Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Peer Schneider (Special Guest) - Kinda Funny Gamescast Ep. 89

Episode Date: October 14, 2016

Special guest IGN Founder Peer Schneider joins us to talk about PS VR, the history and future of IGN, and his career in games media. (Released to Patreon Supporters 10.07.16) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That's blue apron.com slash funny. Blue Apron. Better way to come. cook. What's up guys? Welcome to the first ever episode 89 of the kind of funny games cast. As always, I'm Tim Geddes, joined by the coolest dudes in video games, Colin Moriarty,

and Greg Miller. Hello. 89, of course, because 1989 when I was born. Ghostbusters 2 came out. That happened too. You remember that? You go to the theaters, a little baby? Nope. A little bundle of joy. Your mom's like, you're just like Baby Oscar. And then she started calling you Oscar.

Do you remember Baby Oscar? None of this is true. This show is very special. Because we're joined by a very special guest, somebody that we are all very, very thankful for and owe a lot to. One, Pear Schneider. Founder of IGN, all around amazing guy. This is going to be a fantastic episode. I'm super happy. Pear, thank you for joining us.

Thank you. I thought somebody else was coming from the description. Well, we all owe you a great deal. Oh, thank you. I owe you guys. That's a greater deal. How are you doing? I'm doing well.

It's good. I mean, you guys know from the old games media. when it's Q4, suddenly there's this giant mountain of games and everybody in the office loses their mind and they have to review them all. Remember that? Oh, no, we know right now. I still wake up in cold sweats in November. There you go.

So that's happening now, especially when you get like PSBR coming out with its own stack of games on top of that. So that's going to be a lot of fun for everybody. You should just transition to what we do and we're like, oh, we don't care about those games. We'll play this game for 30 minutes and make a video about it. Like we know what we're talking about. Just tell them that we only play 30 minutes. People will know or care. cares.

Yeah. No, that's great. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Kind of Funny Games cast every week we get together to talk about video games and all the things we love about them. You can get it early on patreon.com

slash kind of funny games or you can get it late on YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny Games if that's your thing. I hope it's not, but if it is, you do you. It's cool.

I'll be proud of you too. So topic one of the day, I want to talk about PlayStation VR. It is here. We have had it. We've used it extensively. You guys, did you review?

over on PS I Love You, XO, XO. Thank you for getting the whole title in there. That's right. That's right. I wait for it. You got it. You should go check that out. You guys talked for a long time about it.

Maybe too long. No, as long as it needed. I was into it. It's an hour and a half long episode, what? Probably 50, 60 minutes of it's talking about PlayStation VR. Five of it's a phone call with my father about my sick uncle. It's great. It's a dynamite show.

Classic great. So, Pear, how much have you got to you? PlayStation VR. I've tried it a couple of times. We, you know, we've got it in the office as well, but people are hogging it. But I went to Sony a couple of months ago and tried a couple of demos on it early at E3 of course. So I've tried it. It's cool. Yeah. It's, I mean, I pre-ordered the whole bundle and I'm going to get it day one and I'm really excited for it. What game are you most excited to try out? Honestly, I mean like sitting in the cockpit of an X-wing is what I always wanted to do. So I'm dying to play that Drive Club just,

I think anything where you're in a cockpit and you're stationary and you can look around, I think those games will work the best. But then Job Simulator, I've played that on the other platforms, right? Like, that's really fun, looking forward to playing that more too. Yeah, awesome. So I got to play it a lot this weekend. I got to take your unit home and mess around with everything. You get messing around with my unit.

Oh, yes, definitely. And I just kind of wanted to give my thoughts on the whole experience. I definitely like it a lot more than I thought I was going to. That's interesting because with Colin and I, there's always been like, the, you know, a barometer, right? It's always been calling super into it, me into it, and then you who are like, me. Yeah, I was kind of like whatever. And again, it's not like I was that far off on what I thought.

It is still fairly what you would expect it to be, which is, it is gimmicky, but that's it nails the gimmick, which then makes it transcend gimmick. You know, then it just becomes kind of, uh, the standard of how things should be. But I think that this is there, they're very, they know that this isn't just the future of video games. This is a future of video games. that this is like traditional video games will still be played the way they are. I appreciate that these are experiences that are geared towards that.

And the games that kind of try to mesh it together are the ones that I think fail the most. But it is the ones that really do just go full in and make sure that there's something happening all around you, not just in this, the 180 that succeed the most. I was most looking forward to until dawn rush of blood. And that is, well, because I've always been a fan of light gun games. And I also really like the aesthetic of until dawn and the horror stuff. I was telling Colin in our let's play that we did. And yeah, all week long, we were doing let's plays of the PSVR games. So I guess by the time this goes live, you would have seen them all.

They're all available. YouTube.com slash kind of funny. Go watch the damn letsplays. Yeah, yeah. But I was telling him that like there's this game Carnival that I used to really like back in arcades. Okay. That I used to play at a roundtable a lot. And it was just like this, a carnival that got taken over by evil spirits and stuff.

So you're kind of just going through. It's very Batman Joker-esque, like just scary shit going on and whatever. So until Dawn Rush of Blood, I'm like, oh, this is like the spiritual success in a lot of ways. But it being in VR, man, like I feel like that game is not going to get enough praise for how successful it is at being a game and being an experience. Because you're in the cockpit, because you're on rails going, it feels right. You know, you don't have to deal with the locomotion and all that stuff. but because you're on the roller coaster, you still get those like weird stomach sensations and stuff

that I think VR, I heard you earlier talking about how VR like really tricks your brain. Yeah. And it does. It's like it's so crazy that I could be sitting right there with Colin where he is and he's next to me, but I would not know he is. Oh, sure.

It doesn't feel like it. I feel like him in a total other world. Has it tricked your brain? I mean, obviously you get the sensation of like, well, I'm on a roller coaster. Has it tricked your sense of smell yet? because I played the, what was it, the getaway demo. Oh, London Heist.

Yeah, London Heist. I played that very early on. And there's a dude standing in the room. And you've got this, first of all, you've got this weird feeling that he's really there. Like, how you can feel it on your skin. Sometimes when somebody's in the room, it was really eerie. And then he has a cigarette. And like, I swear, for a moment, I'm like, I'm smelling smoke.

Because you're so used to when you're seeing smoke that you're smelling it. And in this game, I was like, wow, something weird's going on. It was really trippy. Yeah, I haven't had the smell. But I agree with you. that the, so besides until dawn, crazy. Anybody I smell burning toast right now.

Besides until dawn, I think that the, the London heist is my favorite thing. I think as an experience, it's the most thrilling that I've had so far, where you start and you're in an interrogation room, and it's more than just the demo we've done. It goes from interrogation, then you're

doing the actual heist. So you're in a, in this room, and then like people are coming in, you're heisting a diamond, and there's a whole shootout, scene and then you go back to the interrogation then you do the driving scene there's another interrogation and then there's more shit after that uh that i want to spoil but it's it's super fun and keeps you going and i feel like it does a good job of all right here's the interrogation experience where this guy is in your face and it it's it's creepy right it makes you want to like

kind of move out of the way and then it switches to gameplay you know you're driving you're shooting it's more of a light gun uh type game and i love it like it just takes me back to the mid 90s going to arcades and wanting to play the games that needed four quarters instead of one quarter because you get to use some stupid peripheral. Like rumble seats for Jurassic Park. That kind of stuff. Using the cool, like the pump shotgun guns or like the silent scope or any of the like the real premium car games.

Yeah. And I think that VR is going to allow us to do all that stuff. The problem is those experiences don't last. You know, it's like you only want to do those for so long. And it's like, Until Dawn has what, like six levels, I think. And I think that's perfect. You know, it's like, that's the perfect event. I don't need more of this.

Yeah. But that's why I think that the VR Worlds and Until Dawn are my two games. I'm like, man, definitely check them out. VR Worlds. It's confusing. We all thought me and Greg were stuck for like an hour trying to figure out what's the difference between the PlayStation Demo Disc and VR Worlds. VR Worlds is made by the London.

Sony London. And it's fantastic. It's five different experiences. One is dangerous. ball, which is essentially the games from Tron legacy, where it's like they're in the big thing with the arena around them. It's pong, but use your head and you have to move. Then it has London Heist, which is fantastic.

And it has the descent, which is the shark experience. Yeah, yeah, you're going on the shark tank. But there's multiple chapters, too. So it's not just the demo we saw over and over. Eventually, you are the shark. Oh, my God. You're in the human tank. What else is there in that one?

Oh, then this is another game called, oh, I'm totally blanking now. But it's like survive outlast or something like that. And it's the mech one. Oh, right, right. Yeah, you really like that one. Yeah, you showed it in the let's play where you get in it and you jump around. You, that you were telling me, this is a full-fledged game. This isn't just an experience.

I'm jumping around. I'm doing this. I'm running this, but you're attacking people and going on. Yeah, so you're in a mech, very similar to the mech from aliens. And you use a dual shock for, and you kind of go. And it's the trigger. You can see your hands in the game. And he's holding to, what do they call?

The Clevers? Just like, no, like in flight simulators, there's the flight sticks. Kind of like flight sticks, but they're mech flight sticks. So they have the two of them. So to see the hands and it's, it is the R1 and the L1 buttons and stuff. And then you can use them to either shoot missiles or jump. So the jump, you kind of see a targeting thing. You look up at it and you target and you can jump over there.

Then it becomes kind of Mario Galaxy inception shit where you're jumping in the gravity's flipping and all this stuff. And it's super disoriented. That sounds great in first person. No one's getting sick already playing this. You didn't get sick? But, oh, I got really sick from the whole thing.

But from this one, it's because you're looking and you are targeting it and you know that you're going to flip, you kind of expect it. Yeah. So it's kind of like Until Dawn, where like when it's the roller coaster, you know you're going to get that sensation.

So it feels a little bit better than the first person, like kind of frantic looking left to right experience. But my biggest issue with VR is, man, I didn't think I was going to get motion sickness from it. And after, after an hour of playing, which I think is more than people should be playing this at a time, I was just like, ooh, I don't feel good.

To the point that after two days of using it back to back, I was like, I don't, if I have to play it the next day, I'm not going to do it. Like, I don't want to, I just don't want it. Do you think you'll get used to it, though? Because I remember when I got my first PC, I played dissent. Remember that game where you can fly into any direction? And it was running super smoothly. And I was like, whoa.

Like, I couldn't handle it. But now I have no problem with that type of game. Like, you know, first-person shooter is running at 60 frames for a second, I have no problem. So I wonder if we will get used to it or, you know. I think you will. I mean, that's what we keep talking about is like this is the game. We've never played games this way. So you have to relearn how to play everything.

Because, like, the games that have made me sick were, anytime there's an elevator in the very beginning when I would play games, that's when my body knows how an elevator is supposed to feel. And when the elevator would stop, my body would keep going because there was no gravity on it. It felt really weird. But I've started to get over that now because there's an elevator at every one of these games. But like another game I've been playing in VR that is still embargoed I was playing and you're wandering around in first person or whatever

And it was when you switch the controls over to be in control of yourself Where it wasn't like you're not jumping around like Batman Arkham VR You're actually moving yourself place to place walking around that the first five minutes that were like whoa Like okay I feel drunk and then it was like gradually getting used to how fast I can turn my head and then being a little bit more comfortable and you're going I wasn't you know an expert at it by the end of it but I feel like I'm getting better. It's a brain trickery, right? Like your brain says, nope, I'm not moving and therefore something is wrong. Like the alien demo I played at E3 and like Doom, for example, on the other headset, it's like the same thing. Like you walk around and your body's like, no, you're not moving.

Yeah, right? Like it's, the looking part feels really natural or like driving in a cockpit, flying an airplane, that kind of stuff. I think that the big thing with VR that people have to understand and I think everyone inherently does understand this is that it's so convincing to the brain that it's going to require a learning curve for your brain. And I don't know that I don't know that doing it over and over again is going to make your brain get used to it. I think that there's some, I hope that's the case, but I also think that some people are just not going to be able to do it at all. And I think a lot of people will and they'll do it in limited ways because what I found was that I'm very positive about PSVR. I think it's a first step in a right, in a very good

direction, I think. But it's taxing on your brain. Because I was even playing, as I was saying, job simulator, which I think is a really great game. It's probably my favorite game that I played on VR. And it's just a game where you stand still and you're doing funny things. It's very comical kind of game. But after playing all four of those modes in the game and I took it off and I'm like I literally had to go take a nap. I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, because my brain's all fucked up. My brain's like, what is going on? And then I was saying later when I went to a store, I went to grab something off a shelf and almost was like, I was in the game almost. And I was like, like, this is like, it's getting a little glowing bubbles for hands. Yeah. But I almost

want to, you know how you like, when you grab something in the game, you like kind of like arch it over and then press the trigger and like bring it back whatever. I almost kind of like went to grab something like that. I'm like, why am I doing that? Like I'm in the real world. So I think my takeaway with PSBR is this. And I feel the same way about Oculus and V and the limited times that I played those as well. Is that people I think have unrealistic expectations of what these things are going to provide out of the gate.

And I encourage people to think about this as a rebooting of video games. Now this is going to be a supplemental thing that sits alongside the traditional way we play games. But people are like, where is my 10 hour experience? I'm like, guys, when tennis for two came out in nine, 1959 on an oscilloscope. It was the most rudimentary thing you would ever see in your life. And then 15 years later, we got Pong, which was basically the same idea on a screen on a screen. It looked a little prettier. And then we got static screen arcade games and all those kinds of things. Then fast forward to the early 80s, you started getting games that moved the screen, right? And then you started getting side scrollers and

then we got Mario and all these kinds of things. I'm like, be patient. Like, what we're getting out of these experiences is so far ahead of what we were getting on Calico and Atari 2600 and all, and in the arcades in the late 70s and early 80s. And so I really feel like people need to just be a little more patient with the expectations of what they're getting, should this thing take off, and I really hope it does because I think it's really great technology. I can't imagine in five years or 10 years on new headsets that are even more powerful. The resolution's better. It's more immersive. This is an exciting new way to play. And I know people like to use the word gimmick. And as definition, it is a gimmick. But what I've been saying is it's not a hard G capital G proper noun gimmick.

Like I would say like we or move or connect where. This is a really dynamic new way to play games in a way we've never, literally never gotten a chance to play them like this before. And I am tired of this stagnation in games. It doesn't mean I'm not excited to play my next third person open world game. I like my role playing games. I like my side scrollers. That's great. I'm always going to play those until the day I die.

This thing is finally going to sit aside those and give us a new way to experience games. It's not going to replace a supplement or supplant rather. It's going to supplement what we already have. And I think there's a really huge reason to be excited about this. It's expensive to get in in any of the three devices. PS4 is probably the most reasonable with PSBR. But if you're willing to make that investment, and you don't have to make that investment,

I don't care if you make that investment. It's up to you. I'm just saying that this technology is convincing. Like, this is really, I'm super, everyone knows me. Like, I'm very skeptical about things and I like, I do take a more pessimistic point of view, but on this, I'm very optimistic because, as you were saying before we recorded,

when I put on Oculus a few years ago and played E. Valkyrie for the first time, I was like, holy shit. Like, I can't believe this exists. And here we are. and it's here, it's in our homes. And Oculus and obviously Viver are out there too, but I'm a console guy, and so this is what I've been waiting for.

So I'm excited about it. It's like that moment, like when I played Eve, it was like that moment in the movie Rattatoui where he eats the food and he goes back to his childhood and, like, his knees scrape. Like, I felt like seeing Star Wars for the first time, and I'm like, I want to be in that spaceship. And like, just that feeling that these games in VR can evoke

with very simple means. A lot of the games are very simple, right? It's very special. And that's why I feel like the comparison that some people make to, oh, it's like 3D and movies, right? Everybody was excited about Avatar, and then, you know, now everybody's annoyed with it because it darkens the screen and adds dollars to your ticket. I don't think it's the same thing.

I think it's such a unique and different experience that once developers figure out that, oh, I need to make a very, very different game that doesn't last as long, does something very different. I think it'll be really special. Yeah, I mean, it's the, what you're talking about, it's the wonderment of putting it on and letting yourself get tricked. And that's the whole thing where I put it on and I'm in a giant area and I know I'm still in a small room, but I know that I'm in a giant area and what to do with that.

And when I did the Batman demo at E3 for the first time and I put on the cow and I'm grinning and I'm laughing the entire amount, I put on the cow and the mirror pops up and you're supposed to move your head. I mean, it started moving my mouth. And I'm like, oh, right. No, that doesn't work. And I know that's not how this technology works. It's so, it's right there in your face.

You think that's how it should work and what it should do. Yeah, I mean, I got to say, I am very impressed with the whole thing. And I think that the launch lineup has a lot to do with that. Looking at it going in, I was like, oh, it's just going to be. like a lot of tech demos. And that kind of is exactly what it is. But all of those demos impressed me way more than I thought they would. The only game that I played that I was like,

oh, this kind of sucks is Harmonix VR. Yeah. And I like music games. So I kind of wanted something out of that. But that is more just like a music visual. Did you go through every one of them? Like the four levels or whatever. I went through and every one of them was different.

So that game overall was like, this is a weird hodgepodge of like, here's things we could do, but we didn't really make a game about it. We're just making you these things. And that's the thing is. I think it is just a lot of demos. But I was thoroughly impressed demo after demo with these experiences where I was like, man, this is super cool.

And I think that it's the combination of a lot of gimmicks that then kind of make it worth it. So it is the move combined with the 3D. You know, so it's like those things by themselves or whatever. But when you add it all together, that makes the experience like, whoa. And having my friends put it on, I mean, I think that's one of the coolest things about this is putting it on people that haven't played video games in years. and then just being like, what the fuck? Yeah, this is crazy. And with the scary stuff, even people who are not scared by horror movies,

like they put this on and you play some of the experiences, they freak out. Like there's this kind of like physicality to the creatures that are in the room. And you're like, you constantly worry that somebody's fucking with you, that there's someone behind you, right? So when you're wearing the headset, you're constantly like, oh, what's going on looking around? And like, I can't think of any other medium that could make horror this.

scary. Yeah, it's very immersive and that's why I'm so excited about Residential 7. I, like, to me, I just feel like people have to get their, their expectations in check right now about what this is. And then let's look at the genetic code of how gaming got to this point right now on TVs and then reset it. And then let's just go again. And I think market forces are going to dictate this just like with anything else that this thing grows and proliferates. And I'm hopeful that it will. I think that their expectations have to be very low. I was saying on Colin and Greg Live today that if Sony can get 5% of PS4, owners right now, which would be two and a half million, let's say 45 million PS4s in a while,

that's two and a half million people. If you can get them to buy in, and I think that they could, then I think you have a successful unit. And then you go forward. I also think that is a very savvy move on Sony's part to get in in a, in a way that is proprietary very early on. There's really only three bigger players in the space because I think this pays off with their TVs.

I think this pays off with their, you know, well, not computers going to do that anywhere, but with other services. And I think that thinking about games only makes us think small. I think that the, you know, I keep saying when we go to, when Mars, when we go to Mars with NASA or SpaceX in 20 years, wouldn't it be amazing if they just dropped a couple cameras, you know, and they're like, put on your VR headsets and you're going to be there with us.

That's the possibility of what we're going to be doing with this, nonetheless the concerts and the other experiences that we have, the virtual tourism. I think... Church. Dude, I mean, imagine if the Vatican did that, and you can go and you can go to Latin services. You can see the Pope, right?

Yeah, like, Christmas Eve, Mass. It's like, the, like, I understand why people think this is a gimmick, and maybe to them it is, and I respect that. But I'm telling you, man, Like there's something to this. Like there really is something to this. People think that I'm using it pejoratively when I say games are stagnant.

In a way maybe I am, but I don't really mean it that way. Games are stagnant. We're getting the same things over and over again and we enjoy those things. But finally, we have a device that's going to make people think differently about how they create games

and we are not going to get the same things over and over again. We're excited about playing Farpoint or a shooter or something like that. Any Valkyrie, which is a flight sim basically. But man, like, there are some brilliant minds making games and they're going to look at this device

and they just have to sit and think about it for a minute. And they're going to, so let's, like you say all the time, Shuhay said this was PS1, right, for them. And let's see what PS2 looks like. Let's see what PS3 looks like. And before you know it, I think if we're just patient, and we get out of the pong and the centipede and the asteroid's kind of era of PSVR,

and we get to the river raid, or we get to, you know, pitfall, and then we get to Mario, and then we get to Castlevania, and then we get the Final Fantasy. And then as a gamer, as someone who's playing games for almost three decades, as we all have been playing games for many decades,

this is exciting. This is a truly exciting thing. And I want it to see, I want all three of them to succeed. And I don't want this to replace the way we play games. But I want to look at my, I want to look at my setup one day and be like, well, I got my PS4.

And I got precious Vita sitting up there. Aw. And then I have PSVR. And I'm like, today is a, I have an option to go into this world now. We use this word, we throw around this word immersion and immersive. And I will say again

that I don't think games can truly be immersive on a television screen. I think that we can immerse ourselves as best we can, but the phone's still ringing, the person's talking to you behind you, the sun is shining in from the real world through your window, that is inherently not immersive, right? This is. And there are true limitations in games right now where I feel like what we think, you know, games like Uncharted or Forts are all these games that we love to play now,

what we're accustomed to, we kind of know what comes next, right? Better visuals, there'll be some clever, clever sequences, but you also see the kind of the band-aids in there. And like, I'm playing Forza right now, and when I am driving on a course, I have a hard time seeing where the course is going. You know, cross-country, all right, I need the little lines that tell me where the course is going. When I'm turning into a curve, what I do naturally in life when I'm driving, like I look

to the side, I can't do without using the right stick, which in Forza makes all sorts of crazy shit happen, right? Like, it's way too touchy. With VR suddenly in a racing game, you are freed from that limitation. that all these racing game developers had to deal with. I guarantee you, they are like companies like Nottie Dog when they make it uncharted, they're like, man, wouldn't it be nice if you could intuitively do this?

Or like, if you remember Metroid Prime and you had to like do first person stuff like open doors, like you didn't get a sense for the space because you're looking at a flat screen with the VR goggles and everything. I think lots of stuff will change and we'll see new genres develop too. Yeah, I think the one major hiccup,

I mean, there are major hiccups. I think that the thing, you know, is still finicky, the resolution's not great. I mean, where this is a lot of wires, Like, it's very early times, right? Like, it's a very, it's a cacophony of nightmares with the wires. But the, but the, the, the one major thing that I think needs to be overcome and I don't know how they're going to do it in an effective way is locomotion.

And I know that there's a lot of different people that are trying to, you know, I see weird things at GDC every year where you're like walking on this moving platform and all this kind of stuff. That's not going to be the solution. It's got to be eye tracking or something like something different that like, I remember a couple years ago at GDC we played infamous second son or no, it was infamous two, I think, on PS3. Oh, it was only your eyes.

And it was amazing. It was just an experimental thing where it's like look in that direction and he'll walk in that direction. And it worked. It totally worked. And I was like, this is ridiculous.

And I think that they were experimenting with that in a secret way for PSVR and all that kind of stuff. And I think so the locomotion issue is going to have to be taken care of and you're seeing people taking care of it different ways, whether it's job simulator in which there is no locomotion, whether it's in Batman,

where you're using a button and pointing and going to that place, whether you're using a dual analog stick. But I think we have to get away from the conventional controller ultimately in order for this to work. For sure. And reprogram, as I've been saying, your eyes are now going to be the left stick,

or the right stick rather, the left stick is the problem. And once they solve that, we're golden. And I really do believe that they're going to solve it, and it's probably going to be some weird eye tracking shit that they're going to do. Cable in the neck. Or plug you right in. Yeah, man. It's fantastic.

I definitely, if you guys are interested at all, I highly recommend finding some way to at least try it out. And I think that, you know, if you have the means, I think it's worth getting it just to spread it and show other people so that they can understand where this is headed, because it's a very, very, very special device. And I had a lot of fun with it despite all of shortcomings, which to me, it's like, it's very taxing on you physically,

whether it's the motion sickness or you were saying the tiredness, but also just the heat. Like, it's a, having that on your head, I'm just like, man, it was an experience. Like it felt like a workout afterwards. And like these are the Kailik, the Blood and Toshinden games, right? Like these are the early experiments with 3D space, like back in the days. We're going to get better stuff than this. Yeah.

No, it's very, very, very excited. All right. Topic two. Here. It is IGN's 20th anniversary. Can you believe it? No. Look at all the gray. Seriously.

So I want to talk to you about kind of the history of IGN. Like take us through from the beginning all the way through now. Sure. And you guys obviously were there for a long time. I still on my calendar see like the anniversary dates pop up as like 2007 or something. Right. I think July. July.

Right. I still see it. I'm never going to delete those. Just like you can never change your PSN. Oh, always be more, your IGN. No, it's, you know, IGN was the idea of Chris Anderson, who is the guy running TED, if you've ever seen the TED Talks, right? Chris Anderson founded a publishing house in the United States.

You know, back then he had one in the UK called Future, started it over here called Imagine Media. And the I and IGN is from Imagine back in the day, which is no longer our parent company. And so he basically said, okay, we're going to make these magazines for gamers. And their competitor at the time was Ziv Davis, ironically, now our parent company, right? And so they basically published all these mags that you probably know, like PC gamer, right? And like what was it, PSN, all these magazines over the years.

And then at one point in 96, they said, let's try some stuff online. And so September 29, 1996, the official launch of the Nintendo 64, it leaked a couple of days early, right? That's when they launched n64.com. And that was the first IGN website. And what a great.com you guys got with that. Yeah, that's because nobody called it N64. Everybody, Nintendo, and all that press release is always all caps, Nintendo 64. If you wrote N64, they're like, no, it's all caps, Nintendo 64.

You know how they are. And so, yeah, we got that domain very early on and then created this website. And it had a lot of, like, Nintendo-looking graphics. Like, the ratings scale was like Mario Hats. It was like red Mario hats. So you could totally mistake it for the official site, which is what happened. And then after a while, Nintendo said, that's kind of our brand because we registered it now. And, you know, what can we do?

But to be fair, they were pretty gracious. Doug Perry, the EIC at the time, met with Nintendo. And so they put a plan in place where N64.com would link to both IGN64. org.com. Terrible domain and N64, their website at the same time. So you could choose which one. And that was really the beginning of the IGN brand as a standalone. And, you know, for a while, it was kind of like these different websites, you know, like the N64 website.

Matt and I ran it, Matt Casamacina. And it had its own feel and it was different from, you know, Saturn World or PSX power or, you know, which would become IGN PSX. Saturn World was actually lost in a server mishap. That's how Bush League we were. It was fine. It was gone. No one worried. It's still on the way back machine.

Oh, nice. Yeah. And we imported a lot of the car. content again. But like, then we put the IGN brand on everything and made one homepage, you know, years later, like 99, I think. That same year, we took the Den, an entertainment network. If you guys remember Stephen Horn? Yeah, he was running that. So it was all like sci-fi movies, television stuff. And we merged that into IGN. So 1999 is really when we became what we are today, which is lots of gaming, but also we know people don't just play games. They want to know about Game of

Thrones, Star Wars, all that stuff. So that's when we became what we are now, I think. Yeah. And then, you know, I don't know how deep you want to go, but like YouTube happened, right? In 1996, there was no YouTube, no Google, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Snapchat, none of that. And so when YouTube happened? Well, even before YouTube, you guys were doing video. So when did video kind of come into the... Oh, God, I'm trying to remember. We had like this, we had this channel. It was called IGN TV, which was broadband videos, 640, 80 quick times at 30 frames per second. You couldn't stream them. You had to download them. They were so big. And one guy was just like editing these. So that was pretty early on. Was that the insider? Was that the same as insider?

No, that was IGNTV was free broadband stuff. So Insider was after the dot com crash where we all thought we were going to lose our jobs. And so we said, crap, advertisers don't buy ads anymore online because they're going back to TV and magazines. What do we do? And we created Insider, which was kind of like the more expensive content we created, so videos behind a subscription wall and stuff.

So we did more of that stuff then too. But yeah, like I have the. this full timeline of when we launched what on IGN. It's just crazy. I mean, so many different experiments, things that failed that we stopped doing, things that worked really well, right? Like, the launch of Beyond is on their podcast, Beyond where like Chris Roper and you guys started something really special, which was, you know, that wasn't like some corporate like initiative saying like, we really got to get into this podcast market. It's like these guys saying, this is awesome, let's do this and trying something. And then you look back years later, you're like,

holy shit, it's like a million people listening to this stuff, right? And so I think that's basically all history for the first 10 years, which just take stuff and throw it at the wall and see what sticks. And, you know, like if you go back and you look at how E3 was covered in 96 and then look at what we did in 97, we basically said hourly updates, around the clock, which was a novelty back then, you know? And that kind of developed how we do things now. Now we're just doing the same thing. Yeah. You refined it a bit, though. Yeah. No, but think about like how IGN changed over the years, right?

We only hired writers. They all wrote articles. Our website would update automatically at midnight once a day. If you had a typo, it'll be there for the next 24 hours, right? That's how IGN was in the beginning. And then writers started doing more stuff. Like when we launched the IGN boards in the year 2000, suddenly you're like, oh, crap, the mic's on there. All these people.

You realized how many people were like reading this stuff. And then editors became social media managers. like, oh, every day I got to talk to my audience. And then when we launched videos, some people were really good on camera, right? And we said, Damon. And we said, we said, or some people were really good at writing incredibly long, awesome articles, right? We said, all right, features, let's do more of that or let's do more of this.

And then, you know, people just kind of forge their own paths. And, you know. Well, that was the funnest thing. I mean, when I think look back at my time there, you know, especially because, you know, I started at the 10-year anniversary and we had those horrible cupcakes that then get us put up on the... Yeah, but still have some of them. That's awesome.

Yeah, they were in the rafters. But that was the thing is, like, you got to go do whatever you wanted to do, and you did get to try, and you did get to see what works. And I remember those days of, like, yeah, when there were no comments on articles. So you published an article on IGN PlayStation, and then Dunham wanted me to always go into the boards and post it there. Yeah. So people could go and read it and then come there and comment and talk to you and have this

conversation about it. And then, yeah, spiraling off into videos or, like, I wanted to go do this feature. or let's compare PlayStation Plus and see if it's actually worth it. And like, there was no checks and balances to that. It was just like, I have an idea for this. I'm going to go do this. Yeah, that's what I loved about it was, and I assume it's still kind of run this way,

is that IGN always benefited the self-starters. And the self-starters benefited IGN, I think, in return. I think the reason that IGN PlayStation grew to where it was, for instance, when Greg and I ran it, was because we just didn't feel like we needed to answer to anyone. Like, no one asked us what we were doing. We just did it and it just kind of worked. I heard the podcast all the time.

time you're like, well, Pierre doesn't listen to this. You listen to every podcast. I totally listen. I remember when Casey was the EIC. This is just a memory I have. And he was there late doing something. And Greg and I walked in at like 10 at night on like a Wednesday. And he's like, what the hell are you guys doing here?

I'm like, they're doing their TGS press conference. What the hell do you think we're doing here? Like, we're here to write the news. And I remember him, I remember him being like, I remember him kind of being mystified, almost by it in a way where it's like, wow, you guys really care about this. And I'm like, no one told us to do this. We just feel like we need to be here because this is what our audience. cares about. And it was a fun way to kind of like cut my teeth, like kind of growing with the brand

and watching it evolve. And having, like I always say, like my fingerprints are on IGN. They always will be. I think that like that's the way it is for a lot of people that were there for a long time because we were able to mold it this like kind of piece of clay into like exactly what we wanted to be and it worked. And then someone takes the piece of clay and mold it in a different way. But it's the same fucking piece of clay. There's a legacy. Yeah. And deep within the clay, like when you go to Plato years later, there's people's fingerprints and I'm like, those are my fingerprints. They're there underneath that other layer. I love that analogy because I think it really does make sense. You're passing that ball of clay off to the next person or whatever.

And we all learn so much because, you know, in a single kind of, you know, IGN's headquarters are in San Francisco and a lot of the, basically the entire games team is in one big area, right? And we have another studio in L.A. for entertainment, New York, Chicago, but most of the editorial is there. And like, you guys hear all the stuff other people are doing. And that's, I mean, honestly, I mean, Greg was so impactful when he just walked in and he's like, yeah, I'm a gamer, I'm a writer, but I can also do this kind of like this entertainment on screen and interact with the audience and really get them excited. I mean, you built a cult.

At one point, I was a little scared. Yeah. I was a little scared. No, but like, and I think it rubbed off on everybody. And if you guys go back and you see, if you look at our first video reviews, we actually were sitting there, we're like, okay, we have a decision to make. The people who are writing the reviews are awesome reviews. viewers, you put them on camera, they're terrible. Like, the way they read their own content didn't

sound good. So we're like, all right, should we hire an actor who reads all these reviews? And we got to the point where we said, Brandon Jones. No, yeah, we wanted, exactly. Like, game trailers did that famously, right? And their reviews sounded so much better than hours for months. But over the months, the performance of everyone improved. And they kept on listening to each other and giving each other advice. We had somebody come in. I don't know if you remember that we had like a voice coach come in. I remember that. She made strange faces at everybody, right? But it's like, now you look back and like people who were once writers are such great performers on camera.

Right. It's pretty amazing. Well, I know that's what I always tell people my story, right? And like how I always talk about it. I got there right as the old guard was turning over and burning out certain people or, you know, trying to figure out what they wanted to do. But I was talking about. Thanks a lot. No, you know what I mean?

But like, Craig Harris was always very vocal of like, I don't want to be on video. I don't want to be. I'm not doing it. I don't want to read these videos. Not stamping them. And so, like, that was the thing of, like, what you're talking about was self-starters, where we were able to jump on that. And, like, that was the thing of, you want, I remember there's, there's a distinct video of, for GameScoop TV where it was the first, not even GameSoup TV. It was around the office.

Ty Root was walking around filming. And it was a video that jumps back and forth between me and Dave Clayman. And at the very end of it, he puts the camera down and walks down the hallway and you walk up and you go, oh, putting editors on camera. What a novel idea. Because you had been begging the video team to do it. And he was finally doing it. And that's the thing of, like, you point a camera at Craig. and he didn't want it, but you pointed a camera at me and Damon or Dave Clayman,

we're like, yeah, or Nate Ahern. We're like, yeah, totally, whatever you want. We'll do this. But you had the benefit. So I do think that it came more naturally to you, and you had the benefit that we had back in the text days. Like when Matt and I did our Q&As, right, we had input and inquiry on IGN64, where we answered reader letters,

and we got this amazing feedback from our audience just via emails. And so you got this encouragement to do it. And like, I think you got it instantly where some people, tried their hand, weren't that great. And then, I mean, listeners and viewers and readers can be very brutal. You guys know this, right? Yeah. And especially, like, when you don't have a kind of a YouTube channel that caters to a set

fan audience, you have a very big property like IGN that covers these things that add odds, right? Like, Call of Duty and Battlefield. You've got these fan audiences living in the same space. Like, man, that can be so discouraging. And so I think a lot of writers in the beginning were like, oh, they couldn't handle it, right? They couldn't handle the feedback, but the most important thing to do was to face the feedback and interact with the audience. And you build fans, and then they encourage you to do more and really create all that, like get all that creativity out of you.

And it's tough, right? It can be soul-sucking. You guys know that. It is. I mean, I still always say that I, like, you read things online. Like, I've been doing this for a long time. You read things online that are bad about you. You know, there are people that hate me out there.

And it's like, it always, it always, but like you would just have to understand, like, the reach and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, you know. You know, like you look at the likes to dislikes ratio. You're like find other metrics that make you feel a little better and know that you're reaching out of people and people reach out to you and all those kinds of things. There's a lot more positivity out there. But it's muddled underneath the overt blanket sometimes of negativity. But you have to just delve deeper. And you learn that that's not when you like when I. It's a superficial judgment too, right?

Like you for a second, you're like, oh man, maybe that guy knows me in some way. But like you got to remind yourself that that guy doesn't know you at all. You said something that he didn't like. That's it. Right. Exactly. I always used the example of, um, uh, The Last of Us, when I reviewed that at IGN, I gave that a 10.

And that review was read over 2 million unique times when I was there, 2 million uniques. And in the comments, there are like 15,000 comments. And then you assume the average commenter was commenting five times. So there's 5,000 people in there out of 2 million, 3 million, you know. And eventually it puts into perspective. It's like, and then you think, like, how do I use a website? I read The Ringer every day, right? Or I read Deadspin or something like that.

I don't comment. I don't even sign in. I read the thing and I leave. and I like it. So I go back the next day and I read more of it. Majority. Exactly. So like you kind of have to kind of have to think about it like that.

But I'll tell you, Perr, like, you know, people often ask like what IGN means to me now or whatever. And I often think back on, you know, my origins with the site and how long I was there. And I was actually talking about it recently when I was like I was there before you were there. Yeah. I was on somebody's couch sleeping. I was involved with IGN in like a full, and basically a full time capacity for 12 years of my life since I was 18. I had actually, I had actually. actually just turned 18 when Steven reached out to me about my stuff on game facts and was like,

can we use it on IGN FACUs? And I was like, sure. And then email me back 10 minutes later. And I was like, we need a guide writer for $150 a guide. Do you want to write a guide for Spiro enter the dragonfly? Yeah. And I was like, and I was like, um, I was just about to start at Northeastern and I was like, this is all. And I was working as a landscaper there and making a little bit of money and I was like, fuck yeah. You know, like, and then I became very quickly like I was right. I was churning out like three of these a month, you know, in my spare time while I was doing class while I was working as a landscaper. I could have had a gratuitous amount of money probably for an 18 year old, but I was just going and spending it all on games that I didn't even open. And then just to have them on my shelf, I have, I have, I have GameCube and PS2 and Xbox games like up the ass that I like have never.

You were like the big Nintendo guy back then too. Yeah. Is that insane? God, I think back to that Colin who is so fucking on the wee's dick when I knew. And I mean, I always like, I had a PS1 and PS2 at long. You kept on I aiming me too. I remember that. Like they yeah.

Yeah. Like I, and what I, what I realized. A lot of old school calling. What I, what I remember was like, I was 18,

right? And I was excited. I had written, written for some fan sites and I wrote for Game Factor all in time as a prolific writer there. But it could have been anyone, like any one of us.

There was probably 50 of us there that like, were really like always on the message boards talking to each other about our guides and so like that. And it just was randomly me. Right? There were better writers there. There were like more prolific writers there. And I think back at that time and I'm like,

I always explained it as like, someone just cracked the door open. And I'm like, down. You know, like, I'm like, I know how rare and unusual this is that this is happening. And so I started working really hard. I started, I remember even getting freelance and people laughing me later, that's the son. I'm like, I don't know why I did this, but like to prove myself to IGN, I got freelance opportunities from other people. And I'm like, no. Yeah. Like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm writing only for IGN. I remember a magazine in the UK approaching me about Zelda, uh, um, when they

recently linked to the past on Game Boy Advance. And they're like, we'll pay you $1,500 to write like two pages. Why didn't you do that? You know? And I'm like, and I had to do all the, I didn't, I had to jump through a few hoops wherever, but I'm like, I was so involved. I was like, no, like, I don't want, like, I am loyal to this particular brand. This is what I'm going to do. Thank you, man. That's awesome, but crazy. Well, at the time, I was like, this made, this was intuitive to 18 year old, 19 year old,

Colin, you know? And I remember, you know, I became, you know, Chris Carl, who was one of my favorite people in the world, who I owe a great deal to, um, along with you and a few others that are, that are still floating around the internet somewhere. He, you know, was, he, I begged him. I'm like, please just let me come out and, like, hang out. And this was two offices ago. So this was on,

this was on, what was it, Bayshore Boulevard or whatever. Oh yeah, the one next to Candlestick? Or one? Yeah, one back. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And yeah, so not that one. This was the one that was like, you know,

not the one with the rats, not the rats, where the fires were and all that kind of ship. Yeah. And so, like, I'm one of the few people that, like, is like, I remember that office.

I worked in that office. And then the next summer, I came back and I stayed for way longer. I stayed until I ran out of money. I remember I slept on Mark Ryan's floor. I slept. on Chris Carl's couch. I slept on all these. And then I eventually ran out of money. I remember calling my mom being like, I need to come home. I'm out of money. This was when I was about to

start my sophomore year at Northeastern. And this is when actually Matt Casamacina was talking to me about like, maybe we should hire you because Mary Jane was leaving. And I remember I was 19 years old. And I remember interviewing with him and I didn't do that well. But I remember they would probably, I probably would have gotten the job. And I remember having a conversation with my mom sitting outside of Chris's house at the corner of Lawton and whatever being like, what should I do? And I remember, and I'm like, I'm going to come back to school. I can do this again later. And it worked out because when I graduated, I was freelancing at this point. I was freelancing for Nix. I was freelancing for Zorro at IGN TV. Film floors and I was doing all, I was like

doing IGN was paying my bills and I was like when I was not in class and I was not with my girlfriend with my friends. I was doing shit for IGN. My name was all over the site. And then when I graduated, I got a job offer. That was the most amazing thing. It was like do you, I didn't apply. I didn't like do anything. I remember Mark Ryan being like, do you want to come, you know, Jason's going to Capcom. Thanks Jason Allen. And he's like, Jason's going to Capcom. Do you want to just come like, we'll just take you. I remember talking to TAL for five minutes. Yeah. On the phone, then a Fox recruiter called me. I remember being, because Fox owned by, by News Corp at that time. I remember Fox calling me. And I remember that. I've never forget this. I was telling someone recently

this. The woman was like, all right, getting some information from her. She's like, what's your email address? And I'm like, what's your email address? And she's like, no, what is your email address? That will be your email address? That I'm like, no, you don't understand. I'm like, no, you don't understand. I'm like, no, you're like, yeah, you can keep it? And you're like, yeah, you can keep it. Yeah. It was you. That's so funny. Yeah. And I was like and so that was my email address. So in 2007, a few months after Greg started full time, I was there and I had realized my dream and I was broke and I was tired from college and all this stuff. But I was fucking stoked. Like, and I look at that moment pair and I'm like, I made it like, I did it. Yeah. I remember. It for sure. Yeah. I'm like, I'm like, I actually did it. Like I can't believe I fucking did it. And I still look back at that time and I'm like, man, Colin, like you you were a grinder, dude. We all were. And I was the boy. I, I, I thank

you. Like, I really do thank you. We didn't know, but, but I mean, I got to thank you. Like, you guys made amazing content on IGN. And by the way, it's not kind of like this, it's this bygone era. It's like, that content is there. Like, if I look up traffic reports right now, I'm sure Colin Moriarty will look, will come up as like the ninth most read author yesterday or something. Like, you guys are in the site in what we've become, too. But what you describe is exactly how I got my job, too. Like, I didn't wait for anybody to, uh, to post a job. offer out there and say we're looking for this person. I just started to build a relationship with the editors at this company, Future Imagine, right? Like emailing Doug Perry

corrections of his wrong articles and stuff like that. Of which there were many. Spider-Man sticks to come walls. That's an actual quote. No, but I was the annoying internet commenter. Like I ran my own website Nintendo Joe like a fan site while I was studying journalism. And then whenever Doug would do, write something about Turok or something, I'd be like, oh, well, actually, they were taradactyls in an early build.

So the person who wrote in is not crazy, right? Like, I was that guy. And so the moment, like, I saw a press release that said, he was taking a new job. I'm like, who takes, who's going to be in his old job? And they're like, come on in. And that's, you know, like, building that relationship and then not letting go is key to getting a job in this industry.

By the way, wiki writers on our history. Those are the guys that we now pay for guides, right? Like we always, when somebody sticks out, like Jared Petty, a wiki writer, Tamago Sensei, right? Like, you see his name often enough. When you're looking for that guy who's trustworthy to handle, you know, a pre-release game and write a guide, you go to that person first. So that exact same thing still happens.

We don't promote it that much because you want a self-starter. You want somebody who comes in there, goes, I love this. I want to make a connection with you. I want this to be my job. and that's how you get in. I mean, you talk about the grinding. I mean,

that's, the people who, you know, when somebody gets hired at IGN, if they're, and it happens rarely, I would say, at least in our,

my, you know, nearly a decade there, right? There's a thousand people applying for every single job. And when somebody comes in and isn't grinding immediately and isn't out there, isn't killing themselves,

it stands out, because that's the same thing of like, you know, when I finally got there, on my 13th attempt on my Gmail, that doesn't count my Mizzu. Atteu attempts, right? Like,

that was the thing of, yeah, I remember going to parties with Damon, and it'd be like one of the morning, and I'd put down my drink. I'm like, all right, I'm going to go. And he's like, all right, going to bed. I'm like, no, going back to the office.

I'm going to capture some entrances for Smackdown versus Raw. They'd be like, fucking crazy. But that's what you did is because you wanted to do that. You wanted to live up to the legacy that was already established before you got there. Because that was the thing, you know, talking about video on IGN. I will never forget August 9th, 1999. It's the wrestling event that changes my life. It's the debut of Chris Jericho in the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago, Illinois.

Rosemont, Illinois. But I'll never forget that like a week later, the countdown for WW, yeah, not no mercy. Russellmania 2000 started. And, you know, Dunham was running it, of course, and doing all the videos like he would do for the wrestling countdown. And they had, you guys had Jericho's entrance because it was just obviously re-skinned what you, the character model from NW. Revenge or whatever. But I'll never forget being in the library at St. Francis High School in Wheaton and clicking on that video in this little fucking video plays and it's prank the wall. And I'm like, what? the fuck.

And like, that's like my IGN memory. You know what I mean? I remember that so, so clearly. And then, you know, I, you read the site and used the site every, you know, all the time. But that's the one. And then it was when you guys had on the front page the counter to PS2 when you had like the days. And it was like, I remember, I remember when it got to like 90 and I'm like, oh, we're getting close. We're getting close.

So you got your job basically with persistence, yeah? Right. Yeah. What you're talking about is like not saying no. You know what I mean? And the fact that, yeah, I always talk about it. Like, I applied everywhere all the time. And, you know, at least I think it was one-up when I'd get rejected.

One-up would tell me why. I'm like, what I needed to improve or do. I-Gene was just a black hole all the time filing. And honestly, I mean, it's sad, but it's still mostly like that. 100%. Once I was on the other side, I totally understood. So what, we're having our anniversary event on the 15th of this month in San Francisco come, if you're in the Bay Area. I'll be there.

Their tickets join. But what Steve and I, Steve Butsi and I are going to do, we're going to do a Q&A specifically for people who want a job. in games media and I'm gonna offer to everybody that they can give me their resume you know and I will look over every resume and I'll write each person back and tell them what's good and what's bad about that resume because that's the I still feel like kids nowadays are being misled as to what they need to apply to a job and they'll put like all their

freaking like jobs at you know fast food restaurants and everything on there to fill a page objective like don't ever put an objective I want to see you apply yourself I want to see that you made you made awesome YouTube videos and you have that kind of learning experience from terrible to getting better and that we see that kind of diamond in the rough, even if you don't have a single subscriber, right? It's like kind of applying yourself.

So that should be really fun. But I want to know how you got your job. So it's so funny hearing you guys talk about all this because, I mean, I am from such a different cloth when it comes to all this where I very much am the video guy. But I never thought of it is just like, oh, I'm going to make videos of everyone else's written articles. It was always from the ground up I'm making a video.

And I think that that kind of like, you know, you were talking about being, part of the second class after pairing them, kind of the blueprint that they made. I am, I see myself as kind of the first of the second class when it comes to video. Like we had Fran and Nick and Eric and Ty and all those guys and they kind of- Big O C-Mein.

And Chris Barron, yeah, Craig Barron. They defined what- The Tallahassee Kid or Supple-Huyah. You were watching that video in the office today. Like somebody said, this video almost got two people fired. Yeah, well, I mean, so for... I'll talk about that some other times. Well, I mean, well, I mean,

I'll tell that out. It's like the best thing ever. So IGN insider, I mean, that was like kind of the, the big push into premium video content on the internet. And like we're talking early 2000. So 2004,

five. So pre YouTube. And what IGN was doing with video was like, it was next level. There was college humor. There was a couple other sites. But like, I remember seeing this.

I was an IGN insider subscriber. Thank you. And I was like, this is awesome that they are doing this, this crazy content. When you look at now, it's absolute garbage. But like, we're talking about like...

Fran's closet. They send two guys to TGS. And they're like, make video content. They're like, do it, do whatever you want. Just make video. Make premium video. Well, no, it was go to TGS and give people a feeling as to what it's like there. So what they did was they decided to make a Western in Japan.

Two guys from Louisiana. So they made this like sprawling epic that was like 20 minutes long in two parts. And it's like, why? Why would you do that? But then the best other example is Fran's closet, which you should YouTube right now. Oh, so bad. Just look up Franz Closet and you'll find it. That was a God of War video preview.

Exclusive. That was a guy of war exclusive. It's a Nick Scarpino special, so you guys are going to love it very, very much. It's one of my favorite videos of all time. It's essentially them making fun of their boss, our former boss, one of our very good friends, Fran Mirabella. You might know. The third. But it was a God of War II preview, an exclusive preview.

So instead of just showing the game, they decided to make a 10 minute thing that had a five minute intro of them sneaking into France closet where there's this like horrible shit going on. There's Craig Barron's butts in the video. Oh yeah. They spent so much money on props. Like they had a prop budget that was like $1,000. And I'm like, God of war, this beautiful game. They put like a grind house filter on the entire video.

So then they put filters on top of the game and they had each other race. And it's just Nick in a horrible accent. He's playing a character, Uncle Lou. And I'm like, what the fuck? Fuck, how is this a thing? But I remember watching that, not that specifically, but that type of content and being like, man, like, they're doing this. Like, they're making content out of it. And it was very, very inspiring to me.

And pretty much instantly, I've told the story many times, but like, I knew what I wanted to do. And what I wanted to do was make internet video. I didn't want to make movies. I didn't want to make TV shows. I wanted to make internet video. And I'm definitely probably the first generation people to even have that as an option. You came in and, like, I think you challenged kind of like our setup too. And you did too, right?

Like I think there was one time in your career where I said, why are you in editorial, right? Like, why are you not in the video department? And like, well, video makes the videos and editorial rights and was like, we can't be like that. And you were a person I remember coming in, basically being the writer, performer, ideator, like, you did it all. You were like the YouTuber, basically. Exactly. And it was really hard to figure out how to make that work in our setup because, like, you could, you would be like, oh, I'm going to make a video about how this franchise is shit.

And then the editors are like, whoa, hold on. we don't think it's shit. Like how are we going to do that? Yeah. And then that was kind of the challenge. And that's what was interesting. Whereas like, you know, you guys kind of perfected what it means to, uh,

right preview coverage, review coverage of video games. And then like you guys kind of, you came in, um, more like opinion long form stuff. You with just kind of like making it entertaining or whatever. And for me it's like from day one.

It was like, how do we just make content out of this? Like taking all of that out of it. Like how is it content? And it's, it's so interesting because for me, Fran was like the dude. Like Fran was the guy.

Like he was always the one holding me back or pushing me forward. Like it was like that push and pull relationship that's necessary to learn and to understand that you're not always right. Even when you think you are and all that stuff. And I think that they kind of had you for that. But what was interesting with me, me and your relationships very special to me because you are one of the Nintendo guys, of which there are very few in games media because everyone wants to hate everything. You love it. Also, Nintendo just, you know, hires the ones that are really good. Okay.

So, but whenever like cool, cool stuff would happen, like, we would always be able to talk about it and be excited about it. And like the few times I was on NVC, it was awesome. Yeah. But in addition to that, whenever I did something that was super outside the box of what IGN does in terms of video, you always pulled me aside and we're like, that was awesome. Yeah. Or like, how do we do this more? And you always were pushing that. And I respected that a lot because I knew you were on the other side.

You know, you were like more of the editorial, dude. And it reached a point where you were just like the grand overlord of. everything, but you always helped. You never got in the way. You always helped. There was a lot of people getting in the way, but you were always trying to support the people that were self-starters,

and that continues to this day. And I think that's the important part. What Greg was saying is so accurate. You look around IGN, and a lot of internet companies like this, like ourselves, and it's like every single person around you needs to be that way and is that way.

And it's motivating and it pushes you. It's when you hear no, it stings because you're just like, but I'm going to do it anyway. It's an issue for, I mean, for creative people, right? And like when you guys started creating content outside of IGN as well, it's like, oh shit, what do we do about that? Right.

Like there could be now conflicting messaging outside of IGN by people who are at IGN. It's like we always say, well, creators got to create, right? Like you have to build kind of like this playground, let people lose. But I can also afford being the element of chaos at IGN when I'm not the editor-in-chief or the managing editor, right? Like, this person has to make sure that the review is up on the day that the game comes out

before, because otherwise the audience will be mad, right? And they do get mad. You guys know that. And so I could always afford being the guy saying, like, no, let them experiment with it. Because if they didn't have the review up, I could also be the guy saying, what the fuck are you guys doing? Why is the review late, right? And so, like, I think the Destiny podcast is a great example where I think, like,

Destin and Jose basically just started doing a Destiny podcast and didn't run it through the, you know, the giant machine where it's like fill out the TPS reports to create a video. And I think there were a couple people mad on the team saying that, well, we need a Destin to do this other thing. And like that was one of those points where I said, guys, like, you can't stop that. You can't stop that. Because like we wouldn't have beyond. We wouldn't have rewind theater, daily fix, IGN Weekly, any of this stuff. We wouldn't be on IGN Snapchat. We wouldn't have these things.

We wouldn't be on YouTube. If you didn't just say, you know what, I'm going to let this go. I'm going to let this run and see where it ends up. Because you can always later on say, hey, we're going to dial back. And like, you got to have that. You've got to have that courage to also say, we've been doing this for a long time. Stop it, right? Like writing previews, for example.

Remember, we used to write. It would be like, game comes out in two weeks. Robot must write preview. Here's what's in game. There are a number of maps. High definition graphics, right? 12 maps. Like, we had to let that go at one point.

And like, it's hard, you know, it's hard to do that. So, I mean, so kind of like looking at all of this, so talking about the different waves, whether it's the editorial or video or now this kind of watch read mentality, where it is both editorial and video or written in video, how is it kind of transitioning between those different things and how have you been able to manage being there from the beginning and seeing it all and where do you see it going? Yeah, it's so, it's, the world is much more complicated now, honestly. And like, what we have managed to do is like the days where people are, up around the clock.

And I remember, like, my E3s where Matt and I would not go to sleep, like, for two days. And, like, it was not good for our health, right? We would just say, hey, we have this kind of completionist attitude where we got to write about Putt Putt's great Barbie adventure or whatever, right? Like, because it's on the N64. It was a badge of pride. Like, yeah, that's the thing for my E3s. Like, you were in the trenches and you knew everybody was in there.

And I'll never forget my end of my first E3, Damon trying to tell me, you don't need to write this preview right now about babysitters club murder adventure. on DS. And I'm like, it's the last for one though. And it was like 10.30 and everybody was going out to seven grand. I'm like, no, I have to do this. And so we've stopped that. Like, you know, when you go to IGN now at 6 p.m., there may be a person there.

There may be a person somewhere working on something, but generally we want to make sure people get out. That said, people then probably go home and play video games, which, you know, they use that knowledge tomorrow on kind of creating a feature and stuff. So you never fully switch off and you're always on social. but we've tried to get at least the kind of, we tried to limit the amount of time that people put into on a daily basis

so that they do have some free time and they also need that free time to be creative and create the next thing, right? Because for a while, we were just kind of going and doing the same thing. And so the next thing for us, first of all, the internet has changed, you can't just put out a website

and look at comm score and quote advertisers or people in studios and publishers and numbers. It doesn't work like that anymore, right? Now we have platforms like Facebook, we have YouTube, we have Instagram, we have Snapchat, all Twitch, all these different places out there. And suddenly you have this crazy challenge of getting all your content to all these different places. And then once you do that, you have the even bigger challenge of saying like, shit, the thing

that worked on YouTube is not working on Twitch. The games that YouTubers care about, Twitch viewers don't care about. The stuff that works on IGN is not working on Snapchat. You know what our biggest story was on Snapchat Discover? That's our daily content channel. Right? Like if you're in the platform, you swipe right, you get 14 new stories every day. It was finding Dory. Right? Finding Dory was the biggest thing on Snapchat. It's so different from the web.

And so that's the big challenge is try to figure out how to track all this stuff, how to produce all that stuff, how to have the right voice for all the platforms. And then the big scary one, how do you monetize all that? Because you can't serve the same ads across all these different platforms. You guys know that, right? Like you're afforded the freedom to create because you have this wonderful mechanism in Patreon, where people. People, you're not the man, right? You're like, hey, sponsor us, we can create this awesome content just for you. And that works. I can't do that, right? I can't say IGN, hey, give us your Patreon dollars, right?

And so I got to figure out how to monetize all that in different ways. And, man, it's hard. It's hard to grow a business when the internet is so fragmented. Where at any point, Zuckerberg can say, and now Facebook is the second internet. And everything that goes in there does not work outside. So that's the big challenge, but that's also the big opportunity. And a single edition of IGN Snapchat, you said like your review got read by 2 million people,

Snapchat can do that in a day for one review. And it's insane, right? These numbers are so big. And so the concept of having all these kind of different mechanisms and getting your content to an even bigger audience, super exciting to me. So when you look at IGN now, like I feel like when we were there, it very much was there's the editorial team and there's video team.

How do you kind of see it now when there is, Snapchat and there is all these other different type, there's integrated marketing and all this thing. Like how do you kind of see the vision of the content creators? I still think we suffer a little bit from the fact that we have been around for such a long time. So you still have these silos, right? There's some companies like on the engineering side, you have like product and engineering being one team, whereas in ours it's still separate. We have moved video and edit closer together. It used to be literally that when you go to the IGN office and again, if you're in town, on the 14th, we're doing a tour. You can see that. There would be like an area for video.

people, an area for editors, right? You guys remember that. And like we broke all that up. Now everybody is kind of intermingled. You have a video editor sitting with newswriters so that you can be more nimble and faster. So we're breaking those walls down. But there's still kind of segment. There's still segmentation like that. But we don't hire writers anymore. Like every person who comes in to interview for a writing job, even for a wiki, like a wiki strategy guide paid position internally, we now do a screen test. We put them on camera and we see how they are. And we're not looking for like a perfect anchor or anchor woman. We're looking for somebody who has that spark, right?

Like that connection. And so I think that those are the biggest changes, like how we think about content creation. And then in some cases, right, like you guys know, Darren Brazil. You all worked with him. Unfortunately. Darren, Darren was nice. Darren was a producer, you know, worked for Fran. Now Darren handles all social video.

So anything that is created for kind of the Facebook or Snapchat platforms. Yeah. Because the videos are so different. What performs on Facebook? You guys know this? No, exactly. Again, I got to give a shout to Darren, man. Like what he's doing, I honestly think that where IGN's at right now is since I've been

visiting the site, like probably my favorite content to consume. I think that they, it's finally they're kind of acting on the trends instead of being super far behind in terms of video stuff, in terms of the social stuff. And I think that it doesn't, you know, all the reviews and all that stuff, like obviously those have just gotten better over time and kind of that product. is what that product is. And IGN is the best at that product. But in terms of all the other stuff,

I think that with Snapchat and with a lot of the social video stuff, they are now paving the way for the future. Like you guys being on the Discover platform before anyone else, like I see other Snapchat curators and content creators doing what IGN did,

like copying the formats that you guys made. And I think that's super awesome that you're pushing a new thing ahead, a new platform. And IGN is no longer just a website. IGN is, this thing that is on every single platform and different on every single platform.

Yeah, and you have to have that courage, though, to be able to take that step back because, again, it's so hard to monetize when you spread thin across so many different platforms, right? Like, you publish videos to Facebook, you're not going to make any money. You've got to come up with a completely different kind of ad product and way of promoting

and running and tracking it. And it's hard to do. And so that kind of stifles your creativity, too, right? Because there's certain types of content that can reach millions of viewers on Facebook that you guys could quite frankly fart out. Like you guys are fully equipped to do that. You just got to put text on the screen

because people don't watch unmuted and you got to have some fun with stuff and create memes. But why, right? Like right now it's marketing to your audience, maybe growing your following, but it's so hard to monetize. Yeah. But yeah, look, I mean, it's super exciting

to be able to do that in like a platform like Snapchat. Basically, I'm not the Snapchat age, right? There are a lot of teens, there are a lot of younger people. It has a bigger female audience, a male audience. I looked at that platform. I'm like, I don't get it. Like, what do you even start?

Right? Like, how do you create this content? And so then you experiment and you hire people who know and who are active. And Darren is a big Snapchatter, right? Like he was able to just kind of jump in and say like, oh, no, what you're doing is all wrong. IGN first, nobody's going to care about IGN first. Quite frankly, daily fix, which is highly viewed content on the web, right? Nobody's going to care on Snapchat.

It's got to be this. It's got to be that. And then you learn. And in some case, you take some of that content back to the other platforms. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, I commend you guys for listening to that and adapting with all that stuff. Because when I was, like, I was there during the whole YouTube shift. And that was hard because that was the thing that was like IGN was very much they knew because

they invented what video was. But then with YouTube, it's like, I was coming in. I'm like, no, you got to do it this way. And I feel like then we had Start and we had all this stuff. And it's like, looking back on it, start, I think was a very, like one of the, the most important steps for IGN. Yeah, because it created this idea that personalities do matter. Yeah.

And that making fun content, just content for the sake of it being content that people are going to consume as entertainment is valuable, even if it's not making money immediately. But the reason why we were afforded to do start is because it was in a YouTube partnership, right? Like YouTube wanted more content that was long form, not just, you know, back in the day, YouTube was dog on a skateboard videos, right? Like they wanted longer form content. And so they footed the bill for some of that, which afforded us to do, like, take a chance with a great show up at noon and let these guys just loose and do like a daily show for gamers.

And there's some other cool programming on there. But I will say, like, I don't think we have figured out YouTube fully yet. And it's, it might sound crazy, right? Like the IGN channel has seven and a half million subscribers. Not small, right? It's no PewDie Pie, you know? And they're like in Germany that's grunk. They're all these guys who have equal or bigger number of subs who made it happen.

by being single personalities that kind of create this fandom around them. And I don't think we're there yet. I think we're still experimenting on YouTube trying to figure out how to do that. And so what we started to do is like move content out. You know, like beyond used to be on the main channel and it got decent views and we had to have the courage and I had to say, let's move this out into its own channel because then you allow it to grow with an audience that loves that. Team loves that content.

They're there for that. Yeah. And so like it's a small channel. It's like, you know, GameScoop beyond these. channels have like 20,000 subs, but they also have 20,000 views on each episode. So you get in a one-to-one ratio, whereas like you put it on a channel with seven and a half million, they may have that 20 to 40,000 views, but it's like a small portion of the audience. And the negativity factor is so much higher because you get that battlefield versus call of duty factor,

right? And so we're still experimenting with that. And, you know, we're learning from people like you, quite frankly, and single YouTuber channels how to play in that arena. So final question on this whole topic then, obviously we, are very much inspired by IGN and everything. What advice do you have for us going forward if we were to grow? For kind of funny? Well, you know, look, money affords you more experiments, right?

And like, I can't imagine how hard it is for you guys to not just manage the content, which is what we did back in the early IGN days, but you have to also figure out where the money comes from, you know, how you market yourselves. Like when you guys do events, it's freaking crazy what you guys do with such a, a small team. And so I think one, you have to figure out, like, how do we not spread ourselves

so thin, right? Like, I imagine when you guys go and travel to another city to visit a studio or do an event, like, shit doesn't get done back home, right? Like, don't you lose views when you have to do that? I mean, we have to cancel a Twitch show and so. Yeah, the Twitch show, the daily show is the one that suffers the most. Otherwise, you take a work week and you cram it into three days or two days or whatever, so you're doubling up on shows and getting them out as fast as possible. So I think, I mean, your next hire when you can afford it should be someone who looks over the financial side from kind of like a platform's perspective. Like, you guys have followers on Facebook and Instagram. You need somebody who figures out, how do we monetize there?

Can that, you know, almost like a salesperson, like an all-around salesperson who can then get deals from all these different companies to help you monetize that content because you're strong socially and good with kind of audience interaction. It's very difficult to make money from events, for example. but events are, I mean, they just, they're so full of life. You get to meet your fans firsthand. And so that's got to be, you got to have that in your portfolio, but that's not how you grow. I think you need to figure out all these different platforms. And then once you have somebody who does that, I think more money will come in and that

will allow you to do more things and experiment a little bit more and hopefully break out from that, like, daily stuff. And then you guys have a lot of commitments too, right? Like with Patreon, you commit to doing certain things. you deliver an episode early. Why wouldn't you subscribe to the Patreon if you get it early, right? Thank you.

Yeah. Or you can watch it late. I'm learning all this stuff, man. Yeah. We're doing the IGN Patreon tomorrow. Awesome. We want an office on the moon. But yeah.

Like, look, that's my advice to you because content-wise, you guys already know what you're doing. You got it. You got a fan base and you do awesome stuff. Thank you. Thank you very much. So the final topic of the day.

Okay. I asked the audience for a bunch of questions for you, Pear, and we got them. Okay. You too can go to kind of funny.com slash gamescast topic, just like all these people did. Ask some questions and we'll answer them on a future episode of the Kind of Funny Gamescast. And as always, thank you to Stephen Insler, the Patreon producer of the week who we talked to at our Patreon Q&A. He is legitimately alive. He emailed in a private thread.

Thank you, Stephen Insler, for confirming you are not dead. Yes. Who is Stephen? He's been, well, we have this. to be the producer of the show right on Patreon. And he did it. And it's an expensive tier. And it just rolls over month after month.

And he's never talked to us. And we're just like, did he die? Did he do it one month? And then his credit card is just getting nailed every time. Maybe he's been the producer of the games cast for about a year at this point. Wow. Doing an awesome job, man. Yeah.

Yeah. He's super awesome. Thank you very, very much. Glad to know you're alive and well. All right. That's amazing. This question comes from Alex. Okay.

He says, this is my question to pair. It's a pretty long one. 20 years is a long time. I'm a good seven, almost eight years older than that, but still that's a hefty chunk of time. I myself have spent most of these 27 years engrossed in gaming, spending most of my time flipping through EGM, Game Informer, and other publications. Ever since the early 2000s though, I've been spending my time on the internet, getting my information from there. You've seen the change happen, the slow shift from physical to digital. Sorry for the intro, I tend to be long-winded.

My question is threefold. With the hindsight of the past and the experience you've gained, where do you think you've made mistakes and where would you have done sooner? Oh, okay. So professionally, right? Not mistakes in real life. We've made plenty of mistakes. We look at these guys. We let them go. We should have just locked the door and chained them down and they would have had... No, you can not do a YouTube channel. Stop. Yeah, exactly. No, I, you know, that... I think there have been some mistakes where we didn't realize early enough what personalities really meant to IGN. And like, we could have tried harder. And like, they were always kind of... There were financial realities that keep you from doing that, right? Like, I would have loved to keep Casamacina around, for example. But that was at a time where we just could not afford a team to, like, a big team and grow it and all that. So definitely people. I have lots of regrets with not having some other people around.

When the dot-com market crashed, so this is early, this is like in the early 2000s, right? 2000-2001 advertises no longer bought ads online. we took a portion of the site and moved it behind subscription. And included in that were the message boards. And so overnight, basically, we created a subscriber base of 100,000 people who would pay us like 30 bucks a year, which was good. And honestly, that helped us weather a drought. Like to investors, future investors who would come in and purchase IGN, it was, hey, the audience does care about IGN. And they would even pay for the content, which nobody did online back then.

So it was a necessary step. But I think we killed a really important part of our audience at that point, like the community, right? Like you see the rise of Reddit and like the decline of the IGN forums in those days. Like they're very intertwined and calling probably 4chan too, like some of these forums that popped up. And so, you know, we were, we didn't know what we're doing. We're taking content, putting it behind a paywall. And I think we created this narrative for a couple of years that in order to get the best stuff on IGN, you got to pay. And there was an audience that was not willing to pay.

And so we learned from that, right? Like now in this day where gaming sites are notorious for high ad block rates, right? And you can go, you can do the sledgehammer approach. And you could go out and you say, like, you know what? If you add blocks, you can no longer watch videos. Like you can make that technically happen. We wouldn't do that. We wouldn't do that now because we know that that audience that is unable to pay or that is unwilling or doesn't think about unblocking your site.

We know that that audience can be tremendously valuable. today, tomorrow, in the future, these are the guys that share your content or support you, or buy your t-shirts or come to your shows. And so those are some of the regrets and the learnings that have come from it. I'm trying to think of if, you know, there's certainly games that I reviewed where in hindsight I would want to go back and change the scores. Always, and I may have done that. You can never prove it.

We did. We did. So at one point, we changed our rating scale from, I think it was five Mario-Had. to like five stars and then we went to a 10 point scale or something then we went to a hundred point scale and like I think I tweet the numbers on some games and nobody will ever know that's awesome I love that the second question from him is what would you say are your proudest moments from IGN proudest moments from IGN uh E3 1997 when we went in there and we covered E3 like nobody else like around the clock updates and like our site went nuts with activity like we shot up from nothing to being a big site overnight.

And all the other guys were going like, hold on, but I thought we're going to write when we go back. Because it was the magazine business. They went to E3 for three days. Then they went back to write. And we did it all while at the show. So I was tremendously proud at just kind of like the volume and the experience and like the feedback beyond 300.

Beyond 300 was freaking amazing. Like what you guys did at that show. Like, you know, like I teared up multiple times during that. that was really awesome to just kind of see the power of an audience that we talk about commenters, right? Commenters on IGN are 0.8% of the audience oftentimes. So less than a percent of the people who read a review actually comment on it, small part of the audience. But when you take a fervent audience like that, you put them in a room, holy crap. I mean, that like outpouring of love and the reaction, like I got it. That's at the top of my list for sure.

That's awesome. And then the third question from him is, where do you see games media going? Do you think it'll split? Will we go down the more entertainment tonight route or long-form journalism route? Will there be a middle ground? I think there's a middle ground. I mean, definitely games journalism is going multi-platform and that's what we're working on so hard, right? Like making sure that it's no longer like when you're on Facebook saying like, go to IGN to read the review.

No, you're on Facebook, here's the review. That's what we want to do. And I think games media is going to go there. I don't think everybody has a big team like us and can make that happen as efficiently. But it's a no-brainer. Like when you're wearing your PSVR headset, the content should be in there. You shouldn't have to take it off and go to the website and look for it. And so Longform is a real issue, guys.

I mean, you know this, right? Like you've written some of our best Longform editorial content. It's hard to finance that now when your principal monetizing factor are ads. because a really shitty piece that's written in 10 minutes can make the same amount of money as a very long, awesomely researched piece. And so we got to figure out how do you fund that? Maybe, you know, like the Patreon route is a good.

Like, you know, Danny O'Dwyer is doing, like taking that route, that will keep long-form journalism alive. It's more difficult for us to do that kind of stuff. But I'd love to solve that too. Going off of something you were saying in there, a question from Chance Carter, Are there any plans for IGN VR content in the future? Yeah, so we actually have a YouTube channel,

you're just setting this up. We have a YouTube channel. It's called IGNVR, and we host kind of trailers and kind of experiences that are done in 360 video. I don't think you can use the PSVR for it yet. No, not yet. But we do have an app on the PlayStation

for IGN content, free app. You can just watch our videos. And we would love to create a VR area in there where you can play the 360 content. And Sony has the, you know, you can't, do this now with the kits. It's just development time that we have to spend. We've done some experiments. We bring 360 cameras to E3 and events like that now. So yeah, if people buy these

headsets, I think analysts are saying there'll be two million plus tethered devices by the end of the year, you know, like the two million level and then all the kind of like Samsung VR and Google is doing stuff, you know, it might be worth doing more. And what's cool about it too, I saw you guys did that Mario thing where it's VR Mario and even without a VR headset. You can just go on YouTube and look at it and kind of click and drag around the mouse or use your phone and do the whole fake VR, whatever it's called. Yeah. And it's super cool where it's like it's the history of Mario, but through VR. So it's like you see Mario and you can go down into the underground and do this whole thing.

Very cool. Check it out. Yeah, we'll do more. Or YouTube, Mario, IG and VR. But you can't just put a, you know, the 360 camera here. You'll see like, you know, Kevin's sleeping. Kevin's picking his nose over there. That's a big problem. Who wants that?

VR content creators have been facing where it's just like you need to, to, to, content around that entire idea from the ground up or else it's the same problem we're seeing with video games or it's like you can't just take video game experiences and put in VR you need to make experiences for it and that's why we I mean we're far away we've done like square we've done a square office tour when we went to Japan we went to square and so you have a 360 office tour we went to some strange Japanese cafes I don't think we did the owl one but like you know do 360 content like that it's really neat apology says congrats again on the anniversary thank you how crazy is it that your reaction guys meme is so big Yeah, we didn't plan for that one. People still bring this up. And I think I told you this. My wife works, she was half Japanese.

She works for a Japanese company. And when I first went to like a company barbecue, like a guy came up and went like, ah! Like he just pointed at me and I'm like, what did I do? And he's like, he did the pose from the reaction guys thing. And like it just dawned on me like how far this thing has gone. Because he's not like a gamer. Like he doesn't know about IGN, but he's seen this in Japan.

pan before. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we just took two pictures, right? Like one at E3 when Nintendo was showing Pac-Man, remember Pac-Man versus? And we're all like, in the picture. And it was just four IGN guys, Casmasina, Chad Chambers, our intern, and who else? Craig Harris. And then Corey D. Lewis took the picture. And then a year later, we had gotten tipped off that Nintendo was going to show Twilight Princess. And we may have seen the trailer before it was shown. And so we took another picture where we staged fake excitement. I mean, we were excited, but we were faking it.

And then people put those two together on message boards and they became big in Japan. To the point where, like, their anime, it's in a couple of animas. It's in manga. Somebody sent me a picture from Akihabara Games shot a store where it's like super sale. And it's like, I think that was me.

I think that was me because I remember when we were in Japan, like walking through and going down a staircase and they had the manga one. and then they had the real one of you guys. And it's just, that was like one of those weird things. Weird, right? Trying to get, when you get to IGN

and trying to grasp who everybody is and what it is. And then they were like, oh, yeah. And you know what the reaction guys? And you're like, no. And they're like, oh, sit down. Here comes a million message board links and all these different things trying to figure out what it is.

And well, then one day, NHK called Japanese TV station. They're like, can we interview you guys? And like, I think you were actually in the shot. I stood in for the one guy. Like Craig Harris. No, no, I thought Craig was. I don't know. Sure.

You were Chad, fake chat. Nobody noticed. But they interviewed us on camera and one of the questions was, this is amazing. What are you going to do next? We're like, well, we didn't plan this. What are you going to do next? Oh, that's fantastic. Aaron Trembal says, out of the four kind of funny boys, which one surprised you the most with how they developed since day one?

I saw you respond to this on Twitter and like, oh, why are you putting me to this position? So I'm putting you that. So instead, I'm going to tweak the question. I can answer it. Okay, go for it. Development-wise, I would have never imagined that guy would be dancing on stage

in Spandex. Seriously, like, who would have predicted that? No, not even me. No, like, you were very serious guy. You care about what people think of you, and, you know, you were always the thinker, right? And you were always the guy who said, Greg, don't pull me into that shit, right?

Like, let me do my things behind the scenes. And, like, you guys always had kind of, a gregarious personalities. And like for him to just kind of develop this way and like be on these, be on these shows and do this kind of stuff and really engage with the audience, it's freaking amazing. Thank you. Yeah. Like, I don't know if you love it or not.

No, I do. I do enjoy it. It was a learning process for me. But you just let go at one point. Yeah, I did. I mean, because I feel like you would adapt or die, right? Like, it's, it's, I will always be a writer first. And I think that that's what I'm best at.

But I realized when we did beyond. when I came on Beyond in 2009, so it was a couple years after it started, I had just realized that people really did, first of all, people think I'm like strangely funny. And I do think that like I'm really dry and intentionally try to be dry all the time. But people like that kind of stuff. And also, I just think that like, I was amazed at people like, well, we really care with Colin things. Like, we really like, we actually like listening to Colin talk. We don't want to just hear him write or whatever, or read his writing. And that's not everyone, of course, and plenty of people hate me. But, but I was like, yeah, that's, I should embrace

that and become better at it. And I think that I was, what surprised me about it was that I was actually somewhat natural at it. Like, that was the thing that really surprised me that once I started doing things on camera, like, you know, we've talked about in the past, like the, the idea, like the fundamental idea of doing a conversational video at IGM was actually my idea. And that was, that was, we came up with PlayStation conversation, a daily video where was just like Greg and I sitting on a desk talking about something that happened that day. And it didn't, it came way nor naturally to Greg and I. But then I realized as time went on, And I think Tim can appreciate this.

Like, then I realize, like, Greg and I need to be on certain sides of each other. If we start, if we start being on other sides, we can't do it right. And then our first take is always the best. If we ask to do second or third or four takes, it totally goes off the rails. We can't do it. Like, there are certain things. And that's, it started to develop me as like, I guess it's more and more quote unquote personality. And I've just got, so I have let go, but I've also embraced it.

I think that it's part of what it is today. But my writing, what gets me so happy is that a lot of proliferating my, quote, personality has turned people on to my writing and that's whatever and people are still like when are you going to write again when are you going to write again and I will and there are things in the works yeah you got a website and we can put it on but so thank you I appreciate if you actually go back and watch some of your old videos like I do like you you had no problem delivering an opinion or like kind of bringing that text content to life you know what what you but it always felt like you were almost

embarrassed that people cared like I see a lot of old videos where you like kind of like embarrassed like if somebody cheers you're like you're like you didn't know what to do. Whereas like, you know, this guy is like, sure it flies off, right? He goes crowd surfing. I know what you sluts on the gold pans. Well, I think that's why, you know,

specifically with like, I think that's, Greg and I always say yin and yang. I think that's why we work. And we were, Greg and I were talking about this recently with our girlfriends where, I was like, I think we're the longest running duo in games, like for sure,

like in games media. And I think it's just because we're different. Like, we're, it's Conan and Andy Richter. It's like, whatever it is. It's, you know,

it's, it's, it's, it's, Cheech and Chong. Cheech and Chong. Keenan and Kel. I just think it works because of that. If I was like Greg or Greg was like me,

I don't think we would have ever had this kind of success. And Greg would have been fine on his own. But in terms of our, in terms of our, and I would have been doing something else and I've been fine too, but in terms of our combined, like, knowledge-based personalities, we fill each other's gaps, we always say. Yeah. And we enjoy it.

No, like, that kind of relationship, like, Casamacina and I had that. Back on the N64 channel, like, I mean, we still have it. Like, every day when I drive to work, Matt calls me or I call Matt. And then we bitch about the world of gaming and everything. And we talk about everything. And it's like it sticks with you.

Like once you find somebody, you have that kind of connection with. It's like even if you went on to do different jobs in the future, you still have that connection. I think it doesn't go away. Well, thank you for the kind of words. We should just get married. We should all just get married.

Trevor Starkey says, with your history and the ever-changing climate, where do you see the industry going in the next 5, 10, 20 years? The games industry? That's a really big question. Oh, Jesus. Well, I mean, look, every... What is the X for?

NX. X is going to give it to you. Oh, the NX. Oh, yeah, that's going to be an interesting... An interesting device that I can put in my pocket. But, no, I think that you can't predict it, first of all, right? I can pontificate here and say, like, well, it's going to be all VR. It's not going to be all VR.

I agree with you. I think they'll be different experiences, just like phones have not replaced the PlayStation 4, because the PlayStation 4 is fucking, you know, people are playing it. It's a big hit. I do think, you know, I do think this is do or die for Nintendo as a hardware maker. You know, like we've heard it described as a reboot, where they go back and they said, we made a terrible mistake with the Wii. They were not going to say that.

But the Wii you being this tablet that was tethered to your home. And, like, I mean, I can't even take it to my bathroom. I don't know about you guys. Like, you can't go far away. Like, that was a misstep, right? They sold you on the concept of, oh, it's a tablet. It's a console. but then like mainstream users were like I don't know what it is

and so I think the next device will be crystal clear what it is it'll be weird and but I don't know if it's going to be the leader of the of the market again like with the we right but what do we know like the people who predicted that they the Wii would sell over 100 million units like you guys should be running your own companies like we didn't see that coming we said hey once we we played it this is cool but we didn't think people would be like Like, I don't care if it's not HD. I'm going to buy this thing.

And I'm going to watch Netflix on it all day. Well, who thought it was going to multiply by four what GameCube did? Insane. And it's the pontification about it. And we were happy about it. And I was one of the naysayers on this. And I'm glad about that. And I think Greg was too.

And everyone's like, the consoles are dead, PS4 and X, whatever the next PlayStation and Xbox are going to be dead. And they were fucking wrong about that too. So I agree with you. It's impossible. But the big, the big question. I think we're going to know more when Scorpio comes out. Is our gamers ready for the PCification of consoles, right?

where you have sliders in your game saying, oh, turn off shadows and increase the texture quality or whatever, depending on what size hardware you have. Are gamers in the console realm ready, or is that precisely what they wanted to get away from? I have a feeling it's going to work. I think, you know, like we all shell out so much money for new iPhones, right? And the entire iPhone product line fits into a single console generation.

The entire iPhone lifespan fits into the Xbox 360 span. And like, people spend a lot of money. And I think they're going to spend on these upgrades. If developers can nail that concept, that games are infinitely playable still on the old machines without making you feel bad, I think we will see, you know, consoles become more modular and developing over the future.

What do you think of, because you talk about Scorpio, which is, I think, a more quantum leap, it sounds like as opposed to pro. What do you think about PlayStation Pro? Do you think that it's going to do well? I'm not sold on it yet. I mean, first of all,

I have the white PS4, and it's so gorgeous, and I feel like design-wise, it's a little bit of a step back. No, I mean, like, I can see it as a replacement for the existing PlayStation 4, and so going forward, people are going to buy this, and, you know, people with HDR TVs, those that actually know they have one and will turn it on,

get better visuals. But I don't think this is a new, kind of, a new step in kind of gaming. I think it's more kind of like when a better, like when the slim came out in the past, right? like it's a machine that replaces the other one, where it sounds like Scorpio is supposed to be, this is a second machine you could get if you have more dough,

and you can still buy the older one, right? Yeah. Yeah, I'm not sold on it yet. I mean, I have one pre-ordered. I'm buying every PlayStation day one. It is my favorite console out of the consoles I have right now. It has the games like uncharted that I want to play. But I'm having a lot of fun with the other two as well.

Crash Jordan says, what does a pair day look like at IGN? Oh, God. A pair day. I get up at 6 a.m. yelling at my kids to get ready for school. But the way I do it, I have my whole house networked. So I have, I say, Alexa, set an alarm for 6.30 a.m. And then the lights in my house flash.

And then the kids all freak out and get scared. No, so I do, I do have that. It's so awesome. Yeah, I can control anything. I can, like, call them right now and, like, speak through a camera and say, do your homework. It's so good. it's the police state.

Like, it's all true. Germans, man. So, so, and then I drive to San Francisco, and it's about an hour. And then, you know, I get right into it. Like, I talk to my boss, so my bosses live in New York, right? Zift Davis. I got to make sure that we're, we're doing well financially, so I crunch the numbers. But then I also get involved in creative discussions.

Like, for example, I have a meeting scheduled for this afternoon that's like, the future of podcasts, right? Because I feel like we're at a turning point now where podcasts, we call them podcasts, this shows. And IGN produces a lot of them, and they look so ugly. Like, Games Group looks beautiful, right? But NVC Podcast Beyond, they shot in a tiny little podcast room because they were developed for audio.

And at one point, when you guys were there, we said, hey, we need to also output those as videos, right? People were like, no, I don't want to wear pants. It happened. But now we're at a point where you're saying, well, if that's the kind of content we produce, how can it become special and look good and be something that works on YouTube?

And of course, turnkey, right? You only have so many people and so many resources. So how can you make it that the guys can sit down and go? Exactly. A podcast is self-service, right? Like, Jose can spin it, I'm going welcome, and like there doesn't need to be a cameraman in the room. Like, how do you still make that happen but make it look beautiful?

So there are a lot of discussions like that where I get involved. And then, so the teams that I oversee are, you know, I've got a sales team. They sell the ads. I've got editorial and visual. video teams, they create the content. I've got a product and an engineering team and then there's finance as well, right? And with product and engineering, you've got to look at the future and you got to say, the video player right now, what do you do with it? I know you love the video player.

You know, right now we're looking at 12 different video player solutions and we'll pick one for the future. And so there are a lot of kind of meetings with all the different teams and making sure we go in the right direction. And then I complain a lot. Yeah. Do you have to deal with Fran a lot anymore? I do. I do have to deal with friends. I'm sorry. Yeah. Guayu. So, Havanaero.

Please look at France closet. It's the best thing in the world. The final two questions kind of go together. 32-bit player wants to know, what makes a great game review? How do you think the way games are reviewed has changed since 96? And then the other one is from Thoreau 7 who says, I'd love to hear what pair thinks of his early review, e.g. his Mario Kart 64 review. Okay.

All right, good. So two things there. Did I review Mario Kart 64? I did. I did. I was thinking double dash is friend. 37 would be wrong. 7.9.

Oh, we'll never forget double dash here. Don't worry. Okay, so let's start with the first thing. Sorry, it was what makes a good review. So, I mean, first of all, I, I, we get this all the time, right? Like, we get people complaining saying, no, a review must be objective, you know? And like, you can't do that. An objective review is a spec sheet.

You already get that from the publishers. A reviewer has to put something of their own in it, and it has to be abundantly clear what the reviewer likes and what they don't like, right? And so we're never going to assign like a guy who hates racing games to a racing game, right? So you pick the right people for the review. But there's got to be a spark of that person in the review. They got to make it personal and they got to be able to tell the biggest audience possible in our case what makes that game special. And so we made a big change in the past where we used to break out graphics, 9.0, gameplay, 4.0, right?

Presentation. Presentation, whatever the fuck that was. We used to break all that out and you had to, you then put this out to the audience. and then you say audience, interpret this toilet paper roll of content now. And they go like, well, this is a wrong review because 4.0 plus 9.0 does not equal 7.2 and therefore this review is wrong, right? Like we gave people all these different kind of metrics and these different kind of snippets of information and say interpret it. And so what we did is we dialed back the length of a review because quite frankly, there is an audience that wants the deep kind of experience, wants to know everything about this game.

But there are a lot of people also who don't want anything spoiled and who just wants a quick opinion. Some people only want a number. I think you'd be surprised at the amount of people who just scroll down because we do eye tracking and just look at the number. And it's a huge number. And so you can't make a decision saying get rid of the number because it forces people to read. It's like, no, they're not going to read. They're not going to read.

They're going to ask somebody else. Yeah, they're going to ask somebody else. Is this game good or not? And they'll say good. Great. Now I don't need to read IGN's review, right? And so what we came up with is this concept, a shorter review that is both text and video,

we'll always try to do both on Snapchat. We dial it back. We create a review card that gives you just kind of bullet points of what it is. But we also took things out that were easily misinterpreted. I don't know if you guys love the pluses and minus at the bottom of IGN reviews.

Did you guys like doing them? Not really. I like some better than the breakdown box. Yeah, I agree that. But ideally neither. So the breakdown box was nonsense, right? because you could have a game with awesome graphics and really shitty gameplay.

And it's like, so what do you latch on now? What are you latch on to? But the pluses and minuses, people sometimes took also as kind of like a, well, this has four pluses and only two minuses, so this should be a stellar game. Or this has only pluses as how come it's not a 10, right? And so again, it's like you're giving the readership

kind of these things to make decisions with, but they're sometimes making the wrong decisions. And I think that became abundantly clear for us when too much water happened. Like people did. not read Callie's review of Pokemon, in which she says, this game is set on an island, therefore there's a heavy focus on water Pokemon, therefore it does not, like other Pokemon games, encourage you to create lots of different Pokemon types and play this game.

And also, it's a pain in the ass to get around because of all the water, because now you have to take a spot up for serve. And right, she explained it. And the summary, in a funny, snarky way, said too much water. Obviously, she does not think this game literally has too much water, right? But the audience took it as that and then said your opinion is without value. And so what makes a good review is I think something that is not misunderstood by the audience that is clear, concise, and to the point and in the format that they want on the platform

that they're on. And that's hard to do. Yeah, absolutely. Good luck. How do you feel looking back on your older work back when you did? So Mario Card 64, you know what? I think I underrated that game a little bit. I forget what I gave it.

Maybe it was like an 8 or even a 7 or something. Because I was pissed about a couple of things compared to the Super NES one, which I loved that game. I played two-player so long. But I absolutely adored three-player battle mode and four-player, which ran like shit if you go back and play it now. But we played that so much. And so I actually think that game did more than we give it credit for. There are a couple of older reviews. I did not review Donkey Kong 64, but I should have told Casimacina that you cannot give it, whatever you gave it.

You got good marks. I really don't like that game very much. And there are a couple like that in my history too, where I was really excited that a certain game was coming to the N64 where maybe I should have taken a step back and kind of let objectivity sink in a little bit more and say, like, it's not enough for that game to show up. It really has to be good.

You know, whether that's a wipeout, if you guys remember, wipeout 64 coming to the platform. They're games like that where, like, you're so excited to be playing it that you maybe lose sight of the fact that it didn't do as much as as zero or wave rates or some of these games.

I'm trying to look at what what you gave. Mario Card 64? 7.8 or something? 8.1. 8.1. 8.1. Yeah, that may be one I changed.

Well, Pear, thank you very much for joining us. I thought this was an excellent episode. We could talk to you literally forever. And we have. Yes. And we should have you back some time in the future.

You're welcome with us anytime. Thank you, yeah. Thank you guys for joining us. Thank you guys all for listening. Until next week. I love you. It's a good episode.