Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 194: Brian Fargo on Wasteland, Fallout, and The Bard's Tale

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

Interplay and InXile boss Brian Fargo offers fresh insights into his pioneering work with role-playing games like The Bard's Tale, Wasteland, and Fallout.

This week in Retronauts, Tales from the Wasteland. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish. And with me this week on Skype, we have another very special guest, a longtime game developer who's worked on some classics that you have probably played. That is Brian Fargo. Brian, please introduce yourself. Well, thanks for having me a bore. But yes, this is Brian Fargo, and I am here to talk about history today. Well, that puts you, this is the perfect place for that.

So what is your current title? You're with in exile, right? So you're the CEO? I'm the CEO, or I'm also known as the leader in exile. Okay. And you've been with quite a few different companies and publishers and developers through your storied career, and I hope that we can talk about those. But I would like for this episode to focus predominantly on some of your work in role-playing games, such as Wasteland, and, you know, kind of how those came to be, because the Retronaut's 2018, agenda has been really heavily focused on talking to people who work on classic PC-R-PGs,

and you've certainly had your hands in some major titles. So I feel like you have some great insights to share and can give some great perspectives on things. Yeah, I've been, I mean, it all started with my fascination with Dungeons and Dragons when I was in high school and just putting the countless hours into that game. And of course, I used to work with Michael Cranford at the time. He was also a dungeon master for us, and sometimes I was the dungeon master. But yeah, this goes all the way back to my high school days. How far into D&D's existence? I think it launched in 1974, 75. At what point did you discover it? Was it still first edition? And kind of what you drew you to D&D in the first place?

It was definitely first edition. I still have my original monster manual on the dungeon master shield so you could roll the dice and not let them see what you were doing. Or sometimes you'd roll the dice when nothing was happening just to mess with their head. So, yeah, no, it was definitely, this had to be around 1979, yeah, 1980, perhaps, right around that time frame. So definitely early on. I guess the thing that drew me to it, I don't remember the first session and who did turn me on to it first, but there was the social aspect, which I quite enjoyed. We tended

to play more of a free-form game. I mean, there was the rules, which I loved. I always felt like it was like you were like part lawyer. It's like, you know, I have my code of silence. Well, no, you know, you're outside the 30-foot range, right? You know, all these sort of technicalities with the rules trying to trip each other off, which was always kind of fun. But then there was the freeform side of it where the dungeon master would, you know, take latitude in telling the story, or they would improvise based upon us coming up with clever solutions. And so I really liked the storytelling aspect of it because, you know, at that point, you had your character and you were living in that world and there was a great risk factor to all the

hours you put into the character and you, you know, you didn't want a vampire suck in the level away or whatever the risk might have been. So definitely some of my fondest memories, we're playing Dungeons and Dragons. Out of curiosity, what other interest did you have at the time? A lot of people that I've spoken to who were big into D&D and early RPGs seemed to have a lot of common interest, you know, like Tolkien and Star Wars and Star Trek and that sort of thing. Were you kind of in that same line of interest or did you, you know, was it something else that kind of drew you to D&D? No, it sums me up pretty good. I mean, I read the Tolkien books when I was in.

Eighth grade, I think it was. Or no, was it a seventh. Yeah, I guess it was about eighth grade. And, you know, and read them twice. You know, I absolutely, I wish I could find it. I have the first book, Fellowship of the Ring. I wrote a program, like I was learning how to program, and I actually wrote some code on the inside front panel.

And later on at Interplay, I ended up getting the rights to the Lord of the Rings to make computer games for them. And we did a couple of them. But I actually took that book to the Tolkien estate with me as an example of how into Tolkien I was. And whether that helped me get the rights or not, I'm not sure. But it certainly didn't hurt. But yes, very much into that. Star Wars first guy in line Heavy Metal Magazine

I read a lot of I love the Michael Morkock The Elric series The Zamp series The what was it What am I thinking of? The Amber series So yeah

I just read hundreds and hundreds of books And then very heavily in the movies I guess I guess it kind of makes sense that You know a certain I wouldn't say necessarily a certain type, but people with common interest would sort of all sort of funnel into a sort of, I guess, not quite communal, but like a shared space in computer gaming. Did you have a lot of experience with computers back in the 70s or did you get into computers a little later? Because, you know, I know that the computers were not just household items in the 70s and even into the early 80s. And it took a while before those really, you know, kind of reached saturation point in the, in the American market.

Well, you know, I go back to like, what is it, 74 or so? The MagnaVox, but when did the Pong machine come out? It seems like it was 74. Pong, HomePong was 75. Okay, 75. So, so. And I think that was Odyssey 1. That's right.

So I had that. I had the Atari VCS. I went to the arcades and I would play, you know, everything that was out on any format that had to do with games. I played. But it wasn't until my parents got me at Apple 2, around 1979 or 80, I want to see 79. And that's when the light bulb went on for me. Because at that point, it was just like, it was like black magic. Like, I had no idea how those things, how did stuff get in those boxes and what made those dots move around? I mean, it's just not a clue. And so it wasn't.

until I got the Apple 2 that I thought, oh, I see, and then I just drove right into that and taught myself how to program. Okay, so you were pretty much self-taught in terms of programming then. I don't think there was much choice back then, right? I mean, that's true, yeah. Yeah, you had like your magazines, intern and stuff like that, but that's pretty much it. That's all you had, right? Because there were no classes, there was nothing at the bookstore.

So the only thing you had is you had the book that Wasniak provided with the Apple too and then you had like bite magazine and soft talk magazine and and that was about it right other than some computer clubs around and uh you know there was some older guys older than me that were working on the old uh pdp 11s and so i would always track those guys out and try to learn from them so you didn't have a lot of experience with the actual mainframes yourself or with like vaxes or that sort of thing it was it was pretty much home computers and consoles well i did i did actually get introduced to a computer with the PDP 11

I remember that everything was on a teletype machine I used to, they would allow us to use that after hours at school and so I would go there and sit with some of these bright guys and you know print out my long ticker tapes

and all that good stuff so I did get a little bit of a taste of that I was a little young and that was a little over my pay grade at that young age but I loved it And I was there nightly just heating it up. So how long did it take before you, you know, between getting access to an Apple 2 at home and creating your first game? Was that something you did pretty quickly, like simple little games?

Or did you have, you know, in your mind like, I've got to make a Lord of the Rings type of game and really go for it that way? Well, I was, my parameters were based upon what I knew I could do, right? So I was just learning basic, and I just, I knew a little bit of 65 with two machine language, but not at the level these other guys were. So to some degree, I was like, okay, what can I make with my skill set? And so the first thing I made was a graphic text adventure game. That was the Demon's Forge, because I could do it all myself, except for there was one routine. It was a recursive fill routine. Basically, you pick a point and it fills an area in with color quickly,

kind of the way you see our online used to handle it. And I badgered this poor guy to death to help me write this code, and he helped put that together for me. And then I wasn't much of an artist. And so I got Michael Cranford to give me these simplistic drawings that I would sort of read in point by point on a graphic tablet. And I did my first game in 1980. Wow.

So that's really early there. So at what point were you, did you kind of stumble across computer RPGs? You know, you'd play D&D. So at what point did you kind of make the connection like, oh, wow, these, you can do the D&D thing on a computer? I mean, I think wizardry was really the big, the big one for me. I mean, that was, that was something I could play when I couldn't get our D&D club together. And, you know, to me, it had, it had all the rules and all the rules and all the trappings that made it great, right? You didn't have the same latitude. I mean, they were

linear in fashion, but boy, boy, was it fun. And so that was really my first big turn-on to a role-playing game on computer. You know, in the timeline of your life, like what happens between discovering wizardry in like 1981, 82 or so, and the Bardstale coming out in 1985? What kind of projects did you work on or did you work on projects? How did you come into sort of the orbit of Bard's Tale and get to working on that? Yeah, so let's see.

So I made that first game, the Demon's Forge, the one I described to you, and I was basically selling it guerrilla style, you know, in terms of delivering to local stores, you know, running ads, taking orders, and just trying to get it out there. I was stalking one of the local stores at Computer Land, and somebody asked me what I was doing. I described it to him. He said, actually, we're going to start a video game company.

Why don't you come run our product development? It's getting Michael Boone. And this was 1982. And I couldn't even buy beer yet, right? So they basically said they had a bunch of money. They had a golf game they were doing, and they wanted somebody to help run the thing. And so I did that. So I sold my company, Sabresoft.

of them, joined them as vice president development, and then they put me in charge of a bunch of different projects, right? Everything from, they put me in charge of this golf game that was being done by a couple of Stanford math students. And then in order to bring in revenues before then, we started doing products for the Commodore VIC-20. And so basically, I did that for about a year and I was pretty much doing all the work. And after a while, it was sort of a crazy scene there. I thought, you know what? I think I really want to start my own company. And so this was an 83. I had met a Stanford professor, sorry, not Stanford, a UCI professor. And his assistant said, look, we're going to get a contract from World Book Encyclopedia. Would you be, could you do

the work if we do the design for this educational product that we're going to sell door to door. I said, absolutely. And so that was a $60,000 contract to get interplay going. And so it was that deal that got us up and running. So then now I had a contract. I was doing educational software. And I was in this area where often in life there's what you have to do and what you want to do are usually quite different.

and so I was into what do I have so I was scrambling around doing that we did some work for the military we were doing a conversion work onto the VIC-20 for K-Tel records I mean we were doing just crazy random stuff but I'd always wanted to do some original things I pitched some graphic adventures to Activision

and we did a three product deal with them one was Demon's Forge the other was mind shadow and the other was tracer sanction And again, most of these are just like paying the bills, right? It was very hard to recoup back then. But I'd always stayed in contact with Michael, Granford, and he was up at Berkeley. And he's like, hey, you know, we were both, you know, we played D&D together.

We were friends. He says, you know, why don't we do that kind of experience? And he goes, but let's put music and sound. And let's bring it to the Commodore 64, right? I mean, that was kind of the big, that was the impetus. behind Bardsdale. And of course, so he came on down and we worked together and launched Bardsdale and that really put interplay on the map. The Bardsdale was very much kind of forged in the style of wizardry, but it had its own personality and its own kind of distinct elements. For your part,

what did you try to bring to the Bardsdale that was unique and different and would set it apart from other games on the market? Well, let's see. I mean, other than the obvious kind of the touch points that we you know that I head on there in terms of music and sound and I guess you know overall we were trying to set a mood and build a sense of being there right and that there was a world you know in our own primitive way right you started off in a bar you got to walk around and outside you have to go down to the dungeons and so you felt like you were living in a world you were just thrust into a wireframe dungeon and that was it so I think creating a world sense the other was we really wanted to bring music to it

and Cranford perhaps has already explained but one of the things that drove it was we had a great sound routine that you could you could play music and not make the entire game halt and back then there was no multi-processing if you did one thing that's all you did so the idea that you could walk around and hear music play at the same time and have you do other things was a big deal and that's pretty much where the Bard was born. So I think bringing in the other elements, other audio and visual elements into

the category and world building was our goal. Yeah, you know, that's something when I, when I spoke to Michael earlier this year that I don't think we really got into, the fact that the idea of the bard arose out of not so much technological necessity, but more of a matter of like a creative reflection of, hey, here's something that we can do, you know, with the tech of the game and allowing that to kind of shape the direction and the theme of the game. That's really interesting to sort of hear the way that that happens and, you know, how game concepts evolved and become classic based on, you know, just sort of nuts and bolts processes sort of behind the scenes stuff. Well, yeah, and that's the, that's the, I mean, it's part of the fun of the behind the scenes.

You know, people, it's been interesting in terms of the way things have changed, especially as we've crowdfunded projects, as we tend to give people more insight as to what goes on in the making of these games. So you are credited as a writer on The Bard's Tale, the sort of credits list I'm looking at. Did you have more creative input beyond just, you know, the script and the text and the story? Yeah, you know, I actually wouldn't consider myself a writer on that. To me, I help more with dungeon design and common. I mean, Michael Cranford was very much the lead on it, so I wouldn't want to take any credit away from him at all.

But I was the second voice of, okay, well, this doesn't make sense, or this layout's not right, or there's too much going on there. So I was helping to sort of balance it and have the pacing feel right more than I was. I mean, the writing, you know, there wasn't, I mean, the story was, there wasn't a lot going on. I mean, you know, Scarbray was encased in ice. But after that, you know, the story beats were. like there's probably like a half a dozen of them right it was really more about the dungeon experience and what that felt like okay but i i was also the lead qa guy i mean i would put hours and hours and michael would give me a build i mean and i'd go tearing through it and and i remember i got

to the point where i knew the product so well that he could tell me he did something and i would know where it broke something basically i'd be like okay well that's a great idea but you just broke such and such on level 12, right, or whatever it was, because these two things are inconsistent. They go, yeah, you're right. Like, I would know where things would go wrong without even having to look at it. So you wore a lot of hats for the project, basically. I did, I did. But you were more heavily involved in the sequels, right?

Bardsale 2 and 3. Yes, I got more involved each step in the way and putting, because the products got bigger. And so everything started to require a team approach. So then it was like, okay, well, who's the artist? And, you know, what are our restrictions on animation? And how much can I push that? And same thing with sound. And do we bring in one rider, multiple riders, you know, teams?

You know, as you started moving into Wasteland, which is, to me, it was a bit, it was a turning point part of the industry where you kind of went from these one-person games, you know, anything from Bardsell was fairly one person, right? Or Dr. Jay and Larry Bird go one-on-one, or you had Arcon, which was a one-person. There's two people or mule that was one person that you're starting to move away from that. And I think Wasteland was, for me, not to change subjects here. But that was the complete pivot of me bringing in an entire team of people and attacking this in a different way. Right. But you say that, you know, Bardstale 2 and 3 still brought in more people. They did, especially 3.

Bartstale 1 was pretty much just you and Michael, right? Yeah, and I think Bardstale 2 was primarily me and Michael. I think there was a few more people brought in as it relates to visuals and another aspects to it. But Barth Cell 3 was a bigger effort in terms of number of people that were required. And you are accredited as a director on that one. So how did your role on Bardsale 3 different than on the first two games? You know, let's see. I think on Bartsale 1 and 2, it was more, it was heavily driven by,

what Michael wanted. And as we got into Bardstoke 3, my role started shifting about, okay, what are the sensibilities we want to hit? I became like a producer. And so I would bring in like Michael Stackpole, for example, right? So we talk about, okay, what are the touch points that we want to hit? Great.

Okay, let's give examples of those. And then he would start writing and putting it together. Yes, we like that. you know Rebecca was involved with number three more from a programming perspective than a design perspective but I won't say she didn't do any design

but I think the design in terms of where we wanted to take it was you know sort of stack full and myself driven but yeah so it was a very different configuration of putting a game together from number two to

You were drawn to three. You were drawn to D&D because of the communal, the storytelling aspects of it. Computers are systems-based, so you're very kind of constrained in what you can do and what the player can do and the options you can allow. And, you know, that you said you really enjoyed the freeform role-playing elements, you know, where you just kind of stopped being so legalistic about things, which is really kind of the opposite of what you have to do with computer RPGs. So, you know, coming to the Bard's Tale from that perspective, I don't know, what was just kind of like your general philosophy for dealing with. the limitations of games. Well, I don't think with the Bardstall series, we really started to broaden out from a storytelling perspective the looser form that we started adopting later and we'll talk about that.

But what we tried to do was make it such that the free-form game really came in terms of what would be the party makeup. We gave all these different ways of attack. the problems of surviving through these dungeons, and we would find that your party, for example, looked wholly different than mine, or you were able to find an exploit because of your cleverness. And so at least you had that sense of, which was true, of playing the game your way, right? I mean, ultimately, that's what people like.

I mean, to take it to a sense degree now, of course, now we have these open world games, right? now, like, you really feel like I'm playing, not I'm only playing everything my way. I'm going anywhere the hell I want, right? It's the ultimate open-ended. So we started off, you know, with kind of a narrow interpretation of that. And the only real, we had rules, right, but your party makeup is the thing to give it a lot of diversity. It wasn't until later on, in the case of Wasteland, where we started trying to open that up

from the story perspective and letting people play it in different ways. So I would say that we didn't really start to hit on those points as much. I mean, the Barnstall series was, from a story perspective, pretty wholly linear. So, yeah, let's talk about the wasteland or wasteland and, you know, the new philosophy of design that you adopted for that game, because it really was a sort of breakout title, I think. You mentioned it was a sort of a change for you in terms of production and scale, but I feel like just in terms of, what a computer RPG could be. Wasteland represented something that was pretty radically different from what had come before.

Exactly. I think that's where, you know, that product was, I mean, in a way, and I'm sure somebody could pick another one, but I feel like we were sort of the, one of the first, at least, to say, like, sort of have sort of an open world mood to it, right? Which is that you got in there, there was, you could go anywhere you want, You could try to take on areas that were not fit for your level yet, and if you got killed, that's okay.

You had a lot of morality going on or tough situations. You get attacked by a woman in a wheelchair. You're not quite sure how to respond, but then she throws her grenade your way, and you know exactly how you're going to respond. And so it was that moral ambiguity, and it was the ability to play a story your way, to me was the radical ship. And the other thing was that we wanted to simulate more real-life things. And that's how we ended up using the mercenary spies and private eye system, which was we wanted to do, like, the thing with fantasy, you know, if you see a glowing sword, well, if you play Dungeons & Dragons,

you know what a plus two sword is going to do. But if you don't play this kind of games, you're not going to have a context. But if I play something where I see a grenade, or an Uzi, I know exactly what to expect in that game. And so it changes things. But we also wanted to do more modern things like picking locks and climbing walls and sneaking and things that people could relate to them, to put them into a world that felt like something they could identify with.

You know, I know some of the early Ultima games, Ultima 3 and 4 were fairly open. They just kind of drop you into things and are like, yeah, go figure it out. And Ultimate 4 in particular had a real emphasis on morality. And that was kind of the point of the game, but I feel like you took a very different approach to those concepts than Origin Systems did than Richard Garriott did. I'm curious, like, I assume you had played, you know, the ultimate games. So were those in your mind as you were developing? Were you trying to react against them? Or were you just kind of like, well, we're doing our own thing?

So it's fine. Those exist, but it doesn't really matter just what we're doing. I didn't really focus on those at all. I mean, and what we, I think one of the things that we did is we brought in a lot of different writers. And so you had, you had Liz and Mark and Mike, and there were some other ones, each bringing a very unique style to their areas. And so you've got a great, you just got a different diversity than you would get with a single writer. And again, we wanted to be edgy.

I mean, sometimes when people talk about morality, it tends to be more black or white, right? You know, I'm either the good guy or the bad guy. And I don't remember enough detail on the ultimate three or four, but we tried to put you in situations where there was no clear decision about whether you were a good or bad guy, or we'd have unintended consequences. And then we'd also try to create content that you wouldn't see if you chose a certain path to turn things off. And so I think it was a combination of a lot of little things that gave it a different vibe. So how heavily do you feel like your morality, like your personal moral compass and the writer's personal moral compasses,

how heavily do you think those affected the shape and direction of the game? I think it's difficult for, you know, a writer, for a designer not to bring some of themselves into a work. Did you feel like you were constrained by that? I mean, if you look at SimCity or something, like it clearly, clearly pushes you toward, you know, sort of Will Wright's clear vision of what a city should be. Did you feel that happening with the writing process or, you know, do you feel the team was able to kind of avoid that? Well, I tend to have a dark sense of humor. So to me, I love that stuff. So it's rare that I would back off on things. Like I prefer to push the envelope a little bit.

You know, so I guess in that way, I'm not very easily offended. So if something felt immature or sophomore or stupid, I avoided that. But I always encourage the writers to put the player in a situation where they're really kind of torn. Because that's the beauty of role-playing games. It's one of the things where they have over other categories by and large is that, you actually feel bad about what you're doing, right? And so, like, I can tell you with Waysen 3, for example, I've really tried to dial up as an example

where we put you in a situation and we show you this great reward you could get, you know, this fantastic weapon that's going to make your life so much easier. But you have to do something really shitty to get it. And watching people agonize over that decision is beautiful. And that's what makes a role-playing game great, which is like, ah, I really want it, but I don't want to have to kill these innocent people, you know?

Right. They're not real people. But in your mind, they are at that time. And then, of course, if we're doing a good job, you're always worried about the repercussions of what you've done, right? And now what I don't like to do in the game is you've done something. now we're going to, you know, now you, you know, you, we don't like to put a morality on it. We just like to have a cause and effect that makes some sense.

We don't want you to play the game and say, okay, I've killed all those people. Now, I can't win the game. Now, that's not what we like to put our morality. We like to put it on you, right? But it'll make you live with the effects. But as designers, we don't want to make the game unwinnable because of what you chose to do. If that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely. So the idea is for the moral choices you make to have sort of personal ethical consequences and maybe in terms of story, but not so much in terms of mechanics. Like you can't be evil to the point where you can't win the game anymore. I'll put an asterisk. Like something I've never liked in games is where you do a bunch of things and your evil meter goes up and somehow the entire world knows your game. evil, right? I just, that never made sense to me, right? How did they know? How did the word travel? I mean, like, with Waysson, too, we made sure that whatever, like in Arizona, because it's

split into two parts, you can eventually word started starts to spread about you if you're doing horrible things, but once you make it to L.A., which is the latter half of the game, they don't know anything. So there was no way we were going to let that carry across.

So I think that, you know, it has to make sort of logical sense for what you're doing. Now, I will put an asterisk on in terms of you can't finish the game. I like to have, and this is what we've done with our later games, and this isn't Waysside 1 yet, it's like, I like

multiple ways for the game to end. Okay, that is, so you know, for example, on Wayside 2, you know, you are supposed to be the good guys, right? But, you know, it's not like you do one bad thing and, you know, everything stops.

But if you just, you know, murder, murder, murder, murder, eventually the Rangers say, hey guys, this is not our charter, okay, you know, you're pushing the envelope here, you need to stop. So you're giving warning, okay? If you continue to just

want on murder everyone, eventually the Ranger base turns hostile on you. Now you can't win the game in the way that the writers, now, look, you can still win depending on your definition of a win. You can now go try to take on the Rangers and kill them,

mall and be the bad guy right and when and the credit scroll and it tells you what happens about you know your your your asshole your victory you know but you can change the narrative of the game to a different ending as opposed to not winning so i i don't look at it as that you lost i just say you chose to take it a different way Redder Dots fans, be sure to check out the producer's guide, Todd Garner and Hollywood's Elite on podcast one. Join host and accomplished Hollywood producer Todd Garner as he shares his thoughts and stories on the movie business and chats it up with his A-list industry pals like Kevin James, Rebel Wilson, Adam Sandler, and so many more.

Download the producer's guide every Thursday on podcast one or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Get ready for hard work, for high expectations, for high fives, for you've got this, for I did it, for you're hired, you've got it in you. Now let us bring it out of you. If you're as serious about your success as we are, bring it. Visit rmu.edu today. Robert Morris University. Get ready. So going back to the original. You mentioned that you had

multiple writers on the game. Was that pretty uncommon in the late 80s? Yeah, I don't know anybody else that was doing that in the same scope that we were. And again, I wouldn't, you know, pretend to know everything behind the scene to what was going on. But I don't remember it was one, I brought in a bunch of professional writers. It tended to be in those early days that, you know, we would just write our own stuff. You know, and if there was dialogue, we would just try to do our best, right? But, you know, it turns out writers are best when they're writing and musicians are best doing music, et cetera. So, yeah, so I brought in different voices and real writers and they were able to help punch it up.

And especially back then, everything was text. So what you read, it had to be interesting and they really excel on them. Creating a graphical game, you know, an RPG with that much text, what kind of, you know, technical limitations did you come up against? Because, you know, these days you put text in a game, you download 50 gigabyte patches. Text is nothing. But when you're working on, you know, three-inch floppies, text is, there's a lot of cost to that. So I'm curious, you know, how you guys had to balance that and what sort of hard choices you had to make when you were developing wasteland. Three and a half.

We had to fit on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies. Oh, there you go. Wow. Yeah, what were the, that's only. half the space, I think 700K? I think there were 140K. It depends if you were on the common or Apple 2, but I think it was 140K.

I'm guessing, but I think it was right around there. So, listen, we had multiple discs, and we had the, if you remember the paragraph book that we did, which was a nice form of copy protection, but really

it was also a matter of we were out of disk space, and it was a great way to offload text, so we could to say re-paragraph 47, and then the writers could go on and on as much as they wanted to. So that was our technological solve for the lack of disk space, because that was the thing you were always pressing against. You know, it's interesting because back in the floppy days, it was always the conversation was, how much space, how do we do it?

And then when you moved over to CDs, the conversation is how much money do we have, right? Because you could fill that up with a lot of expensive stuff. So you mentioned that you wanted a real world setting for Wasteland, but it's clearly not, you know, like authentic modern day real world. It's a dystopian future, kind of a post-apocalypse setting. So how did you settle on that particular approach instead of putting something more in like, you know, the world we know today, the world of the 80s? Well, I was quite obsessed with the Rug Warrior at that point in my life. Ah, okay. So that was, I don't know.

I saw that movie 10 times, and it was my absolute number one favorite movie for years on end. I also always was attracted to that subject matter. You know, I used to love the Planet of the Eighth, which was dystopian in a way, right? There was the Omega Man. You know, a lot of my heavy metal comics were very much focused on that, or even my regular commanding, the last boy on Earth, right? I always, even when I watch Twilight Zone, you'd be like one guy left on the plan. I was like, this is fascinating, right? So there was something about that that I was drawn

towards. And I guess what I, I mean, I don't think I was thinking as deeply about it at the time. It was more like I just love this. But I think it's like this future, this dystopian future where the cards all get thrown up in the air and everything restarts, it's plausible, right? It's not like a science fiction world that you can't you know you can't you don't really get how i'm going to get from here to buck rogers right but drop nuclear bombs all over the planet and us could are reverting back to the to the to the old age of the of the brutish surviving we can all identify with that as a possibility so how did that you know that that that setting affect the shape of the game and and sort of the nature of the writing, the challenges, the moral quandaries?

Well, I think it's shaken in terms of giving it an edge and the fact that, you know, there were consequences, but not like, like if you did a modern game, you'd expect the police to show up everywhere, somebody who called the police, right? Well, you know, in these games, the police aren't everywhere. In fact, you're kind of doing your best to be the police. So I think it gave the writers a mindset to write something perhaps edgier than they might have otherwise. In terms of designing, you know, this sort of pioneering open world game, what did you, like, did you find that, you know, just creating an open world was challenging? What were the hardest parts of that and kind of making sure everything stayed on track and sort of within the constraints of the game?

Well, I mean, the game, people forget, that first game took us four years to make. What wasteland took a long time and the way it was done I mean it was very technically challenging and is that like each square that you stepped on basically would execute a small program you know you know did they use the rope here did they talk there have they been here before with this thing and so let going kind of square by square by square and looking at it and what kind of dice roll would be able to put up against it was extremely time consuming um but it was the cascade of effects of things that you did that made it so interesting, right? Which is, you know, everybody loves little Bobby in Highpool, you know, it's sort of, it's this idea where, hey, have you seen my dog? Well, no, first you, I don't remember the exact order of events, but, but basically the kids looking for his dog and you get attacked by a rabid dog later or before, I don't remember the order, but basically you realize you killed this poor kid's dog, right? But you kind of had no choice.

And so when he accuses you, he starts throwing things at you. Well, you could just run away, right? You don't have to engage. Well, of course, if they shoot the kid, well, now you're in the next step where now you've got the whole town attacking you, right? And they're all coming on. And again, you could run, but no, if you decide to slaughter everybody, you know, then the ghost of the Red Rider BB gun starts to show up. And so I love just like it was like a miscommunication.

or a misunderstanding that just twists and turn sideways. And the more of that we can do, the better. We love that feeling. I want to kind of move over to fallout. But before that, I am curious about your Lord of the Rings games that you worked on. You mentioned that Tolkien was a huge influence on you. And, you know, you took your books there to show the Tolkien estate and say, like, hey, this is, you know, this is a passion project for me. So what approach did you take to creating RPGs based on the Lord of the Rings?

Because I'm actually not familiar with those games. I was always a console kid growing up, so I missed out on a lot of the PC projects that were kind of big back in the day. So I'm actually kind of an outsider to this particular game. Yeah. And it's been a long time. I think the tricky part about that is that we didn't try to just retell simply the exact same story of the Lord of the the rings, but we added in new content, new things to do that seem consistent with the

Tolkien or that were consistent with the Tolkien universe. And I remember they were very happy with what we did, and that you, it was all familiar. We didn't break canon, but we also didn't try to match the books for beat, and people really appreciated that. In terms of design, how do those RPGs come out? they more open world like Wasteland, or were they more structured, like, you know, the more standard RPGs on the market at the time? You're really testing my memory banks now.

Boy, I haven't played that one in years. You know, I would be guessing. I had not touched that game for decades. Okay. Well, that's fair enough. I guess we can both discover those games in the first time. Or even talked about it. At least with Wasteland and Fall Out, et cetera, I talk about them, so I tend to remember more.

Okay, fair enough. well then let's talk about fallout since that's fresher in your memory um i i feel like fallout is is uh very clearly sort of a successor to what you did with with wasteland but uh what new did you want to bring to this game you know you were obviously had much more advanced technology um but it was also you know a decade later so yeah how did you feel like the the design of the game and the the themes and everything needed to reflect you know advances from the late 80s to the late 90s. Right.

Well, so a couple different things. One is, yes, it was very much, we were not able to do a Wasteland 2, and that's where Fallout was born.

And it is worth mentioning some of the similarities to people, I think people don't realize quite how close they were, right? And in Wasteland 1, we had the guardians of the old order.

That basically was the brotherhood of steel. You know, Fallout has death claws. We had shadow claws. you know, there was power armor. And the first quest of the Desert Rangers is to fix a water pump. Well, what's the first quest and fallout? Fix a, get a water chip, right?

So we tried to push the envelope, right? Okay, how close can we get, but we don't want to make electronic cards upset, right? So we were, that's kind of weaving in so that people kind of felt comfortable in that world. where Fallout really excelled and this very much goes to the

to the credit of you know especially Leonard Leonard and Tim is that the in trying to set

a mood for the universe I mean Fallout would not be what it was today as great as a game that it was if not for the Vault Boy

if if not from the music from the 30s, if not from the innocent vibe of the 50s, right? It was, how do we create a more robust world? There was a list of sensibilities. We analyzed Wasteland and said, what are the things that made Wasteland great? What did people love? We knew it was all of those things. So let's make sure we check all that.

Well, let's put a more robust world together. And the other thing was audio, was the big job. Of course, you could, we were on floppy disks back then. And so having all of those talking heads, and we were so fortunate, I mean, the voice talent that we had for that game with Ron Perlman and, you know, these people were, they weren't stars yet, right? But they were, but we, but we love their voices. And so I think, you know, the audio was a huge leap forward from what Wasteland was

and selling a world sense. And so I think that those were probably, to me, the biggest thing. I mean, there were still quests, there were still morality issues, you know, there was a lot of, there was gathering characters, NPCs that joined your party. A lot of the checkmarks were there, but I think the world sense was the strongest thing that it accomplished. Yeah, so the, you mentioned Pipboy. The whole sort of retro-kish, sort of, that sort of vintage vibe of sort of setting the stage with this eerie, dated video technology. Like, that's something that really does define the series. How did you land on that?

What instinctively told you, oh, yeah, this is going to be kind of creepy and interesting. Yeah, and again, I got to give the guys credit for that. You know, when we were trying to figure out what the opening song was, I was actually a Frankie goes to Hollywood fan, right? And they had a song called Warriors of the Wasteland, right? And I thought, wow, this would be great, right, to use the Warriors of the Wasteland, right? But then they played the Ink Spot's music for me. I said, oh, say no more. that's it you're right that that's the way to go and so i've always and i still today i love

the juxtaposition of the violence against the innocence and that's and that's what that product was about to me right so whether whether it was using the music like that or or even in the opening where he shoots the guy at the back of the head and then waves at the camera right that that that That juxtaposition, to me, it was the stroke of brilliance. Yeah, I feel like a lot of the things that were surprising and different in fallout have become sort of cliche now. So, you know, working on your current games, especially Wasteland 2 and 3, like, do you find it difficult to sort of develop ideas sort of around that and just, you know, being mindful

of the way things have changed in 20 years in the media landscape? Absolutely, because what we have to do is we want to strike our own vibe and feeling, but we don't want to feel like we're derivative of what they've done, right? So as much as I love putting in that classic music, if we were to do it, even though it had a strong feeling, it would look like it was derivative, right? Or if we were to do a mascot like Vault Boy, then it would look derivative, right? So we have to like work extra hard at doing other things that don't, that set that strong world without doing that. So yes, I'm very much sort of tuned in.

And certainly, I mean, yeah, I mean, even Epic with Gears of War, remember their television campaign where they were playing that, you know, soft music against the violin. it's been done a million times now. So you have to do something different if you want to have your own field. In terms of managing how much bigger a game fallout was than what had come before, what were the challenges there? Well, you know, back then when we'd work on a game, there was no early access or getting it in people's hands to test it. So we had to rely on our own internal QA groups. And I don't remember the size of it at the time, but at one point we had 60 or 70 people in QA. And the thing is with all of these deep role-playing games, it's just there's so many edge cases, right? There's edge cases with party makeup, and there's edge case with how

you play it. I mean, something like Fallout, okay, if you have a low Ikey, you get different dialogue options. Well, that requires another group to play it entirely different than another group. And so to me, it's, you've got all this content, you've got all this content that people that you can't see on a first pass. It's just impossible. And so really, the QA was the biggest challenge of this because, you know, you want to put all these things together. Then, of course, you want it to be balanced also. You know, you don't, I mean, it's okay to have some overpowered moments, but, you know, you want to not make the whole game be that way. So I think it's just managing the edge cases is the hardest thing. You know, looking back in the late 90s, people

pretty much thought PC RPGs were dead. There was, that was kind of the general attitude I saw expressed online in magazines and so forth. And Follett was, you know, in a lot of ways, a very traditional RPG. It didn't, it didn't go for flashy 3D graphics. It was sort of a top down, isometric viewpoint, point and click, lots of dialogue trees. Did you, have, did you face a lot of challenges bringing that to market? You know, it's funny, it's been kind of a reoccurring theme with stuff. Like, I tended

to choose depth and scope over visuals, and sometimes it could bite you. But, you know, we've always tried to put that first and foremost. And some people will say graphics don't matter, but they always do it at the end of the day.

The fallout was not a huge success. I mean, Baldersgate outsold at two to one, you know, by virtue of, it was prettier, and it had the Guns the Dragons license. But, you know, I'm very proud in my career that I've been willing to experiment with things and not all of them have been commercially successful. Or what happens sometimes is they get recognized as really great later. You know, it's like, oh, this is a classic, right? And it's like, go, well, where were you when we launched it?

So, but, you know, Wasteland 2, you know, which was later on, we weren't going to deviate from what people loved about Wasteland 1, right? We were going to just do more of what they like. And so it had a certain visual style. And again, you know, I think one of the things with role-playing games that are tricky for us is that like a smarter way to go

in creating product is do something that's very limited in scope but is visually beautiful right and so you know

it could be any number of examples where you could do something that's a very tight core loop and it could be an eight or a ten hour game

but it's just polished to the nines with these kind of games you know they're 40 50 60 80 100 hours and so we're like the catholics right like we can't be the top sprinter and uh pull volter in the world but we better be able to do both and we better be able to get decent scores

but you you run the risk of being held up against something that only does one event right they just do strategy games or they just do adventure games and we're a little bit of a lot of different things so that's always you know that balance with role playing games is always tricky Now, of course, if you've got $50 or $100 million budgets, that would different conversation, you know, or $20 million budget, but you've been refining the exact same game for five or eight years, then you also get a certain head start.

But when you're doing these things, there's a lot to balance with a role-playing game. Like I said, I've always considered them to be the decathlon to development. So do you feel like Fallout in some way helped bring back role-playing games and help kind of revitalize them? or do you think things are just cyclical and it was going to happen anyway? Well, do you mean like Fallout 3 at this point? No, I mean the original fallout because I really feel like, you know,

at the time the original fallout came out, there just weren't that many RPGs on the market. It was kind of a dead zone. And you had, you know, people like, okay, so like wizardry was winding down and Ultima was winding down and moving online. And you really kind of saw people moving more toward the MMO space if they were making anything that resembled a PC RPG. Sure.

And I feel like, you know, after Fallout, I started to see more single-player RPGs, more like really story-driven RPGs on the PC market. And for a while, it seemed like those had pretty much gone away and it was, you know, play an MMO or play a console RPG that's much more kind of linear and focused and story-driven. Yeah, I guess I haven't really thought about that in those terms.

But yeah, I mean, I guess they were to some degree winding down. I definitely get from people that what they really loved about Fallout was that it wasn't magic and that maybe they were a little burned out on that, especially when I travel to Eastern Europe. You know, whether you're Poland or I talk to the Russians, I haven't been to Russia, but when I speak with them, it was like this great breath of fresh air that they could identify with it more. And so I think it, at a minimum, I think it opened up people's eyes to role-playing games

other than just your kind of traditional magical fair. Having been involved with designing so many RPGs for several decades now, what do you feel defines a great RPG, especially like a computer or a console RPG, which is going to be a different beast than a tabletop RPG. What do you think kind of defines that genre? And they're so diverse right now, right?

You have a Skyrim, you have a persona 5, you have a Bardstall 4, you know, they're all, you know, the Witcher, you know, they're all different in their own way. So I guess that I mean, if you were, definition of a role-playing game to me is one is that you are creating a character or a set of characters and their skills improve in the game as much as yours or perhaps only theirs, right? So like with an action game, you get better typically, right?

Although all the action games have role-playing elements now. But by and large, you know, your characters get stronger, bigger, and better. So that's number one, that's critical, and that you're creating those characters in some way, whether you're rolling them up from the beginning or customizing them along the way, but I think the hardcore crowd would say we want to be able to roll them up from the beginning. You're telling a story, and a story, preferably a story that can be altered by the player, and the more it can be altered by the player, the deeper the experience is considered. And I would say that sort of managing an inventory of the world is also an important component,

that you are discovering, finding things, customizing, whether it's your party makeup or what you're using so that you're making the experience very personal to you, where you could go online and debate with other people what the best makeup is because of that personalized experience. You know, the projects that you're overseeing these days, how do they reflect that philosophy, if you don't mind talking about that? Yeah, so, and they're very different experiences, like a Bardstall 4 versus a Wasteland 3. I mean, Wasteland 3 is very much like the Fallout 1 and 2 series, right? I mean, anybody who plays those, they're immediately comfortable with Wasteland 2 and 3.

Bargell 4 is a different approach than that. But in that same way, I make sure, you know, you're creating your party, your custom, it, you're revealing a story, you're altering the story, and we're really trying to spend a lot of time building World Sense also. And again, that's where music and visuals come in. That's where having lots of conversation. You know, in Barts 350 speaking parks, I don't know how many we're going to have in Wasteland 3, but there'll be quite a few. And so I think everybody knows the boxes you need to check to be a role-playing game. To me, my focus now is how can we build a, I don't know, a vibe, right? Like a sense of world that feels unique. You know,

let's take Bioshock, for example. They did a wonderful job of that, right? Right when it opened, the music, everything about that you got, like, I am living in a very unique world because of the all of the elements audio-wise music dialogue visuals you know how can we bring all these together so that you feel like you're there and to me that that that goes beyond kind of sort of checking the boxes and so that's that's my biggest focus these days how do we set a mood Well, looking at some of the specific projects your in exile has been working on or has published recently, I feel like, you know, these all are properties and concepts that reach back into, you know, some of your early work, Wasteland 2, Barts Tale 4, even Torment, like these are, you know, reaching back into into video game history.

How do you make those vintage concepts, those, you know, 80s RPGs relevant to people who are playing games now? Well, it's always, and that's the trickiest part, right? Because you've got people who are nostalgic for the games that came out, you know, decades ago, and it would like something that's just like it, right? And then you've got the modern gamers that, or not even modern gamers, there might even be people who have played the original series, and they've moved on, and they're playing the Skyrims and the other, and they're not, they don't want that old experience anymore because things have moved past, right?

So you've got these two different worlds. So we try to find a sweet spot between the two of them as best we can that makes both camps happy. Because, you know, we ourselves, we play modern games, we play Witcher, you know, We play, you know, mass effect, right? So we are, we, too, are used to modern niceties. And so, you know, we don't want those things ignored. And so the, that's really the trips is to get something that manages those who think.

I think wasteland people are very happy with wasteland two. I think they felt like this was basically the Fallout 3 they never got so that was a big thumbs up the barges tell four I think we have two camps we have the people that are taking it more at face value

or moved on absolutely loving it and then you've got some of the old crowd that would like prefer that was more like something that came out in the 90s and so that's again that's the tricky part.

Yeah, the Bartstale 4 is really interesting to me because that is such a traditional genre. I mean, the first person dungeon RPG hasn't really evolved that much since, you know, since the early 80s. It's still very much about like go into a first person dungeon and then you come up against enemies and you take turns and fight and it's very sort of old fashioned. But at the same time, Bartstale 4 looks, it kind of strikes me as a lot of. the first real attempt to bring sort of modern graphical fidelity to that extremely, you know, the extremely established vintage bones of that genre. So I'm curious about the sort of creative

process there and how you decided to go with that direction for it. Well, I think that's exactly right. I don't think there's been a bit of a big serious attempt at bringing in the Dunchukal genre back for some time. A lot of people point to Grim Rock, but that was a very small team, and it was a very excellent product. Yeah, I'm a big fan of what Atlas has been doing with some of their Shin-Magame Tensei games and Etriene Odyssey, but those are, you know, handheld games. So I think there's kind of a, I think that mitigates the expectation of the technology involved. It's okay to have, you know, simple 3D models or even static images because it's, you know, it's on 3DS. So what do you want?

Yeah, no, it's tricky. It's been an interesting lesson for us because, you know, when you're isometric, you're given a lot more latitude in terms of expectations. Like you were saying mobile, same with isometric. Once you bring the camera down to first person, they're going to say, okay, now we're at Witcher territory or Red Dead Redemption 2 territory, where these guys are spending, you know, $50 or $100 million plus making these games. So it's trying to adjust those expectations for it.

And so that has been tricky. But you're right. We wanted to make, we wanted to, again, we looked at, okay, what makes the original Bard still great? It's sense of immersion, exploring dungeons in first person, although it was up in the upper left corner, but we all wanted it to be, you know, the whole screen. and we wanted it to be turn-based tactical combat. Because some of the dungeon crawlers have been,

you're walking around, but the general strategy was how fast could I run backwards and throw things. And so we thought, well, that's just not going to cut it. We've got to give them something super deep here. So we wanted to create something that would visually work, and we're not going to have text scrolling by, telling you how much damage you're going to do, but how do we do a sort of something where, okay, I play darkest dungeon, I play Harsstone,

I play turn-based games, how can I give them something that those people would enjoy? And I think for that, absolutely mission accomplished. I mean, the combat system is very clever, very original, and it really, I think, checks those marks. Do you find that people have trouble with the disconnect between the level of graphical fidelity and, you know, sort of the way things are presented in terms of staging, I guess, for combat. You know, you have, like, very detailed, just really lovely graphics in the game, but at the same time, you're fighting against monsters and there's, like, 12 skeletons just kind of standing glaring at you. You know, I've talked to people who work on, like, the Final Fantasy series, and, you know,

the current leaders of that series have made it really clear in interviews that, that they just don't think that the idea of traditional turn-based combat is something that's viable, that audiences will accept, you know, once you hit a certain graphical level of, you know, fidelity and detail. And so that's why you see, like, the Final Fantasy 7 remake is, you know, more of like an action game now, and it's not so much of a turn-based RPG like the original Final Fantasy 7 was. But you've definitely, I think, kind of pushed against that. that conventional wisdom, as it were.

And I'm curious to, you know, how's the reception to the game been? Have you got a lot of pushback with that? You know, I don't, it's an interesting point they have, and they may be right at the end of the day, right? You know, unfortunately, we haven't had, we had not a good launch. Probably the most frustrating launch I've had in my career. And so we had a series of where the backers weren't getting their keys, you know, which would, if I was a backer, I'd be upset. And then there was compatibility issues that really caught us off guard.

We use it outside company for it, but we missed it. So anyway, not trying to blame other people, and it's all on us. And so we had people playing it that were given like an 85 out of 100 saying it's a masterpiece. You know, we had co-carnage, it's online going, I played 10,000 hours of the game. This is one of the best role-playing games I've ever seen. Then you had other people playing, going, I can't get it to run, or it's running at 20 frames a second, or whatever the problems are, and they're just killing it, right? So we're looking at, like, what are they seeing?

Well, it turns out we had all these different issues with different cards and things that what we were saying was not what other people were seeing, right? Because it's not like I spend every weekend playing this game. You know, I wasn't seeing these issues. So we really had a launch that was just overshadowed by technical problems. So I think the jury's out, right? We're on a third patch, you know, nine out of ten of our most recent reviews are positive. You know, it's a great game, but it's really going to take a bit of a relaunch to see whether the thesis that they're saying on Final Fantasy 7, whether people want this kind of product.

Unfortunately, we had a rough launch, but, you know, the game is way too good for us to not, you know, get it in the tip-top shape. Because the people that are playing it are raving about it. I mean, I think the guy from PC Gamer last night, he was tweeted out. He's like, what do you say? Bart Still 4 is so goddamn good, right? I mean, it's just out of nowhere, right? And so, and then you have other people that are having problems. So it's been frustrating, we'll fix it, and then we'll test the thesis.

So anyway, response has been great from the people that aren't having problems is the too long, don't read. Are you looking to bring that to other platforms, or do you see it as like, you know, PCs is where it was born and that's where it should live? No, we'd always plan to bring it to console. I mean, that's the good news. By the time we get the console, we'll have 100% of the issues ironed. out. So you'll have a whole audience of people that are like, it'll be pitch perfect. Okay. I'm looking forward to seeing that. So one final question for you, kind of a philosophical question, but where would you like

to see role-playing games go from here? Like, you know, 20 years from now, what would you like RPGs to be? Well, I have to say, I'm a bit of a VR aficionado. I love VR. Um, you know, it hasn't caught on the way it could yet. I think it will get there. It's a very powerful experience. So to me, it's like everything's about immersion, right? How do we get you?

And there's all the tips and techniques that we've talked about in this interview about how do people feel more immersed in a world. But when you're in VR, man, it's like you're there. I mean, your primal brain is screaming. here and the fear that gets there, the sense of personal space or scale, to me, the more I can live in a world, I think the more powerful it's going to be. And I think that, I guess in the future in 20 years, I think there'll be debates about whether it's healthy to be living in these alternate worlds versus the ones we are in now. Because I think the reality loses out at the

end. That's all I have for you today. So thank you very much for your time. I don't know if there's anything else you wanted to add, but otherwise I can, you know, let you go. No, no. I think that was quite comprehensive. I don't know what I would add. Okay.

Well, great. So, yeah, to wrap this up is, do you want to kind of give everyone the pitch where they can find your work, where they can follow you on social media, et cetera? Sure. Yeah. I mean, if you'd like to know more, I do tweet out, uh, uh, uh, uh, some consistency at Brian Fargo and yeah

if you are an old school role player and you want to if you loved Bardstall and Dunn the Dragons go check out Bartstall 4 it's uh you know it's it's one of the most

fun games I put together so I absolutely think you'll enjoy it so please go check it out yeah and Wasteland 2 also recently hit consoles I've been playing a little bit of it on switch and it's definitely got that fallout vibe to it that like classic open world

what the hell am I going to do now kind of RPG vibe absolutely and Wasteland 3 is going to be more of that I mean that's the good part about the Wasteland series you know with with Bardsill we were experimenting for all the things that we just talked about for Wasteland

3 we're giving them exactly what they want and we know what they want and they're going to be getting more of it so that's a safer product but that doesn't mean that it's not going to be brutal subject matter it's not going to be safe in that way all right well brian thank you very much for your time and i look forward to seeing the brutality of wasteland

three some time in the future awesome all right well thanks for your time With Domino's week-long carry-out deal, you can carry out large three-topping pizzas, and now, medium-thre-topping handmade pan pizzas for $7.99 each. It's fantastic news. Cut, cut. Puns? You mean pans? Calling all panatics for two layers of cheese on crispy golden crust. So grab your panty packs, because Domino's large three-thes.

topping pizzas and medium three topping handmade pan pizzas are 799 each. It's pandemonium. Bandastico. Carry out only. You must ask for this limited time offer. Prices participation in charges may vary. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor

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