Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 141: Preserving future classics with Limited Run Games

Episode Date: March 5, 2018

Jeremy speaks to Josh Fairhurst and Douglas Bogart about the Limited Run Games mission of preserving classics (and future classics) through the safety of physical media.

This week in Retronauts, it's the full Monty on the run. Hi, everyone. It's me, Jeremy Parrish, for another episode of Retronauts. And that was probably an inappropriate video game reference. We're not going to talk about Monty on the run or really any of the Monty games. Instead, I'm here in glorious Apex, North Carolina, the peak of living, to talk to the guys at limited run games about their business. And that's not actually, they don't do a whole lot with old games. They've done a few night trap, for example.

But I wanted to come down here and speak to them, one, because they're local and it's convenient. But also, too, because I feel that the work that they're doing in bringing digital-only games into a physical form is really, it's actually pretty important from a preservation standpoint. And also from sort of the nostalgia angle where, you know, if you remember back when you were a kid and you got your NES or Sega Genesis game and you took it home from the store and you opened it up and you tore off the shrink wrap and you could smell the manual and flip through everything and that anticipation of playing it, like that's something you don't get when you're downloading from PSN. I mean, maybe there's the anticipation, especially if net neutrality goes away. but, you know, the physical ritual of playing a video game is something that is somewhat been lost. And to me, that's part and parcel of, you know, video game memories of the olden days. So it's really cool to have a company that is dedicated to bringing that back and making it happen for games that might not otherwise sort of promote that experience,

might not otherwise, you know, be attached to it. So guys, why don't you introduce your I'm Josh Fairhurst. I'm the owner and co-founder of limited run games. I'm Douglas Bogart. I'm one of the co-founders of limited run games. And so what do you guys do specifically with limited run games? It's actually, I didn't realize it was quite such a large operation, but I've taken the office tour. And it's not just like two or three guys, you know, putting together video games. It's a, you've got a business here. It's great. Yeah, we definitely did start off. In the early is it was just Josh and I and it was a lot tougher and then finally one day we're like hey we can't do all this by ourselves anymore

so we're really grateful that we have a team now but I guess for what I do is I do a lot of the developer outreach I go to all the conventions and I also am one of the community guys like I'm really engaged with all the forums

and Josh and I are both equally pretty involved on Twitter yeah that's basically me yeah people kind of associate Douglas as the face of the company. A lot of places don't believe I exist because I don't go to a lot of the events. Yeah, I've seen Douglas many times at events. Yeah, he travels around a lot. Even our bank doesn't think I exist. They requested that I come to a meeting next week because they want to make sure I actually exist. Nice. Yeah, the company was very small when we started.

It was us kind of operating alongside my game development studio, Mighty Rabbit. We were kind of using one of the back rooms that was not being used in our old office to do limited run. And I really put a lot of it just on Douglas. He was doing marketing. He was doing all of the shipping and fulfillment. He was doing all of the customer support and going to shows. And that was kind of while I was trying to keep my game development side going because we were all just kind of early stages there with this. And we did that for a while.

It was kind of ridiculous trying to juggle almost every. single aspect of a full business between two people. So we finally decided to grow and bring some other people on, bring some shipping help and customer support. Because our customer support was awful. I think it was like you would send an email and maybe get a response like eight or nine days later or something. Like maybe you get a response after you opened a PayPal dispute. It was also hard to keep up with if I was shipping. Yeah. It was crazy to try to requests. Oh yeah. We used to autograph anything if somebody asked and we used to like do basically give into every single uh request that that came through an entire wall of sticky notes to keep track

yeah so yeah you were you remember you were putting up like sticky note after sticky note to say like oh they want this thing in their order they want their order autographed they want an extra whatever like yeah that was making shipping i think it took you three weeks to put out breach and clear yeah it was intense well i mean that was also our first that was a really big learning process yeah well everything's a learning process we're still still learning yeah i didn't realize do your own fulfillment until you walked me through the warehouse and talked about, you know, having pallets stacked to the roof and 20 deep. So we started off shipping ourselves, but when we thought that that was too much, that was around our third or, I think it was after we did Odd World, we decided like, oh, we're going to look into hiring a fulfillment partner. We found somebody in, I think, Butner, North Carolina.

And I don't blame you for never having heard of Butner, North Carolina, if you haven't. There's lots of little towns around here that I've never heard of. Yeah. And I'm still learning them, yeah. They had a, they had a fulfillment operation there. And we gave them our business, and we were hopeful that they would be able to take it all off our plate. But we ended up getting a much higher rate of returns from them because they were kind of, I think they pay their employees by how many boxes they can pack. So if you pack more in an hour, you get more money.

So they would just be flying through things. There was so many errors and things getting left out of shipments. And we do this thing where we include a card with every game we send out. And they were putting the wrong cards with the wrong games And then we were having to spend $3 to ship a new card out It was just ridiculous We had to send tutorials on how to pack Oh, and they were

The worst thing that they would do is they would take box cutters To open the boxes that the PS4 game shipped in And these boxes are like easy open boxes They have little lips you just put your fingers under And slide across and the boxes open, boom They would do a box cutter right across it And slash the first game in every box which is just the most ridiculous thing ever.

We realized very quickly that the kind of thing that we're doing was not suitable for a third-party fulfillment operation to do. A collector-focused fulfillment operation just did not make sense to just throw off on a random place. We had to pull it all back in-house. Yeah, as someone who runs a small business, I have discovered that there is this really difficult balance between wanting to do everything yourself

and putting love and care into it and realizing that you can't do everything yourself and finding the right person to help with that, the right company or partner or whoever. So, yeah, that's always a challenge. It sounds like the solution you guys landed on was just, you know, you can't get someone to do it right, do it yourself.

Yeah, and it's actually, it's worked out because we've actually, we've grown as a team by bringing on shipping people that we really like, that do a really good job. And, I mean, they're getting better every time we ship stuff out than they're growing as a team. And I think it just makes it kind of a better

atmosphere to have all these people helping to do all these things and build towards one goal. And keeping everything under one roof is always good. And it really helped to take me off customer support and just kind of make me the supervisor of it, which I barely have to get involved now because I have three people for customer support. And that's also helped us in terms of answering these emails in a much more timely manner. And it's also helped my sanity a lot. I mean, customer support, it's difficult when you're trying to juggle all of the other things

and getting frustrated at those, it kind of ends up with us. being like curt with customers. Yeah. I think that was happening where we were sending them like one line responses and they thought we were being rude, but it was really just. And we also took things a little more personally just because we are the owners. Still do that. Yeah.

When people get angry at Twitter, I think my biggest flaw is that I immediately jump on that like, this is my baby. Why are you calling it crap or whatever? Leave my baby alone. That's what it feels like. Yeah, I have to say I've never had the opportunity to interact with your customer service department because I can never seem to actually buy any of your games, which I guess gets into the name of your company,

Limited Run Games. I'm kind of interested why you took that particular angle as kind of like the hook for your company. You know, like the, I think the hook of, hey, here is a digital only game that we're producing in a physical format that you can collect and, you know, you can own. Like that's, that's pretty compelling right there. But you sort of took it to the next level, like you only have a tiny window in which to acquire the physical version of this game. Yeah. So the reason that we initially chose to do that is all of the different companies have minimum order quantities with the amounts that you can order. And when we, for first looking at our first release, it was this game that I had developed with my company called Breach and Clear that nobody had heard of. It had reviewed actually kind of poorly on Vita. And I think we had sold. We had made like $10,000 digitally. That would have been like maybe a thousand units sold since it had come out. And that was in six months. So it wasn't like it had just come out. And like in a week it had sold a thousand units. six months. And when you were comparing that against the minimum order quantities that Sony had, and they were even going to cut it for me for the sake of that release, it just didn't look

like a situation where I should put it up for pre-order and take people's money and risk having to manufacture to demand, because I'm pretty sure if we had taken that approach, we may have only sold like 400 copies, which wouldn't have been anywhere near what we needed to actually print. So we decided to go for this route of manufacturing a specific quantity and marketing it like that so that we could kind of get people in on it that would want it for other reasons than just the game itself

so we could reach that minimum order quantity. It sounds kind of skeevy when I say it, but it helps us reach minimum order quantities on obscure games that otherwise would stand no chance at being physical. And it helps alleviate the risk of us being stuck with these copies later. It's one of the things we do

that a lot of people don't know is we don't actually sit on the rights to anything. Everything that we put out, Once we've sold out, we actually revert the rights back to them so they can actually do a subsequent release with somebody else. So we kind of act for some companies as almost a testing ground or for whether the physical release is viable. And if they feel like demand hasn't been met, they can go back and kind of print more with somebody else if they need to. It's actually happening with Wonderboy on PS4 right now. So it's not really a case of where we're locking it up forever because the rights revert right back.

so you guys never do second runs like you are true to your word you do one batch and that's it and you miss it then you miss it yeah we actually pulled a lot of our customers to ask like we originally thought maybe it'd be okay to do if we did like a new cover so they could differentiate the two releases but the majority of our customers wanted it to just be the one and done I mean we had already said at that point that was our plan was one and done and I we just really want to stick by that I wanted to stick by that that was back that was right after we did our first release when we did breach and clear because people were saying, oh, I missed it, are you going to reprint it? And I think we, I don't even think we pulled people.

I don't think we said like, hey, would you be okay with us? I think we more have asked ourselves. I think what we did was, you know, we didn't have personal Twitter at that point. So it would have been a case of like, we responded on a forum to somebody saying like, hey, maybe we could do this with another cover or something. Maybe it was on NeoGaf or one of the sites where we were active and immediately it was just vitriol like I remember that was one of the cases where we got death threats like people saying they would never buy anything from us again if we did it and just kind of immediately closed the door on that um they even called us uh skeevy and like you know like we were trying to trick everybody into buying it again so i mean we've just we just stayed true

to our word on that and and it's it's hurt somewhat because games like night trap it's clear that we really, really underestimated the demand on it. I mean, honestly, who would have thought that a game that's generally regarded as one of the worst games of all time would sell more units than Firewatch? But it did. We went through about 8,000 units in under a minute. And we kind of thought that that was kind of a high-end guess at what demand would be. We originally signed it lower. Yeah, it was originally signed at 4,000 copies. We saw the reaction and we were like, well, we should probably do more and it still wasn't enough still wasn't i mean i feel like to this day i feel like we probably could have done 12 or 13 000 and that probably would have hit the nail in the head a

lot better but it's kind of one of those things it's just in hindsight it's always really clear that we should have done something but we stick to our word on on not reprinting because that's kind of what we've told our customers will do and it it works out for the most part as as dougas was saying it helps us not get buried in inventory uh there's a game designer that i like I backed him on Kickstarter a long time ago named Jason Roar. I don't know if you're familiar with him. Diamond Trust of London. Diamond Trust of London.

He put that out on Passage. Yes, he did Diamond Trust of London physical on DS, and you could get it through Kickstarter. And this is kind of one of those cautionary tales on, and I don't really say it's cautionary because I think he made all his money back. But if you look at his website where you can buy it from still, he tells you how many copies he has left. And he still has like 3,750 copies of it. And you know, at this point, he's never going to sell 3,750 copies of Diamond Trust of London. Those are going to follow him until it's just left with his family and they have to figure out where they're going to bury them. So it's kind of unfortunate.

There's an opening in a place in New Mexico. Yeah, just throw them in with a... Now that they took all the DECDs out. Replaced them with something new, I guess. Yeah, we had originally said if Breaching Clear hadn't sold out, we were going to bulldoze what didn't? Yeah, we were going to just film it. Because, I mean, if Breach and Clear hadn't sold out, and I mean, this probably required. is more backstory. We would have gone out of business as a company in my game development studio.

We bet all of our last money on that. And if it hadn't done well, that was it. That was the last hurrah. We were going to go out of business. And we had kind of already come to peace with that. We were just going to bouldose any units that didn't sell and say, well, see you guys later. That was it. Because originally the idea was you wanted your game, Breaching Clear to be preserved before the company died. I just wanted something that I had put the last five years of my life into to be preserved in some way that it would live on because I think about it. And, you know, people remember bad games on the NES better than they remember good games on the 360 that were downloadable. And it hasn't

even been that much time since those games were up. And I feel like that physicality gave those games a little bit more permanence and more of a legacy. Yeah, I mean, even if you haven't played something like Sesame Street 1, 2, 3 or whatever for NES, you've probably seen it flipping through the NES bin at a flea market or a retro gaming shop and you're like, you know, you're aware that this game exists, whereas you might not know that, say, there was an Xbox 360 sequel to Mr. Driller, which is a, you know, a fairly notable franchise from a major publisher. Yeah, that some of those digital only games just, you know, they disappear. And especially once the marketplace for them shuts down, like what happens when we, where

goes offline next. be a lot of stuff. There's all of M2's Konami Rebirth series, which are really good. I've heard rumors about those being remade for current platform. I hope so. Released? That would be nice. That sounds very un-Konami, though.

Doesn't it? Yeah, it just doesn't sound like something they do. That's very fan-friendly. Yeah. Occasionally they're like, oh, money, yes, we could do that. Yeah. Maybe it's like they do one obligatory thing for fans each year. Last year it was, you know, let's bring back Bomberman for a bomber man game.

Maybe this year it can be, let's bring back the rebirth games. That would be nice. definitely be all for that. I mean, there's been platforms that have already shut down. PlayStation Mobile, for example. Granted, I mean, it was mostly kind of very small, bite-sized indie games, but there was hundreds

upon hundreds of games on there, and some of them were very good. That service shut down, and you can't redownode anything, and if you already have them downloaded, if you dare to have the tenacity to change your Vita memory card, they will get deleted. And they're gone forever.

And as far as I know, Nobody has bothered to preserve those for piracy sites. So those games are just kind of, they're lost. And whether those games are important is, I guess, kind of up to everybody's personal opinion. But it kind of just stinks to know that those things haven't been preserved because there is developers who poured a lot of passion into those things, even if it was just one person. And the other issue, too, is just like licenses being revoked, like Scott Pilgrim just being delisted. That was one that really hurt. Yeah, that was a really cool game.

And it was not there for very long. It was a pretty short-lived product. Yeah, you say, like, what games are important, but to me, like, I feel on some level, any game that is created and published, you know, it should be preserved in some capacity, even if it's not very good, just because every game has a story behind it. Yeah. I mean, the Game Boy videos that I've been doing over the past few years, most of those games are not very good. But it's always interesting to dig into them and say, like, who made this? And even though, just even decrypting, like, what company made this game that wasn't credited for it is interesting. And a lot of people have done detective work on that, you know, sites like the cutting room floor and unseen 64 and so on and so forth, game developers research institute. Like, there are places that exist to sort of not can't. But, you know, like at least put down a record of these things. And, you know, you start digging into something like you mentioned, Hey, Yanko Alien, my favorite game before we started recording. And, you know, once you start reading about this game that maybe you've heard of at some point, but don't really know too much about, you're like, oh, there's actually this great

history behind it. And it was actually really influential. And it has a really unique story. And I feel like there's probably a lot of games that showed up on PlayStation mobile or Wiiware that, you know, they're the start of something good, even if the games themselves were not that notable. Like, you look at DSIware and Image Inform, who do the SteamWorld games, got their start on DSIware with a game no one had ever really heard of, but that led to Steamworld or to SteamWorld dig, which was, you know, kind of a breakout hit for them. And now they're doing really well. I think yesterday they just announced that they're merging with another company and forming a new publisher. So, yeah, like that,

You know, Steam World, I can't even remember what it's called. It's like a tower defense game. Like, that should be preserved at some point. But, you know, eventually DSIWare is going to shut down and then what happens. Yeah, you make a good point because what if some of those people on PlayStation Mobile, what if they go on to make a huge game in the future? There's no historical legacy of what they've worked on in the past. And that's, I think, an important historical thing to know that before they made this big thing,

they made this thing and you never know who's going to rise up and kind of be in that position to make the next big game who might make something in 10 to 20 years who might end up being the next CEO of some big company somewhere and they have a history as a developer and their games are lost. That's, I think, historically significant to have these things preserved, whether they're good or not or whether they're large experiences or not. That's something that's important to me, because I've been there as a developer. I've poured my sweat and tears into making games that aren't super well known, but to me, they're really important. I want those things to have a legacy. I want them to last beyond the lifespan of PlayStation Network or iOS.

I mean, all of the games I made for iOS are gone. They're up in the... You didn't upgrade them to 64-bit? We couldn't go back to a four-year-old Unity project and figure out all of the broken things to update it. It just kind of ended up being, you know, that's it. We just have to let these games go. And one of them, Breach and Clear was actually really successful on iOS. It actually made quite a lot of money, and it was still selling until the day got delisted, but we weren't getting any revenue from it.

It was going to the company that we had built it for, who had just released Friday the 13th. So they didn't really care so much about Breach and Clear. They're more focused on Friday the 13th at this point. It would have been kind of on us to upgrade. it and it just there was no reason. There was no incentive to go back and do it. Are the Android games still safe technically or?

I feel like there was a period where those didn't work anymore either. I don't know. I haven't gone back and played any of my Android stuff. I think Saturday morning RPG is available on Amazon for Kindle Fire. But that's the only place I ever actually released it for Android because I got to the point I got so busy with limited run and working on console ports of it that I just didn't care about doing Android. anymore because mobile just felt like a waste of time.

So you've mentioned Breach and Clear quite a few times. So clearly that has an important place in the canon of limited run games. So did it start out as an iOS game, or was it on PSN first? What's the story with this game? So Breach and Clear was the second game that my company made. So I'll just do a little bit of a backstory on my game development company. It's a company called Mighty Rabbit Studios. started in 2010. I was kind of fresh out of college and I had an opportunity to get some

money from some investors that were kind of naively just throwing money at ideas for indie games. They gave me money to start up. They gave us a little bit of space in a basement in Durham to start developing games. And after two years of development, we put out Saturday morning RPG. It got a little bit of decent critical praise. Some sites gave it a nine, some gave it a 10 and some sites didn't really like it. I mean, it was kind of, it was all over the place, but the general response was positive. I seem to recall one-up gave it a pretty good score, but I can't remember exactly. Yeah, I can't remember. I know, uh, uh, kind of one of the best reviews we got was from pocket gamer Damien McFeran gave it a like nine out of 10 and we were

kind of blown away by that because it really showed that the game resonated with somebody. Uh, we made some mistakes on it. I let somebody write the first episode of it and it ended up being much to my dismay references for the sake of references, which is something that I really tried to avoid in all of the episodes that I actually kind of oversaw in terms of the writing. And I think it just left a bad first impression for a lot of people. It felt very like all of the Ready Player 1 stuff

that people hate right now, which is just, hey, look, it's that thing that you remember. We tried that. That's the punchline. It's a thing that you remember. Yeah, we tried to really avoid that as far as kind of subsequent episodes of the game went, but we did this first episode that was supposed to be free,

and we just didn't put much effort into it, which was a really bad idea in hindsight, which is like, you know, if you're going to spend two years making a game, make the intro, you know, be the strongest part of it so people are hooked. Instead, we were like, oh, it's going to be free, so let's just kind of make it weak

and make it kind of a really general light introduction. And that backfired. The game didn't really make much money. but the critical response actually got us work on Breach and Clear. There was a small company in Kentucky. They wanted to make a tactical military strategy game, which is kind of a weird fit for a team that had done Saturday morning RPG, but we made the argument that, hey, this game's going to have RPG elements,

and we just made an RPG, so give us a shot on that basis. It worked out. We spent about a year making Breach and Clear. They only had budget for a demo, but we ended up building an entire game on that budget because we were desperate and hungry for work to stay in business. It was enough for us to scrape by for a year. And then Breach and Clear ended up being really successful for the company that we developed it for. It reviewed very positively.

Players loved it. There was some snafus at launch. The publisher decided that they were going to leave out like half the content and just put little coming soon banners everywhere. So people initially were like very skeptical of whether we would actually deliver on the content we said we would. But as we actually started delivering those things on a fairly consistent basis, the response was very, very good on it. And it made them a lot of money and allowed us to kind of spin into doing another game, which was a sequel to Breach and Clear called Breach and Clear Deadline. And that game had four publishers. And they all wanted something different.

And for some reason, our client that we worked with on Breach and Clear did not want us to reuse the same style of gameplay. They wanted to do a Diablo-style game that had you crawling through dungeons as military guys fighting zombies, and it didn't make a whole lot of sense within the context of what we'd already established for a fan base. So we did this kind of counter argument where we were like, okay, we'll do what you want, but also let us do what we want. So we ended up trying to make a what some people will call a Reese's peanut butter cup game, you know, chocolate and peanut butter. And it doesn't always work. They don't always come together as good as chocolate and peanut. peanut butter. So we ended up delivering a game that was really big, really ambitious, and kind of checked off all of the demands from everybody within a year on kind of a small budget with a tiny

team. But it didn't really reach the same level of success with people because anybody coming from Breach and Clear wanted the same gameplay. And they were dropped into this completely weird, real time, tactical co-op, dungeon crawling, weird game that made like no sense. They could also pause. Yeah. It's just. like it made no sense in the context of the original game. So it didn't make a lot of money. And we were left. What do we do next? We have no work, no money, because we just spent the last few years making games for other people instead of ourselves. We got the opportunity to put reaching clear on Vita. It was kind of like the last thing we could kind of do. And they let

us get the money from that. So we went ahead and did it. It really didn't make much money. And we were left with... So this was pretty early in Vita's life, I assume. Back now. No, late. Late. 2015. Oh, okay. It was already when people were saying Vita was dead. Because, I mean, like, a little fun story with that, because I don't think they'll ever bother listening to this. Retronauts definitely isn't up our clients' alley, so I don't think they'll ever, I don't think they'll ever actually download and listen to this. We can believe names if you need me too. They were actually offered by Sony two years prior a very large amount of money to bring Breach and Clear to Vita.

And they made a very long list of kind of crazy demands from Sony, like, uh let's like we'll do it if we can put solid snake in the game i think was one of the it's one of the things that came up i asked the famous sony character solid yeah uh which kind of shows you the uh the that they were a bit naive on this stuff too uh but sony didn't bite on that for kind of obvious reasons and and those discussions died and we kind of lost a really big opportunity to bring it to vita um so we were kind of in 2015 we had vita dev kits and we had the opportunity to to bring it to vita so So kind of decided, let's take it, and we put it out on Vita.

It didn't sell super well, but it ended up bringing in about $10,000. And that was the last money we had. So we decided we have two options here. We can either pay the team for one last month of work and then close the door and never speak of this again. Or we can do this kind of crazy thing where we put breach and clear out on a cartridge for Vita, which is kind of just doubling down on the crazy. because it had already done pretty poorly on Vita. So were you the publisher on the Vita version?

Yes. Okay. Yeah. So we published it on Vita and it was very easy for us to then take that and go physical. But it just was kind of like, you know, people were saying physical media was dead. People are saying the Vita was dead. And our sales numbers had already kind of confirmed that. And they were saying we were dead.

I mean, we were looking at that, the writing and saying we were dead. That was us. But we decided to go ahead and use our last money to do this physical run and breach clear because really it just felt right to me because it was kind of like, you know, if I'm going to go out of business, I might as well have one of my games preserved. And if it didn't sell, then having that was enough for me. But I was kind of just crossing my fingers and hoping that we'd be lucky and the thing would sell.

We started some kind of grassroots efforts on getting people excited and telling people that, hey, if this does well, we'd love to work with some other people to make it happen. in, and we eventually put the game up for sale, and it sold out in 108 minutes. So it kind of showed, like, immediately that despite the fact that the platform was dead in air quotes and the physical media was dead in air quotes, I have to say that just because nobody can see me doing it. Right. And I don't want Vita fans to actually think that I think the platform is dead because I don't.

It's been surprisingly resilient over the past few years. It's really been, like Sony said, I don't care, but then lots of other people are like, oh, but we do. I think it's just like Indies really like the platform. It's just a great platform for Indies to kind of jump onto and release their game. And I think the fact that Sony doesn't really care about it a lot kind of makes it easy

for Indies to get on it because Sony kind of is lowering the bar in terms of like who they're allowing on it. Yeah, you saw that, Sony kind of does that. You saw that with like PS1 after the PS2 launched. Like you would see these really strange games, some of which were kind of cool, show up at retail

for like $10. And then, you know, You know, once PS3 came out, PS2 was like, let's just put stuff on there. So you get these, like, crazy end-of-life gems that kind of show up because Sony is sort of stopped playing gatekeeper on those platforms. And they're just like, whatever, just make some, you know, some revenues for us. We don't care. So, yeah, I think Vita is kind of enjoying the same existence. But because there's no replacement in the pipeline for it, it just kind of keeps going. It's like the Sony portable option.

And there are still some publishers, like Atlas just announced the Catherine remake. I know that's coming to Vita in Japan, maybe not here. But Atlas, you know, that's Sega. That's a pretty big company right there. Yeah, they're still supporting that platform. There's still big people supporting us. I mean, you just, Douglas just went to Japan and he was telling me. The Vita sections in Japan, like, they make the GameStop sections look terrible.

Like, it's like a whole wall in Toys R Us of Vita stuff. And like, there's still new Japanese games coming out, like, every day. Yeah, the question is, would you want to play some of those games? but there are there are a lot of them yeah and there's a lot of good ones it's uh josh and i've always kind of compared the vita of the dreamcast there's just a lot of like very unique gems on it just a lot of a lot of unique stuff i think it's kind of the indie angle like the a lot of indies are coming on it putting out kind of high quality like unique experiences and a lot of the japanese stuff that's coming out for it is very quirky and it kind of even the japanese

library mirrors the dreamcast in terms of being mostly visual novels or whatever yeah but when you get something that's not a visual novel it can be really kind of unique. And I mean, you get games like Dangan Ranpa, which, you know, that's a visual novel, but it's a really unique one. There's just kind of weird stuff coming out for it. And I like it. It's quirky. It's fun. It's made it a fun system for me to play and own and collect for. Yeah, I guess that was a little bit about aggression, but I guess it does sort of speak to the sort of business that you have, which is sort of propping up and supporting and, you know, taking advantage of these sort of niches that have shown up in video gaming. So you guys do quite a few Vita releases, if I'm not mistaken. I haven't like sat down and looked at a hard list of all the games you've done to date.

So at this point, we comprise over like one third of the platform's physical U.S. library. So there's about 150 games that have come out in North America for the platform and we've released. By the end of March, probably, it's 50. Wow. We've done four. So all together, the span of the Vita's life. Yes. We've put out more physical Vita games, actually probably just more Vita games in general than anybody else Sony included in the U.S. I can't speak for their Japanese output, but I know that in the U.S.

People have actually kind of held the, they've kind of had a running count of who's released the most Vita games. And it was NIS America for the longest time, Nipanichi Software. They had been supporting it pretty well. But even they were just kind of like, no, they're still supporting it. In terms of releasing digitally, yeah. So I think, yeah, I think sometime last year they said, okay, we're done with physical releases for Vita. But it is like,

Techmo's done the same. We edged them out. I mean, the highest was like 28 when I last checked from anybody else. And we have, I have 41 of ours on the shelf already and we've got more rolling out. So, yeah. I didn't realize you guys had published so many games.

I figured your, your total library was around 50 altogether. But if you've got 50, Vita games. It's over 100. So we just released limited run number 118 today. Okay. So,

and that doesn't include some of the PC stuff we've done. So we've done, uh, close to 70 games on PS4 and about 50 on Vita. And, uh, on PC we did. I really think like the only, the only notable PC one is, uh, silver case. Yeah. And I don't think we've done anything else really on.

PC that was a big worth writing home about. I mean, Night trap in some aspects, but that was bigger for us on PlayStation. Yeah. Yeah. I was just thinking exclusive to PC. Yeah, silver case. Yeah. And now you guys have just announced that you're, you know,

you've begun Switch publishing. So I assume that's going to be a big new part of your business, given the fan demand. Like, anytime a game is announced, you have the internet outcry of where's the switch version? So, I mean, given the number of change from the Vita. Yeah, it's like, it's like two dozen games come out each week for the, the, the switch shop.

Like, it's crazy how many games are coming out for Switch. And they seem, they seem to be doing pretty well. What I'm seeing from, they're not getting drowned. Yeah, what I'm seeing from almost every developer I talk about is that their Switch versions are selling better than anything that they've ever released on, which is surprising to me. Because I think in the past, a lot of publishers have really struggled digitally on Nintendo platform. So it's nice to see that that's not the case for Switch right now. It's like night and day from Wii U to Switch. Yeah. And we're noticing the responses to our Switch announcements are

really, really, really excited and positive. In general, Switch fans seem a lot nicer than Sony fans. I don't know, I don't know what it is, but we get to maybe it's because we haven't had a chance to make them angry at us yet. I think it's probably what it is. You're just dipping your toe into the pond here. There's some, there's some ugly Nintendo fans out there, just like any any other kind of fandom. Yeah. So I'm sure we'll be introduced to them over the next year. But there does seem to be this like general positivity around Switch that has really, I'm happy.

I love the platform, but it surprises me, like just how enthusiastic people have been and games that you wouldn't think would necessarily be appealing to the Nintendo audience or wouldn't necessarily do that well, especially because they've shown up on other platforms. They just seem to be soaring on Switch. I've always noticed growing up too, like Nintendo fans are much more like family-oriented with each other. I remember there would be a group of kids on my bus, and they were all very, like, big Nintendo fans and didn't matter what Nintendo was doing. They were always, like, we're firm believers that Nintendo can do no wrong, even if they are.

Like, they always, I've just noticed that with the Nintendo crowd, and it's a little bit easier to work with right now, just because it's like they're much more optimistic about everything. Yeah, but I mean, I feel like for that, for you guys, like, that is just a huge opportunity, given how many games have already come to switch in digital only for. format. I don't know how seriously you want to pursue that, but it seems like a great opportunity. For us, for us, one of the things we're doing is we've kind of noticed that we're releasing too much on PlayStation 4 and Vita. It's exhausting for for me to keep up with. So I know that our fans are kind of feeling the same way. So our approach on Switch is to kind of take it easy as much as we possibly can. So it's a chance to reset. We're kind of looking at trying to keep switch slow and steady, like one release a month, two, one.

Max is the two. Unless something crazy came by. And to kind of, one of the things I've been trying to do is in terms of what we've signed, try to focus or hone in on stuff that might really appeal to the Switch fan base more than the PlayStation fan base. But since we haven't released anything yet, I don't really know what that is. I'm just kind of going off of some weird idea of what I like as a Nintendo fan, which is kind of these charming games with kind of a retro aesthetic. Yeah, and that seems to be where you're going with your first few switch announcements.

They're all three by tribute games? No, two are by tribute, and one is Saturday morning RPG. We always mix in a Mighty Rabbit game so we can learn the platform. Because we want to know when we go to a partner, we want to know the entire process of going from digital to physical. And that's from projects start to actual package product in hand because we don't want to be just saying, like, hey, figure it out. because we know we've had some other people come into this space and do this, and they're not game developers. And I know that what they're doing is just telling the developer to do all the work, just saying, hey, figure it out, like, we'll be here to sell the thing, but you need to figure it out. I don't want to be that person.

I don't want to be passive about it. I want to know what needs to be done to get this thing to market. So we took one of our games that we already had and started developing it digitally for the Switch, found out that developing for Switch is actually surprisingly easy. It's a nice, robust piece of hardware. The development tools are much better than the Wii. Because we actually developed Saturday morning RPG for Wii, but ended up never releasing it, even though it's totally done. It just, the development tools on that were harder to use. The submission process for releasing, it was really kind of obtuse.

But with Switch, they've fixed all those things. They've made it really nice. And it was super easy. And we kind of just decided, hey, let's take this one step further and make it the first thing we announced. So we kind of announced it to kind of test the waters and see how excited people were for things. And that kind of blew up. We got more kind of social media traction on that, which is a weird way to measure how well it releases will do. But generally, we look at Twitter likes and kind of use that to kind of gauge where people are in terms of excitement. And Saturday

morning RPG kind of, you know, almost came in right next to night trap in terms of the excitement, which really kind of surprised me because I kind of see it as, you know, the weakest thing in our lineup on Switch, but maybe that's just me being self-deprecating. I don't know. So what do you see as the various strengths and weaknesses of the platforms you've worked on so far? I don't know how much development time you've put into Switch so far, but I'd be curious to know, like, you know, when you're publishing on each system, what do you have to be mindful of and what can you do there that is not possible on a different system? I know with Vita, for example, it's much harder to get a build that's completely patched, So if the original build that somebody submitted was broken,

it's something that has to go through a lot more work. Vita is hands down the most difficult platform to do a physical release for because, I mean, Sony hasn't just kind of forgotten Vita at retail, the development side of things. I don't think they're as motivated to, like, keep those tools as user-friendly as some of the other ones. So where on PlayStation,

they've been constantly making it easier or PlayStation 4, they've been constantly making it easier and easier and easier to do physical releases. On Vita, they've just kind of kept it where it was back in 2015. You can't just easily put a patch on a cartridge. You can't just easily put DLC on a cartridge. You have to completely rebuild the game against the new product code and then resubmit that, go through a full round of certification. And that kind of led to probably our most notorious release is Skullgirls.

We did a pre-order for that over a year ago. we were able to ship the PlayStation 4 version about three or four months ago, but the Vita version just kept getting kicked back in certification because it had to go through a full round of certification. It just constantly kept getting kicked back for like really crazy things. And it just illustrated how difficult that platform is versus others. With Switch, as far as I can tell right now, there's really no special considerations when it comes to physical.

It seems pretty intuitive and easy, and I think it's going to be smooth for any developer that wants to do it. I mean, what's the flavor, the cartridge flavor selection process like? Oh, it's very. Do they send you like a birdie botts beans kind of thing? You just try all the jelly beans to figure out which one you want for the cartridge to taste like. Yeah, that's, they also send coffee beans to reset your palate. Have you tried, like, eating a goji berry and then licking a switch cartridge?

God, no. I did like the cartridges just because I don't remember my wife, like, seeing me. do it saying why and I'm like because it's all over the internet I got to know because the internet says also here's a tide pod yeah I was about to say you also you also try to tide pod because the internet told you too right did not do that I thought that's basically the same line of thinking there it's like oh everybody else is licking the switch cartridges so I might as well yeah but switch cartridges aren't toxic I mean they taste pretty toxic I mean I'm sure eating it I have a feeling if you just kept it in your mouth for a while it would probably

be toxic well we'll find out soon so um actually I want wanted to go back to the question of Vita, has Sony started to scale down their physical production facilities? Or is it there's no... No, I really think the way that they do it is kind of as long as there is a demand from publishers, they will keep supporting it. They actually, they made it possible to make UMDs until like 10 years after the PSP was production. Yeah, I think the last UMD project, maybe it hasn't actually come out was by Guyjin works, you know. Yeah, they were from formerly of working designs. Wanted to do Class of Heroes 3G, I think.

And I don't know if that was able to actually happen because they had killed off the... He sent out a newsletter to anybody that had kind of signed up for announcements on it and just kind of said they shut down UMD production. And there was one factory that was still kind of doing it. But I think the way that he made it sound was like maybe that was for other markets and he wasn't supposed to use it. And it would have been a huge hassle. So I think he kind of had to shut it down there. But when you look at it just kind of from a standpoint of how long was the PSP popular for UMD production kind of ran like five years after that.

And I guess with Vita at that point, we're probably already there. But they did produce UMDs for about 10 or 11 years. So it had a pretty long lifespan. And I'm kind of thinking that Vita will have the same. Because even like at the end of the UMD's life, like I don't think anybody outside of VIII. Vic was using it, and they were still kind of allowing it. And right now you've got Atlas still using it in Japan. You've got, I think, Codantia games and a few other places use it for their VNs or

whatever they're putting out in Japan. So there's enough publishers, I think, utilizing the cartridges that Axis uses it here. Yeah, Axis is still putting them out and Exceed is still putting out video games to some degree. So I think it's going to keep going for a while. maybe like 2020 is probably going to be when like we really have to panic about Vita being gone. But until then, I think it's kind of, we are, I mean, on our end, we are seeing demand for Vita kind of shrinking a little bit from where it used to be because our popular theory is that people are just kind of moving to switch. Some of the people that were there before.

I mean, it feels like a natural replacement for, yeah. It's like a bigger version of Vita that can also do more. We've gotten in trouble for saying that, though. Like I said that on my, my Twitter and a lot of Vita fans got really mad at me, but. Okay, well, I'm the one saying that, so take the heat off Josh guys. The thing is, the thing is, I think that they just missed that. I wasn't saying that everybody was going to leave Vita for Switch. Like, I know the hardcore fans are not going to leave behind the thing that they're really passionate about for it.

It's kind of the casual dabblers of the Vita that have left it to move to Switch. And there was plenty of people that came in on my thread on Twitter and said, yeah, I've moved from Vita to Switch. Well, I see that a lot, too, when we make announcements, they'll say, oh, darn, I already sold my Vita. Like, you just see those people. Yeah. Yeah, I've been finding it hard to go back to Vita after playing Switch because, like I said, they are so similar, but Switch is just more luxurious, more powerful.

It's got a bigger screen. But I've been playing iconoclasts over the past week, and it's a great game. I hope you guys publish that at some point. But it does feel a little cramped at this point. I'm kind of like, oh, I wish the screen were a little bigger. So I can definitely see where that's taking a bite of it. But that does lead me to a question I've been meaning to get back to, which was, how do you guys pick order quantities? Like, you talked about with Nighttrap, you had initially targeted 4,000, and then you announced 8,000.

But you hadn't actually entered production at that point, had you? Like, how does the process work? Like, at what point are you locked down? So once we've placed the order with Sony, that's kind of when it's locked down. There's a little bit of wiggle room there. if they kind of haven't gotten all the print materials and all that stuff yet. But for the most part, once we've locked down an order with them, that's it. But generally with our contracts that we send to developers, we work with them before we send

that to set a quantity that they're happy with that we're comfortable at. For us, it's generally like what games are similar to this that we've released in the past, what how have those sold, and we kind of set the quantities based on that. Sometimes it's just a general feel for things. And then sometimes it's the developer themselves saying, like, either they think that I'm suggesting too few or too many. And oddly enough, a lot of the time, they think I'm suggesting too many. Yeah, that's what happens. One of the games we were notorious for for a while was Darias Burst Chronicles Saviors.

We actually only put out, I think it was 4,000 copies of that. And people were like, are you crazy? It's a schmup. Why are you only putting out 4,000 copies of that? And we were like, that was suggested by the publisher we work with. They wanted to put out 4,000 copies. That was kind of their call on that. And I'm not going to tell them, like, no, I'm not going to do what you want.

It's their decision ultimately. That's kind of one of the big things that we have is kind of like, we like to let developers release their game on their own terms for the most part. If a developer we work with that has a really good game wants to put out a thousand copies, I'm going to urge them like, hey, you can probably sell way more than that. But if they really want to put out those thousand copies and they're not going to do it any other way, I would rather a thousand copies of that game exists than none. So I kind of just go with them on it.

I remember with tribute games, they were actually scared of the amounts we had signed. They were like, these aren't going to sell. And then they all sold out. Oh, yeah, with curses and chaos, they didn't think that that game was going to sell at all.

I remember when I first reached out to them, they were kind of just like, who would want this physically? And we kind of blazed through what we pressed of that. So that was kind of, that was impressive. It was cool. Yep.

I feel like at this point, you guys sort of have a built-in audience who's going to be there to, to buy, you know, whatever you publish. I'm sure that doesn't account for everything you publish. But I definitely feel like, you know, because it's called limited run games and it's a limited quantity and you have sort of, you know, numbers on everything, like that really hits the collector's mentality, which I know you guys can certainly relate to.

Do you find that's the case? We definitely have like a core audience. And then, I don't know, I would say that we are also our own worst enemy just because of our output lately. I feel like it's been harder for a lot of people to keep up, which is why our goal is to start slowing down and make it more feasible again. But we definitely have a group that sticks with us no matter what. I kind of initially, there was a lot of people buying everything because the pace of the releases was pretty slow and people could keep up with it. But then we hit kind of the around the summer

of last year when we released Wonderboy, a night trap east all in the same month. A lot of people started dropping back to, I'm just going to cherry pick the best of the best that they release. And that's kind of, that's where a lot of people are now. They're not collecting everything. But I think we still have kind of a core audience of maybe like 500, 600 people that are buying everything and really kind of like that we're putting out kind of obscure stuff that they would have missed out on otherwise. They kind of see it as kind of like almost a surprise game sometimes because they're buying

things without knowing what they are. They just, they're kind of in it for at this point, they kind of try. that we're picking things that are going to be fun. As we get a lot of people that are like, I never would have played this game if you hadn't put it out. So they really trust Josh and I as like judgment on some of these games. We got a lot of that with like Firewatch. A lot of people were saying I never would have played Firewatch if I hadn't gotten it from you guys,

which I guess is kind of surprising because that game had already sold millions of copies when we put it out. But I still see a surprising number of people saying like, hey, this wouldn't have been, I would have watched the trailer and thought that this wasn't my type of game, but I picked it up from you guys, played it, and I really liked it. And I like hearing that, because especially with some of the more obscure stuff we put out, it's nice to be able to get those games out to more people. One of the things that I think me and Douglas have done in the past is,

and I think this has come to the dismay of our fans a little bit, is sometimes I'll put out a game because of the story behind it. If the developer tells me, like, hey, I made this with just me and my wife. We're the only people that made this game. I kind of sympathize with that more, and I want to put out that game. more, even if it's kind of an obscure thing that nobody's ever heard of, I like the idea of kind of helping the little guy out and getting the game out to more people and making that person a lot of money because it can help them kind of make their next thing. And you never

know what that next thing is going to be. It could be a monumentally important game that if we hadn't stepped in and helped them out with money and whatever else at this point, that game could have never existed. Because it kind of goes back to like, what if Gunn hadn't given you breaching clear? They took a chance on you because of Saturdaymore RPG. Yeah, if we hadn't gotten breaching clear, if I'd never gotten that money, we wouldn't be here for limited run. And none of this would have happened. I mean, it's all kind of, you know, cause and effect.

And I like the idea of sometimes going to people like the husband and wife pair that made Bards Gold and saying, you know, let's do a physical release of this, even if most of our fans haven't heard of it. And I think that probably helped them out monumentally in terms of finances to have had all those sales from our release. through. And I just kind of hope that that helps them build their next thing and get ahead. And I know in like the case of Octodad, they took the team out on a trip. So it gives a lot of devs a lot more like padding. It gives them a chance to maybe reward the team. We've done a lot. Like we've helped a couple studios stay in business a little longer. It's nice knowing that we could help in some way. It's rewarding because I mean, I've been in that place as a developer where I had no money and I had no options. I had nowhere to turn to. And it's nice to be able to be in a position

now where I can help people who are in kind of that dire situation. I'm kind of honored to be there at this point. Do you find that doing, you know, better known projects like East or Nighttrap gives you a little more leveraged or maybe not leverage, but I guess freedom to do some of these smaller projects that you're doing more out of like the kindness of your heart or just out of personal interest. It gives us more padding financially if those things kind of backfire or blow up in our faces. But I've actually been doing stupid things with the extra money that we get from those big projects.

Like last week, I kind of really announced that we were doing long box jewel cases for Sega Saturn and Sega CD. And that was like monumentally expensive. And I think Douglas is still kind of mad at me for making that decision. But I don't know. The response, it looks like it'll pan out. Yeah. I just know for like the last, before I had done that, it was kind of.

like this is going to blow up. We're never going to get the money back on this. That's like my guilt trip for you to get out of the Bitcoin race for a bit. Oh, yeah. I couldn't get you out of the long box case, though. Yeah, with the long boxes, that's something I wanted to talk about. Are you just selling those as long boxes, as replacements for people whose Sega CD collections have suffered the inevitable damage of time? Yeah, I mean, the cases. on those are probably the worst

cases that the U.S. has ever gotten. I wouldn't say worldwide because the European Saturn cases are pretty much the worst cases I've ever seen. I don't know if you've ever... I don't know that it's in a European Saturn case. I remember PlayStation cases that were like tiny little fortresses basically.

The European Saturn case, it's two pieces of like really bad molded plastic kind of affixed to a folded piece of cardboard with a really weak spindle. and they kind of like almost like snapshot, almost like a Disney VHS clamshell case.

Okay, yeah. But with cardboard. But with cardboard. And kind of the initial run of them, like the plastic for those cases wasn't even affixed to the cardboard properly. So like when you watch a YouTube video, somebody like explaining the cases there, like you'll see them opening them and like everything just falls out

immediately when they open it. It's like, wow, probably the worst case I've ever seen. Why haven't you been? botany to show me. I don't know. I've just never felt compelled to buy a year-bying those sports games. And also European Dreamcast cases are awful. They're the worst. I broke one of those taking the shrink wrap off the case. The hinge broke. But the US sake of Saturn cases are terrible. And I have so many that are broken that it's been a long-term

goal of mine to bring them back into production. And I found out that the Sony factory that we order games from is actually the place that used to make those. So I kind of asked them like, hey, can I buy these directly from you? And they were just kind of unilaterally no. You can't. But the patents expired, so we can't stop you for making your own. So I went out and just started to make my own, even though it was kind of colossally expensive. I just felt like the need was probably there. Wait, they wouldn't let you buy them? No. They have a bunch in just in a warehouse They have the mold still. Okay, but they could sell you the molds.

They could manufacture them. Then they, I guess they didn't want to break out the mold and sell them. I got basically no reasoning. I got that Sony America, because I guess, I guess the case is still owned by Sony Interactive Entertainment America, and they were kind of like, they have to approve any case sales, and that's all I kind of really heard. I never really got any kind of, like, detailed response about, no. So I just kind of went out and did it myself, because I,

I feel like the needs there, and there's so many people that have wanted this and have tried to do it. It's just always been this, the cost of making the molds is so high that nobody wanted to do it. And we have this unique position of, we have a lot of games coming out this year that makes so much sense to include a long box case with. Really? We haven't announced, really haven't announced any of them except for one game. And that kind of gives us a really good ulterior motive for manufacturing these, because I need. need about $12,000 for all of the games that we're going to bundle these with. So that kind of offsets that expense of the mold in a way that makes sense to me,

and then allows me to actually manufacture the others that I'm going to sell the people as replacement cases. So I was going to say originally for like, I don't know, a couple months straight, like every week there would be a box of sports games for Saturn that Josh would be buying because originally he thought he was just going to do 50 of these for a collector's edition. Yeah, I was just going to buy in, I was just going to buy in as many new sports games. as I could for the sake of Saturn and just cannibalize those cases

for one of the games collection. Because I'm sure that they're selling for like a dollar each or something. 15 now. Yeah. They're actually, they're actually really expensive now on Saturn

because people are buying them to replace cases. And since no new cases have been manufactured since maybe 2001, the stock is drying. There's, there's going to be somebody out there

who probably bought like a thousand of them sports games when they were cheap who's like really mad that I'm bringing the cases back into production. But I can't please everyone. So how much are you sort of attempting to be authentic with these, especially in terms of materials, because the plastics on those were so fragile. Are you reformulating? It's crystal cyrene. And in order to keep the costs in a place where people would still pay them, because I know just from looking at past kickstaters and past things where people have kind of talked about this on forums, the max somebody is going to pay for a single case is about $6.

And to make sure that I kept costs around there and balanced against the cost of the mold, I had to keep using the same crappy plastic. Okay. But the thing that I realized I could do last week is I can actually split the manufacturing run. So I could still do maybe a thousand cases with a much more expensive material because they have reinforced styrene, which is a similar feel. It's the same transparency. So everything's still like, it's going to look the same.

It's just a lot stronger, more scratch resistant. It's not going to break as easy, but it's so much more expensive. If we ran with that, we'd have to charge $10 a case. And I just know people would scoff at that. Like most casual people who want to replace a cracked case, they don't want to spend $10 just to replace that crack case. So I think what we're going to do is run kind of two different materials, have one of them kind of be $5 or $6 and then have one be $10 and kind of be made out of that stronger material for. For the really hardcore people, the people that want to make sure that their thing is preserved in a really strong case, we'll have the more expensive one. I just realized that sports guy probably about a thousand, he might be happy now because he has something to put his sports games back in.

Oh, yeah, once he uses the original cases. Yeah. Yeah, those long boxes are such a weird relic of just kind of, I don't know, the way that they ended up being on the market. Because clearly they were created because Sega was like, well, we have CD games. so they should be sold in packages that look like, you know, what people are selling music CDs in, which at the time of the Sega CDs launch were the long boxes. And the only reason long boxes existed for CDs was because record stores were designed to sell records. So in order to, yeah, in order to have CDs that didn't just disappear into the shelves,

they had to release, you know, 12-inch long boxes that you would then throw away and just keep the CD inside. So this is like this weird relic of a completely unrelated. medium and the retail needs of the music industry that has had this huge impact on the collector's market. I find that really interesting and strange. And it's fascinating that you guys are rising up to meet this very niche demand that resulted out of something that didn't even really affect video games in the first place. Yeah. I mean, with me, it's all kind of like, I'm a collector and I started this company to do something that I wanted to do, which was put my own game and preserve my own game regardless if it was going to make money. So I kind of just wanted

to take another stupid risk on something that I wanted to do in hopes that somebody else kind of felt the same way. And when I put it up on Twitter, it was very clear that there was other collectors out there like me that really needed this thing. So I'm kind of, I was kind of re-energized after posting that because I was feeling like for a while, I was just kind of giving into like Douglas saying like, hey, he was going by my desk afterwards and being like, guess what? That response was good. Yeah. And I was like, okay. I mean, I honestly, I kind of started to doubt it for a second. I was like, man, we're probably only going to sell like a couple thousand of these and that's going to be it. And we're never going to get the money back. And I'm going to feel really dumb.

But it doesn't seem like that'll be the case. I think we'll actually get our money back. But I mean, that's where a lot of our extra, anytime we've put out a really big game and it's made a lot of extra money, I've kind of reinvested it into silly things. We have a, a, a Wii U game that we facilitated into existence because it was going to get canceled. And the publisher reached out and was like, hey, would you want this thing if we gave it to you? And I was like, sure, why not? So, like, that's another kind of thing that might be kind of questionably stupid. So is this one you've announced or is it one that's coming up later this year? We haven't announced it. It's probably, it's honestly, I feel like outside of just dance games, which will come out for the next like seven years on Wii. It's going to be like the last non just dance game on Wii. I would imagine. Um, And that's exciting to me, but I mean, we've had our, it's just like I've ended up tying up a lot of money and really stupid things at this point. I have hope as long as it doesn't come out after spring. I mean, all of the things that I put money into, I do think that, you know, will be okay. Student loans can completely wipe you out if don't get a handle on them.

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Some features not available in all states. We're going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. All right. So we're back from our potty break. And oh, that was my potty break. And, well, that was my potty break. And so, yeah, we haven't really talked that much about the preservation angle, which I kind of pitched this episode on. So hopefully our listeners are not too impatient sitting there twiddling their thumbs saying, who cares about Sega CD long boxes? Although you really should.

It's so interesting. It's so weird. So, yeah, I'm curious. Like, how much of the preservation angle really drives you guys? I think, Josh, when I talked to you in Greensboro at the Super Famiccon event, I think you said something about giving a copy a each of these games to the Library of Congress. Is that right? Yeah, that's something that we're looking at right now. There's actually one place, one of my coworkers, Ben actually handles this, but he supplies this museum that kind of, I think they're the digital game

museum or something. I'm not really sure what they're called, but he's supplied them with a copy of everything we've put out. And we have this kind of long-term goal of supplying the Library of Congress and maybe this strong museum and a few of the other places that are doing this with copies because Game Informer has a vault and I send a lot of this. A lot of stuff to them. A lot of these has made their way into Game Informer's vault. I guess the problem with that is, I don't know what the permanence of that is. Who knows what happens if Game Informer goes under? I don't know.

I mean, they're the one magazine that's been hanging on for, God, it's been 30 years now. They started in the late 80s. They've really, they're kind of really, the only one that's stuck around. Because, I mean, everything that I remember, a lot of the digital now are gone. A lot of the European print magazines have stayed around like Games Master, Edge, play, I think. But even Edge, I think that was like 95. when it launched. Game fan tried to come back.

Yeah, it was, that was totally not, not, there's not a lot of continuity there. It's like calling the current Atari, the same company that, you know, did the 2,600. And I know, you were involved with retro magazine, but that was like new, so that wasn't like an old thing. Right. That kind of, that kind of went out.

Yeah, I contributed to it. I wasn't actually. Yeah. Don't, don't hate me. I wasn't, no, it's fine. The business there. Because I know, like, the magazine itself was good. Like, I don't, I don't like put that magazine.

magazine in the same category as the Colico Camelian or whatever, which is what I think caused the magazine to meet its demise. But yeah, that's a whole other conversation. But I think it was good intentions handled poorly. Yeah. But the Game Informer Vault, though, it's like, I'd love to be the person that gets to, like, sift through that if, like, GameStop goes out of business. Because, I mean, their demise will be tied to GameStop. Like, I think they're going to be around until GameStop is gone. I'm sure that they will donate their games someplace.

I mean, that's what happened. I kind of hope that's the case. That's what happened with OneUp.com. You know, we had, yeah, me too. We had like the EGM library, Electronic Gaming Month thing. Oh, wow. And, you know, that had to be winnowed down. So, yeah, the way that all kind of fell apart, it wasn't like a big chunk of things were donated.

But there were donations given at some point. But then there were all kinds of archival media that were just throwing. out. Um, and, you know, in the end, it was kind of like, yeah, you can pick some games and then we'll donate the rest. Uh, so it was, it was not the, the ideal way to go. But I think with game informer, I think they have, you know, from what I understand, like every game that they've reviewed, every game that has come in, they have a copy of that. They pretty much have probably the largest collection of US video game releases. Right. And I think that's, that's a known quantity. You know, like

Frank Sefaldi, the video game yeah, he spent time over there. He's a cool guy. Went up there, yeah, a couple of times. I saw, I saw some of the pictures he took and I was like, I wish I could be in his shoes digging through that stuff. Yeah, me too. But I feel like, you know, because of the light that he shed to that, if something does happen to Game Informer, I think someone will come in and try to keep that collection

together. But anyway, that's kind of a tangent from what you guys are talking about. But But, yeah, it does sound like you are trying to do your part to keep these games kind of preserved in a museum capacity, like a permanent situation. Yeah, it's something that I really, I feel really passionate about is having these games exist in a way where people can play them 20 or 30 years down the line and kind of review them without having to jump through all the loopholes of piracy. because I really think that the only way that people are going to play a large amount of these downloadable games is through piracy. And I don't really want that to have to be the case. I don't want people to feel conflicted when they're going back to research these games.

I don't want them to feel like they're breaking the law to do it. So I've kind of felt strongly from the start about approaching this as a preservation effort to make sure that these games kind of exist and kind of continue to go. It's something that I think I mentioned when we were talking about Nighttrap. The guys that hired me to make Breach and Clear actually made a game between Breach and Clear and Friday the 13th called Speak Easy that came out on PlayStation 4. And it was this game that reviewed pretty poorly, three out of ten from GameSpot. Basically, because it was really shallow, it was like really stylized rock paper scissors that you could play against your friends, which I guess you can play rock paper scissors against your friends.

It's not really a unique selling point. But my hand's not a character. But, yeah, your hand's not kind of a cartoon of Charlie Chaplin or whoever it was that they put in the game. But this game was on PSN for all of two months before it was gone forever. And I know for a fact that it didn't even sell like a thousand copies. So there's probably 900 PlayStation 4s that have access to this game if it even can be red downloaded. I think one of the PS4s, our office still has it, has it downloaded on there.

Maybe the one that's in your office, potentially, unless you uninstalled it. No, I wouldn't have. I haven't looked. I'll have to check. But this is a game that, for all intents and purposes, is lost at this point. And, you know, a lot of people argue, like, maybe it's better that it was lost if it wasn't a good game. But I feel like there is a benefit to having every game preserved so that people can kind of go back and look at things contextually. Right.

And, you know, you look at the games that the publisher put out on the other side of, you know, on either their side of Speakeasy, and those are more notable games. Exactly. So, so, you know, it's part of a legacy. If somebody was looking up Friday the 13th and kind of giving insight into the developer and the history behind that game, they would see this entry on Speakeasy on Wikipedia saying that it exists, but they wouldn't be able to download it. They wouldn't be able to play it.

They'd be able to see the trailer that was uploaded to YouTube that is mostly not gameplay. It's just people smiling while they're playing it. And they wouldn't really have a lot of context for what it is or, kind of why it disappeared. And I think that's kind of a shame. So to me, it's been kind of an important thing to do to preserve games. And it's made it hard for me to select games because I kind of end up being of this opinion where I'm kind of like, if it's a good game or even if it's not, if it's a game

that I find interesting to some degree, I really just, I want to do it. I want to release it. And we get a little flag for that. I've always thought the idea of like those let's plays were pretty cool, but I enjoy the fact that we take it to the next level and actually preserve the game itself. So, what we're going to be. What would you say is the most obscure game that you, you know, like the smallest and least known game that you've brought into physical form? I mean, I would say, like, the game that probably got the most shoulder shrugs was probably mechotails, but like, and really we put that out because we like the guy who developed it, who's a guy named Luke Bernard, has been making games since, like, the Wiiware days, like, kind of one of the original indies, but he never really got, like, he never really had.

a hit per se he just kind of keeps getting by and continuing to make his craft and make things uh basically when we announced that game nobody knew what it was uh except for i kind to think of his core contingency of fans um bard's gold was but i really say like bards gold was super obscure uh futuridium from mixed bag games which is kind of a uh take on eridium the old like c64 game um that game was super obscure but since we released it so early on everyone just kind of like, cool, awesome. But I remember meeting with Sony at E3 that first year, and they kind of said in that meeting, like, we know for a fact that some of the games you've released physically have sold more physically than they have digitally. Yep. So that was kind of

a point in my head where I was feeling like we're doing something important for some of these small developers by putting these games out. I'm glad you felt that. I was just intimidated a long time. Oh, yeah, that meeting was frightening. We walked into this meeting. High-level execs. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we thought it was just going to be meeting with Shane Bettenhausen because he's our account rep. We just thought we were going to sit down at a table with him and just kind of talk about stuff. And then we thought we were going to do a meeting where they were going to shut us down because our account manager didn't even know why we were going.

Yeah, well, we walked into that meeting and there was a huge conference table and probably like 12 people and none of them looked happy about being there. And we just immediately felt frightened because like, what are we doing wrong? Like, we were doing so many things that, like, were probably, like, headaches for them. And headaches for them because we were putting out small print runs of games and, like, probably utilizing resources that are usually only utilized by Activision and EA and people doing retail releases. But it went okay. And then it actually went really okay.

And after we kind of explained things to them, everybody was just like, wow, they're doing something really cool on PlayStation. This is a good thing to be a part of. I don't say the second meeting was probably scary because you didn't go. Oh, because I wasn't there for that one. Yeah. And there was literally a moment where I went, so. how's everyone doing? And they all just kind of stared at me.

But it went okay later too. And you gave Shane a jar jar toy. Oh, in front of everyone. In front of everybody. That was a good icebreaker. Yeah. And then I went as everybody, was everybody excited about Nighttrap? And they all just looked over at Shane.

And they were like, Shane is. Yeah. Yeah. That's what he did. That's good Shane. Yeah. Fans of the show love Shane. We all love Shane.

Yeah. Yeah, so is there like a limited, or a, not limited, is there a lower number threshold that you have to meet? Like, is there a minimum that you have set by Sony? Yeah, so there's minimum order quantities on the Sony side. For the most part, they're attainable, even for the smaller obscure games. This goes back to the thing where I was talking about breach and clear. I think that it would be a stretch to put out some of the more obscure games if we kind of said that they were open pre-orders. because there wouldn't be that speculation side to it

that would drive people to buy it who normally wouldn't. And if you only got people who have heard of the game buying it, you might get like just a handful of people. You might have only had like 100 or 200 people that would have shown up for an open pre-order on Futuridium. I've been guilty of that myself on other websites. If they're like, oh, it's open for this month or it's open indefinitely, I'm like, oh, I'll get it tomorrow.

I'll just buy it later. And then you never happens. You never come back for it because you forget about it. You were just like, oh, I live without it. Yeah, that actually happened with the game. Remember, I came into your office and was like, dude, I totally forgot to buy this. And you're like, I told you for a month. And then I had to go track it down from a third party.

You mentioned that you have, you know, sort of a core customer base of a few hundred people who just want to buy everything. But you also have extremely tiny windows in which people can buy things, you know, in which the pre-orders are available for people. do you have to deal with like bad feelings of people who you know have every game to date but they miss a pre-order window do you have like some sort of special way to account for that if like a regular gets screwed over by the you know the timing we have a support system basically where they can open a ticket and say hey i miss out on this thing and if they tell us like we've been buying everything since breach and clear and they send us pictures that we don't have this if they send us pictures if they send us pictures we don't have this if they send us pictures We always make sure that we sort them out and get them their game. Josh and I, our Twitters have open DMs. We get contacted by like the diehard fans of ours.

And if like we really see that like they missed out and we feel bad, we'll definitely reach out to them. I remember the, the first time we kind of brushed against this was with Soldner X2. That was kind of the first game that we put out that sold out in a flash. And a lot of people who are really big fans missed it. And they were emailing us and we were making sure that kind of everybody that was reaching out to us got a copy.

The unfortunate side of that, I guess, is that there are people who don't realize they can reach out to us, and they're just really angry. So they just start slinging expletives at us all over Twitter and everywhere else, and then we don't really feel compelled to help them anymore. Yeah, I usually try to tell people that, like, hey, you know, if you miss out, just, you know, let us know. I try not to hurl death threats. I would not want to repeat what that one guy said to Emily when he missed Nighttrap. Yeah, that one was bad. I think it, like, the end of it's funny because I think he called her a walnut, but I was like, how's that even an insult? But we get things where it's literally just like FU, FU, FU, FU, FU, FU, FU, FU, like on repeat on our support system after a game sells out sometimes.

And it's like, if those people had just said, hey, I really, really wanted this game because I'm a big fan and, you know, here's a little story about me as I relate to this game or whatever. We're always like, yes, we're going to help you out. we're going to go out of our way to help you because we reserve honestly kind of an almost gross amount of copies of the game for replacements and lost orders because we've had some pretty bad incidents we've had some issues i think shantay we lost like 150 in the mail and we lost 400 odd world we lost 400 odd customs yeah because of customs in france and and the u.s ones where they never gave them back to us where usPS stole usPS stole like 100 copies of that came from us.

Well, USPS also stole Chantay. They took the wrong bag. Oh, yeah, they took the wrong bag. Some of those got delivered with no postage. So we used to, our international items used to go to another processor to go out. So they'd have a blank label with no postage because the processor would print out the actual postage. They would, like, scan a barcode, print the actual postage based on the data we sent them.

The USPS took an entire bag of international orders that had no postage on them and no real labels and those just some of them made it to people with no postage which makes no sense some of them came back to us but then a huge handful got lost forever and since then we've had to be really cautious about what we hold back and that kind of results in us having copies of these games to save for people that miss out so we're always very like super accommodating for people as long as they're not slinging the F word at us and just making us feel miserable I will say the F-word guys, though, keep me humble. If I'm ever feeling full of myself, I just read the death threats.

And I'm like, oh, man, I'm terrible. I'm glad those guys are good for something. Yeah. Yeah, that, see, that kind of gets into what I find so fascinating about this business is that you are a small business that is, you know, built entirely around physical media, physical releases, physical distribution, which is so difficult, so expensive, you know, postage prices keep going up. Um, there's just so many things in the system that can go wrong. Um, have you had moments where

you're like, oh, God, we are totally screwed. Or have you been able to kind of bounce back from big setbacks pretty easily? I would say definitely initially starting out. Every run was kind of scary for us. Just because like we said, we had no idea that Breaching Clear was going to do that well. Um, I mean, every, every subsequent run, we were always like, when is this going to end? There's no way that this is going to keep repeating itself. We're going to hit a, we're just going to hit, like, on the next sale, nobody's going to show up. We're eventually going to hit that point. But it never really came around like that. It kind of showed that there was a permanence to what we were doing. It wasn't just a one-time gimmick. But for the first, like, five or six runs, we were terrified

because every time we were putting all of our money back into this thing. Like, with breach and clear, we put all of our money earned from that into Saturday morning RPG. And then from that, all of that money went into Oddworld, which honestly, we weren't scared about Oddworld. That was ridiculous that it was even happening, that our first kind of third-party game was a remake of Oddworld. I still, to this day, I'm shocked that that managed to work out that way. But then from there, I mean, it was like until I think until we got to like Zio Drifter, we were putting all of our money into like singularly the next game. but then we had enough to put it into two games and then from there three or whatever

and we just kind of kept doing that but I mean it was terrifying for a while because all of our money was constantly on the line it's been fun honestly I'm very grateful for our fans and that we've even gotten this far this is one of those things that I feel not really a religious man but blessed

that's still going Thank you. So you mentioned that you have a few games coming up that will be, you know, germane to the Sega CD style cases. I don't know if you can talk about those specifically, but I take it you're going to be looking more at sort of like retro game reissues or something along those lines. I know you've already dabbled in that a little bit. You know, Nighttrap is a PS4 remake, PC remake of an old Sega CD game that has a history even going back before that. But there's also, what else, Windjammers, a PS4 remake of a NeoGeo game. And then you mentioned Odd World, which was a PS4 remake of a PlayStation 1 game.

But that's, I feel like that's been a pretty small aspect of your business so far. Is it something you're looking at more? I mean, that's been more, that's been more because there's not as many of those games out on the platforms. And when they are, they tend to be coming from the major publishers like Capcom, S&K. and the bigger publishers that are kind of harder to get in with. So it hasn't really been a personal choice to not go after the retro style games. For me, it's actually really exciting to go after those games because they're games that I grew up playing. And to get to kind of interact with people who were core to those series is like huge to me.

To be able to be talking to Lauren Lannning from Odd World and kind of talking to them on a peer level is kind of insane. Yeah, it's one of those moments you pause and go. Is this real? Yeah, how did, how did I end up in this position? I've had a few of those in the press, and I'm always like, man, what? How, what the hell? I remember the first craziest moment for me was being, at a show and having Suda 51, see me and run up and hug me. And I was just like, what?

Or Shuhay, Shoo Hey, hugged me. Yeah. I didn't even say anything to him. It still surprises me. Douglas goes off to all of the events. So he went to, he went to Bit Summit, and, and he just texted me a picture. He just, no context. It's just a picture with him with IGNuma.

Just, hey, look at me. I'm with him. I'm like, how are you just going to casually send me a picture of you with this guy? Like, how does that happen? And then you were just like randomly, like, just as kind of an aside in a text message. You were like, yeah, I was just hanging out with the guy who made Panzer Dragoon. Oh, yeah, that one. You got really upset.

You're just going to kind of casually gloss over that. Like, that's nothing. It's been really surreal to be able to get to do this. I've been a big game fan my entire life and game collector and being. able to do a lot of the retro remakes and kind of bring them back to a new audience is fun or the same audience even, but preserve them on new hardware is, I think, a good thing. It's cool. I really like what we did with Double Dragon 4 in River City. Those are probably some of my favorite collectors. With Double Dragon, it was interesting. There is no actual canon continuity for

that. There was no, like, singular source that said this is what the story of Double Dragon is, but I needed to make a manual for Double Dragon 4, and I wanted to include a story summary. So I actually had to define that series as continuity for that manual. And the whole time I was working on it was like, it's kind of insane that I'm actually defining the canon and continuity for a series that's been around for 30 years. And if the licensor accepts this,

my canon is actual real canon. So you had to clear it with Arc System Works. Yes. Okay. And they're okay with it. They like what you came up with. They said, yes. What is the canon for double dragon now?

So it's double dragon, double dragon two, double dragon four, double dragon three. And in the U.S., because of me, it's the double dragon game boy advance story. Then it's double dragon two, but I think it's, no, double dragon two is actually, sorry, I'm getting really confused here. Double dragon two is how I felt the whole time you were trying to explain it to me. Pretty sure, yeah, it's it's double dragon one, then two, then four. Because I think, you're like, one of them's the arcade version. I think it's the canon for two is where Marion comes back to life. It's the ultra difficult ending where she comes back to life.

And then four is kind of, the story is just a bit of a kind of doesn't even really matter. But there's that. And then three was the hardest to do because the arcade version is nothing like the NES version. And then the NES version is different from the Famicom version. Because in the NES, they were like, you're going to fight. an Egyptian princess name like Princess Noiram or something. And she's actually Marion, but she's possessed.

In the Japanese version, you're fighting Cleopatra for some ways. Wait, her name was Neurum, like Marion backward? Yes. Okay. Very tricky. Yeah. You're not supposed to see who it is, I guess. But in the Japanese version, you're just fighting Cleopatra for some reason.

And I don't know why. You just beat the crap out of Cleopatra and she's the final boss. And then that's it. So I decided to just take the, I'm pretty sure I did the, the Cleopatra one because the Marion one didn't really make a whole lot of sense. I can't remember, but I had to mix and match stories from several different versions of the game. I was sitting there watching let's plays and long plays of basically every single port of all of these games to find story tidbits that I could pull from there and pull into the

continuity because I think they actually take place in like all the games take place in a post nuclear New York City. And I kind of had to pull that from. I think the Game Boy Advance version of Double Dragon is the one that really, like, sets that in stone. I even watched the double dragon movie. Yeah, I remember that. That's the occasion. What about Cartoon? Wasn't there a cartoon?

A Saturday morning cartoon? There was a cartoon, but it's kind of like, it's totally to the side. And there was like a couple games that were based on that, too, like Double Dragon Five. Which I guess never really made a lot of sense to me when I was just a fan of the series playing it when I was younger. Because they consider Super Double Dragon, Double Dragon 4, I guess, because Double Dragon 5 came out after that. But to anybody that was just following the numbers, it looked like it went from one, two, three, and then five.

Because Super Double Dragon was kind of pitched as almost a reboot. So was Double Dragon and Battletoads Night Canon? No. Trade West made that up. Oh, okay. The thing about Technos is they kind of just gave licensees complete control over what they did with the IP. They were just like, we don't even care.

And they tried to fix that by like bringing, like starting their own U.S. development with, I think they released River City Ransom themselves. But with Double Dragon, they licensed it out to Trade West and just kind of said, hey, do whatever you want. And Trade West was like, all right, here you go. Here's some giant frogs that punch guys. Yeah, I like that one, though. It's a weird game. Yeah. The freewheeling 80s.

So, okay, we've talked about. about kind of the smaller games you've done, but what about bigger publishers? What's the, what's the biggest publisher you've worked with? And, you know, do you see yourself going after bigger companies in the future? Definitely. So I guess the, the biggest company we've worked with is kind of Bandai Namco by way of Actal, which is a smaller group that had licensed Ray Gigant, which is a Vita game we had released. That was kind of the biggest thing, because we did have to kind of get approval from Bandai Namco on several different art assets and a bunch of other stuff. And it was a really kind of long process to get it going. I like to consider that one of my

crownian achievements for going after. We have things, we have things in the works that we've been kind of chasing after for two years now that are with much bigger companies. So maybe in like two, three months, hopefully if these things finally like start moving the way that I had been hoping they would, this will kind of be a null answer to say Namakai Bandai by proxy of somebody else. But for the time being, that's kind of our biggest. I really think it's important to kind of go after the bigger companies because you've got companies like Square Enix releasing Romancing Saga 2 and it's digital only. And you're like, why? Why is that digital only? You have your own online store. Why are you not just releasing it there? It doesn't make any sense to me. So we've

kind of just been trying to work our way up to getting to be with... Yeah, and Square Nix is doing some, like, some limited edition. But for some reason, it's... Secret of Mana is coming exclusively through GameStop. Yeah. And Lost Spheres was just through their online store. Which, which, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me that they felt they had to go to GameStop for Secret of Manna because everybody could have just gone through their

store and they would have made more money, but it's like, I guess they look at it as like, they don't want to take the risk on it. Like, for some reason, they see it as a risk when they really shouldn't. No, I feel like that one should have just been on Amazon as well. I thought that one was way bigger. I mean, it is way bigger. They're like, you look at the prices on the Super Nintendo one. You look at the fan community and you just know that, like, clearly there's a huge big audience for this game and it's a good game.

So why not? But I guess Squarionics has been burnt. They haven't even really been burned. They keep their stuff in print for everyone. I'll say, they still reprint PlayStation 1. Yeah. I mean, they're like, like, they've never been burned. So I don't, I don't understand why, like, Star Ocean 4 on PS4.

They have a 4K rematch. remaster of it that is digital only again. And it's like, it just doesn't make sense to me because if anybody's going to hit a minimum order quantity on PlayStation 4, it's them. And they have the distribution in place to do it themselves. I don't get it. But I'm a square boy. I'd buy them all. We want to work our way towards being with them or being with Sega or being with Sega is a big place. Like Sega, Sega keeps putting stuff out

and I just don't, I don't understand why, like, Caligula and PSVita, they kind of just were like, yeah, we're going to put that out digitally. That's it. That came to the U.S. I totally forgot about that. But nobody bought it because it was, it's a huge file. It's digital only and like nobody knew it was there. So it just kind of came and went.

Yeah, they didn't really do a lot of press on that one. And I mean, they left Yaku's of five as digital only. Sonic Mania is digital only. Well, that, that's being corrected. Is it? Yeah. Well, okay, well, I can't confirm at the moment, but I'm pretty sure I read that it is. And it's on Amazon.

already. Okay, well, I mean, I hope that's the case. I hope that's not just like a My Uncle works at Nintendo kind of thing. Yeah, because, I mean, that one made no sense to me. I knew it was more of a, we should push Sonic Forces before we push this. And then you play forces and you're like, no, you should have pushed Mania. Yes, that's correct. So if you guys wish to work with companies like Hamster that are doing, you know, DotMU and Hamster are doing a ton of, oh, obviously.mU is windjammers. But Hamster's kind of the other big one. I mean, they even have Nintendo at this point. Hamster is doing like an absurd amount of stuff.

I can't believe. Punchout or Mario Brothers on a Switch cartridge, I would double dip for those games. Yeah, it's kind of, it's something we really want to do. I mean, we've wanted to work with S&K for a really long time. We're trying to find a way to show Hamster that we can do this. Yeah, so right now, like, we're kind of trying to prove ourselves to Hamster because I'm not sure they think that it's viable. So we kind of just want to show them that this is a viable option for these games because they're putting out. so many good games, so many, so many great NeoGeo things on the arcade archives lineup.

Yeah, I mean, they're a Japanese company, right? Japanese companies have a tendency to be very conservative about things. And if, like, you're suggesting something that's new and unproven, they're like, ah, let's wait and see. We don't know about this. Maybe it's not the right fit for us. Yeah, Japan's been interesting to work with because we're both big fans of anything Japanese, but it's like doing any, like, business with them.

It's a process. It is. Paper contracts. Yeah, you really have to, like, Kempko. Yeah. Kempko is probably, you know, I guess one of the biggest, the longest legacy Japanese people that we've worked with outside of Spike ChuneSoft. Oh, yeah. I guess Spike Chune Soft was the first time we had to deal with like an actual, like, FedEx contract where we had to actually like do a FedEx Express mailing to them to like actually do hard copy signing.

Everybody else is like, digital. It's okay, cool. And Japanese companies prefer guarantees. Like they're like, we want money up front because. they don't necessarily believe in it, and they just want to play it safe. It's been interesting. And, like, I've had to, like, go to Japan and have some meanings to clarify things. Granted, I was already going, but it was like, since I'm here.

You like say that, like, oh, I just had to go to Japan. It was so terrible. No. Those are actually a lot of fun, especially because they always want to go out afterwards. And it's like, wow, this is a way different culture that loves the drink. Let me some Bokinkai. Yeah. Yeah.

But I feel like the thing is, like, once you prove yourself there, then it's a lot easier to start making more of the networking. We've gotten a lot of work from people saying, like, hey, we did really good business with them in a run, and they proved to get everything done that they said they would. Somebody just told me last week that they had gotten a good recommendation of us from Spike ChuneSoft, which is big because I love the XeroScape series and Dangan Rompah. So to have them telling people that they enjoyed working with us when we did good work is kind of, honestly, it's a little mind-blowing.

Yeah, they're a great company. It's a good connection to have there. Yeah, and Playism actually told Spike Chunsoft that we were safe to work with. So that was one that was pretty cool. So it all kind of comes full-south. Yeah, this is everything is passing along. That's exciting to me because, you know, I love

many games that come from Japan and, you know, having more of those available and more widely available or maybe not widely available is the case maybe with you guys, but, you know, having other options for getting those games into people's hands. That's great. That's something we're looking into. We just signed our first localization project. Really? So yeah, we're bringing something that's never been released here except for Steam that is going to come out for PS4 and Vita, and we're hopeful for Switch later. So when you move into being like the original Western publisher on

something, are you going to take a different approach than you have as, you know, being sort of like the limited edition print game, you know, like physical media games? Because, you know, If you're only making like 3,000 copies of this game available and that's the only way to play it in English, that's kind of rough. Like, are you looking into getting into digital distribution? It's definitely still, we would be the digital publisher of record on them. So it would be something that wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense, but it's probably going to be called limited run digital publishing or something like that, which we'll just, we'll give out a certain amount of keys and then cut them off. Sorry, we're out of bytes. Yes, it's 9,000 downloads.

It's gone forever. Yeah. It's terrible. So, like, everything would still be available, available digitally forever until the platforms go down or whatever. So it would just be your bog standard digital distribution stuff. But the physical side would still be kind of as is. The idea, though, is we would print more or at least do something more special for it because it is ours that we're doing with this developer. But it's still going to be limited.

I'm like you saying it's, they'll still have a chance to get it digitally. So it's not like it's completely locked out for people. One of the things that I forgot to mention earlier when you were talking about the business model and why we kind of do it is that I really should have mentioned that it keeps us light. It allows us to kind of focus on what's current rather than having to keep going back and like fulfill orders for games that came out months ago. It allows us to kind of focus on things as kind of a batch approach. So we can get one game shipped out, move on to the next and not have to keep constantly going back. And if we did have that happening, we would probably lose orders all the time because we'd be so focused on pushing out whatever game went up as a new release that we would forget to fulfill the orders from before. So it just keeps things streamlined for us so we can kind of keep track of our workload.

It's definitely way easier to also just refresh our mind saying, okay, we're done with this game. Let's put all our focus on the next one as opposed to being like, I have to remember that we have 10 games going on right now. Yeah. All right. Well, I appreciate you guys giving me so much of your time. I know you have a launch happening in about an hour and a half, so I don't want to keep you guys any longer. Any final thoughts before we wrap this episode?

I would just say thank you for having us. Thank you to all the fans. If you aren't a fan yet, check out our website, limit and rungames.com, follow the Twitter at Limiturunerun Games. Sign up for the mailing list, blah, blah, blah. Follow us on our personal Twitter, engage with us. We have a Reddit. You can ask us anything on there.

You can ask us anything almost anywhere. We're very, very transparent and very communicative with our audience. If you have preconceived notions on us and hate us for them, please feel free to tell us about them and let us explain ourselves because we found more often than not that if somebody has a preconceived notion about why they dislike us after talking to us or listening to us talk and kind of hearing us out on why we do things the way we do, generally a lot of people are much more friendly about dealing with us at that point. They're like, oh, I understand it a little bit more. So don't just kind of listen to an angry guy on YouTube who missed out on Nighttrap yelling about how bad of a company we are. Just kind of ask us why we do what we do. And we'll probably give you a pretty decent response. So you don't have to keep hating us.

Yeah, we've had a lot of people go, oh, after talking with us. And they were like really angry. I mean, there was the one guy that said he was going to have us on his podcast and he was going to ask us really hard questions. And after about 10 minutes, he was like being super friendly with. us because he was just like, oh, I immediately kind of understand what you're doing and I had every, every idea about you guys wrong. And I think people really like seeing that we're just, we are two collectors. We are just like them. We're not two guys wearing suits. Yeah, having seen your offices, you guys are definitely collectors. Yeah. That is, that is what you

do. I actually feel underdressed with you in here. Like, not even wearing a tie. I know. We have octodad ties. If you'd like a tie, we have a lot of octodat ties. I might take you up on that. I don't know for the next convention. All right. So this has been another fine episode of Retronauts. Thanks everyone for listening. And thanks again to Josh and Doug from, Douglas

from Limited on Games. Sorry, my brain just blanked out. That's fine. My blaine. My blaine. Yeah. I'm losing my ability to speak English, so I definitely need to wrap this. Anyway, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find Retronauts on iTunes, podcast one, et cetera, et cetera. All the cool places you download podcasts

from. And of course, at Retronauts. You can follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Retronauts. That's N-A-U-T-S, not N-A-U-G-H-T-S. It's not about zeros. Let's see, I'm on Twitter as GameSpite. It's like video game is more spiteful. And of course, we are supported through Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts. Subscribe to us for $3 a month. And you can listen to this, not this episode, but the next episode, a week early. That's what we do for you, the listener. Anyway, yes, I think that's. It's it for now, and I need to go before I ramble anymore. Thanks again, guys, and goodbye. 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. On to 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. 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.