Triple Click - Writing Video Games and Andor (with Tom Bissell)

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

Triple Click brings on Tom Bissell, writer of video games, books, TV shows and the final three episodes of Andor season 2. They talk about how he went from reporting in Iraq to writing dialogue for Battlefield, his journey to become a writer on Andor, and what it was like to pen the conclusion to one of the most acclaimed TV shows of all time.One More Thing:Kirk: James (Percival Everett)Maddy: Metroid: Zero MissionJason: Never Flinch (Stephen King)LINKS:“The Writer Will Do Something” by Matthew Seiji Burns and Tom Bissell: https://matthewseiji.itch.io/twwdsNicholas Quah on “The Death Star Trilogy”: https://www.vulture.com/article/andor-rogue-one-new-hope-star-wars-trilogy-viewing-order.htmlPaste Magazine interview with Tom about writing his Andor episodes: https://www.pastemagazine.com/tv/andor/andor-season-2-finale-postmortem-with-writer-tom-bissellTom’s Related Reading Recs: The House of Government by Yuri Slezkine, A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, and anything by John Le CarréTriple Click LIVE in Portland, July 11: https://albertarosetheatre.com/event/triple-click-live/alberta-rose-theatre/portland-oregon/Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin 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

It's like I always say, I have friends everywhere. And one of them is a really good writer. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you and the TV shows and books. And okay, this week we have a special guest. It's Tom Bissell, who's written video games and the last three episodes of Season 2 of Andor. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Shire. And I'm Kirk Hamilton.

And hello. Hello. Hello, my friends. been so long since we've been so nice to see you. There's an in joke that nobody will understand. Nobody will understand it. And it's fine. We can just keep moving. You don't always get to get all the inside of us. Or we could explain it by saying that, you know what, sometimes we record episodes at a different time than we normally do.

And we've seen each other a little more recently than usual. But you, the listener, use your imagination. You get to use your imagination. You get to imagine that we're just seeing each other every single day. And there's hundreds of episodes. You are. aren't hearing because we don't record them. It's just us hanging out. But actually... What? What?

I don't know. That just went totally awesome. People can imagine whatever they want. There actually are other episodes that you might not be hearing, dear listener. And there's a way to hear them. And here's what it is. You would go to Maximumfund.org slash join and you'd become a member of the MaxFund Network, just like us.

And you'd be supporting our show if you do that. And you'd get a monthly bonus episode. from us. And I'm really excited about the most recent episode on the bonus feed, which is a beans cast about Andor, a very cool Star Wars television show. My wife's favorite Star Wars thing. I can't make that decision, but she can. A very, very, very cool Star Wars thing. So if you want to become a member and get access to that and all of our backlog of bonus episodes and also just get that warm, fuzzy feeling from supporting us, I mean, come on, that's actually the best part. You would go to Maximum Fund, Daughter, X-Shoin, support us, all that good stuff.

And also, another way to support us, if you happen to be in the Portland, Oregon area on July 11th, which is really coming up, really soon, super soon, as you're listening to this. Please check us out. We're doing a live show at the Alberta Rose Theater, and you should get a ticket. You still can. It's not too late. So pick up a ticket. Come see us. We're playing music.

We're talking about video games like we usually do, but we're doing it live on a stage before your very eyes. And what's better than that, folks? Nothing. Nothing's better than that, except maybe the episode that we have planned for you today, which is a pretty cool episode. Kirk, what is the episode that we are doing today?

So we are going to have another guest on the show, a guest that I am very excited about, Mr. Tom Bissell, who is a writer. He's worked on video games and TV, and he's done a lot of different things. He's worked on games like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. He wrote Battlefield Harline and Gears 5, so like big budget video games. Actually, my favorite game of his is one that we've talked about a lot on the show. A twine game about game development that he made with our friend Matthew Burns called The Writer Will Do Something, that we always tell people to play.

We'll throw a link to that in show notes. Oh, yeah. Got it's free. You can just go check it out. Oh, yes. He has also written a bunch of nonfiction, Magic Hours. God lives in St. Petersburg and other stories. He wrote Extra Lives, a wonderful book about video games from quite a while back, and he wrote The Disaster Artist. I actually co-wrote that

with Greg Sestro. That's about the movie The Room and was adapted into a major motion picture starring James Franco. And most recently, he has been working in film and television, and his most recent gig, the one that he is coming on the show mostly to talk about, was in the writer's room on and or season two. He wrote the final three episodes of that season. So the Beanscast that is in the bonus feed is going to kind of correspond to this interview as well. Synergy. So we are really excited to have Tom on. He is a good guy.

He's just a friend and someone that it's been a while since I've podcasted with at least. So I'm looking forward to talking with him. And yeah, after the break, we're going to have Tom on the show. So let's get to it. Tom Bissell, welcome to Triple Click. Welcome back to Triple Click, I believe, because I was on this show. and its previous incarnation years and years ago. Sure.

The split screen days. That's true. Welcome back to Triple Click. If you count split screen as being Triple Click, which I suppose, I suppose you probably should. Yeah, that makes sense. It's like the prequels of Triple Click. Can we say that? It's the extended universe maybe.

It's the novels, but it hasn't been decanonized. Here is a little bit of lore for longtime fans of the show. And that is that one of the very first podcasts, if not the first, but maybe the first, but maybe the second podcast that Jason and I recorded together was recorded at Tom Bissell's place at your place in Hollywood. This was a previous dwelling of yours. I have no memory of this. What?

You weren't there. You weren't there. You were there without you. Wait. What? How did this happen? The two of them broken. You let us stay at your place.

I can't remember. I think it was for one night. This was like the kind of apartment condo that you had in Hollywood. And you were out of town. We were playing a lot of time. And the last of us in your apartment. Right. And you let us stay there one night.

And so we were just kind of there. And then we wanted to make a podcast. Because Jason especially was always kind of on me. Let's make a podcast. And we're like, I think we just used my laptop or something. And we just talked for an hour about whatever we had seen. I think we were at E3. E3.

And it was. So you were there in spirit, if not in actual body. And do you know who moved into that apartment after we moved out? Someone awesome. But no, I don't know. Logan Paul. Oh, my gosh. Really?

So awesome. I take back what I said about someone cool. Logan Paul. Do you still have a key? Can you get in there and check up on it? It does amuse me that Logan Paul got my wayward mail for at least several months after we left. Did he get in touch with you and forwarded on? Hey man, I've got some catalogs here.

I don't think Mr. Paul is a helper in that sense. I suspect he was straight into the garbage. Yeah, you never know. Well, we're here to talk about a lot of things. we're here to talk about your work writing video games and of course we're here to talk about Star Wars and Or which has just wrapped its second season and in which you played an integral role

Which you stuck the landing, Tom. Nice work, we should say. Yes, congratulations. A show that I think listeners will know I absolutely love. I love the season two. We actually haven't had a chance to talk about that on the show just yet. We're also doing a big spoiler cast for the bonus episode. Which will be live before this episode.

Yeah, it'll actually go up at the exact same time. So if you listen to this conversation and like it and want to hear another hour and a half of us talking about and or become a member, maximum fun.org slash join. But anyways, yeah, I mean, you crushed it, man. It was amazing. I felt really proud watching it, even though you've done so many amazing things. And it feels stupid to feel proud of someone who is so accomplished. But just watching you pull off something that difficult was very cool. But that's how I feel. I'm curious how you feel. It's now been a little while. The dust is settled. The takes are out there. The season has been a

praised. How are you feeling now that it's in the world? You have to remember that I turned in my third drafts a week before season one came out. So this has been an immensely long road. So it was written in a vacuum. Like nobody had any idea how it was going to be received. I've talked about before how nervous I think everyone was before season one came out. just are people going to accept this? Are they going to embrace it? And watching the first season's reception, I kind of relaxed a lot. So I was like, okay, you know, we're going to be all right.

But I mean, it's been two and a half years of just waiting, waiting, waiting for this thing to come out. And I'm just delighted how it was received. There's a little bit of sadness there, especially a couple weeks ago, Tony was in town. and it was a freer consideration screening of episodes 8 and 9 on a big screen here at a theater in Hollywood. And Tony was there and I was talking to him after. Tony Gilroy creator of the show. Tony Gilroy created a show.

And Tony said... It's just Tony. We all know. I mean, people could think Tony the Tiger, they're Tony Soprano. Tony Montana. He's an unsung character in the Andor saga. So Tony, God, I asked him how he... was feeling and he said you know it's weird i'm pretty sure i'm never going to work on anything like this this big and this acclaimed and this beloved again and when he said that i kind of looked at him in horror

and it's like well dude if you're saying that you know what the hell open is there for the rest of us so uh i think there's a widespread recognition that this was a really special thing i feel beyond honored to have been a small part of it and uh i just it's it's you know winding down now but there's an immense sense of pride that I think episode 210, the Make It Stop episode, which is the episode I think I'm proudest of. There's a real deep satisfaction that I think that became a superlative episode of television, you know, thanks to Tony's changes and all the work everyone else did. I think it's just an all-timer.

And I think that's going to go down on my, you know, personal resume. of things that I'm proudest of having worked on. So it's a good feeling. It's a slightly sad feeling, and it's a feeling of, I wish I'd enjoyed it more when it was happening because I don't know if this is going to happen to me again. So, yeah.

It's interesting. That episode is, of course, fantastic. This is the episode that focuses on Lutha and Clea and their relationship. And it's wild to think that you wrote that before anyone had seen and or in the public anyways, the first season, only because it's easy to imagine

how much pressure that would cause you to put on yourself, seeing especially, you know, kind of highbrow critics and people who didn't take Star Wars seriously, reacting to Andor and, you know, being so ecstatic about it, that then you'd have in your head like, oh, man, I have to live up to this rapturous reception that the show received, but that you didn't have that in your head. So you're writing this episode that focuses, for example, on Cleo,

which is an interesting thing, given that she's such a kind of minor character and a cipher in season one. I don't know. It's just wild to think that you had to, to come up with that whole storyline and make it land the way that it did, even though you didn't really know what any of that meant in the broader context of the fandom or the people, the viewers. Yeah, you're trying to predict the future in a really odd way. And, you know, when you're trying to do this, you hope you land on something that is good and watched and all that. But then I'm realizing

now when you're, you do have a show that is successful and you're, you're like, lucky enough to be part of it, you're kind of predicting future zeitgeist a little bit. And so many things in this season had weird mirrors in reality that we can talk about in the spoiler section. Like, I think I accidentally predicted signal gate. And there's a bunch of stuff for the second season that had weird residents with things that are happening, all totally unintentional, all, you know, echoes of things that we were trying to sink to historically that wound up having present day resonance. And that's just, I think it's a combination of luck. I think it's a combination that authoritarian don't have a handbook so much as they have a pamphlet. It's not exactly

the hardest series of moves to predict. And so things that feel like prescient and speaking to the moment are just, I think, kind of an accident. A lucky one for us, because I think it thrusts the show into the conversation that's happening now in ways that are harrowing, but interesting, but all totally inadvertent. Did you know what the actors would be like when you were writing this so long ago? Because I feel like capturing not just the character voices from reading the previous episodes, but also just the way that the actors will be, Was that a component?

Or did you have to be like, okay, here's what Luthon's going to be like. But also here's what he'll be like in the past. It just feels like it fits exactly with who he is. But did you know that or not? I mean, you know, I'd seen the first season, obviously. So I knew what we were working with. And Clayah would like right when we sat down, one of the things Tony told us Tony Gilroy, creator of the show, Jason,

just so you're going to have to shine in there. Not Tony the Tiger. One of the things Tony said early on was Wilman, played by Mahadad Bair and Clea, played by Elizabeth Dullo, that they were going to get a big vitamin B-12 infusion character-wise. And so to keep that in our heads. And as we were discussing the breakdown of the episodes, I was just praying, hoping, hoping, I'd get the Clayah Lutheran episode because that was sort of like, you know, a planned episode. I'm a dad of an 11-year-old daughter.

Dad-daughter stories are just like, I mean, I'm just completely ruined for them now. Like any, like, I can watch a commercial with a dad and a daughter having a tender moment and I just start crying. So that I got to write, you know, the closest thing to a dad-daughter story in Andor was just immensely wonderful. And I tried to bring a lot of, you know, my own drag my own baggage into that relationship and yeah i am not a budding terrorist obviously

yet but um it was uh we were banking on elizabeth in particular coming through and tony said this this this this young actor is astonishingly good and i'd seen the first season and you can see that she's yeah she's a real star you know i mean she had whatever that thing is that goes beyond just being an excellent actor. Is it presence? Is it gravitas? It's that strange act factor that separates people who when you point a camera at them, they transform and people who don't. Elizabeth Dulo has that instant transformation thing. And I was expecting a lot. And when I saw the first cut of episode 10, I was just like, okay, well, I look like a genius because she just, she just plays everything well. So yeah, that was just Tony banking on the right people.

And, you know, the Dedra-Selan scene where they confront each other, that was an example of hoping like hell these two powerhouses would just show up and do what you're expecting to do. And not only did they do that, they surpassed what I could have possibly hoped for that scene to become. Tom, I think we'll zoom out in a second and talk a little bit about your broader career, but I'm curious to hear a little bit more about how the and or writers room actually functioned, because you've kind of, you talked about how you really hoped you would get that Clayas stuff. How much of the story did you, like, how much of the story did Tony Gilroy come out and say,

this is what the plan is here is like the chunk that you're going to write? How much of that was actually, how much of the beats were actually outlined? How did the process work for you winding up with these three episodes? and getting these scripts and how much did you actually get to decide versus how much of it was just like, here is what needs to happen, write the dialogue, and the building blocks along the way. So maybe like 20 days before the writer's room commenced, we got a big document. It's like a series, a season outline. Tony's outlines are really fascinating how they work because sometimes they break into screenplay format.

and sometimes they break back into just like pros. And the way I've put it is they kind of hover and pounce, hover and pounce. Like that Dejah Luthen confrontation scene I just mentioned, like a version of that existed in that outline. It was one of the most complete things that was there. So the things he was like had locked into his head were sketches of them were already in this outline. A lot of the beats were, a lot of the big beats you see in the show were they.

A lot of the stuff was discovered as we talked it over, but it was a 98-page or 100-page document. He calls it red meat that he just throws in the middle of the table, and then everyone just sits around and talks about it. Some of the stuff he got challenged on. There was tons of ideas that never went anywhere or got, you know, desiccated over the course of talking about where things could go. I mean, the way the room worked is we had this outline to look back.

back too. You have note takers. Bo Weilden's, Bo Willemann wheeled in his whiteboards, and he was just constantly writing on the whiteboards. Dan Gilroy was beaming in from California on a, on a laptop, and Tony was there, Zana Wollinberg was there, who's the executive producer and who's Tony's like co-conspirator, Luke Hall, production designer was there. And we had some note takers there. So Luke was a fascinating guy to have in that room because as we were talking stuff over, I'd look over and he'd just be sketching some new location that just came up to two minutes before and he'd just be drawing stuff and he would chime in about Tony'd say Luke is that location does that sound doable and he'd think a moment and he'd like he'd nod yeah I think we could do that so it was this really strange organic thing

that was growing you know right before our eyes I mean I talked probably the least of anybody in that room because I was new I was you know I don't have anywhere near the body of work that those guys have when it comes to television writing or feature writing. But I tried to use that as like a learning occasion. I think I was there as the, I mean, I was the closest thing to a big Star Wars fan in that writer's room, although Bo and Dan are both, you know, self-avowed fans of Star Wars. And I think the impression amongst Andor fans is that nobody in that room like even liked Star Wars, you know, that is definitely not the case.

And one funny thing I can tell you is being in that writer's room with these guys and Tony struggling to remember the name of Jabba the Hut at one point. I remember. And I went back to my room that night, just a few blocks away from the Soho Grand Hotel. And I'd open up my laptop and I'd go to the Star Wars League subreddit. And it'd be like, and or series prediction cameos. It would just be like these really deep cut characters and I'd just look at the list and I'd be like, boy, are you guys going to be disappointed? I don't know who half these people are.

I promise you that the people in that room don't know who any of these people are. But you managed to throw in, May the Force be with you, which I think was well, well-timed. I did, yeah. Yeah, so we'll get into some of the specifics, I suppose, some of the Star Wars these specifics in a little bit. I think that's a good place to pivot to talking a little bit about your work writing. on video games because I'd love to know a little about the differences in those two writing processes. Like, you talk about having basically a courtroom sketch artist in the room with you, drawing whatever you guys are dreaming. And also because TV production works the way that it works,

there's this, there's kind of just such a different pipeline for your ideas becoming real, compared with video games. The writers actually have power in TV. Right. It's really, really different. And I think the role of the writer is very different. I always tell people my favorite game that you, you wrote is the writer will do something because it's just such a great self-analytical look at what it's like to be a writer in video games and to be cast as someone with power when in truth you have very little. And I know that you've worked, especially in the early stages, on more games than your big

credited games. Like you just kind of will consult on the story or do, I guess, what would be given a story credit in a film. And anyways, I guess just can you talk some about what that process is like and how it's different from something like Andor. When you're trying to come up with a game story, it's usually similar. There's a room. The creative director is there. Maybe the lead level designer is there. Maybe one of the lead artists is there.

The narrative director will often be there. But not the sound people. No, never, never the sound. Far far away. That's a writer. We'll do something in-joke audience. They come barging into the meeting later, pissed off about something that is being rammed down their throne.

Yeah. Poor, poor audio. So the way I would put it is a bunch of people get into room and come up with the coolest ideas you possibly can. And because game story telling is, you know, very distinct from, like, telling the story of Andor. Andor, you're constantly going to be thinking about character behavior and choices and setting things up and paying them off. And you're going to be thinking about constantly, like, emotional truth. Boy, would I love to say that's what happens in games, but it doesn't. games the coin of the realm it was a different brand of spectacle and because games they're

constantly about doing things rather than a process of uncovering character and character discovery games can have that right it's just much harder to pull it off and it's much harder to do because if you've got a big narrative moment hooked to an untested or untried gameplay hook like maybe some big mid-game change-up that mixed it, that kind of flips the table on the established gameplay, and then 14 months from ship, you decide to cut that part, and that happens over and over and over and over again.

And then suddenly your story has got three legs, and it's wobbling, and everyone is scrambling to fix everything. It's just you never follow the North Star of narrative on games, right? You come up with this story, you kick it over to some level designers, and they come back with their story, which very rarely has anything to do with the story you are trying to tell. And, you know, a good creative director, and I've worked with really good ones, and I've worked with some less successful ones, no shame to them.

It's a hard job. It's a really hard job. But the number one thing a game creative director needs to do is just make sure everyone is making the same game. That's the one thing they need to do. And so many of the creative directors, I've seen struggle, are people that just have a hard time doing that. And that's when games go over budget. That's when games sort of care them out of control. And you write games as they're being made. That's the biggest difference. You maybe write a middle of the game, cinematic, and then you maybe do some like experimental kind of level scripts for like some gray box level that a level designer came up with. You're just trying to set your levels. You're just trying to discover what the tone is going to be.

And then the game just, once it goes into full production, you are writing cutscenes before the levels have been built around them. And so you're trying to see into the future in a very difficult, hard-to-predict way. Whereas, you know, a TV script, once it's locked and everyone agrees, and the network says, here's, you know, $11 million to go shoot your pilot, and then you hire people up and everyone coming into it, oh, this is what we're making. Okay, it's just much easier

to get everyone on the same page. So why do you keep writing video games? This is a question I've had. You've written so many different kinds, you've done so many kinds of writing. There's something in video games that draws you in. It sounds so difficult and stressful. What is it about it that makes you keep doing it?

I like games. I used to think, I mean, I've been so disabused of so many of my early ambitions. I wrote a whole book called Extra Lives. about why I wanted better storytelling. I love that book. That was the first book of yours that I read. Well, it's so funny, like, looking at that now,

because it's just very much the kind of idealistic, like, games would be so much better if they have these incredible stories. And, like, I, it's this kind of, like, ambitious, like, oh, man, we could strive for so much more. And then I feel like you've been knocked down to earth in your experience actually writing stories. Completely. Completely.

Like, I just have much more modest hopes for what a talent is. writer can do in the game space. You're up against so many headwinds. I think as the game's industry has gotten a lot more calcified. You know, I know there are studios right now, untouchable studios that are now getting extensive notes from their corporate overlords. And these are studios that I worked for and there were never any notes. And now there are a lot of notes. No idea what you can possibly be No, I'm not just talking. I'm not just talking about one place. I'm talking about multiple places. And so this is happening all over. So that kind of, I think it's, you know, a lot of it's driven by fear and a lot of it's driven by, oh my God. Just the ecosystem is completely different from what it was 10 years ago. You know, I think it was fun that game developers got on the forums and chatted with the fans. And like there was a symbiotic feedback. And then, you know, the uglier tides were always. sort of churning underneath that. And then, of course, those tides rose

and kind of the industry reacted. And, you know, I think all of us on this call were kind of collectively traumatized by the forces that were, you know, churning around games in the early teens. And I don't know if my pure love of the medium ever really recovered from it.

But I still like writing for games. I still find it interesting. It's not like any of, other form of writing. Like, prose writing and screenwriting, believe it or not, have more in common with each other than either of them has in common with game writing. Game writing is, you kind of have to be good at writing like a user's manual. You have to kind of be, you have to know stuff about character.

You also have to know, you just have to be good with transitions in and out of like cinematics to in-game scripts. You just have to develop. and it takes a long time to learn how to develop a sense for where the potholes are going to be and where you kind of have to barricade the story a little bit more in some places and others, that literally takes years to develop a sixth sense for that stuff. Whereas I think it's probably easier to learn good screenwriting principles earlier on. Like you do, maybe you go through the development process a few times,

maybe even something gets shot. I think you can learn a lot more from sort of one outing as a screenwriter than you can from from multiple, you know, full production experiences on a game. Like I didn't feel like I was really particularly good at it until two or three games into my, into my sojourn as a game writer. Yeah, that's also a very specific type of game, the big budget cinematic with cutscenes interspersed in between the gameplay. There's also, I mean, I feel like video game story, one of the,

the kind of differences between screenwriting and games writing is that games writing doesn't really have any established principles and rules yet because nobody really knows what it can be yet. I feel like we're still learning the rules of what a game story can be. I mean, we all, the three of us, have you played blueprints, Tom? The three of us are raving about this game a few months ago. I have not played it yet. Oh, man. It's very cool.

It's one I'm looking to play with my kiddo. Yeah, you'll like it. It's really cool. And from a storytelling perspective, it does so many interesting. things that can only be done in a game and that other games haven't really spent a ton of time exploring. And that's the type of thing that makes me really excited about what game stories can be in almost a different way. Sort of like how Andor gets me excited about Star Wars in a way that like very few other Star Wars things don't. It feels like there's still room to really push the boundaries and

like do things on a higher plane. Maybe it's just not the kind of like big budget like Gears of War uncharted approach. No shade on those games. They're a lot of fun, but like, that's not how you push the boundaries of storytelling. We had Ray Chase on the show just a couple of weeks ago. He is a voice actor who was also the director of this game, date everything, which looks like a conventional dating sim, but then the more you play it, the more you realize that it's this incredibly complicated, interactive story with 100 characters and all of these branching narratives.

And he was telling us basically that he is now addicted to, well, he didn't use the word addicted. But he is really into directing games because as hard as it was to make the game, he had to solve a bunch of problems that he, that had never been solved before. Like, no one had ever made a game quite like this before. And the sense I get from a lot of video games is that most games kind of feel that way, whatever problems you're solving, you're solving for the first time. That's also kind of a source of inefficiency, right, where you're reinventing the wheel every single time. And as a result, you know, it's a really arduous process. But I guess it sounds a little like you're saying that, Tom.

Like some of the appeal is that you get to solve problems that have never been solved before that are just very different kinds of problems. Yeah, I think that's true. And I do, and even though, like, if you ask me in my heart and hearts, in my heart of hearts, is the big sort of classic cinematic, big budget game, are those kind of like a creative dead end in some definitive sense? I don't know if I'd go quite as far as saying dead end, but I feel like we know what the extent of that kind of a game can be.

You know, like the Uncharted Games, I think did the action-adventure game as good as anybody is ever going to do it. I think Last of Us took like a zombie story and just through the care it showed with the character, it really elevated it to something genuinely special. And that's the interesting thing about game story telling. And if I was going to say, if Last of Us were a TV show, it is a TV show. If only someone would brave enough. I don't think the show is as good as the game.

You know, I think, I feel like the game does a better job with its story than the show does. And I like the show quite a bit. Don't get me wrong. I'm just saying, someone said a long time ago, I think Michael Thompson, do you guys remember that? He was a big critic. He said something that I, the older I get, the more I think that it's true. Game storytelling, storytelling is to video games, what lyrics are to rock and roll, that if you just put the lyrics of a rock song on a blank piece, of paper and you read them, they would seem

like ridiculously stupid. But you put a beat under it. You just, you create the aura of the event of the song around it and then suddenly it's elevated to something that feels spectacular. I think like you put

a story in a video game. The gameplay, the art, the level design can all like elevate that story into something that feels really special even if it's like, Again, you just put it on paper, just described what happened. It would feel pretty mundane and maybe even a little dull.

Like I'm, and I really think that that is the sauce that games don't have to rely on story alone. Whereas if your story is faulty on a show like and or, a story that is about people and their choices, well, then you're just host. You've got nowhere to go. You've got nowhere to hide. Games just have a lot more places to hide perception-wise in terms of how their stories are appreciated. Do you want to talk a little bit about your transition to Hollywood, TV films, and or? Because I know a lot of people out there might be curious because you were journalists for a long time.

You wrote a lot of books. You went into Iraq. You did a lot of serious journalism. You also did some video game journalism. And then you started writing for games. And then eventually you moved into cinema. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I don't know if I've ever told this story publicly. It was around 2015. I've been writing games for five years at that point. I'd never had any ambitions to be a screenwriter of any kind. It just never occurred to me as like a possible career. I didn't, you know, Hollywood is such a big locked door that it's just hard to even know, even though I knew lots of screenwriters and actors and stuff. It just never occurred to me to try to get work there.

So I had a cousin, a guy named Matt Bronger. He's a comedian. He's an actor, wonderful guy. He just said, hey, we should sell a show together. We should develop a show and sell it. And he's like, you're working in the games industry. We should do a show about the video games industry. And I was like, oh, that seems cool.

Yeah, so he and I spent a couple weekends just kicking some stuff around. We came up with a show called T-Pose, which was about video game actors. That's a great name. I didn't have a manager. I didn't have an entertainment lawyer. I didn't have an agent, a film agent or anything. But Matt had his manager and agent and they set us up in a bunch of meetings. And our first meeting was with Showtime.

And we're going up in the elevator. And Matt's manager says, you know, it's good that we're starting with Showtime because we're never going to buy this show. So it'll be good practice for you. Because I'd never pitched anything before. I'd never gone into a room and pitched. So I'm nervous as hell. I don't know what the hell's going on here. We get in the room.

and what I didn't know is that these executives have been told the day before find our Silicon Valley. So me and Matt Bronger walk into this room and we start pitching our show about the video game industry. Jesse Dikovitsky was a wonderful executive at Showtime. Her husband was a developer at Infinity Ward.

So she knew this world and I didn't know that either. So as we're just pitching this show, I can just see they're like really interested. And then as we're leaving, We get a phone call and they're like, can you come back and do that again tomorrow? And we did. The show was bought the first time, my first time pitching something. Like, there it is.

I sold a show. I was like, well, that was easy. TV is easy. No problem. And then, obviously Showtime did not make that show, but I got the bug, right? I was like, I want to keep doing this. Wait, why didn't they make the show? It sounds like they were really into it.

I mean, dude, I've sold so much. many shows that didn't get made at this point. Like, who knows? It's just... I want to know, so did they ever T-Pose in T-Pose? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was basically a show about the world's biggest video game actor, but he didn't want to be.

He wanted to be like a TV or feature actor, but he was huge in games and nobody in anywhere else. Oh, interesting. Yeah, interesting that you came up with it. So it's like about a guy who writes video games, but really seriously wishes he was running TV. That's what the show is about. So that was my first sold show. and then right as that was happening,

a disaster artist had gotten made. Or it went into production. And so suddenly got all these people reaching out to me being like, hey, have you thought about film and TV? And I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to barge through this door. Yes, in fact, I have. In fact, I recently sold a show to Showtime. And they're like, but you didn't have a representation?

And I'm like, I know, right? Crazy. So it was a weird entree into this. And I just felt like, okay, this is a shot. I'm going to take it. And the disaster artist, I think, without that happening, like, I have no foot in the door here at all. And so when people have asked me, like, I want to be a screener.

I want to work on a show like Andor. And I'm like, well, step one is to co-write a book about the worst movie ever made that gets turned into a movie that gets a lot of buzz. Because I literally don't have any other, I didn't have any other path, you know, my cousin. disaster artists happening at the same time. It's a crazy story, but everyone's journey into this, I think, is similarly circuitous. And it's, you know, has a lot to do with right place, right time, who you know.

And that's, in that sense, it's like every other industry in the world. Yeah. Were you writing a bunch of stuff for TV and film before you wound up on Andrew? Like, what kind of stuff did you do? Oh, yeah. Okay. Yes, I have. I think I've sold like seven or eight shows at this point.

Before and or before, because I want to get into the story of how you wound up on Andrew. Yeah. One of them was Mosquito Coast, which obviously got made by Apple. Another show was called Masters of Doom based on the David Kushner book about John Romero and John Carmack. We actually shot that pilot.

And then the decision about whether to order it to series was going to be on March 15th, 2020. So March 13th is when the world shut down. And I think we were all holding our breath. I was very passionate about that show. I had a very strong sense that it was going to get sent ordered a series and, of course, you know, that didn't happen.

And then, like, you know, writing during the pandemic was crazy. I sold a show to FX that didn't happen. I sold another show. Yeah, it's just been just trying to get something going. And or happens, which we can, maybe talk about that if I'm not jumping ahead too much. No, please. I want to hear the story of how you got into that in the first.

Like, did Tony Gilroy just call you up and say, hello, Tom? So I loved Gears of War Five. Battlefield Hardline sold Tony Gilroy. He, I'd gotten some, my throat slashed a couple times on a couple projects, Hollywood throat slashing. And I thought, okay, I need an agent because I just had my manager and I just had my lawyer. And my manager's like, well, okay, we'll set you up with, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the

big agencies. So my very first meeting was with CAA. And, um, it was five people there, uh, including one person named Tiffany Ward, who is Tony Geroys agent. And, you know, she was going to be on my team. And they were talking to me about what CAA can do for me. And, and one of the things she brought up was the chance of working with Tony on Andor. She's like, look, we've been, look, we've been trying to find someone. for him for like four months and he hasn't liked anyone but hearing you you know hearing your interest and your back drawn i think you guys would like each other why why don't i set you up together and uh they sent him some of my scripts but i don't even think he read them he read my short fiction because tony's very literary fellow you know all he really i don't think he cares

so much about are you a good screenwriter as you know do you have an active imagination i mean that's the thing he talked about a lot is imagination being the key ingredient. And he read my stories, and I think he liked them. And then a couple days after that, we were on a call together. And it just went really fantastically well. Because we talked about history. We talked about books we'd read. We talked about, like you mentioned, my jaunting off to Iraq to embed with the military

to study how insurgency wars are fought. He was fascinated to hear about that because I was there during the summer of the IED, when the IED sort of rose up and I described that whole summer was like a chess game between the Marines and the insurgents about like IED procedures. He thought that was really interesting. I think that's probably what got me the job in that moment was the, you know, my story of the summer of the IED

because I think he was like, oh, okay, like this is this, I had a more than academic interest in insurgency, let's put it that way. And we just got along. And then I had to wait a question. couple months after that before it was official. But I just felt, I felt really good about, you know, our talk. And I mean, I just don't know if I can admire a person more than I admire Tony.

Not only is he's as brilliant as you would expect, he's just also a very decent soul, you know. He has every reason to be full of himself and, you know, every reason to be like a jerk and unkind and dismissive. and he's not. He's just a wonderful collaborator and a wonderful leader. I cannot say enough good things about him. I think we can say here this will be our spoiler warning. So we're going to talk about Andor and just more openly with specific spoilers. What happens to people at the end?

Hopefully everyone listening to this has already watched the show. It's a good show. But if not, I'll drop a timestamp here for where you should skip a hit. If you haven't, you're a weirdo because why are you listening to a podcast about Endor if you haven't seen the show? Maybe they need to be convinced. Okay. They just wanted to hear what Tom Bissell says. about it. That's true. If they haven't been

convinced yet. Now they're ready. Yeah. Bing. Kirk here editing the episode and I have that time stamp for those of you who don't want to hear any specific and or spoilers and the timestamp that you should jump to is 1.15.20.

That's an hour, 15 minutes, 20 seconds. All right. Let's pick it up with Tom. I think it was to Paste magazine. You gave this great interview talking a lot about the writing process of this season of TV and your three episodes in particular. And you mentioned that the writer's room was, I believe the words

were rough but never cruel. Is that right? Yeah. And I think, I just thought that was very interesting hearing about how it's not a gentle place. They don't really care about your feelings so much, but it was never cruel. Could you talk about that a little bit? So one of the things you learn when you work with people like Tony, and I've worked with some other directors on stuff that didn't happen. I worked with David Fincher briefly on something. I worked with Jim Engel briefly on something. I worked with Ryan Johnson on something. The thing you realize very quickly when you're working with people sort of at that level is you never get a good job. You never get a, you never get a good work. You never went excellent. Like you come to learn that silence is praise. Like if they say nothing

about something, that's them saying you're doing great. And that's, I think, an adjustment that you go through when you march up through the ranks in this business is that just being in the room, the expectation is you're going to do superlative work. Because if you weren't capable of that, you wouldn't be in this room. And learning how to internalize that and without freaking yourself out and without putting pressure on yourself, I mean, it's a little bit of Stuart Smalley looking in the mirror and saying you're good enough, you're smart enough. And you can do it. Like, there is, there is an element of just looking at yourself in the mirror and being like, I can do this. They hired me for a reason. Gosh, darn it, I can do this. Gosh, darn it, I can write. Luthens.

suicide scene. So we were talking about chat GPT before this all started. The number one problem with it if you're using it creatively is how affirmative it is. Because that will not be your experience as a TV writer in this business. That's funny. That's very true.

That will not be your experience. You will be like, the worst thing is when you pitch something and then there's just silence. Like it's in nobody's best interest to just say that idea sucks. like just how silence is praise sometimes but silence is also like recognition

that you just put a big juicy turd on the middle of the audience room. So you can interpret the silences. Some are good, some are bad. Yeah. And watching Bo and Dan who are two of the most incisive minds who've ever like, you know, screen to play.

I don't know if that's, can you say that? Who've ever written a screenplay? Screen to play, you know. Like they, they have just as many, like, like whack-a-doodle ideas as anybody does, you know, and just learning to feel comfortable. It's just like thinking out loud and pitching stuff and not getting defensive, not getting your feelings hurt when your idea doesn't go. And this is the thing I've struggled with in games a little bit. The times I have worked with, you know, other writers, younger writers in particular,

when people get hung up on my idea, but it was my idea. And you just want to grab them and shake them and just say, this job isn't having one good idea. It's having 20. It's having 20 good ideas a day. And if you're getting this hung up on your one idea, you might want to think about a different line of work because one idea is not enough. You have to have 20, 30, 40. And you just have to be exploding with ideas constantly. And that's the thing that is was harder for me to get going on because in that room, most of the ideas were pretty viable

and pretty good and you throw out a couple that, you know, produce the cricket chorus. It's kind of hard to get right back in there and just start winging ideas out there again.

So, yeah. Do you remember which of your ideas was the first one that you felt like? Yeah, all right, they liked that one. That one might work. So this is early on.

This was an idea of my daughter had, believe it or not. So I was reading over the Tony's outline and Cassine stuck on a planet that you later realize is Yavin. And we, you know, Tony's like, and we're going to get him off the planet somehow. He's going to escape from these two squadrons of goons that are kind of holding him hostage into this power struggle. And, you know, Mina, because she's an avid little sponge, wanted to, like, figure out, like, you know, she's all, where's all this stuff taking place? So I signed her to an NDA and told her, you know, there was this, there was a scene.

sequence on Yavin. So she went off and got her rebel files book, right? And she was reading up on Yavin. And she came to me, she's like, dad, do you know there are all these monsters like on Yavin before the rebels got there? And wouldn't it be cool if the monsters came out and attacked? And I was like, oh, that's not a bad idea. We got to the race. And she is what, eight at this point? She's eight or nine. And I wound up pitching that. I wound up pitching that beat during that sequence. And Tony was like, oh, I like that. Yeah, monsters. Okay. Let's do that. And I thought, oh my God, my eight-year-old just got an idea, a story idea, into this episode. And my daughter has writerly ambition.

She wants to be a screenwriter, God help her. And when that episode played and the monster came out and ate the two guys, I don't know if I've ever seen two little eyes that were brighter than that. She was so proud that her story beat got in there. But that was, I remember that being the, because that was day one or two. It was the first thing I pitched that Tony was like, yeah, I like that. And, you know, and then you just build off of that. And so many of the things that I'm proudest with having come up with weren't in the room.

It was just stuff that, like, taking a episode of television from an outline to a script, they seem bulletproof in the room, scene by scene breakdown. And you're like, oh, boy, this is going to be easy. And then when you're starting to turn it into full-on scenes with transitions and character behavior that makes sense and getting the right people in the right rooms, as Tony often calls it, boy, a lot of your in the room kind of hot take solutions for problems just tend to fall apart pretty brutally when you're actually like fully inhabiting them as moments. So my ideas I'm happiest with, which I've talked about before, which is this wonderful

senile alien granny that Clay pushes around the hospital. That was just a desperation move for me because I didn't know what a Star Wars hospital when Incursion looked like. I didn't know what it should feel like. I don't know how a Star Wars Hospital operated. I went to Tony at one point and was like, how am I going to do this? And he said, oh, just watch the embassy escape from the firstborn movie. And I was like, okay, yeah, I'll do that.

Oh, my God, he was right. It was super helpful. Like, this really high-stress sequence. And Matt Damon is using doors and staircases and window ledges. And it's, and I realized, oh, God, if this were a game, you want people going out windows and swinging from rooftop to rooftop. But, like, if you're in it, locked in it with a character, and it's on. screen and there's no interactive element, man, you can do a lot with a little.

So with that sequence specifically, I'm very curious about the logistics of this. Did you know, like, was it decided by Tony in a story Bible or whatever? Like, okay, we have Lufin. He tries to kill himself. He's injured. He's taken to the hospital. You need to get, like, Clayah from this point to that point. Is that how it was kind of?

Yes. Yep. And the way we had it was we put all of our work into the flashbacks, what the flashbacks were going to be. And on Bo's whiteboard, whenever, you know, the next beat was, Clay continues incursion into hospital. And I only realized when I got home that we hadn't actually really worked any of that stuff out. So it was all on, all on me to figure that out. Similarly, in episode 11, figuring out the exact choreography of how everyone converged on the safe house at the same time was a bit of a nightmare. Episode 11 is definitely the episode that Tony had the

heaviest hand with because that was like so much stuff was so hard to to plot outright and getting just everybody there plausibly right at roughly the same time oh my god it was such a logistical challenge am i remembering right that it was him also he made the call to not end that episode with the action sequence but to start the next episode with it yep and then when you're given it writing credit i mean how much of the dialogue and the kind of minute to minute seems scenes are you versus the entire writer's room, just figuring it all out. That depends on the scene, depends on the episode. Like, you know, Tony rewrites everybody.

Did you write the line we used up all the perfect? I did not. That is a Tony Gilroy line. It's a great line. I was wondering if that was you. That is a Tony line. Well, good on Tony. That's a great line.

So you have talked about how your job writing the final three episodes was actually a little bit easier for some of those reasons you were just talking about, that there were fewer question marks on the whiteboard. Yes. because you had to just engineer the plot in order to line it up with the start of Rogue One, where if you're writing like the Gorman arc 7 through 9, there's just a lot more question marks and that's a much more difficult writing undertaking, which I thought was really interesting,

only because my initial reaction was the same as a lot of people, I think, when I heard that you were writing the final three episodes, I was like, whoa, holy shit. Not only is Tom joining for season two, but he's going to write the finale that seems like the hardest thing. And of course your explanation totally makes sense. Yeah, can you imagine writing the Gorman Massacre episode? Like, how would you even begin to conceptualize?

No, I have no idea how that was made or engineer. I can't even imagine what it would take. I can't even imagine what it would take to do what you had to do. And I guess I'm curious a little bit. I want to hear about the tonal shift that you had to manage because I watched Rogue One after Andor season two, and I've watched it a few times before. And it is really striking how different it is tonally.

It feels like a Marvel movie compared to it. Andor. Like, I know Tony wrote a lot of the dialogue or whatever, like, he was very involved, but it just, Andor hadn't happened yet. And so it was just such a different thing. And there are little hints of that that I noticed in the finale, particularly when Kay comes in and is kind of messing up Stormtroopers and it has a little bit of that humor. But, man, I mean, it's still such a big shift. How did you think about managing that tonal shift? Or did you think about it at all? I didn't. I really didn't try to tonally join it to Rogue War. in any kind of conscious overt sense.

I mean, it's a movie that was made 10 years ago by a lot of people, some of whom, you know, were working on Andor, but I thought it was going to be a Mug's game to try to do a one-to-one tendril-to-tendral connection at every point because, I mean, yeah, like you say, Rogue One is a, I love Rogue One, but it's like a big, fast action movie.

And Andor is a slow, deliberative John La Curee novel, that happens to take place in the Star Wars universe, you know? And it is a very different vibe and spirit from Rogue. I think elements of it are really echo in an interesting way. I think Cassian's character is like way more interesting, knowing all this stuff you had behind him. And, you know, I think he has like, there's these glimmers of the darker Cassian in Rogue One

that I thought were like really intriguing. And, but I don't think anybody, you know, I don't think when Tony was doing that, you know, to 2015, I don't think he was under any impression that he'd ever be like telling 24 hours of sequential storytelling about this guy's life. So it's like, it's a miracle that it lines up as well as it does. But, you know, Rogan, a New Hope going into each other, very different vibes in every imaginable way. So I think we can be easy on ourselves and, just recognize that all these things were made at radically different times.

And you could kind of intellectually squint and pretend that they're all like a continuous story. But like at any rational level, they're not. They're individual stories that link up to each other. And I think they all, like, they're all wonderful and they all have their own au jus, I guess. I read a piece by Nicholas Kwah that he wrote for Vulture where he was talking about a new trilogy that he's defined for himself, which is and or to Rogue One to a New Hope, as like the Death Star trilogy. And if you think of that trilogy, there's a huge tonal shift that happens from each entry to the next entry. And it kind of, it makes the tonal shifts de rigour or something. Like,

you're kind of like, well, okay, yeah, the next one's going to be really different and kind of more of a kind of a fantastical blockbuster kind of a vibe. The Star Wars timeline is like so interesting. My mother who's seen all the movies, she came to L.A. to watch my episodes when they came out. And then we watched Rogue One after. And when Darth Vader came out in the end of Rogue One, my mom was like, wait, isn't he dead?

And I was like, no, mom. That was, and then I just realized, my mom's just like a normal person, right? She had no idea, like the order in which these things took place. And I think that's probably a lot more common amongst like non-Star Wars head people. Based on how my wife reacted to that moment similarly, like the kind of normal person memory of Star Wars.

where like I'll be the one like annoyingly pausing Andor and being like, okay, so this guy's going to raise Princess Leia later. And she's like, I don't know who that is. And I just want to watch this show. That's fine. You can also enjoy it through that context too. And it doesn't matter if you remember whether Anakin was alive or not or going by Anakin for that matter.

Still good. Well, I just realized that she thought that they took place. I think she thinks like they happened in the universe at the time they were least chronologically. Right. Which is a totally normal assumption. I mean, like, and I was just really amused by that that this person who has seen them all and professes to love them just had absolutely no clue in which the order any of these

things are supposed to take place in. There's a lot of them now. It's tough. It's a lot to keep straight. One big shift that happens, actually over that invented trilogy, that Death Star trilogy, is that the music significantly changes? Actually, from season one of Andorra, season two of Andor with Nicholas Prattel doing season one and Brandon Roberts doing season two,

reworking some of Brutel's themes amid his own music. And then, of course, Giacino doing Rogue One to Williams's score on a New Hope. I'd love to know a little bit more about that shift in season two because you guys reused a lot of Brutel's music cues from the first season. And I think that was a really good choice. I know he couldn't do it for like various reasons. Like he couldn't write a whole new score for the new season. You probably weren't involved in that at all, but I just have to ask about it because you worked on it, and I just found it so interesting how they woveed new music in together with Brutel's iconic cues. Yeah, Brandon and I, like, I met Brandon after, you know, we've done a bunch of events together, and I just, I love him to death. He is such a man. He's a great

composer. He's such a good dude. And I remember I saw Tony, maybe, I don't know, a year ago, maybe a little over a year ago here in L.A. And he was here doing the music, he said. And then when we met for dinner, he was when he told me that Nick wasn't coming back. And I was like, oh, God, like, are we screwed? And he's like, don't worry, I found the, I found the perfect guy. And I was like, well, how can that be? And then, you know, hearing Brandon talk about the immense pressure, he called it a

fear sandwich. I can't even imagine. One piece of bread is Nick Pertel. The other piece of bread is John Williams. And don't worry. You just have to sort of figure out your way through them. But I'll be goddamned. Like, there's moments of Brandon's score that are as good as anything in the first season.

And I think he just murdered it. And such a case of, like, restraint. And, again, I'm just speaking as someone who, you know, someone with two ears. You watch the show. Two ears and a heart. That's who all who I am right now. And I think he did an amazing job. And I know Tony was thrilled with it.

And I know Brandon is, like, relieved because he has, had a really hard go of it. But yeah, there was a very conscious effort as the show went on to get away from the synthi stuff into more more orchestral kind of vibe. Yeah. Tom, it's kind of like being in the middle of a Bo Willamon and Tony Gilroy sandwich, but pulling it off anyway and still still killing it. Well, I want to ask some specific spoilery questions about various things that happen to people. The big one that I've been wondering is, did you guys always know that DEDRA was going to wind up on Narcina. Yes.

That was just, that's, from the start, it was like, this horrible prison, this is where we're putting this lady. Perfect. She was going to wind up in prison. But the one thing I brought to the table, and this is something we hadn't really worked out,

when I got to the drafting stage, we didn't really have an antagonist when the forces converged on the safe house, right? So I just put here. I just elevated here in my episodes, her old assistant. And it was only after I did that, where I was like, oh, God, this works, like, really well.

Yeah. Yeah, that's so funny. We did not have a face antagonist for that sequence. And so I just grabbed here and stuck them in front. So here, like, and I really love that it's a very strange decision for this antagonist to be built up for all this time to just yank the rug out from underneath her. And I was a little worried about it. People were going to object to it. But it's such a perfect object lesson in fascism eating its own that I think it's like thematically on.

And I really do feel like the dynamic that Kirt and Dedra have, it just feels great that he, you know, marches off into that particular conflagration and gets his, he becomes a gears of warm meat shield for K2. Was it, was it intentional the subtext of Heret and Lonnie being a little bit more than just friends? Because that's how I read it. Same. Yeah, I mean, maybe they were playing with that on, and performance, but it was never, there was never anything that came from any script that I saw. I mean, I'm sure. But I don't dispute that moment.

Yeah. It is what it is. I read it that way, but I also like Lonnie has his own motivation. So I kind of took it as him just kind of being like, sure, I'll go with this and this conversation and then change whatever I'm doing in the next one. But I mean, here it also has his own All About Eve situation with Dedra where he's like, I'm going to replace her, which is just, I don't know. I think it all works really well for him. I mean, these side characters are also elliptical. because they don't have a lot of time on screen.

So the actors do so much with just a very little bit that you give them. But then it does turn into a whole, it's very vivid even though. And you can paint the picture in your mind. I mean, clearly I've painted a picture in my mind of what all of them are thinking off screen. And some of that is the writing. But some of it is just these performances being really strong. How many of the endings did you get a chance to come up with yourself versus how many were plotted out by the time you already got the script? Yes.

Yeah, the Wheel of Fate at the end. I mean, that was a group effort. We just started throwing spokes out there. The only one I can remember contributing was the Force Healer. And again, Force Healer scene hadn't been written yet. Maybe my favorite scene in the whole show. Really good. I get teary-eyed every time that moment comes up.

And that wonderful actor, Josie Walker, I believe her name is, oh, my God. I think it's one of the most effective, devastating sort of day player performances in the whole show. I love that moment. I love that moment with him and her. I think Cassian is effectively agnostic on the force, but when he looks over it and he gives her that little head nod,

like indicating, I'm not sure I believe this yet, but I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I just love that moment so much. So that was not what I wrote. I just wrote he looked over and saw the force healer and she looked back, and then, you know, he looks ahead and walks on. It's up to those actors and Alonzo Ruas Palacios, who directed it to really like bring home the staging.

of it. Yeah, that must be really fun for you and sometimes frustrating to see like little flourishes that you didn't intend in the script to come out. It's the best. When it's better than what you're imagining, it's the greatest. And when it's not what you're imagining and it's worse, that's the worst. So it's, it's, but like luckily on and or I can't think it was single instance where something was changed where it wasn't better than what I was imagining. Well, you know, my career in games. Yeah. My career in games is a constant. they've changed things and I don't think they're notably better at all. Right.

Well, this is like carmic payback for all the times that you put up with that in the world of games. Yeah, getting to work on like the top notch of top notch. Right. Because really in that, there isn't a single weak link among the cast and like, I mean, some of the episodes I found, I mean, a couple are better than others. But it's like really just like top of their craft people on every single discipline on this show. It's really, there's been very few shows like it. So you guys referenced a lot of history when you were writing Andor, and you've mentioned that Tony is a big history buff. And you've talked about reading the 9-11 report and going through some of the intelligence failures that are documented there to understand some of the ways that the ISB might have failed and, you know, how the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing often, especially in large state intelligence operations.

And it's funny you mentioned earlier that, you know, you inadvertently predicted Signalgate just because these kinds of incompetencies tend to just happen again and again and again in this kind of a bureaucratic organization. I'm curious specifically if there's any recommended reading that our listeners could do, if they want to read some of these, like about some of the historical reference points that you guys used for this show, because doing that reading would help you not only understand what inspired and or, but also understand this terrible world that we live in and all of like all of these patterns that keep repeating. So there is a book called The House of Government.

It's the life's work of this historian who teaches at Berkeley, I believe, named Yuri Slashkin. He's an immigrant, I believe, from the former Soviet Union. He's a wonderful historian. He's a brilliant writer. And it's like a thousand-page long book about the first. first Bolshevik generation, all of whom lived in this massive shared apartment building across the street from the Kremlin. And you take them from the dawn of the Bolshevik revolution to the early 30s when the forces of Stalinism start pounding on their doors, pulling them out in the middle

of the night and dragging them to Le Bianca prison and in many cases executing them. So it's really about how one revolution ate its children. But it's told through diaries. It's told through it's a work of nonfiction. And it's a masterpiece. It's one of the best books I've ever read. So I started reading it while I was working on my episodes because I heard it recommended on the Ezra Klein show, right? So I start reading it. And I'm a bit of a Soviet history buff, having been a Peace Corps volunteer in the former Soviet Union and then lived in a different former Republic of the Soviet Union, Estonia, later in my life. So I'm always been intrigued in the historical catastrophe of Soviet communism. I started reading this book, and it was reminding me of Andor a lot.

So I sent Tony a text like, dude, there's this book called House of Government. You're probably sick of reading about revolutionaries, but it is blowing my mind. Tony texted back, and he said, that was the source text for season one of Andor. And I was like, holy shit. Like, I accidentally discovered the Rosetta Stone of the show after, you know, I think this is after I'd written my episodes. I don't think it was while I was working on, I was after. So that is a book, if you want to see how Tony is, Giroi sees into the hearts

of these revolutionary characters I think it's a very valuable book. It's a brilliant book. I mean, you kind of have to have some grounding in Soviet history to get the most out of it. You don't need it, but it's a truly fantastic book. And a book he talks a lot about

is Hillary Mantell's book A Place of Greater Safety about the French Revolution, which I haven't read, but I love Hillary Mantel. I love Wolf Hall, her book about Oliver Cromwell. So I think those are some some books if you want are like mainline. And oh, and La Carre,

John La Carre, all of his stuff. I think that's the other big. I mean, we talked about La Carre stuff we'd all remembered reading in La Carre novels over the years because La Carre is very dense and grounded about the spy craft, like real spy craft, not digital watches

that shoot poison darts, but how to handle an agent. The fact that you know, people that are on deep cover and intelligence jobs actually have to know how to do the jobs that they're pretending to do, like, really well. Like, lots of stuff like that. And there was a lot more spycraft earlier on

in the writing process for Andor, as we were talking about this season, like multiple sequences of BICs going on weapons inspections that I thought would have been really cool. So now they're referenced that they, you know, she does these inspections for Luton, but it was a lot about showing, up looking at a bunch of weapons, figuring out, you know, are they traceable? Is this a setup?

Are they just looking to see where these weapons go and her developing this like eye for like real, real intelligent stuff? Because if you're an insurgency, you have to be really careful about where you source your weapons for because the number one thing, you know, if you're, especially if you're fighting an occupier, they're going to want as many weapons to fall into insurgent's hands as possible, provided their crappy weapons or unreliable weapons. weapons and stuff like that. So there's that whole shell game of it. So there was a lot more of that texture of the show at one point. And I'm not sad. It went. I just think it's kind of interesting that we were all thinking about the down and dirty, nitty-gritty of spycraft. So we're going to have to

wrap up soon, but I have to ask about the end-end ending, the very last scene. Speaking as a father, and you mentioned before that you've become this sap over the years of dad and dad stories. It is so tragic to know, know that Cassie and Andor had a kid who will never know his or her dad. Tell me a little bit about, was that like always the plan to just like have this secret and or baby? How did you go about like writing that scene? Yeah, I took a lot of cuts at that because it's the last thing, right? And my first version of it was I wanted her looking into the night sky. And this is kind of a really corny idea.

no wonder it didn't go, but I wanted her looking into the night sky, and then you just see like a tiny little shimmer in one of the stars, and I was imagining that that was the event of Scaref, of the Death Star hitting it. Like Tony thought it put the B in subtle, as they say, and it was like, it'd just be hard to read that and hard to like... That's a good saying. Yeah. And then, like, as that star shimmered, you'd hear.

hear a baby crying and she'd turn and she'd walk back into her little Mina Rao hut. And that sort of hung in there for a minute. And then Tony's like, no, I think we need to see the baby. And so me being a genius coming into the scene, it was B2 like going around the hut and then bumping into the crib and then seeing the baby in the crib and then cutting the Bix out in the field looking up. How complicated can we make this? I never put the baby in Bix's arms.

Like a genius screen. writer here like I kept trying to think how do you show this baby it's like oh maybe have the mom carrying it like maybe that would be useful so uh I really like psyched myself out on that very final scene and it really took Tony coming and it's like maybe she should just be holding her and I'm like yeah that's pretty good idea it's so funny by the way people I don't know how many people out there listeners out there like think about screenwriting as a craft but it's so funny to imagine it as it being not that it's your job to come up with the fact that she had a baby it's your job to to figure out how that is shown.

And they kind of, yeah, stage it, which is so interesting, just like these logistics and building blocks. And that is so much of your job, it sounded like on Andor. Staging is everything. Like, you have to write it in a way, and I don't mean this disrespectfully. I mean, if you're writing, if you're really hipfiring in all cylinders

and you're writing a screenplay, you kind of have to make it director-proof in some way. And I don't, by that, I don't mean that the director doesn't add anything. but like the movement and the vibe of the movie has to be there so purely that instead of a director coming in and like think, oh, you could do this 100 different ways. Maybe you're only giving them three or four different ways to do it. Like if you're staging it that emphatically, you're kind of locking the director into just the logic,

especially in TV, the logic of the show. Features are a whole other thing. Like, you know, stories are legion of directors just coming in and taking screen. screenplay and going, just throwing it away over the shoulder. But you can't afford to do that in TV, you know, because everyone who's coming in is they're creating another link in the chain. And the whole chain is only as strong as the links are. So you don't want to mess. Directors don't want to mess too much with what is functioning already well. So I'm always trying to think really hard about how I stage things and making it feel as visual as possible without like doing that annoying screenwriter thing of

medium close-up on Bix is the camera. You don't want to do that. You don't want to do that. But you just want to write it. And you want to do that without doing that. And you do that with like vivid, visual, forceful writing. Tom, you talked about the logistics, but just to follow up on that, the thing I asked before, like, as a dad, what is it like for you, writing the scene? And knowing that now Cassie and Andor, like, is, or this baby is growing up with that attack.

Because for me, as a father, that's like, like, my biggest fear in the world is that. like something will happen to me and my kids will grow up without a father. So tell me what that's like emotionally for you writing. I mean, it's, it's, is quietly devastating. Maybe not for me so much because it's kind of hard to, like there's things about the show that catch me up and put a lump in my throat. But it's hard to be too terribly moved by it when you've seen inside the machine. You know, like I've never worked on something.

I think and or more than any other thing I've worked on, I've actually felt myself like get moved by the thing. things that happen in it. Whereas most of the things I've written, like you're just, it's like that thing with comedians, you know, when you're watching a funny movie or a funny show with a comedian and they're just like staring at the screen dead-eyed and they're saying things like, that's very funny. That's really funny. That tends to be how I process the drama and things that I'm written. It's almost like a lizard-eyed sort of evil scientist, kind of like, Did you get sat?

Did you feel tense? You know, like, you're almost like a doctor taking someone's vitals, you know, like. But, so I can't say that I ever went there in my head, like, poor Cassian's good kid is going to grow up without a father because I was just like, why the fuck didn't I put her in his mom's arms? I was too hung up on my idiotic inability to figure out a good way to stay. You're a mother and a kid walking through a wheat field. but um so i'm one step removed from the from the very sad fact that uh little little casso or whatever he or she uh winds up getting named uh their fate but uh i do kind of hope that that that kid is able to grow up anonymous and in a world that uh doesn't need more i thought you're going to say

that that kid is going to grow up to star in their own and or spin off Turns out it's a Skywalker. I mean, that is not my call to make. That's true. So of course, also Bix is standing on the planet Mina Rao, which is named for your own daughter. Did you make that decision? Like, did you get to write? Oh, and they should definitely be on Mina Rao at the end here, just for me.

So one of the first times I spoke to Tony, I mentioned that my daughter was, she was in a heavy Star Wars phase at that point. like heavy, heavy, obsessed with Star Wars. And when this possibility of this job came up, she was like, you know, ecstatic. And she just really wanted me to get it, obviously. And then I get it. And then she's just throwing, she's pitching me for like three months.

You know, like, what about this? What about this? I'm like, okay, you just have to stop. I mean, she's already landing ideas on the writer's room, right? She's pitching me. It's about 10 days before the writer's room commences. and I was watching rebels with Mina because we hadn't seen rebels yet

and so we're watching. I'm like, oh, it takes place at the same time as Andor. You know, maybe be useful. So the phone rings and it's Tony. And he's like, okay, I ask you a question. Would your daughter object if we name, if I named a planet after her in season two?

And I was like, oh, my God. So she's sitting next to me. I like, would you object if we named a planet after you? And she went, oh, my God. And just went like running around the house. And then she got really calm. And she's like, yeah, that's cool.

And I've often said to her, when I was your age, if I had a planet named after in Star Wars after me, I would not have slept for like a year. I would have just been wide awake every night just like, oh my God, oh my God.

So she's obviously having a different journey than I am through this franchise, the one that I had. But during that call, Tony says, what are you doing? And I said, oh, I'm just watching rebels with my daughter. And he was really quiet.

And then he goes, do me favor. And I'm like, yeah. And he's like, stop watching it right now and don't watch any more of it. And I think there's one way to spin the story. Ha, ha, Tony Gilroy hates the cartoon. No. Here's what he told me later.

When I asked about it, he said, I didn't want you showing up in my room with a bunch of other stories in your head. And it's like actually really good advice for a certain kind of show like that, you know, come in, we're going to do something totally self-contained. And or it's just not that kind of show. And so I realized after like, because I hadn't,

you know, I'd barely seen the first season at that point. I think, no, I had seen the first season. So I got it. But I do think it was like a useful thing to remember that now whenever I'm coming in to like do a piece of franchise storytelling, I don't automatically assume my number one job is to consume every piece of media from that franchise, which is what I used to do. Because I've worked in a lot of franchises. And now I think I'm just a little bit liberated from that because you don't necessarily have

to imprison your imagination and what other people have done so far. And to me, and or is just a case study about how to escape the gravitational pull of a massive IP in ways that are like really, I think, creatively smashing and interesting. That is a great note to end on. I think that's very true. And that's such a cool lesson to have taken away as a writer on the show. Because it's definitely a lesson that I took away as a viewer anyways. Man, well, this was so much fun. Tom Bissell, thanks so much for coming on the show. I adored my time here and thank you guys for having me. Are you a five-star baddie? If you answered yes, then Black People Love Paramore is the podcast for you. Contrary to the title, we are not a podcast about the band Paramore.

Black People Love Paramore is a pop culture show about the common and uncommon interests of black people in order to help us feel a little bit more scene. We are your co-hosts, Sequoia Holmes, Jewel Vicker. And Ryan Graham. And in each episode, we dissect one pop culture topic that mainstream media doesn't associate with the black people. but we know that we like. We get into topics like Gingerill, the Golden Girls, Black Romance,

Uno, and so much more. Tune in every other Thursday to the podcast that's dedicated to helping Black people feel more seen. Find Black People Love Paramore on Maximumfund.org or wherever you get your podcasts. One thing we all have in common, we all have a mind. It makes me so scared because I'm like,

when is the bad thing going to happen? And minds can be kind of unpredictable, an eccentric. Everybody wants to hear that they're not alone. Everybody wants to hear that someone else has those same thoughts. Depression Mode with John Moe is about how interesting minds intersect with the lives and work of the people who have them. Comedians, authors, experts, all sorts of folks trying to make sense of their world. It's not admitting something bad if you say this is scary.

Depression Mode with John Moe. Every Monday at maximum fun.org or wherever you get podcast. And we are back for one more thing. Thanks again to Tom Bissell for taking the time to come talk to us. That was a lot of fun. All right. One more thing. Maddie, you're first. What do you got? Okay. So I decided to take advantage of just the great power of the Nintendo Switch 2 by playing a Game Boy Advance game called Metroid Zero Mission, which I've played before. And I don't know why. I just was really in the mood for this game. I've had a lot more gaming time since quitting my job. It's not

say I'm not getting writing done. Don't worry everybody. You'll see my byline again soon. But I also just want to take a little break, play some games I know I really love. And I wanted to super recommend this one. So here's the deal with Metroid Zero Mission. It is actually a remake of the original Metroid, which I've also played, but which I don't really recommend anybody do unless they are whatever form of Metroid fan I am, because it's tedious. The rooms all look the same. It's kind of clunky feeling. Like the way Samus moves, it just doesn't feel that good.

She moves pretty slow. Like her literal walk-in speed is slow. It just doesn't, it's shades of what will come. It's of the 2D Metroids. And there's something there that I think is magical still. But it is tedious. And it kind of feels like the old game that it is, which is why Zero Mission exists.

It's a remake of the first game. speeds up all of that, makes some of the boss fights a little harder. I think Mother Brain is way harder in Zero Mission, by the way. But also, it tacks on a bunch more stuff. So usually you'd beat Mother Brain at the end of Metroid, the original Metroid, and that's it. That's the video game.

You did it, you're done. And this one, after that, Samus is trying to leave the planet, and then she crash lands, and she has to do this whole other series of missions just starting out in her Zero suit. She loses all of her equipment again. Sammas Aaron just can't seem to hold on to her equipment, folks. She just can't do it.

And so Zero Mission just kind of adds on a bit more story of like what happens to Samus immediately after the events of the first Metroid game. So it's really cool. I think it's a cool concept. And I also think it super holds up. I mean, I'm the one saying this. I'm a person who really likes a 2D Metroid game. But if you've never played the first Metroid and you want to know what happens in it

and you like 2D Metroids, maybe you played Metroid. Dread, maybe you played Super Metroid and you want to know what to play next, I think this is a really good entry, especially if you just have heard that the original Metroid is like important canonically and you kind of feel bad that you don't want to play it. It's okay. Nobody wants to play it and they know that and that's why this game exists. So Metroid's Zero Mission, you can play it on the Switch too, just like I am. And then you have save states, which makes it way easier because You can just use those fancy suspend points. So that's what I've been playing.

Well, actually, I beat it. But yeah, it's not that long. If I were going to play Metroid, Zero Mission, or Super Metroid first, which would you recommend? I mean, I like Super Metroid better personally. But that's me. Say no more. Yeah, I think if I were going to play one of those two, I would probably play Super Metroid. But that's good to know that Zero Mission is fun as well.

It's very good. It's very good. Nice. I'll go next. My one more thing is a book called, James that I just finished by Percival Everett, a terrific book that I'm sure a lot of our listeners have heard of. It was very buzzy. It came out last year, won a bunch of awards, and deserves every one of them. It's really, really something. So this is a reimagining of Mark Twain's Huckleberry

Finn, written from the perspective of Jim, or James, the title character, the enslaved man who accompanied Huck Finn during his adventure in that story. And it's really great. Great. It's not what I was expecting in a lot of ways because I wasn't really sure what to expect going in. I remember Huckleberry Finn fairly well. That's probably the Twain story that I remember best. And, you know, that book is notable in part because it's written in vernacular. And so a lot of the narration and just the way that Huck talks and the way that everyone talks, it's like southern vernacular. And there's just a lot of like everything is in dialect. And so, and that was kind of a new thing that Twain was playing around with in the way. 1800s. And the big kind of idea of James is that James and his family and other just enslaved characters all speak in a kind of, they kind of code switch in order to play the role of the slave and to speak in that like slave dialect. I don't really know how better to describe it, but that that kind of way of speaking that is depicted in Twain and a lot of other older fiction. But that's a mask that these characters are wearing. It's not their true voice or their true

self. So there's kind of like, it's a lot of playing with language and sort of playing with identity and the different ways that you hide who you really are when you're forced into slavery and when you're forced into such a, you know, kind of horrible situation. That's kind of one of the big, at least, it's not a twist, but it's the big sort of central idea that runs through the book. But the book is about a lot of different things. I mean, it's about the horrors of slavery, definitely. It's about the power of language and the power of thought. There are some really beautiful and moving passages in the book, just where James is alone with a book that he's maybe he's stolen or he's acquired somehow that he's able to read, where he realizes the freedom

of thought that comes with reading, there are these really just incredibly evocative and powerful depictions of what it means to read and what it means to think and how language informs our thought that, you know, play out in that sort of linguistic setup that I was describing earlier. So it's a really, it's just a really great book. It's very funny at times. I wasn't expecting as much humor, but it makes sense because it's structured very much like Huckleberry Finn, which is also quite a comedic story, you know, as they just kind of bounce and roll along from encounter to encounter. But then there's this undercurrent of horror and fear because James, unlike Huck, is never safe. He's always at risk because he is an escaped slave, and anyone who sees him in the daytime knows that. And so he's

always at risk of being captured. And so there's like this tension in the story that, of course, didn't exist in Huckleberry Finn. And then otherwise, it's just a really interesting book. You can see Everett himself speaking through James at times. There are some really interesting sequences where James imagines or dreams different intellectuals of the time period who wrote different justifications for slavery, or if not justifications, at least explanations of it. where he sort of challenges them and he wants them to better explain to him why it's okay, this horrible thing that's being done to him and his family. And they're completely incapable of it because when you're reading the book and you're seeing what happened to people,

there is no philosophical justification that anyone could come up with for one human to do that to another one. And so it's very interesting just to see this idea explored in so many different ways. Anyways, really an amazing book. It's a pretty quick read. It's structured much like Huck Finn. and then it moves very quickly from chapter to chapter to chapter. I can't recommend it enough. It's a tremendous book.

So that is James by Percival Everett. Big recommendation from Maine. Yeah, it sounds cool. All right, Jason, you're up. What's your one more thing? My one more thing is also a book called Never Flinch by the Master, Stephen King. This is his latest book. And yet another book to feature Holly Gibney, who is a character that he is relied upon for like six books.

now. He's obsessed with her. Does this take place after Holly? Yeah. Yeah, this is the most recent one. Okay, got it. But it's not really connected. It's just kind of the ongoing stories of Holly Gibney. Holly Gibney is a fascinating character. She's this kind of middle-aged to elderly woman who's maybe slightly neurodivergent or I don't know where on the scale is, but she looks at the world in a different way, which helps her

kind of helps her to be a detective and an investigator. She's a private investigator and it helps her kind of make deductions. that other people don't. So the story in Never Flinch is they're kind of two dueling stories. One story is that the police department in Buckeye City, which is where the novel takes place, the police department gets this letter from someone saying he is going to kill 13 innocent people and one guilty people as retribution for this kind of the death of an innocent man, the needless death of an innocent man, he says.

and the innocent man in question, who he's referencing there, was stabbed in prison after being wrongfully accused of pedophilia. So this guy who's stabbed in prison is the innocent man. And so this new person who's sending the threatening letter saying he's going to kill 13 innocents and one guilty as retribution for that. And so that sets off this chain of the police department and the police detective in charge, Izzy Jane's trying to figure out what happened there with help from Holly. at the same time there's another story, which is that this feminist critic and author and political kind of advocate named Kate McKay, she is on this lecture tour where she's packing stadiums and she starts getting harassed and threatened by some anonymous person who does not like her politics. And then we kind of, we bounce back and forth between the two.

Kate winds up hiring Holly to be her bodyguard, and Holly winds up coming in and trying to figure out what's going on with both of these cases and we bounce back and forth between the two and then eventually they connect towards the end of the book. And it's just kind of a classic Stephen King book, especially along the lines of his more recent thrillers as opposed to like his big horror pieces. So it's more along the lines of like Mr. Mercedes or Holly than it is some of the, I don't know, the stand or like under the dome or like some other kind of big sports. sprawling epics or horror stories like Firestarter or like It and stuff like that. This is more his kind of crime thriller period.

And it's good. It's not his best by any means. And it has a lot of his kind of his modern quirks, such as just talking about Trump all the time and COVID and other modern things that just feel needlessly shoehorned in. But it's an enjoyable read in the way that every Stephen King book is an enjoyable read. And the plot is fun and the twists are good and the mystery itself are very entertaining and fun to read.

And Holly is a great character. I can see why Stephen King wants to spend so much time with her and keep her starring in all of these books. And it's fun. It's a thrill. It's just another, it's a fun summer read, I would say. It's a good beach read because it'll just keep you. It's a good page turner for the beach. It'll keep you entertained while you're sipping dackeries by the pool.

But it's not going to blow your mind the way that like his JFK book blew my mind, like under the dome blew my mind. It's just a kind of another, just forgettable thriller that I probably will forget the details of in a couple of years. So yeah, just another, I mean, even like the middling Stephen King books are still better than most books out there. So still recommend it. I think Holly had going for it were the villains were memorable. Does this one have memorable villain, like a memorable villain? Not quite on the level of the elderly couple that is... who eat people.

That was killer. That was a great villain. They were very fun. But I will say the main villain whose perspective you get, I mean, you get the perspective of both villains. One of them is much stronger than the other one. The one who, the book kind of opens with the guy who goes by the name Trig and he's the one who sent the letter.

He is a very compelling, very strong villain. The other one, a little bit less so, is a little bit more tropey and problematic in some ways, I guess. I don't know. That's a little bit beyond my death. I won't get into the specific there. But that one isn't as interesting. Triglamine, kind of the villain who sends the letter, I would say, is a very interesting villain. But no, they're not at the level of that elderly couple who I think was pretty good at haunting dreams. Yeah, I guess the elderly couple let King get into his own stuff.

Like where he's thinking about how to be a good old person. I guess we talked about this when we talked about howl and that gives them a little bit more. little more meat there for him to work with. Yeah, and I would say Holly is a better book overall, but this is still good. Again, like, uh, baseline Stephen King, the bar is so high that it's like you're, you're not going to have a bad time reading one of his books in general. No, probably not. Um, well, I say that. I haven't read all 60 whatever, so maybe they're a couple of real clunkers. No, and some of those Bachman books are pretty wretched, at least going by Just King things, recaps of them, but, but those are Bachman books. Yeah, I was going to say, I, I feel like from

listening to the Just King Things podcast, there's a few I'd skip, but, Hey, there's a lot of King books. Yeah, we can all skip rage. But then again, rage is like not available in publicization. Yeah, even Stephen King wants you to skip rage. It's okay if you skip rage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say of his more modern, avar, avro, au re, au re, au re.

This is like when I tried to pronounce boudoir. I know you're going to do some French duolingo. It's like along the lines of many of the other ones, like the Mercedes trilogy, most of all. Cool. Yeah, I would read another one of those sometimes. Sounds like a good beach read. Yeah, next time you have a plane ride. Norflinch, it's a good book to get at the airport. Nice. Well, all right.

We've done it again, folks. We've done another episode of TripleF. Yeah, thanks again to Tom. That was super fun. Yeah, amazing. That was great. And yeah, thanks you all for listening. Hope you enjoyed this supersized interview. It happens sometimes when we have a guest.

And yeah, that was a whole lot of fun. All right, let's go play some video games. We'll see the two of you next week. In person next week. Yeah, that's true. See you then. That'll be fine. See you in Portland.

And hopefully many of you listeners out there. 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 maximum fun.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. Maximum fun. A worker-owned network of artists own shows. Supported directly by you.