Triple Click - The Demise Of Google Stadia (And Cancelled Games)

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

What is it about cancelled games that make them so intriguing? What are the most heartbreaking video game cancellations? And what the heck just happened to Google Stadia? Jason, Maddy, and Kirk take a trip into the world of cancelled games, from Star Wars 1313 to Bully 2.One More Thing: Kirk: The TommyknockersMaddy: Street Fighter 6 betaJason: Cabin Fever (Michael Smith, Jonathan Franklin)Links:Kirk’s 2015 story about No One Lives Forever: https://kotaku.com/the-sad-story-behind-a-dead-pc-game-that-cant-come-back-1688358811Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy a Triple Click t-shirt: https://topatoco.com/collections/maximum-fun/products/maxf-tc-tclogo-shJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Here at Triple Click, we like to consider ourselves Vaporware, and that we've been going on for years, and we will never, ever, ever be finished. Welcome to Triple Click where we bring the games to you. This week, we are talking about cancel video games from Project Titan to Silent Hills. Why are games canceled? When are games canceled? How are games canceled? Let's talk about it.

I'm Jason Shrier. I'm Kirk Hamilton. And I'm Maddie Myers. Hello. Hello. Hello, it's us again. It is us again. Coming at you.

Doing it. The internet into your ears. Coming at you from the various corners of the contiguous United States of America. That's right. We picked each state on purpose. We did. There's a secret code. I would say two corners really.

Because Maddie and I are kind of in the same corner. We're in like the northeast corner. That's true. That's true. The shoulders. We're kind of the shoulders. The shoulders of America. America. That should have been our new podcast name.

Live from the shoulders of America. It's triple-glars. We're holding up all of the American gamers. It's true. As a trio. Like a step, like a stool. Like the three legs of a stool. Three shoulders.

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You will help us make the show. And also, because we know that people like to get things for their hard-earned money, we will give you a monthly bonus episode. You also get access to bonus episodes from a bunch of other shows, but ours is every single month. We are our most recent one, most recent bonus episode, which we ran at the end of September. We talked about formative games from our childhoods, which is really fun. Not only good games, the bad games in there, too. That's a really fun episode. Formative.

Formative can be bad. Before that, we did the spoiler cast on Better Call Saul. We did a whole lot of, we have tons and tons of good bonus stuff up in there. So it is, there's no better time to become a max fund member than right now. And we'll announce our October bonus episode soon. So thank you to all of you for supporting and thank you to all of you who don't support and listen. So today we are going to talk about, it is time for a hot topic. We're going to talk about canceled games.

We're going to talk about video games. And this is hot because it's about cancel culture, right? That's why it's such a hot topic. about games that said something offensive. You undercut my intro. Oh no, I think we need to cancel Maddie. All right, Maddie's the first one to get canceled on this episode. It's chomping at the bit now.

That's what the people want. Maddie was just chomping at the bit to tell a joke about cancel a culture. Today we are talking about games that said something racist on Twitter and we're there for. And it was years ago, but the internet never forgets. The internet never forgets. And eventually those games got a Netflix comedy special. And like things went out. for them.

And that is what's going to happen to Stadia. Like in five to ten years Stadia's going to have a Netflix comedy special and we're all going to love it more than we ever thought we could. This podcast is already off the rails.

But yeah, Star Wars 1313 turns out that it had a racist past. Man, you would not believe. Star Wars 1313 was wearing blackface and so we had to cancel it. That's true. No, today we were talking about the games that did not make it.

We were all discussing and we thought it would be interesting to dive into the topic of canceled games. Why are games canceled? How often are they canceled? Are they canceled without us even knowing about it? Yes, yes, they are. Especially in the wake of some high profile cancellations, such as Stadia. And also, just this week, there have been headlines about the canceled Microsoft game scalebound, which people just do not stop talking about. I've never seen people more obsessed of the canceled game that didn't even look very good in the first place. have any theories about that? I have always been

curious about it. I know there are hardcore fans. It's not as type of game that I'm that familiar with. A couple of theories. So scale bound, for some context. Scalebound was announced as an Xbox one exclusive by Platinum Games, which is a well-known action developer in Japan. A couple of theories here.

One is that there's never been a proper post-mortem so nobody really knows exactly what happened. So, yeah, for whatever reason, nobody's done it. Sorry, I have not done the platinum, the scale-bound post-mortem. But two is that the novelty of the Xbox having Japanese exclusive when Japanese people have been so resistant to the Xbox over the years, I'm sure that's a factor. And also people are just like kind of obsessed with Platinum games, even though they have more misses than hits.

Wow. I can't believe you're saying this on the heels of Bayonetta 3 coming out. Well, Maddie, I was going to say, I know you love Bayonetta and Platinum has made a lot of other cool games that people really like. they've also made Babylon's fall, which was like so bad that it got, it got pulled, like, shut down, or it's getting shut down after less than a year of operation. You won't even be able to play it anymore. So, yeah, I don't know. It's interesting.

You know, you say they have more misses than hits, but Bayonetta was actually a misses that was a hit. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Sorry, I was just sitting here thinking of that joke the whole time you were talking. We're just going to tell stupid jokes and let Jason carry this episode. and see how that goes as like a podcast. And really, I mean, Bainetta is more of a Ms.

really. I just, you know. Well, I mean, usually it's me telling stupid jokes and you guys carrying the episode so it works out. No, I shouldn't say. I want to take that back. I don't know if they have had more misses and hits. I haven't counted them. But they've certainly, it's not like they have some flawless track record. But yeah,

people are, it's just like this confluence of factors that people are obsessed with. But anyway, just to speak, there are headlines about like, Phil Spencer said no comment when asked about scale bound revival, which is so funny. People are asking about a scalebound revival every single week. And also, I'm going to start emailing Phil every day about it now. That's what I'm going to dedicate the rest of my career to.

Just like, hey Phil. It's, me again. Thoughts on scale bound? Really anything you could provide. This has also been fueled by some rumors that were floating around a couple of years back by like some bad rumor mongers about scale bound, like getting revived for Nintendo Switch or something like that. Do you guys remember that?

It was just like kind of the quote-unquote insider crowd. Perfect way to get upvotes, though. Like to just invent a lie about a canceled game because it can never be disproven. I mean, I assume that's part of what you're about to get to, Jason, is the allure of canceled games is that you can just imagine anything. Yeah. Well, that's what's so fascinating about cancel games. To be fair, I don't think it's invented. I think it's more just people not really corroborating or like checking their stories.

A lot of people, a lot of the stuff you see floating around as rumors on the internet is sometimes is often just like, this person on Discord message me that this was happening. And so I tweeted about it or posted about it on Reddit. Anyway, so yeah, that's what is really fascinating about canceled games. And just to give everybody some examples of like high profile canceled games over the past, in modern history, at least, there was Silent Hills by Hideo Kajima, kind of infamously teased with PT, which was then pulled by Konami. Star Wars 1313, I mentioned earlier, by LucasArts. That one does have a post-martim in some little book called Bloods Sweat and Pixels. Ragtag, the Visceral Star Wars game, StarCraft Ghost, Blizzards Titan, Rockstar's Agent.

There are a lot of these high-profile games that were announced and then canceled. And I think there's something that really fascinates people about that, because presumably if a game is announced, it's at the point where the company behind it is pretty confident that it's going to happen. And so it leaves so many questions when that game is then abruptly canceled. What happened? Like, how did this, this game that looked so promising or sounded so promising or was shown at E3 with a big demo? Like, how did this game actually get canceled? Like, why? And it will always live on as this, like, perfect specimen that we never actually got to play. And so it's kind of like crystallizing forever the E3 hype. Like, imagine the E3 hype of like getting super excited for a game put in a fossil because you will never actually get to play it. So all that exists. is the hype. And that I think is part of the allure. But yeah, do you guys, I want to hear your thoughts on canceled games and then maybe we can all talk about some, some of our own personal

canceled games that we wish existed. So I think canceled games are fun to talk about, but I don't think there is fun to talk about as the average gamer. And I guess I'm hoping I can figure out why I don't think they're that fun to talk about. I'm not really excited about scale bound. It was actually really hard for me to come up with a true answer to a cancel game that I was excited about. My tentative list has StarCraft Ghost on it, but my joke answer was Dante's Inferno too, because it's also kind of the real answer. But that's only recently, right? That's only recently.

That's only recently. And also because reading about the creation of Dante's Inferno is delightful to me because that game shouldn't have existed in the first place. So the fact that they were going to make not only a sequel, but an entire trilogy is hilarious. To be clear, by the way, it wasn't, Dante's Inferno 2 was never announced. It was in early development. Yes, but generally when I hear about canceled games, I assume there was a good reason. And maybe this is just a jaded journalist thing where I've destroyed my capacity for wonder because of the work that I do.

And I've heard so many stories from people who are like, you know, this should have been canceled or this was such a troubled development. if only we'd take in another direction at some other point, that if I hear about something being canceled. And both of those sentences were about Bioshock Infinite. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Which was canceled and remade multiple times over the course of development.

Not literally canceled, but you know, canceled in Ken Living's heart. But because I know how difficult it is to make a game, if anything, hearing about canceled games makes me almost relieved in a weird way. But also I guess it is sad. It is sad to think about it. I just think it's very different. different from movies or even books that you started writing and never released or whatever

else where maybe there's something there that would be kind of fun to watch or see. But with a game, there might not be anything there that's even remotely fun. I do want to push back a little bit on that point because actually some of the high profile cancellations were canceled not for good reason, but because of corporate shenanigans. Fair enough. Silent Hills is canceled because Konami stopped making video games for a while. Okay, but do you think the reaction to Silent Hills has been healthy and normal? No, not at all, but that's another story.

Star Wars 1313 was canceled because Disney decided to stop making video games for a while. It's true. Like the list goes on and on. I mean, we don't know exactly what happened with Rockstar's agent. StarCraft Ghost, I believe, was canceled. Well, that was a whole, that's a whole long story with all sorts of shenanigans. But at the end of the day, it was canceled because of a console transition. So, again, corporate, like corporate stuff.

So sometimes, sometimes they're canceled for good reasons. But I feel like my counterpoint there would be the original creation of Overwatch was built off of a game that didn't happen. And we could just talk about Overwatch 2 and whether or not that should have been canceled. That's not what we're here to talk about. Nonetheless, though, I always think about those stories, the games that were the foundation for another better game. And many of these examples, I mean, I guess PT,

isn't really a full game, but it did come out of Silent Hills. And I would argue Dust Stranding, I mean, I don't think Kajima's ever said on the record that that's the case for that game, but it's very clear that there are a lot of similarities in terms of how Silent Hills was described in some of the themes in Dust Stranding. And Dust Stranding is a pretty cool video game. And it still happened. And same actor, right? Norman Reed is supposed to be in.

So I feel like usually something cool can still come out of these ideas, even if there are corporate shenanigans. Art will not be silenced. That's the position I'm taking today. Except for Star Wars. Except for Star Wars, which why are you trying to deal with Disney? It never happened. Star Wars is just cursed.

I pity it. Sometimes it does go the opposite direction where a thing comes out and is disappointing and then people begin to look at the prototypes or the canceled things that could have been. This happens a lot with films where a movie will come out and then people start talking about different script treatments that didn't make it into the final version and they'll just start to wonder, oh, this could have been interesting. And a lot of times those script treatments will be out there. Like people can just read them and they can imagine what that would have been like,

which is kind of why I think anyways, canceled games capture people's imagination to the extent that they do. Because usually a canceled game is a game that's been shown. Not always, but like Star Wars 1313. It had that huge, you know, E3 showcase where they showed at least what the game was supposed to look like, even though it was debatable how much of an actual video game that was they were showing. And so people start to imagine what it's going to be like to play it. And because video game culture is so built around talking and thinking about games that aren't out yet,

because of pre-order culture and preview culture and the whole way that the industry is so focused on telling you what's going to come out, when a game is canceled, it feels like a real thing that was an active concern in game culture. It was a thing that was happening. and we were all talking about it and suddenly that's gone away. And that's just a really dramatic thing to have happen. And I think as a result, people have all these feelings and thoughts attached to this, you know, game that wasn't even out yet that may have never even remotely looked like what they thought it was going to be and got canceled. And that just leaves a lot of energy with nowhere to go.

And I think that's kind of why we wind up with canceled games having this sort of special aura around them. Yeah, which is funny. Well, that's what I was saying before with like the crystallized, like hype. and that's like forever, fossilized forever for generations to come, like in 40 years, people are still going to be asking, like, Phil Spencer and the old age home about scale bound. I think that one of the interesting points here is that all of these games that I listed, all the games we're talking about are games that were announced and then canceled.

For every game that's announced and then canceled, there are probably hundreds of games that are not announced and are just kind of quietly canceled. And those, I think, are more likely to be canceled for good reason. Something isn't shaping up, something isn't working, they need to make a pivot, and so on and so on. Because those are usually the games that you just never hear about because they didn't even make it far enough to be heard about. There's another distinction that I think is interesting, and that is a canceled game versus vaporware. And I keep wanting to call it vapor wave, but no, we're not talking about vapor wave. We're talking about vaporware, which is a term that I love and refers to a game that was announced, but is kind of just never going to come out and has begun.

become vapor. And I think, well, I love the narrative of the vaporware, the quote-unquote vaporware game that comes out. I think that the Last Guardian is a great example of that, of a game that was announced and shown. And then it would kind of just be like, well, it's in development. I think Beyond Good and Evil, too, is a good example of that. I was already thinking of it as you were talking.

People are excited about it. And they're like, oh, yeah, we're working on it. Sure. And, you know, you picture this sort of one person in a closet somewhere is drawing pictures. And they're technically the development. element team for the game. But then the last Guardian came out and was a pretty cool game. So it felt like this miracle and it was kind of a great reverse cancellation or uncancellation. But there is a kind of interesting distinction there as well. So Jason, you were drawing the

line between a game that is never announced and is internally canceled versus a game that is announced and then canceled, which is much more dramatic. And then there's also, if you keep going in that direction, there's the game that is announced and never officially canceled, but it's just never going to come out. Well, that's agent. A Rockstar's agent was never officially canceled. That's true. In fact, I think that even StarCraft Ghost was never like officially canceled.

Like Blizzard never came out and said, we are canceling StarCraft Ghost. It was just kind of indefinitely put on hiatus and obviously it was canceled. Yeah, correct to your point. It's funny. I was actually just talking to somebody Ebersoft recently about Beyond Good and Evil 2. They were like, yeah, it's still in pre-production. Still, still slogging along. We're still brainstorming and throwing ideas around.

I think there's some internal strife around that game that I'm very curious about. So we'll see. We'll see what happens there. Does Half-Life 3 count as Vaporware according to you two? I guess it does. Was it announced? Episode 3 does, yes. Okay.

Well, Vaporware is different than silently canceled. I think that was more silently canceled, right? Vaporware is something that is still ostensibly coming. It's just, like, been announced forever. So you're saying you don't believe it's still coming? No, absolutely no. Well, they made clear that that's not so. Well, unless they announced a new version of it, but the version that was announced is not coming.

Yeah, it's getting into some kind of fine distinctions because Half-Life 2, episode 2 ended with a cliffhanger that was going to be resolved in episode 3. That still hasn't happened, but Half-Life Alex also addresses that and pushes us in a new direction that presumably now leads to something new that could also become vaporware. So it's like, what do we call it? I don't know. But it's not really clear what's coming. Yeah, I know. It's a fun problem to have for them. Just keep making more like 0.5, 0.25, 0.75 versions of Half-Life so that you never have to answer the question.

But I would make a distinction between something like Agent, which was never officially canceled, but is canceled, and something like Beyond Good and Evil 2, which is still, and people are still working on that game, unlike agents. So that's Vaporware, but it's still in development. And so the most infamous example of Vaporware in the video game industry is Duke Nukem Forever, which is a game that was in development. for 10 plus years probably should have been canceled based on the version that actually came out. But that was kind of the iconic vaporware in that it actually did materialize after many, many years of being MIA. What about Ken Levine's narrative Legos? What if I just keep asking you about different things and asking you to define whether they're

canceled or not? That's just development hell, right? That hasn't even been officially announced. There's no title for it or anything. Right. Can it be canceled if it doesn't have a title? Well, that's the thing, right? Like a lot of this stuff happened. Ragtag also didn't have an official title.

Like the code name Ragtag only came out through reporting at Kataku. Like it wasn't officially announced, but it was they showed off concept art of it and then kind of canceled it when they shut down the company behind it. And we're like, yeah, sorry, it's no more. So we have these three sort of categories internally canceled, publicly canceled, publicly canceled. vaporware. There's also cancellation in the age of games as a service, which I think is another thing worth mentioning because we talked about Stadia, which is this really ignominious end for this thing that everybody thought was going to fail and then really epically did. But because Stadia is a service... That we asked, that we, wait, hold on, not only thought that we asked,

Maddie and I sat down with Phil Harrison, the guy in charge of that project at Google, asked him, is this going to shut down in a few years like every other Google project? And he gave this like wish you watched her answer that was like, well, the scale and the amount of money we're putting into this thing. But of course, three years later, it shut down. Anyway, sorry, go on. I mean, I guess what we were shown is that even with the scale and amount of money they put in, they still are capable of shutting something down at Google. They're willing to do it. And they did. And so I think that when something is a service like Stadia, it has to be canceled because it is turned off. It's a going concern, and then it gets unplugged. And it's similar when a game has

servers that then get turned off, which we've seen many times over the years. And that's kind of a similar thing, but the game can still be played, but maybe it's not able to be played online, or maybe even there's DRM that doesn't work anymore, so it's kind of been turned off. But that aspect of cancellation, where it's something that you bought, it's something that people have that people have been using that is now going away, that feels like that's maybe the more modern version of cancellation compared with what we're talking about, which is a little bit more of a 2010s thing,

a little bit older fashion, where you announce a game, it is a product that was going to ship, and then has been canceled and is never coming out. Like if something's in early access, or I'm thinking of gearbox's BattleBorn, which of course came out, and then it was just that not enough people played it.

It was sort of an Overwatch alike from that era of team shooters. There was another one that Cliff Plasinski made, Lawbreakers, I think it was called. Yeah, that also, the server shut down. But that is not, even just from a headline perspective, I know we've had to come up with ways to describe that. Like, it's not a cancellation, but it's like, okay, server's shutting down. That doesn't really have zip to it. But it is a momentous thing for people who still play

the game or even people who are just rubbernecking in its failure to take off. If you functionally think about it, canceling a game that hasn't come out yet is basically saying, okay, this isn't going to be released. This thing we're working on is never going to be released. Any game that's a live service that requires the participation of the people making it to keep it going is kind of in a state of perpetually being released, which can be great because you're getting updates and sometimes the game gets better and better over time. But that means that at any moment, they can still cancel it, even if it's been out for many years,

because they're basically saying, well, we're no longer going to release it. So it's still basically a cancellation. And then you get into kind of like existential like ship athesious questions where it's like a little bit where if you're playing Final Fantasy 14 but it's 2.0 and not the version that launched then what are you playing or if you're playing destiny one but but Nolan North is voicing your ghost instead of Peter Dinklage are you still playing the same Destiny 1 that we all played in 2014? I mean Overwatch 1 has been canceled one could argue yeah that's Overwatch 1 is gone no more it's canceled yep 100% I was just playing no man sky. they just updated that game again. By the way, anybody out there who wants to play No Man Sky, there's like a really cool new way to play that game where it's kind of in between casual and survival. So they didn't cancel the original No Man Sky,

but it is kind of wild. I mean, I guess in a way they did. It's just they improved it in so many ways. It's kind of in arguable that it's just been made better. But you can't play that version of No Man Sky that I played when it first came out. But I do think it's worth noting that like, even though we're mentioning, like I said before,

we're mentioning the big splashy games, that were announced and that everyone is lamenting. I think it's healthier to think about it in a way of like, it's healthier to think about all the games that are canceled that we never see or the games that are never Greenland in the first place. So they're like pitched, maybe a prototype gets put together over the course of three months. And that happens so much more often than people realize. Like there's so many times when a game studio might have finished their project.

And so like a big team stays on to work on DLC or whatever, a live service stuff. And then a smaller team goes off to spend six months working. on a prototype for something and then that prototype just turns into nothing because their publisher isn't interested or like it gets doesn't pass a milestone or whatever. It's not good enough for whatever reason. And I think that it's healthy to think about that when you're thinking about the likes of like scale bound or whatever else you're obsessing over that was announced, which is the context here is that so many games get canceled often for good

reasons that like maybe it's not really the best idea or the healthiest idea to fixate on the ones that we just know about and have heard about. And sometimes you can reuse that scaffolding from a canceled game. I mean, I said this before, but it is another thing that makes it very different from a movie where maybe you have a bunch of footage that's been shot. It's not like you're like, well, we got all this great Daniel Day Lewis footage. We could just use that in another movie. But like that would be absurd, but also kind of awesome.

Maybe they should do that. But video games are that way where it's like, okay, this game isn't going to work, but this one character's move. set is really cool. Can we make a whole game about them? And maybe it's a single player game instead of this open world, you know, multiplayer thing we're going to do or whatever else it was. And that actually happens. Or it's just a good learning experience for people to try and fail at something. Like, this is one that wasn't announced. But Bully 2 is a perennial canceled game favorite that I enjoy reading articles about because so much of Bully is about social engineering, which was just a really

cool thing for a game to be out about at that time wasn't very common then um and in bully two they were going to add even more social engineering which i think is i mean i don't i don't know i haven't talked to anyone who ever worked on bully two although it's been pretty well confirmed it existed but people who have worked on it have talked about how much more social engineering they wanted to add and how unwieldy the ideas became but it's fun to read about them from just a dream standpoint where you're like, okay, they couldn't make that happen, but that must have been a cool thought exercise and even a cool design exercise to keep trying, though. And that probably helped all those developers with other projects that they ended up working on

later, even if none of that was actually usable at the time, they still probably learned from it. One of the things that's so enticing about some of these canceled games is that it is just, it's a game that it's a type of game that people want that they haven't got. I mean, Bully 2 is a great example. I love Bully. and it's this like rock star treatment of persona where you're a school kid and you're going to class and you're managing all your social life and stuff. And I would love to play a modern new version of that. It would be so cool.

And I think when you feel that way and then you think, oh, bully two existed and now it's not coming out, it makes you more a little feel a little more agitated about the cancellation. For example, Star Wars 1313, for a while when people saw that and when they saw that trailer, The sentiment was, finally, they're going to make a big single-player Star Wars game. Like, we've wanted for so long. I loved all those old Jedi Night games, and they're going to do it. It's going to be so cool. This looks amazing. It's like uncharted Star Wars.

And then it got canceled, and it was heartbreaking because it felt like, God, Star Wars' curse, we're never going to get that. But now we've had, you know, Jedi Fallen Order. There's kind of more of a world where there are Star Wars games. So it stings a little bit less. And I see fewer people lamenting the loss of Star Wars 1313, because it feels a little more like, well, okay, maybe that game had to die so that these other ones could come out. If another game like Bully 2 came out, maybe that would feel the same way.

I still really want Bully 2 to come out. That would be really cool. That's why Silent Hill still hurts so many people. Well, yeah. Scalebound. Just the obsession of the scale bound continues. There's nothing else where you fight dragons or something. You lost me there.

I'm like, well, there's a huge Silent Hill fandom still, and that fandom is still sad and it's still like, well, where's Silent Hill going to go next? but then you said the word scale bound and all my senses turned off and everything went black and I didn't know what you were talking about and I was lost and scared. It's just so funny that that's the game in 70 people. I don't know. Respect to people who love scale bound.

If you listen to you love scale bound, that's fine. I'm going to get really... Like what you like. I don't want to yuck your young. Well, hold on, Kirk. You say respect to people who love scale bound. That's like saying it that way makes it sound like they love a game

that they're like a cult classic game or something. These are people who love a trailer. They love the name of. the game. Die hard scale-bound fans. Listen, you gotta respect the lore. They're called scalers. They call themselves scalers.

The name of the fan names. Scaly, scale. Can I share the story of a really sad cancellation? That's a little bit different than the ones that we've talked about? Please do. So I love No One Lives Forever, which are games developed by Monolith for PC that came out in, I think, 2000 and 2002, starring Kate Archer, one of the great heroes of video games, a super spy in the 1960s. and they're just really cool games, and they're basically impossible to play.

This was a story that I reported when I was at Kataku, was that the reason they're impossible to play is because ownership issues with the license, which is apparently a thing for a lot of games from around this time period, but I've been thinking about it more because so much has changed. Like nothing has changed because no-unless forever still isn't getting re-released, but also so much has changed, and it's sort of darkly funny. But the very short story of this game is that this, studio night dive games wanted to remake it.

And they had a whole plan to do it and they'd remade system shock, I think, or something else. Like they'd re-release, oh, they'd re-release System Shock 2 at the time and made it work on modern systems and kind of just neat it up a little bit and made it so it can be on Steam and people can play it. And they wanted to do the same thing with No Ones Forever 1 and 2, which would be so cool because I'm always telling people about that game. I'm always telling the two of you about that game and listeners. And there's no way to play it right now unless you just go torrent it or you already have CD ROMs, like some kind of weirdo up in your attic. I don't know who would still have to know

this reference CD ROMs in their attic. Is your computer even still have a CD-ROM drive? I have a USB one. I use it to rip some old audio CDs. Anyway, so they wanted to release it. They started just kind of doing the start work on it, get the source code, start figuring it out, and then track down the rights because they were, of course, going to pay whoever owned it. And then it just turned into this total, just cluster. It was a disaster. It was a disaster. where nobody knew who even owned it, but Warner Brothers in the end, they were kind of the closest to maybe having it. And then they just eventually were like, no, we just don't want you to do that. We don't know if we own it, but we're going to tell you that you can't make it anyways.

And it was a super frustrating story because in the story I reported, I really just kind of talked to the two guys. It wasn't a ton of reporting. But they basically were like, yeah, we're not doing this, that we have to move on. Like we have a business to run. We're doing something else. And they had canceled this re-release, not even a remake, a re-release of this game, but they still had to cancel it. And the darkly funny thing is that the licensing issue was between Warner Brothers, Activision, and 20th century Fox, all of whom had their finger in the no-unless-rever pie at

some point in the 90s and the early 2000s. And no one really knew who controlled it. But now, of course, Warner Brothers is owned by Discovery. Activision is soon to be owned by Microsoft and Fox is owned by Disney. So all three of those corporations, it was already a mess and no one could tell who had this license. And now they're like buried under. Yeah. another acquisition and I'm sure it's even worse and it just makes me depressed. Though I'd love to be pleasantly surprised and finally, you know, whatever discovery, someone at discovery is like, you know what? I'm finally going to re-release no one this forever. But that has always bummed me out and made me feel that what if, and I've even played those games a bunch of times, the what if for me is what if

people that I know could play that game? Like what if that game could be back in the conversation because both of those games are wonderful and they're kind of just lost to history. Very sad. It's so weird that no one owns it. That is truly the future of games as no one having any idea who owns it. It's a really weird. A weird thing that might be more common than we realized. And it was definitely a disorienting thing to be trying to pin down. Yeah, I can't imagine how frustrating that must be to be the creators of a game or any sort of

entertainment property that you don't know who owns it anymore because it's been shuffled around between corporations. It's like, I freaking created it. I should own it. Not these corporations that don't give up. fuck about my property. Right, right. It's frustrating.

Yeah. Do you guys want to talk about Stadia a little bit before we go? Yeah. Let's talk about Stadia, right? So Google Stadia, let me set the stage a little bit here because I remember GDC 2018 and I've reported this over the years, both on our show and at Kataku, and then a Bloomberg later, at 2018, GDC, it was like whisper, there were all these whispers from developers.

And it was like, man, new player in the console wars. like new player here, Google is coming to get Xbox and Microsoft. And Xbox and Microsoft people were whispering Google to each other. It's true. You just, you would hear these spirits. It's like, um, uh, yeah, it's like you're in, what is it? The Shining with the Whisper. It's just like everywhere you're going.

You just hear Whispers, Google. Yeah, you would see the two twins in the hallway. Yeah, the two twins were. Cloud gaming pouring towards you out of the elevator. Come play video games with us, Stan. What's the name of the CEO? Come stream forever. Render and ever.

Pandar, I think that's the CEO of Google. Anyway, so 2019 it gets announced, and there's some heavy rumors leading up to the CDIA announcement, including that it's a console, which we reported at Kataku. We were like, no, it's not a console. This is just like a streaming platform. The only hardware here is a controller, and then they announced it, and it was a streaming platform.

They come out. Phil Harrison is like, we're going to take on Xbox and PlayStation. I remember there's this big slide that was like, Xbox, like four terraflops, like PlayStation, three terraflops. Terraflops are really big. I do remember everybody talking terraflops back then. Oh my God.

It was crazy. And then the real, and this, again, I kind of was like trying to warn people about this. But then the other shoe dropped around June of that year, around E3, which was, oh, instead of being the Netflix for games that everyone assumed we would be where we sell you, where you pay for a subscription and you get unlimited access to cloud streaming CDIA games, we are actually going to sell you games for $60. And you would have to buy like Red Deer Redemption 2 and Assassin's Creed for $60. In addition to like the most confusing launch program ever where in order to get early access,

you also had to pay a subscription and like be a member. And eventually that got waves. But like for the first wave, you had to like really be pay a bunch. And it was just a disaster. It was the biggest flop that we've seen in recent years. And so expensive. I mean, I don't know if it's the most expensive flop. in recent years, but it sure seems like it could be.

Yeah, I mean, they're refunding everybody. The refunds are the thing. They had hundreds of people working on first party exclusive stadia games. Of course, none of those actually launched with the device, which was a problem. So there was no real compelling reason to play it. But yeah, and then slowly over time, they just whittled this division down. They cut all the first party people and laid a bunch of people off, shut down their studios. And then eventually just last week, just shut down the,

whole service R-I-P, Stadia, what is dead may never die. Yeah. There was someone in the triple-click Discord who told the story of buying Cyberpunk 2077 and getting a free Chromecast and controller, and then playing through the game and then selling the Chromecast and the controller, and now they're going to be able to refund Cyberpunk, so they're basically going to make a profit. Wow. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention.

Which is kind of amazing. Everybody, this is unprecedented. And they said everybody who bought anything on Stadia will get a full refund, which is pretty cool. Your Google, I guess, and you have infinite money. So I want to say a couple of things, a couple of thoughts anyways. And then that's that I think that Stadia, as a product, is different than Stadia the way that it was rolled out and handled. And I think that as a product, it's actually much, much better than its legacy will indicate. And even then this conversation has made it sound, I don't think that if they had handled this right, it would have been such a huge,

Yeah, it's entirely marketing and pricing, yeah. Marketing and pricing and yeah, just the... Messaging, yeah. And even messaging, right, because... So I've read a lot of good, there have been a lot of sort of obituaries for Stadia. A couple of great pieces about people who loved it, who found a lot of value in it. I think people who played Destiny 2 on Stadia really got a lot out of it because Destiny 2 was live on Stadia.

There were always people playing, and it was just an easy way to play that kind of MMO. I've just seen a lot of people say, you know, that was the game that made it click for me. I've also seen people who mostly just play on a switch, but they wanted to play a couple things like cyberpunk or Red Dead 2, really graphically intensive games play it, and that people liked it, and that the issue really, to me at least, seems like it was partly a pricing thing, which you already described.

That just was a mistake. They didn't have any first-party stuff lined up, so there wasn't really a reason to get it into your house, like, oh, I want to check out Halo or whatever it is, you know, the exclusive thing that I can only play on Stadia. That didn't happen. and that it was billed as this finished product. If it had just been, yeah, we're just kind of kind of try this thing for a while.

And it's basically early access. They don't have to call it that, but it's just the, it's in beta, right? Aren't a million Google things in beta? I feel like there are things that we use every day that are still in beta. It was so not, yeah, it was so not Google the way they were like, here's this big console launch that we're going to do. It just speaks to the people who were in charge because these are all people who are like all men in their 40s and 50s who have been working in games for 20 years and kind of failed their way up through different companies, ran the PS3 launch.

In Phil Harrison's case, he oversaw two of the biggest disasters in video game console history with the PS3 and then the Xbox 1. So, Brandl arrive at Stadia is quite something. But yeah, these are people who like have just this old school like 20 years ago way of looking at things. And that's how they were thinking. They weren't thinking about early access or soft launches or like focusing on what is appealing about this thing and low latency games.

all the other stuff that you're talking about, Kirk, they were thinking about how can we take on Microsoft and PlayStation? Because that's the era in which they've grew up and like made their career. The like huge financial buy-in of getting a console and then having that be your identity when in actuality, what they should have been marketing was a subscription service a Xbox GamePass, which there are plenty of people I know anecdotally who just have that and that's, they maybe wouldn't even call themselves a gamer, lowercase Gero. uppercase G, it's just like, oh, I can try things out on there and cancel and come and go as I will, which I feel like would have been perfect for something like Stadia, because that's the audience that

they nominally wanted was a more casual audience that was like, oh, I want to try the skyrims of the world. I want to try these things, but I don't want to buy an Xbox. I don't even know what kind of computer I would need to buy, but I can play it in a web browser. Great. But that audience needs as little buy-in as possible, just make it super streamlined. I don't know how you get them to start paying for it, but I'm not a businesswoman. I feel like you need to not have that massive cost buy-in that they had at the beginning and then tried to take away, but by the time they took it away, it was way too late and nobody understood how the service worked.

A free trial and then $10 a month. That's how you're going to pay for it. I don't think it's too complicated. I think it's actually pretty simple. I think the problem is that they wanted the likes of Red Dead 2 and Assassin's Creed and the big splashy AAA games. And you can't get those without selling them because the companies behind them will absolutely not allow them to be part of subscriptions. Right.

Unless you pay them a ton of money. And they already paid them a ton of money. They were paying literally like tens of millions of dollars. I learned this through talking to Google people and developers who were involved with the companies involved. They were paying more like the amount of money it would take to make a AAA game. They were paying just for. report to Stadia. It was pretty crazy. You've heard sometimes just look at the amount of money that is being spent on something like Stadia

or these recent reports about meta and their VR stuff and just think, you know, could I just have one million dollars? Like just one of those millions of dollars that you're just flushing down the toilet. Could I have it? Because I would put it to great use. It would change my whole life. You would buy the sickest guitar. Yeah. It would be fantastic. It would be. It would be. You buy one guitar that costs $1 billion. That's right. So just a million, just one million that you are otherwise going to light on fire.

Don't light it on fire and give it to me instead. I sometimes think about that. I was kind of sad that that wasn't quite the tack that anybody took about Stadia. Like I did see a lot of people lamenting, oh, the indie games that were taking advantage of this because a lot of those games were getting a really big cut compared to other cuts that they get elsewhere. And to me, from the reporter perspective, I'm like, oh, but you were getting that huge cut because Google was so desperate to get you. That wasn't typical. That wasn't going to set a standard for the industry.

That was a company that was so desperate to get any platform exclusives of any kind or even not exclusive, but just games on their platform that they were willing to pay anything. So why not see it as a good thing that you were able to clean up while you could and get that Google money rather than lamenting the law. of something that never seemed to me like it was going to last. I mean, I do feel for the people who were counting on the money and thought it was going to last longer than it did, but the writing has been on the wall for Stadia since that very first day when Phil Harrison was announcing it. Yeah, so I just, just to follow up on something I said earlier, so GDC-2018 Xbox and PlayStation people were literally like terrified for what Google was going to do. They were like, here's a new entry to the, to the console landscape, like has enough money to buy everything.

they can do whatever they want. Cut to GDC 2019. Sadia has announced they're all cracking up. Like the sense of relief at these companies was like tangible, I imagine. Yeah. It's also interesting that Microsoft is basically doing what we've said that Google should have done, which makes sense. It's easier for them.

They have a really established game library. They have a whole infrastructure to support this. And they're doing live streaming as a sort of, you know, auxiliary thing. if you want to do it, if you have GamePass, you can just also stream games. And it's not probably going to look as good as it would running on their most powerful console, but it's like a nice option.

And that just seems like the way that game streaming is going to develop for a while still, even though we all, I mean, it's easy to look at the future and be like, well, yeah, probably at some point in the future, we'll just be able to stream things just like we stream TV shows. That'd be great in a lot of ways. It just seems like from now till then, that's the approach that's going to carry

you all the way from here to there, the one that Microsoft is doing. So it's not impossible. Someone is currently doing it, and that's what it looks like. Yeah. And then we'll end up in a subscription war like we are now, where like at first all you needed was Netflix and now all you need is Xbox Game Pass. But five, ten years from now, it's just going to be so many competing cloud gaming services and streaming services.

But at least Google will not be one of them. Yeah. Or they will be, you know? That's Google. stadium 2.0. Yeah, it really speaks to you. I think it really just speaks to the,

how having, how shall I put this delicately, an executive with foresight and business savvy in charge of your product will make all the difference. Because I know for a fact that there were people in middle management and lower management at Google Stadia

who were pushing back against some of the stuff who were saying people will not buy $60 games on this thing like that is not going to, this is not going to go over well. And they just got nothing because executives on the top think they thought they knew how to run things and were, again, they're just from another era. So yeah, I mean, props to Phil Spencer and his team because they are just seem to have a lot of foresight when it comes to all this stuff and have just built this brand where it's, they're, they're lovable. And people seem to be into what they're offering. Yeah, and it feels like a value.

I don't know. They won't release no one lives forever. So I'll get no good. Although, I don't know. Maybe when they own Activision, Kirk can. Yeah, maybe once Microsoft buys Disney and like all those other companies, then maybe. I mean, let me just say, I never thought that Konami would do anything with Sweet Coden again. And the fact that they're doing a remaster means that maybe Kirk's dreams can come true to. Yeah, the bummer is that it's most likely, I think it was that it was most likely Warner Brothers.

But if it is Activision, then I actually could see that. I could see Microsoft being good guy Microsoft and saying, you know what? we're going to bring back these beloved. Or Kate Archer will just be in multiversus and that'll be way better. There you go. There you go. It'll get me to finally play multiverse. Kate Archer versus LeBron.

All right. On that now, let's take a break and we'll be back with one more thing. And now a live reading from Rachel's Poetry Corner. Elephants Therrimands Clifton. Neopets, Porstrips, Jeptson. Pine Smell Jelly Beans, Golly Goals.

Skittles, Squirrels, and the mole. Celery chopsticks, A Case of You by Joni Mitchell. Lullabies tie-dye, the more you know. All of these things on our wonderful show. All of these things and more. Wait for you on Wonderful. Every Wednesday on Maximumfund.org or wherever you download podcasts.

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So I've been kind of inadvertently consuming media that gives me a new perspective on the baby boomer generation. My one more thing is the Tommy Knockers, which I alluded to last week when I kind of piggybacked on Jason Stephen King. one more thing just to mention that I was reading the Tommy Knockers, but I just finished it last night and I think it's a really interesting book. And also that it dovetails kind of interestingly with my pick from last week, which was the Big Chill, the 1983 film, which is also very concerned with the sort of unwee of the 1980s baby boomers. So the Tommy Knockers came out in 1987, which was a completely bananas year for Stephen King. It was the year when he had published, what was it? It was It, Misery, Tommy Knockers.

He did four. Bing. The other book we were trying to think of was the Dark Tower Book 2, the drawing of the three. Bing! He had, and they've discussed this on Just King Things, the wonderful podcast that Maddie and I both really like, where our buddies talk about Stephen King books. And they've been talking about this a lot. This is how I know this context.

But that he had like between one and 1.5% of all books sold in the year in 1987 where Stephen King books. which is just completely nuts when you think about the number of books sold. So anyways, Stephen King is dominating the world and also coming to the end of his darkest period of addiction. And the Tommy Knockers is kind of the final capstone book of that. And it is in many ways a book about addiction. It's also just a really good, interesting, rich novel that I enjoyed a lot. And that's interesting for a number of reasons. One is that the book is critically disliked.

It's thought of as a lesser king. Also, the book was disliked by me as a kid when I read it. I felt a lot of kinship with Michael and Cameron, the host of Just King Things, who both described something similar, or at least I think Michael did. Michael hated it and said it was his least favorite king book ever for years. Because I read it right when I was like 14 or 13, and I had just read, you know, I think I'd just read it and the stand. And I was like, this guy's amazing.

I love these books. And then I read the Tommy Knockers. and it is a very unusual, very dark, and very adult novel. It's about adults who are dealing with adult issues. It's about an alcoholic. It's two kind of writers who are successful in different ways, but not very successful. And it's about a town full of people being taken over by this alien force. So it's very much a king, big town novel.

It does the thing where he zooms out and he kind of whips the camera around from place to place and you get to know all these minor characters and all their little dramas. as they're sort of, you know, succumbing to a dark power. Yeah, you would love this, Jason. You'd also love Salem's Lot. I mean, you both will. Salem's Lot does that more than I realized, and I recently read that as well. I think that was one more thing.

Anyways, it's also about just this sort of baby boomer energy, the energy of someone who believed in all this radical change in the 60s and even through the 70s and thought things were going to be different, and then finds themselves in the Ronald Reagan era and in this kind of this cold era of capitalism, which is, I think, what the big chills title is a reference to even. It's just there's this kind of, it's just this winter of the 1980s where all of culture just sort of froze and everything became really cold. And you can see that happening in the Tommy Knockers as well.

There's a paranoia that sets in. One of the two protagonists is obsessed with nuclear power and how it's going to end the world. And he's also a really raging alcoholic. There's an amazing scene early in the book where he's at this party and he gets increasingly drunk and begins just getting into combative arguments with people about nuclear power. And he knows, he's like, oh, God, I'm getting started about the nukes again.

Here we go. And it winds up just completely exploding in this, you know, just really high drama, ridiculous sequence. So it's basically an alien invasion story. It's, you know, he references the Day of the Triffids a lot, but it's got a kind of body snatchers thing. But it's also just about people and disappointment and the dissolution of the self and the collective. It has a lot of interesting parallels, even with today, with technology. that we don't fully understand being unleashed on us.

That's a lot of what the Tommy Knockers is. There's this alien ship that causes people to just have amazing realizations that they can invent just, oh, I can take some D batteries and a circuit board, and I can build a nuclear reactor that powers my whole house. Oh, that was easy. And they don't know what they're doing, so they're really irresponsible with it. They're kind of wind up blowing themselves up and stuff. And that is, of course, it feels like a really interesting way ahead of its time

commentary on social media and the internet, especially because everyone in the town becomes telepathically linked with one another. So it's just like a rich, interesting book. It's a downer. It doesn't really have any of the, even the sort of, yeah, raw, Stephen King, all right, all the good guys are going to win. It doesn't really have that. But it was a really good novel that I enjoyed, and I'm very much enjoying the Just King Things episode that I'm finally listening to as well. So anyways, I want to throw that out there and say a little bit more about it, that I really think it's a great book. It's one of the best King books that I've read, you know, maybe

ever. It's really one of the most that I've enjoyed it just as a piece of literature. I think it's a great book and I recommend checking it out. Strong words. I will get it from the library. That's good. Maddie, you're up. Okay, so I played some of the Street Fighter 6 beta, which was

this past weekend as we're recording this October 7th through 10th. And I I mean, I dug it. I think it's going to be good. I don't have a lot to say about the systems of the game. I wanted to talk about the hub because it's so weird. And I feel like even as two people who don't play fighting games,

you too will appreciate how incredibly weird this hub world is. And I don't understand why more people aren't talking about this. Tell me about the hub world. What's up with hub worlds? Why would there need to be a hub world in Street Fighter 6? I don't have an answer to that. For micro-transactions, I assume. So is this like a lobby where you walk?

walk around as your fighter. So as soon as you... Well, that's like NBA 2K, like slowly out of that as a way to sell you thing. Call a duty out of that, right? So here's how it is the beta, which again, they might change this. The game doesn't even have a release date yet. And this was the only thing that was available for the beta. So there might be a version of fighting in the game that doesn't work this way and there's

no hub world. And I really hope so. Because if it all works this way, I'm probably not going to play for very long because I will go insane. So when you started up the beta, it is over now. So I have to use the past tense. It will force you into a character creator. So this is already interesting to me because I'm like, I'm used to, you know, Mortal Kombat

has character creators. There's certainly fighting games with character creators. And then there's like a character creator mode where you can make your guy fight other guys or gals and it's fun and it's like a goofy shenanigans mode. So I was like, all right, goofy shenanigans mode. So I make a fighter who looks kind of like me because I couldn't think of anything else. And then I send her into the hub world where I get introduced by this adorable announcer character. And then I'm just walking around to all these arcade cabinets where other people are sitting.

And in order to play a match against them, I have to walk up to an arcade cabinet and sit with them and play them. So I have created, I am playing as Maddie who is playing Street Fighter. I am constantly playing as Maddie. who is playing Street Fighter. I, Maddie, am not playing Street Fighter. I'm playing as Maddie, who is. And this started to make me feel completely insane after a few matches.

You're going to have to put in quarters to keep playing. It's like retro game challenge. It was that way, because if you walk up to a cabinet and there's already two people playing, all you can do is awkwardly stand there. And people would do that. Or they would dance around. And like, the music that plays in the lobby is so soothing,

which I actually think is a great choice, because if you get creamed and then you're just suddenly spit back out into the lobby again, you just are forced to listen to this really soothing music. It's like a spa, keep you from raging. And there's like this gentle lelting announcer's voice who's like, a player is on a winning streak. And like she's constantly saying that because someone's constantly on a winning streak. And like there's not an easy way to talk to just your opponent, or at least if there was, I couldn't find it despite looking a lot.

So people are constantly just spamming Gigi in the all chat. So like the entire room is just people screaming Gigi at the full room because they don't know how else to say Gigi to one another. It was really strange. And it also gave me mild anxiety because at a certain point I was like, I want to go take a lunch break, but I don't want this person to think I'm rage quitting. So I need to like get up from the cabinet and like say Gigi to them and then log off. Like it's like being in a real fight night. It's like metaverse shit. This is like the metaverse.

The metaverse actually happens when the CEO comes. from above it is like we need a metaverse everyone has a metaverse. I don't want it though and it's tough because I like all the in-person aspects of fighting games so in theory I'm like shouldn't I like this but instead I think it might be the worst and a lot of people wait until they're selling like t-shirts for your character for like real money and you can like unlock new outfits and I'm like I don't care what outfit my character that I'm playing as is wearing I like want to unlock outfits for Blanca I don't understand that like I want to play as Chun Li.

I don't want to play as me playing as Chun Lee. I don't know. I thought it was really strange and that the metaverses may be bad now, but only because the Street Fighter sticks. This is it. That was the thing that pushed you over the edge. I liked it up until now, but now I'm not for sure anymore. RIP Metaverse Ambitions for Maddie Myers.

My one more thing is a book that I took out from the library this past weekend and have started reading. It's a book called Cabin Fever by Michael Smith and Jonathan. and Franklin. It tells a story of this group of colorful characters who wind up on a cruise ship, not knowing that there is a deadly secret in this cruise ship. And that over time, even though it starts out with this like happy go lucky ride where they're making their way to South America and they're like having all these good times, like seeing the sights and eating great meals and dancing together, they do not realize that on board this cruise ship is a secret killer

that will eventually shut down the ship and force them to turn around. And what's going to happen next? Who knows? It also is a nonfiction story about COVID-19 on a cruise ship. This book is about an actual cruise ship that was harboring the coronavirus in March of last year. Is this the infamous cruise ship? No, it's not the infamous. I don't think so.

The one I'm thinking of, I might forget. There were so many of them. This was in the news. but there were so many of them in the news of various points. This one had COVID, had to deal with it, had to turn around, had to figure out where to dock, had to deal with constantly shifting plans as like the cabin is like, well, we'll be canceling this part of the trip. Actually, we'll be turning around now.

Actually, we can't dock because the ports are closed and it's just horrifying and really interesting as a nonfiction reported story about like the goings on of this ship as COVID was hitting. Yeah, it's a little bit clunky as a book. There's some repeated descriptions. Like, they mentioned a few times. Like, it was full of elderly people. And so the writing is a little bit off, I would say.

But the story is really interesting. And, like, I mean, as I pitched it earlier, like, it's just as gripping as any novel. Because it's a story about, like, people stuck on a cruise ship as this deadly virus is circulating in the world. Total nightmare situation. It's very much, like, something with Stephen King could have written. So, yeah, really interesting. interesting, really fascinating book. And yeah, just by reading it, you can kind of guess who survives and who doesn't based on who spoke to the authors and like how that, like if you're talking, if you're reading and like you're only getting one side of a couple's perspective.

That's always interesting because it's like, oh God, that's great. What's going to happen to their spouse? So yeah, it's really, I generally have been trying to shy away from reading books about like modern news and like negative books about modern news. like I will never read a book about the Trump administration and any of those. Not even Maggie's book? No, not even that one. I didn't mean either. I did, I'm a funny anecdote about that in a second.

But yeah, but this one has gripped me because of the way it's, it's just like really good reporting and really well executed, I think. Yeah, that book, so Maggie Hammerman, famous New York Times journalist, wrote a book called Confidence Man. And this is so funny. There's like, there's been a lot of backlash to her for stupid reasons, like people complaining that she held stuff for her book, which is so stupid because, first of all, if people didn't hold reporting for their books, there would be no books. Second of all, sometimes when you're

reporting for a book, the people you're speaking to will only talk to you because they know it's in a book, and it's not going to be in the New York Times the next day. So the stupidity of the criticism against her. But anyway, that's another story. But I did see some dumbass, like, resistance tweeter. You know all these tweeters who are like conmen with like hashtag resistance and like 200,000 followers, even though no one knows who they are. And all they do is tweet about co-fef and how dumb Trump is and how game theory. Game theory. Yeah, exactly.

We're getting these. Yeah, I love, vote. This is, no matter who takes from Jason. We are America's shoulders today. We're getting into it. So this guy tweets in response to Maggie Haberman showing a picture of her book, which is

titled Confidence Man. And this guy tweets, uh, fix that for you and crosses out the fit in. So it says con man, which. is one of the funniest things I have ever seen on Twitter. For those who are not familiar, con man is, of course, Comman is an abbreviation of confidence, man.

That's what it's saying. Surprisingly, not that many people seem to know that. I recently told someone out for the first time. Yeah. But to like go out of your way to be like, fix that for you, it's so funny. It's so stupid.

These resistance grifters are the dumbest people on the planet. This is a really big talk from somebody who corrected me on the whole chomping champing thing recently. That's true. Anyway, it would be like if I wrote a book and I was like, now the story of

electronic mail and someone was like, fix that for you. Honestly, Jason, somebody should do that if you release a book titled Electronic Mail things. That's not a good title. That's true. But Confidence Man is actually a pretty good, pretty good title. It is pretty good. But still, despite be defending

her reporting, I just, there's nothing that can bring me to want to read a book about the Trump administration. Like, I feel like I got everything I need to know about that administration, I already know. I'm with you. You're kind of selling me on this COVID book, even though I feel like I can't imagine reading it. So I'll read the Tommy Knockers instead. That sounds like a real idea. I'll let you know when I finish it. I'm not, I'm not quite finished. I'm like halfway through. So I'll let you know when I finish it if it was, if it's worth the entire read. But I'm enjoying it. Tommy Knockers is grim enough. So maybe maybe go with that one. So yeah, that's Cabin Fever by Michael Smith and Jonathan Franklin.

I believe one of them is a Bloomberg reporter, although I do not know them. So this is not like me recommending some, like a colleague I know or anything. All right. On that note, it is time for us to say goodbye. Kirk. Maddie, I'll see you both next week. Yeah, see you next week. Bye.

Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at Triple Clickpod. Send email the triple click at maximum fun.org

and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximumfund.org. Comedy and culture. Artists owned. Audience. Audience supported.