Think Like A Game Designer - Jordan Weisman — Crafting Iconic Worlds, The Interplay of Story and Mechanics, Lessons from Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Virtual Reality (#9)

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

I’ve looked up to Jordan Weisman for years. He is a revolutionary story-teller, game designer, and Entrepreneur. He created the legendary worlds like Shadowrun and Battletech that have resonated with fans for over 30 years. He launched his first company, FASA, at twenty years old. He created one of the first Virtual Reality Simulation games with Battletech, and he went on to develop the revolutionary Mageknight and Heroclix games and continues to be on the cutting edge of the tabletop and video game industry. He is continually pushing the boundaries of what is possible in technology, design, and business. Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing this game design legend. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Jordan Weissman. Now, I have looked up to Jordan for years, and it was actually one of the best honors of my life when I got to sit on a panel with him at GenCon's 50th anniversary. Jordan is a revolutionary storyteller, game designer, and entrepreneur. He's created legendary worlds like Shadow Run and Battletech that have resonated with fans for over 30 years. He launched his first company, FASA, at 20 years old. And he's also been on the forefront of creating new technologies for games. He's created virtual reality simulation games with Battletech. He's created brand new formats for miniatrist tabletop gaming with Mage Knight and Hero clicks and countless other innovations that we get into in the podcast. He's always pushing the boundaries of what's possible in technology, design, and business. And unlike most of the other people that I have

interviewed on this podcast, the fact that he crosses that boundary of entrepreneur, game designer, technologist is something that was really an inspiration to me as I was founding my own company. And I've learned so much from him over the years since we first met. And now I'm very excited to share his lessons with all of you. So without further ado, here is Jordan Weissman. Hello and welcome. I am here with Jordan Weissman. Jordan, it is awesome to have you here. Well, thank you, Justin. I appreciate the invitation. You know, it was, I'm going to start with just like a little story because for me, you know, I've been in the game industry for a long time. And one of the things that for me really made it feel like I made it, like I've really made it somewhere.

It was like being on a panel that Gen Con 50 retrospective panel with you, we did a couple years ago. I have looked up to you for many, many years for multiple reasons. As I mentioned to you then, not only creating great games, creating legendary IP and stories that have lived forever and creating more companies than I can count, as well as sort of innovating technologically in the industry. So there's like a ton of stuff to cover. I doubt we'll be able to get to it all in this one chat, but I'm really excited to just start digging in. Well, no, I appreciate that. It'll be difficult to live up to that intro over the next hour. So I always start these kinds of chats the same way because a lot of our audience are people who are aspiring to be game designers, people who really want to like get into the industry. And so I always sort of start with the question of like, okay, what got you hooked here?

How did you get, how did you become, you know, who you are, get into the industry and become a professional game designer? Wow, well, I mean, it was a different time, all right? I feel like that old old view online, you know, it was. But I was a severe dyslexic and luckily at a very good school. And so they spotted that I was dyslexic back. This was, you know, like early 60s. And so dyslexia was not well understood. But I had a very, a teacher who was really with it.

and she suspected that I wasn't dumb. I just had this new thing she'd been reading about. So I was lucky I had tutoring. So I knew how to read, but I didn't do it because it was almost like physically painful. So you just avoid it. And like a lot of dyslexics, you learn to kind of navigate the system and, you know, kind of cheat your way through school to avoid reading, which is what I had done up until I was 16. and I had been going to a summer camp up in Wisconsin for many years,

and at 16 I was there now working as a junior counselor, and one of the full-fledged counselors, a college student, brought in this brand new game that had just been released called Dungeons and Dragons. Of course, you know, Lake Geneva was only, you know, about four hours away from where the camp was. And that game, you know, I mean, it is completely honest to say, completely changed my life. the kind of social and problems solving and collaboration and just immersion. It was really fantastic.

Unfortunately, I didn't know what the heck anybody was talking about. Never, you know, having read Tolkien, no less, you know, see Jane, Dick, and Run. I haven't read any of that. So I had a lot of catching up to do. And D&D was my kind of entry drug to reading. it forced me to actually, you know, finally there was something I wanted to read for me. So that's how I got into gaming. It became kind of dominant in my life really quickly.

And just started, you know, running games at school, took all my friends back up. And there's a whole wonderful story of Dave Arvison when we bought our copies of D&D. You can dive into it another time. Sure. So, yeah, but it basically got into playing and then, you know, started making it. stuff. And then while I was at school, I started printing stuff up, taking them to game shops and, you know, offering it for sale. My first products were deck plans for a role-playing game by Mark Miller called Traveller. And Mark saw some of them at a convention at one point,

and he took me over and said, hey, you want to get a license and do these officially? I was like, sure. And that was kind of how I got started. That's awesome. How old were you when that happened? Um, we started FASA when I was 20. Um, uh, it was literally my group around the table. And I said, Hey, I'm going to, you know, print these deck pens up and sell them. Um, who wants to be my partner? And Ross Babcock raised his hand and said, yeah, I'll throw in a couple hundred bucks. And, uh, that was it. We, uh, we ended up working together for 20 plus years. That, yeah. So that's, that's crazy to me that you, you had that, that kind of sort of entrepreneurial spirit at that stage of life.

such that you, you know, sort of got investment and just started printing right away. What, what is it about your sort of your personality or background that kind of made you, made that feel like a natural thing? Because most people would have stopped there. They're like, oh, cool, I love games. This is awesome, but I don't know what to do, or maybe I can go find someone to work for. What got you to be, you know, kind of just kick that process off? Well, I had a great role model in my dad.

My dad was entrepreneurial and actually ran many a handful of different publishing companies over the years. So the idea of printing and distributing something was kind of, you know, I had seen that as I grew up. Of course, he also told me, you know, he said, whatever you do in life, don't be a publisher because it's a really hard business. So then what do I do? I just go off and start to become a publisher. But, yes, I mean, I had a great role model, and I think that that's key, right? It's like the classic story. If you don't believe you can do it, then you can't do it, right?

And so I was raised in an environment which showed me it can be done. And thus, I, you know, believed I could. That's great. Yeah, it's actually one of the reasons why I started doing this podcast and, you know, talking to a lot of different successful designers to, like, show these different kinds of stories and, like, give people examples of like, no, no, look, it doesn't matter if you're dyslexic and you don't know that, you know, what your place is here, you can make it here. Or I have tons of other stories where people would just, you know, get started and start

creating stuff on their own and either get discovered or start, you know, just working their way through stuff. And every story is unique, but has these echoes of common themes of like find something you're passionate about, start doing it for free and doing it because you love it. And then, you know, over time, you can find a variety of different ways to actually make a living doing that. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think, and I don't know much about many other industries, but anything in the creative arts,

if you don't love it, if you're not passionate about it, then don't bother, right? You can't go into something in the creative arts because you think it's going to make money, because odds are it's not, right? And so, yeah, you have to do it because you love it and you have this need to try to express it and, you know, and really because you're driven to make people smile, right? that's got to be kind of core in your DNA, which is if you're a person who loves working hard so that other people have a good time, then you could be successful at this. But you got to do it for that passion.

And then, you know, hopefully money is a side product. But if you're going in and just looking at it, oh, this is a place where a lot of money is, it's not. It'll be really hard. Yeah, that's totally right. I love the way you put that. or someone that's willing to work hard to make other people happy because that that really is like that's the payoff, right? I mean, the same sort of things. We go to the, you know, conventions.

We see fans and you see how excited and lit up they are by what you do. And it takes you out of this cloud of like how much in the weeds you've been and how many things you see that are wrong that still need to get fixed. And you're like, oh, yeah, that's great. I made these people so happy. That's great. No, it's very true. And I think that's something that's always been really special about the tabletop game industry is, is that, you know, since its inception, we've had this ability to connect with our audiences through conventions, which, you know, like video gaming didn't have until, you know, the internet, right?

And so that feedback loop that we had with our players was enormously valuable, right? Both emotionally, as you said, for us as designers, because those days get long and hard. And it's great to get that energy from people to realize, wow, I am making people smile. I am making a difference in some small way in people's lives. but also to help you make the games better, right? The feedback and the stories really do, you know, make the games better. And so, yeah, it's been a huge advantage that we've had for, for what, 40 years now. Yeah, yeah, well, this ties into something else.

There's a message I kind of keep reiterating, which is the importance of that, you know, feedback and iteration, right? Like, nobody comes out of the gates a great game designer. No game comes out of the gates, a great game. it's all about that iteration loop and testing things and seeing like, okay, this feels right, this feels wrong, this thing can be improved and going through cycle after cycle. And you're right to highlight that like tabletop gaming, and I always recommend people, regardless of where their interest lies, you know, start with tabletop gaming because the iteration cycle is so much tighter.

You can get feedback more quickly. But when you're dealing with the digital properties, it's much, it's much harder and it's much more expensive and mistakes are much more expensive. How do you work to sort of minimize that? iteration loop and cost or what what lessons have you been able to apply from tabletop to make your digital games more successful well i mean i think um i think what a phrase that kind of used for many years is ttf right time to fail um and this the shorter ttf is the better your game's going to be right because you can guarantee i don't care how many years

you're doing it um whatever you write down first is going to suck right um and and so it's It's all about minimizing that time to failure, right, so that you can, like, do it and fail and make it better and fail and make it better and fail. And, you know, just work that cycle. So I do think that is a huge advantage to Tabletop Gaming House, right? Because it doesn't take you many months and many talented and expensive people to visualize the idea and get it to a point where you can test it and realize it sucks. You know, you can do that so much quicker in Tabletop. And I think one of the key takeaways on digital is that we try to use table. as much as possible, you know, doing tabletop prototypes of our gaming, of our games to the greatest extent possible to try to vet that stuff out.

And then also what we've learned over the years is on the electronic side is that you have to assume that anything you're building in the beginning is throwaway code. And it is only there to teach you how to make the game better. so we now have you know used to be like oh we'd be oh we'd mess around for a month or two and now and now we're on the real development no now we look at it more like we will be in prototype phase for you know a year or so and we will then take that year's worth of work and we will completely throw it out and we will start over and write the game from scratch but now we know what we're making because that year of prototyping should have resulted in an enormously hacked piece of code but a fun thing to play. And then we throw all that hacked code away and we, you know, we capture the fun play and now build it on a solid engineering base. But trying to build, it's kind of like trying to build the foundation for a building before you know what the building's really going to be. Like is it a townhouse or a hundred story skyscraper? Those are really different technical foundations. You have to build underneath the building. So understanding your building first is what

really allows you to build a good foundation. And it goes so much faster, right? I mean, you'll take what took a year to arrive at. And when you go back and, as the engineers say, refactor the code to make it, you know, actually shipable quality, it'll come back together in months, right, rather than the year or so it took you to figure out what was fun. Yeah, that is gold. And, oh, God, I wish we had this conversation before I tried to build my own digital game. Because I did the same thing as far as the played and is at least smart enough to know I should be paper prototyping and iterating as much as possible until I had something. really fun. But then once I started in the digital side, I was like, well, it's okay. I'll just build it in pieces and we'll just layer on top of what we already have and it'll be fine. And that was

troubled to say the least. Well, we've all made that mistakes many, many times. Yes, yes. Well, that's again, another purpose of the podcast is so people can make cheaper mistakes than we have. Yes, that would be great. So I just to dig in a little bit more before we move to this. So when you, you know, you spend a year-ish on a, you know, sort of, you know, first paper prototype and iterate as much as possible, then garbage code and iterate as much as possible. And then, okay, yep, this is fun. Now we know the thing we're building. How much does the thing still change a lot from when that, you know, are there still movements back and forth in that last year? or is it like once you got that defined thing now,

it's just sort of polish and get it, you know, get it to work properly? Or do you find there's still some thrashing, even in this more expensive phase? Oh, no, it's, the game still changes, right? Because your prototype isn't, you know, 40 hours long, right? And your prototype's kind of captured the essence of the play cycle. But there's going to be a ton of development to, you know,

that kind of creates the arc of the play. So you're going to be introducing lots of new types of characters and abilities, and you're going to be introducing, you know, new types of situations, all of which is going to cause you to find how that works within the structure where it is. So it's not like it's not the equivalent of a blueprint, right, that when the architect's finished and you hand it over to construction and just go, yeah, it's perfect, go. No, there's still going to be tons of little loops. They're just much smaller and less expensive now, right? so that, but they should embrace the same kind of approach, right? Let's hack together a version of, you know, the grenade launcher and see if it's fun. And now, okay, now let's go back and we'll build it in the right way, right?

And that's why what I... You're designing components within the overall structure and loops within the overall structure, but the overall structures are, maybe if it's not a blueprint, it's scaffolding is there, and you're just sort of building in the insides. That's the goal, right? And admittedly, even like, you know, sometimes even you'll find pieces of the scaffolding that, that as you've got much further into things, you start to, oh, wow, that actually, that piece of scaffolding is even wrong, you know, we need to go back and swap it out. So it just, but the way to think about it is it's like a spectrum, right? And you're just narrowing and narrowing and narrowing the spectrum as you go forward, you know, in terms of where the thrashing takes place, right?

in the beginning you're swinging all over the compass right and then when you as you move after you finish that prototype phase you should be kind of like well we're in this quadrant you know we're in 90 degrees now and then as you you know as you get further and you're just narrowing that down to okay now we're in a 10 degrees amount of thrashing because we really got you know we're on channel and and you're in kind of high volume production right yeah the most expensive thing is what is to hit high volume production while you're still out at like you know 180 degrees of spectrum because you're going to make a ton of content that's not going to be useful. Right.

Right. But if you, you know, if you're, if you've hit your high volume content development when you're at, let's say, you know, 45 degrees of spectrum, you have, you know, the percentage chance of the stuff you're building being useful is much, much higher. Yeah, that's interesting. I like the, this sort of analogy of the sort of the spectrum and the, the length of your, of your swings and variance. I, yeah, when I, when I talked about this in my book, I kind of talked about the phases of

design and that you know there's sort of like the you know high level engine and then engine development and then component design and component development and polish and and that each phase you're focusing on more narrow and narrow questions as you you know it's never a precise you know transition but it's like over time you're sort of funneling down to you know little details as opposed to big big shifts and I find that to be a pretty important way to sort of think about as you move forward. And it's actually something I've noticed in, in novice designers, they spend a lot of time worrying about little details at the beginning. When those things are completely irrelevant and you're wasting a ton of time. I know, trying to stick with our building analogy, it's like I'm worrying

about the paint color when I don't have a foundation yet and you're just, you know, wasting a lot of time. Oh, it's so true. And, you know, another mistake that's so commonly made is like, well, you know, we better get started on the cinemas. Like, what? Like, you know, again, it's like, you know, to use your analogy of the building in the paint, it's like, so wait, now you're doing the flyer for moving in? It's like, it's like, don't you think you should know what the building is first before you try to sell apartments in it?

Yeah, so, I mean, it is tempting to like, oh, let's get to the fun part and tell the stories. And it's like, the stories are fun, but they're there to support the game mechanics, right? I mean, it is, you know, I love narrative games. I mean, that's my whole career is based on narrative games. But it is, it's a game with a narrative. It's not a narrative with a game, right? Now, that's not always true.

Like, I did a game called Shadow Run, right? Which a lot of people's kind of initial review was, it was a game you played in spite of the game system because you love the story so much. But that's obviously not ideal, right? You want the mechanics and the narratives to really, really sink. And so you want to make sure that your time. telling a story that's supported by your game mechanics that you can actually bring that story to life via the mechanics you've created. So it is, and also the story's going to change. Stories change, you know, a ton over the course of development of a computer game or any game.

And so it is, you know, it's, I always say, you know, resist the, the temptation to go do those expensive kind of assets until the very end. And you have to do a work back because they take time but you know um to figure out when you need to start them but but boy really try to start all that stuff as late as possible well so that's this is great uh because this transitions this is something i really wanted to talk about with you first of all i mean shadow run really was one of the most resonant like stories for me growing up i mean i played through that game and i didn't mind the game mechanics at all i've played through that ton i played through the nintendo version i played you know i i've read through the books i've like i became obsessed with that world and that universe and

And so I really did want to dig into with you, like, how does story overlay with design in your work? Like, you know, so in my world, I am almost always a mechanics and game design first person. I will build what I see is a great game and then I will make sure that there's a world that kind of fits to it with some. But I've paid a price for that in times. And I've actually been over time changing my process a little bit more to incorporate story earlier to make things more resonant by the time we get to the end. And I'm curious what your process looks like to make these stories that like now, I mean, span for decades that people are just, you know, still loving and coming back to. So, yeah, can you talk a little bit about how that syncs up? Sure.

And it's different. I think it is different between tabletop and digital ends, and specifically in role playing games versus even, you know, board games on the tabletop side. So, I mean, Shadow Run was a, you know, a classic kind of RPG, role-playing tabletop RPG. And so in that context, it was, for me, the creation process was all about story. And then worked with a bunch of great guys to then build mechanics within that story that I'd come up with. And, you know, kind of on back on the business side for a second, right? because this is commercial art, right?

So commerce and creation are often intertwined. And in this particular case, I had been working on a cyberpunk role-playing game because I've been reading a bunch of the cyberpunk books that had come out and thought the world was super cool. And so it was working on a game and setting in that genre. And then Mike Ponsmith released Cyberpunk. And as Mike is apt to do, it was a really good game. And I wouldn't have mind being like the second

cyberpunk game, but the first good one. But I didn't want to be the second cyberpunk game that tried to be as good as the first one was. Makes sense. So I basically shelved what I was working on, right? But it just kind of kept nagging in the back of my head. And I was like, well, how do I spin it? How do I make mine different?

than what Mike had done, right? And that's when I kind of like tripped on the concept. Well, how about if you, you know, look at what the essence of what cyberpunk is all about, right, which is this kind of dehumanization of humanity, right, both on the macro level with governments no longer being even pretending to be concerned about citizens and seating all that to corporations, which are only looking at profits. And at the micro level of humans not believing that the physiology they were born with is good enough. And so they're constantly replacing their own physiology.

So it is this whole kind of, you know, we're divorcing ourselves from humanity and as a wider extent from nature. And it's like, well, what if we put a contrasting force into that, which is what if nature is now trying to fight its claws way back, right? And the expression of power in nature is magic. Right. And so I was like, oh, cool, magic versus tech. I yeah, it's certainly not a new idea. People have talked about that before. How do I get there in a way that's interesting?

And my dad was a big kind of amateur archaeologist and had tons of books about the Mayans and Mesoamerican cultures. And so I grew up with that stuff and I was like, oh, wait a minute, the long count. And so then it just became, oh, I can use the whole Mayan calendar as a way of talking about how magic flows. from and from so came up with that kind of story insight and then just went crazy pulling out encyclopedias because this was before the internet you couldn't do a wickrpedia search so i literally had like 40 different encyclopedias open all over the place um you know doing cross-referencing and building my alternate histories um to uh to put that story together uh and then went and said

okay now what's a game system we could we could bring this to life with right um and that was true Even on Battletick as a board game, because I think the goal in that board game was to find a hybrid space between a kind of board game mechanics, but RPG investment, player investment. And so world came first. And I think that's, that was kind of in the 80s mechanics. weren't, how do I phrase this, weren't as elegant as they need to be today. Right. So the mechanic could have a lot more rough edges if the fantasy, that the player fantasy was rich and deep enough, right?

Today's world, whether on tabletop or in computer, you can't get away with that. Right. Your mechanics have to be much more elegant than we could get away with, you know, 40 years ago. and so yeah well you were laying the foundation for the things that now we take for granted so no but i mean i think all arts evolve right and and and you know the state of game development today is just way better i mean we're making the industry as a whole is making way better games than were made 40 years ago right just i mean in terms of you know like i say the elegance of the mechanics the the how long they take to play their ability to integrate into our lives and

rather than dedicate your lives to them. All of these things, I think, are improvements. And as a result, we have more people playing games than ever before, which is fantastic, you know. But it also means you have to approach the problems in different ways, right? So I don't think, like, I'm working on a tabletop game with my son at the moment, Zach, and you can't, you know, it's just an example. We're in the throws. We're in those wide swing period there.

and it is a matter of, you know, you can't start like I did 40 years ago. Well, here's a great story. Now let's figure out what the mechanics are to fit to it. You really have to kind of work both sides at the same time now. And because the mechanics have to be much more elegant, they have to then match to the fiction in a more connected way. On the PC side, I mean, on the video game side, it is, I think, even more mechanics driven.

right? And then you blend your, you build your story around the mechanics that are really, that really work because, you know, and there's a difference between setting and story, right, in that, you know, a big setting is really inspirational, but a story is what you actually play. But an individual story can be relatively, is easier to reflow around a mechanic than trying to, you know, be stuck on a story element and then not be able to get a, mechanic, you know, to mesh well with it, that, you know, that you'll get appropriately slammed for that.

So it's sort of easier to rewrite a story to fit a mechanic than the other way around. Absolutely. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Story is much more flexible than mechanics are. So digging in a little bit more on the story sides, when I hear from your story of Shadow Run is a couple of things that I think are really important to highlight. One, you know, you said specifically sort of commerce and art are intertwined, that you actually stopped this, you know, the sort of game and story you were making at the time because

there was another one out there that was telling the same story and telling at least as, you know, pretty good, and had a pretty good game going. So there's this, this idea that I think also is somewhat corrosive that, you know, the starving artists that like, no, no, no, this is my pure expression. It doesn't matter if there's an audience for it. You know, I think building, being good at the job of design and is also being understanding the marketplace. And I think that's the... Yeah, I mean, I think that's key, right? There's a difference between fine art and commercial art, right?

And, you know, fine art, the artist has to speak to themselves, right? And commercial art, we have to speak to an audience, right? And, you know, I often put it together as that, you know, fine art is done when it's done and commercial art is done by Tuesday. Yes, I use the phrase, deadlines are magic. It's somehow mad. Somehow there's a deadline and this, we're running out of money, so we're launching is, yeah, we did it. We got it done.

Exactly. And then I think there's there was something else there, which is, I think, powerful. And what I've been trying to go back to when I'm trying to create new, new stories, new world is that, you know, you tied into these fundamental, not only fundamental resonant stories and kind of mythologies, and use those, but also these struggles that we can relate to at a basic level, right? Like it was shadow run. It's this idea of technology as a way to improve ourselves, but also as this thing that's taking us away from ourselves and what that means and then, you know, sort of over-dramatizing it and representing in this fantastical way, I think is a big part of why people care and why

people, again, you know, however many decades later are like still super invested in that kind world because that kind of story is even more resonant today in many ways than it was when you first wrote it. Yeah. No, I mean, it's scary how much of the dystopian future which at a run projected we already live in. And that's kind of frightening. So, yeah, I think that's true that the goal is to create stories that can feel real, settings

that can feel real. And they then connect at a deeper level. And my cheat to doing that is I steal them because, you know, that's so much better than trying to – easier than trying to write them yourself. But where I steal them from is history. I'm a huge history fan, and I read a ton and ton of history. And my kind of feeling is that if it actually – if a version of the story actually happened, then the kind of human and geopolitical and social forces that made it happen feel real because they were. So there's kind of, even if people don't know the history that I'm referring to, I just feel that like those things feel like they must, they feel more organic, right, to us because other humans had made those decisions previously.

and so some reason we can understand them more naturally, then trying to, you know, kind of like a novelist will do, they'll write a character and that character will drive them wherever they want to go. That's a different kind of thought process I'm doing when I'm doing world construction. When I'm doing individual story construction, that's true. But world construction, I try to look for historical paradigms to base it on. And so all of the big settings I've done are kind of bringing together, there are different themes, but then overlaying them on top of, you know, kind of a historical

framework that also gives me a framework, right, gives me that foundation to help build things on. So, which is, you know, a lot less scary than, you know, trying to every day have a completely clean sheet of paper. Yeah. Yeah, this is the couple of themes here. You know, first of all, I think, you know, all creativity is theft at a fundamental level. and being able to steal from great, you know, narrative arcs both in real life or that people we already know are resident, like, you know, religious stories and things that, you know, sort of the classic heroes journey type things I've found to be really just, it's just great to rely on these things. We know that these work. We know that people care and we know that these things are going to be resonant. I find to be very helpful.

Yeah. And one of the things that I lecture when I teach about IP creation is, This concept just I kind of boil it down to, you know, establish the familiar so that your audience can appreciate the exotic. If everything in your world is kind of brand new creation and equally exotic, then your audience doesn't know what's important, right? Is that a toothbrush or a weapon that will destroy the world? I don't know because they're both completely exotic to me. I have no idea, right? and it becomes it becomes very hard

for an audience to have their footing they have to be able to feel some some grounding in the world so that they can then you know kind of go along for the ride I mean I'll use a very old example

but it was a great one at the time Star Wars the first scene in Star Wars is especially for the era was completely mind-blowing right of spaceships and and robots running around and people shooting each other

and this magical big guy in black armor is like, what the hell is going on? I have no idea. I'm just completely lost, right? It's all cool, but I'm completely lost. I have no idea. And then we cut to this farm, which looks, again, completely alien, and I'm still lost.

But then I'm in a scene in a kitchen between an aunt and uncle and a kid. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I saw that scene in my house last month. Right? because the relationships between the people, the goals of the teenager, the conservatism of the adults, was completely human, completely identifiable and grounding for us. Now all of a sudden, I'm like, oh, okay, I have a foundation now. I can now understand the exotic because the familiar has been established, you know. And I think that's really important to do in our games.

And I've made this mistake on several of my games where I've been like, oh, it's also new and different. and the audience is like, I don't know where to stand. I don't have a foundation, you know, for appreciation and navigation through this world. So it's important to be able to find that foundation. I've actually taken it to the extreme now in thinking that, you know, the goal is to change as little as possible. Not to kind of show off by how much you can change, but to change as little as you need to to achieve what you want for your mechanics and your story. that's a great that's a great frame uh frame shift i uh yeah i think similarly or maybe not as extreme as you but i also talk about this this principle of you know you can't be your audience can't relate to

your game if it's too new like trying to be too innovative and too original is actually going to you're going to get lost and that that you really need people to be able to say oh okay it's kind of like this but with this thing right i can do an elevator pitch for my game that is like allows you to reference things that you already know. And if you can't do that, then it's going to be very hard to get an audience. It's going to be very hard to get people to come along on the ride with you. Absolutely. And I do think that you're right, that this, that kind of, it's not just in story, right?

You need to look at the product overall, right, the game overall and realize what are the new elements? What are the existing comfortable elements? And that includes mechanics. It includes monetization, includes story, includes artwork, right? so that if you want to do a radically new story, then do it on a mechanics that everybody understands, right, so that they're not trying to figure out both simultaneously, right? Right. If you want to introduce new mechanics, then do it in a world that they kind of already understand so that they, again, don't have to try to absorb everything at the same time and figure it all out. So, yeah, I do think you're right.

It is mixing, looking at kind of where is the innovation taking place and not trying to innovate on all aspects simultaneously. So speaking of innovation, I believe, I think this was actually the first time we met, or if it's not the first time we met, it was the first time we had a lengthy conversation was on a panel about physical digital hybrid design at Pax Dev. And this is this sort of bringing in the new technology and interacting in the physical world in different ways, either via virtual reality or hybrid physical digital games. and you've been at the forefront of this since the concept existed, basically. And I really, you know, with both successes and failures, I really want to dig into this world because I have tried and taken bites at this apple and never been able to kind of get to something that worked. And you've lived and died on this hill multiple times. So I want to dig into that as a sort of both what drove you to be so kind of, you know, trailblazing on this space

and what you've learned over the years to kind of make it, you know, where we're headed. Yeah, by all means, where do you want to dive in? Yeah, so let's start early on. Let's start with the kind of, you know, your first exposure to sort of the concept of the virtual reality worlds and building those awesome battle tech pods, I believe was your first real foray into this. Yeah, so like, you know, I think the old expression is, you know, whenever you're making plans, God laughs. And, you know, that's certainly true here. So I was, my very short college career was at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, which is the fifth government academy.

You have to get a, you know, congressional appointment to it, just like for Annapolis or West Point or Air Force Academy. but it's to learn to either be a deck officer or an engineering officer on merchant ships. And I, you know, love sailing, so I figured a life at sea would be wonderfully romantic. As I went to school there, I realized, well, maybe that wasn't the case. But they just built this brand new thing at the academy, which was a ship bridge simulator. It was this $50 million building that had a bridge of a ship surrounded by projection screens showing very, very low crude polygon models of harbors. And the most dangerous point in navigating a ship is not at ocean, but when you're actually close to things you could hit, which means bringing them in and out of ports. and so this simulator was to help pilots.

Pilots are, when a bridge, when a ship comes into a port, it's probably more detail when it comes to a port, they send out a local pilot to that ship on a little boat who then is the one who is in charge of the ship as they bring it into port just because you have local, you know, you have local knowledge versus the captain who may be from across the world, right, to help successfully driving it. And they needed a way to train those people.

So they built a simulator. And students got to tour it once. We would never get to play on it, but we got to tour it. And I saw that thing. I was like, well, damn, that's the future of entertainment. I need to get out of here and go make that. And I had this belief that rather than spend $50 million on these giant Mayframing computers, I could take a bunch of Apple twos and time together.

There was no such thing as network at the time. but it was we actually literally soldered wires onto the main onto the motherboard of our Apple twos to make a serial connection between multiple Apple twos um which if you do wrong by the way completely fries the motherboard and and kills the computer which is I had Apple two number 500 and something and completely fried at doing this so oh wow maybe not recommend it but um but went home and yeah quit school went home and and tried to build this thing um wait so just I I got to pause the story for a second.

So when did you learn to do this? Like, how do you even learn how to do this sort of stuff? I mean, even if it went badly. Like, you just start soldering randomly and see what happened? No, well, so I had taught myself to code in high school, right? A pet 8K computer, like, showed up in our math department one day, and I basically just took it over and never left it and just became obsessed with learning to code and make games on that device.

and then saved up money and bought an Apple 2 and then built, you know, wrote games on the Apple 2 and just, you know, was really into that. I didn't know a squad about hardware, but I found a guy in Chicago who, you know, who did, at least enough to try to get us through it. And we, we, the bottom line is it didn't work. I couldn't recreate that $50 million simulator. But I, I, I, I know. Couldn't just do it in your back air then.

But I did. we got far enough for me to believe that the approach was right, right, that we could take microcomputers and establish a way for them to communicate to each other and that we could build this. So I believe, you know, it was enough, we got enough right that I could see the future of what we, what we needed to do. So, yeah, I mean, being an entrepreneur is being stupid enough to throw yourself off a cliff on the premise, you'll invent wings before you hit the ground.

Oh, I love that quote. That's wonderful. You just got to do it, right? I mean, it's like you can't, you know, it's that there's just that it's, it's, I don't know, a combination of vanity and faith, right? I mean, that launches you off into these things. But so, yeah, so that was the premise. And I came up with this idea that we would create these entertainment centers, that people would come and buy tickets. And then, you know, originally I was doing this all kind of based on a Star Trek.

bridge, right? You know, taking, it was a very literal translation from the ship bridge to the, to the Star Trek enterprise or similar, you know, bridge. And, and so I put together a business plan and, and went out and tried to, you know, show it to investors, which I, you know, networked to my dad, my dad's friends to try to find people who invested in businesses. And, and, you know, kind of the universal response was, what the fuck are you talking about? Right. What's a computer game? Why would people buy tickets to one? Who the hell are you?

You're a college dropout who's never done anything. And, you know, I'm going to be really mad at whoever took an hour of my time to set up this meeting. So it did not go well. I'll just. Yeah. And so I was like, all right. I backed basically. All right, well, instead, what I'll do is take.

take the concepts and apply them to pen and paper, right? So that's where basically that's what started FASA, right? That, you know, when I then asked my game group, who wants to put in, match my $300 and become a partner and start printing stuff, it was because the plan was I was going to get rich overnight making tabletop games, which would then fund making this. It was long before the term virtual reality existed, but these virtual reality, you know, experience centers,

It didn't, it took longer than anticipated. You mean you didn't get rich overnight making tabletop games? That's so weird. No, we didn't. We didn't. It took longer. But about seven years later, the FASA was really cranking. And we just, you know, I had been really constantly pushing the idea forward.

And so at that point, we committed financial suicide. launched what was first called the ESB for Environmental Simulations Project, and then eventually became virtual world entertainment. And it really did almost put fast out of business. I mean, it was only my dad, at this point, my dad was working with us and was only the kind of amazing, you know, magic tricks he was doing with our suppliers and our finances and, you know, to keep us afloat why we we spent, you know, a huge amounts of money on trying to launch this first, first network game ever available to the public and the first 3D immersive game ever available to the public.

So it was, it was crazy stuff. Yeah, that's, and then, you know, in addition to, you know, the quote of being an entrepreneur, you know, throwing yourself out of window hoping you're going to invent wings on the way down, You're also overcoming, you know, rejection and people telling you constantly this isn't going to work. You're facing new technical challenges that have never been solved before. Like what else kind of keeps you going in those situations, like where you're facing these, you know, failures and setbacks and near bankruptcy and somehow sort of pushing forward? Is there something that you were able to rely on there, either in your personality or the support? obviously your father was helping you, but like what, what was that like?

Well, I mean, I think a key element is the support team you build around yourself, right? And for me, you know, absolutely fundamental on that. Obviously, he's my dad, right? You know, my dad and I had the pleasure of working together for 20 plus years, right? You know, when FASA was really growing quickly and I realized that I was not a great business manager, right? that I needed to focus on the product and the marketing and the development, right, and needed someone to really run the, you know, the business side of it. So I asked my dad to help us find a business manager and we went out and interviewed a bunch of people.

And at the scale we are, we realized we've, you know, learned we're going to have to give a fair chunk equity, whoever's going to join us if we're going to get someone with a lot of experience, which is what I was looking for. And knowing, you know, again, having read a lot of history, realizing that, you know, in most situations that means you bring someone in and then they steal everything and they leave so I figured if I offered my dad the job if he did that mom would yell at him so it was a defense mechanism so yeah I asked my dad if he would join us and and he did he left where he left at the time he was at the Chicago Architecture Foundation and he came over and joined us and we

worked together for 20 years so having my dad there was enormous enabler for me but then equally as important was my wife. If you're going to be constantly, you know, throwing yourself off cliffs, you need to make sure that you have a spouse or a significant other who is supportive of that, right? Because you can't fight a two-front war, right? I mean, you can't be taking those risks and worrying about all that stuff at work and then come home and have someone who's really upset about what you're doing at work, right? because there's it just like I think would drive the crazy it's I can't I mean I

know that makes that makes a lot of sense but I I've definitely had that same that same sort of experience especially you know when things are going well and work's going fine and you know yeah you can deal with tons of things on the home front but if you know when you're you know in in the shit and you know facing challenges and bankruptcy and complaints and things aren't working and, you know, you having a safe harbor is, is a game changer. It really can give you that strength back to go back into the front. Yeah. And I mean, I think, you know, her support and involvement. I mean, she, you know, she is a creative director, art director from went to Pratt Institute in New York. And, and so, you know, we've worked together now for 20 years. But even when we weren't

working together. She understood the creative process. She understood the risks you need to take, and she was completely supportive, right, of that. And so, yeah, that was, that was key from you. But, you know, in terms of internally, it's, I think, you know, it's, like you said, you got to work, you got to be excited about working hard because you want to see people smile. It's being a it's a showman, right? It's that it's like, you know, in your own way craving, you know, wanting that opening that opening night with the applause and willing to lay it all down on the line to try to make that happen, you know, um, uh, I don't know. It's, it's its own form of insanity. It's its own form of gambling addiction, you know, um, uh, that, you know, that you keep looking for the, for that high,

you know. Yeah, so then we get, you know, you do create this thing and we've, it exists and it's actually super cool, but, but not, not necessarily the financial success you were looking for. I mean, I still see these, these battle tech simulators at conventions to this day, basically, without that, they seem like the same things that you made back then. Well, yeah, it's, I mean, they were, yeah, they, we went through. So this is, I mean, there are downsides to this. to this mental structure as well. And the virtual world story kind of illustrates some of this. So we created the first generation of cockpits, and it made international news and kind of pioneered e-sports.

We had, you know, national and international competitions as we built centers around the world and so on. And, yeah, and it was financially really challenging even after we launched it, right? And we were again, like right on the precipice of bankruptcy when Tim Disney, grandson of, well, son, yeah, grandson of Roy Disney, who was co-founder of the Disney Empire, had decided that this was an industry he was interested in, and he and a guy by Charlie Fink who was a, was a, was. was working with him at Disney and a really good creative leader as well, went out and they were interviewing different people in the industry to figure who they wanted to get involved with and had, you know, met us and we spent a lot of time with them and they decided that they

wanted to come in and buy a majority of the company and really start to take this idea out to the next level. And yeah, that was that was our saving grace, right? We were right, right on the edge there. And working with them was great. We, you know, but this were like my, my need to stay ahead. Here actually was a problem because with this new foundation, well, actually, even prior to that, I'm sorry, even prior to the acquisition, I had pushed us to a whole second generation of technology because I believe, I was so afraid that people were going to catch up with us. So I quickly like abandon the technology we had built and moved into

a whole new technology because the first technology was a giant cheat which is why it looks so good and literally we had all the people from the simulation like the military simulations business coming and saying how did you do that because it's so much better fidelity than what we're able to get because it was a giant

cheat that's why and I think that cheat bothered me rather than I should have I should have just like and let's write that cheat to the bank instead I was like well no we should go back do it right with a true polygnal, you know, renderer, which we did. And so we kind of abandoned our lead, went back and rebuilt all new computers, right? And again, we're literally building the hardware and then re-implementing the game. And, you know, a year or two years later,

we're back with the same game that frankly doesn't look as good as it did before, but now it's real. Right now it's true 3D. rather than cheated 3D. And that was a mistake. That was just, I was just a bad mistake that cost us tons of time and money, right? And so you do have to, you have to watch out for your own drive, right?

You have to, you know, you can drive yourself off, you know, off that cliff rather than that. Yeah, I mean, it's the essential entrepreneur's dilemma, right? I mean, to start a company that's very successful, you have to be both right and anti-consensus, right? You have to be ahead of the curve in the sense that many people don't think what you're doing is the correct path and you get there anyway. And to have that drive means a lot of times you're going to be anti-consensus and wrong.

And so it's hard to know the difference. There's no one. You should be listening to other people and saying, hey, wait, maybe this isn't the right path or you should be sticking to your guns and being like, no, no, no, I'm going to. going to be, I'm going to be the forefront of this. Yeah. I still haven't figured out how to do that. I don't know if you have it all this time, but. No, I mean, no, I don't think there is a, I mean, so much of it is wrapped up in, in personality quirks and, and the team around yourself. I mean, one, I think, as you said, keeping is listening to other people, right?

you know, you do have to trust yourself, but you also want to, you want to be open enough to really listen to other people and understand their good counsel and take it to heart is critical, right? So the cockpits that you see at the convention, those are actually the third generation of the technology, which, as you say, people are still playing now 20 years later. But that business did create that, a foundation which then we, you know, took all the learning from that pivoted to a PC business, right, as PC's, home PCs got into big enough distribution and powerful enough, and that, you know, created the, you know, the Mech Warrior series and

Mech Commander and so on. And that, and that led to the acquisition by Microsoft. So it's a twisty, curvy path, but eventually led to, you know, to a nice outcome for everybody. Well, this is, this is another sort of secret sauce here, which is coming up even repeat. repeatedly in this conversation, which is that even the sort of quote unquote failures and are set the seeds for your later success, right? You couldn't launch the cyberpunk game. You wanted to launch because somebody else did it. So you ended up building a unique resident, you know, new IP. You couldn't, you know, maybe the, you know, the, you know, tech that you were building to create the virtual world simulations that are going to take over the world, didn't quite take over the world, but that tech gave you foundations that you could use to build successful properties. And, you know, you sort of. If you can take that frame, it really, my experience has helped a ton when you're like, okay, well, I'm going to go out on the edge and I'm going to hope I build wings before I land. But if I don't, I'll find another way, you know, another cushion or another ledge that'll be that I didn't see before. I can now drop off that I couldn't before.

Yeah. And I mean, I think as we were talking about like time to failure and design, right, that, you know, you learn so much, you learn a lot from the failure so that then your next iteration is better. that's even true in companies, right? I mean, you know, we always talk about all the successful companies. I've had a lot of companies that were not successful, right? That, you know, we actually had to, you know, lay everybody off and close them down, right? I've had several of those as well. And the key thing is to learn from those to improve your chances of success the next time, you know, just like you did on your game design.

But yeah, so you do have to kind of pick yourself up, dress yourself off, and say, all right, what did I learn from that? You know, how do we do it better? I do want to finish this and dig more into the physical digital hybrid design, but this really does transition well into the other thing I want to talk about, which is how these principles of design really apply, you know, so well to business and to life in general. You know, this was something we dug deep on last time we talked of, you know, like, yeah, absolutely this thing's like time. to failure, like trying to build systems that can resonate with people that are familiar yet different, like that these same principles apply to building your own business or even to trying to figure out how to live your life, right? Like, you don't know what the path is that you want to be on until you, you know, try different stuff. Like everybody that thinks like, I don't know

what I want to be when I grow up. I'm like, well, do things. Eventually something will resonate with you and figure out when that doesn't work, then change paths. And then, you know, that these kinds of things are really have been more and more fascinating to me over time as I see these parallels. and it sounded like you've spent a fair amount of time thinking about this too. Yeah, one of the few benefits of being old is that you've had time to think about it and reflect on some of it. But yeah, I mean, I think that willingness to fail is absolutely critical in a career, right? You know, their sayings have been with this front, nothing ventured, nothing gained, so on and so forth. But, you know, fear of failure is the greatest inhibitor to personal satisfaction.

and innovation, right? And so you've got to be willing to fail. And to do so, you know, publicly, right? It's hard because, you know, we've got so many kind of built-up emotions around not wanting to be the person, you know, the person who's seen as that failure. We had an example of that even at WISKitt. So WISKids was born on this little invention I'd come up with

for this rotating dial at the bottom of a figure and how that could kind of change how miniature figure gamers games are played and turn them from kind of lifestyle into pure gaming by having pre-painted pre-assembled figures on these dials that got rid of all the tables and charts and gave a character an arc

over the course of a game. And so that, you know, it was completely untested. You know, there wasn't any guarantee. I brought it to FASA because I had left FASA that one. even though I still owned a junkbook, but I'd moved down with the software side. And so brought it to, you know, to my partners in FASA. And they were like, I don't know.

It's pretty out there and pretty expensive to do. And so, you know, we're going to pass. And so I said, okay. So I went and raised money and started WizKidskits to do this idea. But people left their jobs to join this little startup, taking very large personal financial risk. You leave a job to go join a startup. That's a risk. That's scary.

That's why you get equity in a company. It's why people compensate you for that because you're taking a personal risk. And they did that with this untrusted idea. Luckily, that worked, and the company grew quite quickly. And we had three big successes in a row based upon that invention. And then we started playing with new ideas. And we had a new type of game we wanted to launch. that was not based on the HeroClick style.

It was based on the concept of these punch-out styrene cards and building the game assets of these kind of very casual, quick levels of gameplay, which on the commerce side was driven because we had been acquired by Tops. Have we been acquired by Tops by then? Yeah, we haven't. So we'd been acquired by Tops. And they had this, you know, they had all this great real store real estate at the front of the stores, but it was all based on foil packs

and our miniature figures weren't being shelved there. So I wanted to get a, how could we get a game onto that shelf, right, onto those pegs? And so the idea was to do a whole game inside basically a card pack, right? But what was fascinating to me was that our members of our team

who had only three years earlier quit their job to join the startup. We're now like really reticent to try this new form of game. And I didn't understand it. Right? I was like, there's zero financial risk now, right? I mean, the money we're spending on this game was like,

it wasn't going to affect our bottom line in any kind of significant way. So there's zero personal risk. There's zero financial risk. Why is this reticence here? And I realize it's all emotional, right? If we had failed as a little startup, no one would have noticed. It wouldn't have been a very public failure, right? It would have been financially very difficult, but not.

public. But now we were kind of like the golden boys of the industry at the moment, three big hits. And I was like, now if we bring out a game and it doesn't work, it's going to be within our little industry front page news. Right. Right. We'll be a very public failure. And that was really, really restricting them. They were very scared of that. Yeah, that's actually, that's actually really, it's this fascinating thing I was actually going to ask about because, you know, there's this weird curve. There's this middle range where it's like, it's worse for people. when you already have success because people will know that you failed. And it's it's this crazy thing.

I felt it, I felt it too. And it's this bizarre psychological shift that, you know, it's, it sounds like either you're just intrinsically, you didn't feel or you were able to get over. Like what, you know, what made you different? I don't know. But it's, but it's, it's, it's something built in, I mean, to the structure. I mean, like, because we always say, well, why don't big companies, you know, innovate, you know, and I think this is a large factor of it, right? And then you have the stock market, which reinforces the problem with public failure, right? Because now it actually has a

material impact on the business. And all of that combined, emotions plus, you know, the kind of financial implications of a public market means that it's much harder for public companies to do truly innovative, disruptive projects, right? And of course, they also, their risk is larger, right, when you're startup and you're disrupting someone else's business, that's much easier than when you're, when you've got a foundation of that business and then you're going to disrupt your own business, right? That's obviously much more scary. But yeah, I don't, I don't know. Can't explain it. But it's important to kind of gauge yourself on it. And probably, frankly, you know, probably has a lot to do with ego. I forget if you kind of, I always say

kind of an entrepreneur has to have big ego, big ego and little ego. Like big ego enough to believe you can do it, right? And you can lead people to accomplish this. And little enough ego that you're going to be open to when, you know, to the ideas of your team and others to help make, you know, help make the direction you're going on better. Yeah. And to me there's like this almost kind of selective blindness, like, or forgetting.

Like, because everything, when you think of the idea and you think of where you want to go, you're like, okay, cool, this will be awesome. I can totally do this. And you don't really think about how much, like, challenge and heartache there is between here and there. Like, you know, I always look back. I'm like, wow, if I realized all this stuff, I probably wouldn't have done it. But I'm really glad I did it.

So I just constantly forget how hard things are for some reason when I'm like, yeah, let's go. And then I'm already in the path. So, okay, here we go. Completely agree. And I equate this to like having babies, right? Because we go back and forth in this. So I said we've worked together for many years. We have three sons together.

And, you know, she will be like, hey, let's have another kid. And I'm like, don't you remember how miserable you were for nine months? And don't you remember giving birth? Those were not fun experiences. You know, she's like, no, it was magical. I mean, no, it wasn't. You know, it was really hard. And, you know, and on my side, it's like, I'm starting at the company.

And she's like, don't you remember how hard those are? You're going to work really hard forever, you know. Yeah, and so it is selective blindness, absolutely. Oh, and you're going to love this transition for you. Great. It's ego, and it takes us to the hybrid you wanted to talk about, right? Okay, great. Which is the birth of gold, Mercana.

Right. Great. So, yeah, this has been, you know, a quest of mine for a long time to try to figure out how to bring some of the great things that computer games have given us over the years. and merge them with, you know, the magic of being around a table with your friends, right? And that kind of social, a wonderful, wonderful, unique social experience. And so I've tried a couple things over the years, and Goldberg-Cana was the most recent, which was based on a technology that has been used in kind of like many other places and they figured, oh, wait, I saw a way to bring this together into this product.

And so we built a prototype and we took it out to conventions and people really didn't. Right. I mean, we had, you know, spent enough money on the project to be able to illustrate the play pattern and how it was going. And we got really good feedback. Can you give a brief overview of the mechanic just in case people listening to don't know? Oh, sure. So the idea is we developed a stylus. And the stylus had a super high resolution camera in the front end.

And then it had a Bluetooth, you know, wireless communication. and the stylus so that you would tap the board, you would tap the figures. So you would, for instance, you would tap a figure and say, this figure is going to move to this board location. And then the app on your phone or on a, you know, on a tablet would go, yep, that's a legal move. Go ahead. So you would move over there, right?

And then you would tap a different part of the figure and say, I'm going to shoot with this magical bolt at this figure. Right. And you would tap the other figure. And it would go, okay, you got to, you know, see. did you present chance to hit, roll the dice, right? Or you could have the app roll the dice for you if you want it. So it took all the mechanics of the game, you know, all the rules and everything and had the

app, you know, worked that out for you so that you could just focus on the gameplay. And it had a number of other benefits. But the goal was to try to take the WizKids rotating dial thing to the next level, which is to make the games even more accessible because you didn't have to, you know, you know, debate the interpretation of the rules. You knew everything you were doing was kind of legal, and it made the games playable by a very broad audience of people. And then the goal was,

now that we had kind of a digital overlay on top of the tabletop, we can introduce all sorts of interesting things like when I tap the square and move into it, I could encounter things that weren't there last time I went to that square, right? Because the app could be, you know, kind of random game setup as well as new events that can be downloaded every week, we could keep that game enormously fresh and dynamic with the same set of pieces.

Lastly, all because it's a computer game, it has this computer game, the data would then, it would then flow up to our servers. So like a computer game, we knew, you know, we could look at the play patterns, we could look at that balance issues, right? And we could use the data coming back from games to affect our overall ongoing story. we could run events like are typically run in computer games where like, okay, there a new scenario comes out this weekend and everybody's playing it over the next week.

And the data from that scenario now determines that a fictional event in the canon, right? Right. So I was very excited about it. The team, you know, the team had done a lot of great work on it. And my partner, Mitch and I and Joe, were like, okay, so let's take it to kick, cetera. we knew it was going to cost us a million dollars to make the product, right? We knew we couldn't go ask for a million dollars on Kickstarter, you know, because it was just too big a number. And so we said, all right, well, we can, we'll ask for 500, right?

And on the premise, hopefully we'll go dramatically over it, but if we had to, we could find the other 500 to finish the product if it just, you know, only made the 500. because you want to make sure that you don't go off or something you can't finish right and so he said okay but but let's let's be careful if it doesn't make 500 we cancel the Kickstarter we just kill the project like yep we all agree on this right right and we went to Kickstarter and like in the first day it did like 150,000 or something like yeah this is great you know the first day of Kickstarter it's always exciting it's crank and it's gonna go and then like the second day was like yeah and five thousand dollars more I was like But, okay, we got a problem, right?

Just went to crickets, right? And we should have. We had set a set of rules for ourselves. So back to your game design for life. We'd set a set a set of rules. This is how we're going to play this game. And then immediately, our ego has got in the way. And we're like, I don't want to lose, right?

I don't want to have this. I don't want to acknowledge that this is a failure in public. And so we then just started fighting our way, you know, with all sorts of promotions and and, and, and, you know, expand, you know, kind of an add-on expansions and, and so on to fight that number up to 500, right? Which we did. We got it up to just, just over the, over the wire at 500 and something, right? And so it was a success. It was a just, it was not a success. It was a, it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a, failure. We should have listened to our own rules and not done it, right? Creatively, I'm super proud of that project. Technically, I'm very proud of that project. Looking back on my own performance of ego, totally let our egos get in the way, you know, was a bad business decision to do. That should have told us that the market for the game is not big enough to support the cost

it's going to take to make it, right? And then we had made it worse because we had done all these add-on packs and everything. So we actually took the cost of making the game. from a million up to a million five with all these additional commitments we made. You raised half a million dollars and cost yourself more than that. Exactly. Yeah, we cost ourselves a million, right? And at the end of the day, when the game came out, you know, it achieved its goals and made the game super playable and expandable. And we were able to watch all the play patterns, right?

But the technology was expensive. And so the base game was a break-even. We didn't make any money in the base game. So all the margin was in these add-on packs of figures, which we were really betting on kind of a competitive play dynamic where people would go back and buy more figures as they came out to keep changing up their armies for competitive play. And that competitive play dynamic never really evolved. So people really love the game, and they didn't feel compelled to go out and buy a bunch of figures because it was fun enough already. And so, yeah, it just financially did not work.

It also, back to our previous conversation about innovating and too many things simultaneously, totally felt prey to that as well, I think. Right. Brand new plate pattern, brand new technology, brand new world, you know, and it was like innovating, trying to innovate on every level. So it does show you that even we say these things and we know these things, it doesn't stop us from making these mistakes sometimes. Oh, yeah. Well, I actually, I've actually implemented this policy because I, to me, to me, like, you know, wisdom is basic practical knowledge consistently applied. Like, we have all of the information we need to be successful in life and to know, but we just don't do it. We forget. We get overwhelmed by ego. We get caught up in the moment and emotion. And it's just like, you know, so now whenever I, I sort of read, you know, I love sort of reading and learning new things, but I have forced myself to every time I read. something, a new book, I go back and I read one of the books that was most impactful to me.

I go back and I reread lessons and notes that I've read before because it's like, it's just about being able to apply the things you already know. And even in going through these podcasts and interviews and talks, it's like the same lessons are getting reiterated in different ways by different designers. And it's the same stories we all go through and with our own unique spins. And it's just like, nope, these are universal. Just keep, I do this half to remind myself like, yep, don't forget. about this stuff. It's it's amazing how how quickly we lose sight of of the things that we've

learned through through blood, sweat and tears over the years. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, like again, this one, you know, ego is necessary to be an entrepreneur and ego is also your worst, your worst enemy, you know, so yeah. Right. Right. It's, it's like, you know, if not a Yoda statement, it should have been, you know, like all things in balance, you know yeah yeah well i um mark rosewater uh had this quote that i've i've loved and used for years which is you know your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness and vice versa um that that without without fail the thing that makes you exceptional there is a there's a dark side to it and you need to be conscious of that and so yeah that like you know as an entrepreneur i sort of share these things like

i you know i am willing to break rules i'm willing to sort of re-envision stuff and go forward and i'm and i have an intense focus you know will but there's something i'm going to get done on like, I don't care. I'm going to get there. But it also means, like, I have terrible peripheral vision and I will, you know, be a bull in a China shop sometimes. And I will, you know, lose sight of an important thing that needs to be there. And so I need to find people surround myself with people that are going to like knock me upside the head sometimes to remind me that I'm missing those things. So being conscious of that stuff is important. And again, yeah, just reminding yourself like where, you know, not to lose the value of, you know, again, your ego or the things that are

driving you, but also to realize where that that creates weaknesses and blind spots. So on the hybrid side, so we have, so Gola-Marcane is a great example of this. To me, it is, it's, you're trying to create the hybrid side. You want to get the best of both worlds, right? So in that case, it's like, all right, I'm going to get the combat resolution and complexity and hidden information and like persistent online world and tracking in with the tactile fun of moving cool figures around the board, right? Like that was the goal.

And I found I think it's a great innovation, but there was a little bit of like still clunkiness around that scanning process to me. It didn't feel as magical as I wanted it to be, even though it did again innovate and get further than anybody else had gone. And I have seen, you know, you've pushed the edge of those boundaries in a couple different ways. And we've seen like the world kind of come back around to this. So other angles to discuss like virtual reality has made a comeback of sorts. And there's this huge wave that feels like it's kind of, you know, a little bit died out. But there was this like, oh, it's going to change the world again. Now it's really for real this time.

And I worked on some virtual reality projects. We actually did a virtual reality version of Ascension, which is really cool. We've done a, you know, worked on another virtual reality game called Labyrinth and a few others, which is really fun. But, you know, there's just not an audience for it. It's just not quite taken off the way that everybody said it would last year or two years ago. And then there's the augmented reality games, which are, you know, like the Pokemon Go is the sort of most, you know, successful example of that, I think, where it's like, okay, it's partially the world and I'm holding up my camera to the world and it's somewhat interacting. But it also, you know, all of these things seem to still fall short of like this, this ideal that we have.

And I kind of want to talk about, I guess, the ideal or where you see it going or, you know, if you were going to, you know, push something today. where would you, where would you be pushing towards? Well, okay, yeah, interesting and broad subject. Yeah, VR, yeah, having, you know, been a major player in wave one and wave two of VR, when wave three of VR came along, I was like, okay, I think we'll, we'll set this one out. Because, you know, I love the immersion, but the kind of improvements that were in the first wave of hardware, of this third wave of VR, to me, didn't address the fundamental problems that exist in VR. I do have to say that surprisingly, to myself at least, there's a piece of VR tech that did really blow me away.

It just came out. It's the Oculus Quest. And it is finally, I think, from my perspective, a consumer VR experience. and it's just beautifully done. It's completely self-contained. You don't have to set up markers all over your house and so on and so forth. And it uses what's called slam technology, which is actually from augmented reality,

which I'll switch to in a second. But it's a really good experience. Now, that said, I still get nauseous when I play it. Right. Because you have that kind of anytime you're, even though my body and one of the nice things about the quest is it is full, there's some full body maneuvers in it. So you don't have as much of that kind of body moving one way, head thinking, you're moving a different way, kind of stuff that's nausea.

But you still, it's still, can still give you simulator sickness. But at the end of the day, VR, I think, is always inherently going to be a smaller market because it is about cutting yourself off from the real world. and historically that's not where breakthrough technologies come from. Breakthrough technologies, if we look at all the ones that have changed our landscape in the last 40 years, there are things that enhance or augment or make more efficient our actual world, the real world. And that's why I've always been a much bigger proponent and believer in augmented reality technology than virtual reality technology. I just want to push on that a little bit. So, like, what does that mean?

Like, how does, like, you know, I mean, television and computers in theory of now sucked us into screens more than ever before? Is that make the world more efficient? Or those breakthrough technology? Well, yeah, but let's look at what, look where most people's time on digital devices are. They're not fictional worlds, right? They're Facebook. And, I mean, Facebook is a single biggest timescape. They're YouTube.

So these are portals into the actual world of people I know and people I may not know, right? But they're all reflections of the real world being brought to me through, you know, this very super convenient UI as opposed to where, admittedly, television is an immersion into fictional worlds. Completely agree with that, right? But it is still social, right? Like I'm sitting next to my wife, my kids, my family. We're still able to, what? But, you know, we're, we have a social experience while immersed in that. If we each were wearing our own headsets, right?

I don't think you would have that same kind of like shock and awe in the living room at the red wedding would be a different thing, right? If all of us were immersed in our own bubble, right? Yeah. You know, and if I look at the web, like when the web first came out and we, you know, all, the lot of us all like, what's the killer after the web? and we're building all these immersive experiences. Like, no, you know what the killer app for the web is? A pizza in 15 minutes and a cheaper box of Klorox, right? That's the killer app for the web, right?

It was about how to make my real world better. How to give me better information? Like, where's the best restaurant? What's the fastest path to there? It was all about how to make the real world better, more usable, more accessible, more accessible. Sure. And I agree with you.

And I'm only pushing back because I don't know that that, that pushes away from virtual reality by default. And I'll just say briefly, like having this experience of building ascension as a tabletop game, then building it as an app for mobile and then building it as a VR. The VR is so much closer to the tabletop experience because of the social aspect, because I can see avatars for other people across the table,

because I can hear them talk because I can see them move. So in many ways, it can create this virtual presence that I think would be the magic. but I haven't seen it, you know, really happened. But I don't want to derail you too much, but I just, you know. No, so I don't disagree with that, right? Because you do have that kind of, it's, you know, telepresence experience, right? But where I see, and this is really, and it is really only a handful years away, right,

is that AR gives you that, but in the real world, right? So what I mean by that, so, you know, current mobile-based AR is already doing some pretty incredible based things. Like, you know, being able to go to a piece of furniture on a website and then say, well, what would that look like if that couch was here? And actually then being able to look through your phone and seeing that couch in your living room and walk around it and see how it fits in the room, right? That's pretty magical and very, very powerful for like a purchase decision, right? So we're already seeing that kind of stuff. And, you know, Pokemon Go, which was barely an AR game. It's really a GPS game, right? But it had virtual character. I think

Harry Potter is more of an AR game, right? We can dive into reactions to that at another session, maybe. But if we go a handful of years down the road here, but because holding up a phone and looking at the world through a phone is not a viable play pattern, right? It's not a, it's just, yes, yes, it is not magical. It is boring and painful after a few minutes. Yeah, but when you put on a pair of glasses that are kind of like a slightly beefier version of a pair of raybans, right? And now projected, you know, into your world, you look at your real world, but now there are 3D objects and or avatars projected into that 3D, into the world you're navigating. That really is this kind of next experience that I think is going to be enormously transformative. So in that model, when you're playing Ascension, you're sitting at your actual kitchen table, right?

You're using physical cards, right? Your friend who you see them sitting on the other side of your table is actually, you know, on the other side of the planet. And you see their cards physically on your table, right? So that, to me, is that that takes telepresence now and makes it within my real world, right? So that when, you know, my wife walks in, I see her, I'm, hi, how you doing, honey? it's like there isn't that kind of like she's now part of my world even though I'm playing this game with you

on the other side of the world right so you've kind of combined the best of both of those experiences and I don't think it is that far away so that that's very much kind of where my direction you know wants to be in terms of tabletop is how do we anticipate

how do we how do we you know build the foundations to start to create that kind of experience right It's a ways out, but I think it's going to be super, super impactful on the world overall and on gaming. So the prediction game is always a, is always a fun one. But when you say, you know, a ways out or near, what's your estimate? If you would say that I'm going to have these, you know, the better, the better Rayban Google Glass thing that will work this way? Well, there's a company called Enreal that will be, as announced,

that they're going to be shipping a set of the rayband level of kind of encumbrance, set of AR goggles this Christmas for $500. Now that it'll have a thin USB cable that connects to either your high-end Android phone or their own little processing puck. It is not anywhere near fully as featured as it needs. to be, I think, to take that huge next step, but it is an amazing step forward and it's already kind of not quite consumer level costing but getting close, right? So I think that the true inflection point is probably four to five years out in terms of when we start to see,

you know, real consumer grade experiences with, because the Enreal is missing a couple all the key things that I would like to see in a fully kind of, a full setup for augmented reality. But it's, again, it's a phenomenal step forward. So I think it's probably four or five years that we're going to, so it's not that far out, right? Yeah. That's only two product life site. That's two product dev cycles from a software standpoint, right? So it's really, it's not, it's not, I don't think it's science fiction.

I think it's, it's, it's reality. And it's going to be, uh, it's going to be interesting. well it is there's there's so much more that I can dig into on this on this topic and others but I know we are running short on time so we may have to continue in a part two what I want to give people an opportunity that want to learn more about the stuff that you are you are up to want to find you online want to play your games what's what are the resources where should they go well I'm kind of actually don't participate that much in social media I know which sounds weird, but I just never really, for some reason,

so I have a Facebook page, but I never go there, so don't bother with that. I mean, Herbrain schemes is where we're developing PC games, and we have some super cool stuff coming, which I can't talk about, but very excited about. And then, you know, on the tabletop side, we've got a new thing about it's working on with my son, Zach, which hopefully will be probably not too far after this podcast comes out. We'll be trying to bring it to Kickstarter. And it actually does have a, it is a physical digital hybrid game. So it's very apropos.

So maybe what we should do is we'll do another session. I can talk about that more. All right. And we can pick up on the subject. That sounds perfect. I can't wait. This has been such a great conversation. I'm looking forward to many more.

Thank you so much for taking the time, Jordan. And we will chat again soon. It's my pleasure, Justin. Great, great to talk and look forward to seeing you soon. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listener reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you. I've taken the insights from these interviews, along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry,

and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast. think like a game designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever, find, books are sold.