Retronauts - 489: Inside Star Control with Pistol Shrimp

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Nadia Oxford, Shivam Bhatt, and Scott Sharkey are joined by legendary developers Paul Riche and Fred Ford in a discussion about Star Control. What makes this RPG-adventure pioneer so compelling and popular? What comes next for the Ur-Quan Masters? Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us and more great shows like us at podcast.hyperx.com. This week on Retronauts, check out my ceremonial bone pit on Insta. By the fetid breath of the dark twin Kazan. It is I, Nadia Oxford of the Acts of the Blood Guide. Hi. Those of you with MyCongrade memories will recall that be hosted a Retronauts episode not that long ago about Star Control and Star Control 2.

And that was with my excellent friends, Shivon Bot and Scott Sharkey. And wouldn't you know it, we are back to do more Star Control. We've picked up a couple of hitchhikers since our last excursion, two guys who call themselves like Fred and Paul or something like that. You seem like nice dudes. Want to go ahead and introduce yourselves, starting with you, Fred. I'm Fred Ford. I've worked for a long time with Paul Ritchie, and we made Star Control, too, the Airquan Masters. And I'm Paul Ritchie, and I have no idea what this man is talking about.

He just ran into the room and said, we've worked together for 35 years. Maybe it's my memory. That's fading over time. But I'm Paul Ritchie, and I'm a game designer and X Studio Head and X Dungeons and Dragons Fanatic. I've actually still current Dungeons and Dragons Fanatic. Okay, Sharkey, Shivam, I know you're itching to introduce yourselves again as well, so why don't we take a moment? Shivon, you go first. Hi, I'm Shiva, Butt.

Normally, I host a podcast about Magic the Gathering called Casual Magic. but every now and again Nadia and Parrish and friends shank hi me into taping a retronate episodes, usually about my favorite video games of all time, of which Star Control is one. If you listen to the last two hours we did about this

podcast, you know that I could have probably gone for like 12 more. Yes. I am unbelievably excited right now. One might even say the juice is boiling. I was going to use the mic on one, but that's a little too gross. You know, you know, my flesh grows turgid, or turgid in.

My fiber is a turgid. So you used it anyway. Look, you know, I haven't played this game for 30 years not to use references every chance I get. Yeah, I'm stoked beyond words to be here. So let's go. All right. Sharky, what about you? Oh, yeah.

Scott Sharkey, a freelance bastard. I've been basically in hiding for 10 years, so I don't really have anything going on. you've always been my friend so that's that's worth something on the resume i suppose but yeah this is probably the first time you ever actually going to see me starstruck like i like a huge huge fan for like a lot of old cobblower games like i cut my teeth on like arc on like arcon and mail order monsters and shit oh wow that's great yeah like that was that was just my jam i had a disc just full of little critters and yeah i mean like i'm meeting the r3 so one of the rs

Certainly. But yeah. I don't know anybody knows. Like a mail order. Mail order monsters, that was the AI that you fought all the time because you didn't have any friends. I have to say just for a fun aside, near my house, there's a gas station. And this is where I go to fill up my bike tires since I don't really drive.

And there is a sign on the air pump that says air is not free. And indeed, it costs about two bucks to turn it on. And I just want you guys to know, I think of you and the drood every time I see that sign. Send us a photo. I absolutely will. Like, if they still have the sign on there, like, you can't peel it off. I mean, it is crazy that I paid two bucks.

Like, when I was a kid, we'd bike down to the gas station and just F around with the bike pump for a couple hours. You know, that's what we had to do in the 80s before we all had Nintendo's. It was living in the moment, not a cell phone anywhere. We should just get a Crimson Corporation sticker and stick it on that machine there. I think if you give them pedestrians. they'll give it to you for free. Feed the furnace. When you pay at the pump, they come out and start, like,

throwing kids in your gas tank. Just a second. Or dinosaurs, baby, but yeah. I try not to think of oil as dinosaurs. With the dude just hanging there by his arms is still one of my favorite arts in the game because, I mean, the conversation's so casual.

And yet this man is just like dangling and it's got to hurt. And it's just like, yeah, well, you know. Why was the man dangling? Was there a specific reason I don't recall? Chairs are expensive. Because he's an Amazon manager. You know, George Barr was the artist who did that illustration and that painting. And he had a lot of freedom to decide how best to represent the characters.

So I would sit down with him for way longer than he probably wanted to and tell him about the character. And then he just thought that there was an unease and attention. ha-ha, by being held by chain, suspended from the ceiling, like, what's going to happen? What's underneath him? Why doesn't he have a chair? So I think he made some really great choices as an artist to do that. He absolutely did. Like one thing I want to get to is how a really interesting thing to me about star control

and more I think about it, Star Control 2, is how you guys really delve into the horror aspect of it's so love crafty and yet so its own thing. Like some of the, even the way the. Arilu, talk to the human, so subtly, like, hinting, what does it, they say? Like, there's no more Androsinth, only oars now. Stuff like that is just, and you have so many flavors of the horror as well. Like, who are the, the umga, the umga, like, they're trolls. They're funny.

They're hilarious. Yeah, and they're horrifying. They're horrifying. They're, they're also like four-chan trolls. They are four-chan trolls on a galactic lovecraftian level. And that is terrifying. Like, did you intend for there to be such a, uh, uh, an element of horror to the game because

you really nailed it. Oh, yeah. I mean, horror is one of the three main food groups for me. Are there only three food groups? Maybe there's four. But it's been living in my head. I grew up when my parents told me

I was going to be dead by the time I was an adult because of nuclear war. And then I read a lot of HP Lovecraft and a lot of early Stephen King. And so that just is one of the many sort of AIs running in my head, spitting out, you know, you're going to die, it's going to be horrible. Things are going to come from the shadows and devour your soul. But you can't do horror very long before it starts to lose, you know, cure, terrifying horror

before it loses it. You have to introduce something else. And for me, humor is always the only other place I can go. And it's really the flip side of horror to me. You don't usually laugh at unholy cosmic beings. But I think also, Also, just the idea that there's an alien race for hum, humor involves eradicating species, you know, or just it's, we relate to it, and you sort of think, gosh, they're funny. And then you realize, wait a minute, they're talking about dropping a meteor in the ocean. And like four mile high tidal waves, and that's not funny, but it kind of is. It's funny when it happens to somebody else, yeah. Yeah, like Homer Simpson, full of wisdom.

He always said things like that. Yeah. It's amazing because I normally hate horror. I'm very much not, like, it's not my jam in any way, shape, or form. But you're right. Like, every different alien race here is just another facet of terrifying. Like, first off, your first encounter with the, you know, the Urquan is this big military bug demon that just coming here is like, you will die. There's that martial theme.

And it's just horrifying. The first time you see the Korah and they're hanging over the pit of bones, it's like, what the hell? and all of these other races you run into like the spiders they're just spiders they're giant demon spiders with the crazy font like that's terrifying too

with like a self-mutilation kink on top of that yeah like what and I'm amazed now that I think about I'm like I hate body horror the umgah are amazing what's going on I don't understand but it's so

deftly interwoven that you don't even realize until like you start seeing the bubbles disappear on the star map like when the various like the khoras start taking over and you're like oh crap oh crap like there's a scene where you run into the um the utwig and they're talking about their war with the cora and you're like how's it going and they're like oh well you know uh it was better in times it meant better i you know like we lost millions of us and we just keep getting thrown

into the green ones and they keep blasting it back to the black ones and we're dying but You know, it could be worse. And I'm like, oh, my God. This is like, we just sent these people to genocide themselves so I can have another month of time in game. Like, what? I can have another month. Well, there's something powerful, actually, about hearing about something or reading

about something rather than having it shown explicitly to you because your own imagination can fill in the blanks then. Yeah. Yeah. I have to say, one of my favorite things about the horror element in this game is how Shiva mentioned the cora and how cold and merciless they are, especially compared to the Khartata, who are like, oh, we're going to put you in a slave shield and you're going to like it,

military music everywhere. The cora are so direct and cold, and there is a line that always makes me shiver, something about how across the millennia, like millions of races have tried to get their wise men to calm us down. They have all failed. It's just nothing says to me like, you are going to die. Like there's no negotiation.

there is nothing, just you, hopefully, if you're lucky, ending up in the bone pit. And I can't remember who the voice actor was for that, for the corop. They were absolutely incredible. I believe it was the guy from Bananas at Large in Santa Fel. So Bananas at Large was this music store that sold professional music equipment. And we needed to get a dat tape recorder. And I should look up his name because it's been a while. But he did the cora.

and I, who else did he do? He did, Illrath. I think he did the Elrath. I think he could check me up on this. But he was great. And he was just a salesman, not just a salesman. He was a salesman at Bananas at Large and Center Cell. And when I heard his voice and he was talking about this digital audio tape recorder that he wanted me to buy, I'm like, wow, here's the deal.

We need people to be voice acting. And he's like, I could do voice acting. Like, I thought so. It's like, hey, you know what you sound like a sentient, terrifying. Fying centipede that's hanging over a pit of death. He had range. He definitely had range. Also, my father is a salesman, so I understand why he can do the whole death spider, you know,

love crafting, horror voice. Like, my dad used to kind of imitate Dr. Claude from my amusement when I was a kid. But anyway. That's terrifying too. That kind of thing. The bone pit was, again, the artists, you know, put that in there in the illustration. That was Errol Otis. And he...

Of D&D fame? of Errol Otis of D&D fame. He wrote the Urquan theme. He wrote the music for the Urquan theme. He is a genius. I didn't know he could do music. I've just known that I'm also a D&D hardcore. So like when you say Errol Otis, I just think of like the Monster Manual and stuff.

Oh, hell yes. Well, that's Dave Sutherland. But you know what I'm talking about though. But he was, I mean, he, yeah, he went, I mean, I went out there. He and I went to high school together. So, yeah, I know, it's crazy. He and I went to high school together. We put out a fantasy role-playing game book of our own

and started a business when we were 17 called Booty and the Beasts and the Necromicon. I saw the add the illustration for that. It looked really cool. Oh, Errol was a genius in high school and has stayed that way all the way. But he's currently doing Hackmaster stuff, I'm sure you're aware, and he is my DM. After a mere 45 years, he is still my DM.

But he, anyway, he painted that and like so many of them, like the Mycon illustration, I would, you know, be thinking through the plot and I would understand the plot and, you know, it had been in my head for years at that point. So I knew the role of the Mycon, but when you get an illustration back, man, there was so much in there to pull from. Yeah. So I looked at the bone pit and like, oh, you know, and I knew what it was. And I asked him a little bit about it. And then I'm like, yeah, this is a big deal. We're going to talk about this. You go back to the writing and you're like, we're going to add some whole bone pit things here.

And you start realizing, I'm making this statement here where he's referring to something horrific, the bone pit could fit here. You know, that's like cowbell. You need more bone pit. But seriously, that's one of the most exciting things about working with other talented people is the feedback thing that happens. It's not like they're just filling a hole in your game. They're offering you something and it's always got more than you asked for. and, you know, then reaching in and seeing what's in there and connecting it back to your own work means that now when someone comes through, they'll actually think you intended it to be this way.

And I'll think you were, you know, maybe a better writer than you actually are. The game is up, Paul. Yeah. Hey, everyone. It's co-host Jeremy here again. Do you ever notice the thing where you have a quiet conversation with your partner or a friend in the privacy of your own home, only to realize that your social media feeds are suddenly serving you ads relevant to whatever you were talking about? The social media companies keep saying that's just a weird coincidence, and who knows, maybe it is. But it's a great reminder that privacy is one of our most precious and rapidly vanishing resources today.

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subscribe. Head to P-I-A-V-P-N dot com slash retro and get an 82% discount. That's seriously 82%, which is just $2.11.1.1. a month. And on top of that, you also get three extra months completely for free. But you must go to P-I-A-V-P-N.com slash retro for a truly private digital life. One last time, that's P-I-A-V-P-N.com slash retro. Did you mention art? Did you have, like, traditional paintings done for all these characters, or were this just done in pixel?

Almost all of them were in paintings. you mean so there's somewhere there's like an urquan painting except for the urquan serza which was a page digital painting i did in deluxe paint but um all of i think all of the other ones so i can't remember fred and i have probably got like eight or nine of them we got them back from george errol errol refuses to sell his original so he has the ill wrath the cora you know the micon the kunk uh so yeah and they're beautiful paintings So in his retirement, perhaps he will make those available. I'm blown away because the idea that the idea that these aren't just like spright drawing is just like wrecking my mind right now.

Like that's so cool. I have a couple of my house. Yeah. I mean, I'm in the toys. This is the not the toys for Bob. This is the pistol shrimp headquarters above Fred's garage. And we everything, you know, pistol shrimp's a smaller more. more intimate company. But at my place, which is a very small intimate place as well, I've got,

you know, Star Control artwork up. I've got the map from the Horde up. That is one of us beautiful physical paintings of all time. By Ian McCagg, another person who worked on Star Control at Star Control too, the Aquan Masters. We, by the way, you know, obviously, historically those games were called Star Control at the time. Nowadays, the trademark doesn't belong to us. So nothing that we're doing from this time forward, do we refer to you as Star Control? Because we can't. Right. But it's the Erkwan Masters. Well, with that in mind, is there any chance of you guys ever being able to tell the story that you implied in the first Erkwan Masters where you're talking about, let's go and see the precursors and go to where the rainbow world are pointing or anything like that?

Strange, you should mention that. So for the past year or two, Fred and I have been working, both two of us as well as two other people, Ken Ford and Dan Gerstein. Now, we've all worked together at Toys for Bob over the years, and we're working on a sequel right now. And it does indeed cover what you're describing. Ah, beauty. And, you know, right now the story is funny because back when we were doing the Airquine Master's, Dark Control 2, that story lived in my head for two, two and a half years. and Fred finally sort of picked me up and shook me by my feet and put it on a piece of paper. And now it's been more like 30.

Yeah, exactly. Now it's been like 30 years that I've been thinking about this. And it's obviously the story's gone through some tremendous, there was a whole time when Fwifo had messed up time. And this is what's not going to happen. But I will tell you that what was, this was in my head for a while that Fwifo, after the end of the last. game. You know, the main character was a hero. And his friends, Whiffo, you know, Kalano.

Fofo was the main character. And, yeah, he is me, by the way. And I sort of had this vision of Fwifo like going on late night talk show and doing, you know, product placements and making a ton of money and then blowing it on

something. I'm not sure what it was. At the track. Fiffo at the track. Part of it was that he listeners, my eyebrows have not dropped since I I spent it all in Skylanders. Well, one of the things, and again, this is, you're hearing it first. So obviously, since 1990, when the story was invented, I mean, the full story, things have changed, like the peaceful stuff, the Little War in the Middle East has come and gone

and hasn't occurred. Things that are specifically mentioned in the plot, the timeline, you know, it hasn't happened as far as we know, you know. So one of my justifications for it was Fwifo and him goofing with time. The way the retcon is, well, you know, I had this couple of years and I think I may have taken drugs or actually traveled in time or both. And I'm so, do you remember the whole thing about the peace faults and how everybody put away their weapons and then, you know, early teens of the 21st century? And then you as the player were going to go, no, that absolutely didn't happen. He's like, yeah, I'm so sorry about that.

It's like how Star Trek has to keep pushing back the eugenics wars or whatever. It's like the only reason this future is possible is just bootstrap assing around. I think although I'm confident that everything we've seen about authoritarianism in the past like five, ten years is the beginning of the eugenics war. Absolutely. Although they're not demonstrating it visually. But yeah. Anyway, moving on from. a very negative topic to more positive.

So a variety of stories have been kicking around in my head over these years. And the way that I work is I sort of build or I just happens. Characters come alive in my head and they talk to me and I talk with them and we have conversations. And that I just document that conversation essentially. So like FWIFO is just me talking about what I actually want in life. I want, you know, a big walled property with trees and rocks and the whole deal. So I've got all these characters running in my head. I can go talk with Fritash.

I can go talk with Fiffo. And it sounds kind of nutty, and it is potentially, you know, institutionalizable, if that's a word. But for me, I need to now share this with other people and get them out of my head. I mean, that's how a lot of fantasy writers tend to, I mean, my other shows in an interview show. And every time I talk to writers, they're always like, yeah, I listen to the story being told to me by these characters. And then I'm just transcribing it down. So I feel like that's not necessarily institutional. as much as you're a writer, you're used to it.

Yeah, I'm sorry. I do the same thing. I have my characters talk to me, and I kind of record that, and everybody suffers for it. But I wanted to say very briefly, because you mentioned twice for Bob, I found the reference to the oars in Skylanders, and I was just over the freaking moon. And I'm trying to like, I'm like an ape telling this kid's, who, who, who, I know that, and they're like, and they don't care. Like, get out of here, you're scary. But, yeah, I heard I think it was Persephone.

was the fairy. And she's like, what did she say? Hello? Extremely. And I'm just like, ooh! And I just felt really proud of myself for recognizing that. There's a spathy hat in Skylanders, too. Is that a stathy hat? I think I'll find the spathy hat. Oh, that's amazing. It's so much fun to reach back. And even in the horde, you can find Wimbly's Trident. And it's a tremendously powerful weapon. It just was in the wrong universe. It was a sort of a useless piece of junk in the world of the equine masters, but move it to the world of the horde and Kirk Cameron, all of a sudden

it gains awesome power. And man, we've picked some real winners in terms of people to participate. Oh man, can you imagine the horror we've seen of that guy? Oh, anyway. apologies for that. Look, man, bananas. Bananas, right?

Bananas large. Can I indulge you in a fan question? Well, because I really want you guys to tell me how Star Control came to be, I've never gotten to hear that story. But really, there's a question I've always wondered. And that is why, why does a Mel Norma's bridge turn purple?

Oh. Fred, I'll let you answer that one. Oh, you can't trick us that easily. That's all I say. Look, I've got 65,000 credits. I've been sitting here for 25 years. Please let me have this one. But, I mean, God, there's so many questions I want to ask you because you're, like, literally my favorite game designers ever.

Have you ever played Dragon Lent or seen Dragon Lent before? Was that a Sega game? No, there's a dungeon and dragon setting. Oh, that one. It's a module. It was, while I was at TSR, it was being played as a game by the guy who became the head of the RPGA. I think Tom Mencer was his name, Frank Mencer. Frank Menzor?

Can't remember it was Tom or Frank. So that's what I know of it as. And he, like I said, I think before you got on, the dude wouldn't stop talking about dragons. and there's an appropriate amount to talk about dragons and then there was how much she cared about them and it was really people who are playing

I didn't plan his campaign which in retrospect was a huge mistake but so I know only about it what he told me in 1980 then never mind because of the fact of the Conquer exactly like the kinder race from there but

dragon people are like horse girls like they just oh absolutely I've got one track mine and that crack is a dragon so what do you want me to? How many how many How many burn mushes were there in the 90s? Oh, how many of them got pulled down because of copyright?

My only lingering claim to fame in Dungeons and Dragons was I invented the Thrycreen, which periodically they crop up, yep, periodically they crop up again, and people have, of course, breathed a thousand times as much interest into them since I invented them than I did in my simple little description, but yeah. They're super cool, so, like, I had a Thrycreen PC for a long time. Don't never ask a D&D player to tell you about their character You should know better But one of the things I thought that Star Control did exceedingly well

Was that the storytelling you guys imbued in these characters And in this world building Like I had never played the original Star Control when I got to StarCon 2 But I still felt like I knew what had happened And the event of that game impacted me While I was going through this game Like it mattered to me And it, like, for instance, the Androsinth, the Andersynth are obviously a major player in the first one.

In the second one, you only see their shadows. And yet that, like, just those story segments of talking to the ors, talking to the early and learning, like, these people were here. They had their own freedom, their own planet. And now they're vaporized. And just the emotional resonance of feeling for people I've never seen or played or have any, like, connection to. And I'm just like, they will pay for what they've done to my beloved. And like when I was a kid and we'd be, you know, playing with my friends and stuff, I would be making up stories about the Andresence and everything. Just because it was such a cool, like you did such a good job of developing a race that wasn't even there. Yeah, I have to admit, I was terrified when you read about the Anderson's and the manual. It's like, oh my God, they hate us. They have justification. We're hating us. This is going to be a really hard fight when it gets to their territory. It's completely empty, like Chivon said. And it's, again, that's a horror aspect. Like, where is this overly past?

powerful race as opposed to give me my due, and why are there parrotfish talking to me in weird ways? Yeah, their lack of justice. I mean, they cry out for justice. And, you know, so much from my perspective, I would want to go try to make things right with them. And the fact that you're left with no way to do that, you know, you have the awareness of what happened and the desire to at least say, I'm so sorry what those idiots in the past did. And I wasn't even on Earth at the time. But I think, as Fred said, oftentimes it's really offering an interesting Lloyd for a creative person to paint with their own imagination. And people who like Star Control, one of the things you can tell is that they're imaginative and they're readers. And so I like

everybody who likes our game for beyond the obvious reason. But when you do that, there's a of people who aren't interested in filling it and they want to have everything given to them and they don't dig it as much. But it's so much more effective. Like when Fred said, when you construct your own story, I couldn't do what you just described if I tried to say it all in those words. But I'm really happy it had that effect. I mean, that's so gratifying. I mean, think about the fact that this is like 1991 to now. That's like 30, literal 30 years. This race has stuck with me as just like they never got, they had a planet and they were going to get free.

And then these damn fish things came and it's just over and I'm still mad about it. It's like, no, I am not a happy camper, buddy. Like, this is not okay. I was just, I was going to say, I love this intersection of like D&D writing and stuff, which is kind of different from it's interactive writing and that's separate from novel writing. And you're giving people a chance to like poke around and find answers if they're interested, or at least like hints that they can pull together themselves. Like I always, my favorite was like the male nom and the melnorme and like that's never explicit. But you can put that together in your head and it's like, oh, no, these guys are like the equivalent. of that dude at a party, like, always leaves right before the cops show up.

And that's why they bug out. It's like, oh, maybe shit's real now. Like, should be worried. It's there for you to piece it together. And if you want to, like, pull it that thread, you can get it. But, you know, it's not like just given to you as exposition. And they're certainly not going to tell you. No. The manner, I've been working with a guy named E Hutchinson, who's a volunteer writer. He's helping me write. And, you know, he, this game meant a lot to him. And he's, you know, been an editor at Ars Technica forever. He's a really good writer and good thinker. And he, when we started writing together, I hadn't given him the whole spiel about interactive narrative and how so, how different that is from linear narrative. And not only in the manner in which you write it, but in the intention. And so we went through that where initially, you know, he was writing this back and forth between two characters and you only had like one choice you could make because he just thought that's how you implemented a conversation. And I, you know, was talking through like, let's go back through what we did in the first game and how, yes, there is, there's like the normal

dude thread, the normal person thread. You can just follow it. You're like hero protagonist 101. And then there's the like, I'm pissed off now and I want to say something nasty. Or I'm bored and I want to say something nasty. And then there's the like, I'm like Greg Johnson. I'm sweetness. in light. And I, he's the guy who did StarFlight and who wrote some of the work. And, you know, Greg would never say anything mean. He would always try to be nice. And as I, because I'm a cynical person, that never works. And so, so that the ability to essentially let you poke around in one way of looking at it is you're poking around in a database. Another is that you're, you're having this conversation. And I did a podcast a few months back about this, but that I had this epiphany when

someone told me literally how this works is that in a game conversation can be considered a maze. And each room, so to speak, has a series of doors. And the room is a subject or a topic that you're talking about. And you can't be in this room for a while, but eventually a door will open up. So you're changing the subject. And now you're traversing to a new, place in the conversation. And ideally, you might be trying to get to the exit. You might be trying to get to the room with a treasure, which is a piece of knowledge that you need.

And just that simple description of how to structure a conversation really influenced our control too tremendously. It's one of my favorite D&D tricks, actually, is like when you're having a puzzle dungeon or you're having, you know, a conversation moment. And it's not combat, but it is combat because we're sparring verbally. And you create this kind of decision tree of like, Okay, well, if you say these things to this person, the doors are going to shut and the enemies are going to come in. You can say this one, you're going to get the magical orb that lets you do the thingy.

And it's such a fun and interesting way to structure a dialogue because it lets you, you know, evolve the conversation based on what the players are doing and also give them the illusion of choice. And one thing I think, like, the illusion. That's so important. you see things like later on on Mass Effect and other games that have come since the idea of conversation All the decision trees like re-collapse or Cotor did it especially but like in Star Control

where all of the text has already been written and you've kind of got a linear path to follow it still makes you feel like you're taking choices and like there's some of these decisions you're like oh God if I do this he's going to attack me and I need to do this and eventually I mean Star Control is early enough

that it was still a little railroading and you still feel like where you're going however the tension that you guys managed to imbue in that was still there and it's still made for a very entertaining kind of way to get through I mean like when you go back to that game there are reams of text in that game yes like there's a lot just dialogue and getting people to sit there and have to hit space bar space bar space bar to get through an entire like you know novel from the melorme about I don't know the burvixie or whatever they're talking about is the fact that you were able to continually do that for hours, he's attesting it to the quality of the hooks that you're putting in there. One of my favorite moments like that was with Whiffo, where you can say, tell me about yourself.

That's always dangerous to say under any circumstances. And he just goes on and on and on. Doesn't he say, like, the best day of his life is when his mom wrote his name? Yeah. He had a lot of brothers and siblings. Yeah. The conversations themselves weren't.

just mazes, but also they interlinked with the other conversations. And so you could talk to somebody and then come back to a conversation and there would be a whole new set of, a whole new set of maze rooms available. Yeah. And of course, I love like the captain just losing his patients. Like, tell me what you're doing on Pluto now. And let me tell you, the first time I ever played Sarkhan. And I was, sorry, this shouldn't be the Shivam show. I apologize. But the first time I ever played Sarkon, I was driving and trying to figure out how to pilot that ship. And I went to Pluto first. And I saw the big purple dot and I saw Fiffo.

And I was like, holy crap, have I stumbled on something? I shouldn't. This is so sick. Oh, my God. So I feel like I circumvented something and felt really cool. But I also love that you seeded a random planet with like, A, a mega orb of crystal, like the purple crystals and then B, an alien rays. So suddenly I've got a hook and a plan and a direction to go in, which in a map where, Like, when you look at the map of StarCon, it is intimidating.

It's huge. There's a billion stars. I have to memorize them all because I lost the map and had to put in the piracy protection by hand. But you have no idea where to go or what to do. So when you stumble on this dude and you're like, hey, here's my home plan. You're like, boom, got a thing. That is like Mario-esque level of training someone how to play this game, which is fascinating. And the ship sucked so much in the beginning that,

Getting someone to actually suffer through playing that until they get a good chip implies that you were doing something correctly. I think a lot of people may have written the word probe down in their own blood with my name underneath it. Yes. I was going to say, as friendly as the starter is, like Shev-Ale was explaining, those probes will never, I will never erase, we come in peace from my mind. It will always, always be there. Why? We come and, no. We come in, we come in pieces, bitch.

That's what you come in. Some aliens are going to show up at Earth, and he's unfortunately going to meet his Star Control fan. And then this chance for first contact will be blown. Like, what did you say? If annoying that probes are just the last boss of life. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I actually love how these terrible sinister probes, you find out they come from these really nice little marshmallow people. They're just like, wow, how did that go for us?

Oh, it went really terrible. You're really, you're driving extinctions out here. Oh, no, you don't want that. This is actually, I wanted to ask about is that where that's just a classic sci-fi conceit, you know, coupled with like, you know, good intentions gone wrong. But like, do you have any, like, favorite like gold and silver age sci-fi, like, stories or authors? Because I can see, like, a lot of that, like, obviously Larry Nivens in there.

Like, I ever noticed that in even like mail order monsters, like the lion bear guy is named skin, you know? But how do you say, Kizinti? Yeah, he's one of those. It recalls you have to growl a lot when you say it, I think. No, of course, he's one of my favorite writers. And, I mean, I think Jack Vance always is at the top. Fred and I just sort of separately have loved him to pieces.

And I reread Jack Vance frequently. I hear that all from D&D people. I think the adoption of his, would you call it a magic system? I guess you would. Dude, Vancey and Magic is famous for a reason, man. Like, Fire and Forget, maybe that's... Oh, wait, they call it Vancey and Magic. Literally, it's Vancey and Magic because that's what it is.

It's Jack Vance. We stole his stuff and is the basis of all things. If you haven't read, yeah, if you haven't read any of the dying Earth stuff, also, if you like Gene Wolf at all, I mean, everybody takes a very different flavor. Yeah, he's kind of hard to read. But, like, all of that claw, the conciliator stuff feels like it's sort of in a really serious and unpleasant corner of the dying earth. But anyway, it's, it's, I really recommend it a lot. You also mentioned early Stephen King. I'm a huge fan of early saving king. Any direct

inspirations you can talk about? You know, Salem's lot to me, who was the first book I read of his? And I thought I was super effective in how it contrasted really horrible like children are dying. Oh my God. That's, that's maximum level then with like my toy is glowing. My Frankenstein, glow in the dark Aurora model is glowing when vampires are nearby. And the contrast of the trivial with the sort of cosmic horror drama, I can't say where exactly I utilize that. But to me, interleaving that stuff was really powerful. And there were a couple of things. It's funny, in some of the lander text, you know, where you know, report from the surface stuff.

Oh, God, those are great. Yeah. We were able to embed a little bit of horror in those. and it's for me that I felt there was I remember exactly the details but one of those felt super effective to me but in terms of other people because there's so many writers I want to talk about Dan Simmons is fantastic young Orson Scott card yeah orson Scott card you know politics aside you know his his first speaker for the dead is still great like I can't fault it and he actually wrote an early review of Arcon believe or not which I loved because he liked it no idea is one of the first ones Nice. We played with him on Game Night with Greg, too. He wrote a story about Game Night at Greg Johnson's house. It was called Feed the Baby of Love.

And it was a weird story, but we were playing this game that Greg Johnson had created called Feed the Baby of Love, Many Beans, or Parish Forever in the Flames of Hell. And it was an awesome board game, which he actually later retrofitted into the Tojam and Earl board game. But the original was great. What? Are you familiar with Toja Amina Role? I'm familiar with Togey. Oh, yeah, I knew there was some crossover there, yeah. That's not the conversation I expected from...

We can get into Chew Choo's soul. Greg Johnson, man, you've got to talk to that guy. He is a polymath creatively and a sweetie. Introducing the new HyperX Cloud Stinger 2. The Stinger 2 is a refined evolution of the classic Cloud Stinger and keeps the fan favorite 90-degree rotating ear cups, comfortable memory foam cushions, and the swivel-to-mute microphone. It also features two years of DTS headphone X activation for upgraded sound localization.

all while keeping the great price of the original Stinger. That's right. Get the new Cloud Stinger 2 for only 50 bucks. Now isn't that nice. Available online at Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and of course, hyperX.com. Previously on Chowd. Good to know. I wanted to use this time to impart some words of wisdom from Eslo.

Straighten up your hair once I'm gone. You got a style all over the ladies. La la la la la la la la are the words. to his new hit single, Live Long, Love Long, and also he woke up from a dream where he forgot to study for the test. Did he really say all those things? Yeah, yeah, these are all things that I discussed.

He discussed with me. That's magical. Chat of the Wild, breaking down Zelda and Zelda-like games, one dungeon at a time. Wednesdays on the HyperX Podcast Network. Live Long, love long, baby. We're here to announce a special deal for all of our retronauts listeners.

If you've had your eye on any of the pink variance of HyperX gear, you can save 15% off during the month of October by using code HXPN over at HyperX.com. Get yourself an elegant white and pink cloud two, or a metallic pink ally origins 60, or any of the other pink peripherals on the site. Once again, head over to HyperX.com get 15% off all pink gaming products with code all caps HXPN. Take a time machine back to before the world went to hell around the year 2000.

The 80s and 90s were so rad. The movies, the music, the TV, the games? That's what I want to talk about. If you're cool enough, join us and listen to less than 2000, because that's all we talk about. Adam and Chad live less than 2000. part of the Hyper X. Podcast Network. So, did you ever play Space War?

Yes, I did. Humorously enough. Fred, you want to talk a little bit about that? What in particular? The prototype, Fred and I were at UC Berkeley at the exact same time. We didn't know each other yet. So it would be years later after Fred got his degree and I didn't. But there were, you know, UC Berkeley was a

big school, but there were like specific haunts that you tended to lurk at. One of them was called Silver Ball Gardens, and it was this classic kind of, you know, it had been a pinball place, and then it transitioned to arcade stand-up video games, but there was a guy who was bring in prototypes of his game machines, and years before they would be released. So Space Wars was brought in as a prototype there. It was called Space Wars as compared to Space War, exclamation mark, which was it was a PDP

and yeah PDP won and that was so I didn't get a chance to play that in its original form but I played this like crazy and I don't know Fred

if you went in there as well but they had yeah silver ball that they had his follow-up games which none of which made it to market but he had like a four arcade standup of maze wars

that was amazing and the problem was people would play it for hours on a quarter and that was also, he had a game called Oops, which was, well, it was one player was playing a syringe of spermicide, and the other was playing a wave of sperm, and there was an ovum in the middle of the screen. And I know, are you surprised that this didn't work? And what's funny is, I'm

preparing for a conversation about melee combat and why it is that we went the way we did with inertial controls for his ship and it's not up. If you want to talk about smyrmicide, we got time. So we used to go into Silver Ball, Errol and I and play Space Wars like crazy and he was so good at it. He really liked the no gravity mode.

Anyway, because he could think and move twice as fast as I could. But that was the physical realization of what I'd been reading about in science fiction as a kid, whether it was Heinlein or I'm trying to remember who did some of the best space combat

but I read a lot of Andre Norley as a kid Yeah Oh yeah lens men and all of that And so but I'd also been sort of trained by Star Trek Growing up with that and that was sort of the third parent And so there was this succession of a building in me at least A model of what I wanted to do in space combat And then making Archon with John Freeman and Westfall, we sort of defined this hierarchy of there's the thinking part, which is slow-paced, and then there's the fast resolution of combat.

And, you know, we had but one, one, each character had only one power. And then in mail-order monsters, you may sense a pattern in adept, same thing, mail-order monsters, now you can build your own creatures. And then Evan and Nikki and I proposed Star Trek Archon on the phone. And I have a, I pitched it with an advertisement for the game. And it became StarCon, Star Trek Archon. And then Evan and Nikki and I went our separate ways. And I, the producer, or assistant producer, I had at Electronic Arts, moved to become a full producer at Accolade. and I signed a three-game deal, which was great to, you know, I had a wife and kids at this point,

and a sort of regular money sounded really good. So then there was a three-game deal with no programmers, just a game designer, me. And so I desperately needed a partner. And Greg Johnson, and we had some mutual friends, Errol, as one of them. And they all said, hey, there's this really the best programmer we've ever seen at the company we work at. his name is Fred, why don't we bring him over to game night and see, and he wants to go back to making games, and maybe we can do a blind date with you two guys. And so we met at Greg Johnson's house and the rest is history. Wow, that's really incredible.

Actually, you mentioned something there that I kind of, you said three game contract deal. Now, I've been thinking a lot about Star Control on a 3DO and just why the 3DO, number one, number two, there's got to be some crazy stories you have there. number three. Why not PlayStation? Where was the PlayStation port? That is a crazy. It was a total fluke that it ever came out on the 3DO. At the time, so we had just finished Star Control 2, and we had that three-game deal with Accolade. And so we came back to discuss the third game, and they said, how about we do Star Control 3 with the same amount of money we gave you for two, which, and that money ran out with six months to go in the game. And so you could imagine that we weren't very happy about that.

And also, we kind of needed a cleansing of the palate. And anyway, so we didn't do anything with Accolade. They released us from the third game. And we hooked up with Crystal Dynamics to do the Horde. and one of the things we agreed to do with them was the Horde on the Sega CD. And so we hired a couple of friends to do the Sega CD port and convince them to leave their safe, cushy jobs. And literally on the day before they were due to show up to work on the Horde Sega CD, the project, fell through. Sega said, now we don't want it.

So we felt bad that we'd convince these people to quit their jobs and they were showing up the next day and we talked to Crystal Dynamics and said, hey, maybe we could port Star Control 2 to the 3DO if

Ackelaide will let us do it for not too much money. And so that's how the 3DO port of Star Control 2 happened. humorously enough, the first people to pay us royalties on our own IP was us, because when we license our own IP from Accelade, we had to pay them, and we got a very small amount of it back. So, anyway, they were not the best at licensing our IP when they had access to it.

But one of the nice things was there's a guy named Mark Sarnie, who is one of the... I interviewed him a long time ago. Right. He is, he is, in one sense, one of the gravity wells that the... game universe whirls around when you investigate his history and his impact, whether it's in games, in arcade stand-ups, or, you know, the mascot games, you know, like Spiro and Crash, or the hardware of the new systems. Mark Cerney is at the center of all of it. And strangely enough, he was in the weird little private school in Berkeley I went

to, and he used to hang out at Silver Bowl Gardens and wear a cowboy. Oh, wow. I think that's Maybe it was downstairs at the ASUC, which was the UC Berkeley. Anyway, so to make a long story short, he was one of the founders of Crystal Dynamics, or he was one of the first employees. And he was kind of their head programmer at the time, and thank God, he was a Star Control fan. So he was, when they were like, like, is this a good idea for us to make a 3DO? He's like, yes. So thank you, Mark, for that.

And these poor guys showed up. And, I mean, we had really had to struggle to make sure. that we could have a project for them. This wasn't an easy thing to just snap our fingers and have it work there. But it was a hard thing for them to tackle. And actually, I think Richard Ontocchi, one of the two guys, not the programmer, but the designer artist, I think he's the voice of the Thridash.

I think he did the Threadash voice. Oh, Trottas are great. So that's what survives. But, you know, it turned out to be really important because when the time came for Chris Nelson, who was a summer intern of ours, He really wanted to work on making an open-source version of Star Control, the Airquine Masters project. I believe, was it the 3D-O code that we had left? Yeah, we didn't have the original PC code anymore.

Wow. That's so wild. Back then, there was no cloud to put things in, and so various physical media would break down. A lot of game code has vanished to the ether, and it's really a bit of a shame. But I was thinking about how just going off track for a second here, back then storage was expensive. So saving over stuff was kind of the norm. And you don't even think about game code, Final Fantasy 7. What are you ever going to do with this?

So, yeah. But the 3DO, you also added a whole bunch of stuff, and that must have made things even more difficult. Yeah, I think, well, Fred, do you want to take that? Well, I was just going to say, yeah, we did add a bunch of stuff. But I forgot to mention that although the Sega CD was canceled, we were going to, we were on the hook for a Horde 3DO version. So we were already, we were already into the 3DO. So in terms of just making Star Control 2 Erkwan Masters run on the 3DO, that wasn't a big stretch for us, but we did add. Obviously, the voice is the biggest thing we added.

And we revised the menu system. That wasn't our first experience. We had made the Sega Genesis version of Star Control 1. That's right. And the biggest cartridge in the universe at the time. And it taught us that using a directional controller was rough. And so we went into the 3DO version, which of course had a directional controller, trying to fix some of the problems.

And we fixed up the menus a little bit, made them prettier. And there were a couple of other things we did. We added the, they, Crystal really wanted us to do full motion video. And, you know, so we did that and that drained a lot of energy from, from me. And then doing the, you know, I did all the recording. And so it was me, you know, finding a quiet place with either Alex Bennett, who was like the shock, shock guy in the Bay Area at the time. And he did the Star Base Commander. That's a very commanding voice. Oh, yeah. He was, oh, man, the outtakes in that stuff was hysterical. He was not him trying to say Chen Jesu. And, I mean, we did the whole thing in a day.

So he worked really hard for it. That's a lot of lines. I've worked with voice actors in video games before and trying to do all that. And the day seems pushing it. Oh, I did. I had no sense of what I was doing to people. people. And so if you're not being like this for four hours straight, you know. But like I remember Greg did the Pekunk and I don't remember who did the R.A. though. I can't remember. But I had like,

there were parents. So my kids went to the Waldorf schools, which is a particularly version of alternative education. And it very heavily pushes theater and performance and mythic, myth in your life, essentially. So most of the parents there, and particularly in Marin County, had some musical or artistic bent. And there were a couple of people there who either were voice actors

or were just actors, professional actors, with great voices. So we would be at some, you know, school function and I would sort of hit him up to, hey, you've, hey, hey, seventh grade teacher, you've always wanted to be in a voice actor,

haven't you? So I literally got one of the teachers there, this guy, Rick Betts. He did the art. Although his father was an actor. Yeah. Father knows best. I don't know.

Father's known. Oh, the voice. Yeah. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah. It's a very densely packed world of network connections.

But so we really, we didn't have much money at the time to do this. So we were, we were hustling. And I remember doing, I wanted to do effects on the voices. And so I went up to this, just like guys cabin in the woods. with a ton of effects computers and hardware and spending an entire day, like, every time he wanted to relax them, like, oh, no, we have another one to do. Oh, no, we have another one to do. And, you know, I think in retrospect, I dialed the impact of all of the effects up so high. Some of them are kind of hard to understand. And if I could go back in time and change that, I would

probably, I would probably adjust that. The echo on the mic on is terrifying. This is kind of a non-sequitur. I lived, like, literally over the fence from that Waldorf school when I was in Berkeley. I just had to look. It's like, that sounds really familiar. He said, yeah, across from Willard Park. Yeah, like I was in the backyard cottage that was right behind that. There was one in Berkeley and then there was one in Marin County

and they are, there's a lot of good things about it. And Fred's kids went to a slightly diluted. Well, I don't, I consider it filtered. It had some of the good stuff

and less of the kind of strange stuff. But my kids loved it, by the way. I got to say, I freaked out at one point put the kids in our traditional education, and they have never forgiven me for that. The one's turning 40 next month, and he still is mad. But both of whom appear in the voiceover actually at the end of the game. Oh, really? With my daughter, yeah, at the end, there's the grandfather who's talking to the children, And then there's the main character. So my voice was the main character.

My dad was the grandfather and the two kids were my kids. That's cool. So it was totally like taking advantage of my position to get that in there. Free labor. Yeah. Slave labor. Bye, my child. Awesome.

So Star Control 1 is a dramatically different game than Star Control 2. How did you make that jump into making much more of a story-driven, exploration-driven game than the way the first one was, which was like way more arcade kind of shootery? Combat, yeah. Yeah. Well, Star Control 1 was our first project together. So a lot of that time was spent getting to know how to collaborate together and just kind of building the underlying technology of the space combat. We obviously didn't use the strategy game in two.

So that was kind of getting our feet set firmly in the ground and Paul sort of teasing a larger story. And so from that sort of solid footing and with that story already out there a little bit, we were able to make that bigger leap. I think also giving credit where it's due, there was Starfleet, you know, and Greg Johnson was a very close friend of ours, and it had executed an adventure. I mean, maybe it's hard for folks to go look at the screenshots of it and understand it, But it had moved me and inspired me.

And I had done a tiny bit of work on it. I started to, believe it, I'd abandoned bailloader monsters for a couple of ways. You were supposed to be doing that. I was so enraptured with what those guys at binary systems were doing. And I, you know, was thinking about conversation. I was working with Greg on conversation systems. And that just kept sticking in my head. So, you know, I wanted very much to take this idea of Space Wars combat

that and blow it out into an adventure narrative. And then, you know, kind of the Star Trek ingredients of traveling to new worlds. And, you know, so there was one, Greg was right there. You know, he was literally one door down the hall because we were sharing a suite of offices. And so, you know, having him around to bounce things off of, and, you know, he was cool with what we were doing. And then I would think, like, you know when I was playing this game, what I really wanted to do was X. So that's what I'm going to do. So in a way, it was sort of taking this template that was so fun and then saying, okay, combat is solved, man.

We're going to kick ass every time we go to combat. I'm not worried about that. Now what about the conversation? I gave Greg all of this good advice. I'm going to totally do the exact opposite. And I had been playing Monkey Island. And I was cracking up at, I mean, the contrasts between what. you could say. And that goes through all of our heads. Like, I could tell this person what I really

think, or I could smile and say something bland. And so I just sort of said, yeah, boy, that was a good thing I told Greg, and maybe wrong, so I'll do this other thing. And I had also, in the mean, Welts, worked on a tech adventure project, which never came out with Errol Otis. That would have been cool. But I had learned about this conversation as a maze thing. And also, there was no, like, design document for the game. Fred and I built it organically, just sort of one piece at a time, kind of starting from combat, working outwards.

Which might explain why it was six months late, but... And well, yeah, and it might explain why I convinced Fred to do this whole thing about away teams, which we had to throw away completely because we got it done. And my design was boring. It was boring. And there's this

thing that I call the Paul Ritchie lesson. So, like, there's the Kazin lesson, right? which being a Larry Nivennerd, I will say that the efficiency of your engine is directly proportional to its use as a weapon. Love it. So that's the Gizinti lesson. The Ritchie lesson is never let the computer do something

that the player would have fun doing. And that seems like an obvious thing. And yet again and again, I find myself convincing people to go against that. It's like, no, what we really need to do is let the computer do all this fun stuff and you just sit back and press a button. I was going to say, I like, I like the contrast between, like, at the time with Star Flight and games like Elite and whatnot,

there was kind of this discovery of what you could do with, you know, procedural generation or extrapolating from a speed. And to use some of that, but then to realize that, you know, a bespoke universe where things are placed as a much more personal feel to it. It allows you to tell a story. Oh, but that was one of the things I, you guys kind of went a little astray on in the podcast. The universe is basically 100% generated except for the location of the stars and the Earth's solar system. Really? Yeah, where all the rest of the planets are. And the only thing that was placed was after, this is kind of a funny story too,

but after the planets were generated at each of the stars, we would go in and say, okay, we want the Cyrene to live here. So we have to place a vault somewhere on the planet somewhere. And we would go into the generated solar system, and I would overlay the generation with that placement. But all of the rest of it was generated. Yeah, you let it fill in the empty spots, but then like the things that you need for story and events, you go in. I guess that would explain why sometimes you go to a planet and it's a vacuum and there's animals living there. So is that because of the generation?

Yeah, exactly. And the funny thing was, is at one point towards the end of the project, for some reason, I can't remember exactly why I did this. Maybe I was just being mean. I changed the random generation. So all of the locations of the planets changed, which just made the testers tear their hair out. Because that blows my mind because of fact that it's so early that the idea that you could have even generated that, I mean, I guess it's just a matter of. like having a computer spit out a spreadsheet with randomized coordinates and then

uploading it or something like that. But it just, because it feels so rich and vibrant. And yeah, I guess now it makes sense to me that you wouldn't want to go and hand populate every goddamn planet in there. Yeah, that would be the time. But like, just make sure to say like,

oh, we need to have foifo on Pluto so we're going to put them there. Or, you know, we need to be in like Delta Volpiculate for whatever reason. But there's so many stars. And when you go and you're playing the game and you're just exploring. You're like, there's no way all of these have meaning,

but you don't know and you need to find out. Yeah. But if you waste too much time, the core, I eat the world, so don't. Yeah, and we don't warn you about it.

So sorry. That timeline, by the way, is cruel and hidden and cruel. Yes. Yeah. But if you think about games of that time, like the Sierra Games,

you step wrong by one pixel and you're dead. I was a very game hardcore. We missed one object in the beginning. That was what killed me in Space Quest. I think I forgot that piece of broken glass from your skate pod in the very beginning that you need later. Oh, so that's what you save the world with. Yeah, for sure. Or your random stogie that's just like thrown away and you're like, I don't need that.

No, you do. I just remember walking into a room where there was a walking into a region on a landscape and there was a gorgon that just killed me instantly. And this message came up, you should be more careful. And I remember swearing. Go to hell, buddy. Yeah. Just like, I God. Yeah.

So that was, that was rough. Speaking of swearing uncontrollably, dude, you have the first battle be against a goddamn ill wrath who zoom in with a cloak ship, jump right next to you and torch your stupid human ship. Come on. It had less than. Still mad. 30 years. Still mad. Well, it was kind of damaged, like, wasn't it?

Yeah, it gets you a chance. But it is intimidating at first. It's kind of a jump scare. Yeah, but your nukes go all over the dead. The human ship sucks so much. That's why you get swept over first. And your bullets go nowhere. Which are a launch of all my missiles and all the other directions except for what the hell is it?

That was, I won't say mistakes were made, but we might do things slightly differently. I mean, I think one of the things I've thought a lot about is training on inertial flight. There was no training. Oh, no. And I think it was 1990. You've learned to play a game by playing the game. We didn't, you read the manual and then you figured it out. Good luck.

And then you got a game, Jeannie. There was a great manual, at least. Dude, one of my favorite manual. I still have it. You can't see behind me, but there's a whole bunch of trash. But there's my Star Control 2 boxes right there. I actually got the first game at a thrift store. And then I heard about the Irkwan Masters.

And I said, you know what? Like I love this little 486 that I'm playing on right now, but I'd rather play on an actual computer. What had happened was actually, on a personal note, in 2003, I had kind of got sick. I got tuberculosis somehow, and I had a breakdown at my work. I was a janitor, so I couldn't do it anymore. I just kind of couldn't work for a year.

So I was stuck at home. I didn't really want to leave. And that was when I started playing Star Control. Like, Erkwan Masters was free, and I downloaded it. And it made such a huge impression on me. Like, when I hear the cold moons, I instantly go back to that summer. And my gradual getting better, like 2004, sorry, 2004 is when I played. That's when I started to get better.

But I just think it's so, so important that you guys put out Recond Masters as a free. free game. Yeah. And not only is it a great game is iconic, like Mass Effect, everything that came after, like, oh, something to you guys. And I love that you did that. And also, like other games, like Cave Story was another super important one. Nikki Yume was another super important one.

So I'm glad that it's still there. And there are people kind of following an example and saying, okay, here's a free game. It's really cool. I want everyone to play it. So just that's an aside. And thank you for that. You're welcome. And we do have to shout out to Chris Nelson.

And his belief in open source and that there was an endless number of people who would love to play the game if they had a shot at it, if they could just get it in their hands. And it has paid back so much in terms of just people telling us that they loved it. But then also, should we ever get our current game done, which we will, it will be because there was this bridge, this 30-year bridge that we needed to. to have with, you know, the open source project. And, you know, a number of the volunteer people that we're working with actually have worked on versions of the game. So we don't have to educate them. And if anything, they have got so many opinions that they've developed over 30 years. Part of it is just finding the one opinion we could work with. Cooler weather has arrived at last, and that means restless nights of sleep.

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So if you aren't 100% satisfied, you'll get a full refund. Upgrade your sleep with Miracle brand. Go to try miracle.com slash retro and use the code retro to claim your free three-piece towel set and save 40% off. Again, that's try miracle.com slash capital R, capital E, capital T, capital R, capital O. Thanks, Miracle Brand for sponsoring this episode. The fact that it's still playable on modern systems is like it's a testament to the amount of work they've put in. And also should stand as an example to all of us like who have been playing retro games forever,

like video games archivists to look at this and say like, it can be done. We can still save the best games of all. are all of these different generations and still be able to play them. You just have to be willing to put in the work for it. And it's phenomenal to, I mean, it's remained one of my favorite games. And it's a game that I can still hand to other people because it exists in a form that they can play. And that's more than I can say for like, I don't know, Chirandia or whatever from like 1993. You know, it's like stuff from like five years ago.

I've got games. I can't play now. And that's not because they had servers that don't exist or PlayStation 1 games. I'm like, yeah, sorry, bud. What do you want me to do about that? The Unholy War, for example. I don't know if you've got the chance to play that, but that is one of the bridging games for us

where it's essentially super melee with monsters. And characters have three powers, and it's more like Star Control 1 translated into a kind of monster fighting game. So, again, sounds familiar. That sounds rad. It was pretty neat. For a PlayStation 1 game, it was pretty neat. And it was super fast.

It was the exact opposite of the other games we've done where they take forever and are incredibly expensive to make. That one went pretty quick. One of the other questions I just wanted to bring up, because you guys have done a great job of covering all the things I wanted to talk about, which is neat. Yeah, thank you for that. One of my favorite bits in story that has just stuck with me over the years,

the origin of the Urquan, with the Korah and the Xerza and the excruciate. and the whole idea of like you've got a psychic monster that's controlling you. How do you do it by just putting extreme pain to yourself? And I was like, holy crap, these guys have turned the horrifying villain of this into not only like a sympathetic hero, but somebody that you're like actively feeling bad for and also just like want these people to win and survive. And I'm still blown away that you've managed to turn these villains

who are obviously here to genocide your entire species and evaporate your planet and it turned them into people that you feel like you feel pity for and you feel also just like when you read like oh and they survived

and they freed and you're like oh you feel like they're justified and just like man they lived they survived it's so cool

but that excruciator bit man that is that is a hell of an origin story thank you so good it is it's hard to have a villain that means something

and not want to make him or her or it appealing. I call it the Buffy rule, which is that every single character needs to be sexy or interesting or you understand and you care for them and they're twisted, but they're so close to being okay. It's very hard to have just a hollow bad guy. you know so when I did the way that those of us who talk to the characters in our heads you just you can't just put up a flat mask of them because you've you've talked to them you know you know there's there's and I remember having this conversation with Fred which is what is their reason why why do they you know it takes so much energy to travel between the stars why would you do this and I remember there's two things running in my head one was gardening is weird And because I was gardening at the time. And gardening is weird. Gardening is like, hey there, world. I know what's best. And let me in here. And then I'm going to kill you. But because you're a bad plant and you're a good plant. And the plants are like, what? I just exist in dude. So that was part of it. It was this idea of crazy gardeners. But then in my family, there had been someone going through sort of realizing a lot of trauma had occurred early in her life. And it had really. affected her and and how she behaved now and things that seemed really confusing became clearer

when you understood the trauma and you know what and it's not something that's easy to get over there's no sort of thing you just snap your fingers and everything's okay so for me that was the power behind it was like oh I actually have seen this this is this is something that in a narrative makes sense because it's real in the real world and you know whether it's PTSD from Vietnam or you know abuse it's it's there so it was sort of those two things mixed together and I love how in retrospect when I go back now and read them like because our saw are so officious and sort of like cold like you were saying and then you go talk to the guys who you know are just going to kill you and they're much more relaxed like oh they're very chill well

they know where they live in the universe right exactly and they don't yeah they have exactly zero fucks about what they're doing. It doesn't matter. And they've been through this and it's satisfying because you get the bones. You get the bones. And the nature is what it is. It's like the green ones are sitting there going like, we need to try to control everything. We need to have this material world. And they're unsatisfied. They're trying to dominate this universe because they don't know how else to do it. And the Korah have given themselves to just reality. And they're like, look, There's no good, there's no evil, there's no happiness, there's no sorrow, there's me and your destruction. That's the end of the universe.

And they're just going for that nihilism. They're going for that ultimate dissolution. And in a sense, they, which is weird to say for the, you know, genocide, they're the ones who like reached with the nature and they're like, here, there's nothing left for me. I don't care what you want. I'm just going to, I'm happy to be happy or not happy. I'm just going to kill you. And that's where there's actually a line that I love where when you meet the, because. They saw, sorry, the corral, one of the things he can say to them is, please don't attack us.

We're not your enemy. They say, you're right. We have no enemy. You're not our enemy. You're just a spore. You're dirt. You have to just be eliminated. It's all business for them.

Say what you will about the eternal doctrine, but at least it's an ethos. Yeah, right? At least they have, at least they're doing something. Yeah. We're not just flopping in the wind. On the topic of the Denari, I don't know, you must know this, but do you know anything about the hypnote from Futurama supposedly being ghost based on that thing? I don't know if it is at all.

but it cracks me up every time I see that meme as old as it is. Just like, yeah, they lived on, all right. I honestly don't know. I would love to hear that connection at some point. I've obviously nothing but respect for Grainig. So, Matt Grainick, but in fact, I don't know if you've read, what is it, Life, What is this original cartoon with the Bunny Rabbit and the... Oh, Life is Hell?

Life is Hell. There's this one that sticks. in my brain and it's just you're looking down at the bunny rabbit and from a parent perspective at a child and the room is just completely destroyed and clearly the artist spent way too much time thinking through all the horrible things that had happened and the bunny rabbit is just saying calmly mistakes were made he's acknowledging you know it's all okay he's learned his lesson and he's he's willing to say mistakes were made i've used that many times maybe not very effectively. But, you know, when things are really going to hell, just, yep.

I don't know. I'm just thinking about, like, how when you meet the Zerza in front of the Samatra, suddenly, instead of being like, we're here to kill you, they're like, human, you don't know where you're at. You really need to not be here. This is going to be bad for you. Like, I'm just, giving you. Oh, yeah. Like, suddenly they're like, look, man, it's too late. I realize that you're going to like, I don't have time for you. Please save yourself. And I'm like, what the hell? Oh, oh, oh, oh, why at the end of the game did you give, like, so many Yihat and Pekong trips to the, uh, the player to fight against Samatra? Like, I, I mean, I love that because it's super cool.

they're like my favorite trips to use. But I didn't understand why you just chose those two of like the whole fleet. And because like the strat for me would just go in with an empty ship and just win with 35 yihots or whatever. You don't always get them. You only get them if you've done enough for the Civil War. Well, I'm a completionist. I always get that paid off for you then, didn't it? I mean, there's that classic sci-fi cliche of like, you know, all your friendships show up at the end.

your darkest hour or whatever. That plays out really well. But that's like, where's the Spathie or the Outwig or whatever, right? The Spathie are hiding. The Utwig are being depressed. As much as I would love the Spathie, they're not there to help. I'm just saying the Supox deserved more. Yeah, I think they did.

Like, they were totally ignored for the ship. I mean, I feel like the Supok. Did you fly the suploc? Like, I have been trying to fly the Supox lately for the life of me. Greg Hammond was an artist and a designer who was working in an adjacent space, and he did a lot of the artwork for the flagship module sections. And he could fly the supox like nobody's business. So I was totally confident that I could someday.

Oh, no, I can't use that ship at all, man. And he was amazing with it in melee, because we played melee every day for years. And now I go back and think, like, what were we thinking? This is insane. I can't have a lot of fun ship. There are some great ships like that, though. They're so unintuitive. I think the drouge are my favorite,

just because it's easier to propel yourself with the cannon that it is to use the engines. And all you're doing is throwing someone into the fire. Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned one of the things about like moments of horror, which you didn't see coming, I think putting in the commander getting angry at you for killing so many people, they've been just little dots up until this point,

and now someone's actually telling you their people. And I love that scene Like after you sell your dudes to the drudge And you go back to Earth And suddenly your crew cost of way more Nobody wants to be on the crazy guy ship Who wants to be on the fodder ship That old SS fodder, kindling

It's like, excuse me, Captain Do you know you sold people into death? I really wish We were made We learned I really wish though Because I know when you get lost in space you did a cool save mechanic where the malnorme come and be like here's some free fuel or here we'll trade take your ship stuff and get you back to earth so you can live or whatever um i wish that there had been like either you run to the malnorme or the drudge like that would have been sick if the suddenly i'm nowhere the drudge i'm gonna salvage your ship we can save you just got to give us uh some of your friends yep that's a good point that would have been really like i mean it would be probably been really mean but it would be just a cool coin flip you know if you're

tuck in space. Somebody's going to help you. You've got to... That's a good point, yeah. Take the devil's bargain, man. One question I wanted to ask quickly about the RELU, I find them one of the most interesting characters in the whole game because they are kind of the grey men, the stereotypical gray men, but they're not because whereas the gray man like fire in the sky

and other movies like that are absolutely terrifying half the time, they are almost conceded in a really charming way. And I'm wondering, like, why did you, or how did you, think to make that kind of almost fay, gray man? What was the combination going on there? I think not to trivialize it, but one of their descriptions was

space elves. And I think in the first thing, and so I thought that that needed to be carried through. But, so I wanted them, and Greg wrote a bunch of their dialogue, and he's really in a hell. So I think he carried that. But for me, there

was this idea of you're important, you personally the player in the game as well as the player playing the player in the game are special. And these are weirdos. Like they capture cattle. They probe people. They do all kinds of bizarre, kind of weird, funny, elvish, like naughty elf things. But they also have an insight into some of the most dark things in the universe. And they talk about things like they're trying to hide your smell.

They don't want something to find you. And it puts you in this weird situation of there's an alien race. I kind of want nothing to do it because they creep me out, but they're looking out after me, you know? And part of this came from, I don't know if I've even told you this, Fred, but as a little kid, I often thought I wasn't, I was a changeling. Like, you look at your parents and you're like, there's just no way. I've had that gotten. And so for me, it was like, okay, maybe I'm an alien. Maybe I've been switched at some point.

So there was always this sense that maybe someday this is going to be revealed, spaceship's going to show up, and I'm out of here. But so that idea that there were aliens watching out over you personally, and much of what they say sounds like a really good thing. Yes. Why are they, is this like to serve man? am I going to get, in the end, this is going to just devour me, or do I have a destiny that I actually don't want to have? Like, what's an alien destiny? You know, I barely understand what

normal human destiny is. So, so that was part of it. And part of it was just, I could write anything for them, as long as it was funny or spooky or weird or kind of alluding to something that we actually would never have to pay off, but it was interesting. But it was also driven to a certain extent by this guy who worked downstairs at the office supply store, and we had given him the game to test because he had a PC and he was a gamer and wanted

to test it. And he came up and this is one of those interactions with another where what they perceive, you take that richness and you reintegrate it. He said, I really liked your game and he had some other comments. He's like, so about the R.E. Lou, do you believe the stuff

they're saying? They sort of looked at us. And I said, Oh, why do you ask? And he said, because I have been to Roswell. I have personally interviewed the survivors, and it's all true. And I don't remember I put my back out of that. But it was just like, wow. So that was like a realization.

I mean, you do live in Marin, man. What do you want? Yeah, we've got hot tubs and aliens. So anyway, I felt like, okay, this needs to be treated with respect. And so the whole end credit sequence where they start talking about, you know, the camera ever coming in your window at night or something like that, be seeing you, I think they say, that is a direct reward for that person as unusual as that conversation was because they are, you know, there's this whole idea of night terrors and things that actually happen to people where you feel like someone's on your chest, feel like you're paralyzed. And the gray aliens, at least my interpretation of what they actually are is just a modern version of how we understand that phenomenon. It's either an incubus or a sleep paralysis demon. Exactly.

Caveman probably thought it was like, I don't know, a big cave bear on them or something. But that's a human thing that just happens to us. And I think the way we interpret that is fascinating. But yeah, the incubus is not the one I'd choose. So those guys for me are perhaps one of the most powerful psychologically because I both fear and desire to have that connection deep down and always have so that's good that's i like the juxtaposition there of the surface benevolence but with an undercurrent of something sinister and it plays out well as comedy it plays out well as horror and the two just they contrasts great

i was going to say it reminds me of uh you remember uh paul anderson wrote a story called the queen of air and darkness that was like hugo winner back in the 70s yeah i can't remember the story can you tell it me real quick it's it's basically these aliens and colonists, they keep coming across, like, fair folk that have been taking their kids and, like, raising them under the stars and, like, this fairy thing. But they're, like, weird mind-controlling aliens or something. It's like a long-term plan to get the people off the planet. Wow, I wish I could remember that because that sounds right on. That sounds really awesome. I want to read that now. It's a good one. Like, the main character is like an expie for Sherlock Holmes. And he, like, even acknowledges it as like an archetype. It's got some interesting philosophical ideas, but I always think about the R. A. Lou and I go back to that story. Yeah. I'm the High Crusade is like, I, Another story by Paul Anderson started a lot of what I think another Dungeons and Dragons origin story was that particular novel. Oh, I can believe it. Does the Thratus ship smile at you on purpose? I haven't thought about that.

Tell me, if I go look at the drawing, actually. Yeah, if you look at the sprite of the Thratas ship, it's got the two little blue eyes at the top and then the little smiley face. It's like always been one of my favorite things to these big stokey smoking thugs. to sit there and smile cutely at you while they fart fire in your face. I'm going to say yes. Always say yes.

It's funny. My kids used to talk about the expressions on cars as we were driving down the road and for the life of me I couldn't see it. I felt like I had one of those aphasias

of just like I can't see the smiling faces in the back of the cars. My mom used to say that Nissan smile. So, yeah, it's there. So you've been really fantastic guests, and I'm thinking we have to kind of start winding it down, which is why I want to ask you kind of a longer question here.

You guys have been around forever and a day, and you've programmed, like, everything under the sun, basically, and I was actually reading about the paragraph books that you guys worked on, like before even doing regular video games, before I was even conceived or thought of. And I'm thinking, now that you're working on a game now, like, and of course he did a lot for Toys for Bob as well, what's it like to just kind of make that kind of ascension in a trade, like video game making it? It must be like, so is it difficult? Is it enlightening? Is it just, you just kind of take it by stride? Like, how, what's it like for you guys? Just like our career arc, kind of. You know, when we started working together, we just wanted to to make the next. next game. And we kind of have always kept that mentality, but what that's meant over time is that as games have gotten more complicated with more resources, we needed more people to help us make the next game. And that led to us getting larger and large enough to be interesting for Activision to buy. And then towards the end of our Activision career, we weren't really making

anymore. We were more managing people. So it was time for us to leave and start making again. And we had also, I mean, there's always a trade-off of security and freedom between those two. And we had a lot of security with Activision. Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, we did Skylanders, which was sort of objectively the most successful

game of Alavars economically anyway, and also in a certain sense, fun-wise, because we made tons and tons and tons of children really happy. Maybe we drove their parents crazy, but that's all right. But sort of felt like, okay, we've done that. We could try to do that again in the exact same circumstance, but there's also, we sort of brought a lot of people around us, and then we were just there in front of them the whole time. There was no way to, for people to advance into positions, that they were ready to do and I didn't. So it made a lot of sense for us to sort of move on and focus on being individually creative in this time of our lives where we still have our competences and we still, you know, we're not ready to move to Tucson yet. So it just was

the right time in a whole number of ways. And however, I will say it's a real challenge to actually be, to not have a staff to just kind of say, hey, guys, let's try this. and then have 20 people hop on it. So that's a good, humbling and like, remember your position in the universe is sort of objectively, you know, you're a, you need to kind of do this yourself. It is only for you and the people who enjoy it. There's no grand economic scheme that you're satisfying of a large corporation.

And it is wonderful and way less stressful in a lot of ways. And then periodically you think, man, I can really use $10 million. That would really happen in a situation. We could solve a few problems with $10 million. And that's kind of how we thought back then. It's like, you know, we got to make like 300,000 of these toys. And if we save, you know, one paint stroke, that's like hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And so just the scale of our lives for me is exactly matching the scale of like my family. You know, I had kids in the house. I had a wife in the house. Now it's just me in the two-bedroom condo with my collection of Skylanders and and Star Control art. And so it feels appropriate that we're back at this point where we're sort of trying to connect with something that we thought was so important and was, I think, the most beloved project in our lives. I mean, I will say for me, the Aquan Masters and Star Control was my favorite thing I did creatively. And I had a blast doing it and it was hard. And I've met

a lot of great people through it. So I at least have been very blessed to, have a career. This was Plan C for me. Plan A was making Fusion Star Drives, and Plan B was being a field geologist. Turned out really, really allergic to poison oak.

And this is Plan C. So it worked out really well for me. How about you, Fred? In terms of plans? Well, I graduated with a computer science degree at Cal, but I put

while I was going to Cal, I was working at a video game company, and I made a bunch of games that were only sold over in Japan. And then I thought I was supposed to go to the Silicon Valley because that's what computer engineers did back then. And I tried that for a little while. And then I said, why did I stop making games? And that's when I decided, I'm going to do that again and start working with Paul. But I guess I've always been an engineer, so that there was no other plan, really. But making games scratch as a creative itch that sort of the Silicon Valley never did. For sure. No, it's been a great conversation.

Yeah, I was going to say that you can't really anticipate whenever you make anything, like how it's going to touch people or affect them. But I do really want to just thank you for this game in particular, but all of them in general, because they were formed. formative for me. But even Erkwan Masters was like literally one of the first things I ever wrote about in a magazine for a backpage

like free and indie games column that ended up being really good and I did it for like 10 years. So I kind of like, oh, you will, like at the start of my career even, if you want to look at it that way. Thank you. We accept beer and pizza as or that $10 million you were talking about. It would be convenient. If I trip over

$10 million, I'll let you know. It's a second. It's the second. It's the second $10 million we'll talk about the first. I'm sure you've got plans. Voodoo donuts for everybody. Oh, boy. Blue Star is better. Okay.

Yes. Man, thank you so much, by the way. This has been like a lifelong dream come true for me in terms of just, I think you guys are right up there with like Sid Meyer for me in terms of like game designers who I care about deeply. And I really appreciate you giving us this chance to kind of plumb the depths of one of the greatest games I think has ever been made. And I'm looking very, very forward to whenever StarCon 3 comes out. So, or Erkwan 2 or whatever we want to call it. If you have any good

name, send them to us. Is the secrets of the precursors? The post cursors. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Yeah, thank you very much. So I guess that is it for this Pekunk-loving episode of Retronauts. Thank you so much for listening. so much, Fred and Paul, for joining us. Why don't you go ahead and promote a thing, or several things? Sure. Well, we are, in fact, working on a direct sequel to the Erkwan Masters. It'll be called not the Erkwan Masters 2, but an appropriately cool name that we'll determine later. We also have a Patreon page for Pistol Shrimp, which, if you're interested in seeing what we're doing, we actually livestreamed our development a couple of times a week, particularly a guy named

Dan Gerstein on our team does. In the future, there will probably be some sort of funding drive, It might be selling candy bars. I don't know. But we'll be knocking on everybody's door when the time is right. That sounds good to me. Just a little bit of Pekunk trivia. The epithets they hurl in battle are my voiceover. Oh, wow.

And wait, there's more. Fred was really angry at me at the time. And so those are all things he felt about me at that particular moment. All in one take. He got over, I think. Did you feel better after that? I did. I feel better at the time I see someone play the Baccount.

I just die inside. But that's okay. Well, if you think this episode is cool, we have tons more like it. Just visit Retronauts, Patreon at patreon.com forward slash retronauts. There should be enough retro content there to fill a precursor flagship. At least that's what I think. Support us at the $3 level to receive early access to weekly episodes. Support us at the $5 level to get episodes.

a week early, as well as two exclusive episodes a month. Support us at the Magic Number 64 for the opportunity to set the topic of a reptronauts episode once every six months. As of this recording, there's one spot left, so go ahead and snap it up. As for me, I am Nadi Oxford co-hosts the Axel of Blog God RPG podcast. We talk about RPG's old and new, eastern and western, Paul and Fred. It'd actually be great to get you on the show sometime. I don't know if you're JRP fans, but gosh damn, am I ever?

Are you RPG fans? Please say yes. I'll say yes. I dive into games deeply once every, like, blue moon, and then I'm gone for a thousand hours and then I come back. So that's a way to live. Fred doesn't want to hear about this, and I don't want him to know what they are.

But that does happen. Well, if you like us at Blood God Pod, you can support us at patreon.com for us slash Buggodpod. You can follow me on Twitter at Nadia Oxford. Until then, thanks for listening, and don't go around asking straight. to show you their glowing bits. It won't go well. I don't know.

Thank you.