Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Metal Gear/Republique Producer Ryan Payton - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 09

Episode Date: February 27, 2015

We talk to Metal Gear Solid 4 producer Ryan Payton about Hideo Kojima, we discuss what it is like to be a game dev, game length doesn't matter to game devs, here's why, and spoilers! do we think Last of Us will get a sequel? (Released 02.27.15) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up, everybody. Welcome to the Kind of Funny Games cast. I'm one of your hosts, Greg Miller, alongside the Pride of Long Island. Colin Moriarty. Galalanders, it's good to be here with you, Greg. It's good to be here. We finally drop the dead weight. We listen to the comments. Everybody hates Tim.

Gone. That's all it took. Now, Tim's in L.A. He'll be back soon. Thank you for putting up with it. I've never hosted a podcast before. I hope this goes well. I don't talk about games often.

I don't know. You never know it's going to happen. Colin, yes. When we said we need somebody to fill in for Tim, we said we need somebody as smart as him, who has accomplished as much as him, who has traveled the world like him,

and that's why I picked up Ryan Payton. Right, right. Oh, welcome. Ryan Payton, everybody. You are, for some reason people didn't know you. Preposterous. You're a big-time game developer. You work a camouflage right now.

Trying to be. You originally put out this game. That's the dream. Republic. Now, Republic Remaster just came out on Steam, Mac, good old games, humble. You can go get it all those plays. Did I get them all?

Yeah, we're not on Mac story yet, but. You were saying earlier was going to be on Mac. No. earlier, but that's okay. Damn, I just don't listen to you. Greg doesn't listen. Once you gave the initial information, I was like, well, that's all I needed to know. You did really good, though. I think you got three out of the four, so. Yeah, okay, good. That's not too shabby. That's not too. really good. Thank you for coming to join us. Oh, thank you. Thanks for having. Of course,

of course, you were on Collin'Regg Live. So if you remember that episode, this means we're still at the eve of launch, Republic of remastered. Yes. But by the time they hear, it will be out. Exactly. You can go pick it up on all the places I just said, except for the one that doesn't exist yet. But we'll one day. Right. We'll be on the Mac store at some point.

Yeah. And we were working on this lovely device that Greg and I haven't stopped talking about since it was the NGB. If you're at home, he's holding up place to, or if you're listening to MEP3, he's talking to the, you're talking about the PlayStation video.

Yeah, we've made some exciting moves and hope that today will. Hoking you up with the right people. Oh man, we'd love to have the game on the Vita. I'm sure. I think it would be perfect on Vita. It would be perfect.

It would be perfect. It really would be. You know, because the touch interface. Exactly. Yeah, Republic. Give the elevator pitch for everybody who doesn't know. Yeah, Republic is a game that we've been building for the last three years. It's a stealth action game mixed with a lot of hacking elements.

It's a game about paranoia, government surveillance, privacy. It follows a protagonist named Hope who calls you on her stolen phone and ask you to help her escape from a secret to talented nation. Not too shabby. Colin, that setup was a lot like you. Yeah. Worried about this, worried about that. I'm always worried about something.

The government. Are you like me, man? just paranoid and being careful what you say online and text and yeah I'm not so careful what I say as much as I know they're listening and every once in a while like when my dad and I are always complaining about politics when I talk to on the phone when I call back to the Long Island and every once in a while I'll say something and I'll just be like you know and I know the NSA's listening so fuck you guys if you're listening to this right now dirty bomb I just say the

the keywords I think a lot of people do that you know I there's there's a study that we might reference in episode four episode five that that journalists have, there's a survey that they actually change the way that they write or they think about, they're more careful about the way that they're writing, whether it's emails or articles, because they know that they're being listened to

or could be listened to or could be showing up as like different like hot, you know, like these kind of keywords that could show up in some of these other data that they're collecting. So it's not good. It's not a healthy thing. We'll be fine. It's not like, you sound like my dad. He's like, I've got nothing to hide.

Yeah, that's the problem. That mentality is. Basically what you're saying is I don't care about my rights. Pretty much. Give me video games. I don't care about my rights. Greg opens every phone conversation with his mom by saying the following words. His mom will be like hello and he'll be like, terrorist, Abu Ghraib, cocaine,

Freedom Tower. Freedom Tower. Anyways, Mom, I'm just calling to see if I had the right. Then you know that you have their attention. Nick Scarpeon is here. He's moving the light. Hey, Nick, how you doing? You know, we don't put him on one kind of funny games cast.

He breaks in. Swings the light all around. Changes it around. Looking good, man. You happy now? Pappy? We love Nick Scarpino so much. If you didn't know, ladies and gentlemen, this is the kind of funny games cast. The idea is simple each and every week.

We come to you three best friends around this table, each bringing not a topic. I've never introed this one. No, you're introing exact like other show, which is probably not. That's why Tim just does the rigameral and stops. Kind of Funny.com. You'll find anything. I appreciate you. Support us on Patreon.

Thank you so much. Every week we bring this show to you about video games on Friday. You can get it on Patreon early. And if not, it's broken out topic by topic day by day on YouTube until we post the entire thing for free on YouTube and MP3 services around the globe. So now here's the thing. We're talking about topics. Talk to me about it. Ryan Payton.

You gave a brief tease of this on Colin Greig Live. But you have to bring it up and tell everybody your official story. The topic number one is Haideo, fucking cajillo. You know that I'm a huge Metal Gear fan. I do. I love, Kojima son. I love Peace Walker.

It's the best game of last generation, my favorite game of all time. It's time to get into the fact that not only are you a Metal Gear fan, you worked on Metal Gear 4. You worked with this man in Japan. You were his right hand. You were like his ninja. He sent you out on missions.

Cyborg ninja. Yeah, exactly. You were his gray fox. You were his Merrill. I want to know everything about Hideo, what do you want to know, man? Start for everybody to bring everybody who didn't catch Colin or Greg Live. Let's start with how you got to work with him, how you started in this industry, how you became a game developer.

So you guys can tell me if I'm going a little bit too long. But I'll tell a little bit more. Please, this show is literally, every show we do is a walk. Don't worry. Fair enough. Because it depends on how detailed you want to get. But the story is interesting. And I don't, I'm not tired of it yet.

All it did was change your life. Yeah, it really did. So graduated from college. with a degree in foreign languages in business. And I joined this thing called the Jet Program. Are you, when are you gentlemen familiar with it? No, I don't know. The Jet Program.

The Jet Program is an official sponsored Japanese government program to bring native English-speaking college graduates to Japan to teach, help teach their junior high and high school students in public school. And so if you're a Japanese kid growing up, most of the time, you would have some guy from or some gal from, Australia or America, England, there to be like a native speaker to help you with your speaking. Sure. So I was one of those guys. I was at a high school in rural Japan.

Didn't know what I was doing there. They sent me there because I had, I could speak Japanese. And yeah, so I was just kind of honestly miserable. I thought I was going to, you know, because you have that vision of, you know, growing up of Japan. Like it's like Blade Runner and I'm going to be eating like ramen and, you know, playing video games all the time. And everybody's going to be a row. I'm going to be talking to robots. And it's going to be amazing.

So you're envisioning Akihabra. Yeah, you're just living in an awkward. That's kind of expected. I was going to be living. And then they were driving me out to where I was going to be living, which was in this, in this prefixion called Hiogo, which doesn't have a lot of people. And yeah, it was like, it was eight hours from anywhere, basically. It's a small country, but it's very densely packed, right?

And so I was out there in the country, not really knowing what I was doing, cried my first night. And, but thankfully, I had this freelance gig with Siff Davis. So I was writing for Xbox Nation magazine, oneup.com, EGM. I ended up writing for Wired in Japan times. So I was able to kind of subsist or kind of regain my sanity by teaching English, which I wasn't really a big fan of, but to writing about video games and covering the Xbox Japan beat. This is the sexiest beat you could get, man.

This is the best one. I fought really hard for that one. So, yeah, I was just, I was traveling over the, on the weekends to Tokyo. The guys I was working with with had never been to Tokyo, and I was going there every weekend because I just couldn't. stay in this like you know back backwater town it was nice people but it just wasn't for me so anyway um i was covering the beat i was a freelance writer and uh were you living in like innaba was this was this persona four this is persona four yes this is persona four no no it's it was way more

inaka countryside than the persona four town oh wow uh it's it's primarily a fishing village and this is very this is very common in japan uh for any kind of most like the suburbs or outside of the big cities is that the when the when the kids grow up and they graduate they go to the big cities and they never come back so it's mostly old people Gotcha. And the high school was kind of like a persona high school and the fact that it was more or less haunted because it's a huge high school that they built in like the 60s or the 50s. And there's nobody having kids outside. Yeah.

You know? And so or outside outside the big cities. So there's like 200 kids for this school that house 2000. Jeez. And it's just really scary and haunting and nobody's my age. And it was weird. It was a weird, weird place to spend two years of my life. But I did again, kind of like was able to kind of connect with the thing I really love by.

writing about video games and flew on my own on my own dime to E3 2005 to cover E3 and try to get some money just doing some freelance articles and I was covering the DS beat so I was I think I was looking at like beautiful Joe DS and Ocami DS maybe I can't remember some of the games but I got a call from my editor James Milkey who said in a panic that he had he overslept or he double booked or something but he couldn't he couldn't make his appointment to visit or to meet and interview Hideo Kojima for Metal Gear Solid 3 subsistence. And as a huge fan, I just played Metal Gear Solid 3. I realized when I played it a month or two before that,

that was my favorite video game of all time. And you can imagine my excitement to be able to run over there and interview this guy. So it was me and Scooter and a couple other journalists at the interviewing Hideo. And he noticed that I think in the interview that I understood his answers before he was being translated by his amazing translator, Akisaito. And after the interview, I was, was talking to the translator in Japanese.

He went to the restroom. When he came back, he overheard us speaking in Japanese. And I had a southern dialect because I was living in the south. And he's like, why do you speak in a southern Japanese dialect? This is so weird. And then it kind of cut to the chase like, hey, are you interested in interviewing? I have an open position for a bilingual guide. You want to come in and interview it at our offices in Tokyo.

And I said, sure, of course. So here's the time out I want right now. When you're interviewing him at E3, did you think about speaking to him in Japanese? I did not. And the reason is because you guys have seen this. you guys are in the press that there are there are guys who are in the press to be in the press and there are other guys like turn coats like me who are in the press because I want to be a video game developer and a lot of these guys will I didn't want to be that guy to

enter like you interview them for an article and then afterwards like hey if you ever need somebody for your company got you got you I just think that's that's that's not right see I was every time I've ever spoken to him because he's such a hero to me I always think about man like if only I would listen to Dan shue and gotten a minor in Japanese when I was going to college because how baller would it be yeah To just sit down and do like an E3 couch demo or whatever And we just have this Japanese conference

I'm translating for myself I'm telling what's happening That's his ballers against Right? I frankly think it shows a level of modesty For you to, you know, you're fluent Japanese and You know, regardless of your want to get a job,

Whatever, I don't necessarily think he would have read into that If you just spoke to him in Japanese And I think it shows actually quite Quite a modest Sure, in a group interview especially Would have cut out like all the other American Yeah and there is something I thought you were going to say

Which was interesting and maybe it was in your mind or not was, you know, I only went to Japan a couple of times, but I had dealt with a lot of Japanese especially as you're on the PlayStation Beat, is it's just a culture of honor and respect. And so I would, if I spoke Japanese and I know that this guy came from Japan

simply to translate, I would have actually felt bad. That's true, too. That's a good point. That's what I thought you might have. You don't want to be that guy. And those guys do exist. You guys have probably seen them. And there's like a classic one,

like this Nintendojo guy from early 2000s, early 90s, like during like a Nintendo Presser at E3, you know, in front of all these, like it was a time when at the Nintendo Presser they would take Q&A at the end. This is way back in the day. And this guy was like, Miyamoto Sama, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. In Japanese in front of everybody and they're like,

okay, either you're showing off, you're trying to be cool, but none of this works. And I don't want to be that guy. Sure, sure, sure. So, um, but yeah, it all worked out. So where were we? So you were, he had just asked you to come to Tokyo to interview. Right. Gotcha.

So obviously I'm super excited. And I, on my own dime, go up there multiple times. It's about a three, four hundred dollar round trip from where I was. I was living to do these interviews. Are you flying? Is that how you're getting in? I'm flying and sometimes I'm taking the bullet train. But it's a day long trek for me.

And at the time I had quit my English teaching job. I was studying more Japanese in Osaka at the time and running out of money and interviewed and interviewed and I got the word and it was you didn't make it. We're interviewing about 25 people and you didn't make the cut. So that sucked. So I packed my bags. I was like, I'm done. I don't want to live in Japan anymore.

and I moved back to Washington State with my folks. Went to Costco, bought World of Warcraft box set, and a 24 pack of Mountain Dew. Yeah, you did. Fuck, yeah, Ryan Payton, you're an OG. And I decided, I'm done. You know, like, I'm just going to... I'm hanging up the dreams.

I'm never going to get in the game industry. Because it was too much, like... I was thinking about a similar kind of situation earlier about trying to find the right analogy for it, but I really can't. It's just basically, you never think about it, but then when it's presented to you, and you're like, yeah, yeah, I want that.

And it was taken away from you. Sure. It's that to be crestfallen like that was really was really tough. So fast forward about a week or two. I'm playing World Warcraft. This is going to be my life. And living with my parents like a baller. Yeah.

And I get an email from Konami. Turns out you actually did pass. You actually are the selected chosen one. We got it wrong. Can you can you start in a month? Because TGS is coming up. Yeah, yeah. So my immediate response is.

Oh, this is great. This is great news. You can pay for my trip back, right? My move, they're like, hell no. Yeah. So I had just bought a car. God. So sold the car, used the money to pay for the flight, moved all my stuff back to Japan.

Threw away, wow. Yeah, threw away, wow. Never went back, never went back. Nice. And never had time. And got started just before TGS 2005, which when I got in the office the first day, they had ushered me into the editing room. And Hideo wanted me to know, he wanted to ask me, like, what I thought of the trailer,

which you guys will probably remember. It was the first gameplay trailer, first, like, visual trailer of MGS4 when you know snake is you know behind that wall and you can see like the get-go right and the soldiers behind him kind of going and you saw the new oticon like mk2 robot and stuff like that so and I thought it looked stunning so I was like this is amazing and I can't believe I'm here like that was really the early days like the very beginning of that project so let me let me ask you a quick question before we move on with more of the stories this is actually very this is awesome you are awesome yeah yeah

this is very very fascinating story one thing I want to know is so Kanami made this mistake or Kojima made a mistake or as people made a mistake where they selected you and then they didn't tell you. Do you know the story behind that? Was it that they like, they're like, shit, we, we, we, we told the wrong guy, we messed up clerically or did they like, they made, they changed their mind?

This bumbling moron shows up and they're like, oh, this is not the guy we wanted. Did you ever hear anything about that? You know, that's a good question. I don't know. I'm I should know. I never, I don't know if I ever asked her if I forgot. But I don't think there was 25 people. There really aren't 25 people that are qualified to do the thing that, you know, they set me up to do. So yeah, but I know some friends that did interview and didn't get the gig. And I don't know

what it was. I mean, I remember being interviewed by Hideo and he was asking about my favorite movies and books. And it was true. I was talking about Blade Runner and stuff that he obviously likes Blade Runner. If you look at Snatcher and there were some stuff that resonated there. But I think there was some concerns about my Japanese. It wasn't awesome. I mean, I was major in Japanese. I was writing a lot in Japanese. I was writing for a Famitsu magazine, but it wasn't perfect. Sure. So I think that they might have been looking for that perfect candidate who more or less doesn't exist, which is perfect English, perfect Japanese, can do business, marketing,

all that kind of stuff. Those people are really, really hard to find. And I think they just decided to maybe just train me up to the level that I needed to be, which, you know, I think it ended up working out, okay. Well, then I left three years later, so maybe it bit him in the ass big time. But no. So what is the role they're bringing you on for?

So what they brought me on for in Japanese was called Kaigai Tanto, which Kaigai Tonto means, as you guys are very familiar with. Kaigai is like foreign or outside or international. and then Tonto was kind of like in charge of or manager. So it was kind of in English. I gave myself the title, International Manager. And then they're like,

no, no, no, you're not a manager. You're not managing anything. So I was like international coordinator, which basically meant that every day I was emailing back and forth between Konami America, Konami Europe,

and then in the Kojima Productions, coordinating about, hey, you know, E3's coming up or TGS is coming up. Here's the press that's going to be showing up. Here's the box art. Do you guys like the box art?

I get the box art from Europe and America. I take it and put in front of Hideo. So it's, kind of like a messenger, you know, back and forth, just trying to coordinate with the different different branches. So what was that like then? Like to be in there, especially with, it's Metal Gear 4. You know what I mean?

Like you want to talk about pressure. Like this is the one that was going to tie up all the loose ends and do all these different things. True. But when I joined, it was very early. So they didn't, it was, when I joined, it was all about Metal Gear Acid 2. It was all about, um, there was one other game we're promoting really heavily. Well, there's the digital graphic novel and there's one more game.

Oh, it was Metal Gear Solid three subsistence. Oh, okay. I had interviewed Hideo 4 on the press side, but then I had to help ship it. Yeah. So that was pretty exciting. So when I joined, it was,

most of the team was actually not an MGS4. They were on subsistence. Because if you guys remember, they added the 3D camera. And there was a lot of work to be done to, because players can now move the camera anywhere. And they had a bunch of fake stuff or they didn't build out the jungle in areas

because they knew that you couldn't see them previous. Yeah. Now because you have the 3D camera, they had to actually build out the jungle more. So that was really interesting to watch that happen. But yeah, I was really just on the PR marketing side. I worked with Mark Franklin and those guys.

Nice. And so then they start. So I know your question, which is, how did you get from, you know, paperboy to actually working on the game? Yeah, because your title on four was producer, right? Isn't that it? Yeah. So the big turning point for me was, you know, about a year in, we had shipped acid to. And acid two did not sell very well.

But the original acid did sell really, really well. And it was because of what Hideo would call the launchment. magic. It was a launch title for the PSP, as you guys remember. And I think there were some kind of false positives related to that franchise. So when Acid 2 didn't sell very well, everybody was basically saying, hey, look, we mistakenly bought Acid 1 because we thought it was a real Metal Gear game. And now we know that the Acid series is not what we want. We want a real Metal Gear game for PSP and then enter Metal Gear Solid portable ops, which we ended up calling it. Right. Which I have a really good story about it. And I, it's, I'm on that cusp of being able to say

things without getting in trouble because it's been a while. You're not allowed to say you have a really good story about it, not tell the story. Well, don't get, I don't want him to get in trouble. Me and Kajima are friends. It's cool. He follows me on Twitter. I gave him that painting at E3. I don't know.

If you can't, yeah, don't get yourself. I won't go into details, but let's just say that just the name of it was a lot of work to get that through because if you might, you might have noticed, you might not have noticed, but that in America and in Europe that no PSP game had the title portable in it. Interesting. And it was for some reasons, and not like any kind of conspiratorial reasons or whatever, but it was just kind of a Sony thing. And we had to go really, really high up to get that title because we wanted a metal gear solid portable ops. Why?

Because we wanted the acronym to be like an NPO. This is very Metal Gear kind of thinking. So we went for MPO and they asked me to come up with a bunch of acronyms that could work for an MPO, a Metal Gear PO. What could that be? And the best thing we could come up with was portable ops. And because it had the name portable in there, Sony didn't really like that. Sure.

So we had to go get some permissions. That's kind of a weird insight of baseball story. And I'm trying to think of like PSB games with portable. And you're right. I can't actually. Yeah, that's a really good point. Now in Japan they do like Monster Enter second portable,

things like that. But in the States, they were trying to avoid that for whatever reason. So as portables were so poo poohed. This handheld game. This isn't a real game. Yeah, exactly. Maybe that was a thinking.

I'm not quite sure. Just like when we used to have to like, well, this is pretty good for a digital game. Yeah. Like those days. Those days. remember that? Yeah, I remember that.

Oh, man, Shadow Comics is really good for an arcade game. Unfortunately, that still exists. Indie Station. That's different. Now you can be a download as long as you are backed by a giant corporation. It's when it gets out there. It's when it gets out there. Orby Minecraft.

We're still on the road to be becoming a producer. We're still on the road to me becoming producer. So portable ops was my big break. And the reason being is that now the team is the full team, 90% of the team is on Metal Gear Salt 4. It's a huge game, as you guys know. but the acid team is now evolved into the portal blobs team and they don't have a ton of support

and the game needs to be shipped within a year they had a year to make that game and that game's really good yeah I loved it and the producer on that was really awesome like the executive producer name is Okamura-Morasan and he was asking me for a lot of help basically he was like hey beyond what I was normally used to doing and so I would fly to Australia to meet with Ashley Wood

who did all the cinematic art like the thing on your wall right behind you like Ashley Wood had you know did that And so I was helping a lot more with production. And what ended up happening was, again, without getting in too much detail to get me in trouble. But the director was having some trouble. And he was working tons of hours. And he just couldn't get full coverage onto the game. And so myself and the audio director, his name is Akihito Honda, he and I are young, crazy.

I had moved right next to the studio in Rupongi. That's really expensive, really stupid. But I just wanted to be at work all the time. I was living my dream. And we would, after my real job was done about 10 p.m., Honda and I would just play the latest build of portable ops every night. We'd play until about two or three in the morning. And you guys know it's a really good, addicting game.

Yeah. And but lots of problems we saw. And we just wrote up reports. And I would write them up every morning, or actually, before I went, before I went to bed. And so when the development team came in the next morning, they had a bunch of feedback. And I just, and they saw like, oh, this boss battle is broken. That's boss battle is cheap or this, this place looks air. this area of the map looks really bad or whatever.

And I wasn't, it was just like to help out. Sure. Like my game or whatever. And Okromura came to me about for a week after I kept doing this. And he's like, keep it going. Just keep doing that. Just keep doing that. I'm like, all right.

So for about three or four months, I just kept doing it, playing it every night. And basically kind of doing what a real game director should do, what we always get too busy to do. I don't do this on Republic and I should. Yeah. So anyway, the, we get close to ship. It's supposed to come up before Thanksgiving because that's the sales period, the retail sales period.

And the game's just not ready. So I fly, I get permission to fly to America and beg for forgiveness and ask them to delay portable ops by a month into December. And they're like, nobody ships in December. I'm like, that's my secrets. Like that's, that's, that's, now it is like I love shipping in December because you get, we've done it with Republic. Um, and, uh, we might do it again with episode five. We'll see. But, uh, it's, you get, you get like a lot of press coverage there because there's all the games that already come out. It's quiet. And, uh, and they let it, they let us do it. And the game was a huge hit. I think it might even got a 10 from IGM. Portable Offs. No way. I might be wrong about this. I think you're wrong. I might be wrong about this, but the game reviewed really, really well and sold really well. I remember that me and it was Jeff and I were there and we were playing on a PSP. We loved it. And we, we, I don't want to take credit for it, you know, last three or four months of it. But we laid the foundation for what ended up becoming Peace Walker. You know, a lot of that Pokemon stuff, a lot of that Jagged Alliance stuff. That was the whole thing. That was the whole thing of these bite-sized missions to go out and play comeback. That was all the whole thing. I'm way wrong. I wasn't even working about it. Jameson's coming. 9.0. 9.0.

Yeah, they did a second one, didn't they? There was like a... And MGS 4 got a 10. Portoloft Plus, which is not good. That was really bad. Sorry, so Colin, what was your question? I was just going to say MGS4 got a 10, so you might be... Oh, maybe I was thinking about that.

Yeah, nine out of 10. Nine's good, but that was real good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really good. So it was like a Christmas party or something launch party. He'd ale came over to me. I was just kind of sitting by myself and he's like, you did really good. You did it really good on that on Portobops.

I heard from the team. I was like, oh, thanks, man. and he's like, I want you to do that on MGS4. Okay. So Monday morning, the next, that next week, in front of 200 people, he's like, Ryan, I want you come in front of the group. I'm like, okay, do you do it? Me, 26 years old or whatever.

And he's like, we're promoting Ryan. He's going to be in charge of, you know, playing the game and giving feedback. And he's going to help us sell this game in the States, basically. And he's going to help us fix their controls, make sure the boss, you know, battles are tuned properly, you know, help out with the script and all that kind of stuff. And, man, it was excited. to you at the moment. Oh yeah, this is a dream.

You're like, your eyes are just getting the biggest saucers, I imagine. I was like, okay, I'll do it. At any point did you pull him aside? I don't know about this, man.

I'm just, no, man, I knew I could do it. I knew I could do it. Yeah. That's awesome. And when I wonder if when he was talking about specifically tuning the boss battles himself and you know,

kind of tweaking the story originally, we're like, how can we get fat man back into this? Yeah, you got to get fat man back this. That was my first thought, I think. Actually, I think I might have said that

in front of the team. I was like, my first move as a new producer on this title is we're bringing back Fat Man. I understand. We like this Fatal's idea, but no, no, no. And you heard just one person in the United States. Yeah. Yes, and that was good. You know, you had a telekinetic link.

You over there, go model those rollerblades. You over there, go model that glass of wine. I was going to say, I need drinks. And we also need the straw. Who's going to do the straw? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, get all up in that. It's a really an amazing story.

Yeah, no, totally. So I guess what you wanted to get into, Greg, you know No, this is great, this is exactly, this is fine. But I'm curious because I think we can really get into some meat here now because we're both Metal Gear fans, but I kind of fell up with the series after Metal Gear Solid 2 and you are still a huge Metal Gear fan. And obviously, Kojima has this aura and mystique in the West and has forever. Like everyone like...

I remember the first time we met him together. I was like... In the E3 line. Yeah, it was like one of the first times I've met famous people all the time. And Afune is my favorite developer and I was... There's only him and like only I select others where I was like, oh my God. Yeah. I'm meeting.

Like, a royal hero, yeah, yeah. And so I was just curious, like, so what is the man like? I mean, that's what I kind of here. Yeah, I mean, there's so many questions about him. Like, is he a vampire? Why doesn't he age? Why does this man not age? It's insane.

Him and Fuminto Oedemus must be going to the same clinic. That guy doesn't age either. Yeah, it's just this Japanese thing, man. You guys see it all the time. Like, you know, Japanese movie stars, all these, yeah, they just, their life expectancy is a lot longer than we are, we have here in the States and stuff like that. So it's diet, you know, in Japan. And he tweets, he makes sure that you know what he's eating every day, right? So, you know, they eat really healthy.

And, you know, he started to really exercise during MGS4. He got really, really fit and got really muscular. Yeah. If you look at pictures of him, MGS3 era versus MGS4 era, you can see he got really ripped. Yeah. So it's got to get out there. And he's putting a lot of pressure on me and Ken, who was, I'mizumi, who was my boss and was really supportive during that whole time.

And he was like, you guys got to go to gym and do this stuff. And I was like, dude, I'm working on the game, man. Got to make this game good. So is he like, at what point does, I mean, you're a fan too. You know, you were blown away to go interview. At what point does that start to wear off? And he just, does he ever just become your boss, one of the guys kind of thing? I honestly remember in 2005 when I joined talking to friends about how as much as a fan or a fan of I am of Metal Gear Solid 3, I wasn't necessarily.

And I don't want this to come across the wrong way, but I wasn't necessarily a Hideo Kojima fan. Okay. And I think that was really important joining the, the, joining the company. And I don't think he wanted that, right? Maybe he saw that in me. I don't really know. But I was a I was just as much I was there for him and appreciated the opportunity. And he really did help me in especially in those early years, getting involved in, you know, the company and everything. But I was there for him. I was there for the franchise. I was there for the fans. I was there for the team. And I really start to learn over time if there was one big

takeaway. And I remember interviewing with Microsoft talking about this is that it for me, it wasn't like I was fighting for him. I was actually fighting for the the other like a hundred, like 199 guys who are working on the game, who are killing themselves, you don't get the same recognition that he gets. And I just, some of my best friends are still the guys at Konami and every time I go back to Japan,

I just hang out with those guys because they got, I mean, you look at the game, they're just so talented, right? And again, I don't want to take anything away from him, but that group he's got is unbelievable. Oh, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's what I was going to ask because, I mean, that's a really great question in the sense, or just a statement in the sense that there are certain visionaries that you think that, we know something about game development, obviously where it's like you don't think Miyamoto makes the game by himself. You don't think Inafune made the game

Mega Man by himself. You don't think, you know. Yeah. But what is that dynamic like when you have a outward visionary style person leading a project where you know that no one, I don't want to say no one, but 90% of your audience really doesn't give a fuck about anyone, but Kojima, you know, and thinks that every decision is his and he wrote the whole story and he designed every character and did all these things.

Like, what is it like working at a studio? Like, what is the morale like? Because it seems like in Japan, it might be a little more of a, uh, again, like an honor-based thing where it's like that's not a problem for them as opposed to the United States. You actually see less of that here because I think that might be a problem. Like a Cliffy B style person who's like,

Gears of War is Cliffy B, but there's 200 people that work in that game. So what is that like? That's a really good question. That's something that was really conscious of while I was there. And I tried to make, to the best of my effort, when I was doing more PR promotion types of things, for example, the making a video

of metal yourself for almost killed me. It was so hard. And it was like this two-hour Blu-ray. I have a crazy story around that that we probably don't have time for but uh trying to get all the time i don't i don't i got to be out of you know you know my cutoff time but uh the yeah i tried my my best to try to get the the team on camera and talking about what they did and these guys that were working there for 20 years you know that a lot of people aren't familiar with the same thing like you were talking about miamoto like the same thing goes for a Nintendo like they're

starting to do that with the awa ass like bringing some of the old guard on there but yeah there's just so many people behind the scenes and again to answer your other question about like Is there a resentment for that within Kahnem? I don't think there is. I think they're just used to that, and I think they're okay with that. A lot of these guys I don't think are there for the promotion. Sure.

And if they are, they're in it for the wrong reasons, quite frankly, yeah, as far as I'm concerned. But anyway, in terms of like the aura around him, like I guess I just never really had that. Right. I had a lot of respect for him, and he has amazing ideas, and I just have so much respect for the stories that he's created over the years. And MGS 1 was a seminal game for me.

That was the game that made me want to join the game industry more than anything else. and so yeah I just it was fun working with him but I just approached him like another guy nice really that was really important for me yeah I didn't yeah it's one of those you know you think about these legends in the game industry and I always think of Jack Trenton

and I know when he was at Sony PlayStation he wasn't hanging out with people in the cafeteria chilling out he had an office he's off over there he said hi in the elevator I think once in a while very good spot it yeah yeah so then what Metal Gear Solid 4 how long are you

what you get to this producer role how long are you actually what's your time table on that. Like, what do you, how much time do you have in a role? I guess I have about this, I must have about a year, year and a half. Okay. Okay. So coordinating, I was doing my producer stuff still. Oh, wow. And then doing the game stuff and also game production, not only just design, but the production. So coordinating trips to Morocco, you know, coordinating trips to Peru for all these different, like, research trips and to Prague. And so getting involved in that was really fun, but tons of work. And, yeah, as you know, I just, I'm having bad flashbacks now about all.

the game conventions that we did. Oh yeah. Because you know, Metal Gear is always there. There's always a new trailer and it never feels like you're making a real game. And I start to see the benefits of it though. It's that the team, one of the things I learned and about the production of Metal Gear, I don't recommend this by the way. It's a very expensive, costly way of doing this. But the game, I think the team more or less learned what the game was. Like the vision of the game came from the trailers. Really? So that, you know, it's like a vertical slice of a vertical slice in a sense like oh now now I see where things are going there's no like documentation being thrown around there's no huge presentations they're like okay guys this is the vision here's the five

pillars of the game there's none of that crap it's more like they're all involved in like the production they're making the small part of the of the trailer then they see the whole thing together along with the rest of the world and like okay that's what I'm building yeah yeah it's a really interesting approach and they really push things forward in that that kind of these kind of piecemeal little releases and then they have to buckle down I think they have to realize and this has happened to me having worked on a number from projects there Konami is that at some point it comes down to okay we have to make a video

game now it's not just trailers not just cinematics. It's fun I mean that made me laugh in the sense that when you feel like you're working on a middle of a game and you never think it's real or you're not making a game and it's it is true in the sense that like just like being on the outside like when the fan of pain was revealed everyone was so excited and I was like

what the hell is it? Not even that I was just like I don't know like is this game even a fire mental rail first of all yeah like yeah it's like so it's so weird where it's like I don't know I'll be excited about when it's when it's here in my PlayStation but yeah it's Because you just don't know how long it's going to take and what the hell is going to happen. Right. And you can rightly assume that they haven't figured out all that stuff too.

Yeah, yeah. Right. That Phantom Pain trailer, by the way, is I think the best Metal Gear trailer of all time, I would argue. The initial review? Yeah, the initial one. The reveal was cool. And I think it was the same, was it the same. I think gives us some insight because I think it was the same year that the last was revealed.

Yeah, VJ. And then the last one had come out or like two years ago. And Metal Gear obviously will come out this year. But it's what was so funny to me about that, what I'll never, Yeah, well, I'll never forget about that particular trailer is that it took literally five minutes for someone to be like, it's Metal Gear Solid 5 and the logo gets the V. And I was like, and I remember seeing that on Gaff for the first time and being like, no way. There's no way. Like, that's brilliant.

But there's no way that you figure that out. And that's a real thing. I don't like, no, that really is. Well, then you go on Gaff and you see that there's pictures of Fido wearing a Moby Dick studio, not studios, studio, studio, t-shirt. And you're like, why would he have that? You know, it just got really silly, really quickly. I mean, he's a funny dude in that respect, I think. like where it's just like, he plays with it.

He understands what the business. He's basically screwing with everyone. Yeah, that's like, not in a mean way, but it's just like, you always, you have to always look at him and study him and be like, what is it about you that is telling me something about the project or. Right. Right. I think he has a lot of fun with that. And like the other, it's cool. The way that he promotes is really interesting, right?

Really guerrilla style. Yeah. Why doesn't he speak English? I know he understands English. He laughs at my jokes when I'm interviewing them before they get translated in the same way you. I'm like, just talk to me. Let me in. Just like a lot of Japanese guys, he probably has a lot more confidence in his listening ability.

Okay. That's fine, I guess. Yeah. I just want to talk to you today. Well, you got babblefish, man. Yeah. We'll sit there and go back and forth through that. So then you stay through the ship before?

When do you leave? I'm not familiar with this part of your career in terms of projects. So I left a couple months after MGS4 was released. And was it just time for a new challenge to get back to America? What was it? A little bit. There was a couple of things. One was, yeah, so the game shipped on June 12th, 2008.

And I was, the team had shipped. I want to say that we surted around the end of April, early May, and the team was going on a long break. And the way that Konami does, it's overtime pay, wherever they don't pay, they just give you more time off in exchange for the amount of time that you did overtime. And I had accrued about four months of vacation. You were working just a bit on this.

Yeah, I was. But my vacation didn't start until after ship, because again, again, everybody served and everybody was fine, but then we had this making of video. So I was spending all this time in Vancouver, Canada, and working on this big project with Victor Lucas and those guys up there. EP.

Yeah, and EP Daily. And those guys did a fantastic job on that, really, really, really good making of video. However, this is one of the stories I didn't want to tell because of time, but I'll give a sneak preview is that my goal with that with that, was that I was going to archive with Victor, he wanted to do this too. We were going to archive all the old videotapes. that I had found in the basement of coaching her production.

Oh my God. Of the past 20 years. We were going to capture the entire thing, put it all to XDK, or not XDK, it was to XD CAM. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, we're gonna make the most comprehensive making of documentary and metal you've ever seen. And I think we really did pull it off,

but I had all these tapes, only had like, these are just the originals. I didn't even have time to copy the, I didn't even know how to copy a lot of these different formats. We had everything. We had every kind of video format you can possibly imagine. And so I put them all this big box and I take it with me to Vancouver, Canada, because we're going to go capture all these things.

I'm jet lag and I'm at YVR, like in Vancouver International Airport, waiting for my bags in this box of all these tapes. And I start seeing the tapes. Oh, my God. I start seeing the tapes. Oh, my God. But it's not in the box. On this carousel.

Oh, no. Hundreds of tapes just coming off of that little, that machine, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's conveyor belt. And then I see the box completely ripped open. And I start seeing tapes fall down in between the cracks between like, you know, the different where the metal things are. Like this is like all the company history and I've completely screwed it over.

So I got to quit. I was thinking it was that was it. There was two moments where I thought I was it. There was that. And then I thought I had lost the motion capture video that we had. And I thought it lost in Los Angeles on a hard drive. I had to bring it to VO with me and I couldn't find it. Yeah.

And I thought it left in the rental car. And I kept calling them secret. I never told Ken or Hideo or anybody because I was like, and I worried every single morning I woke up, I thought it was going to be on YouTube. I thought all the cinematics, like the motion capture versions were going to be on YouTube like a year before release.

And I kept calling and I spent, I spent hundreds of dollars in my own money on like international phone calls to Enterprise rental car asking about this one rental car. Can you search it again? Can you search again? I'm sure it's in there. I'm sure it's in there.

And then I was so worried. I went back to L.A. and I got to the recording studio, which is now called Formosa, and they're like, oh, you left this hard drive here. I forgot to tell you. I was like, oh, thank God. So I thought I was going to get fired over that. But the tapes, though, so this shows me how it shows how like a terrible employee I was.

So these tapes, I call Victor, I'm like, I'm going to be very, very late, if at all. I might not even show up. And I start just collecting them all. And some guys started helping me. I started lining them up. There was hundreds of tapes. And I had like a spreadsheet of like each, I had them each number too already. So I'm like, okay, here's one.

one here's three here's seven here's 15 I'm like oh crap where's everything else lined them all up it took me hours and hours and hours and hours guys some guys who worked there at the airport kept going underneath and trying to like pick more and some of these tapes are broken all the ribbons coming out I'm like oh my god I can't believe it man I three of them were totally destroyed and all three of those I had backups for everything all the originals were fine I was able to get them to Victor's place and capture all I was so lucky again never told that story to Ken or Hidal, but yeah, man, those were like two moments. And so maybe that was why I wanted to leave because I was so stressed out.

And getting that Blu-ray out in time was so stressful. And things just weren't really working out with the video capture equipment and all that stuff. So anyway, go on vacation. We shipped. The game had amazing response. You guys hear this all the time, but you really lose perspective when you're working on a game for that long, if the game's good or not. I'm just convinced the game's going to suck. And I thought we were going to get really hammered.

And we did a little bit, but not to the degree that I thought we would in terms of the game's length. Yeah. You know, it's a topic of relevance right now. And, you know, cinematics versus gameplay and stuff. But people didn't seem to care. They just love the game. And I was so happy about that. I went home, loaded up, I think it was like Halo 3 and two human.

I was playing that. I remember that around that time? And, but before that, right when I got home, within the first week, I started, you know, spending time with my folks. My mom was getting these weird calls from this hospital. And she then told the whole family that she was diagnosed with breast cancer and that didn't look good and my dad looked at me and said you're not going back to Japan you need to stay here and take care of your mom and um and your brother's going to school and I have to work so

I'm like all right this is the time you know I thought I was already thinking about my next move and you know we were they were talking about a PSP metal gear which ended up being Peacewalk yeah I thought that would be a lot of fun but I don't know this the timing felt right I just there's just no way there's sure you can you know when you think that and thankful mom's okay now but when you think you're going to lose your parents that like that and uh there's just no way sure so uh I went back to Japan. I talked to Hideo. He was very supportive of the idea.

And I left. And then the moment, like within 10 minutes of that news hitting internet that I was leaving Kronomi, I got an email from a Microsoft recruiter. And they said, we're looking for a director on a Halo game. So I went up there, interviewed his local job so I can, you know, be with my folks. And, yeah, I got the gig. Nice. Your story's awesome.

Yeah, thanks. Hopefully it's interesting to your guys' listeners. We should have them, we should, next time we have you back, we should now hear about hey we don't have yeah exactly then you'll experience of Microsoft and with Xbox

that stuff is actually a little bit harder to talk about because it's a little newer it's newer and I think they're a little more sensitive about it

no language barrier to protect you no assuming no one's listening to the right you want it from what I understood this is all

you know through the trees you hear rumors your Halo 4 was going to be a match three where you played Katana right

yeah and exactly and you know it's amazing how rumors get out but yeah I don't think they found the hard drive

of the mocap of the matching oh no it did it Yeah, man. That's fascinating stuff. Free to play Malta Halo. That's what I wanted, man.

No. I didn't want that. Topic number two for you on your Kind of Funny Gamescast debut. You're a developer. You're a big-time developer. Last week, over on that there, Kataku. They put up a story from Anthony Burch.

It was basically like an editorial he wrote. And it was basically the five things. And Anthony Burch works at Gearbox. Not anymore. Yeah, exactly. Anthony Burch went from Destructoid to Gearbox, wrote Borderlands to DLC, right? Or the whole game?

I thought you wrote the whole thing. I'm unfamiliar with his entire career, but I know for sure. And then he helped out on Borderlands, the pre-sequent. And now he's outside of there. And this is the five things he learned being a game devs. And what basically the outside world doesn't get, as critics and fans, nobody understands. And I wanted to know what yours were. Going from basically our side of the fence, being a freelancer for one-up pretty much,

jumping into game development and what you learn. Because what he had done is like, it's way harder than it looks. The games look like shit 90% of the production. That's true. developers use the word excited they're not bullshitting you they are excited like you know really excited for this yeah uh that he basically read every critique ever like people you do read the critics because i think when you know you we're firing off a review or some people's firing off of you're like well they'll never see this right he said he read everything ever they ever they

they ever read everything yeah and basically along that those lines yeah so i mean like that's all true yeah what what are something to add all right moving on good job anthony next no what else i mean what were the biggest what were the biggest surprises i guess for you when you first made your jump. Oh, man. Just how long everything takes and how everything sucks for so long. And, you know, I thought it was actually unique to Metal Gear in terms of, like, the game coming together at the last minute. Yeah.

Learning more and more that that is actually just what most games kind of, they encounter. And so a lot of work that goes before E3 or some kind of demo that to show the press. And that the game is oftentimes really terrible, like a couple weeks before that. Sure. Just the nature of the beast. And it sucks because I think, you know, I've been on that side. it is too. I'm thinking, why don't you guys spend more time on the scenario? Like, I'm playing

this game like, well, I could do this. I can point out all these problems. Like, yeah, you don't think these guys know these problems? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was his final one, is that if something sucks, the developer knows it. They're not like totally, oh, we missed that fact that that boss was cheap or this happened or that you could see through that wall or whatever.

And that's one of the, what separates the good from the great in terms of game development. And a lot of these guys have different ways of achieving this. But to make your game great, you need something special. It could be extra time, a really supportive publisher, a ton of money to throw people on the problem. You need to have some kind of policy that is like we're not going to ship until it's ready and whatever and screw you guys. And that's kind of like a blizzard approach.

Yeah, yeah. And yeah, exactly. And there's like a lot of different. Or you just kill your guys. Everybody just kills themselves to get it done in time and make sure you have the extra time for polish. And for whatever reason, sometimes it's really hard for a lot of developers to get that, whether you're on a license title, for example,

and you have to align with a movie, there's no way. There's no way. So that's one thing I'm really trying to find out with our studio. You know, for Republic, for example, we were set on shipping in October of 2013. We ended up shipping in December. So we shipped two months later, and that extra two months made all the difference in the world.

And how did I get there? I liquidated all my 401K that I had accrued from Microsoft. at a huge tax penalty to pay for the staff for two months, right? Because I felt, and you just, that's what you need, right? And I'm not saying that episode one was everything, anything, anything, but it did make a huge difference. And we got great reviews, you know? Right.

So I'm trying to think about that for our studio moving forward to is like, how do we, how do we get one of those things, you know, tons of money or tons of staff or like being able to crunch like crazy or have a publisher that lets us delay, delay, delay, until it's perfect or, you know, all those things are. really hard to get it, let alone one. Yeah. So what, I guess, I think for, it's easier when you talk to Colin and I, you know, people here, like we're creators, right?

We've branched out on our own, done this, kind of the whole thing, right? Like, well, hopefully people support us and it goes on from there. But when you're to the point of, I'm going to liquidate all my money and I'm going to put it behind my own staff, support them for the two months to get this out and stuff, like what's going through your head? Is it just like you, there's no other way, so you have to make this work? That's basically it. Yeah.

Yeah. There was no way I was going to ship it. that I remember I was in a meeting I remember talking to Darcy our producer she's like we have to ship like they you know they believe me when I say like this is this is our burn rate there's how much money we have left like we have to ship you know this right I'm like and I always had the back of my mind I had that 401k yeah my dad told me not to touch oh god of course that's what parents do yeah I was like dad I'm 31 years old I don't need a 401k right now right and so yeah

I wanted that as an extra backstop but yeah it's just when you invest so much time in like the Kickstarter backers too you have 11,611 guys and gals who backed your project a year or two before that and you don't want to disappoint them you have this responsibility as a kickstarter or as a patreon right to do to do good by the other guys too like if your game sucks it's another you know mark against crowdfunding right if your game's great it's it helps other people so there's all these different pressures like I know those people at microsoft and maybe a couple people at conami that wanted my game to suck maybe they don't like me or you know they just want me to be to be successful post

those projects and that's fine but I want to prove them wrong there's so many things that I wanted to do with that game and so it just I think there comes a point like what you guys have experienced on your own which I have like the utmost from respect for is like you have to you have the safety net and you have to decide whether you how bad you want this thing and this is not for everybody you know yeah yeah there's guys at Microsoft that have tons of respect for that have you know five kids and full of health benefits dude don't go on your own are you crazy and that's not he wants what he wants to do anyway and that's

yeah there's nothing wrong with that but for crazy guys like us, right? And we want to do something really big and on our own on our own terms and stuff like that. You know, there's nothing better, right? But if you got to do it, you've got to go all in, man. You've got to go guns and blazing. That's exactly right.

That's exactly right. That's exactly what we figured out. We tried to have a poeys. Yeah, one foot in, one foot out. It doesn't work, right? It doesn't. So then how hard is it for you to put distance between yourself and critics and reviews?

I mean, like when scores start coming in and stuff, like, is it what you're, expecting? Is it not what you're expecting? Do you read them? Do you not read them? Do you try to stand off? No, I read them. So, you know, knock on wood, the critics so far have been extremely positive towards our game. We've done three episodes. We know PCs out by this time. And I hope those reviews are going to be good. But I'm not really, I don't go to bed at night worrying about critics. And if anything, the thing that, so at a high level, super, super happy. Don't worry, not worried about critical acclaim or or not for our game.

That being said, I was surprised by the lack of enthusiasm on the mobile side for our game. Because as you guys know, the game first came out on iOS and then Android, and now it's finally on PC and Mac. And I thought we were making, like, the game for these, like, you know, mobile app reviewers. But a lot of these guys were tearing us apart way more than, like, the console focus guys that are playing the game at like IGN or GameSpot or Game Informer or you're a gamer. They were all giving us great reviews. Yeah. But it was like the mobile sites were like, this is trash and what the hell is this? I'm like, to me, in my perspective, and I know I'm the most biobiles.

person in the room but this republic is way better than most of the the crap that you guys are reviewing and giving five five stars to yeah and that was a thing that I I again I wasn't really upset about it was just something I really surprised my head around did you I mean the more you think about it is the fact that that you're you're a console guy you've made console games you're and you're reviewing well with console players because like Colin and I you know never to pick up her iPhone expecting to play video games right I mean this is a game designed for us right right then that might have been my tactical error I'm not I don't regret them move going on iOS and Android first.

It actually got us way more notoriety and press coverage and attention that we would have gotten if we went to PC or console first, actually. So we had a great story to tell when it comes to the release. But yeah, you know, one of the things I've learned is that I think the game is a little more, a little bit too hardcore for the mobile audience. It's, I was like, I had a Ken Levine like, you know, we were talking one day and he was like, Ryan, what you're trying to do is really, really hard. You're trying to create a market.

You know, that's really hard. And I was trying to argue that I'm not trying to, that Infinity Blade is there, right? Or the room is there. Sword and Sorcery is there. Device six? Device six is there, right? There are games, right? But he's like, yeah, but this is a different, you're in, it speaks to like the genre.

I was, that was one of my biggest tactical errors, I think, is that I brought stealth action to this mainstream mobile audience. Stealth action is one of the least user-friendly genres. Sure. It's always fun to fail over and over again until you figure out what, oh, that's what I need to do. But people get so frustrated. I remember watching, I was in MGS4 reviews and preview events, stuff like that, and just watching really hardcore guys who say that Metal Gear's their favorite franchise,

getting really pissed off at the game and hating it, because stealth action is kind of by design, a really frustrating genre. Sure. You know, you guys have play that. If you sit down to play Metal Gear, you have to be in the right mindset. Yep. That you have to be patient, right? And sometimes it's just not working.

I don't know if you guys ever felt that, especially in John. It's all trial and error. When I sat down to play Ground Zero's, it was the first Metal Gear I streamed. And like, yeah, it was so frustrating because the chat's telling you how much you suck. You're trying to show something cool, but you're not paying attention to that guy over there. This is exactly. I need to kill the lights, sit there and be like, I'm going to lay in the grass for five minutes and figure out what the hell is happening. Mark every goddamn enemy before I make one move.

And so meanwhile, I'm like, yeah, the stealth action of the games, we're going to bring it to the masses. And then I look at Tailtale and all their success where their game and no offense to those guys because they do great stuff. But like a monkey, if you give him enough time, he could finish that game. Yeah. You know, not our game. Like our game is way too hard. Like on average, when we did the free app of the week with Apple, we had millions of downloads. Awesome.

Wait, on average, most players were getting caught eight times in episode one. That's way too much. And they were quitting all the time. Yeah. It was just, that was a tactical error. So we feel a lot more at home right now on PC and Mac because we feel like the other user base is a little bit more use to this genre. Oh, definitely. I think your game's going to be a hit on Steam with that more hardcore gamer that finds some of the more, what is the opposite of hardcore?

casual game, I guess. Offensive. They find those things offensive on things. It seems like your, yeah, your game will work. That's why I think it works so well on the fact that, like, you know, why it reviewed well with Itching, why people love it. You know what I mean? And that's the thing for me on why I, you know, I haven't completed all the episodes.

I started playing it. And it's just like, I really don't like gaming like this. You know what I mean? And I've tried and there's like certain games that'll come along game dev story. That's like my one success. Oh, dude is so good. That is like the one success. I'm like, yeah, great.

And then everything else is just like, I'd rather have even a mouse and keyboard. I want some kind of tactile control. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. So it's part of our story. You know, we're about two thirds of way through this whole endeavor. Yeah.

Five episodes, trying to get this game to as many platforms as possible. And the team's growing along with each episode. You know, we're becoming better crafters of entertainment and storytellers. And so it's been a really fun ride. And I wouldn't trade it for the world, even though I'm a lot poorer now. Yeah. Make sure, I mean, today on Colin and Greg live, we talked about, you know, Greg sent out a tweet to, you know, Shaheed and Geo Korsi and

Shue Hay Yoshida to try to get the game on DeVita which is where I think it really belongs and on PS4 and PS3 because there's definitely still a huge user base there. So hit those people up on Twitter and let them know what you think. Yeah, I mean, these kinds of things really matter. What I think people have kind of

lost sight of is that these building, it's building the list, right? Yeah, hashtag building the list is actually worked and brought games over like Sony's been instrumental and Borderlands is the one that they always use the example of, but tails of hearts and other games like that were like all brought

because people asked them to do it. Yeah, they want to put stuff out there. And so where's transistor? I want that. Yeah. Yeah, the transistor would probably run on. You think so? I mean, the bastion. The bastion's coming over.

They have the shirt of the animal. That's the real one. That's what we've been waiting for. That's finally a win. Yeah, that's. wrestled that one away from Microsoft. Banner saga. There you. God. Oh, Banner Saga's come in, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bita's awesome, man.

We'd love to do it. Did you guys want to get in that inside baseball? about the Vita or you don't care. This is the thing is what did you learn as a developer? And what is the inside baseball story? Also, we can talk about Vita for 14 hours. Dude, I'm down, man. Count me any time.

So the Vita is the is the is the by far, outside of PC is by far the most requested platform. And if you look at the numbers and the sales and stuff like that, that doesn't make sense, right? But there's a very passionate, passionate, you know, consumer base out there for quality stuff on the Vita. So for us, again, because we're. built in Unity and our game is a is a showpiece for for this new version called Unity 5, which should be out pretty soon. We're shipping on a beta actually. And we had to remaster the game for PC. What that means is that we redid every single piece of art content in the game and made it work for Unity 5, which has really, really high tech, really, really

cutting edge graphical features now. So the game looks very, very different than it does on iOS. So Unity also lets us push to lots of different platforms. It could be, we can push to Linux, Wii U, Xbox, PS4, PS3, Vita. And so a lot of people tweet us or text us and say, like, why? Like, you're on Unity. You can just push easily to Vita. And it's really not that simple. Yeah.

You know, Sony's support is good for it. But really, the Vita's memory is an issue. The onboard memory is a problem. So one of the things we have to do is a lot of custom work to profile the game and turn off some effects and stuff like that to make sure that the game will run. Now, we've, one of the advantage is actually a building for iOS and Android first. is that we actually have, under the hood, we have a bunch of things that we do

to profile based on each device. So the iOS, or how do I say, the iPhone 6 version and the effects that we have and the way the game looks looks very different from the iPhone 4 version because we know that the iPhone 4 has about half or less than half the memory and all these different kind of things

we turn on and turn off. So there is a world that we're a good looking version of the Vita game will ship. It's just, there's a lot of like tweaking going back and the door. You can't just push a button. Yeah, exactly. Everything's just remap. buttons, right? Well, yeah, your left click becomes

the triangle and then it's over and you put the game out. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely not that. Yeah, I mean, what I'm, what I'm, what I'm, what I'm, what I'm, what I'm, what I'm, what I'm, what I'm, what I'm, what I'm, what I'm, what I'm, about it a lot. We definitely are huge advocates for it. But what I love, if developers that show Vita love, and I don't mean like just put a game on Vita, but like, show Vita love. They'll write PlayStation, Blot. Dreambox is a great example. Exactly what I was thinking about. Like, when they're like, we write PlayStation blog posts and we make these games and they work on Vita and frankly, maybe they're best on Vita and something like that. They get

rewarded and I was at GDC a couple years ago when Drinkbox gave a talk and someone asked like why would you put your game on Vita and not on iOS and they're like because like Vita gamers buy games and iOS gamers don't you know and like that's why we're like they're like we're killing on Vita you know and so it seems like the

there's just developers out there that seem to get it that the Vita install base is low but that the Vita attach rate is enormous like fucking enormous you know like two years ago was something like 12 you know what you can say You know, so it's like, like, people, you read the PlayStation blog comments or read our Twitter account or when we used to do podcasts, beyond it. People are just crazy about that device. And if people support it, they buy the games, you know? And so I really feel like, you know, you guys have a hardcore game that speaks to that audience. And if you gave that audience love by giving them the game, I bet you they buy it. Sure. You know, and I think like that there's just a lot of examples of it. I just think that you have to be a little more. And it seems like you are a little more attached and cognizant of that subsect of gamer that cares about this device, that if you put your game on, um,

you know, Wii U with a comparable amount of Wii U's out there whatever it's gonna sell probably 10 times towards. You know what I mean? Like that's just the nature of... Sure.

Vita gamers know to go buy games or whatever. Right. It's just interesting. It's weird. I've never seen anything like it. I mean, you know, we've been studying in this industry for a long time and playing games for a long time.

I've never seen anything like this device in terms of how... It doesn't sell huge, but the games do. Just complete indifference from the consumer base yet like people just insist on bringing their games to it. Yeah.

Because like, we always give a shout to this awesome NeoGaf thread where they show all the games that are coming up. And there are more Vita games announced than any other platform. And that's like amazing. It's amazing.

You know, like it's so weird. Yeah, so we'd love to support it. You know, I love the idea of getting, like, getting behind a platform that,

that's kind of what I was talking about and your guys', your guys' life stream is, it's just about, it's not just about just about just about just uploading the game to these stores. It's about getting the support from the,

either the platform holders or a publisher to help us, like the Velocity X2 guys are talking about. Like, you need that extra support to make it, like, I want to make it an event.

If we come to Vita, it needs to be an event, right? Whether they get episode four early or episode five early, or we have exclusive content for it, or we're just optimizing the hell out of the sucker. We have cloud saves, you know, from Vita to PS3 to PS4 or whatever. Anything and everything we can do to make the... And that's actually one thing I learned from Metal Gear. One of the great things about Metal Gear,

it's like no matter what platform on those, they're always using those unique features, right, of the platform, of the controller. And so that's what we want to do. So hopefully Sony or, you know, if Microsoft wants to do that with Xbox, whatever, we're always open to talk about those kinds of things. Well, good luck with that.

I think that, yeah, there's going to be demand, I think, from the first parties for your game. And there probably already is. So, you know, that's exciting. And we have a controller prototype. Like moving, you can move hope around with a left analog stick. Why the hell didn't you ship this remastered with it? Come on, man.

Six months of work. Minimum, man. You can only be with this space bar. Minimum, man. Six months of work. Yeah. Because we have to remap all of her animations to the analog stick. You don't have a Konami 401K?

Come on. Are you kidding me? All right. The next one I want to do is a little bit a two-fer. We mentioned this a second ago, this next topic, right? You talked about game length, Metal Gear Solid. This is, again, a big thing right now with the order. 1886.

I don't know if you've heard of this game. I've heard of it. Okay, good. It's a place. It looks, it's beautiful. It's very beautiful. Not incredibly long. Not as short as some we're saying.

If you want to speed run it and do it, blah, blah, blah. When you're making a game as a developer, is that what you're thinking? Where is your headspace at in terms of the end, experience how long it's going to be. Are you making a story? Are you making gameplay? What are you doing? What the hell are you doing over there? Awesome question. I've never heard like, yeah, this kind of come up in the press or like on podcasts like that is how developers gauge playtime. Yeah. That's a really good one. And you should ask smarter people than me and who have more experience. But from my, from, you know, the past, you know, few games that I've shipped, you kind of have this

general sense. You kind of like this really rough target and you think, oh yeah, you know, you know, for Halo 4, for example, I think we're talking about like 10 missions. I don't know how many they shipped with, maybe eight, I want to say. That sounds about right. I think I remember that. And because you figure, you factor like, okay, like an hour of mission and it's about, you know, it's a little bit over 10 hours. We should be fine.

It's just really rough math. Yeah, yeah. Put on the back of a napkin. There's no way to say that what Colin, this expert gamer is growing up a mega man, knows all the stuff. How long he's going to play, getting every collectible versus someone who's just picking it up and playing it on the weekend every so often, not even where, versus the guy who who wants to beat him on night one and is just,

steam rolling, right? Like, it's always such a weird question. It is. And so for one of the things I've learned, and I think a lot of developers would agree, is that, and this doesn't play to the strengths of the order. But games actually take a lot longer for people to play than I think developers first expect. And I've always found that to be the case. Like you think, oh, they're going to be able to finish this in two hours.

You put in front of somebody, average time three hours and a half or three and a half hours or something like that. So that was one thing that I've really learned. So maybe even like the order guys were going like, oh, man, we were shipping like a three-hour game. Oh, six, all right, not bad. Oh, yeah. The other weird thing, this gets more of the publisher side of things, I think, but the unfortunate thing about alien isolation, for example, where it seems like they might have padded it. Yeah, too long.

Right. Because they're worried about, you know, lack of value. And sometimes too much is a bad thing. Right. So. Well, that was the concern with the order right leading up to when they were talking about. It's longer than people are saying it is, but we jump around a lot. We want you to feel different, right?

We want every gun to feel different. We want every scenario to be different. Every time you pick it up, we want you to be doing something different. So there isn't repetition. Right. And then it was like, well, now there's no flow to the game. There's no pacing to the game. And what does that matter?

When then alien isolation, yeah, it's just like, first eight hours are great. And then there's more. Why are we still going into this? Right. And true or false, if the order was just an amazing, incredible, unbelievable, six hours, seven hours, we wouldn't be having this conversation. We would have been, people would be saying, oh, this is how games should be. I like a six or seven hour, really, really, really, top-notch.

AAA experience. Maybe that's not what the game is, right? No, not to me. I mean, that was the thing I've been talking about when we played the order and, you know, all these things started, we had the order early and so like a lot of these things started breaking. We couldn't talk about it. And one of the things that was frustrating us was like, I don't think the game's good at all. I just think that like the length is not the problem. In fact, the length, if the game was longer, it might have been worse. And I think that that was the thing that people were ignoring was like, what is this, you know, subjective notion of value and what does that mean? And I wrote, you know, I still write a piece

a week for IGN, just op-eds or whatever. And the topic I picked up this week was, you know, why game length, this argument of game length is weird because, you know, Journey is not one of my favorite games of all time, but Journey was the most resonant, emotional game I had ever played. And I beat it in 90 minutes, and I was crying at the end, and I have no idea why. And I told Greg, I came on Greg, I'm never playing that game again. I'm never playing that game again. I'm like, that 90 minutes was precious.

I would pay hundreds of dollars to get 90 minutes like that again out of a game. And so that is my subjective equation for value is what does the game do and what does the game mean? Unfinished Swans, another really good example of that. These games that are short but awesome as opposed to, you know, people forget when they're like, well, Final Fantasy 6

took 60 hours or 70 hours to beat. And I'm like, yeah, but Final Fantasy 6 is able to take advantage of the conventions of the JRP genre, which no other genre does, which is they can just pad it however they want. Here's another dungeon. Yeah, well, it's not even dungeons as much as it's grinding. Like, you can, theoretically, you should be able to blaze through a game like Final Fantasy 6 in 10 hours if you want to,

except for the fact that you have to level your characters up and be thoughtful and, you know, persistent in, in leveling your characters up making them stronger and so like that. That is how they make a 10-hour game, a 70-hour game. So people are ignoring all of these tricks of the trade, as it were, that are fine. I mean, that's what an RPG is, and that's why I like them. But, you know, so this argument about the order was weird to me in the sense that, well, you're right. Like, if it was six really excellent hours, like uncharted, two and three, especially, I think, are, 10, 12 hours and they're fucking awesome.

And they don't need to be longer and I hope that they aren't shorter and that's good but not every game needs to be that long and I think people need to like shake this notion of $60, $10 hours, $60, $20 hours, $60. It's like why can a five hour game be $60? No, not saying that that's right or wrong. I'm just saying like you could get five powerful hours

for $60. So I think that people are losing sight of that. Yeah, again, I think it was an awesome game. I think people would be put this thing up on a pedal store that maybe this is the future of games. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean,

it's, maybe the game should have been $40. I don't know. I mean, maybe that's more of a question of, I think it was developing for a long time at a AAA studio. Maybe that's more of a question of a publisher

and not wanting to explore this middle ground that could exist for even retail products. But Jim Sterling, actually, Jim, fucking Sterling son said, he did a piece on Jim Quiddish. When he was saying that, he's like,

publishers are afraid of exploring this middle ground because they're afraid of being tagged as a budget game. Yep. That's absolutely true. Yeah. and it has like a bad aura and mystique about it. It's just not, to no blueno.

They don't want that. So I don't know. I bet they run the numbers too. Oh yeah, what happens, you know, focus groups if we sell the order for $39,99, less people buy it.

There's a perception of lower quality. Yeah, yeah. I bet there's something to that. Yeah, it's interesting. This particular argument just gets me in the same way

that the Indian downloadable space kind of argument gets me where it's like, games that aren't $60 don't have value and games that aren't 20 hours don't have value. And I'm like, why do you have such a narrow

Oh, Colin, you gotta spend more time on the App Store. Then you get into this weird, really dark space where you'll never win. It's, you know, you make a game that's, I have a friend who put a pretty good game out there for a dollar 99. Yeah. And people are bitching and moaning.

It's two hours long. And like, we can't believe you're charging for this. It's two hours. Like, you want it for free. And then you start doing the whole lot now or the comparison of like, this is like less than half of a cup, price of a cup of coffee.

When you get into that, realm you know you've lost because there's no no logic will prevail it's it's a really it's a dark place out there I forget what was Republic when it came out 499 yeah people complain like crazy yeah and it was an hour and a half two hour first episode you know I think that's pretty good yeah it's awesome it's all I mean replayable and all that stuff yeah it's weird like the whole and you can I mean it's kind of segueing out of the specific argument of game length or how long is but like this whole argument also just a value outside of length about we we

talked about a little bit before about and we have some great viewers who were saying like that they would prefer to buy your game as opposed to getting a code from you when we were giving away on Colin a great. It was awesome. And it is great because there are people. I don't want to say we're educating people because it's up to them whether or not they know. They know intrinsically that it's true. But these things cost money to make and they're going to cost money to play.

And if you cut out, if you just start, I really feel like some of it is developers' fault for under, like the iOS store. Like the app store is a fucking disaster. And like they all did it to themselves. Like by undercutting each other. They did, but because they felt like they had to. And what really needed to happen was that the, the, the, the guys who run those stores, whether it's Google Play or App Store or whatever, I think they could have done a better job of at least holding back some of like this,

like the free to play phenomenon for taking over. Because I think what we end up having now is just a bunch of crap and a bunch of manipulation that goes on now. Sure. You have to build all this manipulation to kind of trick people or make them feel guilty or do whatever to get money out of them. It's a really bad way to, I don't know, like to interact with consumers to the limited degree you even have interaction with on the app store, which is in a whole whole.

other problem. But we still embrace it. And I have actually really good feelings about the long-term viability of our game on the app store because there's one billion iOS devices out there, a billion. And getting the game in front of even like a small point percentage of that is a great opportunity, you know. Yeah. And it's interesting. Yeah, I love to talk to different developers that have experience on the iOS store and just on iOS and Android just in the sense of how their game succeeded or did. And how people like we were talking about with Drinkbox actually just go to Vita with 14 million. of them or whatever there are out there because they're like it's just easier you know um yeah i i the free-to-play thing is all interesting i mean we talk about plans versus zombies too which i was really excited about it's the last time i ever played a game on my ipad because i usually just

use it to me you know they give it to me you know they give it for free and then it's just like like it constantly nickels and dimes you in the app and i'm like dude's like i would have given you $20 if you just left me alone and now since you're bothering me i'm not going to give you shit you know like that's that's the whole that's the whole now i'm not even going to play your game yeah like i'm just like yeah grind it out or pay us you know two dollars and i'm just going to grind it out because i resent you know you you asking me for this one, I would have just given it to you up front and you're just like not talk to me.

Or give me the option and just like the leave me alone button. Yeah, yeah. It's just really unfortunate. Yeah, with the way that I think consumers have been trained and the, the, the, the consumers that will pay six figures into some of these iOS games. If you let them, they will. Yeah. And, well, that's the same thing with Patreon, right?

Like, it's like you have these people who will support you and try, you know what I mean? Like that. And like Colin just wants to give this developer money, right? And then, but then they get in this way and they screw it up. and the people who will, you get nickel and dime, you get addicted, maybe you go the wrong way with the money, right? And then you have things where if you have a way, like the people in the Twitch chat today who are like,

well, if I get a code, I still want to buy it, gift it to somebody on Steam. I want to make sure they're supporting you. That's awesome, yeah. That's where you hope the good wins out, right? Yeah, and we actually see a positive sign. I think it's because of our kind of console pedigree and the audience that buys our game, at least on iOS,

is we have a season pass just like the Tailtale games, have season pass on iOS, which is $15. It pre-purchases all the future episodes at a discount, account. And what we actually found was that there's more people that have purchased the season past than who have finished episode one. That's strange, right? And what we talking to the telltale guys, they basically say this is, that doesn't surprise them that a lot of people, uh, you know, want to support your game or they're buying it in advance because they want to wait until episode five comes out. But that just showed a lot of goodwill, at least for us. Like, you know, and more people,

way more people, this shouldn't surprise you, but the guys who buy the game at premium, if they buy it at $4.99 are more likely to buy the season pass than are the ones that get the game for free if they get it as part of a free promotion that obviously makes a lot of sense but it's because these people we want to that's our target target audience is that we want to cultivate the people that are willing to pay for quality and a very smart person way smarter than me and told me he's a he's a consulting firm told me Ryan you have to you can't think of all consumers as the same you have to focus on who your consumer is you have to have your target consumer and I was like yeah I'm an idiot like of course yeah that's right and he's like your your your target consumer is

is not the ones that are you know trying to get you know 99-s- cheeseburgers. They want to sit down at a restaurant and eat like a, you know, a $10 cheeseburger. And that's fine. They go after those guys. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. Yeah. That's why it's going to be successful on Steam. I should have said steak, because all developers want their games to be steak. Exactly. Steak. Flamin Young. Yeah, I think this game, I mean, the reaction was good when we showed on Collin'G Greg Live. I think, I think again, that this will be big on Steam. And I think when it comes to the console, it'll be big there, too. It speaks to the console, the hardcore game.

Yeah, you started doing that. It's funny because you started at a place you thought you should be and probably needed to be in the iOS market, but the place that was most unintuitive for a development studio like you to be. But I think that that what's so cool about that is now, I don't want to say the hard work's over, because the hard work's never over for a studio like yours and you guys are still working on the game and stuff, but maybe that the trials and tribulations are over. Like if you get, if you go to Xbox One, for instance, there's got to be some confidence that you're like, well, you know, this makes more. Yeah. These people will get it. Yeah. These people will get it. Yeah. And shipping, this huge game with all the memory

constraints and all the things we're learning about iOS and pushing iOS in areas that they've never been pushed before outside of maybe Infinity Blade and a couple other things. So you're right. Yeah, we took the hard path and that's kind of like what I want to do with my life anyway. So hopefully it'll pay off. You want to be challenged. I want to be challenged. I want the Dark Souls path of life.

I'm not, I'm not, you know, playing some, you know, a game that's like constantly throwing achievements at me. I want to earn those babies. I like that. Get a new 401k. Republic remastered. Out right now. If you're hearing this, go get it.

PC and Mac, Humble Store, Gog, that's not Greg. No, it's not Game Over Game Over, Greg. And Steam. So, thank you so much for us supporting it. No, no problem. Our pleasure. Final topic of the Kind of Funny Gamescast for this week. It should be a fast one, first off, because you have to go.

But also, because we've hinted around. You've played this the last of us, right? Yeah, of course. It's my favorite game of 2013. Well, all right, you have good taste. Over on patreon.com, Adam Herschaw backed us at a certain amount to get his question right on the air. Thank you very much, Adam. And his question is,

one of my favorite shows you guys ever did was The Last of a Spoiler cast. There surely has to be a sequel. Where do you see the story going? And what do you want to see from the next game? Love you guys. Go Islanders, Adam Kirscho. Clearly, this is a spoilers one. If you haven't beaten The Last of a See, you probably want to bounce.

Exactly. But I'm never going to untap my head on this one because it's just to the end now. I don't know. To the windows? To the walls. It was clear to me that, you know, I did the history of Nauti Dog. I spent a lot of time at that studio and wrote like 50,000 words on the studio or whatever. And I never got to write the piece about the last of us because everything changed.

Everything changed and I never had. It was all primary sources, so I just never got to write it. But it was clear to me that they didn't necessarily design the game to be to have a sequel, nor that they necessarily want to do one. But I think that they're always open to the idea of doing it. I think now that the game sold what six or seven or eight million copies, whatever it's sold. It's a no-brainer. And so I've said time and time again, like just to get right into it,

that my personal opinion on the sequel to the last of us is that I'd like it to start literally right at the ending of the last month. She sighs and you pick right out from the... Yeah, like they talk to each other and just start right there. Yeah, I'd play that. Yeah.

Well, here's the thing, is that I'd play any of them. I hope it doesn't happen. Like, I really hope they don't. Oh, you're one of those guys. I am one of us, yeah. I know, I'm not saying, I'm saying,

I'm not betting that it's not going to happen. I know it's going to happen, but I wish they wouldn't. Or, and if they did do it, I'd rather see, I would have rather seen something we've always talked about, like more DLC of Ishes' tale or something, right?

Like, I'd rather see even filled in when Joel, a younger Joel story, a prequel to that, you know what I mean, to see everything happens. I think it's likely to, you might see some of that stuff, right? These guys are gutsy, you know? If anything, I'd like to see, and if we have to go forward more, and they are very gutsy. If we have to go forward more, I would want to see, I think I'd want time to pass, see Ellie a bit older, and Joel a bit older, and go from there and see, I want, I mean, I still want, I always, when I beat The Last of Us, right, I, and I immediately started texting Neil

he was like, what did you think? I'm like, I'm not there. I'm not there. And I text him immediately. I'm just like, I was the bad guy. I am the bad. I was playing the bad guy. He's like, you're not the, that's, well, that's up to interpretation. I'm like, no, fuck that. Joel is a bad guy, but his choice by the end, right. And that's the thing is that you got to get in these conversations with people, especially people who have daughters and like, no, he made the right choice. I would have never have done that. Yeah, which is, this is good. But like, you know, what I was, what I was hoping when it's happening, I mean, not even when it's happening, because I'm just too floored by what is happening. But I always

wanted her to wake up and be like, they told me how he was going to die. Like if it picks right up, I want her to be like, you know, they told me this was going to kill me and this was my choice. And you've stolen it from me. You know what I mean? Like, I want there to be conflict between Joel and Ellie, which sucks because I love them and I love their relationship. You're probably going to get it. That's what I want. Like, that's what I want to see in the next one for sure, is there to be some kind of repercussion with her based on what he did. Yeah, the way there's no way that they wouldn't be able to, that they wouldn't go across those waters, right? Yeah. Yeah. She sighs like she knows. She knows. She knows he was lying to her.

fucking good damn it yeah I think I mean to me you know it's funny the way that people interpret that game too because I remember I remember talking about it on the spoiler cast before we had Neil and Bruce on podcast beyond like after the game came out and we were talking about I remember in the spoiler cast my whole thing was like you play as a bag out I'm like no you're not there's no guarantee that that that cure was going to work anyway and in fact the fireflies might have been lying to you no way and and Greg was like you're crazy and everyone's like laughing me and I remember I remember talking when Bruce came he's like no he's like or Neil was like no it's a great point like they never actually there's no guarantee the cure was going to going to work and there's no guarantee the fireflies were telling anyone the truth. So it was, like, they can do whatever they want. Yeah. So it was like, to me, I was like, Joel made the, maybe the, maybe not the, it was definitely

not, it was definitely a selfish choice. Yeah. But my whole rationale when he did it was, in my mind, if I was in Joel's position, have been like, where's the guarantee this is going to work? You have no show me no proof that you, that you know this is the sacrifice of this girl is going to work. And I think that's what everyone got caught up on, as opposed to where the way I looked at, I think a lot of other people looked at it.

And I think the way Neil might even written it, which was that there is no guarantees. and so he isn't the bad guy. It's like way more nebulous than that. That said, you know, they downplay it or don't talk a lot about it, and I do believe them in terms of the rationale or the, not the rationale, the inspiration for the game being the road, which I think is, you know, Corma McCarthy's book, which I think is fucking obvious,

but like they don't take a lot of inspiration from it. But when I think about that book, one of the great books I've ever read, it's about a father and his son, but really the star of the entire book is the world. And I think we also have to get caught up with that. That Joel and Ellie are special when we love them, I think maybe the star of the last West is actually that world. And I wonder if, like, the story that you tell is, has nothing to do with them at all.

And it's like a totally. Think it was a different story about a different group. Yeah, just a different story about a different group. Maybe the fireflies do have a national reach, I guess, at least from Boston to Salt Lake. But maybe it's about a different group or in a different country. Maybe it's the fireflies going after Joel. You know what I mean? They've put it together that's just happening that there was this massacre.

He's kind of like a legend, right? He is an eye and legend. Now they have to go after him. That's what your mission is. So, yeah, I think that like the whole issue. thing is obvious and I think that should have been the DLC and I don't think they're going to go back to that or whatever and I think the DLC they did what left behind was amazing

I wish I had no combat at all I wish that they had the balls to do something like that but you know I think that the last West sequel is definitely going to happen I'm sure it's in pre-production now I'm sure that the entire even though they have their two team kind of thing going on in Nardi-Dolli that all of them are all in Chartered and they have to roll off right yeah so I don't think anything's happening now and I don't think the last West 2 is imminent at all I think you see it 2018 2019 maybe but

I hope that either If they don't continue right after the ending, I hope that's just totally different. Like a totally different story. But I'm not, I can understand the sanctity of that story in terms of like leaving it alone, but Sony's pretty blatant about

and everyone is Activision and Ubisoft. Everyone that makes IP that, you know, they make IP to make money. You're a business. And if there, if that IP came out to gate and sold 8 million units, then I can't imagine. Hopefully it's as good as Peace Walker.

Yeah. Give me the last of us portable. Bite size operations. You know, we got to talk about Peacewalker at some point, but I got to run. You guys can keep going. No, no, no, we're ending. We'll wrap it. Yeah, yeah.

I'm sorry. No, no, it's nothing. I've been watching. I've been watching. Don't worry. We're going to get you out of here at three and get an Uber. Don't worry about it, ladies and gentlemen. It's been a pleasure having you on the Kind of Funny games cast. Remember, each and every Friday, we post this at Patreon.com. slash Kind of Funny Funny.

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come find everything then mp3 youtube on friday it's great it's been a pleasure thank you sir thank you sir republic remastered is out right now in steam gog uh humble don't say it i'm not i'm not gonna say one day to mac one day to mac one day to mac one day probably to vita because we know people you got it uh everybody go get it thank you for your time thank you call thank you for yours oh my pleasure until next time i'm not tim getties