Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 288: Full Throttle

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

It's time for another entry in our ongoing LucasArts mini-series! This time around, we'll be looking at 1995's Full Throttle: Tim Schafer's first project as a solo director, and also the first LucasArts game to blast beyond the barriers of mere diskettes and ship only in the CD-ROM format. Though Full Throttle's design doesn't exactly hold up 25 years later, it stands as a fascinating look at what the multimedia age meant for adventure games, and a path LucasArts explored that ended up being a revolutionary dead end. Joining us on this one is the great Jake Rodkin, of Idle Thumbs and Campo Santo fame! This is the first time we've had an actual designer of adventure games on this miniseries—you might have played The Walking Dead season 1 and his other Telltale work—and we ended up having a great chat (and some friendly disagreements) about what this game does right and wrong. We'll definitely have him on again in the future to discuss some of the more contemporary adventure games he worked on in the future! Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get exclusive episodes every month, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon.

Retronauts is part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. For more information, please go to greenlitpodcast.com. This week on Retronauts, a religious pilgrimage with a lot of butt kicking. Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackie. And today's topic is the 1995 LucasArts adventure game, Full Throttle. And this is part of our ongoing LucasArts miniseries. So far, we've done Loom, Monkey Island 1 and 2. And our last episode was Sam and Max hit the road. And today we're doing full throttle, as said before. And we have a very special guest, Jake Rodkin. Hello, Jake. Hey, how's it gone? And Jake, you're the first adventure game designer to be on this series. So I have a lot of questions for you. Okay. Great. I don't even know if I think of myself as an adventure game designer, but I'm happy to be called one for the purposes of retronauts. So in case people haven't heard of you, Jake, you were recently on the running for 10 years recently wrapped last year, idle thumbs, the great, great podcast. That's true. Did it wrap? I guess we kind of just faded away in the hopes that we will one day fade back in, but we have no idea when that. that'll ever happen. But yeah, idle thumbs. Because of you guys, we kickstarted our podcast seven years ago. I just saw that and was like, hey, you can kickstart a podcast. So you are partially responsible of us ripping off your idea. That's why we're here today. So you worked on things like Telltale, Tales of Monkey Island, Simon Max, the Devil's Playhouse, the Walking Dead, Puzzle Agent 2. You moved on to Form Campo Santo working on things like Firewatch. And today's release on the Patreon, if you're listening to the Patreon release, Half Life Alex,

just came out, and you worked on that as well. Yeah, I helped out a little bit right towards the end. And we talked about it on our last podcast, but you were also the co-designer of the Sam and Max surfing the highway re-release. Jake, what is your history with LucasArts Adventure Games? Hmm, let's see. My history with LucasArts Adventure Games, I think, started right when Monkey Island 2 came out. I had played some Sierra games on and off.

I think the first adventure game, the first graphic adventure game, at least, that I ever played was the Sierra Black Cauldron game. And that game made me think that adventure games were bad. No offense, if there's like Black Cauldron defenders in the world. And I think I played a little bit of Kingsquest four and five on and off at friends' houses. But a friend of mine in elementary school, just bounded into school one day and said, I've got this game that my dad just bought.

And it's like you're playing a cartoon. And you have to come over to my house and I have to give you a pirated copy of it. And it was Monkey Island 2 for Mac. And then I took that game home. And it was like, I think that playing that game made me, As like a 92, it was fifth or sixth grade, I guess, made me, I think, finally internalized what humor is. So, like, yeah, it was weird to play Monkey Allen 2 before one, I guess. But I played that game to death.

And then I finally eventually got my hands on Monkey Allen 1. And then that sort of was my gateway into LucasArts games as a like tween to teen, basically. And did you eventually just play through them all as they were coming out in that era? I think so. My memory of that is all kind of hazy because, you know, as a kid, especially in sort of pre-internet, era you don't really I wasn't super aware of what the absolute latest things were all the time it was sort of once my friend group got a hold of LucasArts games we sort of slowly warmed our way forward and backward through the catalog like I think a friend of mine got the collection that had the like Indiana Jones in the last crusade and loom on floppy disks and then another friend of mine said oh what is this day of the tentacle and they got that so he's sort of I think by salmon max at the road by sort of 93 I was probably caught up I played full throttle at my friend's house who had a CD-ROM when I didn't have like basically right around the time that full throttle first came out. So why did you want to do full throttle?

Why did you want to be the guest on this episode? Because I love full throttle. It's a full throttle is a great game. I mean, we can have a nuanced and long conversation about all of the details of full throttle. But I think this is maybe sacrilegious among some adventure game fans. But playing full throttle and having it feel so cinematic was really, it kind of changed my perception of what the like audio, visual, stylistic, whatever ceiling for games was. Like, this is a ridiculously specific thing about full throttle,

but it was the first adventure game, at least, if not the first game that I played, where the character's footsteps are tagged to play different sounds depending on different materials. And I just have this potent memory of Ben walking on the planks outside of the kickstand and then walking down into the dirt and hearing his feet like stamp in the dirt and just thinking, this is like an animated film, except that it's also an adventure game.

And just everything about that game at the time felt extremely fresh. I mean, whatever you could say about some of the mini games or whatever else, but just the way that it's, the way that it's animated, the way that it's this game that's like right on the cusp of 2D to 3D and sort of traditional animation or traditional pixel art game animation, being able to move up the fidelity ladder to more like even more classic cell based. And then in the future 3D animation, full throttle is that this totally weird. nexus where like, uh, or like the cutscenes were very clearly animated, I think, at least by like being roughed out on paper. But then the final art was done as classic pixel art in deluxe paint, even though it's all full frame, totally cinematic animation. But then it's pixel art characters riding on 3D rendered motorcycles on hand-painted backdrops. It's just this crazy perfect moment of like sort of the beginning of the huge change that game tech and art took,

starting in the mid-90s and ending probably in 2000. Yeah, it's very much like a CD-ROM game of that era. Like, it is a multimedia experience, and it's so much a product of 1995. But it's so aesthetically tight. Like, when you think of multimedia CD-ROM experiences, at least for me, I think of like bad mojo or something, you know, like games that are like really deliberately leaning into that sort of mid-90s aesthetic mish-mash, like cursed techno future stuff, whereas full throttle was like it felt like it was using all that technology.

and using all of the know-how that that team had accumulated over years of just delivering best, like the best aesthetics of their type and in their genre, but then using it to make a like a thing that kind of looked like an indie comic or like an MTV animated show thing that also was a neo-noir. I don't know. It's just that game just got a lot going for it that feels like it just kind of came out of nowhere. The other thing that I like about full throttle is that it is short, And that is another thing that people have historically dumped on it for.

But I think like when I was working at Telltale, I never had aspirations that I would be able to make a thing like full throttle. But I always thought back to Full Throttle as the template for like this is what like you can you can tell a compelling adventure game. You can tell a compelling front to back story in a very tight package if you do it well. Just look at Full Throttle. Like that was that was the other thing about Full Throttle. Yeah. It doesn't overstay. It's welcome.

You mentioned the word cinematic. and that's a very good word to use to describe this. Like, I feel like the game could be a movie. It's written as if it could be just a movie screenplay with all the beats of a movie. And previous adventure games, I think, from LucasArts, weren't really like that in their design and their storytelling. Yeah, I think that's true.

I mean, you're sorry, that is definitely true. I think LucasArts games, at least sort of starting with the Ron Gilbert ones, I kind of feel they were way more about how can we use the language and the mechanics of adventure games to kind of either softly simulate, or just like scratch the surface of the feeling of a role playing game or of an open world game or something like that while still like having the bumpers on like multiple puzzle chains running at the same time or like you have a monetary system or what like you know monkey island games are very much like you have very light systems and a ton of places to go figure out what's going on whereas yeah full throttle i guess the part where you're in melonweed has a little bit of that in it but it feels like that's like almost a vestigial thing it's like the the only bit of full throttle it kind of has that LucasArts structure of you blipping between places to solve two or three things at once, whereas most of the game is just you're like in a shoot going from the beginning to the end. Yeah, that Melamine section, I believe, has the classic Ron Gilbert get three items puzzle. So I want to move on to the history of this game and the people who made it, of course.

So previously to this, there was Sam and Max hit the Road and Day of the Tenticle. And after the Day of the Tentacles release, the directors of that game, Tim Schaefer and Dave Grossman were asked to each pitch five games. So two of these pitches had to be the premises for a day of the tentacle sequel and a Monkey Island sequel, but the other three could basically be whatever they wanted. So Tim Schaefer, we all know him, we all love him. He pitched his mandatory ideas, but he also pitched three other ideas. One was the idea for a spy game. One was the idea for a Day of the Dead game. And one was the idea for a biker gang. And the story goes, even though LucasArth asked these guys to each pitch five ideas they interpreted that as like oh you're pitching all these ideas that means you

don't care about any of them go back you have one week develop one of these your favorite one into the game you want to make and tim shaffer developed full throttle and that is a game that was eventually made and apparently like these were not super happy times of the company i i want to say like through conjecture alone i think when the company was spun off into its own independent company when it was no longer lucas film games that's when things started to change slowly that's when market research was more important. That's when the ethos of, you know, do whatever you want, just don't lose money, was sort of fading away. And this was when that was taking over in full, the new market-driven approach to selling these games. So according to people that were

inside the company at the time, it was not very happy. And Tim was very afraid of losing his job, as was Dave Grossman. I don't know anything about this time period of LucasArts from an internal standpoint, but I would believe it. There's a lot of information now on the books because Tim Schaefer did a commentary for Full Throttle Remastered. And as part of the Kickstarter for Broken Age, I think one of the things that was unlocked was him doing a let's play of full throttle. And that's on YouTube.

And there's so many great behind-the-scenes stories. So this is the first LucasArts game that's post-Dome. And Tim Schaefer was like, okay, adventure games are in a slump. I want to streamline the genre, make it more accessible. And the problem with adventure games in his eyes was you always play as a dork

or a loser or an outcast. And he was like, what if we make the player play as someone that is powerful and cool someone they would want to be in real life and that is really what informed full throttle like let's make this a fun experience to play because he felt that previous adventure games were making fun of the player

for just playing an adventure game like look at you you're a dork, you're a wuss people laugh at you you're Bernard Bernoulli or your Geibrous 3poid those are the possible protagonist for LucasArts game and the origins of the concept Indiana Jones exists so you can't like that is true I think it's because they had a licensed property where you were one of the coolest, manliest characters ever.

But their original ideas. The Ron Gilbert and those guys' sort of school was definitely what Tim's talking about, I think. Oh, for sure, yeah. And the idea came from a friend of Tim's that basically spent a summer in Alaska and found themselves hanging out with bikers. And she came back with all these stories about their world and their subculture. And Tim was like, okay, this is a world that most normies don't know about. And it's almost like, you know, a great setting for an alternative adventure game. And he viewed the bikers as the Pirates of the Road, like an interesting world that's dangerous and most people don't know what happens within that world.

And that would be the perfect world to explore and the perfect, you know, fantasy setting for a player to want to explore. So this was a very, very big budget game for the time. So in 93, there were two LucasArts adventure games. There was nothing in 94. and then there were two in 95. I think because of all the development time on this and also because the dig was in development hell, that's why 94 was just a no-adventure game year.

But this game had 18 months of development and a $1.5 million budget, which was both of those facts were shocking to the developers at the time. Like we have this much money and this much time because if you go back to our previous episode, Sam and Max hit the road from the first day of development, they had seven and a half months

until it shipped. So that was a very fast development cycle. It's crazy. Yeah, they wanted to get a game out like before the new year and it was just a constant crunch mode until that happened. So this game, more than twice development time, and I'm going to assume more than twice the money of the last adventure games, Sam and Max. But all of this work paid off because Tim would bring up in interviews, you know, Lucas

Arts games. They were beloved by their audience, but Sierra was always kicking their ass in sales. And it was a struggle to break 100,000,000. copies. And this game on one platform sold over one million. So this is, I'm going to say without a doubt, their highest selling adventure game, period. It really is the first LucasArts adventure to take advantage of the CD-ROM format because it is the first CD-ROM only adventure game. Samet Max was the cutoff point where previously you had your diskette version and then you can buy your optional CD-ROM version that's a talkie from this point on where it would just be like

you need a CD-ROM drive or you cannot play these games. It's 1995. Call up Deller Gateway and get one shipped to you because this is the future of gaming. And I think, like I said before, Jake, this game has a real, like, multimedia era feel to it, but you're very right in that it works. It works in a way that's not just, oh, let's put a, you know, video of a character in front of a CGI background like Phantasmagoria or something like that. Exactly. The people behind this game. So Tim Schaefer, I don't need to explain who that is because we talked a lot about him in previous episodes. And I was wondering what happened to Dave Grossman, his co-worker on, or co-director, rather, on Day of the Tenicle.

Dave Grossman at this time, unfortunately, was working on one of the many canceled versions of the dig that consumed many a career at LucasArts. And I can't wait to get into the history of that game because it seems like a nightmare in a mess that push a lot of people of the company out of it, just because it was something that they didn't think what happened, but it finally did. Yeah, the dig is a mini season of its own. It really is. I really want to look up every interview possible on that game. Music salary We're not salary We're for

Coos in this game Music in this game is by the Gone Jackals, which is so the cover of the box says, you know, a heavy metal adventure. That is a misnomer. It's kind of like a grunge adventure because the Gone Jackals were a very grungy,

classic, rocky band. And their first album, or sorry, the album that they were making at the time of this, I believe it's called Bone to Pick. It was their first album with some metal in it. And that is what you hear in this game. That side of the Gone Jackals.

And they were a local San Francisco band, which makes a lot of sense because that's where this game was made in the Bay Area. And Tim wanted Soundgarden to do the soundtrack for full throttle originally. And he actually had a meeting with them. And I believe the story is they, the management brought the band members into the room to talk to Tim. And they were like, why are we here? This is a huge waste of time. Why did you set up this meeting? So did not go well. This could have been a Soundgarden, you know, adjacent game if it had gone well. That would have been way more in the 90s multimedia zone. Yes. It would have been way more

grungy and I think might not have age as well as the Gone Jackal's music does. And just a few more people behind the game. So we talked about these people in the past. I'm not going to go too far into them. So Peter McConnell does additional music. And what I like about this game that's much different than other games is that like previous LucasArts

games, it's like, here is the scene and here is the musical piece that accompanies the scene. In this game, it is very much scored like a movie. In many scenes, there is no music, and there's often only music to underscore action. So you don't get your standard like background music for every scene that you get in previous games.

And the main character of Ben Throttle is voiced by Roy Conrad. He was a character actor, fortunately passed away in 2002. He didn't do a whole lot of stuff, but he was doing video game voice acting around the time. And Tim and Company really picked him because everyone was doing like a gruff sort of Billy Bob Thornton and Slingblade kind of voice for Ben, but he had a much more low-key attempt on the character a take on the character. So he was the one who got the role and he does a great job. And also on this is Mark Hamill playing Adrian Ripberger, the villain of the story. And Mark Hamill was just

a full-on voice actor at this time. He had already done a ton of Batman playing the Joker. So he was very deep into his voice acting career and he plays a great villain. And along with these guys, there's just everybody in the TV cartoon voice acting mafia like Bill Farmer, who played Sam and Sam and Max. He's also Goofy. Kath Sousie, Maurice. Lamar, Nick Jameson, Trace McNeil, like everyone doing TV voice acting at the time was in this game. It's a very high quality experience. They didn't get just, you know, anyone off the street or locals. They got the best TV voice talent possible.

So let's get into the story of the game. I find it interesting that it's not about saving the world. It's not about a very high-stakes adventure. It's about saving the future of a motorcycle company and also sort of bringing a murderer to justice. So the story is this guy named Adrian Ripberger, he wants to kill and usurp Corley Motors founder and CEO Malcolm Corley. And in order to do this, he is going to enlist the help of a biker gang to escort him to the shareholders meeting. But that's really a guy's to murder the CEO and frame the gang and then take over the company to make minivans instead of motorcycles. Ben, the main character, ends up wrapped in all of this.

He's left behind by the gang and he's got to catch up with his gang and bring a. Adrian to Justice, and that is the story of full throttle. What do you think of the game's world, Jake, because people think it's a post-apocalyptic world, but it's not. Tim is just like saying out there, it is an alternate version of our reality. Like, what did you think about this world when you first played the game? When I first played it, I definitely, I mean, it doesn't feel truly post-apocalyptic, but it feels like a pretty decayed world if there's, you know, all these places that are sinking into the mud, and you don't really have a sense of the world outside of it.

But, I mean, the games world building did slightly curse itself with that one cheesy country song that includes the mention of the apocalypse. But I've always thought the world of full throttle is just pretty fantastic. I think it does a thing that I wish more genre works did, which is the world of full throttle really only extends out as far as it needs to for the purpose of, the story it's trying to tell and the characters who are in it, you never see the outside world, but the game also never feels like it has to tell you, oh, well, the reason you don't see the

outside world is because they were all destroyed or whatever. It's very self-contained and serves all the needs that it has to for its own story, but it strikes this great balance where everything in it is still so evocative in how it's built or sort of

in just the little details that are added that the world I think kind of feels bigger than it does. You can kind of imagine what's out there, even if what's out there is just the middle of the country is empty. You never know. I mean, there's a cable newscaster who reports on news and you get the feeling that the demolition derby has a crowd at it and the shareholders meeting have people at it. But at the same time, you just spend, you know, hours and hours and hours out in the middle of nowhere. You never see another card pass you on the road. You just see biker gangs out there in their own little bottle ecosystem.

Um, this is a probably dumb comparison, but it kind of reminds me of the first of the original Star Wars in that regard where like, who cares what else is happening inside of the universe of literally that one movie. It has all of the pieces that it needs. And then it feels like there's more out there, but you never have to know about it. Like I don't want to know more about the cave fish in that I don't want a person to come and tell me, oh, I've written a spin off novel about the cave fish. I like that they are this weird. evocative thing that you blip off of for, you know, a half hour in the story. And then your imagination can kind of feed off of it and just sort of wonder what it would be like. But the fact that the game doesn't feel the need to really tell you it. And it just sort of confidently moves on, I think is extremely good. Yeah, it actually reminds me of Mad Max Fury Road and that there's very little fat. And you can easily fill in the blanks yourself. Like, I think that cinematic approach was them saying, let's make all the conversations necessary. Let's make them so like if you were watching a movie, this could naturally fit into a scene in a movie. So there's not a lot of things

to look at. There's not a lot of characters to talk to. The conversations are usually pretty brief. And there's not a lot of flavor text either. And I feel like it's all for the sake of a cinematic experience and just the pacing of a movie. But you could do a bad version of that. And I think in full throttle, it has very little of all the things you describe, but the world still feels extremely rich somehow. It's a, it's a tough formula to achieve, I think. Yeah, I replayed this game for the podcast and it does seem like there were things cut from it and there definitely were on the record things come from it. But it didn't really bother me too much because at the end of the game, I was like, oh, what happened to Miranda? And then I thought again, oh, it doesn't actually

matter because she was there to serve her purpose in the game. She does not need like a moment of triumph or whatever. She did what she needed to do. and she exited the world. Yeah, and just like Todd, the junkyard owner, who you never, I guess you kind of see him and that he gets knocked unconscious almost instantaneously. But like, there's just enough weird details about that guy where you go into his basement and there's all the welding art

that is just deeply fucked up. And I don't know, it has just enough detail to paint a picture that lets your brain fill in all the rest of it. Which, I mean, that's also true of the art style, which, you know, is obviously super graphic and clean. extremely well designed, but so much of that look is also just about withholding. You never see the character's eyes. Everything pits down into pure black shadows all over the place.

Anything that is saturated is like a few pixels on screen unless it's just like the bright orange of the rock formations, but almost everything else is just empty, but it still feels rich. Yeah. Yeah, I do like the withholding information in this game. Like, I feel like a less confident game would say, let's meet all the members of Ben's gang. Let's talk to them. Let's figure out what this gang does. Like, you don't even know what activities the pole cats do.

You don't know if they're running drugs or you don't know if they're involved in legal things. This could just be a weekend warrior situation. Who even knows? But they had the confidence to say, like, no, you know enough about Ben, I mean a few words, to want to be him and follow him through this story. Let's talk about the interface for this game because it is an improved version of what we saw in Sam and Max at the road. So as in that game, there is no verb bar at the bottom. but you have a floating cursor that's very accurate and when something you can interact with is on the screen

it will light up when you pass over it and once it lights up you click the left mouse button and there are one of four of very broad commands that are symbolized by parts of the body so you have eyes, mouth, fist, and boot and I believe like in the game within the game's universe that's actually the tattoo that Ben has or like the tattoo of the Polkats.

Yeah it's the Polkats logo I think and right clicking brings up an inventory screen very simple. It's a much more improved over Sam and Max. It basically fixes every single problem I had with that interface when I was replaying again for this podcast. It's a very effective interface. And I think like they were trying to streamline things where eyes always means look at for the most part, but between the mouth, the boot and the fist, it's a very like broad assortment of verbs it could mean. So there's less margin of error for the user to put in a wrong command or a wrong verb. Yeah, that was, I mean, that's definitely been Lucashearts's process over their entire existence, it seems like, is slowly streamlining and stacking verbs on top of each other. Full throttle is, I think, personally for me, the sweet spot. I know the curse of Monkey Island has a very similar interface, but I think even one fewer because Guy Burst Threeple doesn't kick down doors with his boot. Yeah. There's just like look, grab or use and the mouth one, like eat or talk to.

Yeah. Yeah, but full throttle, I think the design of the of the, of the, of the, too is extremely clever. I really like that since it's a ring, the object that you're clicking on is still visible in the middle of the interface. That's something that Monkey Island 3, I think, missed by having the coin show up because you click and then the interface literally obscures the thing. But what is there to say about the full throttle interface other than it was really well done? Yeah. And like when you, the interface is a skull, right? And when you bring it up on the screen, you can hear the flames coming off of it. Like it has fully. Yes. Which is really cool. It's the first interface I think that has that sort of thing in it.

so I want to talk about design because pre-show chatter with Jake it's kind of weird that I'm doing the two games whose design I like the least in a row for retronauts so Simon Max I didn't like the design too much I think full throttle might be my least favorite game of LucasArts in terms

of design but again I would not be doing this podcast if I didn't love all of these games I want to talk about I'm like even though I am not a fan of the way this game is designed I still think it's fascinating and a product of what they were trying to do with the experience And I really think that cinematic approach did influence the design.

It was all trying to be about ditching the artifice of the genre, and it really does. But I think there are some flaws, in my opinion, as someone who just replayed the game. One of those is it has really gorgeous art, really gorgeous animation, and lots of cutscenes, and we were really in love with these things in 95 when they were just starting to become possible. I think this game is a little indulgent with those and I think a lot of them act as connective tissue that could be expanded into an adventure game scene or a puzzle but that is just my own take on what's happening here

I believe that I honestly have never thought about that because I've just always been so enamored with the style of full throttle but that definitely makes sense it feels I mean I've never talked to anyone who worked on full throttle about full throttle But it gives the impression of being, like you said, they had the power, the technology, the skill to finally do these really cinematic moments. So they did them. And I'm guessing that if you tried to inject dialogue into the middle of those or interactive dialogue or puzzle moments, it probably just would have not been possible.

Or if it would have been possible, it would have blown the budget and scope of that game, even more than they'd already had. And to be fair, I totally agree with you. And to be fair, I'm approaching this with 25 years of hindsight. And I know what's possible now. I don't know what they were thinking at the time and one of the things is there's a lot of puzzles you can fail and the fail state is always you watching a little

video and I felt like at the time no one was thinking like well that could get repetitive but just like no people will be excited to see video on their computer I think that would just you can see a bike crash and it looks totally sick when that bike crash even if you have to watch it crash 20 times people were on board with that things are much different

now but my modern perspective is informing what my thoughts are about this game and one of the reasons why I think this game is so short is because with previous LucasArts games, I think for the most part, they would develop a set of core assets like all the characters, the items, the rooms, and they could just, you know, puppet them around to do what they would want them to do. There'd be, you know, unique animations for some things, but for the most part, it was a pretty simple process. With full throttle, there are so many, like, unique shots of characters,

unique setups of scenes with unique art. And I feel like the bottleneck of production wasn't much larger with this game compared to other games. So I felt like that also made the game a much briefer experience, just like the how much they could do with the amount of people and amount of money they had. That definitely seems true. I mean, I hadn't actually thought about that even until you brought it up. But if you think about how many characters in full throttle probably actually have an entire movement and talking suite that, you know, like in Monkey Island, too, every character

would have every character has a talking loop, has a walking loop that could turn all the different directions. Ben is maybe the only character in full throttle who you actually see go through all of the paces of an adventure game protagonist or an adventure game NPC even throughout the game. Almost everyone else spends most of their time just blasting completely unique content.

Even Maureen, she's like fixing the bike or taking a picture in a cutscene or is like giving a presentation to the board. Yeah, this game is very bespoke for a LucasArts adventure game. Oh, for sure. And I mean, they were doing things like this previously, but it was very rare within a game, like you would get a full-screen animation or a close-up of a character, but they tried to do that as much as possible with this game,

and I think that really led to fewer resources to be spread around. The population is greatly decreased, and now the odds are greatly increased, that I may someday get a chance to kiss your lips. I thank the Lord each day for the apocalypse. Folks are mostly disfigured or dead, but sugar I won't let it go to my head. Hey, Benito, I've been reading the Bible lately, and nobody ever told me how many talking dogs in wizard battles were in this thing.

Well, Chris, you know what I always say. If you can understand Star Wars, you can understand the Bible. Apocry Pals. Part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. The award-winning Go-Nintendo podcast covers the latest Nintendo news while also diving into what's hot and pop culture, music trivia, hands-on impressions, and so much more. Hopefully, we can make you laugh, too.

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So another And I've been to do with with this game was make an adventure game that did not rely on inventory puzzles He wanted everything you needed to do For a puzzle to be on the same screen as the puzzle And I really like that idea

And I have played adventure games that are like this. I think unfortunately the confidence is not really there where it needs to be from my perspective because a few puzzles need an item

of I think you have like maybe four or five total items in the game but I felt like while playing this again I'm like I just really wish it would have stuck to that core idea

because I think the weakness in this game are the item based puzzles Okay what's an example of that you're changing my perception of full throttle in real time I'm making you hate it

no one of them is the bunny puzzle where you need to keep putting little bunnies out on the minefield and grabbing them and picking them up and putting them back down. It's a tricky puzzle interface-wise to actually execute well. And if you mess up, you have to actually walk back to where you got bunnies before and pick up more. It just adds more like shoe leather to the experience. And I felt like, oh, there should have been like some way to have infinite bunnies on that screen, you know? Yeah, that's interesting.

It's funny when I think about a few of the puzzles in full throttle that do stand out in my brain, honestly the bunny one is one that stands out to me as a positive so does the um the bit where you have to break into the junkyard by pulling the chain and the garage door opens but then you've got to go get the padlock stick it on the door and climb up it i really actually like that puzzle and i like the the bunny one where where you're actually standing in the world when you deploy them where that matters and i like them in isolation because they really do remind me of some of my favorite stuff from especially monkey allen one and two where there's this feeling that you're using really standard classic adventure game verbs and adventure game inventory items, but there's just enough weird mix of the real world inside of it or of some underlying system that takes your actions extremely literally or works the way that a real thing would. I think, though, that you're right that maybe a problem that full throttle has is that the game is definitely not all that. The game is usually a completely different style of puzzle or world interaction than those things. And then all of a sudden, one of those things shows up that I think

clearly comes from the same sort of pedigree of design thinking that a lot of the post-Mukyalland 1 LucasArts games have. And in my opinion, are really, like, strongly thought out puzzles. But I get what you're saying about it, just not jelling with literally any of the other things that you're doing in the game. And it's funny, like, this game was their highest selling adventure game. I don't think anything sold more than this for LucasArts, but they didn't do this ever again. Like, you move on to Curse a Monkey Island, you're back to inventory and verb puzzles. Same with Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island. Like, they would just continue that old tradition into the future until they just stopped

making games. I just, uh, it's interesting that this works so well, uh, financially for them, that they didn't decide to just do it again or try to make a monkey island game like this. I don't think you could make a monkey island game like this. I think that would be a, that would be a disaster. But it's, it is weird that they didn't. Even Grim Fandango doesn't really have this feel to it. That's true.

Yeah. And it's interesting, like the first puzzle of this game, it does kind of set you up for an inventory-free experience because the first puzzle is you just clicking on the inside of a dumpster to punch your way out, to find the right place to punch to get out of the dumpster. That felt like such a strong statement at the beginning of this game that literally your first verb is just to punch your way out of a dumpster. And then your next thing you do is kick down the door, and then the next thing you do is grab a guy by his nose ring. But pretty soon after that, you're throwing food to a dog and locking a door with a lock so you can climb up a chain. Yeah, you're back to your normal adventure game puzzles. Yeah, I feel like if I wish there was more confidence, I mean, I wish there were just more of them sticking to that inventory-free statement. I really want to see how the game would have went that way.

But I understand that they were just looking for solutions. Yeah, and I think full throttle is just a game that exists in this weird, liminal time where you're right that it is sort of a transition, it's a transition into a bunch of things on some fronts. And in others, it's a dead end. But it does really feel like so much of full-throat. throttle, it's like both a flex and a concession at the same time, I guess is how to describe some of that stuff. That's a great description. All the

big action sequences, like the destruction derby, the mine road motorcycle fights, they all feel like, oh, wow, we can finally do all of the parts of a story in a game as opposed to, it used to sort of be in an action game. If

in the story the character was supposed to jump or shoot, you would let the player do that. And in an adventure game, if a character was supposed to talk or solve a mystery. You would let the player do that, but anytime they were going to jump or shoot, it's a cutscene. Whereas in full throttle, it felt very much like, oh, we could do it all.

But the edges to which they could do it all was very often extremely compromised. Even though at the same time, so much of that game is just like still unprecedented or literally can't be reproduced. Yeah, like you were mentioning earlier, so the game starts off with

the inventory-free, even like verb-free puzzle. And then you are on to getting three sets of items, doing some more stuff, and then getting three more sets of items. So they're still kind of a little, like, one foot stuck in the past when they're trying to just innovate as much as they can. One thing I don't like about the puzzles in this game is I get the intent completely. Like, I don't want to make a slow-paced adventure game. I want this to feel like the pacing of a movie. And because of that, there are lots of timing-based puzzles.

A lot of adventure games, they basically wait for you to make the right move. But here, Ben often has to be in the right place of the right time. And my issue with this, I think upon my first playthrough, is this kind of design doesn't let you know if you were doing the wrong thing or maybe just the right thing at the wrong time. You mean, for instance, kicking the brick? That's a major example, yes. I think a more, I mean, so when I got to that part, I was like, oh, it's one of those, oh, this puzzle moments. And Tim is a very apologetic for that. and I feel like that's accentuated later in the game

the ending is great like they're trying I mean the ending is great to watch they're trying to give it the ending of an action movie like very over the top lots of fun almost near death from the main character but basically the ending scene would play out in maybe 90 seconds in a movie be a fun exciting experience

the ending scenes where you're fighting Ripberger for the last time it is essentially like either four or five time sequences that will send you to a fail your cutscene if you don't do the right thing quickly enough. And it's a bit frustrating. Yeah, it has a little bit of the feeling of an adventure game puzzle if you sort of look at it on paper or intellectually, but you're right that in practice, some of that stuff at the end really has a Dragon's Lair feel to it. Yeah, it does. And it seems like in trying

to give it that cinematic quality, they actually made it slower pace because of all of the time you're just kind of stuck in that one spot. Let's talk about some puzzles, Jake. Do you have any famous, like, what are your favorite puzzles in full throttle? I have to go back and think through all of the puzzles and then think about which are the ones that I like the most. I mean, I said earlier that I do really like just having to lock the garage door and climb up it because it is so practical to the point that it is almost insulting. Like, not, but in a good way, I, I've always enjoyed that in that puzzle, you can pull on the chain and the door opens and closes and then Ben just sort of looks at it. And there's no wacky comments or anything. And then when you lock it, you climb up it.

And then for some reason, the game just plays like a wacky Mission Impossible riff. Yeah. I thought that was good. The other one that I really like, again, because it is both just weirdly practical and impractical. And it's just this, of course, it's what you would do, even though it's crazy, is when you push the bike ramp backwards to knock the yellow dots off of the, off the road, which I believe are called bots dots. Oh. named after the creator of them, but the, you know, just the, so that the cavefish can't track them because you learn that the cavefish used dots. That's, again, a thing that's like, I don't really, my, my full throttle opinions are maybe slightly cursed in that, like any adventure game, at least for me, my brain remembers some things in life, but it's always a mixed bag on what I recall, unless it's an adventure game puzzle chain, in which case it is seared into my brain forever.

Like, I could just be a walkthrough service for LucasArts adventure games without having played some of them for over a decade. So I'm like, oh, I really like that you push the ramp backwards and the dots pop off the road. I actually can't remember how easy or difficult that puzzle is or how many people get stuck on it or are infuriated by it. Playing it again, I was stuck because the way that articulates with the verbs is kind of tricky. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. What's for you?

What are likes and dislikes? I think the problem with me when I do these podcasts is I really, remember the ones I don't like the most, just because they just, they're the ones I'm stuck on, they're the ones I think about the most, and I really should think of more about the ones that work. Now, because this game is, you know, trying to avoid too many verbs, too many inventory items, there are so many scenes where you are interacting with something with very machine-like properties, like the crane. You often are operating, you know, projectors or video screens. Like, they're trying to figure out ways for you to interact with the world that

aren't, you know, use, touch, kick, punch, look at, or whatever. They are finding new ways for you to interact with the world. Some of these don't work out so well. Like, an early sticking point for me was the junkyard puzzle. The one, the bit where you throw the meat into the car and then get the dog in it, that stuff? Or is there more to it than that? I don't want to, uh, to litigate this puzzle too hard on the air, but I have a real problem with it because, uh, I think because a lot of these puzzles, I think you're not

given proper visual information or Ben is just a very quiet character. So you're not really sure why you failed. But the solution to this puzzle is to, uh, you know, throw the meat into the car and then lift the dog up in the air in the car that he jumped into. The problem with that puzzle is the car, the crane only lifts, uh, things four car lengths high or sorry, four car heights high. So four cars stacked on top of each other. And, uh, like logically in my brain, I would think, well, a dog, that tough dog could jump out of a car stacked on four of their cars. Why is he stuck now? And like playing it again, I was like, oh, that's the solution? Because my first thought was, okay, I'll put the meat in the car and then I'll stack cars on top of the car. But the problem is you don't see how the dog is escaping. And that's why you don't know, like, how to trap it. Yep. Now, I remember having all of these exact same thoughts when I was solving that puzzle for the first time. You've brought them all back to my brain. I'm trying to just figure out why I don't like these things, but I can see...

No, I think that's all totally fair. I mean, that puzzle, the messaging on it is pretty rough, all things considered. And it's interesting, like, when you walk away from that scene, you're often chased away by the dog. You see the crane is now, like, lifting something 200 feet in the air, when previously it's lifting something upwards of four car heights in the air. It's a strange, like, the art doesn't communicate what the puzzle needs to. So I think they were like having some problems there, especially at the resolution they were working at. Yeah, it's hard to know. I mean, maybe they were worried that if you were able to bring cars up higher than that and then you could drop them by turning the magnet off, like it would require art support outside of scope for what they had for being able to drop cars from great heights or that people would start thinking you're supposed to destroy cars if you can do that. I have no idea what the what the reason for it was.

But yeah, it definitely feels like they again were right up against the edge of some constraint or another that at this point is almost impossible to. to guess it what it was because the tech pipeline on that game seems so specific to me to the exact moment that it came out. Definitely. As you can tell from everything that I say, that is the thing that I maybe secretly the most obsessed with with full throttle. It's just that era it came out in? Yeah, I mean, I still really do think that full throttle being a 320 by 200 game

that has full frame animation that is hand drawn but is pixel art, but there is 3D rendered stuff. it's like it's it you're right that it does just distill down to oh it's a multimedia experience but it feels it feels I don't quite know how to say it it's just it's the aspirations for that game are just so specific and the solutions that they came up with were like you could only make this game that way at that exact moment in time with that exact team which I honestly think is is really rare especially for like 256 color sprite games from the 90s there's very I don't know enough about that era to be able to say what I was going to say, which is there's very few like that. There's obviously a ton of games that I'll do all sorts of different stuff, but the exact way that full throttle was on the cusp of we're leaving pixel art and going into a higher fidelity thing and we're integrating 3D and we're integrating video. It just feels it's like it's a look all all of its own. It's like it's got a sort of weird grind housey feel to it and not just because it's a because the subject matter is like schlocky bikers or whatever.

But you just feel all these people using these tools, all these game development tools for a thing that they really don't seem like they were exactly meant for. You know, like all of the motorcycle chase stuff I think is using insane, which is the sprites drawn over video that Rebel Assault used to make a 3D Star Wars experience. But they're like, oh, what if we put pixel art bikers riding on CG bikes on top of a video projection so you could solve adventure game puzzles? It's, I don't know if you want to talk about the special edition. in its own place or not. Oh, we can get to that after we do the design discussion, but I totally understand what you're saying because it is them using their old tools

in like their old kind of approach, but in a new format. Yeah, the cell animation, full frame cell animation, but done as pixel perfect, non-anti-aliist pixel art is such a cool look that you just don't see a lot of, I don't think. It's not rotoscoped like out of this world

or flashback, and it's not anti-aliased and very clearly scanned in, like, the Curse of Monkey Island or something, you know, it's, it's its own crazy thing where it's like you get all of the fidelity of sort of a cinematic, hand-animated thing, except that then it's also been gone over by an incredible pixel artist. So every frame just has this crazy look to it that is just, it's so bizarre. Yeah, it's, it's really the last time when pixel art had to communicate all of that stuff, like when you still had to think about every square before you could just scan in an asset, that's, that you're really the last time. you drew or actually draw that asset as it would be represented on the screen. So, yeah, it's like the height of pixel art, like the last year of pixel art for LucasArts. At least for LucasArts, yeah, because then the next thing they did, I guess the dig came out at the same time. But the dig very much was the scanned look. The dig, the characters were more sort of classic small scale LucasArts characters in the adventure game walk around parts. They were, you know, characters the size of Monkey Island or Indiana Jones in the fate of Atlantis characters, I think.

Yeah, like no real detail on their faces or anything like that. Yeah, but the cinematic sequences in those were very clearly these are scanned in and digitally painted. They looked more like a sort of low-res, you know, a 320 by 200 version of what you'd see in the Curse of Monkey Island or something where you could feel the brush lines and you could feel the sort of everything was a little smooth because they treated those videos more like video, whereas in full throttle, I think that there was a goal somewhere in there aesthetically that even when you're in a cutscene, it's going to still be pixel art. so that the line is blurred between am I in the walk-and-talk adventure game parts or am I in a cinematic part? I think that the fact that they don't break technical style between all of the different modes that the game's in is,

again, like it's a crazy flex for the time, even if the actual mechanics that they were trying to accomplish underneath all those aesthetics are a lot crickier. You mentioned the motorcycle sections where you're fighting different gang members to get like a chain of weapons to eventually get the things that you need. I don't think anyone thinks that's very playable now, but it's interesting to see them just trying as best as they could to. have some action elements in the game and it plays out as well as like road rash does it's not like terribly hard to play or you know confusing it's the part that definitely feels like this is a mixed media CD ROM game where you can you can feel the layering and you can feel the weird

inputs although at least the mine road puzzle that you're talking or the the scenario you're talking about does have a adventure game shortcut to it where you can go and pick some fertilizer up off of the tipped over big rig and throw it in the eyes of the woman with the chainsaw and then you just have an instant kill weapon. So there's at least, there is a puzzle path inside of it, but it's not, it's not like telegraphed at all that it that exists. Yeah, I was going to point that out. It's like, I was just, I was having problems with it and I didn't want to cheat. So I was like, how do I get the chainsaw? She's so hard. It's like, oh, throw a fertilizer. I don't know that. I have the fertilizer.

Yeah. But yeah, it feels like that has to just be a discovery that you might make if you tab through all your weapons and then the fertilizer shows up and you're like, oh, I guess I, I guess I have this. But there's, the game definitely is not written so that when you pick the fertilizer up, Ben turns to the camera and say, this will come in useful. There's none of that, like, classic adventure game dialogue giveaway stuff. Not too much talking to the player.

And you mentioned it up front, I think the demolition derby section is just, I think it's just rotten. It's not, it's hard to play. It's frustrating. And when I solve the puzzle, I'm like, I still don't get how in the reality of the world, how that works. But I'll take your word for it.

I just want to see the ending. Yeah, there's, in the opening premise, they say that the cars have a weak spot where if you land on them, they stall, but that's, that's like, it's not, again, not presented as this is information that you need. Like, it's, it's hard to separate that out from, is this just funny flavor dialogue saying these are shitty cars. Did you play through the demolition derby in the special edition? Is it different? I did. It's, uh, it runs a little smoother, but, uh, it's exactly the same. It's just as hard to do. Um, the physics are just as weird. And the, uh, the visual information

you get makes it very confusing as to why the solution actually. worked. Any other thoughts on the design of this, Jake, before we move on to a failed sequels or canceled sequels in the remastered version? And final thoughts on the game itself? The end of the game is extremely satisfying. I really, when you, when you, the way, I guess maybe the second to end, the, the, the boardroom sequence where you're just doing weird corporate espionage with a slide projector

to totally own that guy's PowerPoint and out him as a murderer in front of everyone was, was a, an adventure game finale that I had never seen I'd never seen anything like it tonally and just I know you said you weren't really into manipulating machines and fiddling with weird technology but it's true that especially the junkyard one is a little bit funky but I

have to basically give infinite respect to full throttle for making a weird desert wasteland biker story that is also totally a like film noir techno thriller where you even though you're this weird stoic, super broad-shouldered guy in a leather jacket, the way that you accomplish so much of what you do is just through weird technological espionage. It shouldn't work. But for me, I think the fact that all of these characters have such an immense working vocabulary for just literally the mechanics of things, like how a bike works or how a car works, or they're people

who just have to do all this weird, fine, knowledge-based work as they're, as just to, maybe not to survive because it's technically not a post-apocalyptic world, but this feeling that there's just this world full of all this kind of abandoned or out-of-date technology that really no one is servicing anymore, maybe other than Corley Motors. All of that tonal stuff works for me so well. So just the bit where you show those photos at the end and then Ripper gets totally owned is one of the more cathartic puzzle solution reward moments in adventure game, in all of adventure games.

I did like that one actually and I didn't need help with it. I really like the logic of, you know, burning the film and the projector. It did make sense to me. And it's interesting Ben knows how to use a reel-to-reel. Like, he knows how to put that tape on. Yeah. And Mark Hamill's performance as Ripperger, when he's just totally lost up on stage because his PowerPoint has been destroyed is extremely tasty.

Let's move on to what happened after Full Throtto. So Full Throttle comes out, sells a million copies. Everyone loves it. And there were attempted sequels, of course, without Tim Schaefer's involvement because he left to form Double Fine Productions, which is still operating. So there were two failed sequels. The first one was called Full Throttle Payback. It involved Bill Tiller as the art director and Larry Ahern as the project lead.

And of course, this game was canceled, and that's what drove these two guys out of the company. So the plot was about stopping the plans of an evil governor who wanted to replace all paved roads with hoverpads. And the first part of the game would involve stopping his plot to assassinate Father Torque, who we see a tiny bit of in this game in full throttle. And the second part would involve bringing the governor down and covering a secret, and it falls directly after the events of Full Thoughter 1. Like Ben was acquitted of Ripberger's death, and he's sort of in hiding, and it picks up from there. And that was the story of this game. And development of this game lasted from spring to November of 2000. And based on interviews, it sounds like one guy in management didn't like how the project was going.

So it was assigned to a new team that involved none of the people that had worked on the previous game. and then it was quietly canceled. And I think news of this just sort of broke in the late aughts. Like interviews about this first started coming out when I believe Bill Tiller from the company started talking about it way after that happened. The second failed sequel has evidence online. You can see this. There's an E3-2003 trailer just like the canceled Samimax game. There's evidence that they were making this.

So it's called Full Throttle Hell on Wheels. And unfortunately, Roy Conrad had passed away by this point. So he's narrating the trailer, but it's a new actor playing Ben Throttle. So development for this was announced at mid-2002, and it's a multi-platform game where it would have been if it came out. The project lead was Sean Clark, who directed The Dig and co-directed Sam Max at the Road. And not much is known about the plot, but it borrows nothing from the payback game that they were making earlier in the decade. It just involved Ben, Maureen, and Father Torque teaming up to stop some sort of evil plots. And based on what's known about this,

It had a rhythm-based attack system. It had some action elements and tons of weapons to work into the system and was canceled just a few months after appearing at E3-2003, and nobody really knows why. And I have to say that I was really bummed in the early aughts when Sam and Max freelance police and this were canceled. But I think ultimately, I don't know how good they would have been because this was a very ugly and awkward period for games and especially adventure games. I was at E3 2003 and I saw the full throttle. Hell on Wheels demo, because I, from the late 90s through the mid-2000s, basically literally up until I started working at Teltail, I helped co-run and write for a LucasArts fan site called the International House of Mojo, or it was at mixin mojo.com. I forgot to ask you about that.

It's still running. People are still posting stuff all the time there, and I love that that Mojo still exists and it's still just doing its thing. but yeah I saw the demo for full throttle hell on wheels in I guess it was 2003 because they had LucasArts had the demo for Helen Wheels there and then they only had a trailer for Sam and Max freelance police we couldn't see the game and I remember mostly my reaction to seeing full throttle hell on wheels at the time was being ambiently excited because there was a new full throttle and a new Sam and Max but kind of confused by what the game was and I'm sure that the team had a very good idea of what the game was but the way that it was being shown to the public I remember was like they would show you a demo of this is a part that will play kind of like an adventure game, but it was more 3D action-oriented adventure game. And then they would say, and this is the part that plays like an action game. And then you would just get in a bar brawl with characters. And it was a very strange experience going to that demo knowing or with the people demoing it, knowing that we were like the diehard, just adventure game nerd fan site there,

like to the point that the person demoing the game for us when they, they got through the menus and they were going to show the action part, she literally said to us, you guys don't want to see this part. And it was like, whoa, this is an emotionally intense experience to have run a fan site for years, to finally get to go to E3 and get invited to the Lucas Arts booth and get to, you know, which is all a closed doors thing and see the demos for all their stuff, a lot of which was really awesome at that show. And then to finally see a new full throttle game and have someone literally tell me that I'm not going to like part of it on the show floor. That was intense

But I don't really know anyone who worked on that game And I haven't talked to people about it Since I've you know Since I moved into actually making video games And not just writing about them for a fan site But my impression entirely from the outside Having never checked in on the inside Was that that game maybe just had too many identities inside of it

And it was I was bummed like you When both those games were canceled But in hindsight it's it's really hard to know Even what those would have become that they shipped at that exact point in history both of like sort of the aesthetic of what low poly 3D games looked like at that time and where LucasArts was at that time

it's hard to know fortunately it's now decades in the past somehow so wow you know when making the notes for this I never even thought you would have played that demo I know like I don't know probably 100 people played it at that event or more but so you're one of the rare people that experienced some part of this game before it was canceled yeah I touched full throttle

hell on wheels the thing in hindsight that I'm honestly the most sad that never got finished from that was whatever the music was for it. Because I remember talking to Peter McConnell about it and he was just so excited about being able to work, you know, doing that sort of that same sort of tense, noirie stuff that he was doing but then maybe incorporating more country and more rock stuff straight into it. And he was listing all the musicians that he was starting to work with on the score for it. And it was like, uh, I don't remember any of the details now. I just carry with me the excitement that he had for what they were going to do with the

soundscape of that game. And that's the part that I'm like, oh, man, I wish that whatever that was existed, because I think there's no Peter McConnell score that is bad. And the last item I have on this list in my notes is a full throttle remastered. I believe that came out in 2017, hot off the heels of the day the tentacle remastered. And Jake, it sounds like you had some thoughts about that when it came up in our conversation. Oh, I think that it's a beautifully done remaster. And it's really awesome to play full throttle on an HD TV. and have it fill the whole image and for everything to just be, like, crisp and consistent. But I also feel like for all the, when you heard me just losing my mind over the crazy aesthetic mismatch that was the original game and how somehow I felt like, I feel like even though there's all these different art styles and different art execution techniques mashed into every frame of that game, I think that it works.

And I do miss in the special editions that you don't get to see all. of the different sort of technical artistry on display on any given frame. Obviously, the same amount of art, like probably whatever, literally 10 times more art is coming out of any one frame of full thrall remastered. And again, it is all just cohesive and really well executed and it's fun to play. But there is something that is just really cool about looking at the original and just looking at all the different pieces that are put together that are the different pieces that come together to bring any one part of that game to life.

And I think that by cleaning all of it up, the special edition does, or whatever, is it remastered is what it's called? I think remastered, yeah. Yeah, it loses a little bit of the charm for me in a way that maybe I don't, I don't think Grim Pandango Special Edition does. I think Grim Pandango Special Edition just feels like the upgrade button was pressed on the game. And it all just comes across as one, whereas full throttle, because the original was so execution, because it was doing all the full frame animation but was rooted in the world of pixel art, you just have to make creative choices to actually. actually change the way that things are executed in a way that you didn't really have to with Grim Pendango. It's like just smooth it out and make it bigger. It's not necessarily for the worse, but it's objectively different in how some of the things are pulled off in the special

edition. Yeah, I agree. And I think so. I reviewed Data Tenticle when I worked at U.S. Gamer. I wrote a really long oral history about it. I love that game. But I think a lot more work had to go into this one because I played through it, you know, constantly switching back and forth between remastered version and the original version. And it seems like they had to like basically re-render videos or create their own pre-rendered videos because they're not cleaning up every frame of a, you know, 320 by 200 FMV. At least I don't think they are. It seems like all original work. It seems like a lot of it was was re-drawn over the top of it. And I mean, to the credit of Full Throttle Remastered, it has the same like emotional mood. It has the same

sort of style. It pushes all the same buttons when you're playing it as the original does. Because, like, if you kind of sit back and unfocus your eyes, there are times in that game where you're like, oh, this is just exactly how I remember it. And then you go look at the 320 by 200 one and go, oh, no, it's not. They definitely had to put a ton into getting this to work as a 1080P thing. But it's just different. So, Jake, you've been with me for a while now. I really appreciate it. It's a pleasure to talk to you about adventure games.

Hopefully I didn't taint your opinion about this one too much with my own thoughts. Oh, no. You have further radicalized me as a full trial defender. Excellent. And any final thoughts in this game before I let you go? Any final thoughts on full throttle? I probably have thoughts on full throttle. I mean, how long do I have? You've had many. You've had many throughout this podcast. But just take as long as you want. Yeah, whatever you want to say. Yeah, full throttle is great. Everyone should play it. It was a game that I went back to a ton actually when we were working on the Walking Dead season one at Telltale. Oh, really?

Yeah, maybe we were we were trying so hard on that game to think about what is a what is an adventure game feel like if the pacing is more of a handoff between the player and the author than most adventure games are. What is what is it like to have a cinematic conversation in an adventure game that then can sort of cut back into the nav cam and walkbox based stuff and how does that work seamlessly? What is it like to have an adventure game that has a relatively reserved protagonist? I mean, like Lee was not based on Ben at all, but there are similarities there. I don't know. I just go back to full throttle all the time and both to play it and just to think about it when I'm thinking about moments that I love in games. And I don't ever think about how do I take this exact design idea from from full throttle or whatever. But it's more that game just for me more than a lot of other games has moments that create a feeling or a mood in in me that I will think about like, oh, when that thing happened in full throttle and I felt this, how. How did it do that and how can I do that in a thing that I make? And I still don't think that I ever manage to touch the highs of full throttle.

But it's like, it's a thing that I always think about in that regard when I'm working on a game. Excellent. So thanks so much for your time, Jake. I really want to have you back to talk about specifically Tales of Monkey Island and your work of telltale. At some point in the future, I want to move on to those games once you get through all of these. All right. Sounds good. Probably in a few years or so, but please let everyone know where they can find you on Twitter.

And, of course, if you're listening on the Patreon, Half Life Alex is out today. And if you're on the free feed, it was out last week. You should have been playing it. It's really good. Awesome. Yeah, you can find me on Twitter if you really want at JA2KE. Sometimes I post things that are worth reading, but most of the time it's garbage. So thanks again to Jake Rodkin for being on the show.

I'd love to have him back for another adventure game exploration. But as for us, if you want to support our show and get some nice rewards on top of that, please go to patreon.com. odds. And if you sign up for three bucks a month, you'll get all of our episodes one week ahead of time and at free and at a higher bit rate, a very nice offer for you. We also have a newer $5 tier we started in 2020. And what you get if you sign up for $5 a month is two exclusive episodes every month available only to patrons giving us $5 a month or more. Once again, those exclusive episodes are only available to $5 and up patrons. But if you want a little sample of what

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We will see you next time for another great episode. See you then. There's got a hammering up I don't have to have run. Thank you.