Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 259: Limited Run Goes Retro

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

Jeremy Parish talks to Josh Fairhurst and Douglas Bogart of Limited Run Games about the company's growing line of classic game reissues, and the behind-the-scenes details of selling new retro game releases.

This week in Retronauts, old games never die. They just get a limited run. Everyone, welcome to this episode. Everyone, welcome to this episode of Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish co-hosting, actually just hosting this week, my co-host. I don't know where he is, but he's not here because I'm in Apex, North Carolina, which is very close to Raleigh, North Carolina,

once again at the offices of limited run games, and I was here a couple of years ago talking about stuff. And now there's stuff that's actually more relevant to Retronauts this time. Last time I was just like, hey, let's just talk and, you know, talk about stuff. But this time it's like, hey, let's talk about old games, because that's what you guys are doing now. This has been a big change in your business model. now you're just old games, right?

Only old games all the time. It kind of feels that way, to some degree. We're doing a lot of re-releases on modern platforms, but also re-releases on original hardware as well as entirely new games for original hardware. Just to let people know, I'm Josh Fairhurst. I'm the co-founder of Limited Run Games, and next to me is... My name is Douglas Bogart. I am also a co-founder.

And next to me is... You sound like a robot. You forgot your own name there for a second. I didn't. I remember you said your last name. This isn't live, so it's okay. You don't, you don't have to be nervous. Quick question. Did you come up with that tagline? Like, just now? Just now. Do you want to use that? I'm willing to license it. Yeah, totally. That was a pretty good one. Thanks. It's one of my superpowers. I can come up with

intros to a podcast that are moderately quippy. Oh, there you go. Good superpower. I approve. It's good for when you're a podcaster. But yes, just to kind of recap what limited run games is about. Do you guys want to give like the elevator pitch of what your company does? Yeah, sure. So the core concept has always been to take digital games and release them in physical

form for collectors and preservationists. Basically, we wanted to bring physicality back to games because as collectors, we really wanted to have something to put up on our shelf for a lot of the games that we enjoyed. And we wanted to have something that kind of guaranteed

our ownership over those games for years to come. I don't know if Douglas has anything to expand on that, but I think that's kind of the core pitch of limited run games. Yeah, I would completely agree with what he said, as well as just helping out our partners. A lot of the people we work with, they were getting, you know, it's difficult to go to retail. And with the way our approach is, it helps a lot of these developers preserve their game as well as get into the hands of all their fans. Yeah, just the idea of physical releases for games, that itself is kind of retro, because now

you open up a PS4 game or a Switch game and it's like you open up a switch game and you know you've got the plastic case and then there's a very foul tasting cartridge inside and that's it there's nothing if you're very very lucky then there's like a reverse cover that you can take out and flip around but other than that it's it's pretty much just like here's your game and a case for it just count your blessings that you're even getting a physical version yeah and that's one of the things we've really liked on Switch especially we've been including manuals with every release uh we always do interior arts or switch releases are kind of they feel like older game releases. Tojam and Earl in specific we have, remember the exact page count of that manual, but I think it's about 80 pages. I don't say around 80 it's the largest. That's like

Final Fantasy on NES size. Yeah, it's Earthbound getting a strategy guide. Yeah, it's not quite like what was that Usizuki Sega Genesis game that came with like a real thick manual, I don't remember sort of something.

Sort of Vermillion? Yeah. Did it come with a huge manual? It came with a huge manual. I've never seen the retail version of that. Yeah, never held it. That and Fantasy Star 2 came with a huge manual because Fantasy Star 2 had the hint book with it. It's not quite that, but it's still impressive for a modern day release.

We also did Cosmic Star Heroin on PS4 and Vita, and that came with a 72-page perfect bound manual. We wanted to do the hardcover working design style manual with like the foil stamp on it. but costs were way too high, as you would probably imagine. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't even know what happened to Gaijin Works, which is what came out of working designs. They released some night six a few years ago and then just kind of disappeared. Faded off.

Yeah. If I remember correctly, they had plans to do a couple more PSP games and kind of- of heroes, two and three, I think. Yeah, kind of similar to what happened to us with Vita, I think those lines just kind of shut down and they weren't expecting it. And I don't know if. that played into why they haven't done anything else recently, but I know that they did not seem super happy that they couldn't run Class of Heroes two and three physically for PSP, because I think

that was kind of what they were developing it for first and foremost, because the audience for digital PSP games at that point could not have been substantial enough to justify the release. Right. Yeah, I have a lot of admiration for Vig Ireland, but I feel like he does kind of get his heart set on things and like just that becomes this stumbling block like goymoin on yeah i was gonna say that's kind of what bankrupt them was trying to do that for ps2 which uh that's always been kind of a thing that that i've been bitter about if you look at like the european catalog on ps2 there's all these games that are just absolute garbage on ps2 and uh in in europe yeah they're usually named after like some local psychic that you know maybe if you live in surrey you've heard of

them but no one else in the world has my my my favorite publisher on ps2 in europe is this company called phoenix games uh they they've done some very questionable things like taking these these movies that are like knock off disney movies with one guy voicing every character and then they've put those on a disc and called it a game essentially uh i love them because they're so awful uh but it kind of exemplifies uh the frustration that i think a lot of developers had with Sony of America, because Sony of America was saying no to almost everything. I think East, maybe it was like East 5 was supposed to come out here, or was it may have been like the remaster of the original two games for PS2.

I remember there's a PS2 East that wasn't allowed to come out here. Right. I know Konami did release East 6 here, but that was actually like 3D graphics. So I think Sony was like, okay, that's cool. Yeah. And then the Vic Ireland thing with, I call it GoMond, because I'm bad at saying Japanese things. I know that he tried for years to get that through and couldn't. And it hurts when you look at what came out in Europe and the fact that that couldn't come out here and that sunk them when they were doing such quality releases on the platform, like the growl answer thing that I think was their last release with that watch that it came with.

That was so cool. And I would have loved to see more stuff. But yeah, it's unfortunate. Yeah. Well, I have the Summit Night 6 box and it's quite impressive. But I feel like you guys just kind of do that as a matter of course now. That's like you're pretty much your entire business model. I mean, you do put out just basically like game releases on physical versions that, you know,

don't otherwise exist that way. But then you also have the deluxe versions. Yeah, we're doing a lot of collector's editions now that are kind of elaborate or higher concept things, which has been fun because I get to kind of come up with crazy ideas and then see them executed. For Tojame and Earl, we did this really weird. weirdly formatted box that was better in concept than execution because now that I have it

and I'm trying to put it on my shelf it doesn't fit anywhere. It's a centerpiece. It can only go on top. You have to put it on top of your shelf because it's like the box isn't a normal box. It's like all these weird dimensions

and proportions. And I have no idea how to display it or put it up there, but it seemed really cool when you were doing it. And that's the kind of weird high concept stuff that I think working designs would still be doing

if they were around. Granted, They tended to do more stuff like our Jack and Daxter Collector's Edition that we did for Sony and Nottie Dog. We did a very premium box with foil stamping and a hardback book inside of it. And I know that's more working designs, I think, because it's very premium and high quality. That's probably the closest comparison of the Summonite box. That was a really nice box. I don't think he's-Summonite box is another one.

I don't know where to put it. That wonderful edition, I have no idea where to store. It's on top of my desk. it's down under my gaming cabinet it's hidden with all the like the power strips and everything I'm just like where can you put it

but you know I love that it exists and I love that you guys are putting that kind of care and thought into your packaging and like you said you don't go as much for like the hardbound stuff or like the super thick the board that they use like working designs like to use for their packaging

the rigid boxes we've done a few but it tends to be at the quantities that we're doing things at. Rigid boxes are going to get very expensive, and we've kind of found from trying to do rigid boxes, a lot of our retro CEs, for example, which we'll talk about more later, those are in rigid boxes, and the actual box itself ends up being about $12. Wow. And when you have to mark the product's cost up to reflect the cost of the box and then people

see how expensive it is, and you try to tell them it's expensive because of the box, they're like, well, I don't want to pay for the box. I expect the box to be free. So we have to figure out this fine line between how lavish do we get on the box before the cost of goods has to become absurd. And we have to start telling people that the box contributed to that. So we have to kind of figure out where we can do these things. Most of the time, we're only able to do them when we can find like several projects to put together. So, for example, our retro CEs, we're running about nine or ten different games at the same time.

So we're doing a total of like 12,000 boxes. So that gets the cost down to a more manageable spot. If we weren't doing that, they would be absurd. I think the lowest run of rigid boxes we ever did was for Nurse Love Addiction, which we tried to do this med kit style box, which was a mistake in it of itself. because if you ever try to ship something that looks like a med kit overseas, it's going to get opened up. Yeah, yeah. So every single one of those we tried to ship overseas got opened up. But beyond that, the actual box itself was $21, which was absurd.

And we didn't expect that. So we actually lost money on that particular item. So we kind of want to do more of those, but not always able to. The cool thing about working designs was they were doing these. by default. So their standard editions had these hardback manuals in them. So they were running hundreds of thousands. Yeah, I mean, the lunar games on PS1

must have been at least a run of 100,000 copies each. So when you're... Those were big games. Yeah. When you're doing those kind of runs, those sizes, you're getting a better economy of scale and then the price is lower. So they probably paid a dollar or less per book. But if you just tried to get that in a quantity of

a thousand, that book would probably be $15, $20 even. Yeah, that's something that I've kind of had to deal with, not as a game publisher, but as a, you know, magazine or book publisher. Once, you know, when I worked at Zip Davis on magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly and so forth, once those magazines were shut down, we still wanted to do kind of our own little self-published magazine. But they ended up being like, oh, God, they were probably like $15 to $20 per issue to have them, you know, like print on demand published. And people said, you guys are trying to rip us off.

I was like, no, we're making like $1.50 on each magazine. Like, we are making very little profit on this. It's just the reality of small run printing for high quality, like good stock paper, nice covers. I was buying a lot of magazines from a, I don't even remember what that website was called, but it's where Nintendo Force started. Like, is that website called? MacCloud.

Yeah, MagCloud. It was HP Mag Cloud. Yeah, that's what we were using. I was buying a lot of stuff from that. And it was like $25 an issue. So I bought a lot of, I bought all scroll on there. I bought Nintendo Ford. and I was paying $20 an issue maybe for these things,

but I was willing to pay it because I knew that both the magazines were high quality and I knew I was supporting people who were continuing to create these things that I liked, which was gaming magazines. It's unfortunate that it's so expensive to print that stuff because I want to see more of those, but it's just hard to hit the right economies to make it the price that people expect, because people expect to pay $5 for a magazine. And if you're anywhere beyond that, they start to lose their mind. You better have like a demo disc in there.

Yeah. And especially in the 90s, you know, if you grew up with gaming magazines in the late 90s or early thousands, your perception of value on what a magazine should cost are incredibly warped because you've got EGMs that have like 700 pages coming out in 2001 or whatever. And you're thinking that that should cost $5 or less. But, you know, like 60% of those pages were ads. Fair enough. It's totally different.

But it still feels, it still feels like that much. And I feel like part of the people who grew up with magazines, in any case, they, I feel like looking back on it, like they like the ads. I did. I used to rip them out and put them up, put them up on your wall. Yeah. I feel like that, that's almost part of the experience. So I feel like they do kind of equate that. They factor that into the value perception.

Yeah, the ads were a little more entertaining than, than they are now necessarily. Yeah. I mean, a lot of them are embarrassing for sure. That's 100%. There's some old game. Shark magazines or advertisements that would not fly at all. Yeah, I mean, some of the old magazine content was embarrassing, too. But that was just, you know, kind of the nature of things at the time.

And like I was saying, you know, this having a business around physical additions really reaches back into the early days of video games with things like infocom games and the Phillies that those came with. That was just part of the standard package. And that's just something that's completely vanished now. So, you know, just inherently, I think your business kind of speaks to a different era in a good way. Yeah, it's definitely a revival of what I liked about games as a kid. I liked taking the manual out and reading it. Sniffing it. You're a big, this is a big sniffer of games.

He opens it up, and the first thing he does is sniff the case. I don't do as much for Switch stuff because there's not really a smell. It's more about the taste. I mean, I don't, I don't, yeah, you lay the cart every time. I'm like, one day it'll taste different. I understand it because I, like, smells. I only associate memories. And I still have a very, like, fond memory of the smell of the original Xbox console.

Oh, wow. It had this, like, really heavy new electronic smell. And every time I catch a whiff of that smell, it takes me back to, like, 2001 at Christmas playing the Xbox. Well, the room we're in. This used to be our card room. And you used to walk in here for the comic smell. Yeah, that we're recording in right now used to be filled with our trading cards. And our trading cards are printed by the factory that used to be Skybox.

Okay. So in the 90s, they printed all of the Marvel Masterpieces cards and they printed later on a lot of the Flair Ultra cards. So this room smelled like 90s Marvel cards. It smelled like a 90s comic shop, which to me felt like it smelled like a safe space. Like it smelled like my childhood because I would go into these comic shops and buy comics and car rooms. Yeah. And it was a very nostalgic smell.

So anytime I needed to decompress or I was stressed about something, I was just walk in here and just inhale the comic book shop smell. I don't know if that's healthy, but we had stores in Atlanta when I was a kid called Book Nook. And it smelled just like that because I would dig through those from my Shadowhawk and Turah comics. There's just, oh. Have you guys looked at it in like scent enhancing your packages or your releases, like

somehow infusing them with, like, a comic book smell. Well, Josh said, if it could find a way to bottle it. I mean, if I could figure out a way to bottle the smell of those trading cards, I think that, honestly, I could sell that as a cologne. Because it's a similar, it's a similar smell to, like, a new pack of magic cards. Yeah, and I guarantee you, there is enough people who want that smell. Yeah, okay, but I think that would be better as, like, a room sprayer, maybe like a glade plug-in.

Yeah, or a car, like, car freshener. I don't know if anybody wants to personally. they smell like that. So my, this is why I'm not in the fragrance business. Yes. Okay. My ideas on the fragrance business are not, not the best. You're walking around and everybody's like, it smells like a comic shop.

Like, gosh, just me. Yeah. Just smell like a new pack of magic cards. So let's go ahead and jump over to the retro business you guys are kind of dabbling in now. I guess it's beyond dabbling at this point. But, you know, when I was here a couple of years ago to talk to you, it didn't really exist. Like, that was not something that was at least not to my awareness on your radar. Like you were just beginning to look to publish on.

switch, which is kind of the opposite of going retroits going forward. But, you know, since then, you've published quite a few classic games or things connected to classic games, including like a cassette soundtrack for Snatcher and, you know, windjammers. I guess you had done windjammers at that point. Yeah, we had done some. It was kind of like a one-off. Yeah, the thing that we had done at the last time you were here, we were mostly doing releases of older games on modern platforms.

So Night Trap was the biggest one we had just done, Wonder Boy and Dragons Trap. Those were kind of genesis for the idea. Yeah. You noticed the retro stuff was what was doing best. This is always been in my head because I, previous to doing limited run, I ran a game development company and I funded most of that

because my game development company wasn't making a lot of money. It was actually on the verge of going out of business before we started Limited Run. I funded most of that by, buying and selling retro games. So I would go around to flea markets, thrift shops, everywhere I could in this area,

and buy up old games to resell. And I had noticed that stock was really drying up, but demand was increasing because of YouTube personalities, basically. That's what I chalk it up to, at least. That's a bit of big part of it, yeah. I think that a lot of these collecting channels have a very young audience that wasn't around when these original games came out. So the print runs don't account for them wanting these games.

So there is not only people who grew up with these games that want them. There's a whole new generation of people that want it. And as long as that pool keeps increasing, the prices are going to keep going up. So I noticed that a lot of retro shows, I was starting to see bootlegs, repro carts that were just bulk ordered off of Ali Express. And the original developers or publishers weren't receiving any money from it. So that was kind of the genesis of this original idea in my head, which I've had for a few years now. back then I had reached out to Sega and I asked them like, hey, could I get actual Genesis branding and do licensed Genesis cart re-releases? You did this with Majesco back in the 90s. You didn't care then, so maybe you don't care now.

And I, did Majesco publish games for Sega? I know they published, they manufactured and shipped and distributed the Genesis 3. Yeah, so Majesco actually manufactured Genesis games back then. There was about 16 titles that were re-released, including, I think, like, Batman Forever. That's the one that, like, sticks out in my head. At the time, they took over the entire Genesis line. They re-released Nomad. They re-released the Genesis, and then they did a bunch of the games as well. I think they re-released a bunch of Super Nintendo games as well, but I'm pretty sure that was distribution only.

Because if I remember correctly, that's why there's black and white manual versions of turtles in time. And I know they put more copies of Super Mario RPG. G out there because that's how my brother and I got our copy, but that's a different story. But these retro reproductions, I was hoping Sega would say yes to that, but they basically said, if they were going to do it, they'd do it themselves. We were small at the time, so we didn't really have any bargaining chip to go back and say, hey, we can do it better. So I just kind of gave up.

And in my head, I really didn't want to do retro re-releases unless we could get official branding. So I struggled to try to get that for a while and then just realized it's never going to happen. So this opportunity came up to do these Disney re-releases for the Star Wars games and some other titles. And it just seemed like the right point to finally jump into doing this. Yeah, I think last time I was here you had mentioned there was something coming up where you were going to be needing NES ROMs or something. And I think you also had just announced the Sega CD cases that you were doing a run-up. Yeah. So, yeah, the interest was definitely there.

And I guess the first time where I was like, oh, they're doing something really interesting and cool, you know, that's kind of in an unexpected way. Reaching out to Retro Gaming was when you guys published the NES cartridge of golf from Golf Story. Because it was like taking like a component of a game and sort of separating it out and pumping it. publishing it in a way that actually works on old hardware. Yeah, for that, what I liked about that was it's kind of like an inception level of meeting our mission statement. So our mission statement is to preserve digital games. So we preserved a game within a game, which is really weird. And I don't think like anybody else has ever done anything like that.

We tried doing it with Night in the Woods at first, which we haven't released that game yet. but there is a game within that game as well. And I had proposed one of our collector's edition contents would have been a big box version of that. So it would be a box within a box of a game within the game. And when we got to do Golf Story, I thought gulf is really simple. It's a game within a game. So if I can't do this with Night in the Woods, I should do it here. And it's even cooler because it will work on NES.

It's not going to be a computer disk. It's going to be an actual NES cart. And I'd known this guy, Thomas Geinen, and I might be saying his last name wrong. I've never actually asked him how to say it, but I've known him since 2001. He made an internet cartoon called Eskimo Bob that was on Newgrounds. It was one of their top cartoons. And I really liked it back then. And I used to post on his forums all the time.

And I knew he was a big NES modder. So he would take games and hack the ROMs, usually like really like simple things like swapping out sprites and Mario Brothers. But he had done some things. I think he did a full translation of Glory of Heracles. And I think he was one of the first people to do that. So he did that back in like 2000. So I knew that he was capable of not only programming for the NES, but building a game from the ground up. So we reached out and it was something that he was able to do.

And from there, we just kind of ran with it. The issue with golf was that we didn't know where demand would lie. and we did 3,000 units thinking, surely that's going to be enough. But they sold out in about a minute. And I don't think I've ever received so much hate, anger, and death threats. And we had a lot of people saying, like, you should have known, you should have known that a game for the Nintendo would sell this one. And I'm like, there has been, there has been countless homebrew games for NES that have sold nowhere near this well.

Most of them have sold double digits. So how would I have known that this was too few? but yeah it really it really does seem like you're just kind of throwing darts in the dark because like how how do you predict a market for a fake NES game that came from another game exactly and not only that it's basically just golf it's basically just the game that already exists on the NES except it's got some weird hazards in it um is there is there a perception that this game is an official game because that I think that's that's a big part of the collector demand is that when something is seen as like, this is actually part of the official set. This is like a licensed set. I don't think that's there. I think the fact that we're releasing it puts it into a set of its own. And I think that does drive the collector demand a little bit more.

And knowing that it's attached to a game that people love like Golf Story, I think that really drove it. I think kind of in my mind, the market for home brew software has always been licensed titles for HomeBrew. And this was kind of a test for that. The game we have on sale right now, as of time of recording this podcast, it will not be on sale when this releases. So I'm sorry to anybody who finds out about it through this. We're doing a beat-em-up game based on Jay and Silent Bob. And that has sold insanely well. We're over 4,000 copies sold of it.

And I think that's kind of proven even further that new NES games can be profitable for developers. If they have the right IP attached, I think it's much harder if you just do a ground-up new game for it, a new IP, because you're going to have to sell that IP to people. It's the same issue that people are having with modern games. But if you have a good IP, you develop a retro game around it, that's good. It will sell. And the beat-em-up for James Bond is actually really good. One of the most – I don't want to make claims that I might regret later if somebody refutes it. But it's one of the best B-Obs I've played on the platform, personally.

It's got full combos, like a lot of different things you can do with two buttons on the controller. So more of a 16-bit-style brawler as opposed to, like, renegade? Yeah, definitely. An evolution. And it's got drop-in, drop-out co-op. So somebody can just start playing the second player at any point and then drop out. You can swap between the characters on the fly. It's got a tag team system like Marvel versus Kemp.

Capcom. So when you swap somebody out, their health regenerates. So you can kind of play strategically. And then a bunch of different combos based on the direction that you're pressing, the D-pad. So it's a pretty robust game for a homebrew. I'm really excited to get it out there and then see what people think about it. And this is kind of only the start for us because we're looking into other things that we can do with retro hardware and new games. Yeah, I mean, with, you know, things like the analog supern-T and mega-sG and things like that coming out, you have, I think, you know, a kind of serious market of people who are looking for not only ways to make, you know, the cartridges they own, even, you know, like experience those in the best possible way, but also are looking for new experiences. Yeah. And they, you know, like they're drawn, I think, to those devices because in part they have things like a new version of Super Turrigan or Alter-Corps.

you know, here's an unreleased game. Even Star Fox, too. That was a big one, actually. But, yeah, I think, I think it's interesting that, you know, with golf, GALF, how you pronounce it, you guys just did kind of like your standard release, but now you've moved more toward a, like, a pre-release version, pre-release approach with Jay and Silent Bob. With GALF, we ran the units ahead of time.

We had ordered everything. They were actually set to arrive about a week after the sale. And we felt like it was the right amount of units, but it wasn't. And that really, that really hurt because that whole weekend we were just getting yelled at by people. So we found a new manufacturer that is able to do things on a good timeline very efficiently, and they still have good hardware, good boards. So we're able to do open pre-orders this time. And now we don't have to worry about.

underselling and then angering a whole community. So we wanted to do that to be more careful, basically, and make sure that we were not excluding people so that we can build that product line as well. Can you talk about who you're working with? Is it Infinite NES Lives? No. So we worked with Infinite NES Lives on GALF, but unfortunately the costs for that were pretty crazy. I think our final assembled cost for GALF was more than half of the price tag that we had.

And when we're splitting that with the developer and ourselves, it didn't really leave anything there. I feel like with GALF, we didn't even make like $1,000. So the time that we put into designing the assets and making sure everything was assembled and whatever, it just didn't even pay for itself essentially. And their boards are insanely good. It's just, you know, you're paying for that level of quality. When at the trying to figure out what I, like, we're working with retro. it right now. Okay.

And Retrobit did the Holy Diver release. Yeah, they've got a whole bunch of stuff in the works. They just opened up pre-orders for Metal Storm, which is... Yeah, so that's awesome because it's been so inaccessible to people for so long. Yeah, and it's a great game, and it's super expensive. So I'm looking forward to that one, but they also have boards with the proper voltage. It's...

When Holy Diver came out, people picked apart the cartridge, and it passed the test with collectors and aficionados. And as far as I understand when they designed their board, they got a lot of input from people in that community to make sure that it would meet all of the standards that they held. And initially, we went with infinite NES lives because we knew that their boards were respected and met those standards.

So we were trying to make sure that when we found a new partner, we found somebody that could do things at a lower cost, but still get us that quality, passes the test. So it might not be the Ferrari or Lamborghini of boards, but it is still like... The Dodge Dio?

No, I'm just kidding. Yes, it's the Toyota Yaris. It's the geo-trakker. No, the Geo Metro. No, it's, uh, those are definitely the, your bog standard alley express ones that are the, the Geo Metro. Uh, this is more of a,

you know, high-end luxury car, like a, like a BMW, a Mercedes. It's still, it's still up there. It's still high end. Uh, but, but it's a little bit lower cost than a Ferrari or Lamborghini. And the people we worked with that infinite NES lives are great, and we hope to work with them again.

Like, we're not going to write off anything for future partnerships, especially if we have a particular project in the future where we want to have, like, every single thing be this, like, top-level high-end lux package. I can definitely see us going with them again, but we definitely had to, especially for our Star Wars releases, keep our costs in mind because working with a big company like Disney, they make us agree ahead of time to controlling our cost of goods. So we can't go crazy and make 90% of the purchase price be the cost of goods.

I think right now it's about 50%. So we're kind of treading thin water or thin ice. I don't know why I said thin water. I don't even know what that means. I'm thinking about drinking my water over here. What are you missed in water? I don't know. Thank you.

You guys stay at kind of abreast of like the current, I guess, not thinking, but like the current topics of conversation and the sort of retro game, retro community. Like the voltage thing on cartridges, that was a big deal a few years ago. Yeah. But I feel like now the big deal is beveling on your boards. Like everyone, I keep seeing people talk about beveling. Like you need the proper beveling so that when you insert it into the socket in your system, you're not causing wear and tear. It slides in evenly. I don't know. How much of that do you guys actually kind of keep in tune with and how much of it do you just kind of trust your partners to say, like, you guys do it right, please?

I try to keep up on it. But at the end of the day, I really do hope that our partners keep track of a lot of this because ultimately they're the ones that are going to be getting a lot of this feedback, at least before we offer or sell one of their products. Once we've sold it and people start receiving it, if we get a lot of Twitter people telling us, like, it's not beveled properly. or the, I'm trying to think of another example or something that the soldering on the board is bad or something like that. I don't think they would be sold as a blob of hot glue, what's going on. Yeah, things like that. You know, we... We'll keep track of it once we've released something. And if we get negative feedback in any aspect, we'll pass it along.

And if it can't be fixed, we'll look for a partner that can do those things and do it properly. But at least as far as we've seen with Retrobit, they've been very aware of what issues are. And they try to keep in touch with the community to make sure the products they're developing are up to their standards. And I like that about them because it keeps the heat off of us because we're managing a lot of other things at once. So trying to keep track of things like that, especially since we're not board designers at heart, I don't know anything about it, really. for me, if I put it into my system and it works, generally that keeps me happy. But I've got to consider everybody here.

So I want to make sure that we're pleasing everybody at all ends of the spectrum for this kind of product. Yeah, especially with people who are going to be playing this on original hardware as opposed to like clone hardware or something. Because those systems are old and fragile. Yeah, you don't want to ruin them. I love the games that Columbus Circle is putting out in Japan, stuff like Chubibin Men. and Zero and 8-bit music power and things like that. But the first one I got from them, I think it might have killed my analog in T.

I'm not sure, but like the system never worked quite right after that. I think it was like weird voltage or something. I think they use the same manufacturer that Blaze Pro uses for their U.S. releases, if I remember correctly. Because I think Columbus Circle actually did the Japanese release and distribution for a lot of the stuff. Blaze Pro did here, like the Unholy Night. Yeah, Unholy Knight, the Double Dragon game, and then what else do I have up there? I don't even know if I had it up there.

There's that puzzle game. Revenge of Double Dragon. Yeah, there's some puzzle game, and I can't remember what it's called, but it's got like box art with like this woman with deep cleavage leave forward at you. I keep seeing it in Japanese shops. I'm like, okay. But I know that the first shipping of Double Dragon, most of the carts didn't even work. Like they just straight up didn't function in a large portion of systems.

And those are the kind of things we have to be really. aware of when we're selecting a manufacturing partner for these things because you don't want that to happen. That's going to kill enthusiasm for any other releases that you do. It's going to kill goodwill. And we want to make sure that this is a product line that people feel happy with and they want to continue buying releases in because we'd like to expand to other things. And ultimately, I'd like to take sales data from these and convince the platform holders

to let us use branding and let us bring back a fit. games for these platforms. I don't think Nintendo will ever bend. Definitely not. But maybe Sega, maybe Konami with turbographics. I could see Konami for sure. Yeah. And Sega, I think, is a possibility if the numbers look right, maybe it could work out because they did the licensed controllers.

So I kind of see it as like, maybe that's a possibility if we can prove that we can create a quality product that sells that people are happy with. so that's kind of my hope at the end of the day because then we can release games like one of my favorite Sega Genesis games is Pulseman from GameFreek and that only came out here on Sega Channel and it's my biggest dream to be able to release Pulse Man on a cartridge

officially for Sega Genesis. I don't want to just take a game that good and slap it in an unbranded box because I feel like it's a disservice to that title. So let me ask you a question about, I guess, the relative complexity and costs of different systems. You know, like every, every cartridge-based console that came out had larger capacity on

boards. And, you know, the cartridges would become more expensive until you got up to like $90 games on N64, at which point the market was like, no, can do this. 500 on NeoGeo. Yeah, well, I mean, that was, that was designed to be ridiculously expensive. I mean, that was kind of the entire strategy there. It was like, hey, you're going to spend a lot on this game. But, you know, with mass consumer products like Nintendo in 64 games, those got to be pretty expensive. But now that technology is, you know, 20, 30 years old. So going back and publishing like, you know, the Game Boy version of Star Wars versus

Shadows of the Empire, is there a significant difference in cost and complexity to those boards? So the prices for the boards have actually, if I would have to guess versus the 90s, actually gone up because it's an economies of scale thing again. In the 90s, when this hardware was on the market, they were producing more of these boards, more of these chips. They were being produced in bulk, being gang run is what we call it for print. They were loading these boards 24-7 at factories that were dedicated to it. So they were actually cheaper. Now it's specialized technology for the most part. So it's being mostly produced in questionable factories in China. And because

it's special niche stuff, the board prices reflect that. So like an N64 game is like $19 or $20 to produce. I think that, and this is just speculation, I think that the prices of these boards now more or less are determined by how hot they are in the counterfeit or bootleg market. The more interest there is in the counterfeit market for these particular platforms, the more boards there are being manufactured. So the cheaper the overall cost is. So with Game Boy, for example, uh, if you've tried buying a Pokemon game, you know that the bootleg market for those is absurd. Uh, there's probably nine bootleg Pokemon games to every one legitimate one that's out there. And, uh, they don't stop making

them. Like the lines for bootleg Pokemon games are always going. So Game Boy games are, you know, if you just go for a bog standard crappy alley express cart, uh, you're going to get like a, maybe a $4 or $5 cost of good on that because of how many counterfeits and bootlegs are being made. NES, the Famicom market's still hot in Russia and China. Weirdly, you're still getting all those new games. Those dindies. Yeah.

I love those dindies. So those boards are still being produced as well. So NES games are kind of around the same level, like $5 to $7. You're still going to pay a lot for quality. So, like, our boards from Retribit tend to be about like $15. Infinite NES lives ended around like, I don't. I don't know, 18, 19, something like that. So you're still paying a lot for the quality, but if you just want to run an NES game and you don't care about the boards, you can get them for $5.

S&S, about $8, $9 for a baseboard. And a lot of that's probably just driven by the reproduction market in the U.S. So people bootlegging Castlevania, Dracula X and whatever else they can. A lot of the repros of like translated games. Yeah. Yeah. So that stuff's kind of driven the prices down. But N64, there's not a whole lot for people to bootleg on it. So it's like N64 games are expensive no matter what you do. If you buy a cheap bog standard crappy chip from Ali Express, you're still paying like $14, $15, even $16 for that. So N64 is kind of expensive no matter where you get it because there's not really a counterfeit market for it. And then like NeoGeo, you'd expect. there to be a counterfeit market for it, but even the bootlegs are still

if you want to run a NeoGeo game, you're looking at like 200 bucks like at a baseline and it increases based on the game that you do. So yeah, I don't really think that they've gone down in price. Interesting. So you're using like

actual proper ICs and not just like, I don't know, crappy emulation type boards but actual like printed circuit boards are like Is your Shadows of the Empire board that you're manufacturing identical to the one that ran off Simply Lyons in 1996? So my guess is it's probably not. But I know that it's not what I would get off of Alley Express if I just ordered, like I have a battle for Nabu here that I ordered from Alley Express just to see what the quality of those boards was.

And it looks different from what I got from Retrobit. So we haven't received our final N64 samples from them. So I don't know what their final boards are going to look like. But the sample boards they sent were different from the ones that I had received from Ali Express. So there's clearly a bit of different engineering that's gone into it. I know that with NES, I don't think it's just a simple emulation, but I could be wrong on that. Because, again, I'm not a board designer. But I do have to specify the mapper.

I know that I have to tell them some specifics about the game itself and what the game was programmed for. And I'm fairly certain that with your really cheap Ali Express carts, that doesn't matter. Like, if I remember correctly, they can pretty much take any ROM, throw it on there and have it function because they're selling, they have these listings on Ali Express where it's like, just pick your game from this list of 600 and it's the same price no matter what you pick. And they're listing stuff like Castlevania 3 that's going to have specialized hardware. And apparently it doesn't matter on the cost. And the board you get is going to be the same either way. So it's my assumption that it's a more advanced and better approximation of the original boards. So you mentioned, you know, mappers and specifying that kind of thing.

How difficult was it to take GALF from GOLF story and bring it over to the NES? I mean, was it NES compliant internally? No, not at all. Did you have to reprogram it? So Toma had to build it from the ground up. Inside of Golf Story, I believe it was just built in unity. Okay. It was built in unity to look like an NES game.

So Toma had to take the art that was provided by the developer. He had to adapt the gameplay and figure out how to get these various things that they'd done working on the NES. One of the things that they have in the game is they have a synthesized voice sample in the game that's like clear as day and in Golf Story. But obviously when we tried to fit it in 128K of memory, we had to crunch it down real low. But I think on our release, like that occupies like 50% of the memory is just that synthesized welcome to golf that plays or welcome to galf. I think the great tradition of gobble, gribble. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, it definitely wasn't in a format that was easily transitioned to NES.

It had to be very specially taken care of and purposefully adapted to the platform. form. Toma did a lot of stuff in there that I thought was interesting. He put in button combinations to change the palette based on if you're playing on clone hardware because some of the clone hardware is going to produce incorrect colors. So he put in a way to compensate for that. So Toma's kind of been amazing to work with because he's aware of a lot of these issues within the homebrew community and within the clone hardware business that. I'm not necessarily attuned to because I'm just kind of a stupid consumer when it comes to that. I'm just, you know, if it works, I tend to be okay with it. But Toma knows a lot of this stuff that could have gone wrong if he didn't detect it early and actually account for it, which is awesome. So I did want to talk to you about kind of how the Star Wars thing even came about because that's a big license. That is one of the biggest licenses, honestly. And talking to you earlier, it sounds like that's not something you actually went out with, you know, cap in hand to say, can we please have some Star Wars?

Yes. We definitely never would have thought that we'd be able to get anywhere near the Star Wars license. Because, I mean, when you think about licenses right now in this day and age, the two most valuable licenses are probably still Star Wars and Marvel. those are probably the two most difficult things to obtain and be able to use. We're like, who are we to be able to do a Star Wars product? It's not like Garfield where you see it on everything. It's like, we probably could get Garfield from Jim Davis if we're just like, here's $100,000. Let us make a Garfield for NES repro cart.

I don't think Garfield came out on NES. It did. Well, on Famicom, there's a week of Garfield. I need that to the U.S. Now you have a game plan. Yes, I am honestly considering that now because we have some big ironic Garfield fans in the office. Terrible, terrible, too cheeky game, I think. There's plural fans?

Yeah, there is plural fans. Wow. I believe that Joe is a Garfield fan and I believe that Adrian is a Garfield fan. Well, I don't believe that Adrian is. I know. Well, yes, Adrian is definitely a Garfield fan. But Star Wars isn't one of those things where, like, you know, you can just say, here's some money, can I have it? I'm sure if I had countless amounts of money, I could do that.

But it does matter in terms of like the product being a good product. So we got an email before E3 in 2018 just from Disney saying they wanted to look into doing some re-releases of their back catalog. And I didn't really believe it at first. So I went and looked up the guy on LinkedIn and I was like, he actually works for Disney. This is not a prank. This is insane. And on our first phone call with it, Douglas can probably recount this story better, especially since he hasn't talked,

but Douglas said something that I still bring up all the time. What did I say? Okay, so you don't remember. I'm going to have to recount it. But he said to our guy from Disney that was contacting us, he was like, did Solo really do that bad? Because Solo had just come out. That was like May 2018, and they were emailing us at the end of May.

Yeah, because we joked internally that, like, they were reaching. But you actually said it to them. You actually said, did Solo do that bad? And they just had this, like, blank look on their faces. Like, but they gave you the license anyway. We still managed to still manage to do it because we had just actually done Thimbleweed Park. So we had some samples of the collector's edition that we worked on with Fan Gamer for that. That was like a Lucasart style box.

And they saw that. They were like, okay, they can do. do something similar to our old products. And that really helped us, I think, land this. And we talked about how we were looking into retro re-releases. We were familiar with it. We knew logistics of it because we were gearing up for doing GALF. So we were confident that we could pull it off.

And we successfully convinced them of that and somehow ended up with Star Wars, which I am still in disbelief of. Just to clarify, I liked Solo. Other than the random alien in space that could somehow move. But otherwise, I like the movie. It's science fantasy, not science fiction. It's true. Just go with it.

I also like Solo as well. So I am, but I recognize that it was not performing to their expectations. So I still thought that was a funny joke. And if we ever get another project down, there's another funny story to that one, too, where I've accidentally done something. that would be weird and worked out. Well, I mean, I feel like, I feel like we'd almost recount that because we don't have anything, you know, I don't know, maybe we shouldn't. Oh, wait a little longer.

Okay. It's a good story, though. It's a good story. It's great. So how many Star Wars games do you guys actually have in the work? I know it's at least six. Is it more? So I think we have over 15 LucasArts games.

The actual Star Wars, the actual cartridge comes. content, though, is six. So it's Star Wars Racer, Empire Strikes Back Game Boy, Empire Strikes Back NES, Star Wars, and Star Wars Game Boy, and then Shadows of the Empire. So, yeah, six cartridge products. I'm hoping to do more. I really want to do the master system version of Star Wars because it's actually a lot better than the other two.

Is that the same one as the Game Gear version? I think so. I would imagine so because of the similarity. That's the NAMCO. NES game. I actually asked Disney about that one and they're like unfortunately we don't own the rights to that because I was like that would sell surprisingly well because Darth Vader turns into a scorpion I don't think the people at Lucas film would like you like allowing us to re-release it but it would sell really well as a curiosity so I tried but like Master System Star Wars is one that I'd like to do and obviously I want to convince them on the Super Star Wars because that was something that we were trying to we were trying to get those through initially but There's some hurdles. There's some hurdles there that we need to figure out before we can do those.

So six right now. A bunch of PC titles coming up down the pipe like Dark Forces, Jedi Academy, Jedi Outcast, Thai Fighter, X-Wing, Stars Racer, what else? Secret of Monkey Island or the other things. I guess we have other retro re-releases that are not carts. We have two more that are coming up. Rebel Assault on Sega CD. Okay.

And Secret of Monkey Island on Sega CD. So getting use out of those Sega CD cases. Exactly. Yeah. And what I like about Secret of Monkey Island specifically is that that game was only ever released in a very flimsy cardboard box for Sega CD. Kind of like night trap. And if you look at that box in the wrong way, it crumbles. So like I can't find any copy of it that's not dented, dinged, banged up, or in bad shape. I bought a brand new copy and it was still in what I would consider not great shape. So we're going to be able to do like the first actual like long. long box case version of it. It won't have the Sega CD branding on it, but it will still, I think, fit in on a shelf with other Sega CD games better than this box that they previously had released it in. So I'm excited for that. Why did they do those boxes?

That was early Sega CD stuff. I guess it was just easier than having this specialized case. I don't know what drove them to create that really weird long box case. I never at that sale. I purposely didn't buy anything that was in those because they just look weird. I mean, they were all crumpling. They were all like, yeah. Yeah, I mean, with the CD era in general, not just video games, but CDs, there was just a lot of, like, how do we package this stuff?

And, you know, everything was kind of built around record bins. So that's why you got the CD long boxes originally because you had a CD, which is like four inches across five inches, needing to fit into a 12-inch bin where records were displayed. They should have came in all blister packs. And the only way to open them was like on the back side with scissors. and then it's like, oh, did I scratch it or not? And it's like, you know, you're saying the CD itself should have been in that? Yeah.

Like just floating around in there? I'm surprised. That wasn't a thing. The way they were going with that. But, I mean, that, like, that logic wouldn't necessarily extend to video games, though. So I'm not sure why they decided on this eight to, I guess that's like eight inch jewel case for it. Like, I don't understand the logic there because, I mean, I don't recall, like, Tower Records selling video games. and I would imagine the primary video game retailers were outfitted to show off

and NES and S-NES games, which were in a smaller form factor box. I think it's because they came on, like, they were CD games. So they were like, hey, these are compact discs. They're the future. This is advanced and special. Convinced people they're better by doing a giant box. Like with 3DO, they were like, let's make it 12 inches or 13 inches tall or whatever. You'll never be able to put them on your shelf.

Back in the day, PC games were designed in boxes as big as possible to take up the most space on the shelf just to I guess crowd out other games and also give the impression like you're getting a lot for your money look at this huge ass box yeah so it's just that no choice yeah it's just that that kind of like retail mentality that doesn't really exist now because retail is so competitive and has kind of gone away in a lot of ways now it's like what will ship very efficiently on amazon well actually uh tiny switch case yeah tiny vita case as you've seen we uh we have a partnership now with best buy and we sell games there and i I brought up, we'd like to do a bigger box from one of the releases to be on the shelf.

And he immediately got hesitant and was like, whoa, I don't know if we could put it on the shelf then. Because then we'd have to reformat the space. And I was like, oh, yeah. So you're not wrong. Like, they are very particular about their shelf space now. So that was kind of a sidebar from the Sega CD stuff, but you guys basically have a whole lot of Star Wars in the works. We sure do. And the Dark Forces, is that just going to be like a CD-ROM?

What is that going to be here? So it'll be on CD-ROM. It will be on a USB stick as well. So it'll be DRM-free. And my hope is to collect every version that I can find of it on that USB stick and on that disk. So, like, PS1 also in addition to... Not PS-1, because it wouldn't run natively off the disk. Like, I want stuff that, like, you can put the disk in and run without having to crack any hardware.

So the idea with Dark Forces would be to have, like, DOS, Mac, all the different platforms. that it came out that were like personal computing platforms. I don't know if in Japan it came out on like the FM Towns Marty or something like that. They probably didn't, but or the Amiga CD2. I have no idea like what possible platforms it could have come out on. But if it came on one of those obscure things, I want to try to get that version and put it on that disc. Because the idea of our PC releases is to try as much as we can to make them archival pieces, something that a big fan of this game could put up.

on their shelf and you know it's got this game in whatever form they could possibly want and it's in the box really the thing with the LucasArts games that made the PC releases somewhat difficult is they're available on Gog for 299 so how do you figure out a way to create a physical package that brings enough value to even justify the cost of goods so with Star Wars we I came up with this blister packing approach to kind of appeal to the collector's side because I love Star Wars figures and to me like the most iconic piece of Star Wars merchandise is figures and the blister packs. Yeah, the blister packs that are associated with those are very core to every generation

of Star Wars fans, nostalgia for the franchise. Yeah, I mean, Hasbro, that's who owns Star Wars now, right? Yeah, or it has a license. Like, they put out new, like, Last Jedi figures on faux retro cardbacks. Yeah. So it's, yeah, it's really baked in there. Yeah. I've been buying those up.

Yeah. I don't need to tell you guys that. I've seen your office. Yeah. Yeah. So we're huge fans of that. And I thought that it would be fun to put a game cartridge or a CD case onto a blister pack that was designed to look like one of the old action figure cards. and not even necessarily just the 70s one to it, but like, episode one Racer comes on one of those like red, Darth Mall cardbacks from the merchandise mania of Phantom Menace.

And that's going to be anybody who was between the ages of five to 12, and that was their first experience with like Star Wars merchandising craze, that's going to be like the package that like touches their. particular nostalgia for the franchise. So I think that that was a really good first step at justifying the value in these re-releases. And now with PC, we're going to do these kind of really nice rigid boxes that are all standardized in form factor with a standardized set of contents and as many versions of the particular game as we can possibly get for that release. And I think that's going to justify the existence of the.

product. And I think it's going to make it kind of a cool piece for Star Wars fans and people who like these games to own because that's a big thing with me. I like to, when possible, have as much uniformity on my shelf as I can. And Big Box PC games have always hurt because it's like it's like a mental challenge to figure out like what dimensions to try to match up and what games match up with each other. It's like this happens to me. It's overwhelming when I try to put my daughter's books back on her bookshelf. Because I'm trying to match the like the dimensions and like make it go from

biggest to smallest and like have all the spines like at the same depth. And you can't do that with big box PC games very well because they're all different sizes. So for the Lucas arts games, that's the case, especially for the Dark Forces series. You've got the first game in this board game style box that matches the early adventure games. Then you've got Jedi Night 2 and it's in this really flimsy foil box. It looks great if you can find it in good shape but it's flimsy so you never find it in good

shape. And they did some kind of promotion where you mail in the UPC for something. So like every copy I find has the UPC cut out. And then the Outcast and Academy, the next two games in that series are in the smaller like 2000s format PC box

which is like DVD case size but a little thicker. So if you want to put those four games up on the shelf in sequential order, you can't do it. There's just no way unless you're okay with like, this box is smaller than the next one. And then these boxes are tiny sitting next to it. And that bothers me on a very specific level. But I know, like, usually when things bother me on a specific level, they bother other people. So I think people are, like, of my specific type are going to appreciate that. You'd have to scoot the small ones up to match. I mean, I tweeted my 32x collection that's behind me the other day. And it's like the doom. It's like

the closest I got to. a viral tweet. It's almost a thousand likes right now because Doom has an inverted 32X logo for no reason and it kills me and I'm actually tempted to go to Sega and Bethesda and

find out can I reprint this packaging because I've licensed packaging from Sega before and they were fine with it. Shenmoo 3 took a while but I got the Dreamcast branding to put on this commemorative case for that. So I think I could get the 32X branding. Then it's just a matter of going to

Bethesden saying how much would it cost to do this thousand box run with a corrected 32x logo and they'd probably be like, I don't know, whatever, free money for us. You're not going to distribute the 32x cartridge in there also? No, because I feel like Sega would say no to that. But they would let me correct the packaging.

I would say, hey, there's a very specific set of people like myself. That would probably pay $10 to $15 for this corrected slip cover. And it's worth pursuing because it would be a couple thousand dollars in your pocket that isn't there anyways. And I think I could do it.

And I honestly think that that would sell pretty well. Yeah, I'd buy it. Because there's enough people out there who are like, this is really annoying. It's really obnoxious. It's the one thing that doesn't fit on the shelf. So looking toward the future, do you guys have anything in the works that you can talk about

or just concrete plans or just aspirations beyond appeasing type A personalities? There are other things. that I want to look into. I want to do, I'm a big Dreamcast fan. So kind of my ultimate, my ultimate goal, and this goes back to the wanting to do official branding stuff. I want to somehow eventually figure out how to bring back official Dreamcast games. I mean, that's... The propeller arena, cosmic smash. Half-life. Yeah, well, maybe not Half-Life. I don't think I could ever convince Valve. You don't think Valve would be into that? Yeah, I'd have to convince Valve, get gearbox on board.

It seems like a nightmare, but, you know, Cosmic Smash. This is the original orange box. Come on, yeah. Rez, give that a U.S. release, finally. There's a lot of Dreamcast games that for similar reasons to the PS2 games we discussed never came to America. I think pretty sure it's all, it all comes out of Bernie Stolar. I think that's the name of the guy that was at both PlayStation and Sega. Yep.

That really hated 2D games. Yep. So Dreamcast is just loaded with 2D games in Japan that never came here that are fantastic. Even some 3D games that are great because the guy didn't like Schmups. So like you've got I thought he just a lot of Japanese stuff in general. I mean, he didn't tend to. But schmops were seen as simple. I know a lot of them still came over here.

But you do have games like Ratterjee, I think, Keras maybe the one is like the Crow game. Cross. Icaruga. What other ones? Border Down. Under defeat. Did Zero Gunner make it over? No, it didn't.

Zero Gunner, too. There's a lot of content for Dreamcast. That's Japan exclusive. It's like 600 games that never came here. And a lot of them are good. Wow. I have no idea. I'm working on collecting them.

If you look kind of beyond Douglas's shoulder and you can't see this on the podcast, but that's all Japan exclusive Dreamcast games. Yep. And that's not all of them yet. I'm still missing about 100 or so of them. them so so there's a lot of content that was just stuck over there that didn't come here and uh as a big dreamcast fan i'd love to bring that stuff back because uh honestly a lot of the home brew releases on dreamcast just don't scratch my itch for like the kind of content that i want on dreamcast

a lot of them kind of feel like half baked demos yeah i don't think the home brew community has quite gotten to dreamcast like technical quality yeah there's like there's there's stuff there but most of it's repackaged emulators and it's like if i want to burn at dream s NES on a disc and just put my own games on there. Like, I'll, I'll just do that. I don't want to pay $40 for the S&S version of another world on, on a Dreamcast disc. It's just not, it doesn't appeal to me in the same way that, like, an officially branded release of Cosmic Smash would, or any other game for Dreamcast, like Triggerheart Exelica,

or any of these other licensed titles or good games that didn't come out here. So be on Dreamcast, any aspirations? I mean, grand scheme of things, I don't know, this doesn't necessarily play into the retro stuff, but we really want to work with Konami. I mean, they're leaving a lot of stuff digital only now. You've got the anniversary collections that M2 did that are phenomenal, that are not physical. And we'd love to release those. They've got Castlevania Requiem for PS4, which has pretty much like the best version of Rondo of blood. that's come out here.

And I really want that to be on a disc, but it's not. So I feel like there's, and if we go back to PS3, they've got Contra Hardcore uprising on there. So they've got several games in their library that like desperately need physical treatment for the rebirth games for we. Oh yeah. Bring those back as well.

Those deserve to be made available in any capacity whatsoever now. Yeah. And I've talked to M2 about that because we worked with M2 on Battle Gariga. And they're very proud of the. rebirth games, because they don't get to do a ton of original content. They mostly do emulation. They're the best at it, in my opinion. They're legendary and amazing at it. But the rebirth games are great, and they're just gone now. So that's something that they really want to do. I think it's a matter of like, could we ever convince Konami to allow us to do a

Wii disc, maybe, but it's kind of up there in the sky right now. And we're going to have to find other things first to prove to them. I don't think you do. I think like, I mean, I guess, yeah, easier projects. Yeah, yeah. First and foremost, but like, I don't think we have to do something on the Wii. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah.

If I had to guess, if I did, if I did Castlevania Requiem and Castlevania Rebirth and sold them side by side, rebirth would sell better. Probably, yeah. Because it's lost. It has this story behind it that, like, would drive. It's kind of a rallying cry to get people to be interested in it. So I honestly think that, you know, even if we had to put several thousand dollars into figuring out how to engineer a disc image for it, we could pull off the Wii games. And what a great way to send off the Wii instead of just the Wii.

dance 2020, you know, if the final physical Wii game could be that you know of. The rebirth games. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess you're past them. You know, I'll just, well, we'll release one of the rebirth games first and then just sit on the other ones until we know it's the last one. But, you know, the existence of those games from Ubisoft does indicate there is still a market out there for B and probably manufacturing plants, obviously, that are producing. And we've heard from a lot of distributors that, like, surprisingly, the Just Dance on Wii still sells like nearly 100,000 copies every year. How many million units are out there?

It's like 100 million units. Yeah, it's one of the best-selling game. It might even be the best-selling game console. It's not the best, but it's like number three. No, actually, I think it's PlayStation 2 and DS are tied neck and neck. So it beat out in. They're like 150 and then Wii is 100 million. Wow.

Yeah. So the demand is there. And I'm always surprised that the amount of people that I see collecting for Wii as well that are going for full sets on Wii, which like I collect full sets. I have a full set on Dreamcast. I'm close to one on 32X and I have a full set on Vita. So like I get that mentality of wanting to collect everything. But on Wii, like there is this painful step you have to make where you're like, I'm going to buy ninja bread man. I'm going to buy. Right. Like. Well, and some of the. The most hard-to-come-buy games are terrible, just absolutely wretched, but they cost $2,000 now. Yeah, it's a commitment to, like, actually jump into buying things like that. It's like, on the platforms I've decided to collect for, on 32X, most of the games are inexpensive. Spider-Man is kind of an anomaly. It's really expensive. It's also really bad. And Dreamcast, for the most part, nothing insanely expensive.

most games are under $300 on the high end. And also, there's not a ton of shovelware. The Dreamcast just didn't get a lot of shovelware. It didn't last long enough. It got some games that are questionable. Sorry, Doug. Sad face. Got some questionable games.

It got some stuff that wasn't fantastic. But overall, I'm not having to do much painful stuff. Yeah, I had to buy 102 Dalmatians and The Grinch. But the Grinch was made by Konami. It's actually okay. It's not the worst game in the world. We know us for a while. Yeah, because at first I was saying I'll never collect a full Dreamcast set because I don't want to buy the Grinch.

And then you bought me the Grinch. Yeah. And that was like the Lynch pin. Yeah. Like, oh, now I'm just going to go ahead and get the whole Dreamcast library because I have the Grinch now. I might as well. I was going to say about shovelware, though, when I was at Ubisoft and they cleaned out a closet one day of, like, games that they had stored. I had never seen so much shovelware in my life for DS and Wii.

And they all had the Ubisoft branding on it. And I was like, imagine, imagine babies. Yeah. I have like, I have like four copies. of that. And I'm so excited. Yeah, I mean, the Wii, you know, it just, and the DS also, like, they really reached an extremely casual audience. And those are people who just never bothered to unplug their systems. They still have those games going. And, and sometimes it's older people who they pull out their

Wii every holiday season and I guess hook it up for when their relatives are in town and they want the latest Just Dance as far as I understand. Like Wii Sports and Just stance so they're still buying it at my last house that i was running that kit the teen that it was renting or mowing my lawn i was like hey you know i thought maybe i could bribe him with video games as part of like a tip or something because i was like i work at limited run like i can give you a couple games but he was like oh all we have is a we and i was like what still yeah it's uh every family i guess had a we at some point almost felt that way so you just need to show conami this conversation and say there you go guys it's here the demands here

I know, I just know from our own personal experience that those games would do insanely well. I think it's a matter of like convincing Konami to allow us to go back to this Wii game and, you know, go through the whole process of reviving it and putting it on disk. But it would be incredible if we could. And maybe at some point they'll publish it on Switch. I was going to say, maybe it's more like the retro collections they've done. And then it's easy. Yeah. Yeah.

It's more fun to imagine it as a Wii disc, though. I mean, do the whole set, you know. Well, maybe I was asking for for Xbox 1, PC, and and we. And maybe us asking for me and pushing it and saying, like, we'll give you all this money to do it. They'll be like, all right, maybe we should just port it.

Because somebody still wants it. I can work out both ways. Well, it's something to cross your fingers for, I guess. All right, guys, I don't want to take up any more of your time, but we'll wrap now. So why don't you let us know where we can find you and your work on the internet? So you can find me on Twitter at Limited Run, Josh, and our work is over at Limited RunGames.com.

You can find me at Limited Run, Doug, on Twitter, and our work is also at Limited RunGames.com. I appreciate that this is the second time during this podcast that you've stumbled, trying to say your own name. This is weird. It's just one of those days. And as for myself, you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite, and at Retronauts. com, which is also where you'll find this podcast, but the podcast is also on Libson and iTunes and, you know, just places like that. Check us out. You can also support us on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronauts to get the podcast early and in a higher bitrate quality.

So it sounds nice. We do not have physical versions, however, I'm afraid. Anyway, thanks, guys. And I'll be back in a couple of years, I guess. Oh, here, not on your podcast. The next episode, 2025. Thank you. Thank you.