the game. So I'm also, that also has me a little apprehensive

as to what exactly is the story and what am I doing? And the characters themselves, who's the character I'm really going to latch on to? The blonde kid, probably. The blonde kid? Yeah, like, the characters are slow. That's the thing to me is that, yeah, the game seems like an overcompensation for Final Fantasy 13 in many ways. 13 was very constrained.

It was very linear. It was very... Which one? The first one. First one. Which, and, and, you know, 13 was just, like, so, like, oh, God. Like, I just, and what was such a shame about that was that was that battle system was actually really cool. It has such great things about it.

The paradigm shifting and stuff was cool. I liked that idea, and it was just, like, it was such a waste. Like, that game was just so uneven. And, I just fucking didn't like it. I think that, I think to their credit, I think they've listened and they're overcompeting. Now they made this big open world Final Fantasy 15 game. We had that with Final Fantasy 12 to a degree, but Final Fantasy 12 was much more of like a weird MMO, fake offline MMO feel to it with its battle system and stuff.

And it was a game that was clearly made and produced by two different people, which it was. And, you know, like, so there was like a lot of, you know, the game just kind of changes. And very similar to like, you know, like something like people played about Xeno gears, kind of like just falling off a cliff at the end because they ran out of time. Like similar things happen like where the game just doesn't feel like it's done. So I think that they've taken their time. The game's going to be a full package and I'm interested to see what it's going to be. But it's more out of morbid curiosity.

It's going to be Kingdom Hearts Final Fantasy. You know, like that's what it is. So it's not going to be Final Fantasy. It's going to be a Final Fantasy. Well, thank God they named it a Final Fantasy. Isn't Kingdom Hearts 3 going to be the Kingdom Hearts game? Yeah. Well, that's going to be whatever that comes out.

But this, I mean, when you look at the gameplay of this, it's like that looks, it looks like Kingdom Hearts gameplay. And it seems, I mean, yeah, it's like a little bit more Final Fantasy. ask in terms of the speed and stuff, but like it's way more action RPG than RPG. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. We got a couple more on the list. Where are we at, Greg?

It's my fourth pick now. Okay. Tacoma. Hmm. Everybody knows. A little Fulbright fan boy. I'm afraid to say it. You get your drink Christmas duck.

Just remember it debuted. It was just, you know, a trailer, right? You went into Space Station, Tacoma. It opened up and you're there and then it went away. and it was just like the title in full right. That was all I needed at that moment to say, well, yeah, here we go, game of the year. I'm all set. I'm locked in, great.

But then to hear when Steve came through to talk about it, right? And he's talking about how you land on the space station, you go in there and you have to go through basically like the security cameras, but you're living in them. So you're in one room. You hit play and you see everybody talk and move, but they're all independently moving. So then you rewind it because you saw some guy walk off over there. So you rewind it, hit play, and then follow him to see what he's doing to PC. together the story that way and rewind it and follow the other person over there and like wait there's only five guys here but there's six or whatever on the station i made that number up pause it and run around that you find that person to see what that person's up to you that's like neat mechanic that's a cool way to do it especially you know as much as a sucker as i am for audio diaries like we always talk about with bioshop or with gone home you know what i mean to be in a living breathing one to piece together that world to see the characters interact with each other that way to see the side combos over there it's the same reason i'm excited for like apartment right which i didn't put on my list because i'm not sure if that as a date but apartment i'm super stoked for as well

Because I like getting involved with people's lives and having those slice of life of what's happening. Of course, this one's a little bit more grandiose than others, seeing as how we're up in space on a space station seeing what's happened. With earthlings. No purple people just made up. Hey, look, it's a talking rice crispy from the fucking other galaxy. I don't know. Tacoma, I think, is going to be great. Now, Tacoma, to me, suffers from a different problem than Firewatch did.

Where Firewatch, I want the next game that Campo Santos does because I know they can do better. And with Tacoma, I'm like, can you do it again? Yeah. That's like what I'm interested in is because Godholm is so emotionally resonant in its brevity and in its emotional impact and it's it's just gut punch moments and it's just very, very surprising story. We often lose sight of people who played the game that the game seems like it's a horror game for half of it. Right. And that's what makes it so interesting. Like it's like, what the fuck's going on in this house?

I remember sitting in this very room when we were still at IG playing it on the computer for Game of the Year consideration. I'm like, this is insane. Like, I love this game. And there's a lot of people out there that don't like it. And I don't really care. I mean, I think it's, I think it's so clearly such an amazing game that I'm interested in seeing what Tacoma can do,

if they can do it again, if they can make a game as good or even better than gone home. As opposed to something like Firewatcher, I'm like, you guys have the right idea. But I want to see your next game because I think you can do way better than this. So their expectations are super high. Oh, yeah.

And I'll see if it pans out for them or not. But they have such talent. Steve Gaynor knows guys. and gals have such great talent that it should work out just fine. And I like the idea of it being on a space station. I like the idea, you know, it's another space game. Again, with Earthlings.

Not, hey, everyone, I'm the one-eyed rice crispy. Who wants to buy candy? And all the candy pours out of the vents and everybody's, we don't breathe candy. They'll die. What's your last one, Jeremy? Quantum break. Ooh.

Shit, that one slipped by me. Oh, did I? Yeah, it's okay. I'm going to do two at the end. Sorry. I love Alan Wake. That game sucked up so many hours of my time. So I already know that they're really good at understanding large worlds

and putting a game together with solid mechanics and a great story, but I'm also a sucker for time travel elements. So I just like, I love the fact that they're doing all of these interesting things in that game. And to me, it's, I actually have intentionally been avoiding information about the game. Because it's one of those few titles where I go in and I want to know as little about it as possible. but the concept really grabs me, and I'm a big fan of the developer. So that's a game for me that it's getting really close, too.

That's one of the best things, as they'll be able to play it soon. But I just love the fact that they're actually back out again. I was hoping to be Allen Wake 2, but it's not. But I'll take it. Those guys know what they're doing. The game looks fantastic. They have some really good technology going on.

And it's actually a really nice exclusive for the Xbox 1. They're carrying over. They're a pretty strong, exclusive lineup from winter. and fall into now. So as an Xbox one owner, not everyone that I, in my social circle, has Xbox ones, most everyone's PS4 player.

It's just nice to see and nice to have, nice change of pace. No, I'm stoked to turn on. I'm really interested to see how the whole TV show thing plays out. You know what I mean? With these videos in between gameplay segments of like what it's all going on,

I can't wait. Yeah, I'm interested with the weird backlash that happened. I guess it's not weird. I mean, it's understandable, but the backlash that happened with quantum with it and being announced as a day-and-date

PC game as well. I'm actually happy to see that because games seem to be stranded. I don't mean this with any disrespect, but it's like a few games have been stranded on an Xbox one and that was really a shame for those games like Titanfall and Tomb Raider. That could have sold better if they were more ubiquitous, at least on a, you know, PC or PS4 at the same time and kind of pushed in the same way. I don't know Titanfall did come to PC at the same time, but there was this weird backlash when they announced that kind of late in the game, like, right before the game went gold because the game's already gold that, you know, some people were like really upset about it. And I'm like, does it really matter?

at the end of the day. Like this game, Remedy is such a great developer and this game should be played by as many people as possible. So I'm super interested to see actually the sales disparity

between the platforms and if it proves the point that Microsoft's trying to make, I think, which is that Xbox is going to be more about, more of a platform agnostic kind of approach with their games.

The games they publish, Microsoft Studios, as opposed to, you know, exclusivity with Xbox. Although I also see the other side of it, and I talked about it, you know, about, it's a shame

that it's not an Xbox one exclusive because like what makes people want to buy it then you know without the game so quantum breaks an interesting kind of sample kind of interesting in the wild example of like how is it going to turn out for the platform that it was supposed to be on and how is it going to turn out for this other platform that's going to get the game and how are people going to read how is the game going to resonate

but it's gold early it seems like they had all the time they needed to finish it and I hope for the best for that game too and I think it's an interesting experiment as well in terms of live action versus interactive gameplay our boy Dominic Monaghan ended up in it what a watch him where it's team fat sure on his TV show in March my last one not a popular pick star fox zero i love star fox it's one of my favorite franchises so many shitty games in you know in its lineup but like the games that are good i love and even even something

like star fox assault on game cube 50% of that game utter trash and i hated it 50% of that game when you're actually flying around totally loved it and i'm like this is why i love star fox these characters are archetypes that i enjoy and the gameplay is just arcadian fun It's quick. It's one of the... You don't need to play this game for weeks. It's... You play the game for a weekend and you're done.

And it's been way too long since we've gotten a proper Star Fox game. And, you know, it's unfortunate that this one looks like it's kind of just being shot out on the Wii U and just kind of... It is what it is so far. But I still think that I'm going to really enjoy the enjoyable parts of the game, you know? Yeah. And from playing it at the events, I keep saying this, but like, it's the motion controls that hold it back. I don't really care about the graphics or any of that shit. That means nothing to me.

Like the rest of it screams Star Fox And I'm like, great I'm super sold I just don't want to play it with motion controls So sure I think it's going to be a great weekend game And I'll be like cool And I'm looking forward to that weekend

So Good Yeah My final pick Yeah Is none other Then The legend

Of Zelda NX I mean like come on I love Zelda to begin with. I didn't love your last run on the Wii or whatever, right? And I don't play the remakes or whatever because I played them when they came out and enjoyed them then. Enjoyed a link between worlds, of course, but I'm anxious for a real, real Zelda, a new Zelda. And when you look at this game and how beautiful the world is and, like, is it going to be Skyrim meets Zelda?

I don't know. Probably not, of course. But just an open world to run around and do all these different things. I'm stoked for it. You know what I mean? Like, it's more Zelda. That's what I want. I want a true 3D Zelda with no fucking waggle.

You know what I mean? That looks like what this is going to be from the limited glances we have. But again, that's good. I don't want too much to just fucking get it out and put it on the NX at launch. Yep. X going to give it to you.

Yeah, I don't even include any NX games. It's funny because I just consider Zelda an X game. I don't even think of it as a Wii U games. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, obviously I'm excited for that. Of course. That's going to be such a make or break moment. And we'll see.

We will see. Colin, final two. The first of the last two would be Alien Nation by Housemark. People know, first of all, I'm friends with a lot of the guys at Housemark, so you know, you can take it or leave it, I guess. But from an authentic place, alienation, I've played it. It's fucking fun. I have no doubt it's going to be good.

I'm also excited about Matterfall, but that's like so much further out. That's an awesome name for a game. But Housemark, I said it before. I said it again, is the most underrated developer in the entire industry. And they make nothing but great games. Not good games, not okay games. They make great games. They made Stardust.

They made Rezogun. They made Dead Nation. They made Outland. These are fucking good, good, good, good, very good, great, excellent, fantastic games. Some of the best games that I've played in the last two generations. Resolgan, I still think is PS4's best game. They understand gameplay. And this is why we play games.

They understand what makes you want, like, what makes a game addictive and what makes a game fun to play. They are masters of gameplay. and whether it was in outland with like kind of the polarity kind of system that they had or whether it was with Resilgun with a kind of cylindrical kind of defender feel or whether it was with star dust over the sphere or dead nation with kind of alienation seems most akin to dead nation which is fine because I think dead nation's awesome so definitely got to give a shout to alienation

comes very soon to PS4 and then the fifth game is doom from it doom long in development super got to again kind of a morbid curiosity about it. It is not the it of old, but there's still something really special about the way they release games and the games that they make. And I know that rage was a disappointment to a lot of people. And I was even a little disappointed. And it wasn't quite what I wanted it to be. And I kind of abandoned it as a lot of people did. But Doom is their heritage. I mean, Wolfensonson's really their heritage. Commander Keen's really their heritage. But Doom is their is their heritage. And it looks fun. It looks bloody. It looks old school. It looks super fucking weird. And

that's what Doom's all about. Before we took shooters really seriously, we had games like Doom and games like Quake. And so I think that Doom should turn out fantastic. And I hope that that single player campaign, which is apparently like 10 to 15 hours, that's all I really want to play. I don't care about anything else. I just want to play that.

I want to see what it's like. And, you know, just as kind of like a, more from an academic point of view, like the game has been so in development for, you know, for development for so long and kind of rebooted and restarted and kind of just reworked. I mean, we haven't gotten a proper doom game in 12 years.

So it's time. And we're going to get it soon enough. So I'm super excited about that. My only prayer is that with machine games making, you know, hopefully another Wolfenstein game if they don't move on to quake or something like that. Like, Doom itself is just special. Like, let's just do one more doom game and just leave it alone. And then let Id do its thing.

And none of the guys that are at, you know, there's very few people at Id that you would know anymore. So it's not like it's the same team. But there's still something there's like a Junice Squaw about that team. We'll see how it works out. Kevin, we're going to break that into two at some point. Ladies and gentlemen, that topic brought to you by Squarespace. Building a website can be tough, and even if you do know your way around coding,

creating something that looks good and works well is a time-consuming affair. Whether it's for a business side, a portfolio, a restaurant, or whatever else, in this day and age, you probably need one anyway. Lucky for us, Squarespace makes it easy to build beautiful websites without breaking a sweat. Squarespace provides simple, powerful, and beautiful websites to look professionally designed regardless of skill level, no coding required. Not only to Squarespace provide you with intuitive and easy to use tools to create your website with, they also have state-of-the-art technology powering your site to ensure security and stability.

And you know you can trust the Squarespace for your website needs when millions of people and some of the most respected brands in the world trust in them to. Original site. Kind of Funny.com was first made in Squarespace. I don't know that, Greg. I do know that. Nick Scarpino is like barely functioning as an adult. So the fact that you can build it shows you how easy it is to build it. Rocket League merchandise site, Squarespace.

There you go. What's that site? the Rocket League Rocket League store.com. There you go. Squarespace, build it, however you want to.

Start a trial with no credit card and start building your website today. Did you just try to like on the fly invent a new Squarespace tag on?

Because they don't have tag on. Build it out of you want. Whatever. The favorite thing about Squarespace is that you know, they had build it beautiful and then they had

Square space. You should. You should. Yeah. And now they're like, there's a new thing that like there's no more slogan. Just do it with it.

So yeah, they can take build it however you want to. build it however you want. Whatever. So when you decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure to use the offer code kind of funny to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for kind of funny games.

We thank Squarespace for the support. We do. We do. Next topic of the day, Rocket League. Let's talk about the success of Rocket League. Did you expect this? Not to this level, no. We thought that we would do well,

which is the whole reason that we released on PlayStation Plus was to get it out in front of as many people as possible. But we didn't think it would. ever take off to the level it has now. We're 12 million players in the game. So the fact that we have that many players is far beyond anything we had ever expected. We were hoping that we'd get a few million in our lifetime. 12 million is unbelievable.

And we're getting more players every week. Yeah, remember you were just telling me out there. You were talking about how the game just week to week is outpacing. It's true. It just keeps growing. Yeah. So we had better sales our third week in January than we did the second week in January. and then that beat the week before,

and we didn't even have any sales going on. We did have some sales around the Christmas time, like everybody else. Yeah. And so we didn't quite reach that level, because everyone goes crazy around that time. But in January, we were outpacing ourselves week after week. In November, we were outpacing ourselves week after week. So it's pretty good.

So far this month in February, we're also doing better week after week. So the fact that it's happening eight months after the release of the game is the most encouraging thing about it. because one of the misnomer is about coming out on something like PlayStation Plus is, well, now you're out, you've given your game the millions of people, and now you have no opportunity to make any money. And that was a worry of ours, but we were willing to give up the short-term benefit

of making a bunch of money at first in order to get it in front of as many people's possible because we thought the game could speak for itself. And people start telling their friends, and it would grow from there. I mean, what I think is really cool about it is that it kind of has the same kind of independent vibe that we have where it's like you know we put everything out for free and it's like if you want to support you can and we kind of have that same bet you know where it's like if we put something that's good out there then people are going to latch on to it and believe in it and i think that you've seen that with rocket league where like i was talking about on our game of the year discussion thing where it's

like i definitely have not put enough time into that game like the little i did enjoyed it it's really great but i said that rocket league i think if i had to say from an overall perspective it was the game of the year last year like you couldn't go anywhere without people talking about And that's what's so crazy is you still can't. Yeah. You still can't go anywhere on Twitter, on anybody on Twitch. Somebody's playing that game that we know. Yes, exactly.

I think that's the key thing. It's that our friends and our people, like all of our people, our fans are everybody. Like, they're just playing this game because they enjoy it. It's just fun. It's just good. It's not, you know, how much it cost or was it PlayStation Plus or this? None of that matters. They enjoy the game.

You know what I mean? They want to keep playing the game and they're going to keep playing the game. And I think when people see that, we're talking about advertising. That's the best advertising you have. You know, it's like when you have something that people are talking about and they're genuinely excited about, people are going to get excited about it. Exactly. And that's why you have to stand behind your game. And you have to hope that you reach a point where you're ready to let it go. Because if, first of all, if you ask most game developers, they never want to let their game go because there's always something that they want to add to it. And wait, just need this many more features. And we just need to make sure that you'll never get rid of your game unless you're willing to put it out there.

But you need to get to a point to where you're confident and that you're constant. and your idea is strong enough to where the players that you built it for are ready for it and expect it. So we had to convince ourselves we're at that part. But once we managed to get over that hump, the fact that people have embraced it so much added pressure and

like a responsibility to us to also meet those expectations and keep giving them things. So we take a similar approach that you guys do is we keep releasing content drops. We just put 50 new items in the game three weeks ago just to put in there. Things to hide. We've added an item rarity. So now you can find items like everyone else, but then you have these other items that are harder to find you get by playing.

And we've been adding more modes over time. We added hockey mode in December. We added mutators, which let you change aspects of the game, cube ball, pinball, things like that. And that's just the beginning. So the exciting thing about this year, I thought it'd be too disingenuous for me to list Rocket League is one of my five favorite games to 2016. But since the topic is Rocket League, this year, we're. We have a lot of big plans for the game. And we're going to continue to add new modes, which I think are really going to go over well.

Some of them are things that folks have been asking for for quite a long time. First person shooter mode. No first person shooter mode. At least not yet, not in the first half. If that's something that we can actually get to work properly, we first have to figure it out. And then try it. But the amount of stuff that we have coming, we think it's really going to make people happy because we have modes. We have more content coming.

There is going to be some paid DLC here and there. Sure. We need that because we have, again, we have 12 million players so far. So I need to keep those servers going. We have just three days from today, four days ago, four or five days ago, we broke our concurrent player record. So player accounts are going up, not down. And so we need to keep the servers alive, which is why we're doing paid DLC. About once every quarter or so is when we release it.

But lots of free stuff, because people, you know, they're supporting your game. You need to support them back. And then we want, of course, we want to get money. that's a good portion of the whole point of the business of video games. But you need to be able to be able to charge them at a respectable level to feel like it's a mutual need. They want this content and you're giving it to them regularly. And then the stuff that you want to sell is there just keep the lights on and then they're aware that that's just for fun. None of our DLC is ever advantage either.

It's all just stuff you think looks cool. So we think that's important. With the Xbox release, are you looking at that? Is it as exciting? Do you, does it feel like a whole new kind of like breath for the thing or is it just like another? It does. No, it was a big deal because when we launched on PlayStation, it came out on PlayStation Plus. So we weren't getting the full width of the audience and what they really thought about the game by itself without the PlayStation Plus promotion.

A lot of people download PlayStation Plus games because, well, it's there, I'm going to download it while I can and then maybe get back to it later. So this was really about the game standing on its own. Eight months later, there's no. So now it's not like it's brand new. It's not a game that people have just now started to hear of. It's pretty age in the terms of video games. So it was really interesting for us to be able to see where we stood now compared to where we were and we were a little bit of an unknown quantity in the beginning.

And the fact that we launched very well, we actually, we're still trying to get our numbers back. They weren't all delivered to us by the time this recording has happened. But we have well over 600,000 players on Xbox already and we're recording this on a Thursday and the last time that I had the numbers update was yesterday so it might be even more than that that's a really good start on on that game for full-priced and yeah uh eight months old yeah man so when we're dialing back to when it comes out on on PlayStation Plus which is just its release and the initial release when did you guys realize that maybe this was different than like it was going to beat expectations or something was happening

here the moment the servers went down so we we were talking we were talking to the Sony, as we were leading up to the release about what their expected concurrent players would be. So what was your most successful concurrent player count on a PlayStation Plus game that was multiplayer? What should we expect? And they were giving us, because

of all the agreements, they can never really tell us specific numbers. But they do give us ranges. And so they said, we expect your game to do maybe between 50 and 80,000 concurrence at best. And we expect you to get maybe a couple million downloads.

And that was their estimate. And so we were basing a lot of our server, our server infrastructure and our expectations around those numbers. Because we thought that would likely be our highest number and it'll settle over time. Yeah. And then on day one went by fine because it was one of those releases where we started in Australia

and then we started working our way west towards everything else. And it was rolling and everything seemed fine and we were hitting the 30, 40, 50,000 mark and things looked great. And then sometime in the middle of the night after day one started, I got phone calls and Thomas got phone calls. Thomas is our director of development there and was a big component of Rocket League. And the servers were down. And we started looking at the numbers and we had well over 100,000 people that were now trying to play the game simultaneously.

So much of the fact now that they were hitting our game so much that we couldn't keep the servers up. and they were also hitting our website to the point to where it took that down. So our website was down, the game was down, and our feed, our player feed from our CDN was also down because so many people were unlocking so many achievements or scoring so many things that the feed couldn't keep up, the server couldn't keep up with the game players, our website couldn't keep up with the traffic,

and we were like, what's happening? And then, so we had to feverishly, we rewrote the entire net code of the game in a couple of days. Jeez. And so we had to. Yeah, of course. So we did that, and that was our first super hot fix release that we did. At the same time, we just frantically tried to get as many servers as we could.

And the fact is, a lot of them didn't exist. We had to have them built on top of it. So we're having these servers built and we're adding all this new net code, it was nuts. And a good portion of us at the office probably didn't sleep for about a week and a half. And we were grabbing one, two hours sleep at a time. Thomas tells a story that's absolutely true about how at one point he was just coding so much. his fiance, now wife, was literally feeding him, force feeding him to eat while he was playing because he was so in the zone and so tired, it was the only way that he even remembered that he was supposed to eat.

But it worked out. And that's the thing. Did you guys, I mean, I have to imagine the fear is that you were like, oh my God, servers are down. This is now we're losing our shot, right? How many people try to ping a game, it doesn't work? Fuck this. Yes, that was a concern. But, I mean, our whole company philosophy, and this is what we were doing from the beginning, was just to be as transparent as possible and say,

and we told everyone, we did not expect this many people. You guys are playing the game, which is great, but we weren't prepared to handle it because these numbers are way beyond what we expected. So the only thing we could do is solve them the truth. We're working on as quickly as we can. We're going to have it up as quickly as we can, and here's what we're going to do to make it up to you.

And so we created some free items for everyone that had to go through the problem. They can download and have added to the game. We kept giving them updates as often as we could. and that's really what your player base wants. A big problem with players with communities in general and how they're treated is they're just treated like bouncing boards. Here's an announcement.

Now we'll wait for a couple of weeks and see how you react to our next announcement. And that's what creates a lot of these issues where games launch with problems and then get torn apart because there's no level of transparency or communication. They're just like, well, deal with it. We know that that's a mistake because if we don't have a healthy community

and one that's involved, they're going to move on, just like you said. They're going to make, screw this game. Let's go play something else. So it was very important to us to keep them informed. And we think that that was a big help because people remember that we had survey issues at launch. But one of the big benefits is they know why.

It wasn't like it was some bad code or because we were just broken. Yeah, it wasn't popular. But we fixed it and we let them know and we gave them ETAs. And whenever we do anything wrong, we let them know. We like, you know what, this isn't right. we're going to fix this or we're going to change this and we give them as much heads up as we can as often as we can about things that are coming into the game right now there are so many things going on sometimes we don't have as much heads up as we'd like to because some will patches will come in

hot sure and we're like okay this is going out and we're like oh we need to tell people this is happening tomorrow but that's our whole philosophies tell your community what you're doing and what you want to do and they reciprocate by playing your game telling other friends about the game and they keep supporting you was the plan always you're talking about how big 26 16 is going to be. Did you guys always envision supporting it like this and how you're doing it this long? Or was it? Not this aggressively. Okay. We plan on supporting it, for sure.

We said before the game came out, we have long-term plans to support this game. But because it is so popular and because it's so well-received that we wanted to make sure that we kept people happy. And so what we've been doing is we've been updating a lot more regularly than we were expected, probably about twice as fast. Or I shouldn't say as fast, twice as often as we expected. So originally we were going to have quarterly updates. That was the plan before we blew up. And now we have essentially quarterly paid DLC, which range between $2 and $4. We don't want to overpriced any of this stuff.

And it's all, like I said earlier, it's all just vanity stuff. Like the back of the future? Yeah, like the back of the future. Which is awesome. Thank you. It's all just stuff to make people feel cool. But then in terms of regular updates, quality of life updates, new game modes, we've been doing those two to three times a quarter depending on how aggressive the mode is.

Sure. And that is our plan right. now to at least have one, because I don't want to overpromise. Some of these are a lot of work. At least one major new thing every quarter in addition to the paid DLC. So the most recent thing obviously was the mutators. And now we just launched our season two, which is our competitive thing. We've changed a bunch of ways that are competitive sideworks. And we did item drops. And now we have a couple of game modes that we're working on that are really cool and it'll hurt our whole like check it out if I'd say too much about it.

Of course, of course. But they're really cool. They're totally different than what your people are playing with now. Okay. And, you know, we're excited to let people play. But it's 2016 is going to be a big year for us. That's really cool. I want to back up a little bit in terms of before Rocket League came out.

Uh-huh. What were your expectations in terms of, you knew you had a good game. I mean, obviously the game's good or whatever, but what was it? it's surprising to me having played the game and we were exposed to the game beforehand that people didn't quite... It's just surprising me that people didn't understand that this game was gonna be huge.

I kind of found that it was obvious. Like it was almost self-apparent. You know, like it was just like, this game's gonna be huge. And how did you find, you know, how did you find like evangelical people before and after the game came out? Like how does that kind of helped in terms of,

because we were talking a little bit about GameSpot who seems to be like super evangelicalal. And I'm talking about Big Alas. I'm not talking about people like us, but I'm talking about like big tastemakers out there. Right. Did you anticipate that you were guys who are going to kind of resonate with them too

because it seems like I'm surprised when I see Alex that don't talk about Rock League or don't play it because it's such a phenomenon it's really part of the zeitgeist right now of games. Anticipate no, hope yes.

So what we did is our whole approach was we first we debuted the game on PlayStation at PSX, the first one where we were there and you guys dropped or Colin did you had an engagement but you got to check it out later. Well that's the one when he came back

and like Donum's new game's awesome like what is it again? He's like soccer but with cars that sounds not like a game I want to play. And that's why it didn't necessarily take off, right? It's because when you hear soccer with cars, there's either the people that don't like soccer,

but they just don't think it's their kind of sport, or they don't like cars, or they have an idea of how car games or soccer games currently work, and there's this expectation in their head of how it would most likely work versus how the game actually works. Sure. And so that was one of the big hurdles. Plus, Rocket League is actually a sequel to the first game,

Supersonic, Acrobatics, Rocket, Power Battlecars, and that wasn't something that was commercially well-known. I wonder why. That's why we shortened the name, obviously. But those that did know, the folks in the media, remember that that game only had between high sixes to mid-sevans and most reviews, a couple of eights. But they didn't think that it was this huge game. What they didn't realize, and what they didn't understand is that,

Even though the reviews, the original reviews weren't that strong, it was a different time. It came out in 2008, which you guys were part of the games media then. You know in 2008, PlayStation Network games were not very strongly promoted by anyone. The company didn't have any budget to tell anyone about it. PlayStation Network of games, again, were written off usually as just side games. Twitch and YouTube had not taken off on a huge level yet. It was getting there. Twitch didn't exist.

and gaming culture as a whole was not yet accepted as part of the mainstream like it is now. And so there are a lot of different factors in how that game was perceived versus how that game could now get viral this time. So to answer your question is, what we did is once people, once we had a build that we could actually give people,

which we started doing betas around PS. We started with alphas and betas in the PC, but once we got really close to finishing, we moved it to PS4. We just said, we just told streamers, any streamer who wants to play this game, let us know, we'll send you a code. because to us that was the best way just to try it is to get it in front of these people and let them try it and see what happens.

And we had no money. We couldn't advertise. We couldn't do anything. So our entire marketing campaign was completely based on faith in the game and using the right set of promotional tools outside of ourselves to help get the word out. Yeah, because you came on beyond when we were still there, right? Yeah. And came on and said, if you want this on there, you have to tweet us and let us know. And everybody did.

And then you came back and put people in the beta and like, Yeah, and that was the beginning of understanding there was an audience on PS4. And that we could then, and from that point forward, yeah, it was a buildup to getting to PSX, and the PSX reaction was good, and then we got to the beta, and then we could give it to streamers, and the streamers liked it. And then people were watching her, like, what are this game? And then when we announced that we were coming to PlayStation Plus right after that, people were excited because now they saw this game, they knew what it was about, and it was just this big snowball effect.

Yeah, I mean, that was for us. I remember in our audience when you guys brought it in and streamed with us. It was during the summer, but it was still that thing of like, what is this game? And when you play it, you know, but I think for our audience, watching Colin and I play it and freak out and yell at each other and stuff. There was something to that. I'm like, holy shit, this is awesome.

Yeah. Got some questions from the audience here. Sure. We got Rusty Shackleford. He says, if I dislike soccer and have held out on playing Rocket League this far, what's the deal? How can you sell me on it? I just did.

There you go. I just did. It's fun. The whole point of the game is that we want you to have fun with it no matter how good you are. And whether or not you're winning or losing, you should still have fun. So that's what we think is really interesting about it. It has layers. It's simple to play. It's just go with R2 if you're using a PlayStation 4 controller. And that's really it. And then you have X to jump. But where the game really gets interesting is where you start adding the different layers of what you can do.

We have a boost that lets you go supersonic speed. You can jump and double jump and fly through the air and drive on the walls. Yes, there's blocking And there's none of the extraneous rules That normal soccer has where there's not off sides There are penalties It's just simple but the more you play it the more you realize that it's has a lot of layers to it And because we don't have any animations in the game and it's completely physics based

You're not waiting for certain behaviors to unfold before you do And whatever you're doing is your skill level being reflected in the game So speaking on kind of like the layers of that Wyatt wants to know what other oh I'm sorry What do you see Rocket League and its involvement with e-sports? Will you guys sponsor any of your own events? We have really aggressive. 2016 is going to be a big year because it is a year that we're going to start embracing e-sports.

We're going to have some announcements about that very, very soon. We're pretty excited about it. We're not throwing around a million dollars like the Halo guys do. We can't do that yet. Yeah. But we do have some very aggressive plans. We have some really cool things that we. We can't reveal this yet, but as soon as we can, we're going to spill the beans.

It is going to be very soon that we start talking about these things, but we need to get through the next couple of weeks first than a couple of, shall we say, crossing the T's and dotting the eyes sort of thing. That's awesome. I mean, it makes sense because, I mean, that's the big thing when you see. Like, I was talking about, you know, I was at a developer the other day. They were ending and doing a tournament. GameSpot does their tournament.

I remember when we were at RTX, what a big deal that tournament was. And when Freddie Wong heard about it, he demanded to be in it and stuff like that. Yeah. People love playing. It's crazy, man. And there's such a strata between, I'm trying to have fun and then I'm amazing at this. I'm on, you know, I'm, you know, I miss the weekend to be good at Rocket League.

I haven't had a chance to invest to ever get good again. But like, I've still on the Rocket League, read it because I love watching all the gifts of people with these insane shots and blocks and all these other things. And the thing that stands out about that is that some of these things that they do, we never even anticipated that would be possible. Yeah. That's one of the coolest things about the game is seeing people discover new elements

to the title that we didn't even think was there. And watching play styles evolve over time. In the beginning, it was people was rushing the ball and trying to score. And then people started realizing that they could do aerials. And so you saw aerial play take over. And then turtling, which is where you're on your back. That sort of took over when people started realizing how they could do that. And now you're seeing a trend towards freestyling where people are just doing crazy things in the air before scoring.

And so it's really interesting to see to watch the audience evolve and the skill of evolve and what's taking, what sort of form is overtaking on the competitive scene and the casual scene because it's also different on both sides. Yeah, for sure. Final thing comes from Dubinator. He says, no question, just to thank you for helping make Rocket League. The game is awesome. Thank you.

Our pleasure. And I have a quick... One of the things I'm interested in, and I talked about to say a little bit, and people have pointed me in right directions, but people have developed into goal tenders in the game, right? Like, people play a goal in the game, which I think is so funny because it's so glamorous yet, like, so essential.

It's incredibly important. And then that's sort of what's, that's one of the elements of the game that is truly organic about it, is that the roles aren't assigned. We're not, we don't tell people you're a goalie and you're forward and you're a wingman. We don't do anything like that. We're just play and you figure it out. And the teams over time have now realized how important certain positions are and do it themselves. And they, and different teams have different styles. And, but what's really great about is that you now have this whole subset of goaltending players that do things that,

are absolutely unbelievable in terms of how they can get to the ball at the last second and they can block it with just the butt end of their car. I mean, some of these things are really spectacular and our office watches it together whenever there's like a big tournament streaming

and we freak out about it because we ourselves don't even anticipate some of the things that are going on in the game. So it's really cool watching the players just come up with these new techniques and there was a point where we would do developers play against top players and we would hold our own

and win 50% of the time. We always lose now. They're so good. That's a good sign. All right. Final topic of the day. Leaving the industry side to go to the game side. You're in a pretty unique position in that you're at IGN for so long.

How long are you at IGAM? Ten years. My God. Ten years. I was there. 99 to 2009. Before they had televisions. Drop in the water.

Drop in the bucket. I mean, just talk about it. Like, how is it? And like, what are the major difference? Do you miss it? I miss the people. So my last day at IGN was very hard on me, not because I was leaving the job, but because I was leaving you and Colin and Chris Roper and Hillary Goldstein and Fran Mirabella and

Matt Casemisina and all those other guys that we had worked with for so long because it felt like a true family. And that's the hardest part. I actually prefer this side of the job much more because I get to enjoy games as an observer. I don't know a whole bunch of things about games before they can. come out, which is took away from things like RPGs, which I love to play in horror games and story-based games. And now I can just start from the beginning. I can choose how involved I am in the trailers and the unveiling of them. So I actually prefer it quite a bit. And I have a direct

hand in how games are made, which is as someone who likes to write and likes to create is a really good feeling. When you're, here's evidence of something I have done and other people are enjoying it on multiple levels, be it game design or a story or just the overall direction of certain elements of the game. I mean, those are all different things that I've been involved with since I left. What are you worth pointing out, you wrote Unit 13. I did. Yeah, for Vita.

I did. And that was a great experience for me because I learned a lot about how, just how much work goes into a story-based game and how many different variables you have to account for. And there were 20,000 lines of dialogue for that game. And we used, like, 500. but it's okay we learned a lot in the process and we had all of these things

that choose from and there was a lot involved and being able to be there for the VO recording and working with the director it was a fantastic experience and I got to meet lots of people involved in the Hollywood industry

that were there that were also giving us pointers on how to record good VO and make good dialogue and so I was really happy every little element of each game that I work on

has top me something new, which is I think the sign of a good industry to be a part of, or no matter what you're doing, you're always learning something. Agreed. Yeah. Got a couple questions from the good old audience here. David Hannah wants to know, how much beyond did you listen to after you left IGN? Not as much as I wanted to.

You son of a bitch. I didn't listen to every episode. I did listen to some. If my phone is over there, you can see it's on my subscription list. The real problem is time. And I would just get so involved in working that a lot of, of the stuff I used to do or watch watch or listen to regularly and just went to the wayside. But I would, I would drop in and listen to these guys semi regularly. I'd say maybe once every

two or three weeks. It's the same thing for us now. I mean, I was talking about it when I, when we were, for us, it was the commute. When we worked in Brisbane, you know, IGN before it moved downtown and I had a huge commute. I listened to every IGN podcast. And granted, I was on the majority of them. But I mean, like, if I wasn't on it, I would listen to it. Right. So I like, I was up on NBC and everything else. You know what I mean? And then when we moved downtown, the commute got halved. Then I didn't feel like listening to a podcast over. eight trips or something. You know what I mean?

Exactly. And then now we're just so busy. Yeah, I don't have a chance to listen to any of our friends. Yeah. And that's the unfortunate downside of just being busy.

Keep it on the topic of Beyond. Jose Lewis says, what did you expect from Greg from when Greg became the anchor in beyond and did the expectation become reality? I knew we do a great job. So we had launched podcasts beyond. And nobody else wanted to do a podcast but us.

If you remember, I remember that it was the stupidest idea when you said it. We're going to do a podcast for every channel. If you're a little channel teams. And I'm like, that is so dumb. We have Game Scoop. Why are we taking away from Game Scoop? What are you doing?

It worked out, though. It did. It panned out quite well. No, no, no, no, no. But nobody wanted to do it. And so in the beginning, it was towel forcing everyone to do it. And then I had to force everyone to do it. But I thought that at the beginning that it would be a fun way for us to communicate

with our fans in a way that we couldn't before. Because at that time, in 2007, is that what it was? Yeah, yeah. 2007 podcasts were just, they were a new thing. They weren't used that often. And so many people thought they were a waste of time. They did. And our video output was nowhere near as what it is on any website now.

It was a big production. It took days and days and days for one video to come out. Sorensen squeeze overnight. Exactly. The shittiest trailers up. They made that giant video processing machine in the corner. that cost tens of thousands of dollars that took forever

and it would always go down. But it was an opportunity for us. It was a nice way for us to reach out and we were looking at teams like the Nintendo team, Matt, and at the time it was Matt and Bozon and Craig Harris and that was it. I don't think Damon had swung over yet.

No, no. He was still on the news. And they had a really good connection with their fans because they would just, at the time, they would find other ways to communicate them outside of our forums. and our PlayStation fans were just as interested, and so it was a really good opportunity for us.

And the first episode was myself, Greg, Chris Roper, and Jeff Haynes. And I knew the second that we were in the groove, which didn't take long because we worked together all the time, but it felt good. It felt like a good episode that Greg would do very well and that all of us would do a pretty good job of explaining what we need to do. Greg was obviously the standout because he was, was he is a lot more personable than any of the other folks on the show.

We were more about like getting the work done and some of us didn't want to be there. But I always talk about it, right? Well, the reason I'm Greg Miller, or at least the Greg Miller and I've had the success I've had, right? Is that I was injected into IG and right as the old guard was starting to burn out. Yeah. And there was that thing where, you know, you know, Colin and Clements and everybody else followed by four months, five months later, you know what I mean? But I was that tip of the sword where Damon was there and he kind of needed a cohort because

He wanted to do all this video and podcasty stuff, but he had lost David, he had lost Kathleen, all these people. And then I got there and I was like, this is all I've ever wanted to do. I'll do everything. And I was doing Smackdown videos at 2 in the morning on Friday nights and stuff. You know what I mean? And it was the thing of like, yeah,

when you put me in front of the microphone, I was the only person in that room, right, who had literally been on the outside two months before listening to podcasts and knew what they meant and what I liked about podcast. And also you had it built in that you were just somebody who was interesting. The reason I hired Greg, and you were bringing it up earlier in the show that we did this morning, and that's that, you know, we had so many applications coming through.

I would read them all. I would read every application they got because whoever I was going to hire to the editorial team was very important, especially when they were working directly on my team where the time was just the PlayStation team. And Greg's was the only application that stood out to me as being interesting. It made me laugh out loud for real when I was reading his newspaper articles that he submitted to me, and I checked out his blog that he had, that he had going in the newspaper. And that's why his, I didn't send any of the email until much later after you sent the document because I was reading all of them.

And that was when I finally got around to yours. I think I sent it to like 11 at night or midnight or whatever it was. I responded in like 15 minutes. Man, and that's what I always talk about with this story, right? Is that, you know, on my Gmail, which is the email I started right after I left Missou. So I'm sure there's a whole bunch of the old Missou account I had. But on my Gmail at the time, this was my 13th application to IG. I always talk about, right?

In the first 12, I didn't even get the courtesy of a rejection letter because everybody was just overwhelmed. That was mine for every job at IGN, right? And then, yeah, there was yours where you contacted me at 11 or 9 o'clock aren't, or what, it was even later, whatever, 11 o'clock my time. And I responded, we did the interview the next day at lunch and then I was hired on the road the next, that day at 6 p.m. So it was like my life, my dreams all came true overnight. And I was talk about, like, in the interview with you and Roper, I remember, and I'm pacing in the basement of the newspaper talking to you or whatever. There was a moment where I did the, well, yeah, you know what I've been doing on my blog is, on the blog for the thing.

And you said, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I heard you guys shuffle papers. And you're like, we have them in front of us. And I was like, damn. Like, that's awesome. I never thought they would have read them or anything like that. And then do you remember the question? I don't.

The question was, yeah, we have them in front of us. Tell us, is this a character you do or is this really you? And I was like, sirs, that is the most me I do at this place. Because everything else was, I'm like trying to be stoic and cover whatever I'm covering for the newspaper. but the column and the blogs were my chance to be me. Instead to get out there and have you read them already, I mean, that blew my mind. Well, it showed. And you can tell talent when you read it.

And that's part of what just got him in the door and why he took off and why he did a good job of Beyond. Because once he was part of the team, you know, energy and enthusiasm is infectious, too. Other people just now want to get involved. I want to be as excited as you are and talk about these things. And so once that was within your hands and within your hands, knowing you guys as I do, do, I knew it would be fine. Well, the funny thing, too, and I don't know if you recognize it because I don't know about, I mean, I thank you a lot, obviously, I hope.

But, like, one of the reasons I think for sure why Beyond was so successful, for sure, I think, which then translate to why we're so successful, is because when you started beyond and you, that was, because you started and then had, you immediately transcended and went up and Roper took over. Yeah. But the one thing you did is like, it's on everybody's calendar at this time. We are doing this. You don't miss this.

And all the other channels were, ah, fuck, we'll get to when we get to it. And there's been three weeks without it. three red lights or whatever, you know what I mean, and all this other stuff, whereas like Beyond was there consistently, da-da-da, and that's why Beyond grew

and grew and grew until it was the number one podcast for IGN, right? Because it was, you knew it was going to be there. And granted, it was like easy in a way because once you say that and you do that,

you know what I mean? And Game Scoop couldn't be that because Dame was trying to get herd cats together to go to do that, you know what I mean, and then the other channels all had their own thing.

But like, you establish that, which then, you know, we carried over for Beyond. When I took over, I carried over for Beyond. And then it's something we do here, right? We're like, Collin and Girl Live is this, this day.

And like the days at least, we sometimes have to be more malleable. There's only five of us. The moral of the story for everyone listening is if you create a schedule and stick to it, you will become famous. Exactly. You'll become successful. Very true. I mean, I honestly, I've seen that time and time again. Consistency, right?

Yeah. I mean, that was the thing of like, you know, I was talk about it with, even with Beyond. When Roper left or in it, I took over and it was, you know, me, Clements, and Colin, I was talk about it. People always talk about like, oh, you guys were so great on beyond and this and the other moment. I'm like, yeah, but if you remember, Roper leaves in the one teens, one tens, and it wasn't until 150, where I was like, here's the logo, this is the show, we have a vibe. And then it felt, that's when it felt like everything was clicked into place. Because it was weird to go from being able to be the guy who just screams beyond and sings a song at the end of the show to having to drive it and make sure it all worked.

So when you were, this is also fascinating to me. When you were making this, like this is in such a different time when, you know, podcasts weren't what they are now. And like they weren't monetizable. Like it's not like they were making money. I mean, even when we were like leaving IGN, it's not like that was ever really figured out.

And like, how does, how do these audio podcasts make money? What was the goal? Like were you, you were talking about like, you know, getting with the community and like,

yeah, talk to them. But like, why were you like, all right, we need to make this a consistency thing? Because like, that was still kind of a new idea then.

Now it's a little obvious. But back then, it's like, why did you have that in your head of like, we need to not fuck this up. Well, the Tals, Tau, who's the now the VP of Con, he was then too. So yeah, Tau who's the VP of games content.

He's some super VP. I don't even know what the hell he does over there anymore. His whole initiative was he wanted to have podcasts because they, you know, there was an opportunity for us to get into a space that not a lot of people were in from a very, a very smart way to approach it. And then each individual team had its own reasons

why it wanted to or didn't want to do it. The reason I wanted to do ours in particular, the PlayStation stuff is because it was really a good outlet for us to talk to our to our readers at because there weren't really viewers. There were videos are few and far between in a way that we couldn't normally do. And it was a really nice kind of outlet. We would just sit and talk about stuff as opposed to having to write a structured article. And even though our articles were already conversational in tone, it's much different when you're

trying to remember, this is forever. People are reading this. This is representing the site. And this is the official review or official preview or whatever. Whereas here we were just sitting in a room, enjoy. the company that we have and the rapport that we have on a day-to-day basis, talking about stuff that we've been wanting to talk about all week long. And so it was really a combination of just being able to talk to the readers

and just an outlet for each other, just to be able to... Here's what's going on. What do you really think about it? Because up until that point, you don't really have time to discuss it outside of, what do you think they're going to announce? I don't know. Maybe it's a new uncharted, which at the time really wasn't even a thing. Maybe it was a new resistance or maybe it's new ratchet and clank or Jack and Daxter. So it really depended. It was a great way to connect.

I mean, because you figure, like, at that time, IGN did not have comments on articles. You know what I mean? There was the mailbag, so maybe you're able to talk to five readers or whatever a day or whatever, you know what I mean? Or then even the boards, we, you know, we see it already on our kind of funny.com slash forum where, you know, you know, you go in to do this, right? And it's like, we know how hard it is to get somebody to click on a link. You know what I mean? To get something to go into IGN's boards at the time, sign up for them, have a conversation with you about what's happening in PlayStation. Yeah.

It didn't work out that way. And I remember, I remember when it was like, yeah, you published an article. review and you took the link and you went to the boards and you put push it into the boards yourself yeah hey this is up go watch you know go look at it's like when we i'll never forget when we started beyond and like how crazy it was when like the kid wrote in he's like can i be the official fencer of podcast beyond and we're like i guess so and then jeff had a whole like the official beyond athletes and somebody wanted to be the beyond runner and this that of the other and some girl sent in a photo of her butt she wants to be official booty of podcast beyond we're like all right

whatever it was a clothes it was a clothes but who wants to be all clothes bunch are good butts who wants to be the official booty of the kind of funny games cast. Let me know. The magic booty of podcast Beyond you met. She was at Kind of Funny Live. She was there. The magic booty. Julia, I believe her name.

Julia. My God, I love this. I love everything about this. I nominate Kevin. Just saying. Oh, come on. I don't want to see that. So, I mean, what else is there?

I mean, do you have any, Colin, do you have any stories? Any questions about this? Oh, Jeremy does the stories. This is now the origin of beyond. Is the topic. Oh, okay, okay. No, I mean, you know, I didn't, I wasn't on beyond until like the 60s, I guess.

And then I wasn't regular until right before 100. So like I wasn't there and, you know, I was doing different things in the beginning. It was really Roper and Greg that that brought me in. But my history with Jeremy is just different because I've known Jeremy for 14 years almost. So and Jeremy was like my first contact really at IGN that I really got to like talk to and got to know. I met him for the first time, my first internship in 2003, two offices ago. So we were on Bayshore Boulevard, right? Yeah.

And so I was like, I was in that old, old office. And Jeremy was, Jeremy kind of, I don't know, I don't know why. I never really asked, I don't know what to know, maybe want to know why, but kind of took me under his winging away and taught me how to write better and introduced me to like a different kind of world and a different way of looking at games. And one of the things I respected about Jeremy a lot was, which I think people kind of look at me in the same vein. And I don't know. I'm definitely not as knowledgeable. But Jeremy really knows games. Like, Jeremy has like an encyclopedic knowledge of games.

And I always really respected that because I feel like I'm the same way with certain platforms and certain genres. So it was always just impressive to talk to him about games. And we have kind of similar interest in games too. So I don't know. I just kind of had like always a brotherly love for Jeremy. And it was definitely, you know, kind of really, you know, he was the first editor-in-chief ever worked under. I guess Tal kind of was editor-in-chief, right, at that time. But you were really the first guy that, like, really, that was kind of brief.

And then you took over and you took an interest in me. And I definitely started to climb. And I remember when you left. And I remember how sad I was when you left. Because I kind of just, I trusted you. And you just kind of gave me opportunities. I wrote my first preview for you. I wrote my first, you know, as an intern, I wrote my first review for you.

And which I think was, God. Mega Man Collection. Yeah, Mega Man Collection. I think was the first review. And I think Samurai, Warriors or something was like the first preview or something like that. I don't know. Or no, Siberia too.

Siberia. Wow. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. And so, I don't know. Jeremy just gave me a lot of my first opportunities. And so, like, being on Beyond, even though we were never on the show together much,

was before you left, was kind of like, it seemed fitting, you know, in a way for the, kind of the legacy. Yeah. And it's amazing that, you know, I was 18 when I met Jeremy and I'm, I'm 31 now. So it's been a long time. God. Well, thank you. It's really weird to hear myself being talked about like that.

It's not, I have so many stories and it's like, as we go through all this, like, he's like, you're dead. You're right there. I'm like, is this like six cents? No, it's cool, though, because, you know, I obviously started IGN, like, way, way later. Like, I started in 2010, I think. When did you leave? 2009.

Yeah. So I started it was 2010 or 11 that I like was fully in. So I was definitely after like you're one of those names. It's just like everyone talks about you as if you're still there. You know what I mean? And I always thought about. But was what's always been interesting to me about IGN and anybody that is, you know, familiar with the people that work there or, you know, both from an audience perspective or actual personal level. Like it, IGN is this weird thing of it is a family. And it is like different different little sex and groups that are kind of. have this like camaraderie together and like they grow together and it definitely it comes in waves, you know, and there's like the old guard, there's the midguard, there's the whatever. And it's like it was always interesting to me to hear, to come in and kind of be, be there for the end of the like, as far as I'm concerned, second era, which is like the the you guys kind of, you know, getting in being the excited dudes. Sure, sure, sure. I come in when you guys are the grumpy old men. Sure. You know. And where are the old guard purring out.

Exactly. Yeah. And, uh, and it was, it was such a different thing where, you know, the, I look around and like me specifically and everyone has different, you know, perspectives on the whole thing. But I think that I came in at the perfect time as a video producer because that was when video was really ramping up. It went from, you know, not being a thing to just every like week or whatever. They're being a video to, oh, hey, there's a lot of videos, but how are we doing this? All of a sudden, I was the 12th member of the video team. And in the year for me starting, there was 30 people on the video team. So it just like exploded.

That's crazy. And I feel like that was the shift that you see from the writing to the podcast to then the video. And we kind of had that like camaraderie and like brother ship. And like Eric Hart was the dude that I look at the way you talk about him where I'll never forget the phone calls I had with him. I'm like pacing back and forth like, oh my God, like this is happening. He's impressed with the things that he's watched the videos I've made and he likes them. This is insane. And it's just it's really cool to see how it's a legacy thing.

You know what I mean? And like there are people that are always kind of reaching out to the next generation and that it is something that's been instilled somewhere along the line that it just keeps happening. And it's like you did something. You know what I mean? Like you definitely did did something. It's like you and a lot of the original OG motherfuckers like you did something right and you adapted as much as you could. And then when it was time when you're like, I have no more room to adapt. You guys are going to adapt.

You pick the right people and it just kept going. So I'm impressed. I have to say. Well, just the big advantage that you guys have also when you talk about legacy is now because of your best friends and everything else that you, just the amount of people you speak to, the legacy that you guys are now set up to have are the people that watch the show. And so that's a really cool thing because now it's not just about people working with you directly. It's all the indirect influences that you have and the people that listen to what you have to say and then might take that to become something else and remember that you guys are the ones to help them out. So that's one thing that's really cool about also about how the legacy of just what started at IGN way back when there was just a couple of guys in a basement trying to leave Imagine Games when it was a publication and where it's going in the future and what your viewers are going to do. That's kind of cool.

And I'd be interesting to see what the kind of funny people, the audience, what is going to come of them and what they're going to do. and now cite you guys as being the ones that helped inspire and influence them. I just, I'm just glad that I had some kind of positive impact on you guys. I remember my time there as being very little sleep. Yep. And writing a lot of reviews and eating a lot of chicken wings. That's about the whole thing.

I remember. So overall good time. That day one with you as my boss, I remember set the tempo of like, you're like, all right, cool. When you get here, like, I'll check in with you. And I got there and Roper came down. He's like, times and meetings. I'll walk you around.

And Robert just walked around flipping his lighter And this is that And this is that And he's like Put your bag down Here's a notebook and pen you of a demo And he showed me in the demo room And it was people showing me a new controller

And in the middle of it comes in He's like we already covered this You don't need to worry about it I was like all right And I remember it was gonna be And I'm like so am I gonna talk to Jeremy Because you're the only guy I'm gonna talk to Jeremy

And Robert's like yeah He'll be out of meetings eventually It'll take you to lunch No big deal I'm like all right cool And at like 230 You finally showed up How's the first day

I'm like I'm hungry That's so funny Because again The legacy thing for me first day I come in and I just get a call that said I got a voicemail that just said hey report to Fran Marabella I'm like all right cool I go in I start asking like oh yeah just wait here whatever and I'm like every woman that walks by I'm just like is this friend eventually Eric Hart comes up he's like Tim I'm like yeah he's like

Fran ain't coming I'm like first off friends a man second off like he is just elusive and yeah you'll meet him one day yeah oh man Yeah, I think the one cool thing that I walked away from, I walked away with a lot of cool things for Ryan Jen, because we wouldn't be here without them and the opportunities that were given to us by a lot of people there. But the legacy of IGM PlayStation specifically is I think what drives through at least the three of us

and certain other people. So like the legacy of Jeremy and kind of the old guard through Roper and then you and then Jeff and Clements and me, the site basically died with me in terms of it being the way it used to. The old school PlayStation team drive. Like the way like when we left, that whole mentality is over, as far as I can tell, which is fine. the way the internet goes, but it's interesting that that's our through line with each other.

Sure. And also, I think, you know, obviously I always look at the podcast beyond we did as like kind of the golden era of the show, just in a selfish way because it was ours. You know, like the way we did our show, which we now, yes, I love you. It's not to say the show is any less valid now or any less popular as it isn't. But like, I look at back on those things. And I'm like, there are things that bind us, the hard work that, like, it's like building a foundation and then building on top of it, four by four or whatever to wear.

You know, it still exists. It always exists in perpetuity. But it just, it really did live and die with only like, seven or eight of us. Then that's it. And we're the only ones that can ever understand that that particular part of the channel.

And I'm so proud of, you know, you talk about the old school IGN64 and all that kind of stuff was really, Nintendo was really, with CASA, really was what made IGM popular.

But by the time we were done, IGM PlayStation was, we surpassed IGN Nintendo and became really the, at the apex of what the site was known for. And I'm super, super, and I'm super fucking proud.

And I'm super fucking proud. of that because that came through a lot of honest hard work and just honesty and candor and knowledge and all those kinds of things. So I always look back at that era and being like, we like really did, you know, by the time Roper left and it was me, Greg and Clements and Jeff had been gone as well when you were gone. Like we really did run, we really did run that ball down the defense's fucking throat in terms of, you know, in terms of like, right, because we really really did. Like I'm so proud of like what we did. Like we really, really fucking did. A month in like, you know, Dunham's like thing to me at work was like, all right, cool. Now you need to get a

exclusive a week. And I was like, oh shit, fuck. You know what I mean? And I remember thinking that was going to be hard. And then I'd call somebody like, you have a new PSP game. Can I get exclusive screens? Like, yeah, how many you want? I'm like, oh, as many you still get? You know what I mean? But like, it was that thing where it's like, because back in the day, back in our day, it was right, like, PlayStation team versus Nintendo versus Xbox. And you did compete for traffic and who was doing better.

Absolutely. And who had the most exclusives. And that was the thing is like you imparted that, you and Roper already had that. You imparted into me. I imparted in Colin. and Clements was already imparted with that. You know what I mean? It's like, so even when everybody else is like,

that's not who we are anymore. Like the fuck we aren't. How many goddamn exclusives can we get this week? Yeah, that was the thing is that we, they wanted us to let go for a long time, I think, and we just wouldn't. And I think that,

I think with a wink and a nod, it kind of was like for the best for everyone. Sure. I think they realized, you know, who the hell knows really, but to me, it's like, you know,

we, to me, I was like, no. Like, by the time Grega became one woman and I'll say, this is mine. Like,

like I we built this like no one else helped us do this you know and so like I'm not letting this go especially with IG and Vita which like we like we really did build by ourselves like no one at Vita coverage stopped like we really did become the hub for Vita only a few months after they'd been came out because everyone was like I fuck it and and we were like no no way we're reviewing every game Star drone extreme reviewed you know I mean yeah like I had to fucking do off cam video goddamn god damn it was the worst it was the goddamn worst it was the goddamn worst I don't forget you fucking sitting there with your goddamn feet up on the thing playing persona and I'm just like great.

And I finish and you're like, all right, time to move out. I'm like, no, no, I got Stamers persona. I want to show you some other cool stuff. But a lot of it, but a lot of it, a lot of it came from a hard work and a lot of pride, but it also came from a lot of like, well, I don't want this to die with me. Legacy. There was a legacy. Like this was given to me and I don't want this to die with me.

I don't care how the things are changing. Like we still dominate traffic and like I still take ownership over this stuff, whether or not you want me to or not. Like I'm going to. Yeah. So it's, but that's the funny thing. I mean, like, with Dunham here in this, you know,

legacy in this line we have right here is that, you know, even though IGN changed how they ran teams or whatever, like I always felt like, you know, when it, for wrestling, you'd pass that torch to me, right? For better or worse, because I was, I did a talk recently at a developer about internet hate and I looked up and like, sure enough, the boards were still like, it was never been the same since Makazela.

I was like, oh, God, you shell-shocked veterans here. But it was the same with PlayStation. Where I came in as that young guy, and you totally, like, introduced me to every, there and then like I grew you know went up with those people like that was always the thing by the time I got there and other people like man how are you getting exclusives on this that and the other I'm like well I've been with the I remember when me and this PR girl were at the bottom and now she's working on uncharted three so it's like of course they're gonna want you know we help each other

out but even when that change or whatever like that's a that PlayStation relationship is still a relationship we have because of that you know what I mean like it just like the way we try to make the trains run on time here and there's always gonna be a fucking podcast probably not always going to be a Conorrague live, obviously, because that's a different kind of show and a different thing. But in terms of the podcasts are always going to be there when we say they're going to be there, right? PSI Love You XOXO is going to be there at 9 a.m.

or live on Twitch, but there's going to be, we're going to tell you why and what's happening, right? And it's the same thing with like those relationships came with me. And I still have that connection with, you know, PlayStation. You know, that was the big thing when we were leaving, right? Like, well, you guys are going to have the same access? And like, you know, PlayStation gave us to 20th anniversary PlayStation 4s, right? Because we are the PlayStation guys.

we are that PlayStation voice. And that was what the other refreshing thing was, and what I like so much about working now is like when we left and we were worried about the other companies, Xbox and Nintendo came to us. Everybody came to us because they knew that now, for them, like this weird thing had changed because IGN was so siloed in terms of what you do or who you talk to.

Now everyone could talk to us about getting coverage. You know what I mean? It's because we have this positive image in the industry because of the work ethic instilled by you, if that makes sense. Thank you. But you know the thing that sends that more, I think, to people is that you care. that you actually care about covering the product.

And that's the key that a lot of sites and personalities and everyone who's involved in trying to get some kind of attention doesn't realize. Really the key is just caring about what you're talking about and caring about the audience that you're speaking to. That's really the secret ingredient. And the thing is, is that you can't just make it appear that way. It has to be legitimate because they'll see right through it otherwise.

And that has always been the biggest strength, especially their version of Beyond, is that you guys have, always generally cared about your audience and about what you're talking about. And I think that that is the that is the reason that you guys are on the number one PlayStation podcast. And that's the reason why you guys have found success. It's not because of any legacy that I might have instilled with you, maybe a little bit in just the idea of beating into you, the idea of covering something. But it's been about you guys as a team understanding what it is that you need to do and doing what you love to do and letting other people know how much you love it and letting them love it with you.

That's the real key, I think. Definitely. That's a great place to stop. Ladies and gentlemen, that topic brought to you by Luke Crate. Luke Crate is a monthly subscription box service for epic geek and gamer items in pop culture gear for less than $20 a month. You get 48 items that include licensed gear, apparel collectibles, unique one of a kind items, and more. Make sure to head to lukerate.com slash KF games and entercode KF games to save $3 on any new subscription. Luke Crate's more than just a subscription service.

It's an entire community of fans that share their experience, interact with each other around the unboxing of each month's crate. And the guarantee at least $40 value in every crate, sometimes way more than that. Every month there's a different theme and all items are curated around that theme. This month's theme is versus celebrating some of the greatest rivalries in pop culture, including but not limited to. Dark Knight versus Man of Steel. Alien versus Predator. Spock versus Mir Universe Spock. Daredevil versus Potisher and Harley Quinn versus dot, dot, dot, everyone.

Because Harley has no allegiance. She's crazy. She'll go anywhere and fighting. She's crazy. Our exclusive items include to something you can display, something you can wear, and something you can use. And don't forget R.T and LutePin. Remember, you only have until the 19th at 9 p.m. Pacific to subscribe and receive that month's crate.

When the cutoff happens, that's it. Jack, it's over. So go to Lickrate.com slash KF games and entercode KF games to save $3 on your new subscription today. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. You've been a great guest. This has been a great episode.

I always love episodes that don't go. how I have them planned. Oh, sure. Because then you know it's like, all right, this conversation went someone good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So thank you for that. Thanks for everything.

Thank you for making these guys, fucking awesome guys, because they'll help me become an awesome guy. You are. It's all great. Oh, shucks great. I'll take the credit, but it's all of them. Where can people find you?

They can find me at Denham Smash, but more importantly, they can find our game at Rocket League and Rocket Leaguegame.com and on YouTube slash Rocket League game. There you go. Heard it there, motherfuckers. Until next time. I love you.

That topic was sponsored by Audible. Do you love books, but find that you never have time to read them? Well, Audible.com is the perfect solution. Get audiobooks and listen to those books you've been meaning to read while on the go. At the gym, during your commute, Audible.com provides over 180,000 titles from the leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazine and newspaper publications, and more. They're apps free and works on iPhones, iPad, Android, Windows, phone, all that stuff. You can also download and listen on your Kindle Fire and over 500 MP3 players. and unlike a streaming or rental service with Audible, you own your books so you can access your books anytime anytime.

So you can access your books anytime, you can access your books anytime. You can access your books anytime. You're offering a free 30-day trial membership. Audible.com also has the great list and guarantee. If you decide you don't like the book you choose, don't worry. You can exchange anytime. If you're not happy, you'll get another one. It's great.

No questions asked. And just for listeners, Audible.com is offering a free 30-day trial membership. Go to audible.com slash KF.GAMs. Again, show your support for Kind of Funny Games and get a free 30-day trial at audible. com slash kf games