Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 428: 1080 Snowboarding & Vitei with Giles Goddard

Episode Date: January 9, 2022

Senior Japan correspondent Diamond Feit goes inside Vitei in Kyoto to speak to studio founder Giles Goddard and Chuhai Labs producer Mark Lentz about 1080 Snowboarding, Giles' history with Nintendo, and indie game development. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week in Retronauts, live in Kyoto, it's Thursday afternoon. Welcome to Retronauts. Hi. Please, don't adjust your volumes. I am not, Jeremy Parrish, nor am I Bob Mackie. This is Diamond Fight, and I'm here recording a very special episode of Retronauts with some special people in indeed the city of Kyoto, Japan, in spring. It's a lovely day today. And I'm here in the, shall we stay, podcasting saloon of Chewai Labs?

The bar. No, the pod dungeon, baby. The pod dungeon, okay. And we are here. Well, first of all, right in front of me, this is, please introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Mark Lentz. I'm a producer and the business development manager here at Chewai Labs. All right.

Thank you for coming, Mark. And thank you for being instrumental in arranging this meeting. Oh, thank you for coming. And our number one guest, the star here, and I believe officially the CEO of Vite. The current Vitae. Okay. He's the current CEO. That's what we call.

Yeah, because one of these days, he's out of here. Okay. They remind me of that every day. Yeah, I'm Giles. I'm a programmer at Bitti. Okay. Wow, great, Giles. Come on.

A little bit more. Lee programmer. We're here to talk about some of the work that you've done and some of the work that you're doing, and just to catch up on you because you've had a fascinating career, if I say so myself. You know, I think our listeners, We'll be very excited to hear the things you've experienced, the things you've made, the things you tinkered with. The things I've seen. Yes.

So if we could just start, I would say, with your background. So, first of all, I think it was recently your birthday. Happy birthday. Thank you very much. 50. Yeah. 50s. Barely made it.

The big fiber. How is that going for you so far? I'm not far behind you. I think it's all downhill from now. Yeah. But I'm trying to not think about it too much. I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful for my 50s. It doesn't get better.

He's a miserable fuck. All right. Well, so far my 40s and better my 30s, but that's just me. But yeah, so you started out when you were a teen. You were programming games as a teenager? Well, yeah. I mean, I was programming spectrum games when I was 12. 11. Not even teenager. Literal child.

Yeah, I think I had it for my 9th, 10th birthday, Christmas. present, birthday present, something like that. That's where it all started. I mean, taking a magazine and typing in the basic command to make a game, that was how you made games. And I guess we went on to actually making machine code games after that, where you type in the actual codes for the CPU to read and execute to make a much faster, better game out of it.

Yeah, and I guess that's where I started. In programming at that era, I, you know, I didn't go on to anything larger, but I definitely typed a bunch of things into my computer at home. And in America, we would read a lot of magazines, and the magazines would have a full program in the back. And if you could sit there and type it all out, you would just get the program. Yeah, the thing is, they would never work. There'd always be a spelling mistake or a mistake because they never checked these things. So you'd always, I mean, but maybe that was a good thing because you'd always have to go and fix them yourself. So you'd put it in and it didn't work.

And it was either your typo or their typo. So you'd have to go through and figure out how it worked in order to fix it. So you became a program out of it. So it was quite a good idea. I know I spent many hours typing in a program from Mad Magazine that was supposed to draw a picture of Alfredi Newman. And in the end, it started drawing it, and then something goes wrong. And it just became garbled.

And unfortunately, me as a kid, I didn't have the stick to it just to go through it. But that might have been part of the joke. Yeah, I don't think, I mean, they didn't check. the things in the magazine because not many people are actually typing in I think people just like the idea of being able to do it but not many people actually did it were you sharing things with other folks

either in print or via tape cassette or just you make them for your friends I think I used to program stuff put it onto cassette and then send it to magazines maybe and they'd review it and maybe post I'm trying to think what it would have been I think maybe sometimes you'd have cassettes taped onto the front

machines. Oh. And they'd put your game or your demo or whatever on there. You know, back in those days, all the programming would come from the audio on the cassette, and it would go into the audio port, and you would read it from that. Yeah, so I think that's how you'd share it, either that or you'd share it at computer clugs. You're here, you're, you're a child, you're making these programs, you're, you're having, hopefully you're having fun with this. And how does that lead to Argonaut? Is it just, you all get together and decide we're going to, we're going to make a programming team or? No, so I, after the spectrum, we moved on to the Amiga and that's where the demo scene was

happening. So you have these computer clubs where you'd swap your demos or you show what you're working on. And our group, our demo scene was like a 3D demo scene. So all the stuff we were making was 3D. And I saw this advert for a company in London called Argonaut that was, I think they just released Starglider 1, which was the first game they made, Jasm. made and I applied there, I said that I've, you know, I've got some 3D demos and I sent them

a demo in Amiga demo and then they called me up and said come up. I think I was probably 16 then, 15, 16 maybe. So I quit school, went up to London, got a job. I just started making games with the team, huh? Yeah, yeah. I think there was maybe four of us in Argonaut at that time. And was this before after X on Game Boy? Oh, way before. Way before. This was sort of before Game Boy, I guess. This would have been, you know, like 86 87 so like famacom and nes s are out but there's no there's no handheld scene really yeah yeah yeah it's definitely famicom maybe the famicom had just come out maybe that sort of thing and uh so some of the work at argonaut i know a lot of the the innovation was involved with

3d because you know there obviously there were lots of 2d games but it was your work in 3d that i guess got noticed by someone at nintendo or how how did that happen well i mean so nobody was doing 3D at the time it was basically just one company in the UK which was Argonaut and they were famous because of Star Glider and then Star Glider which was like the

the filled polygon version of Star Glider and then on the back of that they jazz went to Nintendo and said look we can make 3D on your nest but it might require a bit of hardware to do it and Nintendo said well let's see what you can do so we show them the software

one and what it could potentially do if it had hard hardware. Jez somehow managed to get them to actually fund the hardware, you know, the Super Effects ship to put on a SNS, not a Ness. Yeah, and it was basically because we were the only company doing 3D, I guess. And so you show them this work and they start to work with you and then you're a teenager and they say come to Kyoto? Like, more or less. Yeah? More or less. We, I'd already been at Argonaut for, say, three years. I was sort of 18, 19 at that point. And then Nintendo wanted to make their own game and they said, can you send some people over to make the game with us? And that was me, Dylan, and Krista. So that's what we did when we were 18, 17, 18. Now, I just have to ask logistically, you know, when I first came to Japan as a tourist in 2001, there was internet.

You know, sure, I looked at some guides. I talked to some people, but I had a lot of internet research. I could just go on, oh, what does this look like? How do I get from here to here? But you're a teenager in the 80s. You get invited to a foreign country. Like, where do you begin? Do you just, did you start looking up or do you just figure, oh, just show up and they'll, they've got support for me or you're...

To be honest, I didn't know where Japan was. You know, if you're a teen with no interest in Asia whatsoever, you don't really know what's the difference between China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, whatever. It's all just one, it's just Asia to you. Right. So I thought when I came here, there'd be at least English on the signs or something. Uh-huh. And there was no, there was no, there's no, nothing for foreigners here. It was entirely kanji or, you know, Katakano.

Especially here in Kyoto, which is definitely like, as Japan goes, this is like the old school part of Japan. And I think it was the bus ride down from Itami, where it was the first time I was on a road thinking, you know, none of this is, I don't know what any of these signs mean or anything. Uh-huh. So that was, that was when it hit me, I think. Right. After you already landed. It's like, oh, no. Oh, no. But, you know, a lot of people at Nintendo spoke English at the time or wanted to speak English, especially Miyamoto and Biguchi, whatever.

You know, we didn't really have to speak much Japanese at first. Can I ask, how soon after arriving do you meet Mr. Yamauchi? Oh, wow. Yeah. Ten years? Ten years? Oh, so it was a long time. I've only met him once, and it was terrifying.

I'm terrified when to look at still pictures of the man. I can't imagine meeting him in real life. Yeah, and he never, he never wrenched around the company. He was, he was always in his office or in between, whatever. But he'd never go around. Occasionally, once every couple of years, he'd do a tour, and that's the only time I met him. And we were all super terrified.

Did he know your name? No, of course not. Didn't you know who I was or anything? Or, you know, why would he? I mean, there's like 600 people in the company, so I'm just one of them, you know, the 600. I think he knew Miyamoto and Iguchi and maybe a few others, and that was it. That's so dope. I would hope you would at least know Miyamoto at that point.

You would also, yeah. But, yeah, so you're a teenager, you're here, you're working in Japan, you're working on. And I guess so you arrive here and you're making games for upcoming systems. You're involved, so you're part of the Star Fox team? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're part of the Star Fox works. I think we all agree. Star Fox works.

It didn't for a long time. It didn't work for a long time. The frame rate was horrendous for a long time, and then we gradually optimized and took things out and made it actually playable. For a long time, it was seven frames a second over. And then the hardware, because we were working on hardware that was actually going to be double the clock speed

by the time it came out. So it was already half the speed you're expecting. So we were just kind of banking on the fact that it's going to be the hardware, the actual final hardware is going to be faster, but of course it wasn't as fast. We expected it to be. So, yeah, it was quite tough getting an actual playable frame rate out of the thing.

And that was a game that during production, it sort of changed from fly anywhere to, oh, no, we really need to stick on one path. No, it was always, it was always a straight on-rails shooting game. Oh, it was basically, you know, we used Starblade as the inspiration, basically. Oh, okay. Because, you know, you have things like, you know, the side-scrolling shooters, like, like, uh, you know, Zavius or Defender and stuff like that. It was a 3D version of one of those kind of games. It's where the aliens, you have aliens,

waves of aliens, waves of enemy, whatever, and then a boss at the end, and then you finish that next level sort of thing. So it was basically a 3D version of one of those kind of games. So there was never a discussion about free roaming 3D. But after Star Fox, how long would you say, because Star Fox, I think, is 93, give or take. A few years, you know, at that point, do you already, when you're making Star Fox, are they already like, hey, we've got a new console, or is it, I don't know, how many years of Leadway do you get on that kind of new? Yeah, there's always overlap. So I think after Star Fox, I'm trying to think of the timeline here.

you made wild tracks next yeah um but they most they were also making star fox two at the time we were making wild tracks and i get yeah i guess by the time wild tracks came out and star fox two was winding up that's when the n64 was just being made not released of us and i think that was the reasoning behind not actually releasing star fox two is the fact that it would overlap with n64 right so it's it's sort of sat in a shelf for a very long time until emerging a couple years ago, much to everyone's surprise on the Super Nintendo classic. Yeah, yeah. I was actually impressed they actually kept that ROM, or a working ROM that was, you know, more or less bug-free. Really delightful surprise, I think, for all parties involved.

I was actually working at Q Games at the time when that got announced at 3 in the morning. And so I was working at Q games, my boss, Dylan Cuthbert at the time, worked on Star Fox 2, and at 3 in the morning, I started suddenly get like a dozen calls. people all trying to get like, oh, did you guys know about this? You know, try to get the inside scoop. So you have this new machine, you find out there's a new machine coming, and then, so obviously it's 3D is a big part of this. And so they're going to, they're going to call you to sort of work on, on this sort of 3D work. So I understand you had a very,

specific role in Mario 64? Well, I guess before that, you know, we were on the team that was designing the API in the thing, the 3D interface. So I was, so we were working, we were going over to SGI every couple of months to talk to them about what we needed for the, in the hardware. And then, you know, so I'd come back to Kyoto and I'd make little experiments and whatever to test the API or test the graphics chips and stuff. And the face would have been one of those experiments.

So the face wasn't for Mario 64, it was just me playing around with the camera that you had on the SGI machines, the development machines. I thought it would be cool to sort of just stick ping pong balls on my face and get the camera to recognize that and then sort of change the model in real time. And then me and motor walks past and says, oh, that's cool, let's use that. So it wasn't really designed for Mario 64. It was just turned out, you know, it worked quite well as a front screen for that. They embraced it. They saw it. When you're putting, it's your screen on your face.

Did you make, did you make yourself into Mario? Or did Miyamoto's like, hey, what if you became Mario? No, no, no. I think it was Khoizumi San, who I think this is right. He was the guy that made the Mario face because I said, I've got this cool idea. I don't have any graphics. Could you make a Mario face for it?

So he went away and made it in like 10 minutes or something like that. And that became the Mario face. So it's always been Mario. Because, I mean, you know, you would do, wouldn't you? If you work at Nintendo, you'd be the first thing you'd do. You start at the top? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Why? I mean, you know, I mean, okay, Luigi is there too, but also it's a coin flip. Yeah. Also, the great thing about Mary's face is it's got lots of stuff you can pull around like his ears and his mustache, nose and stuff. So it kind of, it fits really well with that idea, much better than my face would. I mean, speaking personally, you know, you first get that thing, you get it home, and this is what you're greeted with. And then it's like, oh, I can manipulate this. Yeah, it was supposed to be a cheat mode, you know, a little thing to do while it's loading whatever.

So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't supposed to be really, you know, put up front there. But it turns out it was actually quite good fun to play around with it. Just a curtain razor. Here it is. Here's your brand new toy. And Mario's grilling you, staring you right in your eyes, and then you can grab him in the eyes. But I'm trying to think, I don't think you could actually play with it while it was loading. it was just it loaded you'd played with it and then press a button and then it would actually load or something like that so you've made the face you've got this face on there and at what point do you transition from making you know getting getting this sort of experimental project to all right what about this full game that we want you to program so you're talking about Mario 64 or or the next the next thing that you make I'm trying to think here so long a long time ago he's kind of leading up to this

yeah to this right here oh okay yeah yeah you mean the snowboarding thing yeah that was actually a skiing game originally um because you know still in this experimental team uh one of the things i had was real-time iK which is an extension of the mario faith actually which is iK is where you have a string of bones connected together and you pull the end of the string and all the other bones moved with it uh-huh Is that ICA, is that internal? Inverse kinematics. Inverse chematics, okay. And, you know, obviously that was a, that was quite an expensive operation to do on that kind of hardware, so nobody was really doing it.

So I thought it would be fun to make a, like a taco skiing game where you're basically you have a character that's going down the ski slopes and all the animation is generated in real time. So I thought, you know, an interesting experiment. And I did that and it was ridiculous. Now, when you say taco, are you talking about the food or the octopus? Both. Okay. No, the octopus. Okay.

So, you know, so the arms and the, ragdoll physics, whatever even. So when you fell over it, it looked really cool. And, you know, it reacted like it would do in real life. But trying to get that to actually animate like a real human does is really hard. So we kind of gave up on the idea. It sounds like you had quietly invented Octodad 20 years too early. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I looked at Octodad and thought, oh, hang on.

what's the other one the walking one Quop Oh yeah So I really I had that That was one of my first Demos was like basically

A walking simulator Where you just controlled Where the legs went And the body followed along It was great fun But you know Nintendo wouldn't turn that Into a game

They couldn't see it They couldn't see the magic Quop Way ahead of it So you're working So there's a skiing game And you're making This sort of

Silly octopus thing And it's funny But it doesn't go anywhere and then at some point it becomes snow because snowboarding i mean we should i guess we can talk i mean i don't know uh how much winter sports do you enjoy as people now yeah or in general at the time it would whatever at the time not very much not very much um because i came from the uk i don't have snow there okay i came to japan there was no there's nobody snowboarding it was just skiing but i am now i'm i'm a huge snowboarder uh-huh you know i can go 20 30 times a year

or whatever. But at the time, not tall. Mark, are you a winter sports person? I love winter sports. I couldn't afford it till recently. So I'm ready to get back into it next year. I was, I could say at the time in the 90s, I would sometimes go skiing. Not as often as I would like, but I definitely enjoyed skiing. At the time, at least for me as a skier, I saw snowboarding as some sort of challenge? It's like, oh, I am on skis, and that's snowboarding, but snowboarding seemed somehow dangerous. The skiers hated the snowboarding. Yes, absolutely. They were reckless. They were vanned on most mountains. Yes, I had a sweatshirt as a child that said, friends don't let friends snowboard, and it was a picture. Oh, can you, have you still got that?

That's pretty tight. I want that. I'm afraid that's, you know, that's, it might fit me today, but unfortunately, I got rid of it at some point, probably 1991 or so. It's a really cool nothing to have, isn't it? So snowboarding was kind of this upstart. Like people, lots of people skied, you know, but somehow snowboarding was here. But somehow, I guess, whether it was Olympics or it just became popular with young people or X games, I don't know, X games perhaps. But then you've got, okay, so now Nintendo is making a snowboarding game?

I mean, were you part of any of that conversation or just, oh, it'll be, it's more fun to make one board instead of two? I think MMO, Sam, wanted to make a skiing game. So that was the original thing. Then snowboarding came onto the scene, and it was really cool and hip, and the antithesis of skiing. So everybody wanted to be part of it. Right. And I said to me, Emoto, look, skiing is great, but, you know, on snowboarding, you can do tricks and stuff.

You can do grabs and spins and grinding and stuff like that. All the things you can't do with skiing. So the game benefits, well, the gameplay benefits are huge with snowboarding compared with skiing. He said, all right, let's change it to snowboarding. So we change it to snowboarding. And, yeah, it wouldn't have been the same game if it was stuck with skiing. It would have been Mario skiing or something. But you yourself were not really into the sports.

So how did... No, well, that was the thing. As soon as it came, you know, came onto the scene, whatever, that's why I started getting into it. So I was actually the scheme for maybe a couple of seasons before that. Sorry, before, you know, it became sort of mainstream enough to sort of be an actual sort of thing that people might play. Yeah. So, yeah, it was definitely at the time, you know, the most popular sport at the,

well, the upcoming sport at the time, I guess, wasn't it? Right. But even, there weren't that many games, though. Like, I feel like if you look at the list of snowboarding games, there's not a long list. Well, funny enough, it was Jake's game. Jake Castel? Yeah, Boss Studios. What is called?

Twisted Edge, stupid name. Twisted Edge. They actually found out that they were releasing the same month or something. stupid like that as 1080, but we didn't know about each other's games. So there was definitely another game studio that was thinking about this because they were making it. Right. Yeah, 1080 was not the very first snowboarding game, but it's like, it's high on the list of snowboarding games. So it wasn't like, you know, if you look at the nine, you know, Street Fighter 2 wasn't the first fighting game. Street Fighter 2 came out and exploded and all of a sudden, you know,

in two years, everyone's making fighting games. I don't feel like there was a game before 1080 that would have exploded in a way where it's like, oh, we all need to make snowboarding games. But somehow you all just recognize this is, this is popular, so we're going to go with this. And then, I mean, you could argue maybe 1080 was that game that became popular or twisted edge, depending on who's side drawing. Depends on who you ask. I've never heard of twisted edge. Yeah, I don't know. Obviously, 1080 was the better game.

Obviously, yeah. But yeah, I mean, it's kind of, it was a really niche. sport, I guess, so nobody really knew if it's going to be popular or not. When we released it, we didn't think, oh, this is going to be hugely popular. And the reviews initially, I think, were sort of our internal reviews were

quite low with Mario Club. Marriott is the testing branch of Nintendo. They've reviewed it quite low. So we weren't expecting it to be very popular, to be honest. We knew it was a good game, but it didn't score, because

it wasn't the typical one Nintendo game it didn't score very well and I would imagine to a lot of people snowboarding is probably even if they've seen it they probably are not familiar with how it works or you know yeah it's not a thing you'd see on a shelf and go oh I want to try that because you don't know what it is you know it's not Mary it's not it's not it's not a platform it's not a shoot them up you know what it what is it and it also it was a you know half simulator half arcade game so it wasn't even a in a particular genre at that point yeah because it is it's sort of it's

It's a curious game in that you can, you can sit there and you can race or you can open up another mode and just sort of do these tricks and try to score points that way. Do you know, like, where, was it always the plan? Oh, we're just going to do everything you can do on a snowboard or did it start with one and you figure, oh, well, if we're doing this, we need to also do this mode or how? So I think the way it worked was, so it's always, as typical with most Nintendo games, is they come up with one fundamental idea and they work off that.

So before there's any graphics, before there's any, everything's programmer art, everything's boxes and whatever. If there's a key dynamic that works and it's fun and you keep going back to it, then you've got it, you know,

you've got something there, you've got a hook. And that's where you start putting things like modes and graphics and all that sort of stuff on there. So with 1080, it would have been the core dynamic of you controlling a board

going down, some snow and you have total control over that board how it slides how it slips and stops whatever and how can you make modes how do you make gameplay out of that dynamic so that's that's where it that's the process I think you build the the modes on top of the core dynamic and that's kind of what we've done with carve which is you know we've got a really good mechanism for controlling the board and we've put sort of modes to use that on top of it A carve being your upcoming project. Yeah, I guess I skip to head there, but, you know.

No, we'll just say it out loud at this point. So at this point, this is the upcoming game, which is called Carve. Just Carve? Carve Snowboarding. Carve Snowboarding. Okay. Yeah, and it's for Oculus Quest announcing April 21st, releasing May 27th. Okay, well, this will definitely go up after the initial announcement.

So it won't be any surprise. but just for a conversation of clarity, we're talking about this new game. To go back to the 90s and you've got the snowboard, you're working on the snowboard game, you've got a skeleton, people seem to like it. You think snowboarding is fun, but the tests poorly,

what do you think kept it going? Was it just, it tested poorly and you figure, oh, well, we'll just, it'll be an experiment, or, you know, was it, like, how did the process work where you get these games tested? and at some point, you know, if it tests solo, it's like, oh, just give up, and it tests, you know, how does that work? Well, the funny thing is, even Nintendo don't know which their games is going to sell. So they always ignore the tests, the test scores.

You know, if it's a Zelda or Amera, they know it's always going to be 999, whatever. Right. But these other games, like Pickam in as well, you know, or Wave Race or whatever. They didn't know at the time whether it was going to hit. Just so happened, you know, a few of them did. but they knew they were good games but they just didn't know if they'd sell because that's such a subjective thing

isn't it? Objectively there are obviously good games and subjectively it's up to the people buying it whether it sells and they can never know they never knew whether it was going to sell so actually so that one of the metrics of how well a game was going to sell

was how much money they put into marketing so they could kind of control it with that but I think with 1080 they probably you know because it's a kind of risk title they wouldn't have put that much money into marketing so I had that against it at the start as well you know without much marketing you know it still did quite well

because the game you start making this game in 1997 for a release in 1998 probably designed to line up with the Nagano Olympics and yeah it released in Japan in February of 98 and it came out in America a few months later it came out in Europe, many months later, they actually waited until the next winter to give it, to give it to Europe, but you spend 97, you're making this game, you've got hope, you know, you think it's fun, it gets tested, oh, it's disappointing, but it comes out, the marketing, oh, maybe we don't know what's going to happen, but we know it's good, and then it comes out, so what would you say, what was your experience there where it comes out, and then you start to get responses from, from more than just Mario Club and more than, and of course, you get the Japanese, and then you get different markets, too. like how did that how did that unfold for you um i think it was it was just a surprise to see you know how much people liked it um and for whatever reasons you know there was there's still

hardcore uh speed one of the speed trial people that you know still play trying to get the high into the best speed down the best time down the mountain you know and at the time there were people trying to do all you know all the tricks get all the tricks you get the the fastest scores, whatever, and that happened quite quickly, and they sort of broke the game within weeks, broke the game, as in finished the game, within days, actually. Which was really cool to see, actually.

There was that much interest so quickly in the game. So it wasn't a slow burn it, it was immediately very popular. I mean, I guess it's quite a completionist game where you've got so many tricks to do all the boards, the

characters, there's like two, three hidden characters there's a couple of hidden boards or whatever so you know if you're a completionist that it's it's quite a good game to to get into i think so maybe that that was part of it um but i think but i think just generally it has it has a replayability because the physics and stuff are quite consistent so you you have you have a curve where initially it's actually quite difficult to play but there's there's such a tail end on that curve that you can just keep playing it for months and still get better and better and better. And I think that's maybe why it's,

it also had quite a long tail end sales as well. So steep curve, but high ceiling. Yeah. Yeah. A steep initial curve. And once you get past that, you realize it can go to so much higher than it. Well, this station is conducting a test on the emergency broadcasts. This is a test.

This is only a test. This is a test. This station is conducting a test on the emergency podcast. Recur. Well, I'm intrigued by this because, you know, I don't have the game on hand, And so I had to sort of just review some video footage. And one thing that really struck me, you know, I remember the game at the time, but didn't play it that much. And so in revisiting it, I think I was really surprised by just how fast the game feels, like just in motion.

And by all means, you know, correct me if I'm wrong. But when I look at this game, I think of it, you know, I see a lot of racing games. Racing games have always been popular. But when you're snowboarding, even if you're racing with someone, let's be honest, you're basically falling. Yeah, yeah. You know, this is a sport where you're falling down as fast as you can, but not too fast that you hurt yourself. And I was really surprised about how when I watched this game in motion, I felt tension from watching the little characters move faster and faster and faster.

And I was like, this game, this is frightening to me, you know, and, you know, yes, I'm easily frightened. But the point is that it, I think that probably adds the excitement. I don't know. Like, how, what's your perspective? You're exactly right about the falling down the mountain thing. Basically, with snowboarding, what you're doing is trying to not fall down the mountain constantly. You're trying to not go too fast or not fall over or not do whatever. It's not about trying to go fast.

You're trying to not go too fast. And because 1080 was a very physics-based thing, we spent a lot of time getting the frictions and the slope angles and all that right to make it feel like you're falling down but still control. I think that's why you get that feeling, because you're literally doing that in the game. You're falling down the mountain. So did you have to experiment with like how fast, how fast can we go and how fast can we not go? So much experimentation. It was, we tried every combination of, because the other thing is when you have a camera that's pointing down a mountain at the same angle as the mountain, you can't tell you're on a steep slope or a slight slope. whatever because there's no reference point right um so that was really hard getting the the feeling

that you're going down a mountain even when you are sort of 90 you know 80 degrees going down the mountain it doesn't look like you are right so how do we do that and stuff like that it was really hard to keep that sense of danger in the in the game and it's all about the camera movement and the the movement of the the player whatever that's that's what it's not it's It's less about the speed, actually. It's more about how the camera reacts to things. And also, sorry, also the FOV. The FOV of the camera drastically changes the sensor speed.

Mm-hmm. So we try different FOVs. I think the current one or the one we went with was actually quite wide, like 60 degrees or something like that, rather than the normal sort of 50. So speaking of player movement, obviously the Nintendo 64 had a distinct controller, and it sort of introduced

the analog stick, I would say, to a lot of people. It wasn't the first analog stick. I know this. You can save your emails. But it was an influential analog stick. And that must have been probably the centerpiece of your work. It's like, well, adjusting inputs from this stick to the characters. Yeah, it was one of the reasons for making the game, actually, is the analog stick.

And it was sort of me and Motus's full project for probably, many years actually was trying to get that stick right and we went through so many prototypes of the controller to finally arrive at the you know the fantastic control that it had

but it yeah it's a fundamental part of all of the games that came out at that point like you know Mario 64 was all about the 3D control using the stick

1080 was all about the fine left and right control and the tilting control and all that and also the trigger button which was you know quite new at the time I think

Now, before I go on, I have to say, so in my mind right now, I'm trying to imagine the line of prototypes that didn't make it to arrive at the one that we got. So is there, are there any chimeras that come to mind of like that was, that was just a nightmare of like this one was a, no, that was, I was obviously not going to work. Because the one that we got with, I mean, I used it. I have affection for it, but it's still, it's quirky, it's a little weird. and some people hate it, I don't agree with those people, but I'm still trying to imagine what were the rejects? That was the winner, what were the rejects like? Well, I still think it's a brilliant controller because it's ambidectrous.

You can decide whether, I think Mimotas wanted a, you know, Gigi key on both sides rather than the buttons on one side and the Gigi key on the Right, like Virtual Boy, double D pads. Yeah, yeah, because that would make it. truly left or right, you could choose whether the middle stick was in your right hand or your left hand. I think that was his only regret.

But I think that was the key feature was the fact that it didn't matter how you hold it. If you wanted to hold it with your right hand, you could. If you wanted to hold it with your right hand, you could. Because there was no concept of the current Xbox sort of PlayStation type controller we had at the time. We had sort of those

to make a Famicom shape in my hands. I had those, but nothing that you hold with both hands like a controller, the current controllers, if you know what I mean? Right, but even at some point, you know, the PlayStation debuts in Japan in 94. Right. So there's a full year, year and a half

in between PlayStation existing and Nintendo 64 launching in Japan. So at some point, someone had to show them to go, here's this thing, you could put a sticks on here, but they're like, no, no, I'm good, I still want, Well, they wanted to twist it. Yeah, yeah, they wanted the flexibility of being able to use both hands. I think that was a really key thing.

Because people, you didn't, they didn't know whether people wanted to use their right hand or the left hand to do the main controlling, basically. I think that was the thing, because the stick was on the middle, isn't it? So you could choose whether it was your left hand or right hand doing the actual control. I mean, for some games, I actually, you know, I'm right-handed, but I use my left hand to control it. so I still I kind of like the controller even though it's obviously

dated now well I mean in the end I think it worked out and there were certainly there were some games that took advantage of the stick in unusual ways I believe

golden eye in perfect dark I actually offered a double stick option you can actually hold a controller in each hand and you know now that's the norm but at the time

I remember seeing that on the option menu at the time was like wait wait what well it means only two players but okay and it never then a couple years after that

I go, well, that's what we're all. We're all going to do that now. We've all agreed. And they did try other, you know, odd things like having false feedback on the stick. Or not so much false feedback, but being able to control where it can move, how far it can move. They got a UK company, I think, to make this joystick that could, you could limit the range of movement it had. And so I've made some prototypes of it, you know, you're controlling a Mario character, but when you get to a wall and the camera can't go any further it would stop the stick

from moving any further Oh like physically you're physically stopped You couldn't move the stick anymore Yeah wow And it kind of worked But it wasn't high fidelity enough To be actually usable I think And another idea was to have

You know It sort of vibrate in and out slightly so it felt like a texture Almost You know if you had a The slippery wall versus a bumpy wall to differentiate, but it didn't have enough high frequency to be able to do that, really.

Well, I think in hindsight, we're lucky we didn't go with those ideas, because as soon as Mario Party came out, those things would have just exploded. You know, one round of this. I'm doing the wax and locks off motion listeners, but one round of that would have just torn that stick right off. Yeah, I mean, they weren't very robust, I think a lot of the ideas were thrown out

because they knew it would last probably a week before they got broken. Work your body with break your body. Get down. Push it in. Work your body. Work your body. Get there. Get there.

Push it out. All right, we went on a tangent about the sticks, but let's get back to the slopes. Yeah, I see you smirking. They're ass words. It's a good segue. So, yeah, you were just saying about how you wish you had kept more stuff because a lot of it just ended up getting tossed. I don't mean steel stuff. No, I mean, I keep.

I didn't say steel. I said keep. Giles is pretty avid Keep. Keep and steal are totally different words. They have different letters. Or just at least cataloged some of it or done something with it rather than just throw it in the bin.

I'm sure a lot of it was. Well, I see here in this office space right, and I can see there's some collectibles over here. I see the electro gun, the shoot a cowboy game. Mark found that. Yeah. Yeah, that's a Nintendo game, isn't it? amazing. I didn't even know they

made those kind of things. I think it's a Gumpa Yo-Koi creation, I believe. Yeah, yeah. And their offices actually literally, uh, one block away. Oh. Um, um, Kato's office. You know, actually, since I just brought him up, just, I'm curious, did you by any chance

happen to work with Yo Koi at all? Or did you just miss him? No, no, he was in a different department anyway. Oh, it was kind of, I guess, a bit before my time, maybe. Or in a different office anyway, so. we weren't allowed to move between offices Oh, okay The buildings actually

I think he was R&D 2 Or maybe R&E 3 movie No Yokoi stories That's fine That's fine Not everyone can meet Kumpal Yo Koi I certainly haven't met Kumpil Yo Koi You could go out to Koto

Knock on the door and say Tell me about your boss Believe me, it's a dream It's a dream that I've had I want to go over there someday They're very friendly people They're just like 100 meters From our door right?

Literally We'll say that for the next episode, I think. Or after I have a beer. Good man. So getting back to to the snowboarding game, the 1080 snowboarding game. This is perhaps off topic, but it is about the game where I just mentioned. Do you perhaps know where this game name came from? Because it's kind of, it's kind of an usual game in that, you know, you look it up in Japanese and it's not even, it's not the number even. It's like, it's just the katakana's 1080 snowboarding. And maybe that was not your department at all. but how did you think about this this game coming out and just it's a number does it

do that put at the top of the list alphabetically was that the strategy actually i have a feeling it was me that came up with the name really but it was the it was basically the best trick you could do yeah you know 1080 spins whatever five spins whatever it's how many spin is it that's what be three spins three 60 720 1080 yeah that's what it was it was the best spin you could do or the best trick you could do so that was the goal of the game was to do a 1080 which is now considered quite a lame trick to do. And you said, well, that's the best thing. So let's just name this game after the best thing you can do in the game.

Yeah, yeah, which shows how dated it is. Because now that's quite, you know, that's pretty lame trick to do. Three spins, whatever. That's without even flips. And now it's like sort of quadruple, double, double, triple flips with grabbing whatever. But at the time, you know, it's interesting to see the progression of what this class is a good trick then versus now. oh sure that applies to every sport but absolutely in snowboarding sure yeah yeah um and now the tricks are just so extreme that it's you kind of wonder where it ends well i i'm curious uh from your

standpoint as a programmer as someone making this game what happens during the process of making the game do you do you have to decide where the limits go do you have to decide oh here's what people are doing so we should make the character do these things only or do you say well what if we made the you know what if we just went NBA jam style and you get up there and you do 20 spins and the board explodes like do you have are those conversations happening or just like oh let's let's rain it in let's not go that weird uh well the way i go about it is by just making the physics right and then it's up to you to decide what you do in it so it's like a sandbox almost and then we put limits on to say all right you can't spin nine times or you can't jump three thousand feet in

there but you know if you have the fundamental core physics correct then you have all this other stuff for free, almost. And I guess, so would you say maybe the core authenticity, authenticity perhaps helps sell the game to the audience? Oh, well, if it feels right, then it feels right, and then you don't have to worry about the fantasy stuff. I guess, but that's not what I think about when I'm making it. Well, all I can really do when I make games is make them realistic,

if you know what I mean. I'm not very good at making, games that look like they're supposed to be realistic, but aren't, if that makes any sense. I can only really approach it from a very sort of Newtonian type physics point of view and say, all right, these are the

dynamics I want. This is how it's going to move and I'll get that right. I don't really sort of approach it from the other angle, if that makes any sense. Okay. I get it. So the gameplay comes out of the fundamental physics stuff.

But in the game, there are certain elements that couldn't exist on a real mountain like there are slopes that have like fireballs and things on them no i wish i'd done that though oh you mean on 1080 yes no they're not fireballs they're they're flame torches whatever okay oh they're just everything everything in the game as far as i know apart for maybe the penguin physically possible oh okay i thought i thought i thought i thought i thought i saw firing somewhere on the dragon's cave there is there is a firing isn't yeah you're right there is a firing but you could still do that there if you want it in real life can you i mean evil can you'll did it yeah rest of soul

it would go out quite quickly but you could do it um so yeah i'm always reluctant to i mean this is a bit of my i get told off a lot for doing this sorry i get told off uh for putting my foot down ideas that sound like they're fun or or people think that's going to be fun but i if i think they're not realistic enough i wouldn't put them in I'm trying to think of a specific case, but I don't know. If it breaks the fundamental physics in some way that I think is too separated from reality, then I won't put it in. But I'm always willing to put stuff limits to the reality in, if you know what I mean.

Limits or sort of slight tweaks to the reality. So it's kind of a fine balance between sort of keeping it real but still making it fun. So that's something that sounds like it would apply a lot to the upcoming carve game then because that seems like if you're doing VR stuff you're probably going for a realism angle yeah more so with carve because you know because you're in the physical space you kind of have to match what the board is doing all the time

or rather the board matches what you're doing so you can't really do weird ridiculous moves that you can't do in real life so that's one of the reasons we don't have things like backflips and forward flips in there because you couldn't really do that in VR without making it feel too detached. You can do spins, but we thought flips were just too detached from reality.

So the likelihood of fireballs in Carver very low? Fireballs, we've got tons of them. Oh, fire, okay. All right, for legacy, their grandfather did. Oh, yeah, yeah. I guess since we brought it up, what would you say drew you back to this snowboarding idea 20 plus years later?

I was just the appeal of doing it in a new format or just the fact that you always like that game or the fact that you perhaps are doing, you play the sport now and you like it more? What happened there? All of those things. All those things. I'm right in every way. I've only got more and more into snowboarding since my kids have taken it up. Now all my kids do it. You know, they've all been doing it since they were three, whatever.

So I kind of always have to go almost every weekend. So I just get more into it the older I get almost. So there's that. There's also the fact that there aren't any good snowboarding games out of there. All the games that I've seen tend to be too extreme or to try to do everything, skiing, snowboarding, skating, blah, blah, or wing-suting. I'm not saying steep in particular, but, you know, steep-type games that try to do everything, but I don't think does one thing particularly well.

So the idea of just having a one game, you know, a snowboarding game that, just does snowboarding really well, it's just really appealing to me. So that's why I just wanted to make it. And I'm always surprised that more people don't make those very focused games nowadays. It seems to be a very 90s, 80s game to make. Well, I would imagine at this point, the problem is that probably as budgets are up and, you know, 3D graphics and everything costs more to do, I guess everyone figures, oh, well, if we're making a new game now, we have to get the, we have to cast the biggest net, you know, broadcasting, versus narrow casting.

Well, I don't know. I mean, it's, I think there's still enough people playing games for there to be niche markets. Oh, yes. That's what I hope, that's what I hope the lesson people are learning from the current games industry is. And that's why, that's why indie is quite, you know, you're so popular as it is. So I still, you know, I think there is, obviously you have the triple A's and you have

indies. And I think there's a big enough market in Indies to have niche games like, say, carve. I don't think it's a niche game. but maybe it is. So, yeah, I think so, yeah. Well, I guess it might be niche in the sense that you are appealing to the VR market. So you have to, you know, you are,

it's a subset of the larger games market, but it is, it's a sizable subset and it's one that gets a lot of attention. Yeah, Carve kind of needs to be VR for its full potential, I think. Mm-hmm. Or the snowboarding game needs to be for its full of potential

to feel like you're actually playing it in real life. That was the idea behind Carverleases to make it feel like you're playing in real life. So I'm going to jump in here. snowboarding for Oculus Quest. I feel like we've been talking about that it's niche, but I mean... I don't know. What is it? It's a snowboarding game for the quest.

Okay, cool. Thanks, Jals. It is definitely a snowboarding game. I believe you. Yeah, it is. As a matter of fact. There's carving. You can carve in it. Great. I don't know I have not been asked that so I haven't prepared an answer

Okay Let me think of one Okay We should have PR bullet points In case he does get asked that question Okay The world's first

Realistic VR snowboarding game How's that Based on 1080 snowboarding Spiritually I don't Yeah I'm a bit worried To say 1080 snowboarding

Because I like having my knees On me oh right we didn't we didn't we didn't spell 1080 so that could be spelled in a different way so you know that could be spelled with a cue in there somewhere well actually that's no that's cue games uh spell with spell with an x put an x in there people love x that's that's uh x game x all right this you know we'll pick we'll pick we'll pick we'll look there are the letters yeah you've got a team upstairs i saw them they look they look very they look very intelligent i'm sure they can find one letter that'll they can just claim for their own like all right we're putting this in there and now it's i think they're all literature actually It's the sports entertainment version You know If you misspell it You can own it Like China with a Y

China with the Y Taz with two Zs There we go That's what I'm saying If you spell it differently It's yours But what if we put a dollar sign And then it's $10.

$10.80? Yeah Well that would be A thousand yen plus tax But only if you eat in Versus takeout Because the tax rate is different now I'm sorry

That's some niche Japanese That's how much it should have been It should have been 1080 Our game should have cost $10.80. $10.80. So this project, I would imagine, has been in the works for a few years now, the carve?

Yeah, quite a few years, maybe five years. We've shown it at like two bit summits. Last time we had a bit summit was like two years ago. So, yeah, quite a long time ago. Yes, I miss Bit Summit very badly. Yeah, yeah, we all do. This year, next year. Next year.

Next year. So it's been tweet and tweet and tweet. and experimented on various audiences, you know, really fine-tuned, I think, is the way. We've actually taken it all over the world. It's been to the French Alps. It's been to the UK, parts of Japan, Spain, I think. To the best of your knowledge,

has it been played on top of an actual mountain. Yes. Yes. One of the ski results in France. So someone went to the top of mountain, and before they actually did the real game, it's like, well, wait, let me try this. virtual simulation of snowboarding.

When I say top of the mountain, I mean a ski resort at the top of the mountain. Yes. That's fantastic. And interestingly enough, it was the skiers that were most interested in playing rather than the boarders. Of course. Of course. The forbidden fruit.

They're not allowed to play it, or they're not allowed to use these snowboard, or they're really curious about what this weird sport is like. So they were really interested. It's like me playing Grand Theft Auto 3 in 2001. It's like, I can't actually commit crimes or do jumps in cars, but now I can with polygons. Yeah. And the older, the age group was just all over the place. Like youngsters, old people, whatever, they all loved it.

There was no specific demographic that tended to play it more than others, which is quite interesting. Well, perhaps we could jump backwards a little bit, just to cover up, cover up, go back to cover the gap and time between snow. 1080 snowboarding existing and being popular to you creating your own company here at Vite. Because that's a period of about four or five years. What happened in there? Drugs. Okay. No.

I'm not a cop. So I left Nintendo. Yeah. Not entirely sure why. Started and I know my own thing and then went back to Nintendo as a sort of freelancer and did a few projects with them. one of them being Doshin the Giant, I think, on the GameCube. Ah. Kajin or Josh Doshin, whatever it's called.

I think I helped out on 1080 Avalanche a bit at some point. This, the GameCube sort of sequel. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And then we did some other projects for Nintendo's Theta and some 3DS games, DS games, stuff like that for a few years. Right. Well, that's more recent memory. But, yeah, I mean, it's all one big blur to me.

I get to. get to you've always had since you came over i guess so since we first arrived here you've always had this relationship with nintendo and just for a few years there you were literally in nintendo and then you've just been sort of near nintendo and that's just where you sort of you've hung out for yeah for when when i started vitae originally we were sort of 1.5 party i you know we weren't first party we weren't third party um we weren't second party so we were kind of like part an extension of EAD or NCL at least for quite a few years

so we were sort of almost part of Nintendo and then we sort of split off to do other things almost quite recently actually the last couple of years I think it's basically since Iwattsam passed away when Nintendo sort of changed focused from

you know concentrating more on the big titles which is you know the best thing we could have done, I think, is to sort of cut the, cut the umbraical cord, as it were. So, Vite, I must ask, as a name, is Vite mean life? Or what, uh, what does that,

what does that name come from? Apparently it's a bucket for, um, feeding donkeys or something in Italian. Okay. It's, it's literally a five-letter domain name that I bought. Oh. I made a program to,

to find all the five-letter domain name. that are available. Ah, okay. And it was one of 50 that came up, so I bought like 10, and it was one of those. It means nothing to me. I hate the name. What you don't know about Giles is he buys any domain. I used domain names as a to-do list of projects that I've not done.

So it's funny. Since you mentioned 3DS, I was curious because I know Vite worked on one of the initial games, the submarine game, right? Right, yeah, yeah. Which, um, steel, steel diver, steel diver, yes. Uh, which had its roots, I think, an early in Intel, like, that was an old, is that, an old idea for Miyamoto or? It was Sugiyama. A Sugiyama, okay.

Yeah, it was his little prototype idea for, I'm trying to think what, you may even know that better than I do. There was for some show that they made, but it was, it was a demo, a little prototype demo that he made. Mm-hmm. Um, and then they said, let's make it this into a proper game. using the touch panel as the control input so we did we made it for DS

I'm trying to think what the timeline was there was made it for the original DS and then they came up with the DS light maybe we added more features for that and then we made it again for the 3DS I think the reason I bring it up besides the fact that you

brought up earlier is the fact that I just I think about VR and I think about the 3DS and you know this is me as a not technical person but to me those are similar in the sense that they're both going to they're both systems that are working with with each eyeball on Pokemon eyeballs here listeners and to create this sort of 3D effect that makes the brain think oh the I'm I'm seeing things that are you know so I wonder is is there any correlation there or am I just a correlation between like when you make a game in 3D for the 3DS and then now you're making a game for VR is there any is it totally different process or is it anything related at all? That's a good point. No.

No. You really built that one up. It's swinging to mist, it's all right? No, but that's a good, that's an interesting point. Maybe there is. There maybe is on a technical level. Yeah. I mean, you're rendering, you know, you're rendering a stereo image in both of those

cases, but on the gameplay side, you're, that's taken care of in a different part. of the programming, if you know what I mean? At the gameplay side, you're just making a 3D game. How it's displayed, whether it's displayed on stereo image display or a single image display, whatever, it doesn't really affect the gameplay. So, yeah, I guess I can see the similarities, yeah. There are certain things that probably had to happen lower down

in the hardware that are similar to what we're doing now. So yes and no. Okay, I'll take that. That's not a strikeout. It's more of a bunt. Yeah, I got on base. I got on base. I'll take it. I'll take it. It's actually, it's interesting. It's the first time I've thought about that, actually, whether there are similarities. All right. Then I'll accept that as an exciting. Good question. Thank you very much. That means a lot to me.

Where do we go from here? I know this is retronauts where we talk about old games, but you've got this Vite studio. Well, actually, perhaps you can clarify for this point for me, because I'm an outsider, but I know there's Vite and there's two high labs. what is what is that relation so vitae is more of the nintendo stuff and chew high labs like whatever we want to do no um vitae is the company okay chew high labs is the brand or the the the um it's the face it's the face of the company oh okay a bit like i know google is alphabet owns it google oh okay google is the the brand or the the company not the company the um the thing Hmm. It's a thing. Chihuah Labs is a thing we've got going. Okay. And we're sitting here inside this thing.

In this thing. Okay. The end of this thing. Yeah, we just, when we developed Chihuahelabs, we just wanted it to be a lot. Vite wasn't, isn't silly. Okay. It isn't represent us. And we wanted an entity that was us.

And it was a lot easier to get behind something with a silly logo like the Chewai Labs flask than Vtea. which half of people can't pronounce, and some people think it's a Latin word. Some people think it's an Italian word for donkey bucket. Chewai Labs, it's a lot simpler. Also, for most of Vite's life, we weren't allowed to say to anybody that existed. Oh, like a to say kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah. You know, Nintendo used us, not used us, but Nintendo sort of told us to, you know, keep quiet about our involvement with them so we did so many prototypes and things that were never disclosed whatever um so it's it's too high is is us sort of coming out and so actually existing rather than hiding behind nintendo and before we started recording you were telling me that uh mark you were telling me that you're working on multiple games at this point yeah right now we're working on like in the studio we're working on oh uh jiles is making a very

odd motion to me. We're working on Oh, sorry. Oh, shit. Yeah, this is an audio podcast, Giles. Okay. I saw that in the background. Yeah. Right now we're working on the Quest game, uh, car of snowboarding. We're also working on a playdate launch title. Hmm. Um, which

can't say on this podcast because it's, uh, but you're seeing it right now in front of you. Yes, uh, listeners, I've been handed a playdate, the I would say Famicom disc-sized handheld that has the crank on it I don't, at this time I don't know Has that system have a launch date at this point? No.

I don't think so. No, they have not seen anything yet. This is not the first time I've held this thing, but it's the first time I've held it since BitSumet, I think. And yeah, it's got a little game on it. Yeah, and we're also working on a Switch title and we're working on, we're doing some contract work for Universal Studios, Japan.

Oh, yeah. So our second project with them. Our first one being Lupan, Lupan XR ride. Oh, okay. If you've been on that, but it's great. So you've been working with them on VR stuff then? Yeah, yeah. Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah. The first VR roller coaster was something like that. Yeah, I went there a few years ago, and I think I wrote a, there was a final fantasy sort of thing. And, yeah, like, while I was moving along a very simple track, the images. were there and Cloud and Sefroffroth were there and they were fighting and then they kissed and then it was just you know everything I ever dreamed of Cloud and Seffroth

kissed at the end? I'm sorry we can cut that out right yeah I don't know I'm down for that we'll cut that out no I'm kidding no there's no there was it was all the fanfic because I'm I'm for it is that a thing Cloud and Sephroth

kissing at the end of a roller coaster someone's afraid that or like I said I said it out loud but I'm sure someone has already made that absolutely yes it just wasn't us jay well now won't they oh yeah and uh so we're working with us jay on uh the world's largest uh attraction attraction oh we're pretty excited about that actually uh no release date date on that and we can't announce it unfortunately i understand i understand but it's it's the the biggest best br thing we've ever done certainly but not to detract from calf which is

the biggest best is the best is snowboarding game we've ever done. Have you been to Super Nintendo World yet? No. No, not yet. We tried. We failed. I thought you went. I didn't go. Wow. I wanted to go. I'm meaning to go, but as of this recording, I have not gone yet. Unfortunately, it looks exciting. I know lots of people that have gone. I want to go. I think we should go. Let's all go together. Yes. We can't go today, though. Unfortunately, they've already closed. But perhaps another day. Should go there and I do a podcast.

That is my full intention. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I absolutely want to a podcast from Chimin Nintendo World. That would be pretty tight. But I guess if that is the extent of our conversation, perhaps we should sort of wrap us up with something you'd like to talk about, something you haven't discussed it. You really want to share with the world about Vite or Chewai or Carve or 1080P or, you know, what Mr. Miyamoto prefers to wear when he's not when he's not on stage what does he wear actually he doesn't

he doesn't okay right right right uh you know it's he doesn't wear anything in the office he just goes back to the box like a like a robot and turns off yeah he likes a simple life he doesn't like clothes and stuff like that oh good uh so yeah at two i labs um we've got a lot we've got our own podcast coming out called Nasty Labs with starring Kinsey and myself, Kinsey Burke. And we also have a few YouTube shows coming out. And we're hopefully, as of this podcast, going to be joining the Greenlit Podcast Network along with Retronauts and your CEO, Jeremy Parrish. And yeah, as soon as all this is over, anybody is welcome to come to our office and get really drunk or not drunk with us

depending And we're going to have Mega Nights again And yes Megonite is our series Of the fuckest Upest Well if we could rephrase that

Without profanity It's an open evening For people to come visit And Play games, hang out with other game devs It's like a kind of mini bits on it Isn't it almost? Hmm

Yes, I have attended I have attended these events in the past And you attended the good ones as well Oh I'm glad to hear that But I didn't. They were all good. They only ever got better. And then we had to stop because of COVID.

But they will be back. So I guess we can each individually perhaps go out. Marcus, what would you like to say before we end up? Is there anything you personally have that you want to talk about? Yeah, actually. So I've been on Retronauts twice now. One time with my old boss, Dylan Cuthbert, now with my current boss, Giles. And I've got to be on the podcast with both of this X Star Fox team. And I'm missing the third

Star Fox, uh, Krista. Krista Womble. Yeah. You should have him on, can we do, can you do a Krista Womble, Krista Womble? Uh, the third Star Fox programmer. Where is, where, where, where, where are they at this point? I think he's in Singapore. Oh, all right. Call them up. That would require some travel arrangements, but it's possible. Similar times, I mean. It's close. It's close time-wise, but also not distance.

It's far. It's an eight-hour flight. So I wanted to say, I wanted to thank you personally for letting me on the podcast again. Retronauts is probably the reason that I'm in video games. More than video games themselves, it was Jeremy and OneUp.com and Retronauts that like really attracted me to the lure of video games and made me aware that there's like a culture behind it. So I, thank you. Not at all. I'm happy to, happy to be here and talk to people about their experiences and other things. Do you be things specific as far as Mark, as far as you go as Twitter or, or perhaps your

band? I know you aren't a band. Yeah, I am in a band. You can find me on Twitter at The Henry Demos, and I'm in a band called Nice Legs. We're a Kyoto-based duo. We've been in silly movies, and we're hopefully going to be doing a lot more music this year once this thing wraps up. But yeah. And Giles, is there anything you'd like to personally share?

I don't know if social media or just a personal project or anything at all? Well, I'd like to thank Retronauts. Oh, Daniel. Okay. For coming. Thank you. All the way from Osaka.

Thank you for hosting me. Even though there's a pandemic on, which I think is very cool of you to do. I'd like to ask Mark to marry me. No, to which is your favorite Star Fox programmer? Well, I haven't met Chris. Oh, you haven't met. So that's kind of fucked up. I don't have any of further questions.

Okay. Before we wrap it, though, I just did realize one more thing I remembered in the credits of 1080 snowboarding. You have a credit as a voice actor. Yeah. What was that? What happened? Winti, Winty? Uh, so Ricky Winterbourne.

Ricky, Winterbourne. Ricky, Winterbourne. The Canadian. The Canadian. Yes. Good, good, good for looking that up. And what does he say, Giles? Uh, sure, I'll do it.

And I believe he says all right. All right. Yeah, that's it. He also says things like, ah, ah. and a few others, you know, not provostable things. Yeah, I didn't know he was going to be Canadian. Otherwise, I would have done a Canadian accent. I was going to ask if you worked with a dialect coach

because of your flawless performance. I think the guy recordingist didn't really know that there was any difference between Canadian, American, British, or over. Was that recorded here in Japan then? Yeah, in the NCL studio. And I remember specifically because it took like a day to record umps and ars and all day, eight hours, nonstop. And they use like maybe one or two samples from the thing. Yeah.

If you hit the wall with his character, it's just, uh, uh, uh, uh, it's pretty great. Um, so that's why I realize that I never want to be doing that kind of stuff again. So your first and last voice work then? Yeah, yeah. All right. Being locked in a room, just making weird grunted. hunting noises for eight hours is not fun so does that mean carve will not have any any voice acting or just will you have a grunt we have a we have a professional grunter oh um we have some great

voice acting in in carve actually we do it's uh we've got michael swam he's he works over at ig n i know michael swam yeah yeah he's uh he's gonna be doing a character named carv edgerton and it's like uh there's an there's an incidental radio in the background and uh and he's just giving up giving the mountain weather updates and it's a very nonsensical story that he's building to so he'll talk about the weather and then talk about puppy mills and talk about leveling the the mountain so they can make way for the mayor's son to do x or y whatever the mayor's son is uh oh that's the secret yeah that's the secret that's the secret um and we also have another guy uh as guy locked in the bathroom. And if you ever go up to the bathroom door and knock on it, he'll say something like,

Hey, dude, where's my taco? And that's a stoner dude. Yeah. And that's a guy named Mark Holcomb. He's a pretty well-known metal guitarist. All right. Well, I'm glad I asked that last question before I forgot to ask it. In the meantime, since we'll wrap it up, I will give the official plug for Retronauts. We are a podcast you're listening to right now. We have our own website, retronauts.com. We have a new episode for free for everyone on Mondays. We also have a premium exclusive episode for our patrons only. That's patreon.com slash retronauts. We have two premium episodes per month, as of this recording, possibly more in the future. I don't know. This could very well be a premium episode because we might be doing more Japanese episodes. But as of this

recording, I can't say for sure. But you, the listener, might know more than I do. That's the magic of you living in the future, because that's where we're going to spend the rest of our lives. Beyond that, of course, patrons who subscribe for at least five dollars also get a free column every week from me. I write a column and then record a MIDI podcast about retro anniversaries, and I'm very proud to do that. As far as me personally, you can find me on most services like Twitch, YouTube, Twitter, as Fight Club, F-E-I-T, my last name, C-L-U-B.

And, yeah, I stream games sometimes. I tend to focus on retro games. And, yeah, I'm here in Japan doing Japanese things. And I had a nice conversation with you here. Thank you very much for hosting me in this lovely studio slash drinking establishment. And to everyone out there listening, uh, Matanay. Matanay. Look at

No. Please Look in the light No, please Stop to do with me and then more and you've got to go away and create out of me

I'm going to run by I'm going to go around me I don't know. I have it. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.

Oh. Oh. Oh, my God!