Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 133: Steamworld & Chip Tanaka's "Django"

Episode Date: January 8, 2018

Jeremy takes to Skype this week for conversations with the men behind two of last year's best retro-inspired projects: Brjann Sigurgeirsson of Image & Form (Steamworld Dig 2), and legendary Metroid/EarthBound composer Hirokazu "Chip" Tanaka (Django).

Hi, everyone, welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and a slightly different episode of Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and a slightly different episode this time, instead of being in the studio with other video game journalists or historians. I'm here on Skype with a game developer, and I'm speaking to, actually, I'm going to have you say your name for the first time, just so I don't mispronounce your last name, Brian. That's very good. Hi, I'm Brian Seward Gerson of Image and Form games in Gothenburg, Sweden, and we all have really weird names over here. They're totally normal for you. I'm sure my name is weird for you. So it's all good. But I definitely wanted to be sure that I got the pronunciation of that right.

So Siegergergerson. Sigur-Gerson. Yeah, that's great. Okay. I'll do my best. My wife's Vietnamese, so I'm used to mangling everything and having everything mangled for me. So, I mean, she speaks perfect English. She grew up in America.

But her family, like, they have the hardest time with the name Jeremy for some reason. So they're just like, hey, you. so it's fine. It's part of the melting pot of cross-culturalism. It's great. Awesome. So anyway, yeah, I wanted to get you specifically on an episode because, you know, I'm a huge fan of the SteamWorld games, and I really like the way they seem to incorporate so much video game history into them. I mean, these are, you know, SteamWorld Dig 2 just came out a few weeks ago. So it's not like that as a retro game, but it has a real, like, classic gaming vibe to it. It really feels like a game steeped and versed in video game history.

And that's something I really enjoy. Also, Steamworld Heist, you know, even though it's a completely different genre. Like, I can feel sort of, you know, the, the inspirations and the elements of the past sort of peeking through in that and kind of coming together to form something new. So that's kind of my interest here is sort of talking about the history of your studio. but also, like, what inspirations you've drawn on for the games you've worked on? Mm-hmm. Awesome. So to start with, I'd like to know more just about, you know, kind of how Image and Form came to be. Like, what's your personal history? What games have you worked on before Image and Form?

Sure. I mean, it's, so Image Inform started out as my excuse not to grow up in 1997. That's 20 years ago. before then I moved to Tokyo when I was 19 or 20 so I stayed there for six years and then I went to live in San Francisco for a couple of years and so in the beginning

for me it was I hadn't really decided that I wanted to become a game developer but when I was say 12 or 13 I was really intrigued by it there were like arcade machines that you'd play and spend all your weekly allowance on and I was I was truly fascinated by them and I wanted

I wanted to learn more about it although it was sort of esoteric I wanted to know about it I didn't necessarily want to learn how to make games because I just it just didn't dawn on me that regular people could make games I thought it was just I didn't know what I thought I like all the names of those behind those games were Japanese companies and I

it wasn't like I thought you had to be Japanese to make games but that you had to be a part of

something really really complex and and difficult and you needed to be really highly educated

or like a wizard to be able to make games there was this movie that came out around then

called war games do you remember that one oh yeah yeah yeah We're going to do an episode on that one pretty soon, actually, about kind of like the history there and the context and also the games that it inspired. So, yeah, War Games is great. Love that movie. Well, that's awesome, because that's sort of the image I had of people who

made games, like these professor types, these... Right, right. Yeah, like all the technicians working with Whopper and everything. Yeah, exactly, right? So it's... I thought it was that complex to make games. And I'm sure it was extremely, it was much more complex way back then when you had to sort of be a minimalist, like a real expert at miniaturizing things, like making really effective code because the, because the hardware being so limited. So that sort of, it started there and I started programming at home just making really, really simple game-ish things, like very simple games when I was that age, but it had nothing to do with a dream of becoming a game developer. But then I just, I moved to Japan and I kept, I played quite a, quite a bit of games

while I was in Japan. And then in the early 1990s, in 91 or something, Apple released System 7, which was a big thing. I was living in Tokyo at the time and multimedia became very, very, big buzzwords. So the company I was working for was a translation agency and a rep from Apple came and showed off System 7 to our CEO and he just flipped. And the next day he lined us up and said, okay, up until yesterday we were a translation company from today. We're a multimedia company. And since you've been doing some programming before, Brian, you're going to be the lead programmer. And so we started making game-ish things for for anyone who would give us an assignment. And it was really, it was really exciting to do that. But we weren't famous or anything.

It was just, it was this multimedia fad going on in Japan. And that, that was, that was a thing here too. I remember things like, you know, Peter Gabriel's Explorer 1 and, you know, even like a, you know, even like a. video CD of a hard days night by the Beatles and had like interactive elements that sort of thing that was you know very much um kind of of of the time that early 90s era that's right that's exactly it I mean there were and there were some games there were some really interesting CD-ROM games that came out early on like the Journeyman project for example I don't know if you remember that one but it was it was it was amazing stuff I mean you could you could still only show

8-bit graphics on the screens. I mean, 256 colors and so on. And it was really sluggish. You had to wait forever for your Mac to load the information, like from the CD-ROM and so on. But it was radical. It was games. And the big difference, for me, it was that he was this guy.

I can't, for some reason I can't remember his name now, but there was like this one guy who was in charge of making this game, the Journeyman project. And I realized then that you could actually make games with a very small team. And he just looked like a regular person to me too. He didn't look like a professor or anything. So it was really interesting. And it sort of, yeah, it sort of planted a seed, I think.

And then I moved from Tokyo and moved to San Francisco and brought Japanese work from Japanese clients with me. So I was working on multimedia projects while I was sort of studying in the U.S. Basically, I just wanted to live in San Francisco because it just sounded so cool to have lived there. If you understand what I – so I really wanted to do it at the time. And then me and my girlfriend, we moved back to Sweden after that. And then we didn't know what to do. So we started this company called Image and Form. And we did gamish things in a program called Macromedia Director at the time.

Sort of like the big brother of Flash that came just around that time as well. So we did that for a long time. Nothing famous. I have produced nothing of fame before we started making the Steamworld series and a few decent mobile games before that. Yeah, what kind of games were you working on in those early days, you know, before mobile, like in that period between 1997 and when mobile games started to take off, were you working on? or did you publish on consoles?

It was PC and Mac games, and we worked on edutainment games. It was a big franchise here in the Nordics in Scandinavia, but completely unknown outside of Scandinavia. So it was, it felt on one hand, it felt like we were actually working on, what do you call it, like semi-famous stuff or well-known stuff

but it was outside of Scandinavia no one has ever heard of what we were working on then so it was kids games like learning tools A local phenomenon Yeah exactly

like Dora the Explorer that kind of level stuff and we produced a lot of games I think we put out like on average something like six or seven games per year like separate titles

like CD-ROM titles and they were they were actually quite fun. There was a lot of voice acting and a lot of sort of blinking to a mature audience as well that we were sort of, we were weaving in grown-up jokes

and so on in the kids' title. But yeah, it was, so that was it. We did that from 2001, up until 2009. And it was, we started off in 2001 and we were sort of high tech at the time, And then in 2008-2009, we realized that we were really in technological backwaters.

We were still making CD-ROM games using Adobe Director, so Adobe bought director from Macromedia at one point. And I sort of knew that, yeah, we were making good money, but it wasn't going to be sustainable. And mobile had, or the App Store had just come about. and it had exploded with a few early titles like Doodle Jump or Angry Birds. And we thought, okay, it's sort of, this is our ticket out of this edutainment hell, if you like, because we ended up making over 30 titles in that, in that edutainment series.

And we were so fed up with it, at least creatively. Like economically, we were not fed up. We were quite happy with it. but yeah so we decided to to jump on the mobile bandwagon there and then we made a couple of not very great games

and then we made a game that I still think is probably the best game that we've ever made a game called Antil for for iOS and it's a fantastic game it's a real-time strategy game in an ant setting and it is it is just incredibly complex and wonderful it's a it's a great great little game have you have you updated that for 64 bit I'm curious to try that out I'd never heard of it okay yeah we did so so that is I think if you hurry now you can you can get

it for two bucks because that's what we've been charging for it I I decided that I'm going to do an experiment and do a price hike to just hike it up to five bucks to see what happens to sales if we just isn't going to affect sales at all like if to to raise it like that because I have this distinct feeling that at least I myself I'm viewing mobile games that cost between one and five dollars not to be worth my time. because it's sort of games that don't have the nerve to charge for themselves, if you understand what I'm getting at. So I'm just going to see what happens if we go from 199 to $4.99 for a few weeks or months

and see if we're going to keep it there or not. All right. I'll have to jump on that before the price hike, then. Please do. I think it's probably coming tomorrow or something like that. I would just, I did the settings for it today. All right. So, so for mobile games, what's the genesis of the Steamworld series? I know that it actually began on Wii. I don't think most people have played the Wii, kind of the game that started everything.

So I'm wondering if you could talk about like what inspired the series, what made you decide to go with Wiiware and kind of, you know, where did all this come from? Yeah. Well, actually, it wasn't Wiiware. It was DSIware, but it's... Oh, DSIware. Yeah. So it's almost the same thing. It's like DSI is this console that Nintendo put out just between the Nintendo DS and the 3DS. It was there experimenting with an online shop.

The I, I think, in DSI stands for Internet. And so it was their first sort of go at having a digital shop, like the e-shop, is today for the 3DS and the Wii and the Switch. Obviously the Wiiware store was around at the same time. But yeah, we wanted to make a game the thing was like this. We were trying our hand at mobile games in 2009

and we were just making the truth of it is that our games were just not good enough but they weren't selling and we were sort of wondering, okay, is there anywhere else that we can go as well with games? Is it only, is it all mobile? Is that going to gobble up everything

or is there anywhere else we can go with our games? So we had the Nintendo DSI had been out for a little while then. This was back in 2010 and we decided early on that year that we should make this small

tower defense game for the DSI. to just to see how this shop was how it would compare with the App Store. And so we put out SteamWorld Tower Defense. And the main reason was that at that time, when we started making that game, there were no tower defense games on the Nintendo DSI. So it felt like, okay, that's great. If there's anyone who likes a tower defense game and has a DSI,

then we can hopefully get that person to buy the game. And by the time we were done with that game, they were, of course, already three really decent Tower Defense games on the Nintendo DSI. So, and we didn't know, that was the first game we ever self-published. Oh, that's not true, actually. We put out a couple of games for the App Store, but that was sort of like the first one that made money for us. So, and we didn't know anything about marketing games or doing PR or whom to talk. talk to. I mean, we didn't, we had, we had the email addresses of exactly zero journalists at that time. And so we basically just put up the game on the DSIware store to see if it would sell.

And IGN, for some reason, picked it up and, and said that the game was great. And I think they were being very kind to us. Like we were a tiny, tiny studio that nobody had ever heard of. And we had made an okay game so they probably gave it the score was a little bit too high for that game I think but yeah so the first thing in the first installment in the steamwell series is steamwheel tower defense for the Nintendo DSI and it was it wasn't meant to be a game about robots really in the in its first inception it was robots were the bad guys trying to invade your gold mines and you had to sort of put out towers to shoot them down and then during lunch one day someone in the office said wouldn't it be more fun if the robots were the good guys and the

humans were the low lives couldn't we like sort of add a story twist to the game if we do it that way so we decided to do that and that is that was the one thing that IGN and and almost everyone else who reviewed the game sort of picked up on they thought that was kind of a an interesting twist to it and so we like in in the lunch breaks to come after that we sort of sat and discussed how this steam world could possibly have come about what what would have triggered um like a turn of events like that that humanity like the humans would be complete low lives like just greedy worse kind of human you you can imagine and these steam driven robots were the upstanding citizens like what you

kind of world, what would have had to happen to the world for us to arrive at that. And then we came up with a plausible, I shouldn't semi-plausible, like history for that. There was this real inventor in the 19th century called Charles Babbage. Have you heard of him? Yeah. There was a chain of electronic stories in America called Babbage's for a long time. Oh, really? Electronic's boutique, EB games. But yeah, I think any gamer of a certain age worth of salt should know who Babbage was. Oh, awesome.

Okay, I didn't know about that. So, yeah, then you also know that he sort of created or he designed two computers in the 19th century. The first one was the difference engine and then the analytical engine. And they were, I've seen, I've seen a prototype of the difference. engine at the London Technical Museum. They actually built one in 1999, I think, and put it on display there. Or they built it and then they tried it.

Because the problem when he designed it, he couldn't get a manufacturer to build it according to specification. It was just there was too many small mechanical parts to it. But they built it in 1999 and it works flawlessly. So our idea was that what would have happened if someone had actually managed to build a working copy of the difference engine and then later the analytical engine back in the 19th century, our thinking was that then we would have had computers, working computers like 100 years ahead of time. And with that, like you would have all. all the other kinds of consequences as well that like weaponry and so on would be so advanced that humanity will start like um you'll have this arms race uh come along long before humanity is is ready for

it and like even before world war one you will have like a global war that just kills everything and everybody and but since you have these these machines difference engine and analytical engine humanity will have been able to construct helpers like robots steam driven robots at that time to do like mainly tasks like cleaning and and manufacturing and mining so these mining robots is what steamworld tower defense the first game was was all about. So is any of this backstory explained in the games? I've played through both of the dig games, and I don't think any of that really, I didn't realize that was kind of the basis for all this.

So is it just kind of one of those things in sort of the story Bible, and it's, you know, it doesn't really matter to the player. It's just like, that's how it happened. I think you're exactly right. It doesn't matter to the player, at least not in the games that we have out so far. So, you know, it would be quite interesting to see if we could put together pre-Quil games, like pre-Steem World games, these war games where you have these, well, maybe I shouldn't say too much about that, but it's, it doesn't matter to the player. It's sort of in the lower description that we keep for ourselves,

and sort of how the world came about. Did you guys, did anyone happen to do any research with the novel The Difference Engine by Bruce, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling? Yeah, it's Bruce Sterling. Yeah, sorry, please. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, that had kind of a similar premise where, you know, they actually created the difference engine and it ran on whale oil, I think, and basically was this massive

complex in underground London. And I think the, if I remember right, the novel pretty much ends with the entire world going to war because, you know, the arms race was so much more advanced by technology. It sounds very similar to kind of the ideas you guys arrived at. I think, I can't remember. The way I remember the novel, I might be totally wrong. But the premise there is that Britain is incredibly powerful because of, you know, because of these machines, and they basically have whipped everyone else into submission. I can't remember if the world goes to war in their story.

It's, I don't think so, actually. It's been probably 10 or 15 years since I read it, so it's all a little fuzzy, but I seem to remember it had a kind of a bleak ending. And I guess maybe that's sort of the inevitable outcome of people getting too advanced. I don't know. Yeah, I think also William Gibson is, I mean, he's not, I don't think he's famous for his rosy description. No, that's true. But what I thought was really fascinating in the game, or in that book, was that it was real.

I remember distinctly that when I read it, at first I thought, wow, this is really inventive. How do they come up with this idea that there would be this. guy inventing a computer that early and they also um it had it also incorporated a lot of famous like figures like uh the first programmer for example ada um so forget her last name yes thank you um and uh it's yeah it sort of has this cyberpunk um element to it that that book already i think without, because it sort of idolizes a programmer that lived in the 19th century and so on. But I, yeah, this war thing, I mean, I hope we didn't steal it from there. But I was, I was really, I was really inspired by that book.

When I read it, I thought it was really, really cool. And that was, like you, I think I read it many, many years. very many years before we started working on SteamWorld. Well, I mean, you know, even if you kind of seized on some similar ideas, I feel like, one, it's not like that's where you started from. You know, you sort of reversed, engineered the story. You kind of built it back into this concept you came up with, which I think is probably a better way to go about it than like coming up with a story

and saying, like, how can we come up with a game that fits this? Yeah, you're right. as opposed to saying, hmm, this is an interesting, you know, setting we've created. How can we explain how it came to be? Yeah. But also, I feel like one of the things that really caught my attention about the first Steamworld, or SteamWorld, or SteamWorld dig, I mean, is just the fact that the, you know,

it's cyberpunk in a way, but it's not the way everyone thinks of. It's not, you know, like art deco and dirigible and things like that. It's more of this sort of worn down old American West. kind of, you know, everything's like Rusty. I mean, you've got a protagonist named Rusty. And it just, it's not like any other sort of steampunk setting that I've seen. So that was something that caught my attention was the idea of steampunk in the Old West as opposed to steampunk in Victorian London or, you know, like the 1920s or something like that. It was, you know, it just kind of stood out on its own. Yeah. And that's, that's, yeah, that's kind of what sort of caught my attention about it. initially. I think that's sort of what we thought was interesting too, because it was, I mean, chronologically, they shouldn't be too far off from each other. I mean, it should be that steampunk should sort of end where the West starts or they should overlap a little bit, right? So that steampunk and Western coexist at some point in time. I think it just makes sense. But what has happened is that, yeah, humanity makes it as far as the Wild West and then just everything gets blown to pieces.

These steam driven robots, they're really simpletons and what they do is they emulate their former masters, if you like. I mean, what they do is they put on hats and they like stitched together their plating in the, in the, the shape of skirts and what have you like it almost looks like they're wearing stuff but they're not really it's it's just plates hanging together and and then someone finds a hat and puts it on its head and a scarf or something like that and that'd be because that's that's sort of how their inventors looked so they're they're a lot more intelligent that they can possibly or plausibly be, but they, yeah, it's, the timing of it is exactly that. I mean, right about the start of the 19th or the 20th century, that's when humanity stops.

And nobody really knows, it doesn't really matter for how long these robots have been going. It's not like they're going to involve into a newer society or like a new more modern society because there is no real need to. They're in the Wild West doing what people in the Wild West used to do. So how did you get from, you know, once you had sort of this backstory setup,

how did you get from tower defense to Steamworld dig, which is like, it caught my attention because it seems to bring together so many ideas. I mean, the first, glance, you're like, oh, it's kind of like Minecraft or Terraria because you're digging and reshaping the ground. But then it has sort of an exploratory element, so it's a little bit like Metroidvania. And then it has, you know, kind of this loop of

exploration and returning to town and gathering resources. So that's almost like a dungeon crawler, you know, like an RPG. So it feels like a lot of different things kind of coming together at once, which is a pretty big jump away from, you know, tower defense, which is pretty straightforward. You know, you're setting up guard

positions and dealing with an onslaught of enemies, and that's about as, you know, that's about as far as those games get. It's a great, great, great question, and it's, for once, I have a really clear answer to one of your questions. It's, so it's, it's, it's, it's about the ordering which we did things. So in 2010, we made a Steamworld Tower Defense. What we wanted to make was a tower defense game, and it turned out to be, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, The heroes were steam-driven robots, so we called it SteamWorld Tower Defense. And that was in 2010.

In 2011, that's when we made this game called Antil for mobile. And so it's not like we went straight from SteamWorld Tower Defense to SteamWorld Tower Defense, but rather we were, we made Antil. And Antil is really that it's a mix of game genres. It's real-time strategy with line drawing, with other elements as well. It's a fascinating game. But above all, it's a genre mix, and we thought, this is really interesting. You take different game genres and just mix them together, and the result is really interesting.

It's something new. It hasn't been seen before. What other kinds of genre mixes can we think of. up and we had a lot of different plans um but at that time too we were looking at at the mobile market and that's and we were starting to get cold feet because it was uh it was about to turn uh it was about to turn it was about to go sour is what i was going to say because it was going it was going from paid games to free to play games and there was a there are some great free to play games out there but there was at that time it was it was we thought it was a negative development

it was it wasn't very promising for us we didn't understand free to play and when we understood what we understood about it we didn't really like at that time there were a lot of bad experiments being made like um um um like a lot of games were sort of bordering on casinos um ish games or pay to win and so on. We just didn't like it. We wanted to make regular games that you'd pay for the game and hopefully enjoy it afterwards. And we wouldn't be standing over your shoulder demanding a little bit of cash here and there. So we were getting cold feet with the mobile market. And then we already had this game out for the Nintendo DSI. And that game had surprisingly, since we didn't know how to do PR or marketing, we were very surprised to see

that Stimwell Tower Defense had paid for itself a couple of times, actually. We had very few people owned a Nintendo DSI, but enough of those people had bought Steamwell Tower Defense. And so we felt that, okay, if we're now worried about the mobile, the developments on the mobile market, can we go back to Nintendo and see if we can make a game for their new console, this Nintendo 3DS thingy that has come out? And so we contacted them and they sent us a dev kit and we started making this game. And it was sort of we changed very little little from the original design to the finished

product when it comes to Steamwood Day. We wanted to mix, like you said just before, it feels like a mix of very many different things, and it was supposed to be that. And we were, when it came out, we, we'd been so close to the screen for so long that we didn't know if it was a good game or a bad game or a mediocre game or a great game. We were just very happy to be done with it, and we were really broke at the time. We had borrowed very much money to be able to complete Steamwell Dig. So when it came out, we were just taken aback by the positive reception.

People really liked the game. And that sort of started us off as a serious game developer, if you like. Because with that success, we also decided when we started porting Steamwill Dig to other platforms like Steam and PlayStation and so on, we realize that if we don't keep this up, if we keep on taking work for higher projects on the side to finance what we do, we're never going to be able to concentrate on this. This is our chance. if we if we want to make games for a living we have to we have to come up with something really really grand after this a really big and fantastic game so that so no one will say afterwards that yeah they were they had a really great game called steam will dig but then they yeah they sort of only made mediocre stuff after that so so we had a lot of pressure

internally to come up with a great idea for a game and then we came up with the idea for SteamWorld Heist, which is the next game in the SteamWorld series. Right. So you went from Tower Defense to sort of a platform action game and then

from there back to kind of a real time, not real time, but a turn-based strategy game, which is kind of it seems like it's something sort of related to the Tower Defense. You know, Tower Defense emerged out of real-time strategy, which I feel like kind of emerged from turn-based strategies. So it's all sort of, I don't know, like, I feel like it's all kind of interconnected there to a certain degree.

Yeah. You're right. I think we thought we were very proud of ourselves when we came up with the idea for Stimwald Heist because we actually, at that time, we didn't see the connection between Steelwell Tower Defense and Stingwood Heist. So we actually thought that we were being very, very brave that we had made this tower defense game and then we made a digging game

and then we made something completely different in Steent Heist. I feel like SteamWorld Heist is completely different than SteamWorld Tower Defense. It's just, you know, there is that sort of that thread of heritage there, I suppose. But, you know, the outcome is completely different. Yeah. Yeah. So that was it. I mean, we had made Steamwell-Dig, and at that time, I remember feeling that we're like a singer-songwriter who has put out a really well-received first album, like someone who comes out of nowhere and makes a really great record. I don't know why, but I was thinking about Tracy Chapman at the time.

I was her first album that was just so fantastic. and then she went on making records after that but nothing sort of reached those heights again as the first album and I was thinking that we have to come up with something really fantastic and I think that Steamwold Heist is a good answer to

steamwold dig because it is bigger and bolder in every way but it's it's at the same time it's a game that is harder to explain to someone sort of just off the bat like what do you do in this game well it's turn-based combat kind of like x-com but it's 2d so you see it from the side yeah it's i think it's people have a harder time understanding what it is but at the same time, it's a game that is a lot better than Steam will dig. So, yeah, I felt that we progressed actually all the time. Yeah, so what kind of, you know, influences were you drawing on as you

as you built dig and heist? Were you actually looking back to other games to say, like, you know, here are some games in similar genres? What have they done well? What have they done poorly? What can we do that's different? Or did you just kind of, you know, fly without a net, basically, and just kind of go based on your instincts? It's, uh, um, both Steamwood Dig and Steamwood Heist had a pretty serious game design document or at least like a game vision document before we got started. And it was, um, both games are sort of the results of, of long lunch hour discussions

of what would be cool to, to, to, have in a game but yeah their Steam will dig is it has a few influences like

the obvious one is Metroid because it is sort of like a Metroidvania loop in the game and then you have other

as soon as a game is set underground like Steam will dig you get those influences as well like Spillunky

is one although the gameplay is completely different. But then there was a game called Minor Dig Deep that was on the Xbox

Live Arcade, I think, way back. And I never played that game myself but that I've seen gameplay footage of it and it sort of employs the same thing.

You dig down, you bring up stuff. It doesn't, it is, it's really, really basic that game. So it's sort of that sort of,

more or less all you do in that game but that was something that we drew on too that that was really intriguing and we also one of one big inspiration was actually a steel wheel tower defense as well because it's sort of set in a mining

it's that game is about protecting your minds so we felt that we're still talking about these mining robots It's these simple mining machines that are the protagonists of the game. Like with Steamwold Heist, we had, at that time, a lot of us were playing Xcom and enjoyed that. And some people were playing, oh, I forget what that is called.

It's a game about hats made by Valve. What is the name of that? Oh, Team Fortress? Yes, thank you. So both at XCOM and Team Fortress or Team Fortress 2, I think, were big inspirations for for Steimald Heist. The turn-based combat from XCOM, we knew that we wanted to make a 2D game seen from the side again.

And like someone just brought it up at lunch one day. It's like, what if we, how about like making a turn-based combat game? but set in 2D and someone said, yeah, but how would blah, blah, blah, work? And someone else would say, it's like, well, maybe we could blah, blah, blah, and so on. And then a lot of discussions later, we had the concept for a steamwold heist. But it was, if you compare it to the steamwold dig development phase, it was very different because the vision for steamwold heist was different than the end product.

A lot of the... We had envisioned that you were actually going to travel around space much more freely in SteamWorld Heist than you actually ended up doing. In the finished game, what is really central are these raids that you do on other robots' ships, these heists. Whereas in the beginning,

there was this space, like these shards out in space that you would sort of just fly, freely from one place to another and we would randomize out combats and so on as you flew along. So from there, you went back to the Steamworld Dig concept for a sequel. I know you don't have too much more time, so I don't want to get too deeply into this. But yeah, I'm curious about the decision to go back to kind of a decision. design document you had used before and, you know, what you did to ensure that you weren't just,

you know, retreading the same ground, that you weren't, you know, stuck in a rut. Great. That was a thing. So we had made three distinctly unique games in the Steamworld series before that. So going back to do a sequel to one of them was sort of felt like a risky decision. And, like, were people going to think that we had run out of ideas? Was that the main reason why we're going back to do Steamwell or do the sequel to Steamwill Dig? There were two really big reasons for it. One was that, like I mentioned just before, we borrowed so much money to complete Steamwell Dig that when we had run out of all that money that we had borrowed,

we sort of had to publish the game and we knew a few months ahead of time that okay the money is going to run out around here we need to submit for publishing around here that means that we'll have to cut out this and cut out this and cut out that from the original game plan

and it was so sad because Stimwell-dig was it was a good the reception of that game was just great we were very happy with that. But we also, all the time, we knew that we had planned more for that game. There was more going to happen

than actually ended up in the final game. So that was one of the reasons. We sort of wanted our revenge on that game to come back and do more of the things that we had envisioned for it originally. And the other big reason was that when we made Steenwald Heist

we spent so much time on the game it took us almost two years to make Steamwald Heist and we were so exhausted at the end of it that we like towards the end of it we we said that we must come up with the next game

does anyone have any ideas and people are just so so fatigued that we needed we needed we need to come back back home, so to speak, or make something that, let's not reinvent the wheel this time. Let's make a game that, well, we know what we're doing, so we can sort of catch our breath before we start making other crazy things.

And so it wasn't a hard decision, really. We really wanted to come back to Stenwell Dig and explore it some more. Like you said, like the main challenge there was how do we make a sequel that doesn't just feel like more of the same? Like, I think the first upgrade you get in SteamWildig and SteamWildig 2 are your speedboots. Like they have, I think they're called Sprint Hydraulics in Steam Will Dig 2, just to call it something else. But that is the only similarity among all the power-ups and tools that you get in the two games.

in the two games you have like distinctly different upgrade trees and so on and then a lot of the design decisions that weren't that great in the original are gone in the second one like very many things are simplified you don't have to buy health and so on in the second game as soon as you come up to the surface your water your your light and your health is just automatically restored just so you don't have to concentrate on you can sort of concentrate on

the other aspects of the game instead well it also gets rid of the randomization the procedurally generated dungeon and the game I feel is much larger and much more consciously designed you know you start to delve into things like the temple and you know areas like that

and you're like oh this is way bigger than I expected So it ends up being a pretty substantially larger game. It's, yeah, that's exactly it. What happened was that we hired actual level designers. So, like, for Steam Will Dig, we were just a bunch of programmers and graphic artists making that game, and we weren't that many. And we needed a clever way to create, the world so that we wouldn't have to design it by hand because it would take us forever

and no one was really skilled at level design but like in time for for steamwell heist we hired our first level designer and he's really talented and then we hired another one before we started on steamwell dig two and so those between them they've put in thousands of hours just hand designing the game. And it means very much because in the original Steam will dig, you could actually get stuck. If you weren't careful,

you'd get yourself into a like a crevice or something where you couldn't dig your way out of it or jump your way out of it, so you would have to self-destruct. And we had to build that function into the game because otherwise you'd just be stuck there

and you wouldn't be able to kill yourself so we needed a way to commit suicide so that you could be reassembled back on the surface and start again or start where you left off but in Dig2 is designed so you can actually you will never get stuck like that

that was that was kind of a scary and interesting element of the first game where you sort of had to be careful about how you would dig your way around the underground. But we also felt that it really is based on us not designing the game properly. And it could feel really unfair. And also there was a, it's an interesting, we've kept that self-destruct feature in Stimulting 2 for one purpose only, and that's for speed running. it's really interesting because we weren't going to have it in there but then one of the

testers who tested steamwildick 2 he said wait a minute where's the self-destruct because it takes me too long to get up to the surface sometimes to blah blah blah it's much faster for me to self-destruct and be reconstructed at the at the surface and do whatever I want need to do from there so it's it's in the game you you're not supposed to use you don't have to use it you're not supposed to have to use it let's put it that way but yeah it's so that's so it sounds like you were sort of thinking of a lot of different audiences

when you built this not just you know like how can we make a better game but how can we appeal to people who you know who specifically want to play the game a certain way yeah and also And also, how can you make a game that, yeah, where you can't get stuck? I mean, if I was, if I was, if I were really young and I just got stuck in a game, these days it feels like games, games that are too hard, but too difficult, they have also have a hard time, it's harder to sell those games. And that's also like a, I think it's a product of the mobile mobile.

market, that if you have a free-to-play game that is too difficult, you stop playing it because you're not getting anywhere. And the game is sort of prompting you to pay to get on, to progress past that point, where you can just as easily stop playing that game and download a similar game and play that instead. So it's also that, that we wanted to make a game that is challenging, but not unfair or evil that way. But then, again, I mean, Steam Will Dig 2 also has a bit of horror elements in it as well. Yeah, that part surprised me.

It was kind of a refreshing twist that I was not expecting. I think nobody was expecting that. And it's like I was, when I played that the first time, I was just genuinely uneasy. It didn't feel very comfortable at all. I think we've managed to do something really good there. So just to wrap up, do you have future plans for SteamWorld? Like, where does it go from here?

I was actually kind of surprised by the twist at the end of the game, kind of like the new Thor movie, like, oh, you guys went there. I didn't expect the game to end quite the way that it did. But it does pose a lot of questions about where does SteamWorld go from here. The thing is, so one thing is,

so we made Steamwell Tower Defense. That's sort of a freestanding introduction. And then you have Steamworld Dig that takes place

at a certain point in time. And then SteamWorld Heist comes after that that is very obviously set many, many,

many years after Steamwell Dig. But then you have SteamWorld Dig too that sort of jumps back and places the self

sort of kind of right after SteamWorld Dig. So that means that we've given ourselves the liberty to put or to place any coming Steamworld game wherever we want

chronologically. We don't have to make like a game that follows on the last game and so on. Because we've sort of told people that we're not doing that. Here we're Steamwell Heist. Now comes a game, SteamWorld Dig 2, that takes place way before that and so on. But I think there's definitely, if you talk about that chronology,

there's, I think there's space for us to put some games in between SteamWorld Dig 2 and SteamWorld Heist, if chronologically. But that's probably not what we're up to now. We're doing something very different again. when you say very different you mean not even part of the steamworld family like are you exploring new property ideas both maybe okay all right well i guess you can't really say too much right now but um i i thought steamworld dig was great and steamworld dig too turned out even better steam world heist is really cool and unique so i'm looking forward to seeing whatever it is you guys

announced next thank you So, I'm going to be able to be. podcast one has new shows on our new app check out all the cool features to help you explore our exciting new programming like america's lakers podcast with jay moore so random with corin olympios attack each day the harbos podcast not just sports with suzy schuster and rich eisen and sessions with randy jackson as well as your old favorites like the lady gang steve austin shekel o'neal and adam corolla get the new podcast one app in the App Store, Google Play, or Podcast1.com. If you're looking to buy a car, you're probably familiar with terms like MSRP. You might even know what it stands for. But what does it actually mean? The same goes for invoice, list price, dealer price.

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Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Oh, gosh.

Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. This is a slightly This is a slightly shorter podcast than usual, because even podcasters deserve a little bit of a break on the holidays.

but I did want to wrap with a look at a new release that kind of like SteamWorld Dig 2 may be brand new, but has very, very old roots. And that's the album Django by Chip Tanaka. Chip Tanaka, of course, is the alias for Hirokazu Tanaka, the former Nintendo composer, who currently is the head of Creatures Inc, the Pokemon Company. It's one of the companies that makes Pokemon games

along with GameFreek and Nintendo. And so, you know, and I'm going to be able to be. And so, you know, I'm going to be able to be. Tanaka, of course, has been composing music for something like 35 years for video games and for anime. And even though he runs a company that manages one of the biggest video game properties in the world, he still takes time out to perform live at various events and festivals. It's from these live performances that he's called the material for his new album. his first album in his nearly four-decade career as a musician.

He kind of got a start in video game composition by writing little ditties for Nintendo's Blackbox games, those early Famicom and NES games, where the music soundtrack basically consisted of a single little melody at the beginning, or, you know, like with the balloon trip mode of balloon fight, where it was just a single piece of music playing throughout the game. But Tanaka continued to work, and as hardware evolved and the capabilities of music production and the capacity for music increased on these cartridges, the work that he produced also matured.

I think you could easily make the argument that Tanaka created one of the very very first great video game soundtracks with Metroid, which had sort of the melodic element to it, but then also had a lot of atmosphere. It had some very eerie, sort of extraterrestrial sounds that were just unlike anything else that you'd ever heard in a video game before. Snaka helped develop the Game Boy hardware. He created the link cable for the system, which of course wasn't about music. But, you know, it kind of shows the versatility that he had. He composed a lot of music for early Game Boy games, such as Mario Land, Balloon Kid.

And then probably his maybe most beloved work, Or at least, maybe his most groundbreaking, was the Earthbound soundtrack he composed with Kei-Susuki. Tanaka eventually left Nintendo because he enjoyed composing music for the Pokemon anime, and Nintendo had a rule that forbade anyone from doing freelance work for outside companies while they were in Nintendo's employee. So he left Nintendo and went freelance and has still stayed in Nintendo's orbit, obviously, if he's helping to manage the Pokemon property. He's still very closely connected and still has a very close.

relationship with Nintendo. But if you're expecting his first solo work to sound like Metroid or Balloon Fight, you may be surprised because this, uh, this is really nothing like that. I'm going to be able to be. He calls the album Django for reasons explained in an interview that I published at Retronauts.com, you can check that out if you'd like, on the website. But despite the fact that he goes by the alias Chip Tanaka, this is not video game chip tunes in the traditional sense. There's definitely a chip tune element to it, a very heavy electronic feel to it. It's all very synthetic and rhythm-driven, but it's not, you know, like, you wouldn't necessarily want to play a Mario game to music like this.

I think if you're familiar with Tanaka's work, Django is going to remind you most of all of the work he did with Earthbound. It's heavily electronic, has a lot of synthetic drum sounds and synthesizers, like I said, some sampling, and it's very challenging. You know, you hear music like this with the heavy electronic drum sound, and you kind of expect it to be something that you can just sort of put in the background and just sort of tune out. But this is not music that allows you to do that. It's very challenging. You have to make it all the way to the final track of the album before there's really one that you can just kind of mellow out to. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be.

I'm going to be. I'm going to be. Tanaka is a big fan of throwing in unexpected sounds, interrupting the beat with sort of a rhythmic drum fills. There's a lot happening on this album that really sets it apart from other compositions by game composers. It's not one that I think people will necessarily love at first listen, but it's interesting, and there's a lot happening here, despite the fact that it's quote-unquote chip tunes. As I mentioned, I was fortunate enough to interview Tanaka, despite his busy schedule, about his album. And I have an excerpt here from that interview, which was ably interpreted by Hiroko Minamoto of 84 Limited and the 84 Play podcast.

You've been working as a composer for more than three decades. What inspired you to make the leap into producing an album at this point? I've started performing at club events when I was around 50. So due to performing at clubs, I started composing tracks for my own performances. And then several years later, The tracks I've been composed and started to pile up, and so that made me think of the idea of creating a solo album. And so here I am. That actually happened now.

I guess your musical career has been a little different than many recording artists since you began working with video games, which they create music on their own, and I know soundtrack releases are somewhat common, but you're not creating for an album when you create for a video. video game you're creating for, you know, that situation. So how is that, you know, kind of shaped your career, do you think? So basically I started composing music when I was working at Nintendo, composed music for video games, like FamCon games and Game Boy games. And so these games were released not only in Japan, but also. throughout the whole world. And so through those games, people were exposed to my music.

And so I am aware that people know me from my game compositions. So what I did when I created my album is I used the kind of sound that people know me from, like the Famicom sound and the Game Boy sound, but also blended that with the other kind of music, new kind of music that I've always been listening to and tried to create something new out of that. And so I think I could say that that is the unique way of me using my career as a game composer.

What other instrumentation and element? did you add to this beyond what you could have recorded with just, you know, original FAMICOM hardware? This is a difficult question answer, but, well, for starters, I've used the synthesizers to add a lot of sounds to it. But I feel like this is kind of like cooking, and so there is, let's say, you have a chunk of meat, and you could do all sorts of things to cook a dish with this meat so you could boil it and make stew or make curry or you could just have it the way it is just put it on grill and have steak

and so I feel like the meat part was the chip chip tune part of the album but I used the meat to cook all sorts of things. So what do you think the style of music allows you to do that you can't do with a live band or an orchestra? Like, how can you express yourself differently

with the style of music? There are parts that I composed by playing by hand, and then there are parts that I use the synthesizer, so I synthesize. And so, The most important thing there for me is to see the balance, just find the perfect balance for those two parts. And so as I'm doing, as I'm composing,

there are stuff that I just find out of coincidence, or I call them errors because a lot of the things are, some of the things come out, It doesn't come out the way I calculated them, but it actually turns out to be really good. And then I just decide to keep it that way. But basically my thing is to find the perfect balance for that and then create my sounds by doing that. We're going to be able to do. And so.

So if you want to check out the full interview, you can go to retronauts.com. So if you want to check out the full interview, you can go to retronauts.com. to check out the album. It's available a few different places. Tanaka has a band camp page where you can order a CD. Or you can go to iTunes or I think various other music digital distribution services and download it. That's Django as in Django Unchained. Or maybe Django Reinhardt, if you prefer something more musical. Anyway, that's it. For this episode of Retronauts, I have been Jeremy Parrish. Hope you've enjoyed this conversation with Brian Sigirerson of Image and Form. And Chip Tanaka, formerly of Nintendo, about his album Django. Retronauts, of course, will be back every week on Monday with a new episode, full length, and on every other Friday

with a micro episode. You can find us at Retronauts.com, on iTunes, on podcast one, and, uh, yeah, basically any place you'd like to listen to podcasts. The show is supported through Patreon. If you go to patreon.com slash Retronauts, you can subscribe and enjoy each episode a week early in a higher bit rate than is available through iTunes or Podcast 1. And if you don't want to subscribe, that's okay too. Just listen, tell your friends about us, tweet about how cool we are. And yeah, go check out SteamWorld Dig 2 and Django, both very worthy purchases, brand new releases in 2017 that really reach back to the heart of retro gaming and video game history. You know, I'm going to be able to be.

You know, we're going to be a lot of it. And caller number nine for one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry.

That's not what we were looking for. caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save.

The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week.

Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect. the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.