Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 97: BRO-totypes

Episode Date: May 1, 2017

Steve Lin joins Jeremy and Bob to discuss that most primal of video game forces: Manly video games about manly men. We explore the pop social forces behind the rise of rugged 8-bit heroes, and how those beefy classics shaped modern game sensibilities.

This episode is brought to you by Audible, the audio book service with more than 180,000 titles to choose from. Get a free audiobook and a 30-day trial at audibletrial.com slash game. This week in Retronauts, Choaniki is watching you. That's funny, you see, because Cho Aniki means big brother. Oh, my God. I knew Aniki, Aniki, his brother. What's Cho? Great, super, big.

Superlative. Yeah. Interesting. So, hi, everyone. Welcome to an episode of, a very obscure episode of Retronauts, I think, maybe. I mean, we've certainly started off on that. that footing. We've already proved we only know

Japanese through what we've seen in anime, I think. Right. At least I do. Or video games, yeah. Yeah. You know, Chowiniki, the scene in Final Fantasy

7 with the Honeybee Manor and the muscle dudes, like that was kind of riffing on that whole concept of like the big bro. The like, well, I guess we can get into it later, but the kind of reverse of American stereotype of gay men, you know,

instead of being like wispy, wispy and thin and limp-risted or whatever. Instead, they're all giant bodybuilders in Japan. I'm not saying either stereotype is good. I'm just saying they're different. Right. So, sorry, that's kind of a weird preamble to this episode, but we are getting into some undiscovered or unexplored territory for us, I think. And we'll be talking about really big muscle dudes all episode long. So hello, I'm Jeremy Parrish. Not a big muscular dude. I'm neither tall nor muscular, so I have no business being here. But maybe you guys can help me out from my straight ahead, from my noon, my 12 o'clock.

Hello, this is Bob Mackie, and we finally have a president with the balls to reference bad dudes. He said bad dudes before, and you'll say it again. And that is one president that the bad dudes do not want to rescue. Thank you, Ninjas. I think the bad dudes would fight him in a video game. He'd be the last boss. He would make them buy a well-cooked, aged steak. Well done, aged steak and eat it with ketchup.

I'd rather eat a turkey leg out of a trash can. And I'm a vegetarian. I'm just drinking sodas that I find behind barrels. I'm Steve Lynn from the Video Game History Foundation. Oh, yes. And congratulations on the launch of that. Thank you very much. It's very exciting.

We need to work together and stuff because we're complementary purposes, I think. Yeah. In fact, we announced it on this show. That's true. You did. Wait a minute. Where's our cut, Steve? Of that nonprofit money.

I know you're making money. a non-profit cash. And we did invite Frank Sefaldi for this episode, but I haven't heard from him. So I guess he's not going to be here, which is a shame, because I really feel like this is an episode topic that he would have a lot to say about. Not because Frank is necessarily interested in, you know, beefy muscle men in video games, but because I remember a long time ago, back at One Up, he was talking about something called what he called Guy Games. and it kind of dubbed deals with this topic. I'd like to think that he every day is perfecting his BiosApe Speed Run. He got too wrapped up in it to come to Retronauts.

Yeah, so the idea behind Guy Games is just like games about a dude who kills stuff. And specifically in that kind of late NES era vibe, you really saw a lot of like the 8-bit platformers like Vice Project Doom and Shatterhand. And that definitely intersects with what we're talking about here today. which I'm calling this episode Brototypes. The idea being that it's sort of the developmental prototype phase of the

brocentric dude games that we see today. When you have men who are made of basically carved from tree trunks like in Gears of War, where did that come from? I think part of the answer is, you know,

90s Image Comics, but also I think there was a lot of development in this kind of aesthetic and mindset like video games should be empowering and you should be a big powerful dude that took place throughout the 80s especially and interestingly mostly you saw it in Japanese games you don't really think of like big beefy show off musculature and and Japanese games together but that's really

I kind of feel like that's where all of this sort of fomented and came into shape so we're going to talk about this and I don't know what conclusions will come to if nothing else maybe we'll all just want to go back and play some more Vice Project Doom. But I don't know. I feel like there are some interesting things to be said about this. So hopefully I'm not mistaken and I'm, you know,

kind of jumping into a sort of oblique topic and will come up with something interesting. So it's on you guys. Thank you. I'm ready. Your body is ready. Yes, with my skinny arms and legs.

When you said guy game, I thought we were talking about the recall. The guy game? PS2. Yeah, trivia game, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they went on the attack against us at one-up because Nick Marigos gave them a really rotten review, which was well-deserved. Yeah. And that was kind of an early take on the, like, Dennis Dyak Twitter attack approach.

But Twitter didn't exist back there. So how could a debate even happen? Right. Geez, come on, guys. Get it together. All right. So, we're going to set the wayback machine for the early 1980s. And basically, to this point, you had, video games tended to be very abstract.

Like, if you look at video games in the 70s, it's pretty much stick figures or, like, the loosest outlines of things. And then, you know, in the early 80s, arcade hardware started to develop and become capable of showing more, you know, bigger sprites, more colors. more colors, more sprites, more detailed backgrounds. And then consoles followed suits and computers as well. You know, compare, you know, the earliest, like the VIC-20 or Pett versus the C-64 or the NES. And, you know, there's this kind of evolutionary leap in capabilities of what these systems are capable of demonstrating. And as a result, you started to see developers explore more diverse and unique and specific. specific styles.

I don't know. Did you guys, Steve, you're probably old enough to, like me, kind of remember when video games went from being

just sketchy, loose stick figures to something more figurative. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you look at, for instance,

Atari box art, right, where you saw kind of the painterly things and, like, oh, okay, it's very abstract, right,

when you're actually playing the game, but then as you started seeing actual characters with limbs and then sort of definition Oh, that person's wearing a different shirt.

And as you mentioned, like, especially arcade hardware at the time, it was progressing pretty quickly. So you would see games released in the same year that look like they're from different decades, right? Just because someone had come up with a way of providing more fidelity. So, yeah, I definitely, you know, I think for me, one of those moments was when you saw the size of characters and, like, punch out. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And it's like, whoa. Like the arcade punchout? Yeah, sorry, the arcade punchout. No, no, no, that's fine. Both NES and Arcade Punchout were pretty remarkable achievements on their respective platforms. But Arcade Punch Out really was just like, how are these gigantic people capable of being on the screen? Right. Yeah.

And I think, oh, I can, they started, you could see personality in characters, I think. They started to have their own little quirks and things like that. So I think those are the sort of the things I notice as we're approaching the era we're talking about here. Yeah, I mean, you look back in the 70s and you have. had Pong and then space invaders where you can kind of see like there is a design aesthetic at work. All the alien invaders resemble seafood, you know, sea animals basically, crustaceans, shrimp and crab and squid. And, you know, you around the same time had something like Death Race 2000 where you're the vaguest suggestion of a car running over stick figures. But then 1980, you have Pac-Man, you have Raleigh-X, where, you know, Pac-Man, there wasn't a lot of detail, but it was good design.

They managed to take a yellow circle and personify it, which, you know, that takes some doing. That circle fell in love. But, well, you know, part of it is the, I can't remember there's an actual term for it, and I can't remember what it is, but the human desire to see themselves. in things, which is why you like that entire om-nom-nom-nom phenomenon. Like the power outlet right there. Yeah, it's a face. It's a screaming face. It's got two things and another thing,

and so that's eyes and a mouth. So we looked at a circle that had a moving wedge missing from it, and that became a person with a mouth. But as games began to develop technically, we didn't have to imagine

the mouth. We didn't have to imagine it was a person. The same company, like the following year, made Dig-Dug, where you had a little squat dude, and he actually did have, you know, human proportions, kind of, very, very lumpy proportions, but there was a face, there was, there were arms and legs and a torso. Eyes. Did he become ripped when he became Mr. Driller's dad? No, I mean, Namco never took that franchise in that direction.

It was always very cute. I mean, he was Mr. Driller's dad, and Mr. Driller was very much a very cute looking series all along, very stylistic, very lanky. We haven't read my Dig Dog fan fiction. Please, upload your deviant art. It's on the inflation fetish forums. You're right. Oh, boy.

And vore. Oh, geez. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, so, yeah, like, I think, you know, in Japan especially, you really saw game designers and developers, graphic artists, starting to look to cartoons and to manga and anime. And the very efficient approach that those mediums. have when it comes to representing humans. I mean, manga was basically defined by

Osama Tezuka, a very, very prolific artist who, you know, he was like Jack Kirby times five. I mean, it's amazing the amount of output that guy could. Just sheer tons and tons of illustrations and animations every day. And it's

in large part because he developed this very efficient style inspired by Disney that was extremely minimal. He could define a character by just a few elements, like their hairstyle, their eyes, the shape of their face, their body, maybe like some kind of weird deformity, like a giant nose with pimples on it or something. But it was extremely loose, extremely sketchy, and it created this economy of visual language that really took root in manga. And that translated very nicely over to video games. The games that Japanese developers were making.

in the early 80s. I think the abstraction is important, but the anime angle is just looking at anime cheaply made at the time, how little they had to move on the screen to imply movement. You would see that in a lot of NES games and cutscenes, just like a character is bobbing up and down

and there were just lines coming at him. So they were able to take those techniques. It was very cheap, affordable, and easy to do techniques and, like, apply them to games as well, I think. Right. And so, you know, I remember from being in the being in arcades during the golden era,

which let's say was 1980 through 83, 84, video games were almost universally cute or else they were kind of, you know, like abstract technological, you know, vehicles, like Moon Patrol or something where you have a vehicle, and it's not super cute, it's just sort of detailed. Your spaceship or something, right?

Yeah, but if you had human characters or, you know, cartoon animals on screen, they were extremely cute. and so that was really the look of arcade games and that bled into console games and computer games at the same time but what we're going to look at this episode is what kind of evolved out of that sort of toward the middle of the 80s

and I don't know exactly where the demarcation might be but it's this new trend in visual design for video games and again mostly on Japan side there was some of it in the U.S. and the UK which we'll talk about. But it's almost like this strange mutation of Japanese art aesthetics just sort of came out of nowhere and suddenly video games started to be very cute

or else very, very violent and very butch and extremely graphic. And there was a huge obsession among a lot of these games with sort of hyper-muscular characters. And yeah, I... I'd like to talk about kind of where that came from and talk about some of the notable examples of this style up through the early 90s and talk about some of the results that came from this. You know, what's the legacy of these bodybuilder video games? So to begin with, what would you guys kind of peg, you know, if you were to just take a blind stab at it as the sort of move away from cute and cartoonish in game aesthetics to muscular and angry and, you know, gory and so on and so forth. I mean, that maybe hit its peak in the 90s with stuff like Thrill Kill, which we talked about in the last episode we recorded.

But certainly that mindset was around long before that. I would say just for me growing up, maybe Golden X, I mean, other games predated it, but it was clearly, I mean, we can trace a lot of these back to American movies, as you point out in your notes, Jeremy, but that was clearly like, oh, we saw Conan the Barbarian or Conan the Destroyer. We want to make that our game, and they did. And that was kind of when I took note of it in terms of, you know, just these muscular characters, the committing acts of violence. That was sort of the first time I took note, I think. Yeah, I think for me it was, you know, as the hardware progressed, it gave a lot more creative freedom.

So people could start experimenting with things that were, for like a term, more violent or, you know, had more definition in the characters. I think for me, one of them was Akari Warriors, I think was a big game for me because, you know, kind of weird top-down view, you know, big musk, it was basically two rambos on the screen

at the same time. I don't know about you, Steve, but growing up, a lot of people called that Atari Warriors just because Atari was another video game thing and that was always very confusing. It's like, no, it's Akari. That's a Japanese word

that I don't know what it means, but it's Shinji's name. That's right, yeah. But Akari Warriors is not about Shinji and his father. No, that would be, Maybe it is, right? You can't tell ages from the top down, right? Well, I did a Photoshop of that once with, like, the box art for those characters, but then Shinji and Gendos' faces superimposed.

If anyone would have done that, it would have been you. It was me. Right. Yeah, I think that one and then something we'll get into it later, but I think Operation Wolf was a big one just because it was sort of environmental and that you had that Uzi that sort of shook and then the close up to the guys. it felt like you were actually in a Rambo movie. Right. It was probably the closest thing that I could think of at the time. Yeah, for me, I think probably the first time I really stopped and said,

huh, that's like, you know, like Conan right there in a video game form was Black Tiger by Capcom. Oh, you know what? I played that before Gullinx. So, no, you're right, you're right. And if I'm not mistaken, I didn't think to look this one up, but I believe, like, the promotional art for that was actually just like totally just straight, ripped off from Frank Frisetta. And that's one of the

inspirations for this style, I think, that we should talk about is Frank Frisetta and his fantasy art. But, yeah, like, Black Tiger, I'm sure you guys remember it. You're like a dude in a loincloth and you've got sort of like a chain flail. So it's kind of a Cassylvania sort of thing,

but it moves a lot faster than Castlevania and is not nearly as fair as Castlevania. It doesn't have that very deliberate design that Castlevania has. it's much more like arcade quarter muncher where things hit you and it's not fair. Right. But, you know, as you power up, then your flail becomes longer and then it starts to like shoot beams or daggers or something. And then the flail flies out in like multiple directions and you're shooting daggers in multiple directions.

So you get really powered up. It's kind of like it's almost like a PC engine shoot them up, except you're a dude with a chain flail instead of a spaceship flying around in space. But the same sort of progressive power mechanics. And it really does feel like, you know, a D&D module, like box painting come to life. Was there a sequel? I might have played more of the sequel. There wasn't, but Magic Tower was in very much in the same vibe. Whichever one it is where you rescue a character and they're your partner.

Yeah, I like that one a lot more. Yeah, that was, that was, it was not a, you know, an explicit sequel to Black Tiger, but it's very, very much in that same vein. I played more of that. I played Black Tiger a lot, too. Yeah. I love those games, and it's weird because, like, the idea of super, you know, muscular dudes and speedos, like, that's not my aesthetic. I like cute stuff. But sometimes these games, you know, even though I'm kind of like, eh, I don't care about this dude, who cares.

Like, the games are still fun enough that it doesn't really matter. It's just another, you know, another ridiculous, unrealistic character that you're controlling. And it doesn't make a difference if it's, you know, Taiso Hoare, the little chubby dig-dug guy or the Black Tiger guy. Yeah, that's actually an interesting point to bring up. You know, at the time, I don't think I ever didn't play a game because of its aesthetic, right? It was, does this look like a fun game or not? And so it wasn't like I was looking for, I want the big muscular dude or that one's too cute or girly or whatever for me to try out. It was a lot of stuff was coming out.

You want to see what's a fun game. and just, you know, play it. Yeah, I don't think this really became sort of an undercurrent until a little later. But, yeah, like, you know, just the sort of primal fantasy type stuff doesn't really do much for me. And I don't tend to really care that much about a lot of genres, honestly, but they all tend to be sort of, like, super masculine. I'm like, that's tired, that's played out. But, you know, good game design is good game design. So a lot of these games, you know, even though,

I look at the box art and I'm like, oh, it's big muscle guys again, who cares? They're still good. I think we finally have at the end of the era of revenge dad games where you were a dad getting revenge for some reason. It was like 2009 to 2012 or 2013. It's like every game was about a dad and he was like getting revenge about something. A kid was taken or something or other, but the Liam Neeson influence. It was a short-lived fat I did not care for. So, you know, I think to kind of lay the groundwork for this. You know, I think to kind of lay the groundwork for this, you have to go back to the seven.

70s, really, because there are a lot of cultural trends that began to take hold in the 60s and especially the 70s. A lot of them here in the U.S., even though we're talking about mostly games from Japan, we, you know, in those days especially exported so much popular culture and Japan was so kind of, I would say, collectively hungry to absorb the media that we exported that I think it had a profound impact. I mean, all you have to do is look at stuff, something like, you know, the Dicon 4 animation that Gynax did back before the video studio. And that's just full of, there's like Japanese pop culture stuff, but there's also, you know, all kinds of references to Star Wars and other, you know, American media, superheroes and that sort of thing. I love how much it does, it's like, we don't care. We'll draw this thing because we like it. It was not meant for to be sold in any case, but I just love how they're embracing all the things they love in those videos. Yeah.

Or then you have, you know, Revenge of Shinobi, which has, it has Godzilla as a boss, but it also has Batman and Spider-Man, and whoops, we can't really actually do that. We didn't pay for these guys, so they had to be changed in the Genesis version when it came to the U.S. Right. Well, you look at box art, right? You know, the cover of Metal Gear is Michael Bine. Oh, yeah. The tracing was strong with Konami, especially in those days.

But a lot of, there's a great feature on hardcore gaming 101. You'll have to look through their archives, but it shows like pilfered box art through the ages. And it's a lengthy feature. It's a two-parter, actually. because that was very much a thing that was common back then. You've listed some of these here, but I kind of believe the DNA of every video game can be found in five movies. The Warriors, Conan the Barbarian, Evil Dead, Terminator, and Rambo 2, I think.

Star Wars? Are you talking about specifically these games? Star Wars, maybe. But I think we did an episode about Star Wars, and we really couldn't see a lot of influence in stuff when we were going on about that. We had less influence than we thought it would. That is true. Yeah.

But, I mean, it still influenced people, but I think those five movies... Did you say aliens? You didn't say aliens. Aliens. Okay, six movies. Aliens is important, too. But, yeah, it could be six, could be ten movies. But, like, that period influenced Japan, who was at the top of their game at the time, who made all the best games.

And that influence what would be made after that. So I feel like drawing back to those movies is where, like, the roots of modern game concepts come from still. Yeah. But, you know, even going back before those movies, almost all of them. are from the 80s, the Warriors. Yeah. It's 79. Might as well be 80. You do have these cultural trends that I was mentioning.

And one of them was the rise of bodybuilding. I mean, you know, going back to like the 50s or so, you still had guys like Charles Atlas. But bodybuilding became this thing in the 70s. It became extremely popular. And you started to really see it reflected in fantasy art. I mentioned Frank Frisetta. There was also Boris Vallejo or Vallejo. I don't know how you pronounce his name.

Barbarella and stuff like that, right? Yeah, like, you know, Sean Connery of Zorda. Oh, God. No, I don't want to even picture that. I've seen that's already there. But, yeah, just like, I think probably Conan is probably the big inflection point for a lot of this. Oh, for sure. Yeah.

But, I mean, Conan and Arnold Schwarzenegger kind of rose at the same time. Arnold Schwarzenegger was like the iconic Mr. Universe because of the just sheer definition that he enforced upon his body. He was a huge guy already, and he made himself extremely muscular and the muscles extremely well defined as opposed to being kind of what you saw before that where people would be muscular, but also tended to have kind of like the football linebacker look where they were sort of doughy outside the hard muscle core. I mean, we have muscular leading men now, like, whoever plays, who plays Captain America? Chris Evans. Yeah, I mean, he's a buff guy. But in this era, it was like they're always shirtless and bronze and oily. Like you always saw them in bodybuilder style like.

I guess, poses in oilings and... The new muscular... Oilings, I don't know. It's a word. The new muscular in Hollywood is very lean muscle. Yeah, yeah, that's true.

In the 70s, it was extremely... Yeah, just like, check out my quadriceps. My biceps have triceps. I've created new muscles. Yeah, basically. Well, if you look at it, I mean, also at this time, things like professional wrestling, right? Oh, yeah, for sure.

And sort of Vince McMahon. That was a little later. That was the 80s. Yeah, I guess so, yeah. It was both for the 70s. I'm just thinking, like, how they corner. I think of Hulk Hogan when I think of an orange oily man who's very buff in an unnatural way.

Yeah, in the 70s, like I said, you had Conan really kind of come into popularity through comic books. And honestly, up before that, if you looked at comic book characters, the Superman-type characters tended to be strong. Like, they definitely had muscle definition, but they weren't huge. You had, you know, John Byrne-style artwork where everyone has well-defined bodies. like they're very lean but you tended not to see super hulking characters unless it was a character

like the Hulk or Colossus whose entire gimmick was this dude hits really hard and that began to change in the 70s and into the 80s thanks to the rise of bodybuilding something I can't really speak to myself but I think does tie into this

is the sort of mainstreaming of the gay community throughout the 60s and the 70s and the sort of the idea that, hey, the male gays can actually be at males. It doesn't just have to be looking at women's boobs. It can be looking at really, really well-defined men as well. It could be part of the power fantasy that serves the male interests too, right?

Yeah, I mean, there's a power fantasy, but I do think that, you know, as mainstream America became more sympathetic to the gay community, and I, you know, like I said, I don't want to assume too much here because it's outside my personal realm of experience and I don't want to be insulting to anyone or make assumptions. But you definitely did see, you know, a lot of popular singers who people began to realize like, oh, Freddie Mercury, Queen. Like, there's a reason the band is called Queen. And, yeah, like, and, you know, in the 80s, you had the entire AIDS crisis where all of a sudden, you know, the gay community became extremely sympathetic because of what was happening to them.

Yeah, notable celebrities were dying, not just people no one knew about. So I really do think that this had an impact in kind of, you know, popular culture. And the things began, you know, the way people were presented, the way, you know, art looked. I think there was always, you know, in the creative community, a lot of closeted people who couldn't necessarily express themselves in their lifestyles, but maybe in their artwork, you began to kind of see things that you look back at and say, oh, okay, yeah, that makes sense. So, yeah, I don't know how much that impact that had, but there's just all these things sort of building at the same time. And again, you had, you know, Dungeons and Dragons, and you had fantasy novels and that sort of thing.

So I think those all sort of convened and converged in the early 80s. And right about that time, video games began to operate on. systems on a hardware that was capable of rendering rendered humans, like very well, you know, defined people. And so of course, you know, video games frequently had an element of violence to them. So it makes sense to have a big guy who can inflict a lot of hurt running around with an axe. And if he's going to be wielding an axe and he's probably got to be big and strong to carry, you know, this giant axe. So that is my thought on where a lot of these, these influences came from. I think I'm missing stuff. It wouldn't even like to kind of counterpropose anything. I don't want this to be just me pulling stuff out of my ass. The perfect storm of elements to cause

these games be made. I can't think of anything else that you could be missing or could be wrong about. Well, I think one of the things you brought up about gay culture was just how it had changed over the 60s and 70s where you see things like Easy Rider or Marlon Brando, like the leather

jacket, T-shirt. There was a sense of, I guess, machismo. that started to become more prevalent. And so you were seeing a wider range of kind of like the perception of homosexuality. And it's like, oh, you know, like you're saying big buff guys. And then you have kind of the sort of stereotypical stuff that you would see in the 70s. It's like there's a wide range here. And, you know, people kind of pushing where they went in terms of dress and everything else that you're,

like, oh, there's, you can see influences, especially in, like, for like bosses, right, in video games, right? Like, kind of that over the top, like, this is someone who's just got all kinds of cool stuff on. Yeah, especially, like, men in S&M gear and things like that in, like, Final Fight, things. I mean, just like these sort of things are just made part of pop culture. Yeah, like leather and studs and a lot of that, right? Yeah, and I think it's important to know that there. have always been gay game creators. There have always been transgender game creators. That, you know, that LGBT culture has always been within video games. And so obviously some of that's going to come out and be expressed in the games. And I think, you know, the popular trends were, were, they made that possible in a lot of ways. You know, the rise of Conan the barbarian as Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan and just the entire like oil.

dude in a loincloth fantasy genre that emerged in kind of those low-budget movies that you see on mystery science theater a lot. Like Beastmaster? Yeah, stuff like that. Yeah. Mark Singer. Yeah. Like I said, everything was kind of coming, coming to together, converging, and around 1985 or so, video games kind of began to take a step forward in terms of design going from like the single screen arcade game to more expansive worlds where. you could have bigger characters.

I mean, in the single screen games, you had to have kind of tiny characters. So there was enough space and enough, you know, room for the character to move around in. But once Super Mario Brothers and Ghost and Goblins came out, all of a sudden, you know, these games were moving forward and the world didn't consist of a single screen. So your characters could be larger and they could have better definition. They could have more detail to them. And Ghost and Goblins, you know, almost works in this, except it's so cartoon. tunish. It's got that Tokoro Fujiwara

art style. Like, his characters always have this kind of like goofy, sort of very primitive and lanky, almost like something out of Mad Magazine or something. But, you know, Arthur, he takes a hit and he's reduced down to his boxer shorts. So he's like a dude running around in boxers.

And that's pretty much like Raston Saga and Castlevania, like a dude running around in a loincloth. But the gargoyles and bosses are pretty ripped in that game, right? They've got abs. Yeah, yeah. Devil's got abs, doesn't he? The devil's got some big abs. In the first one, the red armors, the red devils don't really have that much like bodily definition. But yeah, I could be thinking of the

sequel. Yeah, get into the 16 big games and all of a sudden you've got big, beefy dudes. Like the muscular devil naked sitting in a chair that you're fighting as the final boss? Is that, that's it, yeah. Exactly. So you had, you know, technology moving forward, game design moving forward. And I think one final really important Keystone moment here was the game Carotica by Jordan Mechner, which it wasn't, you know,

muscular men, but it was extremely realistic in terms of its presentation. The animation was rotoscoped and very, very convincing. Like, it moved very fluidly, and it was very closely based on another one of these sort of

formative influences, you know, like Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon, the sort of Chanbara fighting style movies. the idea of just like a pure physical test of endurance and strength. So even though Carotica did not have that sort of like, you know, protein powder vibe to it, it still was very much in the like the proto-brawler era. And maybe another good kind of inflection point the same year, 1984, would be Kung Fu or Kung Fu Master or Spartan X or whatever you want to call it,

which was actually based on a Jackie Chan movie. Right, right. And it was also kind of cartoonish, but it still had that sort of, you know, one guy taking on a whole bunch of dudes and kind of overcoming impossible odds with just his fists and feet. A lot of grunting and screaming in that game, too.

Yeah. People grabbing onto you. Yeah. Well, when I remember when I first saw Carotica, I think that was definitely a game where I, like, what is that? That really, it looks, it's so fluid, right, that it really feels like, you know, we're getting closer to some, to, I guess, realism in games, even though when you look at it now, it does look pretty primitive.

I mean, I saw Prince of Persia first by the same opinion. Nothing looked like it even then. Right. I mean, we might get to this later, but when you played, like, Raston, right, there was sort of an animation, like a weight to the sword as he swung it, and, you know, that was basically Conan the game, right? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, the sound and everything. It just really kind of pulled you in. So not to over-emphasize the importance of Nintendo here, but I do think it is notable that both Kung Fu Master or Spartan X or whatever you want to call it and Karatica made it to Famicom in 1985.

Right. And basically 1986 is where you start to see this new aesthetic in games really take off in Japanese arcade and console games. So I really feel like those things. two games, you know, kind of opened the floodgates. They were both really successful, right? Yeah, yeah. Carotica was a pretty big deal in Japan.

We didn't get it here on any consoles, but it showed up on a bunch of systems, including Game Boy, several years later. So it was a pretty big hit. And, you know, it was arrived right at the time that the Famicom was really making it big in Japan, and every game that came out kind of became a hit, became something that people were aware of. So I think that's a pretty important thing to make note of. Oh, random aside, the box for Caratica on Famicom is amazing

because of that from USA graphic that's in the upper right-in corner. It's sort of like North America-ish. So you know it's good. Yeah, so, yeah, it's trying to advertise. So I kind of broke down the games we're talking about into a few different categories. The Conan games, the Commando and Predator games. Both of these are Schwarzenegger. And then just kind of other Hollywood influences, and then look beyond that to more homegrown Japanese concepts, you know, Sainan manga, manga for men, basically, in anime.

So, I mean, I think obviously the most sensible place to start here would be to look at the Conan games, the Conan inspired games. I don't think there was ever actually a Conan game until a few years back with Funcom's MMO, was there? Uh, not that I think. There was probably maybe like a licensed PC or, you know. Yeah, there might have been a game based on the 90s cartoon Conner the Adventurer. I'm not sure, though. There might have been a bad game based on that. Right.

Well, nothing memorable for sure. Right. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe there was one for NES that I'm just totally forgetting. Possible. One of those Western developed games that I'm like, no one really cares about. Right. Let's have a quick look. Someone's screaming at their podcast machine, right?

right now. It's like, how could you forget that game? Oh, there was a Conan game for NES. So how about that? Let's have a look and see what it's like, yeah. Oh, NC64, Apple 2, PS2. Fact-checking ruined. Conan, the Mysteries of Time. Okay, so I'm mistaken there was a Conan game for NES, but not really that impressive looking. Conan's a little guy. It's called The Mysteries of Time. Look how tiny he is. It's by Minescape, makers of Help Me Out Here. What did they do? Somebody's got to know this. Mindscape was a publisher.

They didn't really make stuff. This says it was developed by Mindscape. Does it? Yeah. My goodness. It could be wrong, though. All right. So there were Conan video games, but none of them had any real impact on culture, whereas

Conan inspired games were a big deal. And I don't know the exact chronology on these, but I kind of feel like the first really big one was Razden Saga, where, you know, you were talking about that earlier, where it's just like a dude with a big, you know, double-handed broadsword and there is this remarkable sense of weight to your actions. Like you swing the sword and it feels like you're really committing to it.

And Resden showed up, that was a Sega game, right? Yeah, that was on a bunch of Sega systems. And I don't know, like I I've never quite gotten into Razden Saga and I think it is because of that

weight to it. I feel I feel like it slows the game action down too much, and it's not as responsive as I would like. I don't know. You seem to have a fondness for it. Yeah, I really liked it. Quite frankly, one of the big things for me was the music. I love the music in that game, especially the arcade version. And maybe there was something because you had to be more deliberate, you couldn't just kind

of keep spamming the sword button. There was a sense of distance between everything, and then the characters that would show up, right? They had, you know, the lion breathing fire and the flying things, and you get the I think it's like an axe that gave you more range. It's just something about that game, really. I loved playing it in the arcade, so. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of Namco's Dragonbuster, which is kind of showed up on the other side of the divide.

I feel like if Dragonbuster had come out a few years later, it probably would have looked more like one of these games, but it was still in the sort of cartoon era, so you have this very cartoonish-looking guy. And the controls are very stiff, but there is almost this sense of like, you're kind of in this primal fantasy world, go explore things and kill stuff.

And you can't actually really explore that much. But there's just something about the way the world is presented where it does feel like you're this sort of lone wanderer who is badly overmatched by all kinds of crazy demons and monsters and stuff and has to bite his way through. Well, even the death animation is sort of him like falling backwards and dissolving. So once again, this is part of technology, right? providing more depth to the game.

And then there are some alternative paths, but they're really simplistic in the game. Well, I mean, that death animation is, that right there is a counterpoint to Sega's usual vibe, which was your cartoon character would fall over dead and the little angel would fly up. All kinds of Sega games always did that. They always had the little guy,

his little angel fly up, Wonderboy also. Oh, yeah, Wonderboy. Yeah, for me. the game that kind of did Raston right was Rigar. I played a bit more of that. Although I'm not a fan of the arcade game. I don't like it either. It's like Rastin, but worse.

Whereas the NES game is actually really kind of remarkable. It was very ambitious. They took this game and said, oh, there's kind of the sense of, you know, you're roaming a world and fighting through monsters while trying to explore and find your way around. What if you actually did have to explore? What if you actually had to, you know,

instead of just going through 40 levels from left to right, what if you actually had to kind of find your way around this big hub world and discover items and learn magic spells and things like that? And so it became sort of this early, almost like proto-metroid mania game. So of course I like it. But it also felt really fluid and interesting. You had really good control over... I don't think his name was Rigar.

I think Rigar was supposed to be Ligar, the demon, like, lion's sloth. Tiger thing at the end that you have to fight. I think he was just like the warrior of Argos. I could be mistaken about that. But you had really good control over him. Like there was some aerial maneuverability. You'd jump forward and you kind of, you could pull him back and make very precise jumps.

But his weapon was really great. It was this, it was called the disc armor. It was basically like a shield. It was kind of Captain America-ish. But imagine Captain America with like a very short tether on a shield, like a yo-yo almost. So to attack enemies, you would fling this circular thing forward, and it flew out really quickly and respond or like return really quickly.

So it didn't have the sort of delay and wind-up that Raston's weapon did. You just toss this disc armor at enemies. And as you advance through the game, you could get a longer chain for it and more power for it. So it was very much in a sort of Castlevania vibe, which I think I think Castlevania also sort of fall. like maybe it's, I would say, like, almost a golden trio of these sort of formative barbarian games. RASD, RIGAR, and Castlevania.

And Castlevania had the most deliberate action. But unlike Rastin, the world was really designed, I've talked about this a lot, about how the world of Castlevania is designed around Simon Belmont's limitations, how high he can jump, how long it takes him to wind up and swing his whip. You know, the movements of the enemies are crafted in just such a way to be very, very challenging, but not impossible. If you know where they're coming from, if you understand how they move, you can predict them and you can respond to them. So you have to be careful, you know, not to overcommit to your actions. You have to be very deliberate. But it's very exciting. And that's another one of those where the cover art is just totally ripped off of, I think, a frisetta painting.

Simon Belmont It's a very famous box art You know I love it Yeah Like you see Dracula's face Superimposed over the sky But there's you know

The real thing is the castle In the distance And Simon's standing there With his back to the camera To the viewer wielding his whip Which kind of like coils around In air as he's about to

Lash forward with it Was that identical in Japan The box art I was just curious If that was a Japanese artist That is the Japanese art Okay interesting Castlevania

And Castlevania And Castlevania too have the same box art in both territories. Castlevania 3 does not, and the U.S. box art is much, much better. It's got a really nice, very dynamic-looking painting of Trevor Belmont and his companions kind of at an angle with, like, a dragon-breathing fire at him. Whereas in Japan, like, the characters are painted really badly, and Trevor, or actually Ralph in Japan, looks like Luke Wilson.

It's really weird. I don't think I've seen a version of the Castlevania 3 U.S. box art without the Win a Trip to Transylvania a pop-out thingy. That's not a sticker. It's part of the art. Man, bummer. Yeah, I don't think they reprinted it.

So you never got that. That art's got to be somewhere. I hope it's not thrown away. I'm sure Konami has it in their archives. They care about their game so much. So, you know, as I feel like these three games really kind of define that look. And they all had a lot of clones. I mean, Black Tiger, I would consider a Raston clone.

Castlevania had clones like Adai's, which we've mentioned on Rentronauts before. You did start to see some different ideas. One of the, probably the biggest one was Altered Beast, where it was basically much more straightforward, but you had much larger characters, just these huge dudes who were totally bodybuilders. They had like these tiny, microcephalic heads. And as you collected power-ups, you could transform. into like super musclemen monsters. Yeah, like everything in this game just had abs.

Yeah, it was like, they were totally shredded. It was bodybuilders the video game. Made by the Sonic team, basically, too. Really interesting. Yeah, and it kind of is sort of a definitive game in this style because it's so sluggish and clunky. Like you think a dude who has just been working on his reps and building up muscle mass is going to be a little bit stiff and clumsy

because he doesn't have much agility. And this game really, this game really gets to that. It's like, yeah, these dudes, they're really slow. But when you punch things, they explode into symmetrical pieces. They do. Yeah. And it's actually very satisfying in that sense. It's not that good a game, but it is very satisfying.

Yeah. And, yeah, like that one is just very sort of iconic, I think. Any other thoughts on any of these? I also put Golden Axe in here, which is an entirely different kind of game in itself. But, Bob, I think you mentioned that earlier. Yeah, I mean, I would eventually see the movies that inspired it much later, but definitely some serious Conan vibes, definitely some Frisetta stuff in there, just a lot of those influences worked in, but it is the barbarian game with a bit more fantasy to it.

There's magic, there's elves, there's touches like that. So for sure, I'm pretty sure, like, Death Adder is from Conan. One of the, is Death Adder the villain in Golden X? Yes. I'm pretty sure he's from some sort of Conan thing, like a very very direct. direct crab. But yeah, I mean, that was the first time I noticed this and really took notice of these kind of games.

And later I would discover the source material, but I discovered the games first. Yeah. Gladiator and the arcade was a big one for me because of the characters were so big, right? They take up. Yeah, I think that was part of Altered Beasts appeal too. But yeah, Gladiator was really remarkable. Yeah, that and you can actually knock off armor on different parts of the body. So you could, like, the leg and the chest armor and things would just go flying off.

you were hitting different parts of the characters. So there was that element of like localized damage and then seeing the person underneath, right, instead of just the armor. I don't think I've played this game. Interesting. I think it's also important to note that at the same time, you know, you were seeing this like more realistic art style,

but some developers kind of said, well, what if we took this realistic, you know, the sort of game design styles that are rising out of this and make them more in our kind of quirky, charming, cutesy way. So you had stuff like Karnov, which isn't cute, but it's very comical. I mean, Karnov is, he's muscular,

but it's like the old school fat guy muscular. Yeah, lifting triangular weights. Yeah. He's like the shirtless Nazi in Raiders of the Lost Dark who gets threatened by the airplane. He's just, he's a slab

of body. I'm just amused by the very existence of Karnov and how Dadey used would try to bring him back in some ways just like he's such a ridiculous character right but yeah they turned him into like a franchise basically he shows up in bad dudes as the first boss right and it plays the carnoff music even yeah and uh yeah there's like the weird story where he was a bad man like a thief or something and god punished him and yeah his his mission on in carnov is to basically redeem himself yeah the japanese version of the game has uh story has like narration or like

you know text narration but there's something to it in the n as game you just start you're you You are Karnov, have fun in Karnov land, but there's more to it in Japan. one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of chocolate. Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. Okay, here are some really surprising car facts for you. In Churchill, Canada,

residents leave their cars unlocked. That's in case someone needs to escape a polar bear. It's true. And in Sweden, drivers are required by law to keep their headlines on at all times. Day, night, rain, sunshine, doesn't matter. And now here's another interesting and actually helpful thing about cars that you might not know. True car also helps people get used cars. That's right. True car isn't just for new cars, their certified dealer network also has an inventory of over 700,000 pre-owned cars nationwide. So whether you're looking for a new or used car, you can get real pricing on actual inventory and a better buying experience through the True Car Certified Dealer Network. Oh yeah, here's another fun fact. True car customers can see if they're getting a good or great price before they buy.

They're also more likely to enjoy a faster buying process when they connect with their true car certified dealers. So when you're ready to buy that car, new or used, visit True Car and enjoy a better car buying experience. Some features not available in all states. This is Jay Moore. I have a new sports podcast every day. More sports. Hashtag, more sports. You don't need to know anything about sports to love it.

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which did for take out what Upton Sinclair's The Jungle did for the meatpacking biz. Play Fast Food Nation on your car stereo while picking up lunch, and you'll definitely think twice when they ask you if you want to supersize it. Exercise your brain and save your eyes some strain by downloading a free audiobook at audibletrial.com slash game. I don't know. All right, so moving into the second half of this episode, I would like to change up the format a little bit. Bob, did you want to say something?

Yeah, I didn't see it on here. Maybe it is, but does, oh, it is actually on here. Fist of the North Star, I think, is a big influence on a lot of the stuff. Yeah, we'll do the manga stuff a little bit. But I don't know if Fis of the North Star was influenced by anything Hollywood. I mean, there's Mad Max in there a bit, but. Absolutely. I mean, it was... But I don't know.

Mad Max. Mad Max very much. And, you know, Enter the Dragon. Oh, yeah, for sure. That guy is Bruce Lee. Yeah, as hell. I mean... Kenchiro.

Yeah, Kenchiro. Except Bruce Lee never said, Omayawa, whatever his name is. Yeah. I can't even remember. But it's worth watching on Crunchyroll, believe me. It's, uh, those are great. It's not, it's funny English dub?

No, but I love the Japanese. It's so super serious, but it's the silliest shit ever that show. It's the same plot every time. A guy comes to town, then he explodes at the end of the episode. But it's great. It's fun to watch. Like the Voltron Roe Beast. Yes, exactly.

So I'm going to change up the format a little and jump to some reader letters or listener mail. I ask for people to share their thoughts on this. And I feel like a lot of people kind of came to the same conclusions that we did. So here's one from Mark Mariano. Schwarzenegger, Stallone. Video games take so many of their cues from the movies that it's no wonder the biggest action stars of the 80s. would influence action games around the same time. In a way, Contra gave the world the Stallone Schwarzenegger team up

they wouldn't get into the expendibles films decades later. And it's true, if you look at the Konami NES box art, it is literally traced from Predator and Rambo, I think. So that's another one of those lifts. What are their names, Lance and Billy? Bill and Lance or Matt Dogg and Scorpion. I think Mad Dog and Scorpions and Supercontra. That was a BuddyCod movie.

Contra 3 maybe. Let's see. It's strange then that the NES incarnations of Predator and Rambo were so much tamer than the original games that their star is inspired. Dutch Schaefer and John Rambo has been most of their time jumping around and avoiding jungle creatures. Even so, the media depiction of military force and oiled up muscles popularized by Schwarzenegger and Stallone worked just as well in video games as it did at the box office. Here's an interesting kind of variant from Callum Johnson regarding Bomberman. No, I thought it was going to be about Bomberman X-Zero. Oh.

Not like something like Buff Bomberman. He took off the space seat underneath. Inside I'm ripped. Right. All right. From Nathan Hill, I'm in my 40s now, and I'm trying to remember when gaming got into manly games. I didn't think about gender very much from regarding my games. Then again, I was a youngster, so there's that. Even so, looking back at games, I realize now that

I recognize now as having gender stereotypes like Donkey Kong, it's hard for me to put them into the same basket of something like Double Dragon, despite the fact that the mission is to rescue the female love interest in both games. Games like Kung Fu Master, Renegade, and Double Dragon help set the standard and are some of the earliest examples of my experience with the manification of games. Of course, Razden, whose developers, I'm sure, jumped at every telephone ring, thinking it was the estate of Robert E. Howard calling,

can be thrown in there also. Those lead to Golden Axe and Altered Beast, then to Bad Dudes, and so on. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think the popularity of these games can be tied to the feelings of inadequacy its players were experiencing in their lives. In my case, anyway, I wasn't very popular in school, was picked on, teased,

et cetera. I think these games did something for people like me, allowed us to be the hero, and to do things that were popular on TV shows and movies at the time. We now had the power to beat up our bullies, teach them a lesson, and get to the girl at the end to boot. What a rush that was. And from a cathartic point,

kicking the bejesus out of someone as a martial artist feels better than jumping on a mushroom or a dinosaur as Mario. That's an interesting speculation. I actually kind of went the other direction because I was always, not always, but I was picked on as a kid sometimes. I have always kind of shied away from big brawny heroes

because they remind me of the jackasses who picked on me when I was a kid. I'm like, I don't want to be them. Like, there's no, there's no appeal for me to become that person. I like, you know, saving the day as the opposite of that person. You know, I pick, like, cute characters

or, you know, video games like Valis or whatever, you know, where it's a skinny girl saving the day. Like, that's interesting because it's the opposite of those assholes that I hated so much as a kid. I was thinking about that lawsuit comments. I feel like with how in, love with Hollywood, Kojima is.

James Cameron, the ultimate ploy would be, hey, I want to work with you, Kojima, and Kojima comes into a room to meet James Cameron, the door shut behind him. He says, take a seat, a curtain opens, and there are 30 lawyers. And they says, let's talk about your career. You know, it's based on most of my movies.

So, here's one from Alex Androski. As the gaming industry recovered from the crash of 83, armed with a generational leap in technology, the concepts behind individual games could afford to less abstract and more representational. This meant developers were free to rely

even more on one of their favorite tricks, ripping off popular movies. But the late 80s saw the pop culture zeitgeist transformed by films like Conan the Barbarian, Commando, Rambo, and Predator, and games followed suit. Rigar, as you mentioned, was already wearing the influence of cult classic crawl on its sleeve,

while Contra's influences are so blatant that the box art shows Arnold Schwarzenegger and Stelvestra Stallone, fighting a xenomorph. Gaming was capital, on cultural trends the same way Mattel's Heman and Hasbro's G.I. Joe Toy Lions did. My personal favorite result of this trend was Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear series. Kojima has never hidden his love for movies, and it's easy to see their influence on his work.

A protagonist named after Kurt Russell's character in Escape from New York, a commanding officer who looks exactly like Sean Connery, a setting with enough backtracking and re-exploration that you could arguably consider it, die hard on an X plot, and stealth game play that's inspired by James Bond. and that's barely scratching the surface. Yeah. So good observations here. Yeah, Colonel Campbell is the dude from Rambo, right?

Yep. Yeah, Troutman. Colonel Troutman. I totally forgot the name, the character, the actor. Oh, well. Yeah, like the Metal Gear 2, the Japanese art, which was totally changed for its eventual American release on the HD collection. Was the cover Kyle Reese from Terminator? Is that Metal Gear 1?

It's been a good. Yeah. Again, just directly traced in a very beautiful way, but still just that guy. Billy Norby says, It's easy to lay everything at the emergence of Schwarzenegger's Conan and Stallone's Rocky and First Blood. Frank Fisetto was already the biggest fantasy illustrator around by the time John Millius directed Conan in 1982. Bodybuilding and the Mr. Universe competition had its cultural peak in the 70s, Schwarzenegger on the male side and Lisa Leon on the female.

A better origin might be the launch of Marvel's Conan the Barbarian comic in 1970. It was an unusual series to be made by Marvel given that it had no relationship to their usual superhero universe. But it was a big hit, building on the underground lo-fi popularity of the Robert E. Howard Frisetta paperbacks and the forest embracing 70s fascination with Tolkien. The comic was beautifully and lavishly drawn by artists like Barry Windsor Smith and John Bushima. Red Sonia, partially a Marvel creation, and Michael Moorcock's Elbeck's album. Bino fantasy hero Elrica Melnambon, a spiritual predecessor to Alucard, were brought into the comics sometime later. Marvel's Conan was simply one of the best comics of the era with fun, swashbuckling stories, and stellar artwork.

Aside for the fantasy stuff, it would be a mistake also not to mention the 1970s martial arts boom as well. The insane, shirtless physique of Bruce Lee adorned wall posters all over the world and brought a new athletic physicality to action films. genre stars like Charles Bronson got more and more ripped toward the end of the decade then Dungeons and Dragons is a huge hit in the following years paving the ground for even more fantasy

and bold illustrations oh and he has a link to Hardcore Gaming 101's Tracing the Influence series which yeah let's see there's Michael Bean as Kyle Reese Solid Snake Contra Oh Narc

Narc True Lies Yeah it's pretty shame I'll definitely link to this in the notes for this episode. So I'll do one more later than we can move on to talk a bit more about this stuff. From Juan Guterres. As a 1980s kit, I very much enjoy the manly games from the mid-delayed 80s. Undeadily, it all comes from the influence that the 1980s film popular or films had in popular culture around the world in an era where Internet didn't exist.

Not long ago, I would have said this influence was limited to capitalist countries, but after seeing Chuck Norris versus communism, It's obvious that the influence also extended to communist countries. There's a marked difference in the kind of action scene in 70s and 80s films, almost a matter of style. Who could forget Arnold Schwarzenegger's famous one-liners from his 1980s movies. The style seems to have more easily permeated the Japanese collective of developers in the 80s and the early 90s. It's certainly still very much in the psyche of Hideo Kojima and Goichi Suda to this day. Some of the arcades that I finally,

arcade games I finally remember are manly games very much influenced by 80s movies. For instance, Altered Beast and Golden Axe. In the case of Altered Beast, the visual seemed to be inspired by the Greek mythology represented in Hollywood films like Clash the Titans and perhaps Jason and the Argonauts. But the muscular protagonist are very much a product of the 80s and the legacy of Conan. And it's Conan once again who seems to be the main inspiration behind Golden Axe with perhaps a touch of Red Sonia, something I'm intrigued with because it appears to have been Red Sonia in the comic book, not the film, that inspired Tyrus Flair's appearance. What's important to say about these games is that what drew me to them wasn't the gameplay but the visuals,

these manly depictions of fantasy violence that were very cool to me. Well, that's like 80s cartoons like Silverhawks, Thundercats, mask, he-man, or defenders of the Earth. Of course, Golden Axe is in fact an improvement on the also-manly game Double Dragon that inspired all other

manly beat-em-ups. Yeah. On the cartoon front, there was also what, Thundar, the barbarian. It was like, is that a kind of barbaria? I think he had a bird. Did he had a bird? I don't know if he had a pet bird

But he sounds right He had umpola That like orange guy And then the woman And wasn't Wasn't Thundar The design for that Done by Jack Kirby

I believe so So that traces you know Back to the comic book Superhero Fantasy Connections Kind of that sunsword And all the other stuff

Yeah And Kirby also did What was it Kamadi The Last Child on Earth Or whatever it was called Like a post-apocalyptic story About this kid who wrote around on a tiger.

I can't remember exactly, but yeah, something along those lines. So anyway, we kind of, I feel like, you know, we're all sort of on the same wavelength here. Like the reader mail very much lines up with the notes that I put together. But I would like to talk about a few, you know, kind of, we sort of set down the basis, you know, Conan and muscular dudes and so on and so forth, melee games. But through the course of the late 80s, this style, this type, sort of evolved from being brawlers and melee games, although that kind of became its own thing,

like the Drubble Dragon through line to Streets of Frage and Final Fight. But you started to see more of this kind of semi-realistic style, like big guys with big muscles, take on more of a shooter approach. And I really feel the inflection point for that was contra, but I'm curious to hear what you guys have to say.

Do you feel like those games could be considered an offshoot of what we would. what we've seen here like do you think they trace the same lineage and influences I mean I think so I mean it's still oily muscular dudes killing people but instead of swords it's guns and instead of the stone age or bronze age it's modern times or whenever they're happening and yeah for sure and actually it was odd for me to learn later in life that Rambo the first movie is a fairly serious movie about the plate of Vietnam veterans and I was like what

the heck I was just used to Rambo being this the thing parody to UHF the guy who's just blowing up everything with machine guns and rocket launchers in a helicopter. I had no idea. It came from semi-serious roots. Yeah, right around 1985, Hollywood also had a really big change in kind of the style. Like, if you look at First Blood, if you look at the original alien, those movies are very, very different from their sequels, which landed around the same time. Rambo First Bullet Part 2 and aliens, they're much bigger, more superheroic movies. I would say the same thing for Rocky as well.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. It was like literally countries were fighting each other, represented by boxers. Yeah, but having it got to Rocky 4 for sure. Yeah. Well, I think the thing is what you saw was just weapons started getting bigger, right? You know, you talk about the difference between alien and aliens, right? Aliens, they start doing, they have like the remote pods, everybody's guns are bigger.

They didn't have guns in alien. Yeah, they had a flamethrower. Yeah, they had a flamethrower that they put together. Right. But the deadliest weapon in an alien is actually a magazine. It's a rolled-up magazine that they beat Ash the Robot with. Yeah. I don't know.

I mean, sorry, go ahead. I was going to say it could be, this could be just me being naive, but it could be that, like, war was so far behind us, like a, like a war we were involved with. There was kind of like a fantasy, like, oh, it wasn't more fun? Like, remember war with guns and tanks and, you know, shooting things? That was kind of interesting. And there was not the connotation, like, no, we're in a war now and people are dying. This is insensitive.

It was sort of like a fantasy at that time in America. I mean, I keep going, thinking back to my childhood, and how much, like, semi-automatic weapons, so you're just permeating, like, everything. Like, remember Entertech, they did those, like, squirt guns that looked like actual. Just like Uzi's. Yeah, Uzi was the big thing. Uzi toys. Yeah, and you just, in the context of video games, there was a, you started getting, like, weapon upgrades, right? where it kind of culminated in like heavy barrel, which is like Akari Wars, except you're collecting pieces of this ultimate weapon.

And then when you get it, you're just able to wipe out just waves and waves of enemies, right? Yeah, and in the movie style, you're seeing, you know, Predator with, you know, Jesse Ventura's old painless gun, basically like a, you know, gatling gun. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. But I think the psychic scar that the Vietnam were and our terrible resistance. there inflicted on the American psyche, I think, you know, those really made the idea of war and militarism extremely unpopular throughout the 70s. Oh, for sure. And it wasn't until, you know, mourning in America and the rise of Reaganism that that started to become popular again. And you had stuff like G.I. Joe started as a military toy in the 60s.

And in the 70s, it became the adventure team. It was a guy with a beard and a turtleneck going on adventures and discovering Bigfoot. And then in 1982, they relaunched it again as G.I. Joe, the American military Delta Force, fighting a terrorist organization. And they had realistic jets and machine guns and tanks. And I think in the 80s, we'd all see this fantasy of actually fighting Russia. Right. We want to fight that. We want to shoot Russian people.

We want to red dawn, obviously. Like, what if Russia invaded us? Oh, my God. Like, there was this thirst for war or conflict in a way that was very. very naive, you know, I think, in that time. And it's really interesting how this shaped, like this, this aspect of a very, like, totally American

culture shaped Japanese games. Because in Japan, I just had a conversation with a couple of former Capcom composers and, you know, just kind of incidentally, because my wife is Vietnamese, it came up in conversation

about how she left Vietnam literally at the very last second at the end of the war. as an infant in her parents' lap. And the composers, the Japanese composers, were like, oh, yeah, you know, that's something that we don't really know anything about. Like, that wasn't our war,

so we only know that there was a war. We don't know the details of it. We don't know the process. And, you know, like, even so, because war became so unpopular here, I think that did account a lot for the rise of fantasy, you know, Lord of the Rings

and Conan, and that's, sort of thing and sci-fi Star Wars. Yeah. And then, you know, in the 80s, militarism started, yeah, like, you know, after a decade that started to come into vogue again and, you know, the sort of go America, let's take on the Russians and when the Cold War became popular again. And so you started to see more militarism in movies. And then you started to see it in games with stuff like Contra and Metal Gear.

Russian attack. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah, like, it's, the more I think about this, the more interesting it is. So it's not a crack-pack theory, thank God. I don't think it is. I mean, if you look at the kinds of game themes you saw in the early 80s, there was very little. Like, you very rarely saw combat for Atari 2600.

That was the exception rather than the rule. But in the late 80s, it was much more like, you know, heavy barrel, what's the name of Guevara in the U.S. Guerrilla War. Yeah, guerrilla War. I mean, I think, like, every war film now is a sobering look, like a saving private Ryan look at the horrors of war, like Hacksaw Ridge and stuff like that. There's no, like, fun romps with machine guns and, you know, fun explosions anymore. Because we've been in a war for 15 years, I guess, 14 years, yeah. So I feel like, yeah, we were a little naive and a little comfortable in the 80s.

Yeah. I mean, if you look at action movies now, right, or like, one. with gunplay. It's sort of like the lone guy versus his localized sort of problem. John Wick. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of the platonic ideal right now. Right, rather than like us versus country. Yeah. And you do

still see you do still see a lot of military type games, but even those seem to have a lot of uncertainty about what they do. What they're about. Call of Duty 4 is 10 years old now. We could do a retronauts on it. And that game, you know, even though it is very

like, you're cool, you're killing stuff. There are endless waves of soldiers. It also did make an attempt to show kind of the ugly side of war. I believe, I mean, spoilers, but the first thing that happens is that you're executed in the beginning of the game. Yeah. And it's not just a coalition. It's not just, you know, American soldiers running around. It's a coalition of international allies contributing to the fight.

And eventually Kevin Spacey would take over for whatever reason. Yeah. So, yeah, the video games have kind of wrestled a lot with the idea of. of war, but I think that's kind of a different topic. But, you know, going back to stuff like Contra, I feel like that really sort of set the tone

for basically an entire sort of universe of platform shooter games. I mean, you also had stuff like Mega Man that came out around the same time as Contra. It was another one. I mean, Ghost and Goblins was technically a platform shooter, even though

you know, you're throwing lances or daggers or crosses or whatever. Still, functionally, it's identical. But, yeah, you do start to see more of this, Rolling Thunder is another one, 1986 or so. Shinobi, where there's both melee and ranged attacks. You start to see this sort of variant offshoot where the manly guys

are not necessarily killing guys with their fists. They're killing guys, but they're okay with doing it from a distance. You mentioned Russian attack earlier, and that one's interesting. because it is a melee action game where you do get weapons but they're extremely scarce

and extremely powerful and you really have to conserve your ammunition. So to me that's almost like the sort of bridge between you know, Kung Fu and Contra

like a game where you're still a guy with a bladed weapon with a sharp weapon a sharp stick but there's guns out there and they're very helpful so why don't we just

move entirely to using guns and look how powerful we can be then. Well, yeah, I mean, this also goes to you're able to have a lot more on the screen, right? So with Contra, you can have just projectiles coming at you from everywhere and so you saw like bullet hell shooters and things like that starting. So, yeah,

might as well have something you could fire back. Yeah, technology and constraints and new possibilities were very, very important to all of this. I mean, Metal Gear has been mentioned a few times and that was a game defined by the limitations of its platform. It's, you know, one screen at a time, and it's a stealth game because it was on the MSX home computer, not the MSX2, but the MSX1, which was early 80s technology and didn't have the ability to create a game like Capcom's Commando where it's tons of enemies swarming you and shooting at you.

They had to kind of limit it to, you know, there can be like three enemies on the screen, and it's really best to avoid them. So that way it's never really pushing the hardware too hard. Thank you. I'm sorry. I'm not. I'm not. I'm sorry. Bob, you mentioned

Bob, you mentioned Fiss of the North Star. We should also talk about the manga influence. And, you know, manga and anime in a lot of ways were influenced by Western media. But by far, it's much more of a very specific Japanese medium, I think, and speaks to different cultural sensibilities than Rambo or whatever. So a lot of that's reabsorbing media from other countries and processing it and spitting out something that is distinct and unique to a culture.

No, I agree. I really feel like it really all goes back to the Warriors in some way. I don't know if we've talked about that. But just so much of the like just urban blight with people in punk outfits that I see, even in like fifth of the North Star, I think it's like a mix of that and Mad Max. But, I mean, and there's a lot of influences that go into this adult male manga. I'm not sure if Google 13 is that buff. But it's definitely part of that just like take no shit, super violence, you know, masculine manga. Yeah, Golgo 13 is interesting because he is actually very buff.

Like sometimes in the comics you see him and he like, you know, shirtless or whatever. And he's really muscular. And as the series has gone on, he's become more and more scarred. So he's like aged, even though he hasn't aged. you know, in terms of looking older, the sort of wear has shown on his body. But, you know, his primary specialty, even though he's a very capable hand-to-hand fighter,

his specialty is shooting people from a very great distance. Yeah. Sniper. Which is actually kind of hard to, you know, turn that into an interesting video game. There have been Galgo 13 video games, and there was an arcade game a couple of years ago. Yeah. That was just like a sniping game.

I've seen videos. It's really cool. I think one of the missions is you have to snip the high heel of a woman's shoe for some reason. It's just lots of really creative scenarios like that. Precursor to Silent Scope, right? Well, I think Silent Scope kind of was more of a precursor

to Galgo 13, or at least that particular game. Because, you know, you look at the NES game for Galgo 13, and it does have sniping sequences, but very, very few. It's mostly like you're walking and shooting guys with a pistol. Sometimes you miss, which Galgo 13 never done.

Not canonical. He never went through a lot of mazes in the manga, if I don't, if I recall. Actually, the maze part kind of reminds me of that one movie where he's like fighting a living golden statue of a Greek god. The only movie I know is Queen Bee. It was a different one. There is another one, and I don't know what it's called. Those mazes remind me of Festers quest, which is a nightmare, and we talked about that on a previous episode.

Although the manual for Gargo 13 does have maps for all the mazes inside. So if you didn't rent it, then it was a much easier game to get through. I did beat it back in the day. I don't know I'm not sure where else to go with this I was really hoping Frank would be here to talk about the guy games

Well we can talk about I mean there are other Hollywood influences In your notes that I find are pretty interesting Like Bayou Billy It was This was covered in the Simpsons episode Bart versus Australia But the short-lived fascination

America had with Australian things Yahoo Sirius Film Festival Exactly this is definitely Paul Hogan crocodile Yeah this is definitely of that like three to four year period and yeah Bayou Billy was

Paul Hogan and Crocodile Dundee and this is the only time I can tell this this story but I was looking I don't know why but I looked up the Japanese commercial for this game because Japanese commercials are usually more interesting there's some animation or whatever and this one is pretty cool

but in Japan the game is called Mad City but it is a non-English speaker saying the name of the game so he keeps saying mad shitty This game is mad shitty And this is the only time I can tell that story And that's it

Okay Yeah, you're right But you know, even though it is very clearly influenced by Crocodile Dundee It doesn't take place in Australia It takes place in New Orleans The Bayou Interesting

So you're fighting through the swamps of New Orleans And into Bourbon Street I don't know Where did Crocodile Dundee take place though? Did they go to New Orleans or was he like No, it started in Australia And then you went to New York City New York City was the second movie, right?

No, no. It was the first one, too. He was always a fish out of water. He was a crocodile d'hty to lost in New York. The third one was like L.A. And it's like, this is 2001 and we don't care anymore. Right. It walks on people's heads.

Please go away. I didn't even realize there was a third one. Yep. No, I feel like there's almost like some dukes of hazard in Bayou, Billy. Because the guy you fight at the end, kind of looks like boss of a log. A bit, yeah, a bit. But, you know, Double Dragon really gets on that Fist of the North Star thing, the Warriors thing. I mean, the enemies you fight are all named for characters from Injur the Dragon, like William and Roper and so forth.

The second game is a post-apocalyptic game, which is easy to ignore because it's not really reflected in a lot of the designs. But if you read the intro text, it says it takes place after this, like, nuclear holocaust or whatever. The first game does too, actually. Well, the first game does as well? It doesn't really play it up, but it's, you know, that's why you have guys like a bobo who are just basically like mutants. I thought he had, like, just some kind of birth defect or something. Why you have the armored helicopter inside your garage? Basically, yeah.

So I was just thinking of the first boss in Double Dragon 2 that has like the LeVar Burton headset on and he disappears and disappears when you beat him or whatever. It just reminds me of a like a Mad Maxy kind of thing. Right. Well, we kind of talked about this earlier that the enemy design like the sort of street tufts, right, like the dude with the Mohawk or other, you know, enemies like that just were prevalent in both film and in games. games, right? If you look at the first Terminator, right, he runs into Bill Paxton, who's dressed as sort of like that crazy guy. He's got the paint on his face. Yeah, yeah. Definitely that warrior's influence, so. It is fun to live in the Bay Area where there are still punks around, and I'll just be on

the Bart subway train, and they'll be surrounded by punks, and I'm thinking, I'm in a final fight level. Yeah, actually, the other day I was riding downtown, and, you know, I was wearing, like, my usual sort of almost retro 1960s. It's your Paul Lepton's cosplay. Yeah. But tie. And this kid sat down next to me

and was totally like shaved hair, Mohawk, punk with very meticulously torn jeans. I was like, man, this is such a San Francisco scene. Yeah, punk did not die here. Right. Nope, absolutely not. I'm sure it was a very amusing visual contrast the two of us.

It's just like all these games where you beat up punks in the streets like rainbow mohawked punks there are so many of these games from the 80s and the 90s that can go back directly to the Warriors and I think

Streets of Fire was another big 80s movie that is not mentioned as much but it is like basically the streets of rage movie like final fight can draw back to that in the warrior streets of fire

yeah and then you had other Hollywood influences too like games like Rolling Thunder it's a very different sort of masculinity. It's that sort of sleek, cool spy, like 1960s, like Man from Uncle. The guy you play as in Rolling Thunder, Albatross, is very tall and lanky. See a big hair? He does not have big hair.

It's close-cropped, right? It's just kind of like a normal... Yeah, I think that's side art. Yeah, it's kind of got hair. A little bit of anime there. But yeah, like even the music, it has a very sort of 60s vibe to it. like spy guy. And that, you know,

that's, spy guy. That's kind of the James Bond idea of masculinity. James Bond didn't get really ripped until 2006. No, he didn't. With Daniel Craig.

That was the movie where instead of Ursula Andres coming out of the water and making everyone horny, it was Daniel Craig coming out of the water and making everyone horny. So, yeah, I guess we could, you know,

just name Hollywood influences if we wanted to all day, but instead, let's kind of wrap this up by bookending it with another Jordan Mechner game. We talked about Karataka as sort of a big sort of formative moment in realistic proportions and sort of naturalistic character animation and design and video games. And Jordan Mechner ended out the 80s, kicked off the 90s with another game that really took that to the next level, which is Prince of Persia. And I feel like that's an important game because it sort of dialed back the idea of like a powerful hero as just a lump of gristle. Instead you had sort of this young teenager kind of wiry and very athletic and nimble. And his ability wasn't so much, you know, he was a hero, but his challenge wasn't to beat everyone up and kick a lot of ass, but rather to navigate to

to smartly make it through puzzles and traps. And it made action heroes more intellectual all of a sudden. And that didn't necessarily become the predominant theme. But you did see a lot of games start to kind of pattern themselves after Prince of Persia. You had, you know, flashback and out of this world and quite a few other games along those lines where the heroes weren't, you know, superheroic. They were more natural. It was kind of like the diehard of video games in a way.

not in the sense of like it is a game like Diehard but just in the way it sort of redefined what an action hero could be. More even every man. Yeah. Die Hard was the end of the bodybuilder trend

in Hollywood. He really saw that start to go away. Like Mario could just jump wherever he wanted but you'd have to like pull yourself up to the tops of you know, precipices and things like that. Whenever I play a 2D game that has that mechanic in it, I always think of Prince of Persia like when

Metroid fusion added. It was a fusion or zero mission? Yeah, I immediately thought like this is great. I'm glad they did this, but it is Prince of Persia completely. You don't have to jump, land with your feet on the ledge. You can grab onto it and then pull yourself up. So what would you guys say as the sort of the legacy of these games, this trend? I guess, you know, I was going to say like after diehard movies became less about the super muscular guy in Hollywood

and more about, like, a guy barely scraping through on his own wits. And video games also kind of, they moved a little bit away from that. But I think because of the nature of video games, they never really got fully away from that. No. And if anything, it's hard to get away from video games that are about a guy killing everything. Yeah, I think even as early as 1996, something like Duke Nukem 3D was a throwback to 80s movies to the point where they, oh, like all these movies, I'm just going to steal the dialogue and put it in this character's mouth. I feel like that

was just like, oh, remember these movies? Weren't they cool? Wasn't it cool to have a big, oily guy with a gun shooting everything in the face? Even as early as then, but I think now you can no longer present those ideas sincerely, which is why we have things or had things like Bullet Storm where it's like we have these macho idiots and we're going to have fun

with it because you're not going to take this seriously. You've seen these tropes before, so we're going to have fun. These guys are going to say stuff like dick tits. Yeah, or like shit dicks or whatever. I forget what they say. But yeah, it's it's way over the top, but I like, you can't present these ideas seriously just because they are so tropey. They become the object

of ridicule. I would say even Duke Newcomb 3D was not taking itself seriously, was presenting the action hero as sort of a throwback. Like the idea, you know, this is a guy out of time. He was very much, as Schwarzenegger was

at 96 becoming like the family goofball dad role in all of his movies like Jingle all the way. Duke Nukem was a throwback to when the hero was just a violent sociopath with a gun and very, very oily. Well, I think the thing you're also seeing now is the games industry, or at least the genres, it's so broad now compared to what we were buying, you know, back in the 80s. So while larger releases still have that, you know, protagonist killing a bunch of people,

there's a lot of guns and explosions, a lot of AAA money is sort of funneled in that direction. If you look at the number of games where you don't do that, you know, that are available, is staggering compared to or used to be. So I think from a pop, we're still carrying a lot of the legacy of guys with guns. And there's always going to be

guys with guns games. But because now there's a much wider range of people who play games, who create games, and most importantly, can distribute, you know, this will always be a genre. It was much more important in terms of

the overall percentage of games back then, but, you know, nowadays we have a lot more choice. Yeah, someone like Nathan Drake is a man with a gun who murders thousands of people in cold blood, but I don't trace them back to a Schwarzenegger or a Stallone. I mean, obviously, it's sort of a Tomb Raider takeoff, but I don't see any kind of movie influences in Uncharted. I don't know if you guys do at all. Oh, I mean, it's totally Raiders of the Lost Ark. Hmm. There's a lot of, there's a lot of, like, Hollywood aspiration. I just don't see as much gunplay with Indiana Jones outside of like the few instances that happens.

Right. No, I mean, Indiana Jones was much more about wits and fists. But in video games, you really got away from the idea of melee combat. I think part of that had to do with, you know, the rise of first-person shooters. Because melee combat does not work in that genre unless you're very, very lucky. Unless you're very good. Infinity blade, I guess. Yeah.

But, you know, I think also you kind of owe it to these shooters, like stuff like Shatterhand or Powerblade or whatever. They just moved away from melee combat, and it's very rare to see an action game that is based mainly around melee combat, or at least it was until they kind of figured out how to make it interesting again with Batman, basically, Arkham Asylum. Yeah. And then sort of on the Japanese side, Dark Souls and Demon Souls said, you know, what? What if instead of, you know, I guess there's two different philosophies at work there. In Batman Assassin's Creed, it's the Western approach where it's like this should be a quick, easy, breezy sort of semi-automated approach. And Dark Souls is like, it should not be quick and easy and breezy or automated.

It should be an effort of mastery. It should require you to commit yourself wholly. It's methodical with slow animations for the most part and a lot of waiting for an opening, things like that. Honestly, in a lot of ways, I feel like Dark Souls is descended spiritually from fighting games, which you might not think to look at the way the game appears or the genre that it's in. But the idea of, you know, really being conscious of your movement and your relative location to enemies and countering foes and understanding their tells, like, that's very much something that kind of went away in video games for a long time, except. in fighting games. I think you're right. I think an even better example.

That's a good example, but Brett Elston from a former Capcom employee has said this, our old friend Jose Otero said this, but Monster Hunter is very much like that. And in fact that, like, each weapon is like a fighting game character and everything is about, like, know what every animation does, know how long it takes to play out, know where the hitboxes are. It's all about that sort of very, like, all about intentionality, all about these methodical encounters that are very it's not just button mashing, it's just

about knowing your weapon and knowing your move set. Yeah. And just finally to close out, I think it's interesting that this was such a huge trend in Japanese games in the 80s and then basically completely vanished from Japanese games. It kind of became a joke in and of itself with the Cho Aniki

series. Yeah. Yeah. I think are like, you know, bodybuilders in space and it's very, like very deliberately over the top, pretty much laughably homo erotic, but in the kind of, you know, not like an appealingly homoerotic way, but more like a ha ha, isn't this silly, isn't this ridiculous kind of way? And I really think Shinji Makami's godhand is very much like that. It's like a comedy fist of the North Star almost where you're like spanking people and things like that.

But it's all, it's very, very mechanical in terms of the combat. Like you choose your moveset, you unlock moves and decide what each button does. it's very, very involved. Yeah, but these games are very much the exception to the rule. Oh, for sure, for sure. I think, you know, you tend to see more of that sort of beefy man style in Western games, but it doesn't feel like it comes from the Conan vibe. It feels more like it comes from, you know, 90s image comics vibe.

Video game aesthetics have not gotten past Rob Lee film. Oh, and I'm thinking of the entire time we're doing this, I'm thinking of, and I think, I'm sure I referenced this before in Retronauts, but that infamous Rob Lifefield, Leafield? I guess it's Lifeville. The Captain America. The Captain America, of course, yes, and just like, are you even, are you kidding me? And I got it, it probably wasn't on this podcast, but there's a great video of Stan Lee just destroying him on this 90s television show.

And he's just like, oh, no, you drew this wrong. Like, who's this guy? Oh, he's so dark. Like, you have to look this up. Just type in Stan Lee, Rob Leifeld, and YouTube will find it. I think we've come around to forgive him, but it's still a fun takedown of the image style. I mean, Rob Leifeld is a, I'm not a fan of his. art style. I was when I was a kid, and I was like, that's really cool. He does everything so weird. Look how many lines there are. Not even that. That was, it was more like... That's not McFarlane. It was their inkers is what it was. But no, Rob Liefeld, I was like, wow, he just, you know, draw all these crazy details and other things he doesn't feel like he needs to detail at all, like feet. Why is every character standing behind a bush? Yeah. But I have come around a little bit. Like, I don't like his art, but I respect him for just doing him.

Like, he does his thing, and he's happy to do that. And he's been successful at it. So, God bless it. It's not for me, but God bless you. But, I mean, that style is so pervasive in stuff like, you know, Gears of War and Arkham Asylum. Like, I didn't play Arkham Asylum, and I should have. But I was just so turned off by the aesthetic of it. I was like, this is the opposite of what I want from Batman.

I don't want Batman to be, like, you know, King Slab. I want him to be like this sinewy, shadowy creature, which is actually kind of how he plays in the game, but it's not how everything it looks. He is king slab in that new movie. By the time I will never see. It's really bad. But yeah, by the time I realized, oh, no, actually in terms of mechanics,

this is really interesting. It was the ship had already sailed and I never had time. You will like it. It is a very metric, the first game. I've played, you know, parts of it. I've played the sequels, but... First one's the best, Mike. Yeah, so that's my understanding.

But, you know, just it is the first impression that it gave is just like, this is missing the point so badly. But it turns out it didn't. It's funny because, spoilers, I guess, whatever, who cares. The final boss is the Joker all roided out on some kind of super serum, and he is totally, like, out of the McFarlane box of ideas. It is not good. It is not good, yes. So anyway, we actually need to kind of wind down now. Yeah, we're going to wrap it up here.

But I hope this was an interesting topic. It was kind of me monologuing a lot and kind of all over the place. But I don't know. It is an interesting trend that I've been wanting to write about for a very long time. So I'm glad that I finally got to exercise that demon, that very muscular demon. So thanks guys for joining us. Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks everyone who wrote in.

There were some great letters this time. We'll be back next week with more podcasting. But first, why do we find out more about the people whose voices you've been hearing, Bob? Oh, it's me. Hey, you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. I also write every day for fandom video game stuff, sometimes anime, if you're lucky, at fandom. And I'm also on something awful. I've been writing there for like 12 years now every other Thursday for that long.

a new comedy article every other Thursday at Something Awful.com. And my other podcast is Talking Simpsons. It's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons every Wednesday at TalkingSimpsons.com. We go into super great detail in every episode. But the time you hear this, we should be midway into season five, so you

literally have 100 episodes to listen to. Just choose one of an episode you like, and you should like the show. I almost guarantee it. Steve? Steve Lynn, Stephen P. Lynn, on Twitter, and I'm on the board of the Video Game History Foundation. We just launched on Monday, so you'd find out more

about us at gamehistory.org. And finally, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite, and you can find me at Retronauts, because that's what I'm doing. I'm making Retronauts. You can, of course, support the podcast by going to patreon.com slash retronauts.

Your donations, your contributions, keep us going. If you contribute $3 a month, you get an advance episode a week ahead of everyone else, plus without any advertisements. So that's nice. And even if you don't support us, that's fine. You can find us on iTunes. You can find us at Retronauts.com. Hopefully by the time this episode airs, the site will have launched properly

and we'll have amazing content for you every single day. That's very, very cool. I know because I'm working on it and it's going to be cool. So I think that's everything, all the housekeeping we need to do. So thanks again for listening and we'll be back in a week. Or maybe sooner than that, if there's a mic or before, who knows? It's going to be awesome. We always do stuff. So much stuff. Thanks. And caller number nine for $1 million. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of...

Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Oh, gosh. Bad network got you glitched out of luck.

Switch to boost mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network, can get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month, plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. The Mueller report. I'm Edonohue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General.

Maine, Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it.

It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. expecting a man police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Edonohue.