Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - League of Legend To Horizon, How To Make A New IP - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 180

Episode Date: July 30, 2018

Get your first 3 meals free at http://bluearpon.com/gamescast Special guest game director Mark Norris joins us to discuss how to make a new IP in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up guys? Welcome to the first ever episode 180 of the kind of funny games cast. That is a lot of episodes. A lot of episodes right there. Very, very excited about this one. 180 weeks. As always, I'm Tim Getty's joined by one of the coolest dudes in video games. Greg Miller. Hi, Tim.

Hi, how you doing? I'm not doing well. I'm excited to talk about video games, though, to put myself in a better mood. My amplifier blew in my car. And I am very upset about it because I assumed it was going to be a free fix. No. Is that $300? Is that why you came in with a cloudy demeanor today?

Probably, man. We need you more than ever at patreon.com. By the way, you are very kind. Despite being upset, you were so polite today and professional. I'm trying. I appreciate it. It's a whole thing. Jared Petty, everybody. Oh, hey, Mike. Glad to be here. And joining us for the very first time, Mark Norris. Hi. Hi. Hi. Kind of funny family. You are a game director at Hangar 13. That's a true statement. You have also worked on games like I have worked on DC Universe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

That's where Greg and I met. Exactly. Me and Nick Cohen. Met him. That's right. However many years ago, we came to Austin. I did the Doomsday Boss fight. We showed that off.

DC Universe online. DC Universe. And then we did, oh God, League of Legends. No big deal. It's a little tiny game. I was there early. I was like employees 60-ish or something like that.

So very early, right? Really early there. What did you do there? I was a producer, which at least at that time at Riot, that kind of meant you did. Everything. You know, because the studio is kind of small and we had just moved into the Yahoo Center from from where it was previous to that. And then from that, I did a little bit of time on the Dead Rising franchise.

And then from there, let's see, Horizon Zero Dawn. Little game, you might have it. Little game, yeah. A little game, Horizon Zero Dawn. And then, you know, a new IP for Hangar 13 and 2K. That's what we're doing for topic of the show. You want to talk about new IP. I really want to talk about that of like educating us on what that means.

but we'll get you're right now. But you've yet to mention the Crown Jewel? Here we go. Madden NFL 05. Exactly. Madden NFL-O-5. That's right. Absolutely.

That was one of the really good madness. It was. It was. I'm very proud of Madden NFL 05 and talking through what the salary cap means. Yes. Oh, this is going to be a very good show.

I'm excited for it. This is the Kind of Funny Games cast each and every week right here on YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny Games. We get together, talking about video games, all the things that we love about them.

You can get this. the show early by going to patreon.com slash kind of funny games and watching live along with us for just one dollar a month. If you want to spend a little bit extra, you can watch the VOD on Fridays, three days before it's release on Monday. Where you can get it for free on YouTube. What does that VOD give you as well? That also gives you the pre and post show. Wow. Which is fun. Why would you not do it? What a bargain. Did we talk for 15 minutes before this about a whole bunch of different things? Yeah. Here's what I'm going to do. We did. I want you to know that I had material today for the kind of funny morning show before looking at the

calendar and realizing I was not on the kind of one of the show. So I'm going to tease the post show content for you. I'm going to tell you about how, in the post show, about how I literally, and I can't remember the last time this happened, uncontrollably cried last night. Oh, stick around. Wow. Well, that

was that after making love? No, no. That's what I yell. Would that show be worth a dollar? Absolutely. Shout out to Patreon producer, Tom Bach and Eric Heights. Tombo! Eric Heights. Helping the show happy. And also, shout to all you beautiful people. Oh, the name is what's scrolling.

The names will scroll. They're doing a lot of stuff. And also worth pointing out, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. Mark, we buried this, of course, for the kind of funny best friends, a kind of funny best friend. Yeah, absolutely. This is the show supports us on Patreon. It's an amazing person.

Thank you very much. So if Mark wanted to, could he be watching this live right now? I guess technically. I guess, yeah. We're splitting the atoms of piece. But also, shout out to party mode. It's a little show you might not have heard of. We did party mode week, and I don't know when this is going live.

So things are complicated, but as of this week, You don't know when this is going live. It's your show. You just ran through the police. I understand. But what I'm saying is like there's no time that we can actually have the games cast in party mode week where it goes live for everybody during that week. Okay. That's fair.

I just want you clear. I'm sorry the fans blown you. We love party mode. And we want to give it some extra shine because not enough people are watching it. And they're missing out on some really good content. Andy Cortez works very hard on it. His editing skills are unmatched, some would say. I'm one of those people.

Yeah. Tim, I don't normally like gameplay shows. I love watching party mode. It's the editing. It's so great. It's that magic editing So go check it out. Greg, what party mode episode would you recommend people check out if it's the first time? That's a big old question. You know what I mean? I'm I'm drawn to the Mario Tennis IG universe kind of funny one, but I feel like that one did better than most So I think a lot of people have watched that one. So then I would say probably the rainbow six one will return on Andy And he gets really mad at us and almost quits. I want to give a shout to the fusion frenzy episode. You love that

I do, man. It's super fun. There's a variety of games that we played in it because it's a mini-game collection. It's an old random-ass game. Yeah. And that was a funny episode. I like how hype you guys get on the Nidhog one.

Nidhog ones are always good. There's like a rivalry. There's like a rivalry. It was a lot of... A Nidhog episode where Greg summons Satan to help him win. That actually is a great one. That is a really good.

That is a great show. Party mode is a great show. This is kind of funny games cast. We talk about the video games that we've been playing. I need an update from you guys. Octopath Traveler. Cool. You've been playing a lot more?

No. You've been playing a lot more. Yeah. Have you played at all? Not yet. Okay. And I use a lot more loosely. My plan, of course, I'm going to take the train from L.A.

on my Ghostbusters video shoot to go to Comic Con. And I'm going to play the whole three hours. It's going to be great. Got on that train, immediately fell asleep. But what I've now been doing is, you know, one of my 2018 on the down low resolutions was that I wanted to take Uber, less. You know what I mean? I want to either ride my bike to work or I wanted to take the bus. So I'm taking the bus a lot more. And so I've been playing

there. But first world problem. My bus ride not that long anymore. So my Octopath update is that I've assembled the entire team. The last two characters got those eight travelers. Yeah. I got the last two travelers. We talked about stories and narratives not working as well as I thought primroses did right. I'm going to screw this up

because they're still so new to me. And of course I'm playing with the sound down on the bus. Tessa, Tressa? The The merchant, there's a horn on our end, don't worry. The merchant, really like her voice actor, really like her story, really excited to have her on my team. I like her skills so far. And then the warrior. Kevin, can you pull up the-

Oldbrick? Yep. Oldbrick, thank you. He was my final guy to assemble to the team. Really like him, too. I think his story's super cool. So I am struggling because I'm still obsessed with Fortnite. And that means that, like, last night I was like, I'm going to play a match of Fortnite

and then get to Octopath and instead played four and a half hours of Fortnite and I went to bed. But I came into work this morning. There you were playing Octopath. I finished the train. You know what I mean? Like that's the thing. If there's internet, it's Fortnite. If there's no internet, it's Octopath.

But Octopath, I am falling more and more in love with the more and more I play. Great. Great. Another update. Hollow Knight. Andy. Andy! Andy!

Game's so good. Don't call his name. Don't call his name. Andy Cortez. Can we get you on Shock Mike, please? Can we make sure the shock mic is turned up? Jared. What's your update on Hollow Night?

You were talking a little bit about it last week. Yeah. I really like Holo Night. It is a spectacular Metroidvania. I don't really know how to articulate it, except to say that it's both beautiful and very thoughtfully designed. People talk a lot about the lore under the surface and more and more of that is seeping up into view, and I like that part of it. But what I'm grabbed by is the imaginative gameplay. And also the simply brilliant use of palating. A lot of games, palatting is very subtle and you don't usually notice it when it's happening. But there's, The hues of every individual room are so artfully and thoughtfully done, but they're unobtrusive. It's not a game that you sit and go, wow, this is beautiful. It's a game that you play and just go, I'm stunned by how understated but thoughtful every little difference in color is. I'm playing this shadowy game that never feels dark. That's rare.

I really like, I really like Holo Night. So Andy, you've been playing Hollow Night as well. I got through the Oh, the mic isn't working. Uh-oh. The shot might not turned on. Like it didn't last week or whatever. Andy, what's it with you in the hole?

In the shocklight? I got, uh, oh, the shock, I don't know. It's just, we have problems here, Jared. I got past the first world on the airplane on my flight to, to L.A. yesterday. Um, not, I, again, it's kind of weird because you, I'm in an airplane, so I'm not fully in gaming mode. There's people chatting around me,

but fucking chatty Kathy's left and right, Jared. Let me tell you what, man. This guy kept talking about how he knew the dude who owns Tito's vodka in Austin. Jeez, Louise, man. Why is he talking to you about this? Just get away. Quit talking.

No, he was talking to the lady next to me. I'm trying to play hollow and I. Why don't even headphones on? Huh? Headphones. I do. They weren't good enough. This guy was fucking full volume, Greg Miller.

Okay. Yeah, that's rough. I've been in that situation. Did you get us a hookup for Tito's vodka, though? No, I didn't. Wow, this is sad surrounding me. He wasn't talking to me. It's just, I don't know.

lean up. He was like, oh, you could chat with people on Virgin America flights. I don't know. You could chat using this little remote. I was like, well, chat with the person next to you. I quit fucking talking out loud. You know what I'm saying, Greg Miller? Anyway, number one games journalist.

Jeez, Louise. Yeah, I got past sort of the first world or whatever, and it was a game that I started and immediately realized, eh, not really for me. I'm not feeling it. But I gave it a second chance on this flight. And while I was at the airport as well, it can it's that very soul style of dying and I got to go find my body similar to what shovel night did when you die and you have to go get your coins back or whatever

yeah yeah in this case you have to you fight your dude really quickly to kill him you're your ghost or whatever and I'm not quite sure what the lore is I'm not quite sure what's happening but I'm into it the game are you going to play more of it oh yeah the gameplay is like really punishing and but like you you want to be punished kind of It feels good, Greg? Yeah, it's not like masochistic. No, it's just hard. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of it is just your fault.

Like, there are plenty of moments where I don't have a lot of life and I'm like, eh, I can get past this point. And I play reckless and I die. That's like, yeah. That's on me. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And you know that it's on you, but you want to risk it for the biscuit. You know what I'm saying, Tim Geddy.

So you want to go after that, you want to free that little damn little caterpillar up there, Tim. Yeah. but sometimes what's good for the caterpillar isn't good for the gander yeah I'm having a phone time with it I I just got past I essentially beat the main boss of that sort of underworld well I think he's the main boss there are certainly a lot of things that I have not explored yet I'm sure now that I've unlocked these new powers

but I know eventually give me wall climbing I don't have that yet I know that's in the game though right I'm pretty sure like The Mega Man style wall. There is all kinds of new traversal stuff coming up for you. Yeah, I can't wait for that stuff. And it's slowly opening up. And similar to, I mean, shit,

I can't think of the damn name. The one that Nick wouldn't shut up about. Axi and verge. Axi and verge. Yeah, similar to that, where you're very Metroidvania, you're realizing there are paths that were, you couldn't get to you earlier in the game, but now you do have the abilities to get to it.

So I am definitely going to keep playing it. What makes a good Metroidvania game, maybe more than anything else, is how it re-contextualizes areas that you become comfortable with and suddenly makes them intriguing again. And you realize that there's ingenuity you didn't see at first glance happening around you. I think that sometimes we almost gloss over that aspect of those games. And Hollow Night accomplishes that better than most. I think that's part of the appeal of it.

It's just that it's effortless. You're traveling through it. It's what you don't see until you do. Like you're like, oh, wait a minute. Yeah, that thing is up there, and I ignored it because I knew I couldn't get to it, but now I have the ability to. And I want to keep exploring and keep finding out what's happening in this world. And the characters are very, you know, very toned down in terms of, like, voice acting.

It's just them making noises. Yeah. But the text kind of seems a little too intense for me. Like, I know that there's more under the surface that I can't wait to get to, but it's, you know, it's kind of intimidating. first trying to absorb whatever the hell is happening in this world. Well, you don't really have to. That's the other bet.

That's the time it happened. Oh, there went that window sound. That was my fault. Yeah. That's time it happened. But no, the, you don't have to get into the lore. That's the other bit. I mean, I hate when people talk too much in video games.

And the nice thing about Holo Night is if you don't care what's going on, just go get some more screaming caterpellers. You'll be fine. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm digging it. It's worth pointing out that you say you're on the plane when you're playing or whatever. You're going to see Spider-Man on PlayStation 4.

However, embargoed for that. Yes. Thursday. Well, by the time this air is, if you're not watching live, Thursday, we can talk about it, right? Yes, August 2nd. We need to, pow, wow, I think we just put up a video at some point. I'm just put it out.

Okay, on that Thursday. But we can figure it out. Yeah, cool. Stay tuned for that. Yeah, stay tuned, you guys. Number one game journalist, Andy Cortez, thank you very much. World traveling. Can confirm Peter Parker is playable.

Oh, man. So there's my support here. There you go. Break an embargo. Third or fourth. You meet, no one can see you doing the A&D face, you mean that as a joke, Spider-Man is Peter Parker. You're not saying there's Peter Parker spin,

skin that you run around in. Don't need that getting broken out of N4G. That's Spider-Ham News about Into the Spider-Verse made me so happy. John Malay. That's great. Perfect casting for that. So, Mark, yeah. You've been playing some games, too.

I have been. Tell me a little shit about this Yakuza 6. So, I make open-world video games. This is what I love to make. It's my... thing. So I try to play them all. Oh my God. If one exists, I'm like,

and not just play them. I really want to understand them, right? Like, I want to play them all the way to the end. Because you just never know when a new mechanic's going to come in that changes the way that the game plays. You never know when a new system's going to get introduced. You never know when a piece of content's going to come up and make you go, wow, that's really something that's interesting that I hadn't seen before. Why? We thought about that. Yeah, exactly. Right? So Yaku's are super interesting for me because I picked it up. I never played any of the

Japanese, you know, Yakuza's that you could have, you could, I think, maybe picked up on PS3, there might have been, I can't remember. PS2 there was one. FIS II, absolutely right. I never played any of them, right? So I was introduced to the series

with Yakuza Zero. Oh, okay. And at first, there are things about it that I'm like, oh, wow. Like, I put myself into something that This is obtuse. Yeah, absolutely. And what I started to really understand over time, because I played that, and I fell in love with the,

idea of the way that they did, you know, basically the Japanese, you know, Mafia, right? Yeah. The characters that they introduced were fantastic. And I really love the main character. Well, then they did Yakuza Kawami. And so you got to play Yakuza 1, but it was all updated and, you know, it looked great. It was a much smaller game than Yakuza Zero was, so I was able to get through it relatively quickly.

And now, at this point, like, I'm hooked. I'm like, oh, my God. So I get seven video games. with this character. I can't think of another franchise where you get that much time with one character. And they take this character

essentially from, in Yucuzzi Zero, it's like 1985 or, you know, and then Yakuza 6 is present day, you know, basically 2018 or right around that time frame. It's 30 years. Is he still running the orphanage then? He's still running an orphanage, yeah, he's still doing that.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, the other thing that they do that I have never seen done before successfully and generally speaking I was always afraid to do with any of the video games that I've worked on was they take the same place and they reinvent it

over and over and over again and for whatever reason oftentimes in video games are like oh you've been there before we need to build something completely new for the sequel or you know like they've seen that in another game somewhere so we want to do something that's completely different But what they've done, and I'll probably butcher the name, but it's Camerucho or, you know, the district inside of Tokyo.

Yeah, the red light district. Yeah, they make up. They don't use the real red light district. No, no, of course not. But their version of it, right? Yeah, it's their version of Rupungi. Yeah, exactly. At the very least, not I assume that it's through Yakuza's, you know, two through five as well.

But you go to it in Yakuza Zero. You're there in Yakuza, you know, Kwame 1. You're there in Yakuza 6. And I love the fact that they go, oh, that's down on San Rio Street. that's down on, you know, whatever, whatever boulevard it might be. And I just go, oh, I know exactly where that is. I don't have to look at the minimap. You know, like, I'm literally just playing this game.

And I'm like, oh, my God, it's, there is a brilliance to that. There's a familiarity to the way that they do that. It literally does feel like coming home. You know, it's coming home to that character, and it's coming home to that location. And it's coming home to that wackiness in some way that I just, I fall in love with. I fall in a piece. It's so fun.

How they keep it from feeling too samey? So one of the things that they do is even though that the layout of the area is exactly the same, the buildings that kind of turn on or off. So you'll see it. Like you'll be like, oh, that's Starlight. I went to Starlight, which is like a host club or hostess club in one of the previous games. Well, you can see the facade of that as you're passing by it. So it's in the same place that it was. But it's now not an interable building, right?

But another building that wasn't interable before now becomes an interable. building. So ultimately, you really get to fill out and flash out. You were like, oh, I saw that, that, you know, marquee or whatever in one of the previous games. It wasn't available to go into at that time, but now it's open. And now I go to explore

what this part of, you know, this building is, and what the city is and what stories are trying to tell me here. And then they turn off, you know, certain things. And then they do do some smart stuff, which is at least in each of the games so far, they do take you to a different location, right? So they take you somewhere, you know, unimici, you know, which is,

I don't know if it's actually there, but it's in the Hiroshima district inside of Tokyo and then are inside of Japan. And then in Zero, you go over to where Goro Majima's from, and I can't remember where exactly that is, but it is a totally different location than the Tokyo Relight District that they introduce you to. So you don't actually get as burned out as you might think

because you actually spend, you know, 30, 40% of the game outside of the city, but you do get to learn that city or that part of the city incredibly. It's just really well done. I want to harness you so badly for a video essay right now. It's a tension that you're describing

and I've never really thought about the aspect that you're bringing up here between the more things change than where they stay the same on one end and like Thomas Wolves, you can never go home again on the other which is that when you go back to a place it's never the way you remember it exactly.

You're like a ghost walking through a house that you sort of recognize eyes. That's really cool. And I'm just kind of sitting over going, because I hadn't thought about how that worked in those games. In Yakuza Zero, the way that you save your game is at a telephone booth. Because in 1985, telephone booths were a thing. And there's a quest in Yucza Zero where somebody has like one of those giant cell phones,

you know, and they're like carrying it around. It's like, get the backpack on, and it's got the phone. And the only thing you can do, because you can retrieve items also. I don't know why. But apparently that's what you do in Japanese phone or Japanese phone booths is that you can retrieve your items. and save your game. I've retrieved many items from Japanese.

Exactly. When I love that. But by the time you're in Yakuza 6, obviously, they've removed all of those phone booths. Like they're not there anymore. And that's true of the way that that works today, of course. So, you know, they had to figure out a different save mechanic. Now you can save it anywhere. You know?

And it's because you have a cell phone and it makes sense. But it just, they do a really good job of thinking through what it means to move through decades. And of course, the studio that I'm, Matt now does the Mafia series, right? We're building a new IP now, but one of the things that I loved about Mafia, too, was that it was a game that took place over the course of several years, a decade or so, right? And when you go to prison at some point in Mafia 2, when you come out, all the music's changed, seasons, a different season, the buildings have changed, you know, the makes and models of the cars have changed, and there's just something about that lived in

sort of city feel that. I like it when video games do that. I think it's really smart and I don't think we do enough of it. Now you just make me want mafia cross Yakuza. I want that so bad. That would be amazing crossover in the century. I never really thought about how how Yakuza's hero is kind of like Shenmu if it were fun. That's just, oh wow. I mean, I love Shenmoo. I love it, but I am not going to lie and say that Shenmu is flawless or that they're, it's fun. Yeah. Shenmu is, Shenmu is. The difference between Wallace and fun. Chenlu is fun the way

like Flanders kids going to church is fun, you know? There's like, it's like, yay. Look for those sailors. Yeah, yeah. Do you got to look for those sailors.

What's the other game you've been playing? So, I play a lot of stuff, but the one when I kind of put down, it's one of those things where you kind of pick it up and play it for a little bit and then you put it down. So Dangan Rampa 3 is something that,

yeah, I love the Dangan Rapa series. Oh, Mama Kuma coming back. Oh, God, I love On Okuma. When I went to Tokyo for the first time, it was for the Horizon Zero Don sort of press event for the Tokyo Game Show in 2015. And the one thing I had to get was a monocum of backpack.

It was the one thing I'd have because my daughter was 14 or 15 at the time. She wants to someday be a writer. And the game that she loves the most, and I don't know what this says about my 18-year-old daughter. But the game that she loves the most is Danegon Rompad. Like she freaking loves that game. So it's one of those games we actually play together. That's awesome. And yeah.

So it's really cool. We could not find one bizarrely. Really? You would think that would be everywhere, right? Yeah, that face, right? Yeah, exactly. Could not find it. But Sony PR in Japan, Sony marketing, PR at Sony Localization.

They found me one. They sent me one. They were amazing. So can't thank them enough for that. But yeah, I love Dangan Rompah as well. And I think it is mostly, it's a similar thing. The school changes. It's not the same.

But there's a weird familiarity. Even though the level design has completely changed, you get it. Like you just, you understand it. It feels like an evolution. Absolutely it does. It absolutely does. And we won't talk about, they did like a first person shooter, Dangan Rompah, that I was like, no, nope, not going to do that one.

Yeah, it was a bridge too far. Ultra despair. Dangan Ruffa guy did. Yeah, exactly right. But I love, I love, love of the characters. I think they do a fantastic job of building characters and relationships. And that's something that I look at. Do the games evolve over time?

Because I've never played them. When I look at them, I'm like, these all just seem like the same thing. There's an underlying storyline that I find particularly interesting. You know, it's kind of like what's happening in the world outside of this school that they're kind of figuring out over time. And one of my favorite movies of all time is Battle Royale from Japan. And so for me, Dagan Rompah is like, that's it. Like, that's the movie. And this is the video game version of that movie.

So, but it tells a bigger story, right? My favorite video games are the ones that tell two stories, right? The one story, which is we're saying something, right? One of the reasons I joined Hanger 13 is because they said something with Mafia 3, right? But then there's that other story that we want gamers to tell, right? And Fortnite is the best in the world right now at this. And, you know, when we did, when I was on League of Legends, they did this very well. The water cooler story that you tell about this, Leroy Jenkins moment or, you know, whatever it is that it might be.

He was building a fort, but I came up this background. Exactly right. That's exactly right. So for me, the challenge in building video games that I want to build are how do we make sure that they tell two stories, right? That's got to be tough. It is. Give them enough to do so they feel like there's story, but then give them enough freedom that they feel like they can make their own. It is.

Is that what draws you to open world game development? Absolutely is. It absolutely is. You know, and there are certain, I think, companies that do that incredibly well. I think you can point in Grand Theft Auto as that tells an incredibly cohesive, fantastic story, but then also gives this world that allows people to just tell whatever story that they want to tell with their friends. Yeah. Greg's got one of the best stories about this I've ever heard around Red Dead. When you were talking about it.

I love this. Do you have a minute to tell it? I think so, don't we, Tim. Do we have a minute to do? Can we talk on the show up in your game? If you never heard it. Yeah, so my Red Dead story was I got Red Dead and I'm like, John Marston's a stand-up dude. My John Marston's a good guy. He's not going to kill anybody.

He's not going to do the bad stuff. He's not going to do the bad stuff. Yeah, yeah, right. I'm going to kill a couple of dudes. Hundreds of people. I'm not going to be a bad, I'm not going to be a bad cowboy. You're not going to be a black cat. Thank you.

Yeah, there go. I'm not going to be a black hat. I'm not going to be a bad person. Right. And so there was that side mission, you know, hours and hours in the game of him playing it where the old man wanted you to get flowers, go gather flowers for his wife. when you finally come back with the final flower, which of course is a throwaway side mission.

I'm just doing a million things. I'm checking all my boxes. I brought him back and gave him to me. He's like, oh, great, come on in and meet her. And he walks you in, and it's his mummified wife in the chair. Like, she's been dead forever,

and he's got Alzheimer's or whatever and just can't, he's got dementia. He can't piece it together, right? And I'll never forget. He's like, oh, and John's like, all right, whatever, man. And, like, you know, John walked back out of the house. And I remember looking at the beautiful skies, big blue sky, you know, the rolling hills,

it's green and everything else. And just going, and opening up my wheel and getting the bandana that would like hide your whatever bad act you did, hides your reputation, putting it on, and walking back in,

walking behind it and pulling out my gun and shooting him in the head. And I didn't do it to be an asshole. I didn't do it. It could be funny to kill him. I was just like, this is a mercy kill. I have to take care of this man.

Like this man can't take care of himself anymore. And the mission's over. That was just your narrative. The mission was way over. I got the XP or whatever. I read that used to give you. And it was like, I'd walk outside of the thing is like,

what do you want to do next? And I was like, I want to go back in there and take care of this. I can't leave him like that. Every player's story is unique. I think that that is such a powerful thing to think about when we build video games. If we can find a way to make that true, we're just going to be successful. Well, that's what separates games from movies.

Absolutely. I watch a movie. I'm like, I never would have made that choice. And then even the games that flip it. No spoilers. Because we'll get in trouble with somebody. But the end of the last of us. Like when I was like waiting for the choice and the choice never comes.

And I'm like, oh, you're making. me do this to tell me your story. That's rare in video games. It was not. I sat down with Angie just last week, my wife, and she's never played Shadow of the Colossus. And she's always wanted to. I've talked reverentially about it.

So we sat down and she's getting into it and learning to do the controls and she gets up to the first Colossus. And the voice, you know, the tutorial voice is telling her what to do next. It's like, you know, you got to kill. It's just I don't want to. Yeah, yeah. When do I not? And

I was like, you have to. And she's like, but I don't want to. It's like, well, you're not going to go any. Credits roll. And she's just like, but I thought I was going to make friends with it. I thought it was about me. And I'm like, no, this is a game about doing horrible things that you don't want to do. Let me introduce you to the last going.

And yeah. You're friends with that thing. Exactly. But she's just like, and she looked at me and she said, I totally see the merit to this. Yeah. But I can't do this. And that was it. That was the end of the game.

She's like, I don't want to kill it. I love that. That's just like, nah, I'd rather not play. Those moments, man. And it's like,

they're very few and far between, I think, when it's like those ones that stick with you. But for me, it was Halo 3. Me, my best friend, Kern,

and Alfredo, were playing co-op for the story mode online. And we're all going through it. We did the whole thing in one sitting. And we're at the very end of the game. And the final mission is you're, you're in a wardhog, or if you're playing with more than two players,

like two wardhogs. And you go. and everything's blowing up and it's kind of the you know escape the explosions to get to the end and the end

there's this final giant jump that you take we're going and we're shooting a bunch of guys and I hit the wrong button so instead of switching guns I got out of the war talk

as they went and I was just standing there and things exploded around me and like current turns around to get me and I was like just go without me just go without me

and he's like are you sure I'm like just fucking go and they're They both make the jump and you see the cutscene start playing and you see the Warthogs jumping across. You just see my character just exploding. It's great. And it's amazing.

In canon, there's this one fallen soldier that just didn't make it across the castle. Did any of you play Ashron's Call? I know it's an older game. I know it's, so Ashtron's Call was a game that Microsoft did. It was their first MMO and it was made by turbine up in Maryland or up in Massachusetts, right? And it came out right around the time that I've requested. And it was like the other MMO. at the time.

They had like eight or nine servers and they did monthly content drops. It was like their thing. They were like every month you're going to get new stuff. This is why you're paying $9.99. You're going to get some new stuff. One month they dropped a piece of content that was here's a new dungeon.

And when you go into the dungeon, you're immediately flagged for PVP so nobody can, you know, you get to the end of the dungeon. You're going to unleash the evil in the world. So eight servers within the first couple of days because that's how people, you know, consume memo content,

basically run through, they release evil in the world. One server decided, we're not evil. This is not what we're going to do. We are going to put up a constant vigilant guard of protectors. Fuck yeah. Around this, around this shrine that they had to destroy. Yeah. And turbine is losing their minds.

Because they have to destroy, they have to destroy the shrine or else, what are we going to have, like, branching servers? Are we going to have like this server doesn't get the update? Like, what the hell are we going to do, right? And so, like, I had heard, and I can't confirm because I wasn't there, but I had heard, like, devs were starting to come in and try to get through, you know, this defense. Oh, you know, this defense is just holding strong, right? And by the end of the month, they hadn't done it. They had it, like, they had totally ensured that this, that this shrine had not been destroyed.

So Turban's like, we don't, we don't know what I can do. And the decision that they made was, it's really hard for game developers to do divergent servers, right? I think that would have been great if they could have done something like that, right? They decided to erect a shrine just on that server for the protectors and defenders of the faith or whatever. So I thought that was a pretty good compromise, but that player story for me is like, oh, that's video games. That's why I loved Eve. Eve was just that all the time. Yeah.

That just finally be like, I'm going to eat my life doing this. But that's every day in that world. And that's why I think it's beautiful. Yeah, it is. We were at San Diego Comic-Con. San Diego. You got to be in a commercial for a video game. Right.

I filmed that Ghostbusters World video. Right. Yeah. I went down to L.A. on last Wednesday a week ago today and filmed that. So yeah, an ad for Ghostbusters World. But then went to Comic Con. I got to play Ghostbusters.

So of course, this is one full of disclosures. So to be clear, I got cast in the Ghostbusters World commercial or whatever you want to call it video. You can go see all the stuff on my Instagram. One day the trailer will be out somewhere and you can see it. It'll be awesome. And I'm a live action Ghostbuster with the actual. one, it's amazing, and it was a million dreams come true.

We should do a dog topic on it someday. However, I mean, you trust me, so I tell you a grain of salt, you understand great of salt. That was the deal. There was no, like, now talk about the game, and, you know, we're going to tell how much you like the game or don't like the game because I don't want to go play it by choice. Yeah. Went to play it by, yeah, two different arms. One hired me to do the commercial, and then the PR arm, contact me as video games,

you know, number two journalist, Greg Miller, to go play it or whatever. So a ComicCon actually got to go play and screw around with it. I love the idea that you got to go to a shoot. you brought your own costume. How often does that happen? They were pretty stoked when they cast me. I think, oh,

and I'm like, oh, my own. It says Miller. Like, oh, shit, I'm like, oh, shit,

aren't I can't. Yeah, that's beautiful. So is Ghostbusters world, if I remember correctly, it's the Pokemon Go-esque game? Oh, yeah, this is Pokemon Go knockoff. Yeah, yeah,

yeah, of course. Yeah, the idea is that you're running around catching more than 100, ghosts. It's, you know, still in development, so they haven't, like, locked down their number. But there's a lot,

right now, there's a lot more than 100 on the little dot the Tobin spirit guide we'll see how what the final number net side has but yeah it's Pokemon Go of you know they handed me the phone and you turn it on and you're the Ghostbuster on uh you know they're working with Google Maps so it's very much like Pokemon Go they're doing and I haven't played Pokemon Go since the literally Pokemon Go craze you know I first started so it was first few weeks so I'm not sure if Pokemon Go is updated to this but they're using Google Maps in a way that when you spin it around or move the camera up and down you get like kind of like invisible structures so like well

when we were playing next to Petco Park, like you spun it, they spun the camera and like, oh, there was Petco Park. Like, it's giving you not just the cross streets and things and their version of gyms or whatever.

You know, I mean, there's like actual things there. Like you can orient yourself based on, which is cool. Yeah, but on top of that, yeah,

there's ghosts all over and then there's these dimensional doors, dimensional doors, act as poca stops. You go there, you get items that, you know, your traps and your whatnot and all that jazz.

Are the coasts drawn from the old cartoon show? Or from that ghosts are drawn from everything. Okay. Which is really cool. Like, so like, there's, you know, it's a very limited demo build right now of what you're playing. But yeah, Ghosts are from the movies.

They're from the cartoon. They're from the comic books. They're from any other video game that's happened before. And they're using, you know, the proton pack you have, right, is more than just the Neuterona wand. It is from the, you know, whatever it would have been, 2008 Ghostbusters game that I reviewed, 2009 Ghostbusters game that I reviewed. What is fair in the new one? Whatever, it doesn't matter. Where you're using, like, the boson cannon, like you're changing, you know, all these different things that ghosts will have weakness.

to our strengths too and all that jazz. So I was just using a Neutrona Wan, so just your classic Ghostbusters stream and running around and do that. You know, again, it was grain of salt. It's a game I'm gonna play. And I mean, I'm obviously literally the target audience. Like I'm the bullseye of that audience.

Who's a Ghostbusters guy? Who wants to bust some ghost? Who wants to walk around there? But it's like, I was playing it. And it's like, yeah, okay, I'm totally gonna play this. And like, you know, your Pocodex is the Tobin Spirit Guide,

which is so well known from Ghostbusters. Like, yeah, I want to fill, Listen, I want to get all these, and I like that you can lose. You know what I mean? Like Pokemon Go, obviously you throw the ball, they get out of it, you lost, whatever. This one's more active than that of like, you know, you see it on the map, right? Like, okay, there's, there it is. There's a ghost over there.

There's the chef ghost. There's, you know, a slime or whatever. You click on it. You go into the AR battle, which, of course, you can turn off wherever, but it's cooler to do it in the AR and have it in real world. You go in there and you have to click on your PKE meter that bops it out. You got to use your phone to go like this. Oh, cool. to get the readings, to find it, okay,

and like the thing's moving is you get closer. Ghost appears, and then, yeah, it's like you're using your proton back how you want to. You're zapping them, wearing them down. They have a health bar, but then they have attacks they can hit you with that'll slime you. When they go to attack you, there's a quick thing that pops up. This is counter. You tap it and use that ghost glove punch thing they had in the new Ghostbusters movie that you can do to counteract that or take it.

But it's like, they were talking to me of like, you know, we don't want it to be just, it'll be boring, just capturing if there's no gameplay to it. I was talking to one of the guys there, he's like, when you get going, you get like deeper and you fight higher level ghosts, like if they hit you once, you're dead something. Like you need to be on top of the counters. It's not something you can just sleepwalk through for everything later on, so they say. This was, you know, yeah, you capture him, you wear him down.

Okay, throw out the trap, get him over the trap, slam him into the trap. And it was like, it was active, whereas I feel like Pokemon goes much more of this. Not that I'm like running around getting sweaty, but like, I will be because I'll be in a ghost buster is after playing this. Two questions. Jared, you have a question. Can you cooperate?

with others to catch gross with the streams and two, if you cross the streams, what happens? Great questions. I, of course, would never be silly enough to cross the streams. So I can't tell you what would happen. However, what's cool is that, yes, you can collaborate. Not for every little ghost. Instead, they're like raid bosses.

Okay. So, like, they had one obviously triggered there and no stay puff. And so, like, you hit it and then stay puff marshmallow man's there, right? And you go in there and it's up to four players. You create the room. You do whatever you want with it. And then, yeah, you go in there. And he was a bitch.

Like, he had a huge. It's a raid. Like he had a huge health bar. He was calling out other little stay puff marshmallow man, the minions, and they were throwing stuff at us and blah, blah, so you're in there and it's, I was doing it by myself for a while.

One of the other people jumped in, then passed the phone off to another guy, and then came in with like a souped up account, and then really started weeding, knocking them down. So there is this aspect of leveling up, becoming a better Ghostbuster doing this. There's a story mode to it where you're running around doing all this. There's PVP, which isn't ready.

They're going to talk about it later. But from what I gather it is like, yeah, you've caught the ghost. you know, you've let work on leveling that ghost up and doing stuff with them and then yeah, fight other ghosts that way

to have that go on. For me as a nerd, like you get to customize your character like you make, you know, craft what your Ghostbuster looks like through how much preset options

and stuff like that. And yeah, like, I don't know the legs I'll have with it. I don't know if I'll become an Andrew Goldfarb about it, but for sure when it drops, like I've been telling you,

like, right? Like, yeah, I want to fucking be, make dumb videos here of us in a Ghostbusters uniform. Yeah, but I also totally, totally,

it's what we're, for a Pokemon goes so well of like, yeah, I could see me waking, I'm like, hey, Jen, let's get a cup of coffee and walk around and just go do this and screw around and get a whole bunch of stuff. So I'm, honestly, I'm doing the trade, I'm doing the video and I'm like, holy,

I'm putting up all the Instagram stories and all the stuff, and it's like, this is awesome and, you know, again, the agreement and I'm like, I'm cast as an actor, so if I don't like the game, when I get the game, I'm gonna say the game shit, right? So, but my big thing was like, man, I hope this game doesn't suck,

like, this is a fun experience and it's gonna be, it's gonna suck to be like, Remember on time, Greg was in that Ghostbusters commercial? Yeah, it sucks the game, suck, but whatever, you know what I mean? Like, I'm cautiously optimistic that this one actually seems like, all right, cool. Please tell me I can go to the world's most famous haunted houses, castles, graveyards, and find special ghosts there. Tell me that's going to happen.

I definitely think you're going to have special ghosts around special places. I don't know how deep it's going to be. You know what I mean? Like, right now they're keeping it very broad level. They're fools not to, but I definitely don't think it's going to be graveyards. They don't want to fuck with you on that level But I mean if they don't have something special at the firehouse in New York Are you kidding me?

Yeah, I just think about like real world like haunted castle Places that are famous for their ghosts And I mentioned graveyards not because I'm trying to be in bad taste But graveyards are some of my favorite places to take walks Oh sure yeah yeah So that's where I came from No no I hear you know I hope there's ghosts in graveyard I don't know if there ought to be actually thinking about it

Yeah but again that would be a funny let's play If Greg gets thrown out of a graveyard dress the full Ghostbusters gear My God Portillo running around the state puff gosh There's nothing more fucked up than someone in a Ghostbusters costume walking through. Yeah, let's not do that. That's in terrible case. Do you watch all these YouTube prank videos?

Has anyone done that yet to a funeral? We don't watch them. They shouldn't make them. Let's not do that. It's a terrible idea for a skit everybody. Yeah, don't go to, I'm very much like, oh, all right, yeah. Come up to this year. Yeah, we'll see, yeah.

We had that moment where we all cared about, or not all of us, but a lot of us cared about Pokemon Go. It'll be interested to see if I can get you guys to care about this to go Ghostbust with me. I know big Kev Dog will be there. Wow. That's what he says when he's in there. I played a different game at Comic Con. That game was Super Smash Brothers.

Ultimate Nick and I got to go play. An indie title I haven't heard about it. Yeah, I know. Who would have known? Everyone's surprised that I'm interested in this. I didn't get enough time with it. I only got to play a couple matches. I definitely wanted to play the entire time that I was there.

But yeah, Nick and I played. He won a couple. I won a couple. Playing around with a couple of different characters. I tried playing as the new characters a bit of. well because I want to get the taste of how inkling and a riddley play. Sure. Inkling seems a little Opey right now.

Like definitely there's a lot going on. But I feel like every time Smash adds a character with new mechanics, there's always that learning curve of people just trying to understand. Like when Little Mac added his little power meter where he has that one hit K.O. move or normally a very strong move. Inkling with the whole ink system that has is interesting. Ridley seems like one of those characters that's going to be very low tier until people figure out how to use him and then he's going to be a beast. But yeah, he was pretty hard to use.

So I was like, I don't know about this. And I was seeing a lot of other people play as him and just getting their asses kicked. God, this game's good though. We got to play for the first time one-on-one because last time I D-3, we had to play a player with all items on. We got to play one-on-one, but items were still on, but they were on low. so it was less chaotic and I could kind of focus a bit more because if you're new to it

because I don't think we talk about how we love Smash a lot but I don't think we talk about it Tim is a purist and only plays final destination no items that's not that is the opposite of purism

that's all they play that's the opposite they come in they hit the Omega symbol and that's the end of it that is inverse purism that is blasphemy when we play as a group yes we it's omega levels

it's one or yeah usually one on one or if we do multiplayer or whatever and it's like that's the way to play smash everybody fucking knows it whatever. I have fun playing with items and I do all that stuff. I, Smash Brothers is like the one game that I really do try to, as much as possible, 100%. My problem with you saying you have, you enjoy playing with the items sometimes and all

the stuff is that I know what you're talking about when you go play with Colonel and all your your boyhood friends. Well, wherever, you have a second family somewhere. Because I only play Smash with you people and you only play with items off Omega. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So where does this other family? You're taking out to ice cream while I eat glass. When I just play by myself, like a lot of the single player stuff. Okay. Okay. You can't turn items off the single player. You can get the Cherry Sunday, okay.

And I play the fuck out of the single player in Smash Bros. And I enjoy it. And some of the new items they got going on in this one really cool. And I love how they just change the dynamic. The final smash ball that they added in Brawl, like anytime we play with items on, the moment that becomes, people stop focusing on hitting each other. And they're just running hit a thing, right? There's now a fake smash ball that if you hit it, instead of getting a final smash,

it explodes, it explodes. Is it beautiful? Can you tell? Yeah, the color is different. but in the heat of the battle there's still that moment where we both stopped fighting and ran after and then Nick fucking blew up and it was like, it's just awesome.

Like that's the magic of smash bros is the fucking chaos and insanity. But I also love that you can turn that stuff off. Can I ask you a question that I haven't heard answered that I think is a dumb question but I'd still like to propose just to put it out there. And I'm thinking more of what we've seen in Mario Tennis and yeah I guess

since this is a new smash but it's got everybody but we're unlocking everybody as normal right. new challenger approaches. It's not going to be like everybody's unlocked at the jump. At the jump, it is the N64 characters.

Thank you very much. And then from there, they're still not exactly clear on how it's going to work, but if the other games are anything to say, I imagine there'll be specific challenges you can do to unlock specific characters,

but there'll also be a way of this many versus matches gets you a character every 10 matches you get a new character. And I think this game might do it at random just because there is so many different characters.

Okay. But yeah, so people were asking this on games daily. We had to play with pro controllers. They, GameCube controllers weren't there. You couldn't play it portably. So no Joey cons or anything. We've only got to play with Pro controller. It's fine. It's going to take some getting used to for people, but I don't think it's the end of the world. Pro controller is a fine controller. It's a fine controller. It's a great controller. It's a fine controller. But man, it's fucking smash, dude. I do. I love it. I love it. I cannot wait to play more of it. I've been watching so many videos because now that there's

more demos going out at Comic Con and a bunch of tournaments they've been doing. I've just been watching hours of footage of just trying to break down the differences. And you were kind of saying, like, implying that this is a port. This is not a port. I was implying. Because there's a big debate going on about this, even to this day. And the game does look very similar to Smash 4. But this is so much more than Mario Card 8 deluxe was compared to Mario Card 8.

Like this is, every character has so many little tweaks and differences. And the speed of the game, now that I got more hands on time with it, it is faster than Smash 4. It's not as fast as melee. which I think is a good thing overall in terms of making the game accessible to more people at a high level. The last thing Spash Brothers needs to do is lean into the fighting game community because it's entirely. Yeah. I think it's important for Smash Brothers to respect and remember the fighting game community. But I think leaning into that mechanically ultimately leads down the road to stagnation.

The fighting game community is wonderful, but they are also codified and fairly narrow. the kind of game if we keep it's what happened to arcades let me illustrate this more clearly Street Fighter 2 comes out everybody in the universe is playing Street Fighter 2 as new iterations and clones and things other fighting games come out they keep doubling down on more and more complicated mechanics by the time Street Fighter 3 comes out normal humans cannot get their minds around it any longer and gradually the entire genre fades into a niche Nintendo understands that they can honor the fighting game community's wishes for depth without completely abandoning the ability for normal human beings to play a game

that's ultimately about a big pink marshmallow beating up another big pink marshmallow. And I think that's good. Is that true across the board? Because I've spent probably 20 or 25 hours now inside of Mario Aces. That game's hard. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God.

I was playing through it. I'm like, oh, great, I get to go play boo in his castle. I probably fought that boss 70 times. This fucking story about that. Oh my God. Like, that game is really hard. I bought it because my daughter and I were loving playing. We play a lot of Nintendo games, right?

And I'm like, oh, I like tennis. I loved Mario tennis, right? And so I'm like, all right, great, let's pick this up. That game is hard. I think that I think it's a miscalculation on that part. I think it was a mistake. Yeah. I really do.

It definitely seemed like that. Went out quick. Yeah. Every super stoked on the online beta. We were super stoked from what we had played on Let's plays and everything else. And then when we got it and we're like, man, this story mode's not great. It seemed like that took the wind out of every sale. I just don't.

All the RPG was out of that too. Yeah, you're leveling Mario up and doing stuff for nothing. For nothing. Yeah, I mean, I just haven't fooled with it. I was really excited about it. And when I heard the story mode wasn't fun. And that's the thing too. We talk about on the shows all the time.

There's not time right now for a game that's like, yeah, there's not time for games. Absolutely. Yep. Smash has always been, I feel pretty good about respecting the fighting game community and just casual players. And, you know, there's definitely some exceptions to that. Like, tripping and brawl was such a mistake. Tripping was the best.

It's so stupid. It doesn't make any sense. Like, why would you have that functionality? To make fighting game players angry. And that's why I love it. It's so dumb. But I feel like Smash 4 did a really good job with the online mode of the For Fun or For Glory, different type of matches.

So you can play with items on and it'd be fucking chaos and stupid shit. or it can be one-on-one Fowellon destination Fox only type shit and I feel like with the Switch and where it's at now and everybody kind of this renaissance for Nintendo, it's a great opportunity for them to come in and like really give

a platform that for years people are going to be playing and you can kind of evolve down two different paths, both those pads being shown the same type of respect. It sounds like exactly that they've nailed it from everything I've heard from you and everybody else that's where they landed. The smash community both the melee guys and the smash

guys are all like, all right, Ultimate seeming pretty good. There's some issues right now with balance, but like, Sakurai the director is looking at that, and there's tweaks being made, and I'm very excited to see where this game comes out. But going back to the Port versus new version conversation,

like with the Smash Bros. blog that they've been updating every day, I just, the amount of content that they're adding is just so insane. And the amount of love and extra care being put into this version is just proof to me that this is going to be a brand new experience. It's not just going to be the same game again.

I'm so excited. I'm just going to wait to play it. Jared, yes, sir. You've been playing old games. I have new again. Mega Man X collection one and two. I downloaded these the other day after based on the games cast we just had.

I guess yesterday when they got early or this week when they got released. They are excellent emulations of these games. They're wonderful recreations. The museum stuff is, there's a lot in there. I like seeing the different, particularly the merch and stuff that's in there. I think those are really neat. Yeah, more sirens here again. The merch does need, I don't, it doesn't quite have the same degree stepping outside of the games themselves of TLC that you saw on like the very first Mega Man collection where you could jump in and have the challenge fights and all that.

They do add a neat two boss challenge fight mode that I like. That's really cool. But there's not quite as much variety around that stuff and I miss that. However, when it comes to going and playing some really spectacular Mega Man games, I mean, I picked up Mega Man X and I'm just like, oh, this is still great. This is just as much fun as it was the first day I played it. If you like good platforming, some of those games are spectacular platformers, and others are very good platformers. Are there any bad ones?

I don't think any of them are bad. What are the must plays out of the question? The must plays are, one is essential. I feel like one and two are still the strongest in the series. Some people really like three because you can play a zero. And I like that as well. But I feel like one and two are the best. But all of them are worth your time.

Even the, like, eight is, it was a PlayStation 2 game. Yeah. And that's ugly. It's an ugly game. But it's actually a very well designed ugly game with some neat platforming ideas and and a lot of fun. And I think more than anything else, though, it's that you've got something almost impressive at a series that began on the Super Nintendo all the way to the PlayStation

2. and the ability to play through those same characters and their evolving story and they're evolving mechanics across SNES, PlayStation, and PS2 across three platforms in these two collections. It's really cool.

I'm a fan of this. Have you been playing it? No, not yet, but I worked at Capcom for a little while when we were doing the Dead Rising stuff. I have an absolute love of my heart for Mega Man. Yeah. Well, as a game designer,

it has some of the absolute, I'm a big moment-to-moment game designer. Like some people are systems people, some people are mechanics people, some people are level design, right? Like I am huge on mechanics. And Mega Man for me in particular, especially two. Oh, yeah. Yeah, have you? It's Golden Age.

Golden Age for mechanics too. Have you ever gotten your hands on nine? Not yet. Okay, so nine is two part two. Yeah. And some people don't agree, but I think it's the best Mega Man game. All right. I'm going to check it out.

Nine, though. Oh. Wow. Best Vigaman game. I think so. It's because it's two built on 30 years later. Somebody just went back to two and said, what worked about two and what can 30 years of platform design teach us to make that even better?

I'm going to play. I'm going to message you and then we're going to see if that is that's true. It's radically good. Yeah, it's two of all the weapons were good. Fair enough. But yeah, I think X is, you don't have to like old games to enjoy playing particularly X1 and X2. And I think X3 is really worth your time. And the others are, they're a neat historical,

they're not just curios, they're all good games. So you can literally get dozens of hours of good platforming out of buying these. I think they're a great pack. So collection one is one through four. Yeah. And then collection two is... Five through eight. Okay.

Yeah. So you get in eight games between the two collections. And that's a pretty spectacular. Also, I think probably a disclosure on this. I did some sponsored content for IGN for Capcom. Capcom sponsored a video I was in recently that was about the history of MegaMan and Mega Man X, and I should probably disclose that. So I'm not sitting here being compensated for talking about how I enjoy the game,

but I did some commentary that I was paid for about the history of it there. More sirens. Yep, got to make sure that gets said. Megaran was in that too. Yeah, Megaran was in that. Oh, really? Do we get a kickback on that? No kickback.

Please send a season. Hit up Sean Finnegan. I'd be like, you know what I said up Fenninger. You know what footage that I gave you that you could use in this? Yeah. We won't money for. Jokes on you. But yeah, guys, it's great platform.

Open up the pocket purse. Pear Schneider. The pocket person. And then your final game to talk about. Sky Skiskipper. Yeah. Skyskipper. The fuck is Skiskipper.

Well, that's a great question, Jim, because that was my question when I first heard of it a few years ago. Sam Claiborne introduced me to this game, the managing editor of Rhode IGN. So SkySkipper is a ridiculously obscure Nintendo arcade game that was created by Nintendo in 1981, right after Donkey Kong, did not. test well and then pretty much all the cabinets were converted into Popeye machines. They used the Popeye boards. Kind of like Donkey Kong was radar scope with a new, you know, a new ROM on it. This was, Popeye was Skyskipper with a new ROM on it. They're like, oh man, we'll make game people want to play.

Skyskipper is a weird little game about flying an airplane around a world full of playing cards flying through the air while giant monkeys throw rocks at you. It's weird. It's garishly colorful to the point of hurting your eyes. Yes. It's an interesting piece of history for a Nintendo completionist. How do you play it? You can play it on Ye Old Switch because Nintendo for the first time ever has released Skyskipper

based on a ROM that they have in their archive to the general public. And so we can play this very, very, this long, lost forgotten piece in Nintendo history. It's just been released. It's eight bucks. But you recommend people play this long lost piece of Nintendo history. No, not unless you're really into Nintendo history. It's okay. It has some weird bits in it.

It has cussing in it, which is interesting for an only Nintendo game. The monkey gets in the cage, and the monkey's like, damn it! You know, mild profanity. The main character is named Captain U, Y-O-U. So it's like, yeah. It's got a very strange. You're flying a little biplane. You have to refuel.

But there's a mechanic where all the things you're picking up have different suits of playing cards on them. And if you make different hands up in the corner, you get point bonuses, which is a neat mechanic. But it's kind of awkward and weird. It was also released on the Atari 2,600 for some reason, because they bought a license for it before the game actually came out. And the Atari version is awful. There's Mr. You, not Captain You, Mr. You. Okay. Yeah, don't give them a lot of.

But yeah. Also, Nintendo really into monkeys that year? Lots of gorillas. Monkeys were huge, man. Yeah, monkeys were huge. I have a theory that's- These colors are fucking atrocious. Yeah, not amazing. Garrish, like I said.

It's really weird. Yeah, it looks strange. It's this kind of weird scrolling game. You fly off. Get up there. So what you're trying to, you have to chase the monkeys off, and then the little guys

will hop out of their holes and you catch them. This also looks complicated as all hell. It's not as complicated as it looks. That part's actually, all you have to do is pick up all the jumpy guys. You just get more points. West is this way. East is this way.

Yeah, jumpy guys. There's little frogs that jump to. Oh, yeah, there's a frog. But see the top left corner with diamonds if you get four diamonds in a row as your pickup you get a bonus but he's not gonna get a bonus because he didn't pick up four diamonds so it'll push the next card over he's trying to make little hands see what's happening yeah so you get more points to that way it's a weird game and then the monkeys throw

things at you so no it's not a good game does it control like a dream like it seems to it controls exactly as you'd expect it to watching this video oh my god yeah it's a weird little game but I wanted to play it because it's not been widely available ever. And now it is. I mean, you could dig up, you know, some old, like, you know, in the dark corners of the internet, there were ways to find versions of it.

But now Nintendo's giving it to us. And I say if they give it to us, we should play it. All right, we're about to get a topic of the show. But this episode of Kind of Funny Games cast is brought to you by Blue Apron. Greg. Can you tell me all about that Blue Apron? You know I can tell you about Blue Apron as I cook with Blue Apron quite often, including this evening.

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You're welcome. Thank you. Let me talk about Blue Apron. You make him salivate. I'm hungry. I'm hoping Jen lets me make the steak tonight. That sounds really good. Those garlic mashed potatoes.

Yeah, yeah. That sounds about right, right. Let's go. I can't have those. That sounds so good. Smart. Yes. You are involved in the mafia series at this point over at Hager 13.

Well, you involved with the MAPTI series? I actually, no. You came after Mafia 3. I did, yeah. So Horizon Zero Dom was my last game before transitioning over to, you know, obviously Hanger 13. And when I got there, we were all in on. It's time for a new IP.

New IP over at Hanger 133. So what does that mean? So, like, you know what I mean? I think people out there. there understand IP intellectual property. Sure. You guys, you want to make a new thing from the ground up. You don't want to just make another mafia. You don't want to make another thing you guys have done before. That's right. Where the hell does that kind of process start?

The hardest thing about building a brand, a brand new IP. The absolute hardest thing is that it's a whiteboard. Like literally, you're just looking at a whiteboard. There's nothing on it, right? And for some people, that amount of uncertainty is just like, nope, we're going to opt out. We're just going to nope the hell out of this one. Yeah. Right? Like that. There are certain types of creatives that I like to call original creatives. And they love to build new stuff, right? And then there are other types of creatives that I call derivative creatives that take a look at something and go, that's not the best form of that. There is a better way to do that, right?

And so if you're building something brand new from scratch, I like to surround or build that team around original creatives first at the very least. because there's going to be less frustration and upset around like, we don't know what this. We're not going to know what this is for six months, seven months, eight months. We're going to sort of go through a lot of ideas. We're going to churn through a lot of stuff because you're going to throw a lot of stuff against that whiteboard, right? So that's really where it starts is figuring out the team that you want to build

because it takes a specific type of person that really wants to dig into, all right, well, you can make literally anything. What is that thing that we decide we're going to make? After that, the hardest part about it is vision correction. You know, because you could say, we're going north. Well, from San Francisco, North can mean a lot of things, right? Like, North could mean a lot of different destinations, right? And especially when you're working with multiple studios as part of your studio.

And you're not there all of the time. North could end up moving this direction North could end up moving that direction. There's a lot of time spent just kind of course correcting North, right? So, you know, the question was around like, how do you start, right? Yeah.

At the end of the day, I start at, and I honest, I picked this up from both some of the really strong creatives, guys like Tom Cadwell at League of Legends and guys like Jan Bart Van Bik, who was the art director who had the original idea for Heise and Zerodon. They started with what they loved as kids. You know, they went back,

to what do we love as kids. Old robot dinosaurs. Certainly you can see. Absolutely, you know, a love for things that we picked up, you know, at that time. Right. I have not yet seen that not work. You know what I mean? Like, I have not yet seen when somebody fell in love with something from their childhood

and they went, I can't do that thing because generally that's a licensed property. Sure, right. Right. Right. Right, right, right. Right. But they could do a version of it that they fell in love with, right? And if you can find something that lots of people love, then suddenly you're cooking with some

fire, right? Like you're getting to the point where you don't have to explain as much anymore because there's a common understanding that at least you've kind of picked from and then you start to move on, right? you know, it's a huge, huge, huge process. I think, and I don't know the exact time frame, but it took a really long time for the thunder jaw from Horizon Zero Dawn to get to the point where the thunderjaw was, right?

Where you really understood how it moved and how it looked and the way that it wanted to react, even at a very basic level, even at a, you know, the first playable level. Because no, even though there was an idea around that that's it's going to be a robotic dinosaur, right? Which, in fairness to horizon, it was never dinosaurs. It was always animals, right? That was always one thing that was actually

more true about it. But it was at least that idea that it started from somewhere, you know, and it said, all right, like, we're going to take this to take it to its best form. So I think that's the place that you start at least, is that you find a way to get some common ground.

And oftentimes, at least I have found, that if you start from a place that everyone kind of loved at some point in their lifetime, then they have something to contribute, you know? So when it comes to getting something like this actually greenlit, when you're trying to, when you're,

you're the, you're the creatives, you're in there, you've got your team. Yeah. You've built this kind of common vision of something that doesn't exist yet. And now you've got to go to your publisher and say, you can you guess invest the ridiculous sum of money

and this thing that we're describing to you? How does that process work for somebody from the outside? How does that come together? It's hard. On league, it was a very different process. I wasn't there for the pitch process, but I was there kind of towards the back end right after the 10-cent cash infusion

and stuff like that. I remember talking with Yambard about the idea for Horizon Zero Don and the way that Herman Holst, who was the studio head of Gorilla and some of the key members of that team, could you imagine walking into a room and saying, all right, here's the deal. we're going to do

robot animals and dinosaurs a thousand years into the future of a post-apocalyptic Denver like nope greenish right like that's that's a tough call how'd you make it happen at the end of the day they made it happen right

so in fairness they were the ones there on that one that made it happen a lot of it comes down to I think passion and zilitary around how much do you really love this one thing that was absolutely true that convinced me to come onto the Horizon Zero Dawn Project when I came on was they loved that video game.

Like, they absolutely loved what they were doing on that, and I could feel that passion. And I'm sure when that original pitch was happening, that passion was felt. Yeah. After that, imagery. Right? After that, it's imagery, right?

Concept art? Oftentimes concept art. Oftentimes concept art. But almost immediately after concept art, it ain't real unless it's in game, right? Like, it's just, it's not real unless you can put your hands on controller and play it. And one of the things that I can point to that Cory Barug and his team did on God of War, they had released some of their first playable footage, a 2015 build. Man, you could

see it at that time. Like, you could see at that time that God of War was going to be special, right? And so I think it's a combination of passion and almost zealotry around that IP. Like, it's not that you just want to make a... You have to know that you're going to commit five years of your life to doing nothing but this and building this and trying to make sure that everybody stays on that same path. Corey has described it a number of times as the number of times that he had to repeat the same thing over five years. Just started grinding on him. He's like, I know that this is what God of War was before.

This is where we're trying to take it now, you know? And God of War wasn't a new IP, but it was a reimagining of what, you know, they had done previously. It was the same thing on Horizon Zero done. Several members of that team throughout the entirety of that development process were like, I'm just not convinced, you know?

And that's hard. Like, it's, it is constantly hard, but that's why you have to have almost that zealotry, you know, almost that, oh, you've got to really love it and believe in it. After that, the imagery definitely helps, right? Like, good concept art is good concept art. But when you're building something that nobody's seen before and you don't have to explain why it's good,

that is something that people just immediately go, okay, like, when you say the words a thousand years into the future of a post-apocalyptic Denver, you know, with human tribes and, you know, robotic, you know, animals, we're like, I can't. There's so much to grok in your head. But when there's an image that just captures that, you don't, the words don't have to be used anymore. right? And then just following that is something playable. Like you just got to have something, right? There's something that's proving out why it's special, which is, I think if I had three or four big takeaways about building a new IP, which to get back to like what is an IP, we could talk about it's not just a game. Like you're really building a universe of things and you should be thinking about comics and movie rights and, you know, everything else that is associated with a big intellectual

property. but you got to do something incredibly well anything one thing you've got to do incredibly well whenever I hire new designers one of my favorite questions is who's your favorite designer I just who is it you know I get a lot of Kajima's right I get a lot of Miyamoto's yeah I get some Todd Howard you know and for me it's both Miyamoto from the mechanics perspective and Todd Howard from a system's perspective, like they just do amazing work inside of their fields. Man, there's a lot of stuff wrong with Elder Scrolls.

You know, people talk about it's buggy, character models, animation fidelity, I-K, you know, like you could talk about those things, right? You know, that's a 90-plus metacritic game that's sold, continues to sell copies, you know, because it does, in my mind, two things better than almost anything else in the industry. one is the sense of exploration the sense of exploration that you get in Skyrim or the Elder Scroll series and in some ways the fallout series too

is unlike almost anything else that you play right the second is the reason why that exploration even is valuable is because it has all these layered systems that make everything that you find interesting and unique you know like oh I just went into this you know

droger cave and inside of it there is some pots and pans and you know a couple well, I can use those in alchemy. Or so they take a look at a couple of things in Bethesda, and they go, this is what we are going to do world-class better than anyone else. Right? And they invest in that, you know?

And if you take a look at, I don't know, Fortnite as an example, man, talk about really, there is a game that Jagax makes. And it's called Block and Load. And Block and Load is a five-on-five building and shooting, you know, sort of game. It's basically Fortnite without the Battle Royall apart. It didn't do anything perfect. It did a lot of things okay or a lot of things. Well, it just didn't stand out in my mind anywhere.

Fortnite comes along, and the original version of Fortnite, people weren't really picking up on Battle Royale, obviously made it as big as it wasn't going free to play. But, man, building and firing in that game is just so much freaking fun. Like, thinking about, and this gets to almost my next point, which is think about who you're trying to target. You know, because you're not going to sell a video game to everyone. You're just not, right?

You've got to think about who it is that you want to, you know, actually make this video game for it. The team is always first because, again, if the team doesn't love it, it's really hard to spend multiple years making something. But right after that is who do you really want to target with it? It's so smart what Fortnite did because they took Minecraft-based build mechanics for a generation of kids that are screaming for an updated,

aged-up experience and said, hey, remember those things that you did for hours on end, but we're going to simplify that, but we're going to keep that as a mechanic, we're going to add that to shooter mechanics. And now you've got a video game that, you know, God, what an amazing video game that, you know, Fortnite's become.

So I think that's a big part of thinking through what it is that you want to do with an IP. You know, the very first thing is you've got to get some imagery. You've got to put something, you know, sort of in engine. But right after that, you better have some mechanics figured out on that moment-to-moment perspective where people go, yeah, I can see myself playing 40, 50, 60 hours of this repeatedly

because this moment-to-moment interaction is so damn good that I don't mind repeating it. So when it comes to that, Stephen King likes to talk about writing each piece for what he thinks of it was his ideal reader. Absolutely. And you're kind of describing the same kind of idea. Yeah. For the things you make outside of the team, who's your ideal reader?

For me, it starts with, all right, this is going to sound like pandering. I don't mean it that way. I think it starts with the kind of people that watch kind of funny. That's you best friends. Yeah, it is. Because the people that watch kind of funny care more about video games than just picking up the game for a couple of hours and, you know, playing it.

Like, they think about them. They wear t-shirts, you know, that are about video games. Gaming is part of their identity. It's part of the culture that they, you know, create. Do you want more water, too? That would be great. Oh, wait, are we watering up? Oh, no.

Just for me and the guests. Jared, if you want to slack, slyly. You can slice. Oh. Please continue. I'm just getting sass. Right? I'm getting sass.

So from my perspective, it starts with the kind of gamer that's ultimately going to be an evangelist for your title. And it's people who evangelize are people who love video games. Right. Right. So I've seen on Twitter now a little bit around this, do you have to be somebody who likes video games to make video games? Or is it something that you have to be passionate about? I see a lot of people go, no, you don't have to. And I'm like, God.

I want, no offense, I'm not hiring those people, right? I know that other people might, you know, like Miyamoto, he's stated, you know, sometimes I look for people who, you know, aren't just gamers, I think is his quote. Great, you should have a multitude of interest. Other areas that you can pick up entertainment. I love Vegas because I go to the shows and I get creative inspiration from that. I get creative inspiration from books or movies or life experiences.

You get it from everywhere. But damn it, if you want to make video games. You better play some games. You better play some games. I love them, you know. When I'm not making, it's the first thing that I want to do, right? I'm thinking, like, I'm Jonesing right now to play Octopat Traveler.

I'm like, oh, my God, I'm going to get up my hands on Octopat Traveler, right? It's so good. Not just because I'm an old school RPG, obviously I play a lot of Japanese video games, but because it just, the idea of that, that narrative in the way that works is, sounds cool to me. So I'm big on it. And I'm very passionate about building new IP. I feel like between Gen 6 and Gen 7 and Gen 7 and Gen 8, we continue to build less new IP.

because it is big, it's risky, it's expensive. SQL sell, right? You're probably a guaranteed return on that. It's a proven quantity. It's like the reason I imagine Gorilla did kill zone forever, right? Gras, they enjoyed it, but cool, we can iterate, we can do something different.

You look at something like Shadowfall, right? That it wasn't the traditional kill zone. It was something different, but it had the kills zone name and it, hopefully to get people in. Yeah, the stretch of going off. And that was hard for them, right? Like, I wasn't there for a kill zone at all,

but obviously trying to do something a little bit different you run into that problem where the franchise is established. You're like, well, the people who like the franchise like it for this reason. If you mess with it, that's hard. But you do have that wonderful counterpoint.

You talk about, you know, we've talked before why was an Octopath Traveler Final Fantasy 16. And the one part we haven't talked about. Well, not only that, no baggage. And now you're going to have

Octopath Traveler 2 and 3 and 4. And suddenly you've created new franchise. New franchise, which means new guaranteed money from sequels when it's successful. And there's that end of it because if you never take risks,

then you end up, I mean, Final Fantasy, 15. 15. I love Final Fantasy. Just to be clear, I love Final Fantasy 15. I agree with the reason why you do Octopat Traveler as a separate IP, because if it hits, I'm going to go by 16 and I'm going to go by Octop Traveler. Yes. Right?

So that just, it makes a ton of sense. So with the new IP and with how hard it is, not only to pitch it to get made, but then also to prove to the audience to buy it and play it. Yeah. How quickly in the. process does the conversation go from a lot of hard work and creativity and just kind of this. It's all coming together and we're all working to the not fun, shitty questions you have to answer of.

Sure. How much do we need to pander to a specific audience to guarantee we hit at least this? Like how do we make sure that just using the right buzzwords to get in there? Yeah. I would say we never pander to an audience. I would say that every single. segment of the gaming, the people who are gamers, right? They like things. There's a segment of gamers that will never play online games, right? There's a segment of gamers that only play

online games, right? That's a really difficult segment of gamers to bridge. You know, you're like, all right, well, if you decide you're making a single player only game, you know you're going to ostracize X number of gamers and potentially even X number of regions of the world that are never going to pick up your video game, right? If you decide as an example, you're going to make your quantum dreams, right? And you make Detroit. I love Detroit, right? I think it's fantastic. You know when you're making that game, China's never playing Detroit, right? Like, that's never going to happen. You're never going to pick up X number of millions of people that could potentially want to enjoy your product. Right. Now, you know, Detroit's a PlayStation

exclusive and stuff like that, so that makes it harder. But as an example, you know that you're giving up. At the end of the day, I would rather make a game that people love than a game that I feel like hit or checked all the boxes and then became almost bland or it's that old saying of you can't please everyone, you know? So I think that's absolutely true. So just please the ones that you think are really going to enjoy the kind of game that the team wants to build. And I think if you head down that path, that's the best way to actually get it. Does that become part of the conversation as early as the pitch meetings of, here's the group that we are targeting. Yeah, it does.

It does. It absolutely does. And, you know, in fairness, good marketing and PR departments and stuff like that are a part of that conversation, right? The publisher, at least for me, right? I'm at 2K. And the publisher is the one who's handing us money as an internal studio. You know, so they want to be a part of that process.

And they absolutely should be. because if they don't believe that they can sell it, that's a really tough, you know, call on our end to go forth and say, well, this is the one that we want to build, right? So there's certainly a collaborative process that occurs inside of that. And during that, yeah, we absolutely take a look and we go, all right, you know, without getting, you know, into specific information about how segmentation is work and everything else. We absolutely take a look and go, are we building enough features for this segment of gamers that would enjoy something like this, right?

Like, great example for me is, is Dark Souls, right? It's really at its core a single player experience, you know, it's something that you kind of test your might against, you know, and I think the vast majority of people will play that probably play it's single player. There are enough things inside of that that allow people who would love to play online games. Obviously that, you know, it has PVP in certain ways to get into it. But the idea that they had around putting down the note cards and the idea that they had, you know, around being able to bring in extra buddies for boss fights,

India. There are smart things that they, that the development team from From did that said, hey, this is something that this is our core audience, but we've done enough in this space that some of these other kind of gamers may come in and pick this up as well. When you're talking about segmentation, follow up to Tim's question,

we've been having a discussion a lot in Games Daily recently about the vast market shift toward games as a service. Sure. Do you think that marketplace has become over saturated right now? Do you think there's more good games being made in that space than there are customers? So this gets into sort of Red Ocean, Blue Ocean stuff, right? Like when you talk about Red Ocean is there's a set market space, and that market space doesn't grow larger.

And so what you're trying to do is you're competing inside of that space for gamers, right? There's a limited amount of gamers. inside the ocean. And then in a blue ocean, you're basically, you're expanding it, right? You're like, well, this is what, it's just like space. Apparently, weirdly, space is continuing to expand, which blows my mind. But I don't know how that works. I see it. Right, right, exactly.

So the idea of blue ocean is like, you're literally creating more ocean. Nintendo, Nintendo, Nintendo. Sure. Well, one of my favorite examples of this is EverQuest 2 in World Warcraft. Oh. Two games that release within one week of each other, one the current king of MMOs, right? the other, an upstart that didn't really know what they had with World of Warcraft. One went and said, all right, when we build the original EverQuest, we literally required

gamers to go buy a video card, because a lot of PCs at that time didn't have one, right? So you had to go buy a video card to buy EverQuest, right? And so they said, these hardcore gamers, these people that are willing to go shell out $300, $400, $400, whatever it is, in addition to buying the game and the expansions and the monthly fee, these are the ones and they go there's half a million of these out there and we're going to grab them right Roto Workaf said

what if we stylized the graphics we made it a little more single player so that you didn't have to have this force grouping that EverQuest 2 had and we made sure that it ran on PCs that literally existed all around the world at that time right yeah exactly right well turns out that was the right call

you know because it went from an MMO audience that at that time was probably somewhere around a half a million to a million people. Now, today maybe it's shrunken a little bit, but certainly at the world of work at peace, you're 15, 20 million people inside of that audience. Like, that's what new genres do, you know? And so when you talk about what building a new IP is, and sometimes it's also even having that conversation around, are you building a new genre? You know, we certainly had that conversation at Riot Around League. You know, there was a time where we, on our website, basically said,

hey, do you like Dota? You should totally come and play League of Legends, you know? Like, we hired some of the Dota guys over, and that's what we're doing. At one point, of course, Blizzard and Valve got into a huge fight around who owned Dota the term, right? Obviously, Dota was Warcraft 3, a mod, but Blizzard hadn't really done anything with it, so Valve decided to, you know, basically to trademark it. So we decided at league, like, well, we don't want to call ourselves a, you know, like we don't want Dota all over our, you know, that's going to be a competitor to us. So we had to come up with a new term. And I remember in the meeting where we figured out MOBA. You know, we were like, all right, well, what are we going to call ourselves? Because we need to take Dota off, but we need to explain what the hell we are. So massive online battle arena. Yep, that's where we are. We're just to start calling ourselves a MOBA. And like, that's how it happened, right? Can we have another hour long sub interview about that meeting?

Man. It's an interesting thing. I will say one of the, you pick up things from different studios that you work at. Brandon Beck at Riot Games is brilliant.

Absolutely brilliant because he doesn't think about things as games. He thinks about everything as an IP. There was a point on League of Legends where they literally just ripped out

all the lore. They were like, man, me this. We don't need this lore the way that it's working. It was all based around who the Summiner was.

You know, became very apparent, very quickly, the champions were the stars of League of Legends, not trying to figure out the fields of justice and they hired an incredibly brilliant game designer, Christina Norman from the Mass Effect series, to come over and help with this problem, figure out what they wanted to do with this.

So, you know, to this point now, what League is, you know, e-sports and merchandising and everything that it does, it's thinking about their title as an IP as opposed to their title as a game. Sure. So I think that's super important when you're trying to build an IP. I'm enjoying all this four dimensional chess stuff.

This is great. Here's my question. So like this spawns from you just gave a speak a talk, right? Where you talk and where you basically announced, hey, you know, hangar 13. We're working on this new IP. Yeah. Yeah. I know that you can't talk about what that IP is.

No. I don't know if this is a leading question. So feel free to be like, I can't talk about that either. Can you tell us where we've talked about how it goes from whiteboard to this. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Can you say where you are in that?

Like has this been approved? Do you have the IP and you're moving on it? I think the best thing that I can say is that we have, we have the idea. Okay. We're very early in the process. Okay. So I don't want to talk about like where we're at in specific milestones.

No, no, I understand that. I understand. Because my question is, especially for you guys, Hangar 13, owned by 2K. Yeah. When you, you come on as Mafia is finishing. Yeah, right.

Are they, do you get like a deadline of like, all right, cool, here's your white. board, figure out what game you want to do in six months have a pitch for us, have three pitches. Not really. Yeah. So, oftentimes you build studios around people. You know, you're like, oh, we figured out who this talented person or group of people

is, and then you figure out what you want to do. And Hanger 13 was built around the studio. Had a guy named Hayden Blackman. And Hayden had worked at LucasArts for years. It was a prolific writer, and he was the game director on Force on Leash. and forced on leach too. And he is, when I try to figure out what studios that I want to join, oftentimes I try to figure out who the studio is and where that studio head comes from.

If the studio head is a creative in nature, that as a creative, I'm like, I'm all in. Because I think that they worry less about deadlines and what the, you know, how much money or what the profitability of a title is or all those things that go, let's just make a great freaking video game, you know. Now, they are responsible for all the rest of that. have to hit time and budget and everything else, but their focus always is, and certainly Hayden's is at Hanger 13, he just tells me every day, your job, make a great video game. You know, like that, that's the only thing that you have to worry about.

So he trusts the product, then. Yeah, he trusts, absolutely trust the product. And 2K mirrors that absolutely, all the way up to Carl Strauss and Zellnick, yeah, who are the heads of Take 2, who's the parent company of 2K. any time that, and I'm not in the meetings, but any time that Hayden and, you know, Strauss have that conversation, at least what Hayden comes back to me with is build a great video game and everything else to take care of itself. So, yeah, sometimes that might take a little bit longer than we thought.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In particular on this one, we, you know, we had an idea. We had two ideas. We had three ideas. And on the fourth idea, you know, which was kind of this, it's not as if they were all unique ideas. They just kept morphing and changing and iterating. and iterating, yeah, and now we've got it.

Now we feel like we've got where we want to go. Very cool. Any final questions about this new IP business before we move on? What's the title? When's it coming? Do you have the PS5 Dev kick? What's going on? Definitely can't talk about any of that.

One other thing that I will say on this, everybody makes their stuff just a little bit differently, right? One of my favorite new IP that was kind of in Gen 7, right at the end of it was dishonest. Sure. But even that teaches you things. Like you learn things by creating your own new IP, but you also take a look at other new IP. And I love the mechanics and dishonor. And in particular, in dishonored one, I thought a lot of the level design was super smart. It really brought forth some of that old deus X feeling and, you know, multiple ways to do things and different paths and great. You could watch people play dishonored and you could see them be stealthy and just. wreck things. You could watch them just use abilities and do crazy stuff with summoning rats and stuff like that. You could watch them be Twitch gamers and watch how they do different stuff with the sword and abilities. And it didn't matter. Like in all ways the pair could be successful. And I love that, right?

That world is super depressing. It's not a world that I feel like is worth saving. And so every time that I step into an IP that I want to build, one of the things that's true about the stuff that I want to make is that I want to make a world that you go, oh man, if I'm going to spend 40, 50, 60, 70 hours in this world, it better be a world that I want to spend some time in. That's a great point. And I take a look at, you know, Dunwall, I think is the name of that area inside of dishonored. And I'm like, you're slaughtering whales and, you know, your character models are very sharp-edged, you know, and they all seem like they're, you know, for lack of a better term, assholes. And, you know, I'm like, I don't know if this is a world I want to save.

Like, I don't feel like I should protect the empress and get this world back. I'm like, you know, it just, and they kind of built that mechanic, right? They're like, oh, if you're, you know, this murderous assassin, actually the world gets worse over time. And, you know, but even I oftentimes play the good guy. Hell yeah. I just can help it. In your face, Tim. Yeah.

And I can help it. I didn't really feel like I saved much. Yeah. At the end, and I'm like, oh, this world still sucks. Westworld season two. Oh, yeah. Totally. Totally. Although I love Rest World.

Yeah, I do too. But what you're describing there is... So that in mind, what is your favorite gaming related IP to spend time in? Where do you like to go? God, I love so many of them. What are a couple then? When you say related IP, do you mean something that is not a game and... Something that's in the game.

Well, you were talking about thinking about IP instead of thinking about those games. So what are some of those places you like to do? So I can't help it. I love books as a kid. I was one of those kids who had the little pin flashlight or whatever and like you would have the covers, you know, up over your head and Montelte July light out. And I'm like, I'm up underneath the covers with the, and I think that's where my eyes suck now. I love to read.

The people around my studio are sick of hearing about Brandon Sanderson. But for me, like, I'm like, oh, Brandon Sanderson, everything that Brandon Sanderson, everything that Brandon Sanderson has written, I'm like, Miss Born, have you guys read Miss Born yet? Have you guys read, you know, have you guys read Way of Kings? Like, the way that Brandon Sanderson thinks about writing is the way that sometimes game designers think about systems design. He has what I call hard, he has this idea of, like, here's stuff that is soft magic and here's stuff that is basically, you know, like, nobody cares and here's hard magic. And he explains this on his website. Sure. Where he's like, ah, Harry Potter. All the rules apply except when they don't.

You know, like whenever you need something convenient, Harry Potter comes up with it. And it always feels just a little cheap, you know, like they couldn't use the tools that they had, so they created a new one on the fly to get through a situation. The way that Sanderson writes is that it's all hard magic, right? In the Miss Born series, you can't do magic unless you've burning metal inside of your stomach. If you got no metal, you can't burn the magic. It just doesn't work, right? Inside the way of kings, if you don't have this sphere, you know, you're kind of sucking in this sphere essence.

if you don't have any of that, you can't do your crazy magic, you know? And oftentimes when I love IP, it's when people have the loss of their powers or abilities as opposed to when they have them. You know, like it is a much more interesting story when Superman gets his ass kicked by Doomsday.

Right? Or it's a much more interesting story, at least for me in Smallville. Oh, yeah. When Superman, is it Tom Wellick? Tom Willick? Tom Willey. Tom willing.

He wants to play football. Yeah. Like any kid probably in Kansas would want to do, right? Like, oh, we want to grow up, we want to put, maybe not so much now. But, you know, brain injury. But certainly. Well, now it's heads up tackling. It's very weird.

Oh, my God. Pull a flag. But certainly, at least in that time frame, 2003, 2004, when that was coming out, like, you were like, of course Superman, growing up in Kansas would want to play football. Yeah. And his dad's like, you can't play football. Yep.

Like, they're putting this limitation. on this kid's power. Yeah. You know, because he could be the world's greatest football player easily, right?

But he can't. And I find that incredibly interesting, right? Because you're like, you can't do that for reasons. Red Sun stories. Just anything,

yeah, I'm a huge fan of Red Sun. Well, not just Red Sun, but the idea that anytime Superman's under a red sun, that's going to be a good story.

It always is. His powers are gone. He has to be... My favorite Superman, and I know that you wrote one. I thought it was really good. I'm working on. My favorite one,

my favorite one, is, and I forget which one it is, but it's when he lands in Russia as opposed to the United States. That's right, son. Yeah, yeah, right. So I'm just like, yeah, absolutely. And I was just like, oh, love that.

It's fantastic. Oh, it's like, yep. What a fun episode. I told you it would be. That's great. You were amazing. I don't know. We're going to wait until you play the game.

We're going to end this out with a fun little game we've been playing called Mobile Game or Bullshit. Jared, what is this week's? Wait, no, no, no, no. Kevin. I want him to give the, That's how you want it to be? Fine, go. Hit the song.

Jerry Petty, what is today's topic? Today's topic is mobile game or straight to DVD movie. So you're going to get a list of titles here, and all you've got to do is tell me whether it's a mobile game or a straight to DVD movie. However, this week there's a small twist. One and only one of these five mobile games slash movies is both. That's right

So we have three options Three options but only one Only one is both Now here's what I would like to propose to the group But mainly the host of Jared Petty's game Of mobile game or bullshit to Jared Petty Can we do it where we go through We go through all five games

We say if it's mobile game or bullshit And then at the end we double back to pick the one Oh my friend That was the plan Thank you just making sure Yep that's how we're doing it Sixth point What that is

Is that a bonus point? That is the bonus point Bonus point. Right there. That is the bonus point. It's like rock and jock. It's worth 25 points. All right. We've got the descriptions here.

Some of these descriptions are real. Some of these descriptions are made up. All right. Now, we have a guest here today, so I think you should go first. Oh, so you got to go last? Oh, well, you want to go last? I would love to go last. Who was first last week then?

I think it was you, wouldn't it, Tim? Give me some. Let me go first here. You going first? Yeah. All right. Number one, Battle Heart 2. Welcome back to the world of Battleheart.

Jesus. Jesus. DVD movie. DVD movie. Battle Heart 2. Here's my question, if I may, Jared Petty from Jared Petty's mobile game or or bullshit. Is the title of the movie, if it was a movie, Battle Heart 2, or is it something like

Aladdin, Aladdin, colon, battle heart 2? None of these have colons. There are no colon. So you're not leaving anything out. Not leaving anything out. I'm going to say Battle Heart 2 is indeed. I choked I choked in the end

Fuck I love this game I'm gonna say about a heart too is DVD All right straight to DVD movie I'm going mobile game Mobile game I am yeah I'm going mobile game Number two I never lost mobile game

All right I don't know first week So we always reverse afterward Okay yeah All right All right Zumbies How is that spelled Z O-O-O-M

M-B-I-E-S. Is that an M or an N? M. Like zombies, all right. But with two- F-O. Yes. Zumbies.

That's all I get. There's nothing else. The description. All right. It all started with an apocalypse. That's straight to DVD. Straight to DVD. Straight to DVD.

I'm saying it's a game. You're saying it's a game. The Zoom makes it sound like a game. So I'm going to go game. It's going game. All right. All right. It's going game.

Go on game. Number three, mercenaries two. Make a Merck great again. What a fucking description. I hope he made that up. I hope I did too. And that's me? That's Greg, right?

Oh, wait, let's see. We always reverse order. So with three people, it gets weird. We go back around. We're going this way again. You're always in the middle, Greg. Oh, okay. I got you.

Okay. Give me it again. Mercenaries two, make a Merk great again. Mobile game. Mobile game. I'm saying game as well. Mobile game. I'm going to go mobile game,

although I would love to point out the Merks way back on the 8-bit Nintendo was an amazing video game. Oh, Merks. I remember Merks. Based on the arcade game, right? Absolutely. Yeah.

Excellent. I like you so much. Let's see. Number four. Tomb Invader. Ah. Descriptions. Explore tombs.

for Fantastic Treasure. I'm going DVD. Straight to DVD. Yep. I'm going mobile game. Mobile game. I mean, the description doesn't work

for a movie, so it has to be a mobile game. Mobile game. Number five, Ice Sharks. Now available on Android. That's the description? Well, I always just pull a line.

Oh, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. No, it's not the whole description. I'm always pulling a line from the description. If it's anything else, I just make it up. But if it's from the game, I just pull it from the from the ice sharks I shucks now they're not playing again no way you go first dress one I mean it doesn't matter

It doesn't matter oh man well you've been broken by the game yeah Kevin still isn't one oh I see where you're at okay ice sharks I'm gonna say DVD as well all right I'm going I'm going game yeah nice sharks yeah and now everybody gets to pick one that they think is both Ice sharks Which one do you think Is both?

You're saying Ice sharks as well Oh wow Okay so I'm gonna put it It's because Well I want to see what Greg says first I'm gonna say that Battleheart too is both

Okay That was my second choice Yeah me too That was my second choice But the reason he is The now on Android Yeah right Like that's so clearly

Mowal game Then I'm like There has to be something more Yeah We'll see The metagame. You know how Jared Petty likes to play with your mind? Got a place of mine.

All right. And which one? I thought it was... Sorry, I got confused. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, let's go down. Battleheart 2. Welcome back to the world of Battleheart, the mobile game.

Yeah. Absolutely. But only mobile game. Number two, Zumbies. It all started with an apocalypse. Ladies and gentlemen, that one is both. Oh. There is a movie called Zumbies.

And there is a game called Zumbies. But nobody picked that as both, right? Yeah, nobody picked that for both. Congratulations, you played yourself. That's right. Zumbies, the game, originally intended for the short-lived We Wear Space, but eventually ported the mobile. All right.

Number three, Mercantaries 2, make them work great again. And I did make that up. because that, my friend, is a motion picture. But not a game. There is no mobile game called Mercantaries too. What? That seems like a missed opportunity.

I'm just saying out there in mobile game case. Tim, we got trouble here. He's got two points. He's got one. There's lots of things with colones, but there's no just straight mercenaries to the mobile game. Nope.

All right, come down, Tim. Don't throw your drinks. Number four, Tomb Invader. Explore Tumes for Fantastic Treasure? Straight to DVD. Fuck! I'm so bad at this. And number five.

So unbelievably bad at this. Ice sharks, now available on Android. Nope, that's a movie. Oh. Yes. I got a point. You have two. Really?

You got Zumbies because Zumbies is both. Greg Miller, what's the score? I have two, Tim S2, and Mark beats me for the first time ever with three. My reign of terror is one. The reign of terror is. I guess wins. Congratulations. Kevin hit the song

Yeah we always end with the song Why don't you play a window sound Kevin? That game's fun I love that game I literally stopped everyone I was like hey guys there's a problem with the computer It keeps making noise I've tried to stop it

And now you're giving me shit Literally a week later because you missed a meeting What a great episode of the kind of funny games cast I know Mark thank you very much much to join us. This is been awesome. Yeah, you're great.

Stay tuned for the post show. Greg's gonna tell us that story. We'll fucking see. We will. Until next time, I love you. Patreon.com slash kind of funny games. Find out why I cried. Wow.

What an episode that was. You can click here to subscribe to Kind of Funny Games. You can click there to Subscribe to Kind of Funny. If you want to support us with your money, I'd appreciate that. Patreon link right over there. And over here, it's the Kevin Fun Time. But whatever Kevin's fun clips he wants to put there.

Who break does it. Why is it my? I want you to put it there, though, Kevin.