Retronauts - 612: Documenting Game History from Virtual Boy to J-Pop

Episode Date: May 19, 2024

Jeremy Parish speaks to Benj Edwards, Jose Zagat, Mark Flitman, and Brian Clark about their efforts to publish books about a wide swath of game history: A platform analysis of Virtual Boy, a history of games about Japanese rockers, and a career memoir. Head to https://www.squarespace.com/RETRO to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code RETRO. 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

This episode of Retronauts is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-purpose DIY website platform for pros and beginners alike. This week in Retronauts, in the words of the poet in Peart, icy red hurts my head. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish, your host this episode. Revisiting a familiar territory. We haven't been there in a couple of years, but it's always worth revisiting an old favorite topic. And this topic is Virtual Boy, because I wrote the greatest, book ever about Virtual Boy. And we have with me this episode, the gentlemen who have written the second greatest book about Virtual Boy ever. My question for both of you is, first, how dare you? No, we have a familiar person to Retronauts listeners joining this episode, but also a newcomer. So if you could please introduce yourself, a person who has never been on this show before. Hi. Thanks for the welcome. Thanks for the invite. My name

is Jose Zagal. I'm a professor at the University of Utah, or I teach and do research in the division of games. So we have a lot of students who are interested in working in the games industry and learning more about games as a form of culture and also interested in making them. And so that's basically my day job. All right. And of course, the other person here calling in from the great city of Raleigh, North Carolina, just a couple of miles from where I am. That's true. I'm Benj Edwards. I'm currently the AI reporter at Ars Technica, so that's my, and co-author of this awesome new book, which is called Who Wants to Introduce it? I'm open to either one of you.

As you can see, I dress for the occasion. I've got my red and black eyeglasses on. Cool. Can you see in stereo out of those? I can't, actually. My eyes are terrible, which is, of course, why it's ironic that I did a complete retrospective series on Virtual Boy, because I'm terrible. at Seeing Virtual Boy. Yeah, you have, I remember you mentioned that,

a depth perception issue. Yep, good times. Fascinating. Well, the book is called Seeing Red Nintendo's Virtual Boy, and it's obviously by Jose and me, and it's an MIT Press book in the Platform Studies series. So it started, you know, Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, is that how you pronounce their names,

they started that series. in what year was it, maybe 2009, Jose? That's thereabouts, I guess. Something like that with racing the beam about the Atari 2,600. And they turned that into a platform study series, and there have been a number of books, probably at least a dozen about different game platforms. One was about the NES, which was pretty cool and some others. Yeah, I Am Air by Nathan Altis is really one of the great, insightful books about the NES.

So that's actually, you know, between that and Racing the Beam, that's a, that's kind of a, you know, a big weight class to punch into. What made the two of you decide to first, you know, write about Virtual Boy, but also write about Virtual Boy in the context of the Platform Studies series? So I guess I'll have been here because this sort of started with my interest. So when Racing the Beam came out, I was really inspired by that book. I thought, you know, here's finally a book that is not just a history. So I'm all about reading histories and learning about the people behind the platforms and the decisions made and so on. But here's someone, you know, two people actually, because it's not just the end by himself

writing it, writing a book about actually thinking deeply about what does this technology allow to do and what was done with it and why and kind of trying to really examined the relationship between the hardware, the games that came out, and sort of the social and cultural context in which it all happened. And for me, that was really fascinating. I've been a game scholar for many years now. And this felt like a real breakthrough moment in the scholarship in that sense, thinking about the technology and the culture and the games in a sort of cohesive way. I thought, wow, you know, I wonder what's next. You know, what other books would I like to read? And I'm still hoping for an Apple 2-1, though Lane Newnie's book is really good. I do

recommend that one, not a platform studies, but definitely a great book on the Apple 2. And this got me thinking about the virtual boy. And I thought, huh, virtual boy sounds like it would be a really easy, air quotes, book to write because there aren't that many games for it. So you can have a book where you actually look at every single game on the platform. And maybe there's some story to tell there. So I put together a proposal. I sent it off. It was soundly rejected for very good reasons. And this would be kicking around in my head for a while. I worked with an undergrad, then undergrad, at DePaul University. Matt Zakara, and he also got excited with a virtual boy, and we wrote a paper together, an academic

paper. And so I'd always been in the back of mind, this idea of, well, let's look at this platform, which is so maligned. I didn't really know much about it in the sense of why it was maligned, and this, air quote, bad idea of looking at all the games for it. And so over the years, I sort of slowly chipped away at this book project. I put together another proposal. Ian kept on Houndee being saying, hey, when's the new proposal coming in? Come on, we're waiting. And I said, yes, yes, I'm working on it when I was maybe yes, maybe no, on and off. Eventually, I was able to put together a much better proposal.

It's kind of really looking at what was interesting about the virtual boy, which what is most interesting is not the fact only has to undo games. What's most interesting is not the fact that it was canceled pretty quickly by Nintendo. There's plenty of stories of platforms that just bombed and didn't have a lot of games. what was interesting about it was what kind of a device it was. And I don't mean just Sassario, I mean the kind of entertainment experiences it was trying to provide

what the intention was. And also there's a story of the creator, right? Gunpei Yukoi, sort of the mastermind behind it, very famous designer, a very important figure at Nintendo, and the fact that he had a strong role

behind that too. A lot of me to sort of figure out that there's more going on here that led to a better proposal. But I realized partway through the project that I was having trouble making sort of headway on this. And I thought, well, I really need to bring someone on board to help me out.

Hopefully someone who can play to my weaknesses so that we can sort of create a combo team that will actually result in a much better book. And that's where Benj came into the picture. I'm the academic. And so I have the dry, dusty, you know, sort of theoretical, you know, perhaps boring for some people take on it. And Bej is, you know, the reporter, the person who, speaks to a broader audience, knows this history of games really well. And I think that's what

allowed us to put together a book that I think fits nicely in the Platform Study series. And hopefully, we'll see how this goes. It bridges sort of the academic and the fan and the general public divide, as it were. And that's what we're hoping the book will do. We hope it'll find an audience outside of academia, as well as one within. So how did you end up landing on binge exactly? Benj, I don't know if that's something you can speak to or if Jose wants to talk about that. Jose, I mean, this is great vanity for me. Let him talk about it.

Vanity listening. So I asked around different people and said, well, who's a good sort of game historian who's also sort of on the journalism site, who might be interested in this? And I went down a list of people who might be interested in this kind of project. Benj had written an article already for a fast company

on the virtual way. And he had done a really interesting work there, interviewing some of the people behind the original technology that Nintendo eventually called them. I might have been a Twitter DM or something like that, but he said, hey, I'm working on this thing. This is my name. It's who I am. I'm not some random crackpot out of the boonies of Noorland. What do you think? And I'll let Bench complete the story from there. Yeah, I said, no way, Jose. Just kidding. I didn't say that. I, you know, I thought it was a very interesting idea.

Like, you know, obviously the article in 2015 for Fast Company was very important for me personally in my career as just, you know, breaking new information about the virtual boy. I was trying to definitively answer, like, what the hell happened with this console? Like, why did it exist? You know, how did this come to pass, you know? And so I went on, like, just writing that article was probably like an eight-month journey or something where I did a lot of research. I put a lot of my own money into funding translations of interviews and, you know, with some, a Japanese source and maybe another one and transcriptions and things like that. And it just, you know, it ended up a nice marriage between the U.S. side and reflection technology that developed the scanned linear array. which is the basic component of the Virtual Boy's displays,

and the Japanese side, through Gunpei Yo-Koi's interest in it and how they developed it from that technology they licensed from the American company. And prior to that, I think someone had written an article about the reflection side that I didn't really know much about, but no one had really gotten much into the Japanese side. And the belief at the time I wrote the article was that Gunpei Yokoi retired in shame from Nintendo for the failure of the virtual boy. And luckily, I found out that that was not the case.

In fact, he went on and developed the Game Boy Pocket, and then he had been planning to retire anyway, and it just happened to be one of his last couple projects there. So that felt like a good redemption for Gunpei Yokoy, too, who had had sort of this curse on his name. And so, yeah, it was great. So when it came to the point of, you know, I've been thinking about writing a book about anything,

at all for the last, I don't know, 15 years. Just, there's a lot of material to draw from or whatever knowledge. And when it came to like, what's the coolest book you could possibly write about, like, that's really interesting and weird. And, you know, like, I love oddities. I used to write an oddities series for Technologizer about all the weirdest things about different platforms. And Virtual Voie is a weird platform.

And it's always interested me for that. And I'm like, man, you could, you couldn't pick a better book. to have just like a, you know, like on your resume as like having written a book about the virtual boy, because it's just such a cool, weird thing. Like, you can't go wrong. That's the way I figured. So, plus Jose, he, you know, he ended up doing most of the work anyway. It's a very academic book. And I wrote kind of the meat of maybe a couple chapters. And I also collaborated on all the chapters with him. And I wrote a big appendix set the back with the, with all that studies all the games.

And it was, you know, relatively easy. We still put in a couple of years' work on it. But, you know, Jose carried most of the weight, and he did a really great job. How long was the collaboration? Like, how long was this collaborative element of the book in the works? When did you guys get together and start? It's probably 2021 when you approached me, right? Something like that.

I'm trying to think. Was this in the before times or in the... It was during COVID. I mean, like, the era, it wasn't 2020, I don't think. I think it was 2021, and we set up meetings. We were meeting like every week at one point, I can't remember. And then meeting weekly for like six months, I don't know. And then we met like once a month after that for a while.

And then so the process was like Jose would mostly write the bulk of a chapter and I would edit it or add and we discuss it. I think first we were discussing what every chapter would be. And then, so we kind of came to an agreement about what is, what do we really think about the virtual boy? Like, what, how do we consider this? Is it virtual reality? Is it, you know, whatever? And we had to come to these sort of joint conclusions that Jose fed into his, his work.

And then, you know, I wrote a couple of chapters and he added a lot of stuff to him. And it was a nice, it feels like a good collaboration. Yeah, I think in collaborations, it's, it's a dangerous. you to think of it like, well, I did 50% of the work and the person did 50% of the work in terms of like hours put in, when actually a lot of the work is sort of intellectual, right? Sure, maybe I wrote more words, but we would have these meetings and I would say something and then Benj would push back and say, well, that doesn't quite make sense for these reasons and we'd go back to the doorboard.

So that's how everything gets refined and improved. Or Benj would have an idea. So, well, how do you thought about this side or this angle? And I would say, well, I hadn't really considered that. But I think I know some places to go to back that up or to support that or to investigate further. So it really is about sort of the intellectual work as for me that's a more important thing than the like how many words were typed out by someone or other. The timeline I think is also a little bit. I just want to clarify for because the non-academic audience that academic

books take a long time because the editorial process is also quite a bit longer. So once we finished writing the book, the manuscript is done, we send it off to the publisher and then the publisher sends it out to a bunch of anonymous reviewers who are other academics. And I'll read the book and they'll give comments and feedback and ask for changes and so on. So then, you know, that takes a couple of months and then those come back and then we have a couple of months to implement those changes and so on. So the overall process, publishing process is a bit longer perhaps than a typical book where maybe you're just dealing with an editor or and then, you know, because of this review process in the middle. So yes, we spent a lot

time working on it, but I don't want to scare people. I thought, oh my God, this was like five years worth of works, like, yes, but, you know, stretched out. So it sounds like the book was in The Works for a while, and about the time you guys started working together is about when I published my own Virtual Boy Works book. Was that annoying to you, I have to ask, that you had this project that you'd been kind of gestating for so long, and then someone comes out and is, you know, with a book that's pretty comprehensive in terms of the virtual boy library? That's a really good question.

And the honest answer is I was super excited when I heard about your book. And I was disappointed I wasn't able to get my hands on it sooner because I really wanted to get to see it as early as possible. I think I put in for the special edition with like the glasses and all the other nonsense. And that version got delayed. And so I'm sitting here waiting for, oh, where's my book? And people, there's a discord for the virtual boy community. And they were like, I got my copy. I was like, dang it.

Like, where's mine? Yeah, I got mine way before you, Jose. And I had to show you what was in it. So, yeah. And I was excited because I thought, okay, if this, if this book does well, and I hope it has, it means that there is interest. And it means that maybe there is a follow-up interest in our book. I don't see the books as competing in any meaningful way.

I see them really is complimentary. And in some sense, I'm thankful that your book exists because it means we didn't have to do a bunch of things because, you know, you were doing a book and a book already sort of took load off of my shoulders at least. We do have an appendix at the end that Benjrogles goes over all the games in very brief detail. Had your book not existed, that appendix might have had to be a lot bigger and more comprehensive and so on. So I think they really work well together. That was my impression as well, having read, I've read about three quarters of the book at this point. And, yeah, it covers material.

and perspectives that are wildly different from mine and from other coverage I've seen a virtual boy, both online and, you know, and other books. So I don't know if you'd like to talk about that, kind of the, like the mission and the process. You know, what makes your book different than mine? Whereas mine is, you know, really kind of an overview of the system in terms of the chronology of its game releases and really looks at it through the lens of software. You know, how is yours different in your own words? I guess the way I think about it is your book does an excellent job at a lot of the what kind of question.

So what games are for the system and how good were these games? You have a lot of really interesting commentary on the different qualities of the different games as a player from the sort of player experience. But it doesn't go and it goes into a little bit of the how. like there's a fair amount of similar history there but I would say a lot less so on the why kind of questions why does this thing even exist or why was it done in the first place what were the creators trying to even achieve so we try to provide a much deeper context for it

and kind of try to give an overview of some of the cool things about the system in this broader context of entertainment media in this broader context of games I think a lot of games history books focus on the facts like this machine had this many megabits and this many this processor which was this fast

and this game had this many sprites and that stuff is super important really relevant I think what our book does and other books on Platform Studies series too is sort of set back and said well why are we using sprites in the first place like where did that come from

why did it come we know who invented this we know where they were working and what constraints you are under. But how do we kind of tell a broader narrative of everything coming together? I think of the virtual war, I realized that there were lots of interesting narratives kind of woven in together

that speak to games more broadly as well. We have a whole chapter examining, well, this idea of the gimmick, right? And what is a gimmick? What makes something a gimmick? And is a gimmick a good thing or a bad thing? And we sort of look at the virtual boy under the lens,

but we're also saying something broad about just gimmicks and video games in general on how central they are to video game culture in games as a technology as well. My favorite part of the book, well, I'm going to be derailing your question. I do feel like it's your book,

Jeremy, and ours are very complimentary and they don't compete at all in my opinion because our book is very, very academic and it's very, you know, just like everything, Jose said, it considers different angles in a different type of way. And we are very thankful that your game first

because, you know, like you had engaged me to create that gallery in your book before and that had familiarized me more with the games and I create a bunch of screenshots and we used some of the outtakes of the screenshots in our book because I had already taken them and like why do it again but sure anyway it was great but I wanted to say my favorite part of what Jose did in this book is is like you know discovering this lineage of peep boxes that spans back hundreds of years and discovering the layered diorama style

he's like named it that on the virtual boy and just putting the virtual boy in this context of devices you peer into I think that's absolutely fascinating and when he approached me with that idea I said man you're really onto something you need to really follow this down and so that's really I think that's a cool angle Yeah, I agree.

I think, you know, having spent the better part of a year, immersed in the system, writing about it, playing the games, creating videos, I've come away from, you know, what I've read of the book. having learned a lot that I never considered, not only facts about the system, but just, you know, the history behind it and kind of the philosophy behind it. And I have to ask, first, I don't know if you'd like to talk about a few of those things. But secondly, like, how do you develop these thoughts? Are they, you know, kind of informed speculation? Are you doing research and drawing lines, or are you actually kind of picking up threads from things that some of the creators have actually set? So I'd say yes to all of the above. Obviously, a lot of it is sort of playing the games and thinking about them. A lot of it is also looking at other scholarly work in the area and kind of, I'm not sure if it's from Dominic Arsenault's platform study on the Super Nintendo or from Nathan's platform

study on the NS. and maybe both of them they sort of talk about like the marketing site and how the device was sold and so that got me thinking well I wonder how this device was sold how was it presented

we talk about the advertising behind it and what Nintendo was trying to do with that so that became another theme in the book they also talk about the sort of the gimmick thing that idea is also present though not fully developed in the case of NES because for the NES it was more of a

the robot particular was the analysis that Nathan does in his book about the when the NAS was brought to the US they sort of added this

robot to camouflage the fact that it's a game console and as soon as the console took off the robot

disappeared pretty quickly from the scene and so that's basically you're sort of connecting different ideas

and seeing okay well there's a pattern here right this is the same company their same

basic philosophy just some reading up on Gumppe Yokoi I bought a couple of books in Japanese that I then

had translated where they're interviewing Yoko and he talks about his philosophy and design and sort of threads the needle between what he's done with the game and watch and the Game Boy and obviously there you go, well, I guess it's the same thing with the ritual boy. In the scholarly side, there's a whole area of a whole discipline called game studies where

a lot of people are studying and looking at games seriously. But you can also look at sort of media archaeology, people looking at old forms of entertainment, old forms of media, and that are going to be thinking, hmm, well, there is something to us, like what, serioscopy, when did serioscopy start? How has it become to be developed? as a technology. So I'm starting to read other scholars and things they've talked about. So it really is a process of learning and reading and studying and researching and then trying to see if there are dots that need to be connected or not. And that's where bouncing ideas

off a bench and Benj giving feedback was a big part of that process. I say, well, I just saw this article about this thing. And then it says, oh yeah, and Benj was saying, well, this connects to this other thing. I thought about that line on. No, I hadn't. So that really is the process of trying to form a coherent line of a thought. In our case, multiple. Each chapter has like a different theme, a different perspective that we're exploring. But figure out which are the ones that make the most sense,

which are the most interesting. I think that's just part of the process of doing the research. Yeah. I think something came to mind, which is that another favorite part of the book that was sort of a discovery that came out of research for me was when we decided to explain how stereoscopy works, like, you know, with your eyes and your brain and stuff like that in a little bit of technical detail, medical almost. And I learned stuff, like, I think I began that section myself, like, by doing research into medical literature and stuff.

And I discovered the horopter thing, which is like this imaginary line where anything passed it. is farther away and anything closer to it looks nearer and you have to have a relative object in the middle to even see depth, which is crazy. And it's funny to me that, like, in developing the system, Nintendo had to figure that stuff out and figure out like some fundamental things about how the human brain perceives depth

so that they could manipulate it and trick you into seeing it the right way. And then inform the developers of games how to make it, make them work that way, you know, and given the limitations of the system with like mostly flat sprites placed at different places

and like how do you move those pieces around or combine them together in a way that's very entertaining, you know, depth-wise. And our book goes into a lot of that, which is really fun. Did you, I haven't, like I said, finished the book yet. Did you get into

sort of the modern trend of HD-2D games that we've seen like Octopath Traveler and that sort of thing where it kind of creates, you know, the idea of it's not true 3D visualization, but it uses that sort of depth of field to kind of create a sense of, you know, boge and sort of like you're playing a game filled with miniatures in a tiny little stage. Because I feel like that's sort of accomplishing with just standard technology, what Virtual Boy attempted to do with dedicated technology.

It's interesting. I think that, and I think there's also similar concepts that tilt-shift photography stuff, right, where you get these. Yeah, tilt-shift, where you get these pictures that look like little models. I hadn't thought about that when we're working about, I'm not sure that that was quite in vogue yet. It might not have come out yet when we were working out. I don't remember what year came up. But it would be a great addition for a second edition of the book, basically, to incorporate that. Because I think it fits nicely with a theme, which is, like, over human history,

we've always had this interest in looking at things differently and then sort of altering our visual perception. And I think that tilt-shift photographer stuff, I think aligns perfectly with that, you know, make a thing that looks like a little toy when it isn't quite a toy. So, yeah, I think that's a really good insight. And we do not make that connection in the book, so we don't end on that either. But it definitely fits in with, I mean, I think that will always be a thing in video games, right? Is sort of altering people's perception of what's on the screen and playing around with that in cool in different ways, for sure. Oh, yeah, I thought of something.

There's another thing for the second edition, Jose, which is Super Mario Wonder. As soon as I played Super Mario Wonder and saw that Mario goes into like a pipe or something and comes out in the background on two different layers, just like Virtual Boy Wario Land, I immediately messaged Jose and were like, wow, this is amazing. It's just like Worryland. Because we used that as an example of using the technology in the gaming, you know, like showing the depth. And it's fun that Nintendo's finally come back to that idea. Yeah, it's interesting because other developers have kind of run with that idea,

usually in portable games. But I know Shante Risky's Revenge had that element where you could go from the foreground into the background and then

once the 3DS came out, what's the name of the company? I just totally blanked on it. The Jules Watson's company created a sort of little compact Metroidvania called Zeodrifter and it uses

the 3DS's kind of visual staging to do exactly that where you kind of disappear into the distance and you're like this little guy running around in the background, doing all the stuff you do in the foreground, but it's just small, tiny. So, yeah, it is interesting that it's taken this long for Nintendo to pull that back in because I can't think of an example of a 2D Nintendo developed game

that made use of that Warioland feature while everyone else was out there saying, oh, that's a cool idea, let's borrow that. The closest thing I remember, which is really not the same thing, is like in Minish Cap, when you go through a tube and you become tiny. You don't, it's not foreground background, but somehow that reminds me of it. Yeah, that's more honey I shrunk the kids. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I guess to be fair, there's the, and we talk about this in the book,

one of the Mario games where you're on these panels that you can flip and now you're up on the other side. So it does have that foreground background, but the foreground background are really close together. So it's almost there in a way. I'd love to see Super Mario World like done in a virtual voice style, you know, like play it out with the layers and with depth like that you see. That would be fun. Hey, da-da-de-la-law-ha-pa-la-be-la-be-la-tina-pa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

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get things rolling at Squarespace.com. Head over now to give it a spin with a free trial. And once you're ready to launch, go to www.squarespace.com slash retro to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace.com slash retro. Let's bring back the internet, one website at a time. Well, one of the things I didn't realize, you know, even after playing all the way through Wario Land on Virtual Boy, is just the amount of depth and detail that was put into constructing the graphics. Like, I just kind of see those as, oh, yeah, it's got a Wario Sprite. But you guys went into a lot of depth about just how complex the character sprites and elements like that are.

and how there's all these independently functional elements on separate layers that it's done so subtly you don't even really notice. Like, how did you even kind of come to that realization? Because it's not something that I had seen, you know, as I played. I think this is a place where we have to recognize and shout out and express our admiration and thanks to the virtual boy fan community. this has been the goldmine for a lot of the information that we talked about in the book and there's different people that have gone into the ROMs and unpacked them and trying to find the sprites for certain characters and they realize, wait a minute, there is no single sprite, what is happening?

And then thanks to the fans who put together, emulators can basically figure out, okay, how is this sprite actually working? How is this picture that I'm seeing on the emulator window running around? Where are the graphical parts for coming together and how they're being assembled? So a lot of our analysis is basically, we're basically saying, look, here's what someone else found, and we're just kind of explained in a simplified way. So I don't want to take any credit for those insights. Those insights come from the fan committee, and we do acknowledge them in the book. And sometimes just a username, that's all we have to go on.

Yes, I saw some interesting. Citations. Pizza roll something or another. Yeah. Yeah, that was like, that's definitely someone on the internet that, They don't know their actual identity. There's a virtual boy discord that has a lot of great people in it who are very helpful. Like the guy named Guy Perfect was helped me with a lot of technical stuff when I started to explain how the, like how the hell does the virtual boy do different colors like shades of red and like what are the limitations of that?

There was nothing written down on the internet or anywhere in any documentation that explained that. And so he, being someone who has developed some homebrew stuff himself, explained the limitations and how there's a certain number of shades. And some of them, you can't even perceive the difference between them. So there's no fixed number of colors you can quantify, which is crazy. It's kind of like how the NES doesn't have an actual palette. It's just how does your television display the graphics? Those are the colors for the NES.

I love that. I love that about video games and everything else. when you have something that can't be quantified and it's so subjective because it really pisses some people off who love specs and stats and stuff but it shows how messy the world is and how analog we really are and everything digital is just an abstraction of analog technology underneath anyway yeah we even sent some of the chapters drafts of the chapters to members of the community just to make sure that we weren't sort of totally off base with some things

we were saying for some of the technical details of the hardware especially It's like, hey, we're explaining this works this way. Does that track? And then we get feedback. So actually, technically, you know, this is happening. Something's happening. So that we're invaluable, not only a source of information, but also as a source of sort of verification to make sure that we weren't just, you know, misinterpreting or misunderstanding or

misexplaining a bunch of things. That's much better than my approach, which is to try to come to an understanding of things based on what I read and watch and then process that and present it and then wait for people to come into the YouTube comments and say, no, that's not right. I mean, there is, you know, I guess it's community vetting, but it's a less responsible approach than you took. But yeah, that is a, like the visual element of, you know, the degrees of tones is something that I wasn't able to capture in my book because I was capturing, you know, an RGB output, basically tapping the video feed before it reached the lenses of the virtual boy headset because it's really it's it's really

difficult to capture virtual boy images from the lens i mean i i did my damnedest and i got a few okay photographs with a macro lens but even those were they were they was tough so you know i basically captured what looked like extremely chunky high resolution game boy graphics and in grayscale, which is, you know, a part of the process, but it's not how the virtual boy actually output its images to the human eye when you look at it through the screen. But, yeah, you just can't present those. What is it, 128 different intensities for each shade or something like that? I can't remember.

I know there's like some, I just reread that chapter last night, so I should remember this. But, yeah, I remember something like 127 or 128. but there are more potential ones and that's sort of, I think that was like the bounds of what's potentially perceivable. And the palette is four, it's four shades and one of them is always black or transparent and one of them is like the most intense.

And the other two, they're all related because one of the colors is like a sum of the other two. And so it's just sort of messy. Like it's all linked together. But the whole display thing, how the display works and how they figured out how to display a stable image is amazing to me because, you know, I just recalled some of that

because I was just reading it again. You know, it's been a couple of years since we wrote it, but I was refreshing in my mind and refreshing my mind. And there's like an angular velocity thing because there's a mirror pivoting on a stick, basically, back and forth, and it's reflecting the light to paint it into your retinas, basically. And because of the angular velocity or something like that and the duration of when these LED

things are lit, the pixels would not all be square, like, if you just did, if you didn't adjust it. So they have to adjust, you know, the duration of how each one is lit, depending on where it is in the grid, to make them all appear square. And since LEDs are on or off and there's, there was no, I don't, they don't deal intensity in terms of an analog voltage. They have just how long they pulse them on and off to deal with the intensity. So there's all these calculations going on all the time just to paint this image. And it's just incredible, like the detail. And all the work put into

developing it and the work Nintendo did to take the technology reflection made and turn it into a game console. And then Wario Land is definitely the most complex game with the most detail into it. Like you said, with the, there's some of the sprites are, you know, I'll explain, if you haven't read the book, you know, one of the ways the virtual boy can display depth is you give it a sprite and you give it like a Z index that basically controls the depth of how you perceive it. And then there, so it's like one sprite and it automatically adjusts.

how far away it looks. And then there's another way of doing it, which is having two graphics for one sprite that are just always, you know, have that difference built into the pixels. And so, like, there's an example in the book of one of the blocks has a little smiley face or something that's, you know, slightly off.

So it just adds just a little bit more depth to that. Instead of just being one flat sprite that's in one spot, there's another thing popping out a little bit from it, the face is popping off of it. And there's, I think we mentioned, I think, was it, Wario's eyeball is a little bit weird or something like that. So there's a, it's just incredible the amount of work they put into it. And I wish that Nintendo had, you know, if this had been a more viable platform,

and, you know, I'd love to see what really creative and well-funded game developers could do with this thing, you know. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and it's a pity. Nintendo has never revisited the system. My understanding from talking to people who have the inside track with, you know, people at Nintendo. is that the company really sees Virtual Boy as a failure. And it did sort of flirt with the history of Virtual Boy a little bit when it first launched 3DS.

But I think once 3DS kind of found its own footing, they backed away from that for the most part. And so they've really sort of just kind of... I think... They prefer to just put the kibosh on it. I, you know, I hate the fact that they think of it as a failure. And my article in 2015 was written to Nintendo. like half of it is aimed at Nintendo like look at what you've done your legacy is nothing to be ashamed of

this is cool and so I was purposely thinking about the audience of people in Nintendo reading this I sent it to Reggie Fizema after I wrote it and probably asked him to interview for it or something because I actually asked him can I talk to some of these people who worked on the virtual boy one of them worked for Nintendo America and they put me through and the person wasn't interested in talking or something like that. So that didn't come to pass. But I did want to send that message to Nintendo to look at this, like embrace this part of your legacy because it's something to be proud of that you took this risk, did something innovative and interesting. And I think it's, there's no shame in it. And we found a way to recontextualize it that quote unquote failure. And it was very key in this, this quote we found from Shigeru Miyamoto, where in one of the Iwata asks, interviews, they were talking about the virtual boy in the context of developing the 3DS, I think. And Shigeru Miyamoto says something like, well, you know, it sold 770,000 consoles, which is a horrible failure for a Nintendo console, which would sell tens of millions or more, whatever.

But if we had marketed it as a toy, you know, like a stereoscopic toy, it would have been a success. So it's just all based on the context of how you look at. it. And we, I think we examine, you know, Nintendo's marketing failure of how they position this thing, you know, to fail, basically, because there's two things. Virtual and Boy are both bad words here because virtual links it to virtual reality, which it's not. The Boy links it to the Game Boy lineage, which it's not. I mean, you're putting, the Game Boy is like hundreds of millions of units, like one of the most successful portable gaming platforms ever. So you're positioning this thing as like maybe a successor to the Game Boy or a compliment

or something like that, which it's really, it's a fairly poor portable machine because it's linked to a table stand and you can't strap it on your face. And it's also compromised because they thought of it as a portable machine first and then because of liability issues, they had to scale it back and take it off your face and things like that. And it was too late to give it more power that you could, you know, if you knew it was going to be on a table and you could give it more power or something, it could have had a better chip set and maybe done some better like polygons, something like that.

But so it was just this weird compromise and it would have been a perfect gimmick toy instead of, you know, like the Nintendo, a new Nintendo gaming platform, I think. I think it'll still go down in history as a bigger success than Applevision Pro. Do you think so? I do think so. But no, actually, I was about to talk about the marketing and how, you know, the name of the system itself ties it to virtual reality and Game Boy. But you already did that. Yeah, sorry.

No, no, it's great. That's one of the things that jumped out to me reading through the book is, like, you guys did a really great job of sort of pulling those. components apart in saying, you know, like, here's kind of the perception, here's the history of the things that Virtual Boy seemed to tie into, at least based on its name and its marketing, but that it's really not a part of, like that's not really relevant to what the system was. That's what makes the system so weird and interesting. And so Jose discovered that the developers honed in on this style, the layered diorama,

because of what they had to work with, you know, which it wouldn't happen any other way. If it was like more powerful, it would have had, you probably would have had like a Super Mario World or a Doom or something on there. I mean, Super Mario 64 type game, sorry. Or, and

if it were virtual reality, and you could look around, you know, you wouldn't be stuck with this viewpoint, viewpoint of one game in a certain way. And they thought of, let's make it like you're looking at a play on a stage or in through a peep box or something, you know, because you're stuck

looking at this thing. And the, you know, it is related to virtual reality in the sense that it is stereoscopic. That's the only way I'd say, you know, so in the lineage of stereoscopic devices, it's somewhere in there because VR headsets use stereoscopy, but they're not the same because there's no head tracking and you're not like immersing yourself into a virtual space necessarily. And I don't know. I'm just going on. Jose, what do you want to say about this?

I think it's, I can't say that Nintendo, I think Nintendo was in a really tough spot, right? They were a tough spot because they were late to the game with the sort of next main console, right? So the N64 was, air quotes, just around the corner for too long, right? PlayStation had just come out and was sort of taking off. and being wildly successful.

And so they've got this other device that they're trying to get out there and they're kind of spinning too many plates as a way I think about it. So they put enough effort into the ritual boy to get it out there. I think the marketing team did, like all things considered

did a really good job in the sense of, well, how do we explain this device? If we say it's 3D, people can imagine it's 3D like polygons, but that's not what we're doing here, right? That's 3D as a buzzword was hot at that time. It was a really hot buzzword. people talk about 3D all of the place and everything you'd add something you'd add 3D to any game that meant to like no it was like the game of the future um virtual like all these virtual the virtual the virtual fighting games for example in or hot and arcades had these early you know polygon characters that look terrible but were cool just because they were polygons right not not sprites um and so they have this device which is stereoscopic but it's basically sprite based and so you kind of suck well how do we explain this in such a way that people who are out there will both get

get excited and understand what it is. And so they hit on this campaign, which I think was a smart idea, right? And as far as we know from the press releases we looked at and so on, it was successful in getting the word out. It's just that people weren't super excited about the device in the end, right? So they ran this marketing campaign with Blockbuster. We could go to Blockbuster and rent a virtual boy for the weekend. And if you think about this context, imagine that, you know, PlayStation 5 is announced and

If you're not sure you want to buy it, you can go to your local Target or your best buy and rent one for the weekend. That's something that would be inconceivable nowadays, right? For any sort of mainline console that you can actually try it first for a couple of days before committing to buying it, just makes, is it a completely alien idea? And yet, Nintendo's said, yeah, we're going to do this with a virtual war because it's such a different device that we really think people need to try it so they understand it. So in that sense, you know, they were really doing their best, I think.

And yes, the name is unfortunate, and perhaps the marketing team was like, well, that's the name it is. We're stuck with it. But you never know. I mean, it's also one of those, I remember when Nintendo, when the Nintendo Wii was announced. And people were like, that's the dumbest name ever. Like, who calls their console the Wii? Like, and all kinds of memes and jokes about that. And yet somehow it went on to, you know, sell Trellions with, again, a really smart marketing campaign, which should emphasize not what was happening on the screen, but what was happening in the living room for the case of the Wii.

And so they were trying to do the same thing. Like they had earlier tried to do the same thing with a virtual boy. So I think that's where our analysis of like what was going on in games and technology and entertainment media in the mid-90s, I think sort of really helps kind of illustrate the tight spot that Nintendo was in with this particular device, right? Because everything was up in the air that time. People did not know what the future was going to be in terms of entertainment. Is it going to be the internet? Yes. Is it going to be multimedia?

Yes. Is it going to be 3D? Yes. Is it going to be all these things? Is one of these going to win? When is it's going to die? don't know. I think we made a list of all the consoles, all the major consoles that came out within three years of the virtual boy. And it wasn't three consoles like we think of nowadays

of like, oh, there's three companies, three consoles. It was like eight or ten consoles. And most of those like disappeared, right? And that's a kind of sign of how unstable, uncertain what the future was at that, going to be like at that moment of time. Things are moving so fast and in so many different directions. It sort of breaks a narrative of, oh, everything is a console generation where maybe it's just more, more megabytes, more graphics, more color, faster passes, and so on, right? It kind of really illustrates the fact that no, things aren't set in stone or predetermined in that way.

And then the ritual boy could have been a hit, right? It could have been a huge hit. And then all of a sudden, there's an entire new category of games. There's portables and consoles and there's virtual boys, you know, like virtual with clones and then maybe it would turn into like some new genre of entertainment. Now, nowadays we have VR. VR was hot then, too. VR could have been the future.

And all the other consoles could have died. It could have been VR. right so i don't know i mean it's always easy to armchair and go like well they should have done this they should have done that or these are like issues of i think we highlight all the issues and concerns but i think it's fair to say well you just made a mistake and this is what you should have done instead because really at that moment of time you've sort of travel back and think of the stuff you know and the stuff you didn't know back then like i don't know that they could have done that much better other than yeah keep on funding it for a while and

hopefully nintendo 64 will come out just right and that's That's the kind of stuff we don't really know for sure what what was going on inside Nintendo at that time. What were they thinking? Where were they feeling the squeeze in terms of their own budget and their time and so on? Yeah, it's interesting, you know, talking about the layered diorama and everything. There was really only one Virtual Boy game that presented 3D in the way that we think of it now, which was Red Alarm, which used wireframes. Yeah. And there's a part of me that wonders if the system had stuck around longer and people had gotten more of a handle on how it worked, I wonder if, you know, the approach that Sega took.

with Saturn might have worked for Virtual Boy, because Saturn doesn't really render its games as polygons. It presents them as sprites that it then distorts and reshapes so that it looks three-dimensional. But it's not the traditional triangular polygons that we think of, the ones that kind of won the technology war. And I wonder if Virtual Boy might have had enough umph to do something along those lines, maybe, you know, fewer trying or fewer, fewer, fewer sprites to be distorted, no texturing and things like that. But I feel like, you know, if you present something that's kind of in the style of Sega Saturn but has that actual 3D visualization, that could have been, I feel like it could have been, you know, a real killer

app for the system where people look in and they see, you know, kind of what they expected from virtual reality. Or if maybe that was just beyond the capabilities of the system, which was the equivalent of God, what console was it? Was it the Bandai Pladia? It was, or PCFX, that's what it was, yeah. So kind of a console that was made for streaming video, more or less,

and Sprite-based graphics. So the wisdom from the fan community, because this is a question that I did ask some of the members of that community directly, is that, yeah, basically, the hardware wasn't there to really do good fast polygons. The architecture, basically, the way this is smart architecture was not good for polygons. And to this day, you know, those fans have been trying to do things and so on.

Maybe some really smart genius person could figure out a cool trick that no one has sought up before, which is definitely a thing that does happen in video games all the time. And there's a lot of that in the Atari 2600, which I learned about from racing the beam. So I don't want to say that it's impossible, but the architecture of the hard where it was definitely not well-suited for polygons and definitely puts a pretty hard ceiling on what it could do. It's just in terms of the speed because at the end of the day, you need to think it's a, you know, the hardware was not cutting edge at that time and it was also having to basically render two displays at the same time. So anything that, you know, double speed means now you have to half the speed on anything.

What I'm actually more curious and I would like to know if the whole, like, how much further could they push the Sprite stuff, right? So the Super Nintendo was doing some really cool stuff by the end of that cycle. And there's other consoles at that time, which were really pushing like Sprite stuff. And I think the added, you know, stereo part might have made for some really interesting, compelling games that we didn't quite get the chance to see because there was enough time for people to wrap their head around the hardware and really push it to its limit. I think that's where wireware kind of shines because it kind of shows it's the same Nintendo people who are basically like, yeah, things we've learned in all these other Mario games. Now we're going like a little incremental steps. Incremental steps, adding more layers and some mutations and some cool stuff like that.

So I think that's where the hardware really does shine in some sense. And that's where it's perhaps most unexplored potential lies, is in kind of really do cool stuff with sprites and stereo. And I think that's, I mean, that's why we talk about the layer diagram is kind of this, like this is what this thing is capable of doing really well and they explored it well. Could they have done a layer diagram plus? What does that plus version look like? That's what I'm curious. to find out. I was just thinking

the other day it would be fun if you could stick some kind of 3D chip in a cartridge and augment its capabilities, processing capabilities with some kind of co-processer,

which probably was not possible in 1995, but you might be able to do it now. And that would be fun. Well, you could then, because that's what the FX chip, right? I mean, that was the Super Nintendo's

a couple of cards that came out with a special chip on the card itself to do the, basically the handle the 3D essentially. So yeah, they could have done that for the virtual boy, but he sort of wondering, wasn't this device supposed to do stereo? Now you added

like S-sharp to do like more stereo or polygon stereo. I don't know. I mean, it's also possible. I mean, that would have been a I mean, there could have been a virtual boy too, right? With double the RAM and maybe double the speed, the process speed that could have pulled it off. Virtual teen.

Well, it would have had to be color to or something. I want to mention something that this, like the misperceptions of the console, it's not just marketing's fault because there's these fundamental limitations of how the technology works, like the fact that the whole thing is red, and it's monochrome. And it's, to this day, people just do not understand why it was red and why it wasn't color. Every time I post something about the virtual boy online, they're like, man, they almost had it if they just had a color display or something. And, you know, to do a color display at that time,

you would have probably had to have, you know, I guess there were some little, some LCDs and stuff that weren't, but, you know, a lot of the big headsets like virtualities headset had little CRTs in it, I'm pretty sure, which made the headset huge and, you know, heavy and power hungry, you know. So as far as having a small portable display at that time

in a consumer product you could sell for 200 bucks, you know, is like, yeah, they used red, LEDs. But still, I, you know, this is one thing I want, I don't know if I mentioned this to you, Jose, while we were developing the book, but I always wondered, I want to look into the psychological effects of actually seeing red. Like red is like a warning, a danger sign, you know, and it's for arousal and anger and everything, you know, and so like this is like maybe the worst color they could have possibly used, you know, for an impression on people. Because maybe if it was just black and white, like a Game Boy, like literally gray, or, you know, white and gray, maybe it wouldn't have been such a, I don't know, maybe people could have looked past it.

But when it's red, it's like, why red? Why not something else? But gray, people, you know, are used to black and white TV, so maybe they could have accepted it. I don't know. Yeah, that's a good point. And unfortunately for them, that's where LED technology sort of wasn't quite there yet for the original way. It was the red LEDs that were the super cheap ones. I think blue LEDs had been invented maybe a couple of years prior to that, so we're definitely not.

They were very expensive. Yeah, they were not at a price point that Nintendo was like, yeah, just like slap a bunch of them in this console. We're good to go. So if the story were like, well, okay, we can pick one LED and we can use, you know, red or green or white, then maybe they would have chosen a different color and the story could be different. And if I'm not mistaken, white LEDs are just red, green, and blue LEDs mixed together. I'm not completely positive about that But at least the early ones were So you would have had to have all three of them

Just to make a white LED at the time So it's even more expensive then Yeah Maybe you could use a tiny little light bulb I don't know But it wouldn't have been in an array And it would have been a lot more Yeah I'm trying to imagine getting like a pair of links

screens or Game Gear screens in there With the ghosting and the Yeah Lag and the expense Yeah the battery consumption Not a good way to go. So, yeah, LED was the way they had to do it. But anyway, Jose, I know you have a hard out and you need to take off.

So we need to wrap here. But thank you both for your time. Please tell us once again where we can find your book, what it's called, and who's selling it. Sure. So the book is called Seeing Red, Nintendo's Virtual Boy, published by MIT Press. You can find it at all major booksellers and retailers, including the, you know, the big ones that I'm reticent to name, but I think y'all know which ones I'm talking about. You can also just go straight to the MIT Press website and I'm sure they have links there as well. All right. I won't do

the Retronauts Outro because this is not long enough to qualify for a full episode. So I'll have another segment at the end. But I would like for both of you to tell us where we can find you and your work online if you choose to make yourself public. Sure. I'm still on Twitter and I still call it Twitter at Jose Zagal, J-O-S-E-Z-A-G-A-L. You can also just Google me. If you come up with someone who's a chemist, that's not me, that's my dad. If it's video games, then that's me. I've got presence in lots of different places.

Google Scholar would be, if you want to read some of my other scholarly work as well. And Benj. Yep, I'm on Twitter slash X as Benj Edwards, and you can find my works currently at either Vintage Computing.com. I just actually posted a few new features there in the last month, which is fascinating for the first time and a long time, and on arstechnica.com. So look me up. And there's some, you know, three or four different virtual boy articles I've written over the years out there. So you can Google those too.

All right. Thank you both for your time. Congratulations on the book. I'm looking forward to finishing it. But it's been, you know, even as someone, like I said, who spent a year immersed in virtual boy and really dug into the system at its library. it's been a learning experience and it's been cool to get these different perspectives on it. So I highly recommend this volume to everyone. Thank you.

Awesome. Thank you very much. Appreciate the invite. We're going to be able to be. This week in Retronauts, we're going to make you read to succeed. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish. week. And with me here, we have a couple of people who are invested in your success. They have written books so that you can read them and you can succeed as the saying goes. These are

both guys that I've worked with under the auspices of my day job at Limited Run Games Press Run. And so this episode is a little self-serving for me, but not really because I've done my part with these books. I helped put them together and worked with the guys to get everything published, and now it's really just to kind of draw some attention to the fine work that they've published and the stories they have to tell, both

of which are, of course, relevant to classic video gaming history. And these guys that I have with me here are kind of come at things from very different directions. One is someone who has worked in the video games industry and spent, you know,

what would you say, like 15 years ish? Plus, yeah. Yeah. working in production throughout the 80s and 90s into the 2000s. And the other guy, as far as I know, you haven't worked in the video games industry, but you've contributed a lot to, in my opinion, to kind of building awareness of esoteric details from the Japanese side of things and bringing things into English that have been very useful for people like me who do a lot of research and writing.

So like I said, two different, angles, two different backgrounds, but both with valuable stories to tell. And I'm happy to say that those stories are enshrined in print so they can never be destroyed. They're there permanently. They're on the permanent records. So first, I'll let you guys introduce yourselves and talk a little bit about your backgrounds. We'll start with you, Mark, since your book came out first. Hi, I'm Mark Flitman. I had a long career in video games. I started in film production in Chicago, went into video games, worked at companies like Minescape, Konami, Acclaim, Atari, Midway, kind of lived on both coasts and in the, in the Chicagoland area, and worked on just a

wide variety of genres and titles and enjoyed it. And now I find out that the generation that was playing my games is old enough to be interested in reliving their childhood and getting a hold of me. And it's been a nice ride. Brian, what about yourself? I'm Brian Clark. I run the site One Million Power.com, which over the years has done a lot of translations on how would put it, I guess like Jeremy said, it's more been video game ephemera Japanese developer

interviews and that sort of things. But as opposed to interviews with people everyone knows like Shigeru Miyamoto, I tend to pick a little bit more obscure people to delve into slightly more niche topics. I've also listened to

Japanese music for quite a few years and there's a little bit more intersection between those two topics than you think, and that's kind of what the book I put out really emphasizes more than anything else. Yeah, so Mark, let's start by talking a little bit about your book. It's not all fun in games. Just, you know, kind of from the top level, how would you give just a quick pitch to someone if you're trying to convince them that they need a copy of this book in their lives. Well, it was kind of a multi-goal endeavor. I wanted to document my career. I started to do that

for my girls so that they'd be able to see what their dad did. And then I started to get more and more detailed. And then I wanted it to be entertaining. I wanted it to be educational so that if somebody either wanted to know details about the video game industry or maybe get into it. I try to have some little tips that I learned along the way because there's always something

you learn at every company that's different. And I wanted to document what I did and make sure that because I knew I was writing a book about video games and toys that there was a lot of pictures

because people that play video games, or love toys, don't necessarily want a book that's just text. They want to be able to see something. We're visually oriented. Exactly. But if you're interested in any of the companies that I mentioned, at Konami, I worked on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Pirates, King's Quest, Carmen San Diego, Mission Impossible, Simpsons, Acclaim was wrestling, Morse Simpsons, Marvel.

I worked on sports titles like NFL Blitz and MLB Slugfest. I worked on anime titles like Dragon Ball Z and Zoids. So, among others, but it's kind of a wide variety, and I know there's a lot of fans of a lot of those titles. So it'd probably be a good read. I try to write it for the common person so that I can explain things in detail if they needed to know. Well, Brian just said that, you know, when he focuses on doing translations of articles and interviews on Japanese developers, he likes to kind of go away from the sort of known public faces of companies and talk to people who are more on the nuts and bolts side of things.

And I feel that's what's really great about your book, is that it's very much about the nuts and bolts. of game production and game development. It's not, you know, like a John Romero or Shigero Miamoto sitting back and saying, like, here's my inspirations and, you know, here's what it was like creating this one game that everyone knows and loves. It was more about, your book is more about, you know, here are the processes, here is what my role was in helping to get these games out the door. Here's how I worked directly with the developers. Here's how I had to deal with company politics and things like that. And it, you know, I haven't really read another book.

And I've read a lot of books about video games that really kind of gets into that side of things and just talks about, you know, some of the more mundane details of making video games. It's, you know, like, I think people have this, this vision of making video games in their heads. It's just like you're always doing super cool stuff and it's just, you know, nonstop pizza. parties, but then you hear about things like, you know, all the crunch that the crunch time people have to commit. And so there's this kind of disparity. And I feel like it's not all fun in games. It's a pretty good job of sort of connecting those dots and saying, like, here is, you know, Mortal Kombat, a game that I was involved in. Here's how I was involved. And here's, you know, kind of what was happening behind the scenes with the team divisions and, you know,

kind of figuring out who would work on this and what the process was for getting it market and so on and so forth. And you just, yeah, you don't really see a lot of that. So it's a really, in my opinion, really valuable kind of document of how video games worked, especially, you know, like 20, 30 years ago. I don't know if they necessarily work the same way now, but it did, you know, kind of fill in some gaps for me, I think. Yeah. Well, and I think the creative process is there's always similarities, no matter what year, what age. Um, market. Marketing changes, of course. I mean, in those days, there wasn't mobile phones,

and now that's a whole huge gaming industry in itself. So things change, but I think the process, the creative process is usually pretty similar. But every company's different, which is something I learned. And I think that was one of the unique things about me thinking, well, maybe people want to hear about this is you go to one company and maybe even you're successful and you think, oh, this is the way they do it everywhere. And then you get to the next company and you go, whoa, this is completely different. So it's a learning process. Yeah, I think that comes out pretty

early in your book, actually, just talking about your time at Minescape where you kind of got your start and then your time at Konami after that. And, you know, just the roles you played and the way those companies were organized is radically different. Like Konami is, it was and still is, very top down from the Japanese home office. And so I feel like people on the U.S. side and the European side just kind of get their marching orders. And, you know, the decisions are sort of issued forth from the Japanese office, whereas Minescape was much more like, hey, here's some people who are working in Australia.

Can you go fly over there and, you know, see what they're up to and just kind of keep that on track. yeah thanks go go do that much it just seemed like my impression at least from your text was that it was much more like you had a lot more autonomy and uh i wouldn't say it was laissez-faire but you know you you were kind of given a lot of trust and um kind of authority to make things happen and i don't think you would have gotten that at a company like konami that's bigger and you know again kind of organized in that top-down approach absolutely Absolutely. And like we said, every company is different. Some companies do give you a lot more leeway or trust. And a claim was one of those companies where there were three producers and each one of us held, handled one third of the company's products. And they just said, you know, if you have like Marvel, you're always going to have a Marvel title you're working on. So if one's done, come up with the next one. What do you want to do it on? what's the subject matter, and you'd just do it, and you'd find the developer.

But one of the big things I was shocked at in my career was the difference between internal and external development teams. And I tried to point that out in the book. I thought it was going to be much easier with an internal team because you're there. You're there every day. You get to see what they're doing, and it's great. External, you have to kind of communicate, visit them, see where they're at. But the one thing I completely forgot about with internal teams is, with external teams, you're in charge of paying them. When they hit their milestone, you pay them. With internal teams, they're salaried.

They don't care. They're going to get paid whether they hit their milestone or do what you ask them. So it was real culture shock when I got into a company that had internal teams, which I was looking forward to. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I don't want people to misunderstand what you're saying when you say that the internal teams don't care. What you mean, if you don't mind me speaking for you, is that they are less concerned about, you know, those milestones and keeping to the schedule than they are. You know, I think, in my experience, talking to people who work on internal development teams, they just want to make something awesome. And they tend not to think about the business side of things as much, whereas, you know, the external studios, that's, you know, that's their paycheck. Well, absolutely. And the internal teams aren't reporting necessarily directly to you. They have a higher up.

They're reporting to the company. And external teams are basically reporting to you. So they want to get done what you need done so that they'll receive their paychecks. So, yeah, it's not that they don't care either team. They both want to make the greatest price. product possible, but it's a little harder, I think for a producer, to manage an internal team because they have many other people to report to. So jumping tracks to Brian for a moment, let's talk about where your book came from and specifically why you wanted to tackle a pretty esoteric topic. What is your book?

Sure. So the book is about video games, mostly retro in nature, because these died off after a certain point, which feature Japanese recording artists. And it is called gameplay harmonies, Japanese recording artists and the video games about them. And I've been listening to and translating lyrics for Japanese pop and rock songs for a long time since 2002. when I was a part of a site called Mognet.net.net, which is still up right now. It hasn't been updated since 2010, but for as long as I'm alive, it will also be alive, frozen there in amber. Which is no small feat. I have lots of sites that I created a long time ago, and they're gone to the way. I also coded the site as well, so every few years I have to go in there and update that to keep it running too, which is a whole lot of fun. But anyway, I kind of like, like solidified my love for Japanese music for years of doing that. And I've always loved video games since even longer than that.

And as though, as I kind of went on in my life with those two things, I sort of discovered how much they intersected way more than you might think. And sort of an overarching point of the book is just how really interconnected a lot of types of Japanese media are. For example, manga will become anime, which will have a theme song, which will serve to promote that artist. The title will be adapted into a video game, and it's not quite circular, but it's almost there. And I feel like when that gets discussed, that the music side of it is not something that comes up a lot, especially in relation to the game side of it. so there were enough titles to support this idea over the years

and I wanted to do something that talked about those and even when you see them covered because it's it's not like I've on earthed any games that no one's ever heard of here right but even when you see them covered there will be in my experience a basic blur of mentioning the artist briefly and then the rest will be all about the game And since my interest is a little more evenly split, I wanted to create something that did both of those halves justice. So someone can really kind of understand the context behind the artists that are being featured in those

and maybe why they were and why they were important in that time period. Yeah, it's really interesting because it feels like Japanese game publishers really ran with that idea. Like here in the U.S., you had Journey Escape and in the U.K. you had a spectrum game based on Frankie goes to Hollywood. But these were just like these weird random outliers, and no one really did anything to follow up on those for a long time. You didn't really see Western recording artists make a contribution to video games until the multimedia era

with like Peter Gabriel Explora 1 and things like that. And that's not really a video game. That's more like, hey, it's me, Peter Gabriel, come fool around in my studio and make your own mixes of my music, which, you know, that's fun, but it's not really video game-ish. And there were Japanese versions of that concept, too, to be fair. But, yeah, especially during kind of like the mid, late 80s, you know, you see a lot of these games. And I think there were a few things that kind of happened simultaneously, like the explosion of idol,

like pop idols there. And also the fact that video games got to a point where they actually could have music, which, you know, before the, like, 1983, 84, you didn't really hear a lot of good music in video games. and it was just kind of little ditties or, you know, like old McDonald or, you know, some sort of like public domain song. So these things all kind of happen simultaneously with the Famicom boom. So I think that really just sort of snowballed into something unique. Absolutely. And some of these record labels, for example, Sony, also having game development or game publishing arms, I'm sure, helped in no small part there too.

because not every early case was, oh, the company who published them is also the company who publishes their albums, but certainly some of them were. Yeah, I mean, like, it's something that I've been writing about recently, just the sort of, the fact that video game music was actually kind of taken seriously in Japan as a, as, you know, like a form of music. as opposed to here where you had, you know, some novelty Pac-Man and Donkey Kong songs in the early 80s

and then it just kind of went away. But you had, like, pioneering artists, like, sorry, it was his name Hosono from... Yellow Magic Orchestra. Doing remixes of soundtracks and, like, releasing those as entire, you know, like, sidelong vinyl albums. I picked up the Super Zevius vinyl a few months ago, and it was just like, I can't believe this...

was like a pioneering video game electronic artist, or not video game, but just a pioneering electronic artist putting together something like this, which is like a dance remix from the 90s in 1984 based on a video game. It's just wild, but I really feel like that kind of thing sparked a sort of cultural movement. I agree. I love that you play that on an episode of Retronauts radio, by the way. I think that was a long time ago, but I was impressed. It's like two or three months, actually. It's like as much of it as you did. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where you have to hear a lot of it and really appreciate the fact that, like, wow, he's really going for it.

There's sampling and all kinds of stuff in there. I think that that definitely started this. And at some point, I had to draw a line because, like, the line between that and what I'm covering is fairly thin. But it would have taken me much longer and been a million more pages if I had also covered, oh, music. who just contributed to video games in some way. So I drew a hard line at, no, the artist themselves must actually be featured in and be a part of this game and not just,

oh, so-and-so wrote the music. You know what? We missed Gack for Final Fantasy. But I, so, yeah, I considered it, but to me that didn't really count because, yes, he was voicing a character, or yes, I assume you're specifically talking about crisis core and dirge of service, where he was like a character

Genesis Rhapsody or whatever that character's name was but like but it wasn't actually here is Gocked it was just that Gocked happened to be voicing this character so I I made an executive decision to throw that one aside so

this kind of gets into licensing and that's something that you worked with a lot Mark really kind of from the beginning with some of your mindscape stuff I don't really have a specific question It's just all It's such a broad topic Because you were involved with so much of it

With so many different partners Right Maybe you could talk a little bit about how that experience evolved Like even with Matt Granning Like when you first started working with him And then the later Simpsons games you worked on You said like there was an appreciable difference In his approach to licensing

Well with Matt Graning You know at the beginning I was at Conan when we were doing Simpsons. And they did the Simpson arcade game, which was pretty successful. And then we did some... Right. And you produced the PC port of that, right? Yeah. And then we did a PC original. And Matt was... We were all new to the gaming industry. And Matt was new to, you know, success and games. And so that was fine. But what was interesting was by the time we were, When I went to a claim, they happened to have the Simpsons license. And so I was working on some more Simpsons titles. And I believe, from what memory serves me, that Matt, his kids had just gotten, I think it was the N64 or the SNESS or one of the Mario games. And, of course, the Mario games are better than anything.

And he saw that. We were at the final stage of a Simpsons title at the time, and he said, I'm not going to approve this. We're like, well, you approved it the whole way. What's? Well, I just saw this game and, you know, you can do much better. Yeah, we probably could, but nobody can do as good as Nintendo. And so things changed with everything, with, you know, the gamers, with the industry, things changed. And game machines and memory capacities and graphics. So you just try and keep up.

Yeah, I feel like it's kind of an unfair comparison to hold up Super Mario World against... Extremely. Really anything else. I mean, that game, that was Nintendo's internal development teams working for two years to develop one game in parallel with developing the hardware that ran it. So it was, you know, like as custom made to do. take advantage of that machine as you could have gotten at launch. Sure. So it's, you know, like, yeah, that's kind of the high watermark that everyone else has to

strive for. But I can also understand why Matt, you know, not being deeply invested in video games, would kind of say, well, you know, I see what can be out there. How come this, this, you know, game that we're developing on this very small time frame with a small team with a small budget can't be as good as what Nintendo's internal developers put together over the space of years. Of course. Like that's, you know, the nuts and bolts, again, doesn't, isn't necessarily something

that people think about and realize when it comes to video games. They just see the end result and say, well, this is good and this isn't. Right. And in the early days, when you had limitations, a lot more limitations than you do now with memory and graphics, the creative teams, we always wanted to do more than you could on the systems. but, you know, you could only do as good as the systems allowed. So, like for a Marvel title, of course we want the characters to be fluid and gorgeous and huge and detailed,

but in the early days of, you know, Nintendo system and the Sega Genesis, you did what you could. Right. Yeah, and even then, you know, I look back at some of the games, Super Nies and Genesis games that did have like super fluid gorgeous animation stuff that was developed by like shiny entertainment and those tend to suffer somewhat in terms of playability because the animation is foregrounded so much you know characters have to go through their complete animation routine before you gain control back over them and that that actually works to the detriment to the game as well so yeah I mean game development is always a balance between many different factors but I feel like especially back in the eight

and 16-bit era. That was especially the case. And so that's, again, kind of coming back to your book, that's what makes it so interesting, is because you talk about just kind of the realities of being the person who is sort of steering these ships and trying to let, you know, people be creative and do what they wanted to do and needed to do, but also saying like, you know, here's the deadline, here's the budget, here's what the licensing partner demands and so on and so forth. That's a lot of different factors for any team to have to keep into mind. Absolutely. And memory was a really big one

because a lot of times on a game you're like, well, we want a really big payoff at the end so that the player will feel real satisfied. But then you go, well, how many players are going to get to the end? And how much memory do we allow for that huge

payoff? Or we want the characters in one of the Marvel titles, Maximum Carnage, we wanted a lot of, it was a huge amount of characters that we could include in the game and we wanted some characters you'd be able to call in

helpers but if we allowed it to be called in at any point in the game then you have to figure out what animations are necessary for that point in the game and it wasn't feasible

you couldn't do it so you had to figure out okay how can we manage this and we had to limit it to certain spots in the game where you could call it them in or in a wrestling title where you have a ton of wrestlers you want to put in, but

you can't. You don't have enough memory. Right. Yeah, you look back at some of the people who really pulled off amazing things on Super NES, like Capcom with Street Fighter Alpha 2 at the end of the Super NES' lifespan. They had to use a special chip that compressed all their data. So when you play that, it actually, it's a cartridge, but it has loading times like a CD because it has to decompress the data. And they still had to drop frames and drop elements that were in other versions of the game.

And it's a miracle of a piece of software that they got that running on, you know, this system from 1990 in 1996, you know, kind of converting this high-level arcade machine experience into something recognizable on the home hardware. But it was still compromised. And those were, you know, those were some of the best people in the business. They, you know, they knew the hardware inside and out. They created the original game. They knew where to make the cuts. They had access to special chips that were only available. to a few developers at the end of the

system's life. And even with all of those things stacked in their favor, they still had to make compromises. Yeah, sure. And then some games could have, you know, a memory chip in there, but it costs more. So as a company, the company's

going well, if we have to charge this much more for the game and pay this much more for the cartridge, is it worth it? Right. And a lot of times they gave you the, you know, thumbs down. Yeah, I remember Rebecca Heinenman was talking about how she developed the game

out of this world for Super Nintendo. And do you know that game very well? Yeah, with the polygons and like it's kind of a movie style animation. And it's amazing that she did that, but they wouldn't give her an advanced chip to run it on. Like it was like the bare bones basic level chip. And she had to figure out how to make this sophisticated, three-year-old. cinematic game run

on the basic super NES chip just because the publisher didn't want to spend an extra $2 for the chip because now it cut into their profit margins or make the game more expensive at retail. So, yeah, developers were making those kinds of compromises and hard choices and just

dealing with publisher restrictions all along. And it's kind of a miracle we ever got good video games. It's, you know, you look at just kind of the compromise and restrictions that were necessary in those eras. And, yeah, it just seems like a lot of people being very stubborn

in saying, I'm going to do something great anyway. Yeah. And remember in the old days, I'm sure both of you remember, that, you know, where you'd have to play a video game and then you'd have to enter in, like, numbers and letters, like, you know, 15 of them. Passwords. Your password for your save.

And so you'd be sitting there with a piece of paper and writing down your codes and... You couldn't take a picture of it with your phone, that's for sure. Exactly. I've been working on some of those games for videos, and I do use my phone. I'm just, like, taking the snapshot. And then you don't have to worry, like, was that a zero or an O?

What did I write down? Was that a T, or was it an F? Oh, no. An I or an L? Those tricky, those tricky ambiguous letters. That was always, you know, you'd sit there and punch in 24 characters and you misinterred one of them, but which one? Right.

Yeah, so it was rough times for everyone. But, again, that was another publisher compromise because battery backups did exist, battery saves, but they raised the price of the cartridge, and publishers said, oh, don't want to do that. And Nintendo would have them, and then the other developers or Matt Grainings would go, why don't you make a game like that?

It's because Nintendo manufactures all their own stuff, and they can do whatever they want. Right. So, Brian, we're kind of still speaking of licensing here and kind of the realities of video game development. Are there any of these games that you covered that you would consider all-time masterpieces, or do you feel like they were created under constraints? I mean, you're dealing with licensing likenesses for artists, licensing music. You have to deal with talent agencies. You have to deal with jazz rack.

Which is an absolute nightmare. Which Jazz Rec is the equivalent of America's ASCAP, and they manage recording rights and licensing for music. So you get all these external factors built in, in addition to the realities of creating a video game. Right. I definitely would say that most of them are what you would think of as a typical license game, full of compromises, full of flaws. but a lot of them at least have something interesting about them and I'd say like if one of them came closest to being an all-time masterpiece like this is maybe the obvious answer if you see a list of them but the Miho Nakayama game Toki-Maki High School

it's what it does in terms of being an adventure game it's certainly not the first to that but it was also kind of Nintendo's entry point to that which snowballed into a lot of things like the Famicom Detective Club games and things like that and it also

involved... It was a collaboration with Square. It was a collaboration with Square though God knows they weren't obviously credited for it. You have to go into like secret credits to see anyone's name who is from Square so they were really trying to hide that but it is a

it is a pretty high production value of, for the game in general. It has actually pretty nice chip tune renderings of a few Miho Nakayama songs. And they really tried to do something with this facial expression

system that the game has. So I would definitely hold that one up as what's the premise of the game? You haven't really explained. Oh, it's true. I haven't. Essentially you are a high school student who is just transferred

into a high school and pop star Miho Nakayama under a very poorly disguised name is also a student there. And you become closer to her and some of the other crazy

students in the high school as you sort of progress through the story and eventually it's revealed to you that she is in fact Miho Nakayama and it spirals into this whole weird story about you being abducted by a rich girl who goes to the same high school and forced to go to her birthday party. And then you, you, you kind of, uh, you kind of part ways with

meho for a while and end up coming back with her in the end when like these agents try to like come and kidnap her or something. Uh, it's, it's like, uh, it's like, uh, it's like, a j drama right there. It's it, yeah, very, very much so. Uh, But it is entertaining, and it is very much an adventure game in that you can make bad decisions and get a game over. But it's also, like, the history of it is almost as interesting as the game itself, to be honest, not just the aspect that Nintendo was involved in, but it also had very heavy ties to the whole architecture that was there around the Famicom Disc System writers at the time. They had a fax service where you could actually bring in your disc, which of course had your game progress saved on it,

and basically upload it to Nintendo and have information written back on it based on the progress that you had made. And there were these ribbons, these different colored ribbons that would write based on the endings that you got because there were a few different endings. and if you had the right number of ribbons you could be entered into contest to win things one of which was like a VHS tape

which I believe you ended up getting an auction win that at an auction to digitize I watched it from Internet Archive for my own research I did not try going after it on auction It wasn't too expensive actually I didn't figure it it might be but yeah that's kind of an example sort of like what Mark was talking about

of Nintendo sort of getting away with a lot that other people couldn't. Like, they, you know, they had that fax system infrastructure that you're talking about built, and so they could take advantage of it. They heavily marketed the thing, you know, in addition to the promotional stuff in the videotape. You know, there was also the element of the actual phone calls. Yes. And that was something, you know, in the Portopia serial murder case a few years before that, like phones factor into the game.

and you call phones in the game to get clues and stuff. But with Mio Nakayama Kokkemeki High School, they actually had, you know, numbers printed in the game and you would call those on your actual phone and get clues and, you know, that kind of makes it difficult to play at this point, I imagine. But I mean, luckily people have figured out what all the messages are over time and documented them. So it's not really a problem if you're reading something that's kind of helping you through the game. But yeah, I would imagine if you really want to go in blind and not read anyone's walkthroughs or hints, it might be a little bit difficult.

By all accounts, those were unsurprisingly pre-recorded messages of Miho Nakayama, too. So, yeah, phone numbers would flash on the screen at various points in the story and with a message to tell you to write it down and presumably call it. Right. Yeah, and the VHS tape is just kind of like a... It's like a day on the town with Miho Natayama. She does a video shoot, talk to little kids, and then goes out and just does fun stuff. I believe she's sitting in front of a TV with a Famicom disc system hooked up to at one point

and just talking about how difficult it is and things like that. Yeah, very promotional material. But yeah, yeah, I feel like that's a pretty unique game. It is. Really within gaming, honestly. It is. The You know,

Uh, uh, and the and the I'm, and uh, uh,

So back to you, Mark, and we were talking about sort of the, you Mark, we were talking about sort of the different roles you play to different companies. I feel like some really great anecdotes show up in your book. I don't know if you want to spoil all of those, but I have to ask, do you have a couple of, maybe like two favorite anecdotes that, anecdotes that showed up in the book, just talking about your experiences and at the game companies? I have my favorites, but I'm curious to know what he's on. Well, I always enjoy the time that I was working on wrestling and I recorded with Bobby Hing.

and was a pretty well-known in the wrestling industry. He was a wrestler early on when he was a young guy, and he was a manager, and he went on to become one of the best-known managers and announcers in wrestling. And when I was a young kid, I went to a wrestling match with a friend around 10 years old, and we saw Bobby Heenan. He was in his 20s probably managing a team. of wrestlers and we went up to him after the match and asked him for his autograph and he said, I don't give autographs, which was really par with the character he played because he plays a heel

and he was just being mean. And then a young lady came up and I remember it like it was yesterday and she said, can I have your autograph? And me and my friend had pencils and paper and everything. She had nothing. He's like, oh, sure. And he went and found some paper and a pen and gave her gave her his autograph and we walked away and we're like, what was that? But, so you know, 25 years later I'm going to do a recording session with him

and I'm in debate whether I should say anything. So I said, I'm going to do it. And then we got in the recording session and I said, you know, we met 25 years ago and you stiffed me for an autograph. And he said, really? And I told him the story and he said, well, that makes sense because

she had, excuse me, she had tits. And I said, oh, okay and he grabbed a legal pad off of the desk we were in the room recording and he wrote to my friend of 25 years keep asking and he drew a pair of breasts and I thought that was kind of fun so that it seems very much in character for it was a wrestler but he ended up being a very nice guy so that was nice and I got to work with a lot of athletes a lot of talented people like Matt graining of the Simpsons Got to go visit. I do remember going once to D.C. in Manhattan. I'd visit Marvel and D.C. a lot because I had both licenses. And I went to D.C. one day, and the salesperson that I was meeting said, hey, Mark, you want to come check out the vault? I'm like, vault. Sure. And he took me into this room in D.C., which had shelves and shelves of D.C. books, hard covers and soft covers. trade paperbacks, and there was an elderly man sitting there that was the security, and the sales guy said, go ahead, take whatever you want. And I was just, like, shocked. And I had ridden the train in that day, so I'm just standing there going, well, how much can I hold? It's like the supermarket sweepstakes. Exactly. Why didn't I bring my suitcase? Yep. And I, and I,

You know, it wasn't about value because I didn't know what anything was worth, but it's just walking around these aisles, seeing all these Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, you mean, you name it, comic books. So that was quite an experience. So my personal favorite anecdote from your book is The Dirty Hairy anecdote, which I think, you know, is interesting because it shows that you had, you know, creative involvement with these games, even though, you know, I think people think of producers as just sort of pushing paper,

and managing budgets. But you got down and had your hands on with the game design. Yeah, well, I got lucky. Sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Right. In the case of the dirty hairy room. Yeah, well, I got lucky. I mean, like I say in the book,

producers' roles change at every company. And I, early on, and I think partially it was, well, it was Konami, and it was a claim. There was some trust, and I had built up some of a reputation, and they allowed me to be in control. But the Dirty Harry, I was new, and it was the first developer I visited. I wasn't even working in the industry. I was a tester. But I was one of the older testers, and they said, can you go to Toronto and work with this

development team, Grey Matter, and help them finish up this game, Dirty Harry. And I said, sure. And I studied film in college, and I was like, Dirty Harry, that's a movie. Awesome. So I went there and, um, We were working on it, and it's a game where you advance through buildings and rooms and all that. And I said to the developer, hey, since there's so many rooms you go into, and people should probably know where they went in the past, and I'm new. I don't know what's going on. He said, why don't we make one room where you go into it, and then you can't get out?

And on the wall we'll just write, ha, ha, ha, ha. And you'll have to start the game over. And I go, okay, and we didn't think much of it. But as I was writing the book, I thought, wait a minute, I remember doing that. And I looked it up, and sure enough, people had written about it that there was this room that you went into and you couldn't get out. But I would never have done that today. But in those days, I mean, I feel like that's very much a product of its time. In the 80s, you had a lot of game developers who would just kind of do stuff like that

because, you know, the rules of how to make a good video game and how you should treat players and what they should expect hadn't really been developed, you know, you know, they hadn't really been established by that point. So, you know, there's a sort of infamous game called The Mystery of Atlantis for the Japanese family computer. And their idea was, with that game, was to make a 99-level game because Super Mario Brothers had 32 levels. so they wanted to make a game that was like three times as good as Super Warrior Brothers. But, you know, not every one of those levels is a masterpiece. And you kind of jump around going to different exits and travel, you know,

instead of going level 1, 2, 3, 4, it's like 1, 2, 11, 7, 33, et cetera, et cetera. And there are multiple exits out of different stages. And there's one stage you can go to that's just a black screen and you appear in mid-air. and you fall and you die. And then you start at that level again and you fall and you die. So if you go there, that's the end of the game. So it's really kind of the same thing. It's basically like, you know, you have to figure out your way through this game.

And there may be some dead ends. There may be some traps. Right. And I feel like, I feel like as players, we had more patience with that sort of thing back when, you know, the rules hadn't been established. So, you know, there was a time that you could get away with that. It was probably during the NES era. I don't think that would have flown super NES, but, you know, the rules were still kind of nebulous at that point.

And programmers would stick in little hidden things. And I'm sure they still do, but there was a time, like you said, in the early 90s when they were doing it a lot and not even telling, let's say, the producer or the company, and it would go out and somebody would find it, but they're cracking down. on that a little more because things change. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you don't know what works and what doesn't work until you try it.

So there was kind of that age of experimentation and figuring out what works. Were there any games where you had, you know, someone tried to slip something in and you had to say, hey, that's not okay? Well, I don't know about trying to slip something in. I mean, Midway was known for hidden features, whether it was characters or tweaks to gameplay. So there was always discussions at Midway

about what was acceptable and what wasn't. And it could even be something silly, like I remember in one of the football games, I wanted, they'd have different modes, big head mode, little head mode, different characters or animals instead of characters, or God knows what, you know. And I wanted like one of the quarterbacks to be a hot dog. I thought that would look really great. This hot dog running down the field and, you know, like a kind of a mascot. And I remember some of the

designers were like, a hot dog. We don't want a hot dog. But they had all these other crazy things. So it's always, everyone's got a different opinion and everyone has different thoughts on what's funny or entertaining or playable or marketable. A lot of times, you talk with marketing teams. Later in my career, I learned that when you work with marketing

teams from the beginning, you usually have a better product. And so you talk to marketing teams about, well, what could I put in this game that would be a good hook for you to market the product? And that was a big thing in a claim, working well with marketing. So when you say you end up with a better game working with marketing, and in what sense do you mean that exactly. Well, you know, like you said, a lot of times developers, they just want to make a great game. They don't want to deal with the business end. And it took me a while in my career to understand that the business end can help you. Because there's a lot of games out on the marketplace that I'm sure everybody knows that there might be a great game that you loved

that didn't do well. And there might be a game that was really not that good that everybody knows. and that's, you know, due to marketing. So at a claim, one of the things that they did was, at least I remembered at the beginning, was try and put five things in your game that we could bullet point on the back of the box that are different from any other product in the market. So you've got to come up with something original in your title. and it forced you to not only adhere to that, but give the marketing people something

that they could say, look at what this game has that the other games don't, and put it on the package, and put it in the ads, and put it on the commercials, and it's going to help sell your product. I mean, if you're not in the business to make something that you want people to see, I don't know, maybe you should be doing something else.

So Brian, over to you, I feel like the games you wrote about, I feel like the games you wrote about were large. about marketing. I think I would agree with that. Either games to market an artist or using artists to market games. I think I would agree with that. I mean, for most of them, it's certainly not coincidental that

the time period at which those games came out were oftentimes the height of that particular artist's popularity. Something like that just wouldn't work. Was that a matter of timing, or was it a matter of the game helped elevate their popularity? I would say more,

was a matter of timing, to be completely honest, I don't know that I can point to any of those games who have having really helped any of those artists be more successful. I think it's just, oh, I hear TM Network or whoever on the radio all the time, oh, look, they've got a game on the Famicom, let me buy this game. I think it's more, what would you call that, like, brand synergy or something? I don't know. Do you feel like they were successful marketing endeavors? Do you think some were better than others? Some definitely were better than others.

I feel like oddly, many of them that actually came about during what you referred to earlier as like the multimedia era where you had all sorts of strange and interesting and sometimes not strange and interesting experiences coming up just because there was now a CD ROM and you could do a lot more. I feel like a lot, not all of them, but a lot more of those fall a little bit more flat because they get lost in the, a thing that everyone was trying to do really, you know, in the east and the west in one way or another. Those early Famicom ones were so interesting, even if they weren't good, that I feel like those were actually the ones that really had the marketing push behind them. If you look in old Famitsu,

magazines or what have you, you will actually see a good amount of ads for, especially the first few, like the Seiki Matu game and the Nakayama Miho game. There are full page ads for some of those at the time. But when you get into the PlayStation and the Saturn ones, there didn't really seem to be all that much, at least print advertisement for them, because I think they just got lost in that multimedia shuffle. And consequently, I feel like those aren't as well-remembered. remembered either unless you were like a fan of that particular artist because then of course you know about it especially if you like games so the the timeline in your book kind of tapers off in the what mid 2000s yes why is that what happened to those games where do they go they stopped existing is what happened to them interestingly they sort of end like chronologically anyway they ended life as educational software titles for children with like the plethora of minimony games they ended on the pico I believe

the Sega Pico which I never thought I would write about the Sega Pico in my life but here I am someone who has one and has played it way more extensively than I ever thought What is it? It is calling it a computer is probably not right It's a console

It's basically a Sega Genesis Yes That's been repurposed into a sort of educational not yeah like like brain said it's not really a computer but it's an educational device that has it does it has a it does not have a touchscreen it is a stylist there is a stylist which is attached to it

and the idea is the cart the software for it is a is a very large cartridge but it's also a book there's like a bound book which is attached to the cartridge So you stick the cartridge in the top. It folds up almost like an old laptop. And when you stick the cartridge in, you can turn the pages of this book while the game is actually playing. And the bottom part of the fold is a very clunky controller

and also an area for a touch screen. So there are games where you are, for example, controlling a member of Minnie Moni, like making their way through an office or something, trying to like navigate their way around employees but also there's just a free drawing mode where you can just like color in pictures of the members of the group for example and when was this out the gosh i don't say it debuted in the late 90s i i think so uh maybe maybe mid to late but it did also come out in america too though i don't think it had as much software for it

i do remember seeing it at like toys ars and d what is this i remember seeing it at like toys are us i I remember seeing it like a Best Buy or something as well But in Japan it was all kinds of children's properties Like it was it was Minimony who was a pop group Very geared toward a younger audience But it was also like Ultraman

And Doraemon and I think there were even Pokemon ones weirdly For a Sega system Imagine that I think Leapfrog had something Kind of similar With a cartridge in a book Was it the Ligua?

leapster or something? It was something like that. When I worked in retail ages ago, I remember seeing those things on the shelf, like long past the point where you could buy a pico here. So, yeah, you're right, it was very similar. And you ended up working on a sort of educational focused machine yourself that really didn't go anywhere. But it seemed like an interesting project. Like, you know, just the concept behind it was pretty innovative, I think. I don't know. Do you want to talk a little bit about your experience with that? Yeah, I'll make it quick. It was called the Ion.

It was at Hasbro. When I started there, it was already in development. And they had, you know, it was a great idea. I mean, they wanted to create a hardware that was for preschool. They had a ton of licenses, about a dozen licenses, anything from, I think they had Thomas the train. They had hit entertainment things. They had... I think there was SpongeBob.

They had SpongeBob. They had Batman. They had Spider-Man. They had Blues Clues. They had some Hasbro things, My Little Pony. Just a lot of licenses. I had to visit probably a half a dozen different licensors. They had it with about half a dozen different developers working on different products.

And it was supposed to be... It was at the beginning of interacting with the screen with the camera. But the biggest problem we had with it, and that's, I guess, could be the gaming industry or the toy industry, one, budget. I mean, how much can you spend on your product, and how much can you charge the public so that they'll pay for it? And the big problem we came across, and these are kind of things that hopefully people in the future may hear this and look out for,

is every developer tested it with the camera in their offices. We tested it at Hasbro, but we never brought it into the home. So all of a sudden, toward the end of development, we bring it into a home and we focus test it, and we realize that the lighting in the homes, because you need your subject to be front-lit, and how many homes have their lights where their TV is, to shoot light at you.

You know, you have your lights at your couch or whatever in the room. So the camera wasn't picking up the movements as well as it should have. And to get a better camera would have put the cost of the product out of reach from other products in the market. These are the kind of things. These are the business aspects of creating product that you just run into problems. and so it didn't do well but it looked great the packaging was great

the unit looked good the licensing was great everything fell in the place but that one problem and what year was that what year did that launch that was probably around I would say

2009 10 so that was after Nintendo Wii but before like PlayStation Move and Xbox Connect it was right about the time of the Wii. Okay, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, even Nintendo faced that same issue that you're talking about with the lighting with Wii because it used an infrared remote. And, you know,

they would put together demos and they sort of infamously had an E3 stage demo where they couldn't get the Wii to work on stage at this, you know, presentation being beamed to hundreds of thousands of people because they hadn't tested it and accounted for the stage lining. Yeah. So, you know, even Nintendo, like, even the giants get bitten in the ass by that kind of thing sometimes. And, you know, PlayStation and Xbox eventually kind of figured out how to make camera systems work with, with Move and Connect.

But I think, well, yeah, I mean, Move required the, like, the Magic Wand controller. And Connect actually did, like, have image recognition, but, I feel like it was a little early to be truly compelling and effective, but, you know, that was, for a while, that was, everyone, you know, was kind of jumping on that train and trying to sort of dominate it. So, you know, the ion was kind of ahead of the curve in a lot of ways. Yeah, no, it was a very progressive adventure. And another thing in general is the toy company's budgets. are nowhere near game company

budgets. So you're working on a game and it could be a couple million dollars that they're going to invest in this. You're working on the toy company product and the toy companies are used to putting out something inexpensive, plastic, you know, an action figure

or something that they're going to promote it Christmas, kids going to play with it, break it, toss it aside, do whatever with it and then what's the next product that's going to come out whereas video games

you were hoping it's going to have some legs maybe lead to a sequel maybe be on the shelf for a lot longer it's a different industry yeah toy companies love their repaints you know just put out the same plastic but with a different paint app

that's been a part of the toy industry since you know I was a kid and I remember you know seeing like he-man characters, it all shared the same body, basically, and just had different heads and accessories. Exactly. Like the evil sorceress was the same as the good, the good sorceress, just in a different color scheme. Yeah, it's trying to work within those very, very limited budgets, yeah. So you always hear about budget crunches and things like that in games, but I guess it's all relative. There is some comparative luxury to making games. And I,

I guess you really kind of got to see all of that yourself working across these different industries and kind of sitting where they intersect in a lot of ways. Yeah, yeah. That's more the sort of later portion of your book, I know, but it's interesting how much video gaming factored into the work you did even when you weren't explicitly working on video games. Right.

That's kind of what got me in the door at Hasbro. I mean, toy companies are very closed, a lot more so than game companies. It's hard to get into them, and it's a lot more secretive. I don't know why. I mean, nowadays, with the Internet and everything, you kind of know everything that's going on.

But when I got into Hasbro, the thing that appealed to them at the time that I was hired was that I had the gaming experience because a lot of toy companies were trying to get into electronic gaming. they saw the money and the popularity, but they couldn't figure it out. And I think a lot of it had to do with

how quick the turnovers are at toy companies and how low the budgets are, and they don't want to invest long-term. So it was difficult for them. They wanted to do it quick, well, just throw out something, and they couldn't compete. But I had this gaming background, and so they hired me,

and one of the big things I started to work on at Hasbro was there was the Little's Pet Shop line, and they had little digital toys that were kind of like the Tomogachis. That right? Yeah, where you'd feed an animal and kind of keep it, nurture it. And they had these little handhelds

with little games on them and pets, but there were no storylines, and there was no obvious goals. You were just kind of walking around, and so I got into it, and I said, well, first of all, I wanted to try and make a storyline with this. I also want to make it more obvious what the goals are, what you have to do. And I also wanted to try and design the housing on these as opposed to just flowers and

pretty little colors to, let's say, if it's a dog, maybe the casing looks like a doghouse. Or if it's a fish, maybe the casing looks like a fish tank, a fish bowl. You know, kind of make it more personal and more obvious and more playable. And so that's kind of where some of the crossover is with video games and toys. So you've talked a lot about, in your book about working with kind of big licenses. You did work on, you know, original IP with different publishers, but also a lot of what you did was dealing with marketers, and you, or not marketers, licensers. You mentioned earlier about Matt Granning's change in perspective,

but I'm curious if you found that just the general process of working with licensors changed over the years that you worked in the producer role. And if kind of expectations from licensers evolved and how, if they did? You know, I'd love to say, yes, it changed a lot. but I think it's not that the licensor relationship changed or their expectations changed because everybody's expectations change when you're allowed to do more.

When, you know, there's no limitations on hardware nowadays. And you can update on the fly as opposed to submitting your cart and that's it. But it's the relationship that I think changes depending on the producer. You know, a lot of companies and a lot of products I've worked on, the companies would try and get away with things.

Don't show them it yet. Wait till the last minute. They'll have to approve it. We've got to hit the deadline. As opposed to, I would always try and keep the licensers in the loop from the beginning, show them as much as possible. But you do have that balance of,

if you show it to them too soon, and they can't imagine where it's going to, to go, you get yourself in trouble. But you want to show them what's going on. You want to keep them in the loop. And the more you do that, the better the relationship, the better the product, the easier the approval process will be. So it's just, it's like any relationship. Whether it's a marriage or a partner or whatever, communication is key. Yeah, I can see where if you pull that stunt where you don't show someone a product until it's nearly done. And it's not good. That's not going to do any favors for your future relationship. Right. But it happens all the time.

Interesting. Do you feel like some licensers were more restrictive with what you can do? I mean, I'm actually surprised when you said that, by the fact that you said, Marvel, you know, when you were to claim, if you worked on Marvel, you basically were just coming up with ideas and saying, here's what I want to do. I feel like these days, maybe it's because Marvel's a different company, but I feel like Marvel would not be giving people that much leeway that they would be saying, you know, here's what we want. Please make this for us. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes that happens. But like I said, it depends on the relationship, you know. Of course, you go in and usually at the beginning, before you're going to start a new product, you get in and you say, okay, here's our ideas. Do you have any ideas? Where do you want to go with this?

I guess Marvel nowadays, because there's so many movies out, you're probably going to tie it into a movie. In those days, there wasn't even a Spider-Man movie out yet. So it was like, okay, any good storylines in the comic books? If not, we're just going to take a Spider-Man and one of his enemies, you know, Doc Ock or Electro or whatever, or somebody in, make a story. And you'd have to get it approved, of course.

But nowadays, there's so much material and so many movies. and so many storylines, that you might as well just tap into one of those. It's going to help you, marketing-wise, and wrestling. You know, I would pick the lineup of the wrestlers I wanted, and, of course, you'd have to get it approved, but it usually wasn't a problem. So I don't think it's changed too much, but different licensors are different relationships. Some of them are more easygoing, some of them are more good.

difficult. Some of them think they know your business and some of them don't and let you do your thing. Just depends. Brian, I have to ask, you know, obviously you weren't involved in making any of the games. I was not. But I don't know if you've read interviews with developers or commentary by them about, you know, some of the games that they had their likenesses in. So much, much to my surprise, I actually did get to do an interview with the, I believe it was the director of Toma Lark, which was a game based on a previous PlayStation game

called Toma Runner, which is like, imagine a racing game but with just people running instead of cars. But they tied it in with Larkin-Seal, who was and still is a very, very popular rock band, but God, especially at that time where they popular. and he was very good with my request to interview him and we did do a short interview and it was amazing and especially in this case Hyde the singer of Larkin-Seal loved Toma Runner

and so he had like a lot of sign-off on that game there's even like footage of basically him playing through levels in there and it's probably the best anyone can be in that game I think. I certainly can't play it that well. But yeah, him just talking about the creative process and working with them and like the marketing budget on this because Larkensiel was involved was just amazing.

They had an event on a cruise ship, basically a tournament where the winners got to play against Hyde and you could actually win like one of his costumes that he'd worn in a music video. And he was even able to confirm details that I didn't read anywhere else, like what music video the costume was from and amazing things like that. The more, honestly, though, in terms of interviews in there, there was another one from a guy named Bert Snow who worked on interesting, maybe one of the most interesting of these games, which was Stolen Song, a sort of, interactive game based around Hotei Tomoyasu, who is again very popular at the time, still popular now. I just saw him in concert last year, in fact. And it was a fully American-produced game

in Japan by his company at the time, Virtual Music Entertainment, and they'd done a game previously that kind of set the mold for this about Aerosmith. I think it was a quest for fame, I think it was called. And they basically reproduced this with Hote. And I had a very long interview with him in that book and like his insights into the process of creating that were very

interesting. Like people often consider like parapa to be the first sort of like quote unquote modern rhythm game. It was not. His actually came first. The Aerosmith one came first. So I got a nice

eye roll out of him when I mentioned than most people considered Parapa to be the first one. Do you know how much involvement the artist usually had in the games? I feel like some maybe from like the multimedia era

were very much kind of personal projects and some of them were just sort of like, here's our likenesses, just make a video game. I feel like the multimedia era brought about a little bit more involvement. Again, with the two cases that I did interviews for

the artists were very involved. Burt Snow would talk about having meetings with Hote and things like that, and Hote saying kind of exactly what he wanted the game to be like. But you can kind of see it in a lot of the other multimedia games, too. There's a Saturn game called Daiske Asakura Media Romancer, which has, like, just an absolutely insane amount of details about, like, his musical setup that I can only imagine he was so invested in that he wanted it in there. And this was, I think this was a case for a lot of these games,

even though they may have suffered a little more on the advertising end of things. I feel like because you had that multimedia aspect in there, probably a lot of these artists looked at it and be like, oh my God, we can, it finally makes sense to have like a video game about us because we're not just like little guys running around the screen anymore. Like it can actually be us and our music. I don't necessarily have a lot of written evidence to support that on some of these, but in some cases, it just shows.

So, Mark, looking back at the games that you worked on, were there any that you felt really came together the way you envisioned them? Or do you feel like you were always fighting uphill against limitations of time, budget, resources, et cetera? Very well put. Most of it was that. You're always fighting something, whether it's, a deadline, a budget, memory issues, whatever. There's, you never, in my experience, hardly ever make a product that you go, yeah, that was it. I felt that we did a pretty good job on maximum carnage, a Spider-Man game.

Like I said, there were some things we really would have loved to have done different. Wrestling, I think when I got to acclaim, I took it to a different level. because in the past, I think the producers on the wrestling titles were just making two guys fighting. And I knew wrestling, and I wanted to add special moves, and I wanted to add little details about the wrestlers, whether it was theme music, or things like you could knock out the referee and then cheat, or use a chair on the outside of the ring, things like that, little details that the real fans knew. And I think that the wrestling games turned out really well. I think that the Dragon Ball Z, Boo's Fury, turned out really well.

But for the most part, I think I don't want to speak for all creative people. You always want more time and a redo, you know. But sometimes you get lucky on the first go. Are there any projects that you worked on that didn't come out? necessarily the way you envisioned them, but you think, like, there is a core of something here. If I went back to that, you know, and we did a, kind of a, took a mulligan on it, like we could really come up with something special. Oh, yeah. I mean, and there's a lot of game designs that I have sitting on a shelf that

never even got into development. I wish we would have finished Marvel 2099. That would have been a great game. And then one other game that I always liked, but it just didn't turn out the way I wanted it to was Barton the Beanstalk. You know what, the Simpsons always did spoofs. That was their thing. They'd spoof a movie or whatever. And I came up with the idea of,

I said, well, Jack and the Beanstalk's a great story. We could do Barton the Beanstalk. And we applied everything in the Simpsons way to make it seem like a Simpson story, you know. the and the main problem with it was it was on Game Boy and the Game Boy screen

to show the giant and to show Bart Bart would have to be so small that you wouldn't have detail so what we ended up doing was having Bart bigger which is what you you're playing Bart but you couldn't show the whole

giant because the screen wasn't big enough it would have been a different game I wish we could have, I wish we could revisit it. Maybe do it on a different platform, but I think it's a great idea, and it's got a lot of gameplay elements. And that's something I would love to revisit. Yeah, that premise sounds like it would have been great for the DS, 3DS era,

where you have the two stacked screens, and you can get BART in there and also still have the giant. Yeah. So just to kind of wrap up, Let me ask you, Brian, really, is there anything that I haven't touched on with your book that you feel like is essential for people to know so they will rush out and buy a copy once it launches? I hope they will based on just the conversation that we had, but no, I think we touched on a lot of the high points. If you're interested in kind of how the Japanese version of that industry works, I think this is a good insight.

into it. If you have any interest in any of these artists and their music, you get a very nice look at all of them and kind of like what the general musical trends and to maybe a little bit lesser extent game trends were in that decade.

And it's just something that isn't talked about a lot in depth in equal parts. So even if you're just there for the games or even if you're just there for the artists, I think there's a lot you can learn about the other half. let me ask you for people who aren't familiar with these artists

which three artists would you recommend what are your three favorites to kind of familiarize themselves with the music that that you've covered um I would my three three the three I would recommend in my three favorites or maybe different different different rankings one of them at least will cover both and it's probably one of the artists that maybe people a lot of people in the haven't heard of. Pardon the name, but there is a rock band called The Yellow Monkey, who has been my favorite band for decades now. No qualifiers, not favorite Japanese band,

just favorite band. They're an amazing band. They've got a great sound. They have a couple of games in here, and unlike a lot of the other artists in here, they have almost no Western presence, I don't feel like. You've got bands like Ex-Japan in there who, lot of people know, even if they don't particularly follow Japanese music. I would recommend the Yellow Monkey to anyone who likes rock. And I would say Hotei Tomoyasu, who I mentioned earlier when we were talking about Stolen Song, is also a huge recommendation. He's also a rock artist. He's very much more on the innovation side of things. He's done a lot more like electronic albums over the years. He's done more

bare bones rock albums over the years and he's always, he's almost a little bit of a David Bowie figure in that he's like reinventing himself every once in a while to kind of go after a different crowd. And for the third artist, I would

actually say maybe less in terms of the music, but more just in terms of like what an interesting idea this was. I would actually throw many Moni in there is the third one. They make up a not insignificant amount of games in this book. Not as

one of your favorites, just as one of the people should check out. It's one I would say that people which should check out. I was definitely following Japanese music for the heyday of mini-money, so I was there for at all. This wasn't anything that I experienced in retrospect. They are very interesting just to see how

enormously popular and how many different products they were just plastered all over at the time and then just absolutely petered out and disappeared so I'd say those are some of the three most interesting artists that if people aren't familiar with and they maybe should check out

and then you know figure out what you like and go in that direction from there there's a lot of guidelines in this book if you're looking to kind of familiarize yourself with Japanese artists that could give you clues for directions to go in what's the title of the book again Gameplay harmonies, Japanese recording artists in the video games about them.

Nice. And then, Mark, have I failed to touch on something that you think is a significant aspect of your book that people should know about? No, I think if you're interested in video games or especially, specifically the ones that I talk about, I think you'll enjoy it. and then toy industry too. It covers a lot of ground. So if you don't mind my asking, who was your favorite game developer to work with in your time as a producer?

I would have to say, you know, and they were all different experiences, and whether difficult or not difficult, I have really good memories of all of them because I met so many creative people, but I would say acclaim. when I got to a claim they were

at the top of their game meaning basically it was like Sega Nintendo acclaim they had every license you can imagine we had like I said so much freedom there to run our teams run our licenses

choose our developers there was trust it was like a big family and it was just a really good experience It was good to have it that early in my career because it gave me not only confidence, but experience and things to compare when I went to future companies. All right. Well, gentlemen, thank you both for your time and also thank you both for your writing.

I think these are both very interesting and very unique books that cover facets of video game history that other people just have not written about or talked about. So it's great that these exist. I'm happy to have played some part in helping to have birthed them. But I hope everyone will check them out. I will let Mark and Brian give you their bona fides and all the details about themselves. But that's after our station break here, or not station break, but just the part where I tell you that Retronauts is a podcast that is funded through Patreon. So if you've enjoyed this episode and other episodes you've heard, you can subscribe to us and get bonuses and benefits and also help this podcast exist. So that's patreon.com slash retronauts.

If you subscribe at the $5 a month level or higher, you get exclusive episodes just for patrons every other Friday and also bonus columns and mini podcasts every weekend. I think the frequency of the bonus stuff is actually going to increase a Stuart Gip. may already have begun publishing patron-exclusive columns by this point by the time this episode goes out. So check that out. It's patreon.com slash retronauts. Mark, where can we find you on the internet and where can people find your book? You can find me on the internet just by Googling my name. There's a lot of information there about whether it's conventions I've attended, articles written on me, reviews. So lots of information there, and it's Mark Flipman, of course.

And where you can find the book is at Limited Run. And in the future, hopefully Amazon. Yes. Hopefully, by the time this episode goes out at the end of May or early June, Amazon will be one of the places where you can pick up. It's not all fun and games by Mark Flitman. That's correct. And Brian, yourself?

Googling me probably won't do you much good. So probably you should go to 1 million power.com, which is my site where I have a long time worth of translations on. I'm B. Clark OMP on most social media. And I recently actually started doing YouTube as well. So that's YouTube.com forward slash B. Clark Omp. And there's also a Patreon for that as well, if you like anything that's there so far, which is patreon.com slash one million power. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, online. Social media these days is pretty much Blue Sky and nothing but Blue Sky. So that's J. Parrish. Dot blue sky. Dot social or whatever their structure is. Jay Parrish is what you want to look for. You can also find me at Limited Run Games, helping to make books, both standalone and

inside of packages, here at Retronauts and, of course, making videos on YouTube as Jeremy perish. Anyway, thank you again, guys, for your time and your contributions. And I hope everyone will check out their books because, like I've said, I'm not just, you know, saying this to, as a marketing tactic. They really are different, unique windows and insights into video games and video game history. And, you know, they should be of great interest to anyone who enjoys this podcast. So please check them out, support their work. And, You know, maybe they'll be able to create new books in the future. Who knows?

In the meantime, I will wrap this podcast and let our fine editor put in some cool J-pop tunes for you to enjoy. but the flowers will start keep it's there so

then say good good love love show love

love love love love love show love love love show

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