Podcasts about danny you

Show Notes Today's Guests: Kerry Lammers PT, DPT, CCS Kerry.Lammers@osumc.edu Twitter: @kerry_lammers Josh Johnson PT, DPT, PhD joshua.johnson@duke.edu Twitter: @joshkj_dpt LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-johnson-21262a41/ Kyle Ridgeway PT, DPT, CCS kyle.ridgeway@uchealth.org Twitter: @Dr_Ridge_DPT IG: @kylejridge LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kylejridgeway/ https://ptthinktank.com/author/kridgeway/ https://www.youtube.com/@kyleridgeway8484 Richard Severin PT, DPT, PhD, CCS rsever5@uic.edu Twitter: @ptreviewer IG: @pt_reviewer Daniel Young PT, DPT, PhD daniel.young@unlv.edu Links: CSM Acute Care Programming: https://www.aptaacutecare.org/page/CSMmain CSM Shark Tank Session: https://apta.confex.com/apta/csm2024/meetingapp.cgi/Session/18385 Shark Tank Application: https://ufl.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9ZF2GDgjg6vxXfw Research Connections Event: https://apta.confex.com/apta/csm2024/meetingapp.cgi/Session/19126 Bridge the Gap: https://www.aptaacutecare.org/page/bridgethegap From December Critical Edge (More information): Seeking Academy Members to “Swim in the Shark Tank” at CSM 2024 In this open call, we are seeking budding investigators to submit their idea, for the chance to pitch it live… to a panel of six expert “sharks” at CSM 2024! Have you ever had a clinical question you thought could turn into a project? Or a project that just can't seem to get off the ground? Are you unsure how to take a great idea all the way to CSM? Those selected will give a 3-5 minute “pitch” of their idea at the conference. Our panel of “sharks” will talk through the challenges and triumphs of conducting clinical research and offer specific feedback and guidance. Contact Research Committee Chairs or submit your idea directly. Everyone is encouraged to join us in the very first Academy of Acute Care Shark Tank at CSM 2024, for a great dialogue about bringing science into practice! Guest Quotes: 3:21 Kerry “The goal of the Shark Tank is basically to create a mentorship type relationship, create connections around the country. You know, connect like minded individuals who have experience doing these types of projects ranging from really sophisticated research projects all the way down to how do I just operationalize a systematic change here at my med center…” 5:53 Rich “But I think there's so many stories from clinical practice that don't get told just because people don't have the means to do it, right?...And this is a great opportunity for clinicians who are trying to test the water.” 6:57 Josh “I don't have to be the one that asks the questions, I get to partner with clinicians who have much more relevant questions than I could possibly ask. And we get to bring those to the forefront…” 26:44 Daniel “I think that the end goal is that we provide better care. Like that's the end goal for any of the things that are coming. So if you're a person who's thinking, I wish we could do this better, or I wish we knew how to do this better or what to do better.  Those are the people and the ideas that we need here.” 27:28 Kyle “We want our time and investment of this individual to help them grow to be better to able contribute in their local environment, whether that's a 40 bed critical access community hospital or 1000 bed academic center and improve the care of their patient populations, given the challenges and the people that they serve.” Rapid Responses: What's your favorite scrub color? Kyle: “It's got to be Caribbean blue. Cause that's what I'm mandated to wear. So that went down in the brand. Let's do it.” You know you work in acute care when: “You value your relationship with the CNAs and the environmental service employees.” Kerry: “The smells. You just know” Danny: “You have to change into scrubs because you got poop on the original ones.” Kyle: “When you end your day and you're not sure if you've done any therapy. “ Josh “the fact that patients and families get really excited ...

“All entrepreneurs, all influencers, and all thought leaders should be considering something like a podcast, because it gives you that chance to build trust ahead of time,” shares Danny Ozment, owner of Emerald City Productions.  In this episode we discuss the reasons why you should consider starting your own podcast. A podcast is a fantastic way for people to build connections and trust with their target market. By starting a podcast and posting consistently, your listeners will build a relationship with you and begin to see you as an authority in your specific area. As your podcast grows, your body of work grows and continues to add to your authority. There are podcasts just about every topic under the sun. So even if you don't believe your industry would be a good fit for podcasting, you're probably wrong. Podcasts serve as a referral marketing system because you can establish trust before meeting someone in person - especially for service-based providers like doctors, lawyers and consultants. Starting a podcast is easier than ever before when it comes to technology. As long as you are consistent and willing to take the plunge, podcasting can take your business further and secure your position as a thought leader in your industry.  Quotes “All entrepreneurs, all influencers, all thought leaders, all professionals brick and mortar should be considering something like a podcast, because it gives you that chance to build trust ahead of time.” (8:52-9:04 | Danny) “I often talk about it as referral marketing on a grand scale, because it is the chance for you to establish trust and friendship with people that have a problem and need to go to a friend to ask advice and have their problem solved. And you can point them in the right direction, which is you while you're the host of a podcast.” (15:12-15:31 | Danny) “There was actually a recent study that was released in the psychological journal PLOS1 that found that participants who listen to more podcasts per month and developed parasocial interactions with the hosts of the podcast actually felt more related to others and had more significance in their lives.” (17:28-17:51 | Danny) “You may think, ‘oh, a podcast wouldn't be right for my industry'. But literally, there's a podcast about everything.” (27:29-27:34 | Danny)    Links   Resources: Take the quiz to find out the best way to get your podcast launched & produced: https://emeraldcitypro.com/discover-podcast-services/ Connect with Danny Ozment: Website: https://emeraldcitypro.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DannyOzmentPodcasting Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dannyozment/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannyozment/   ====    Thank You For Listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review! Your positive review helps others find this podcast and increase its visibility.   Getting to YES boils down to two things: Saying the right things and saying those things consistently… so if you want to go deeper, check out Uli's one-page “Getting to YES” blueprint and training with the essential 9 persuasion prompts you need to leverage: https://uliiserloh.com/blueprint     Connect With Uli Website: https://uliiserloh.com Facebook: https://facebook.com/uliiserloh   Instagram: https://instagram.com/uliiserloh Youtube: https://youtube.com/uliiserloh  Tiktok: https://tiktok.com/@uliiserloh  Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/uliiserloh/ If you'd like to learn more about Uli's marketing agency and available services, visit https://bigboost.marketing

Caribou coffee is starting a subscription programTaco Bell is testing a subscription service in ArizonaClean Juice and Urban Plates are testing out subscription services as wellWendy's is launching a Friday Freebies in October - every Friday, with the purchase of a medium fry, you unlock a free deal. There's also a $0 delivery fee in the month of October.Internal Branding & Marketing to employeesUnderstanding what your brand meansWhy does it matter?Follow up and deliver on your promises as a brandDutch Bros. Coffee lives thisYellow Pages is an example of a company that failed to recognize a cultural shiftTater tots are not fries! Quotes “The McRib is one of those sandwiches that we all remember where were when we first ate it whether or not it a was a good or bad experience” -Danny“You can get customers onto loyalty, but how do you keep them?” -Danny“Now more than ever it's become very clear how important marketing internally is” -Joseph“The restaurant industry has long been one of those industries where you can enter the workforce no matter what your background is and yet you can also still climb the ladder” -Danny“Great service is a by-product of a strong, real, authentic culture that people have bought into” -Joseph“It cannot be understated the importance of brick and mortar and having a sign out there that consumers can see” -Ben“Dine in is returning and the value of being able to sit in a restaurant is returning” -Ben“I think there's going to be a lot of these virtual brands that burst at the seams and then fall off when people realize that they're not really much more beyond what the gimmick may be” -Danny“It definitely does feel like you're narrowing your customer reach when you develop a Cheetos flavored wing” -BenWhy do brands fail? “I think it's because they fail to recognize a cultural shift that is beyond trend” -Joseph“Are people going to want to eat at buffets post COVID?” -Ben“A lot of these restaurants need to have that in their back pocket to reactivate who they were and why they matter to people” -Danny“Do not become too much of somebody else in a world that already has too many options” -Danny

In this episode I give a quick recap of my interview with Dr. Danny Brassell including: - How to powerfully tell your story- The #1 tip he gives to all speakers-  His top book recommendations for entrepreneurs And so much more...Dr. Danny Brassell is a highly-sought after speaker, trainer and coach known as “Jim Carrey with a Ph.D.,” He has spoken to over 3,000 audiences worldwide and authored 16 books, including his latest, Leadership Begins with Motivation. He is the co-founder of www.theREADINGhabit.com, the world's top reading engagement program.Go to www.freereadingtraining.com to connect with Danny*************************************************************You will never maximize your potential on your own so I'm personally inviting you to come and join me in the private Extraordinary Man Facebook group so you can level up your business and your life. Just Click Here to join the Extraordinary Man private Facebook group. Iron sharpens iron and this is the #1 place for you to connect with me and other like minded men who are on a mission to maximize their potential. My goal is to help you become the man God created you to be in all areas of your life. So come and join us in the Facebook group and upgrade your business and your life.

Dr. Danny Brassell is a highly-sought after speaker, trainer and coach known as “Jim Carrey with a Ph.D.,” He has spoken to over 3,000 audiences worldwide and authored 16 books, including his latest, Leadership Begins with Motivation. He is the co-founder of www.theREADINGhabit.com, the world's top reading engagement program.In this episode, we discuss:- How to powerfully tell your story- The #1 tip he gives to all speakers-  His top book recommendations for entrepreneurs And so much more...  Go to www.freereadingtraining.com to connect with Danny*************************************************************You will never maximize your potential on your own so I'm personally inviting you to come and join me in the private Extraordinary Man Facebook group so you can level up your business and your life. Just Click Here to join the Extraordinary Man private Facebook group. Iron sharpens iron and this is the #1 place for you to connect with me and other like minded men who are on a mission to maximize their potential. My goal is to help you become the man God created you to be in all areas of your life. So come and join us in the Facebook group and upgrade your business and your life.

1. house warming 乔迁庆祝 Danny是新来的住户，所以要开一个house warming party. House warming 乔迁庆祝这个用法很中文很像，我们乔迁新居的庆祝也叫暖房。 Danny: (To them) Hey!Rachel: Hi Danny! (Notices his box of liquor he's carrying.) Wow! Thirsty huh?Danny: Uh, actually, actually, I'm having a party at my place on Saturday, it's sort of ahouse warming kind of thing.Monica: Ohh, fun!Rachel: Ohh, great!Danny: Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it.Rachel: Yeah.Danny: Okay, see ya. (Heads out.)Monica: Well, I guess we won't be warming his house.2. jazz sth up 使。。。变得活泼起来 Ross搬进了Joey和Chandler的公寓，未经二人许可就把他们的电话答录机声音给改了，且美其名曰jazz it up a little. jazz sth up 使...变得活泼起来He has tried to jazz up the old car with a spot of paint and some accessories. 他设法用少许油漆和一些零件把那辆旧汽车弄得面目一新.Ross: (entering from the bathroom) Hey roomies!Chandler: Love what you've done with the place.Ross: Oh, yeah I know, I know, it's a lot of boxes, but again I really appreciate you guys letting me stay here.Joey: Not a problem. And listen, hey! Since you're gonna be here for a while, why don't—I was thinking we uh, put your name on the answering machine.Chandler: Oh yeah!Ross: Oh, I uh, hope you don't mind, I kinda uh, jazzed it up a little. Check this out. (He plays the greeting, and We Will Rock You starts to play and Ross's voice comes over it.) We will, we will, call you back!Joey: Hey, all right!Ross: Pretty cool, huh?Joey: (To Chandler) You're fake laughing too, right?Chandler: Oh, the tears are real.3. Queen 皇后乐队 Ross在电话答录机里录了一段应答音We will we will call you back. 这段旋律用了皇后乐队Queen的著名歌曲We will rock you!4. tape over 抹掉（录像带） Ross抹掉Joey的沙滩游侠录像带录了一些虫子的节目。tape over 抹掉（录像带）这里tape是当动词用了Joey: Um-hmm! Look, I-I-I don't know how much more of this I can take! Did you know he taped over my Baywatch tape with some show about bugs! My God! What if that had been porn?Chandler: (gasps) All right look, y'know, this maybe tough but come on, this is Ross! I survived college with him!Joey: All right, I guess I can hold out a little longer. Let's have a game.Chandler: Okay.5. pick one's nose 挖鼻孔 Phoebe的卫生检察官男友不停地关停违反卫生条例的饭店，Phoebe说她知道一个hotdog vendor who picks his nose. 挖鼻孔 pick one's noseLarry: Hey, buddy! (Flashes his badge.) Are you familiar with Section 11-B of the Health Code that requires all refuse material out the back exit?Gunther: But then I'd have to go all the way around the dry cleaner place.Larry: Oh, so you're saying you'd choose convenience over health?!Phoebe: Okay, stop! Larry, okay, can't you just be Larry and not Larry the health inspector guy? Y'know I mean it was really exciting at first but now it's like, okay, so where are we gonna eat ever?Larry: Well, I suppose I could give him a warning.Phoebe: Thank you. (To Gunther, who's standing there frozen) Okay, go! Go! Go! (He runs off.) (To Larry) Now, if after dinner you still really need to bust someone, I know a hot dog vendor who picks his nose.6. go mingle 去交际 Danny说要去招呼一下朋友用了I will go mingle. Mingle本意是融入, 混合go mingle 跟一群陌生人聊天交际Danny: (returning, with a friend) Rachel, this is my friend Tom. (To Tom) This is the girl I told you about.Rachel: Oh, go on! You telling people about me?Danny: You two could really hit it off! I'm gonna go mingle.7. drop the act 少来这套 Rachel认为Danny给她介绍约会对象是在玩欲擒故纵，所以对Tommy说drop the act.drop the act 少来这套，别装了。Tom: I'm sorry?Rachel: No, it's all right, you can just drop the act Tommy. I know what's going on here. Your Danny's wingman right? You guys are best buds. Frat bros!Tom: I'm gonna go talk to uh, a friend.Rachel: Yeah, yeah, you go talk to your friend. You tell him, "Nice try."8. bro 兄弟 frat bro = fraternity brother兄弟会bro 就是 brother. Bro通常用在口语中表示哥们。Bros before hoes. 比较粗俗的一句俚语，意思是不要重色轻友。9. 棒球俚语 Rachel在本集中用到了一系列的网球和棒球术语来说她和Danny的关系比如，the ball is in his court 球在他的场地上 意思是 该他出招了（网球），lob up 挑高球 意思是吊胃口（棒球），knock out of park 打出全垒打（棒球）意思是干得漂亮10. stop talking crazy 别废话 结尾处Joey, Ross和Chandler在公寓里玩儿游戏。扮演牛仔的Joey对扮演主妇的Chandler说 stop talking crazy and make us some teaStop talking crazy. 别废话了Chandler: Well, I see you've had a very productive day. Don't you think the cowboy hat is a little much?Ross: (popping up behind Joey wearing an Indian headdress) Come on, it's fun!Chandler: All right! (He joins them in the fort and comes up putting on a bonnet.) Isn't this a woman's hat?Joey: Dude, stop talking crazy and make us some tea!

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Danny: So, what kind of clothes do you like to wear?Alex: I like to wear casual clothes. And that's why I really don't like what I have to wear to work sometimes because it's just not what I would normally wear.Danny: So what do you normally have to wear to work then?Alex: Oh, I have to hear a tie and kind of like suit trousers and sometimes a suit coat.Danny: Really?Alex: Yeah.Danny: Even in the summer?Alex: Yeah, even in the summer. It's basically the company policy that we look business-like. It's crazy. You know that time of year is really hot. You're sort of waiting for the train, and you're sweating and it's just, ugh!Danny: You want a change of clothes by the time you get to work.Alex: Yeah, it's almost like you need a locker full of new clothes by the time you get there.Danny: I know the feeling.Alex: Maybe I should just wear, you know, like sports clothes, and running clothes until I get to work and then change.Danny: Good idea. So do you keep you clothes for a really long time?Alex: Much longer than my wife would like me to keep them. She's always saying to me, "Just throw that out. It's worn out." "Oh, I like that one." She buys me new clothes but I keep wearing the same ones.Danny: So, you wear them until there's holes in the knees and the pants.Alex: I always have likes seven different shirts I could wear, and maybe four pairs of pants and I always wear the same ones.Danny: So, where do you buy your clothes when you go shopping?Alex: Oh, this is the great thing about being married, I don't buy clothes anymore. My wife buys my clothes.Danny: Really?Alex: And she's a really good shopper. She knows my size, and she --- well, there is only one problem. I don't always like what she buys, but I never tell her.Danny: So how many times a day do you end up having to change your clothes? You say you have to wear this suit to work, and then you end up sweating. Do you have the opportunity to change?Alex: No, not at work. But once you get to work in the middle of summer, the air-cons on, the air-conditioning's on, so it's not too bad, but by the time I get home from work --- and I usually don't have a bath until later, and I always have to give my work clothes off. I just can't wait to get my work clothes off.Danny: So about once a day.Alex: Yeah, basically.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Danny: So, what kind of clothes do you like to wear?Alex: I like to wear casual clothes. And that's why I really don't like what I have to wear to work sometimes because it's just not what I would normally wear.Danny: So what do you normally have to wear to work then?Alex: Oh, I have to hear a tie and kind of like suit trousers and sometimes a suit coat.Danny: Really?Alex: Yeah.Danny: Even in the summer?Alex: Yeah, even in the summer. It's basically the company policy that we look business-like. It's crazy. You know that time of year is really hot. You're sort of waiting for the train, and you're sweating and it's just, ugh!Danny: You want a change of clothes by the time you get to work.Alex: Yeah, it's almost like you need a locker full of new clothes by the time you get there.Danny: I know the feeling.Alex: Maybe I should just wear, you know, like sports clothes, and running clothes until I get to work and then change.Danny: Good idea. So do you keep you clothes for a really long time?Alex: Much longer than my wife would like me to keep them. She's always saying to me, "Just throw that out. It's worn out." "Oh, I like that one." She buys me new clothes but I keep wearing the same ones.Danny: So, you wear them until there's holes in the knees and the pants.Alex: I always have likes seven different shirts I could wear, and maybe four pairs of pants and I always wear the same ones.Danny: So, where do you buy your clothes when you go shopping?Alex: Oh, this is the great thing about being married, I don't buy clothes anymore. My wife buys my clothes.Danny: Really?Alex: And she's a really good shopper. She knows my size, and she --- well, there is only one problem. I don't always like what she buys, but I never tell her.Danny: So how many times a day do you end up having to change your clothes? You say you have to wear this suit to work, and then you end up sweating. Do you have the opportunity to change?Alex: No, not at work. But once you get to work in the middle of summer, the air-cons on, the air-conditioning's on, so it's not too bad, but by the time I get home from work --- and I usually don't have a bath until later, and I always have to give my work clothes off. I just can't wait to get my work clothes off.Danny: So about once a day.Alex: Yeah, basically.

Press B to Cancel... evolution! After 8 episodes we get all poetic about our earliest Pokemon memories, and discuss the inspiration for our podcast name. Episode Transcription: The below is a machine based transcription of this episode. Sorta like Skynet if it was 2 years old, and wanted a cookie. Take it with a grain of salt. Wulff 0:00 This week on presby to cancel, we discussed the evolution of Pokemon Gotta catch them all. AgainWulff 0:29 Hello everybody and welcome to presby to cancel I figured eight episodes deep might be time to jump into a topic reflecting the podcasts namesake presby to cancel so, with that in mind, we're going to be talking about Pokemon today to cancel that evolution. Wait what?Palsh 0:48 Sorry, I just had to do that I was trying to think somethingWulff 0:50 witty, Ching goo Jayco magic keys make you feel all better?Palsh 0:55 We ran. Okay, so here's our intro You may continueJake 1:03 or be very proud of. SoWulff 1:06 today's episode, I know I normally do things a little bit more structured, but today I'm going in a little bit more freewheeling. So we're going to discuss things a little differently. But I'd like to start with Pokemon beginning in the West. So I remember seeing I had kind of gotten into import games and stuff like that shortly before Pokemon released in the West. And so I remember seeing Pocket Monsters merge at import stores and stuff there was a place I used to go called game cave in Southern California. I don't think it's around anymore, but I I'd go there once every month or two and I just see all this pocket monsters crap wall scrolls, stickers, cards, you name it was there and I was like, What the heck is this and they tried to explain it to me and I just didn't get it. Bought a year or two later, it finally released in the West. And I remember seeing a new story on TV about Topeka, Kansas, changing its name for a day to Topeka to Kansas. Nintendo, I'm guessing threw a big sack of money at Topeka, Kansas and said, Hey, we want to change the name just for a day have a big event there. Kick off the Pokemon North American events in Topeka and they were like, Yes, please. So they have people I'm pretty sure they had pretty sure they had people dressed in Pikachu outfits and they had the, the fleet of 10 Volkswagen beetles done up like Pikachu that said, gotta catch them all on the side. And from there, they just started sending those beetles out to everywhere in North America to do the events. Do any of you recall that at all?Jake 2:55 No, but I just find out where they didn't do. Topeka, Kansas because took a piece of Cute little Pokemon.Wulff 3:02 But I think topi was generation toJake 3:05 shows you the extent of my knowledge.GP 3:08 Actually, I do remember this as somebody who lives about two hours south from I love that we're saying Topeka. Sorry, everybody in Kansas says just tipica like it's to a PK, but it's, it's spelt Topeka, but it's like Quebec or Quebec. It's to be here. But I love that you say, it's like saying Comanche instead of Comanche. Anyway, doesn't matter. Gotcha. No, I remember this and trying to figure out why the heck I should care about it. Because it got, you know, like you said, national coverage and all this stuff. It's a big deal. And I just remember, how do you wanna say it looked and seemed so bizarre? Yeah, it seemed like not just the people my age were getting into it. But it was these adults, you know, wondering are not wandering around but stomping around and, and these these thematic and brightly colored anime type shirts. And to that point, all I'd ever really seen of like anime and then that kind of stuff was Dragon Ball. So I'm like, why are we not having a Dragon Ball Z day? What the hell this picture? But yeah, so I remember the event from Topeka, but I just remember being, like, bewildered and confused.Wulff 4:20 Yeah, I was just I was not into it at all when I had first heard about it and then I saw this new story. And I was like, and I lived in Vegas at the time, so it got that far at least. I was like, What the hell is Pokemon like, why is this such a big deal? And then I think I had Nintendo a Nintendo Power subscription at the time. So when my Nintendo Power came in, they started like really hamming it up with Pokemon and everything. And I was like, Hmm, okay, I can see. And then I got a little curious and I think because of the craze, my parents decided to get a copy for both me and my Brother interestingly enough, they got us both blue.Palsh 5:04 I was about to ask do they get the same color each? Because that would be justWulff 5:08 yeah. So we yeah we had a we had a house without a few Pokemon but I remember I was so into that game at the time I played the crap out I was playing it on Super Gameboy mostly because I I lived in Vegas I had lived there for a short while didn't really have any friends so I wasn't wasn't playing it at school. I just played it at home so I didn't care. I got super into it. I I'm pretty sure I beat it. Within a couple weeks, like caught new to everything. Or maybe I missed my chance to catch me too. I think I wasted my master ball is what happened. Now what was I talking about?GP 5:51 You had missed your chance to get to you? Oh, yes,Wulff 5:54 I I had missed my chance to catch me too because I blew my master ball and I think zapped or something. And so I was kind of disappointed and I ended up starting my file over and played through the game a second time over the next few weeks to finally catch me to it. That's how into it I was I do need the master ball to collect to catch him. I don't think you needed it but I think it was such a slim chance to catch him without it that it was just a pain in the butt.Palsh 6:23 Okay, that's fair.Wulff 6:25 I probably tried 2530 times and failed every time as I now I'm done. Yeah,Palsh 6:32 piece ofJake 6:33 you every time I looked it up the guides always said just save your master ball from YouTube. You want themWulff 6:37 But see, they'd sold me on the birds being the legendary Pokemon. I kind of thought I needed the master ball for that.Palsh 6:43 You know, I would have probably done the same. I wasWulff 6:45 tricked. Anyway, moving on from that. That was my experience with Gen one. How about you guys?Jake 6:52 So my Express Pokemon will see I was a pretty cool kid in high school. I know. I know. Hard to believe but all the cool kids used to play Magic the Gathering during recess and lunch. So all my friends play matches the game we played for years. And then I used to do the occasional tournament. He's one of those guys went to the local comic book store the coolest place on Earth, everybody knows. Anyway, after a while, I realized that a lot of adults stop playing magic and start playing this new game with colorful, weird, bizarre characters. And I didn't quite understand it. And one of the mentioned to me was Pokemon. And then pretty soon within a month, they stopped doing Magic the Gathering tournaments. They stopped doing Star Wars tournaments. They didn't do Star Trek anymore. They didn't do miniatures, all the all the grown men were playing Pokemon the card game, it sweeps my area. Like I've never seen anything. be such a fad before. for single lonely middle aged men in conference stores. I can't believe it.Palsh 7:50 I just like to say that pokeyman is how Canadians say it just like how we say merio not Mario.Jake 7:56 Exactly. It's the Pokemons so my experience was was here about the franchise from that. And then a friend of mine showed me an episode the cartoon and kind of went from there. And after the cartoon I've watched a few episodes cartoon, which we can talk about later. But from there I tried the video game and actually I quite hooked on the game, but I didn't play Pokemon until a couple years after the fad kind of hit. And I was probably considered too old for the franchise. I was not a kid but I played the first game. But for an RPG I've always been a fan of RPG and despite the you know, the aiming at a lower younger audience, the game is quite good. This is very solid game challenging and parts collectible hit all right, you know the edges for you. And it's great fun.Palsh 8:37 See, I I'm like from nowhere in the middle of nowhere. So we were always late when it came to getting games like that. So I remember reading it and magazines Of course. And the show Actually, I caught first before I actually played the game and I was like, Okay, I'm not a big anime fan, but this one caught my attention. I was probably in grade eight going to grade nine. Maybe I was in grade nine, something like that. So just just catch my attention. I was like, this is kind of cool. And, of course, when I watched the show made no sense because it was never aired in order. So I remember seeing probably the end of the season first and then like, then I see ash start off, you know, so I get really confusing. But I remember one guy had the game and he had both of them. You had one game boy, he had two of the games, and he had the transfer cable, but he didn't have another game book. So he gave me I think, read the play. And so that was my first experience. And I was like, Okay, let's try it. And I was like, okay, where do I get Pikachu? You don't have pika choo. I was like, Oh, you know, and so you know, I chose Squirtle because I was like the water Pokemon Pokemons over the fire ones. And I just remember, it was really fun, and I wasn't expecting it to be. So I don't know what the word is like. So straightforward. Like it felt almost like a beginners RPG I thought my head at first, but then it had, like, very simple strategies and stuff, but it was easy for me to catch on to and it was just kind of addicting. Right, right from the get go. And it's just, I remember playing it, I don't know how far I got because I didn't own it. And then, you know, my friends like deleted my game so he could play it and I was like, but I just remember seeing a meme about 10 years later, and I'll it shows the intro screen like when you first start a new game. And it says, no matter what you do, you'll never be able to experience this the same as your first time. It was like rip from like, you know, it's supposed to be like your first time with a significant other, but they basically didn't, and they dressed it up to make it look like a Pokemon game and I thought that was hilarious and ever since then, like the intro to the very first game. I was thought was really cool because of that. It's just like a very Personal feel to it. And I'm not even that huge, a Pokemon fan, so I just thought that was really nice. I thought they had, they couldn't have nailed it better.GP 11:10 I growing up had been into like tabletop type games like hero quest and like x men Mutant Chronicles and all those kind of ones. And I had itGP 11:22 here, right.GP 11:24 I was just slaying Poon, left and right. No, sorry, I shouldn't say that. I was 12. But I had a friend who had just a ton of Pokemon cards. And it's time I was living in Missouri. And he tried to show me the game and explain it to me. And I'd stayed the night over at his house one night, and I loved it. Not enough to go out and buy him. I didn't really see the need because my friend Adam. I loved you know, doing like the deck And you know it's back when you played with like the marbles or the bubbles or whatever they're called you know and not just all these things that I have is completely new and and awesome. And then he of course went out and he just had all the Pokemon stuff so he ended up getting the first two Gameboy games Forgive me for not remembering exactly which colors they were and I played one or both of them. I don't exactly remember which, but I loved them and then all of the generation to stuff started happening and I immediately lost interest. It was almost like Mega Man seven came out all over again. And I just to me, it was already this big well thought out thing. And now I've got more that I have to learn and I just, I honestly hardcore fell off after generation two and it was kind of the same with pokemon go if we end up talking about that later, Pogo came out and I loved it until like Gentoo came out. And then I'm like, Well, that's it for me. But I that's my memory of it. I loved it.Palsh 13:06 Yeah, I gotta say I'm the same way. When I played the first one, I was like, I'm the kind of guy that wanted to go for all all of them. And I knew I couldn't because you know, there's multiple playthroughs I knew I'd have to do it all myself because there was nobody to trade with. I was like, I just couldn't do it. And then I found out you can do it all over again with the next next game. I'm like, No, no, no, sorry.Jake 13:28 You mean I gotta walk bore man.Wulff 13:32 See, I was I was actually excited about golden silver. When I when I first learned about it, I was I was on board. But then a friend of mine got both of them. And he played through one of them. And then while he was playing through one, he was like, you can borrow the other one for a while, if you will. And I was like, all right, so I bought it for about a week or two. I tried playing it for a little while, and I got so annoyed with the fact that not only was it across different versions, but now The Pokemon only spawned at certain times of day. And under certain weather conditions, I guess the game had weather. I don't remember if that's if that was implemented in that one yet. But even just the morning, daytime and nighttime, completely threw me I was like, dude, I have other things to do throughout the day, I can't be expected to play Pokemon to try and catch a specific one at a certain time. I'm not going to fire the game up at three different times in the day to try and catch a certain thing or see if something different appears like it was just outside of the realm of reality for me, being a high schooler. It's like Okay, first off, morning and afternoon. They're just not going to happen.Jake 14:46 Yeah, I used to work night shifts. So try and catch Pokemon the daytime muscles be sleeping. No, thank you.Palsh 14:51 I think that's one of those things that would be really good in theory more than execution. Like if they had like an end game clock. MaybeWulff 15:01 Yeah, I thought it was a great idea. But it was not practicalGP 15:05 but right. And the reason they would never do that, like with an in game clock, and we've kind of talked about this before Simon's quest, and so I'll leave that there.Palsh 15:16 Now all of a sudden, we need Pokemon Gold and Silver redacted.GP 15:19 Oh, yes, that'll play.Jake 15:21 Well, okay, I got a question then. So if Pokemon were available during night and day time, Pokemon, generally is targeted children. Kids have to sleep at night. So does that kind of skew the game to either keeping kids out of bed or kind of doing a non to adult surveillance series? It's kinda interesting.Wulff 15:41 I think Yeah, I'm not sure I believe the timing on it was from something like 5am to 11am was considered morning. And then 11 to six or seven was day and then after that was night Okay, wasPalsh 16:00 this like based on your console's timezone? Like, how does it work onWulff 16:04 your cartridge actually had an internal battery that maintained the time of day? Okay?GP 16:10 Which one? Which game was the dinnertime Pokemon? Cuz that one would be okay.Palsh 16:17 I just send it to my friends on the West Coast Hey, hook me up.Wulff 16:21 So I I did get into the card game quite a bit as Jake touched on earlier, I had some friends who played magic but I didn't have any magic cards. And I had some other friends who liked magic, but they also didn't have magic cards. And we all kind of felt like well, it's a little late to jump on the magic train at this point. Everybody's got these badass decks, we can't really keep up. So let's try Pokemon. It's got one set out right now there's 150 cards won't be that hard to start getting into Fred right off the bat. So we did that. And I do believe at one point I actually collected the entire first set and then Pretty much the moment I did it, I was like all right, well now I don't want to have all of these anymore I'm going to start trading them to get the best deck I can make. So away my charas are away with my Venus or I started making other decks and I actually created a deck that was really overpowered that was just water type it was basically blast toys and gear it was to just own everything. We ended up spending so much time playing Pokemon and we had friends who wanted to join in to start playing with us that we altered the rule set at it at a point in time to where we figured out analogues for everything to where it could be played like magic.Palsh 17:42 Oh, nice.Wulff 17:46 That's That's how similar they were is that we figured out a way to wear anything like if the rule said one thing in Pokemon. You change it to match another rule in Magic the Gathering and you're set. See wipe off the zero On the HP and you've got it covered.Palsh 18:02 I like that because I didn't touch the card game so I could have just went straight into that and played.Wulff 18:07 Yeah, it was it was pretty wild that we did that. Some of our friends were like, Well why are you doing that? Or like, I don't know, we just we played so much Pokemon. Now we want to try it as magic.Jake 18:17 You could just by magic, you know?Wulff 18:21 Evil we already had the Pokemon cards.Jake 18:23 damn kidsPalsh 18:26 get off my lawn.Wulff 18:27 Plus that friend and I had art class together and we never did the actual assignments in that class. SoPalsh 18:35 we just blew all that time playing Pokemon or turning it into magic. Were you the kids that were making your own magic cards and Pokemon cards?Wulff 18:43 No, no, no, that was another friend of mine.Palsh 18:46 Oh man. I've never tried to no good with Photoshop now so I can't even do that to this day.Wulff 18:51 Oh, no, no, he drew them.Palsh 18:53 Oh, wow. Okay.Wulff 18:56 Anyway, um, so yeah, from the Gen one that's kind of where that stood for me. I don't think I touched so I don't think I touched the franchise again until it hit GPA. And even then it wasn't the first generation that hit GPA was when they remade red and blue as Leaf Green and fire red. I was like I haven't been into it for a while I haven't been able to but since this is a remake, maybe it'll be able to recapture that that I have been missing with the previous games. And I jumped into it. It helped me for a while I think about 3540 hours and then it lost me again. I never beat it.Palsh 19:35 That's good. That's the intro to like an Elder Scrolls game right there.Wulff 19:39 All right. 3540 hours is nothing to sneeze at for holding you But yeah, pretty sure. I mean, I played through 80 hours of the original blue the first time and then probably another 40 hours to get to the everything the second time soPalsh 19:53 respect, I played the Sapphire one on Gameboy Advance because my friend I'll never forget Get this this is what got me into it again because I didn't touch it again like after like after you said, you know just kind of dropped off like with GP you know, you got to do this all over again now. So I'm minding my own business working. I was working at a gas station I was probably 18 maybe 19 my friend came down just to visit me at work and like I'm working in the shack like it's literally smaller than a sheet of plywood is the shack that I was working in. And my friend came in so there's barely enough room for both of us stand up and he takes his pocket takes his thing and it was pocket and I thought it was like a makeup kit and I was like you bought makeup. He's like Nah, man. scam boy. I was like what so he had the Gameboy Advance SP and I never even heard of it. And what is it he goes game is the advanced is the Gameboy Advance SP. I was like, okay, and he opens up his I got Pokemon. I goes really? And he goes, Yeah, they made new one. So he had Ruby in there and he let me play it. He basically brought it down and immediately gave it to me and let me play And just like pick up and I was just collecting stuff for him and I was playing it for like 40 minutes at work, you know, I take a stop to run out and serve a customer and come back and I was playing the game. And I instantly was like, This is amazing. This is amazing. So, but I didn't have an sp right I just had the old school Gameboy that you need to be under a fluorescent light to play. And so he said, You know what, how about I get, I get the original one and you can get one and we'll play I was like, okay, cool, because you know, we could play together that way. And so we ended up ordering red for him because he had Ruby and I got blue. We're both playing it That was really mad because I had to play out in the basement in my house under fluorescent light while he was in my room, in like hanging down like in the couch that I had in my room. And so the first thing I did after I went on, I went to go to school, I went to Walmart bought an sp bought a carrying case, but Sapphire and started playing incessantly until Christmas. And then I came back and absolutely wrecked him because he stopped playing a month after I left. Wow. So I felt like a king and I still do to this day. So if you're listening thanks for we have an up buddy.Wulff 22:13 So Jake and JP Did either of you touch anything else from Gameboy or gameboy advance?GP 22:20 No, not so much I. Honestly, my exposure after that really has been from Twitch and from watching other streamers who have that deep rooted devotion to the franchise, which I do admire. But it's one of those franchises for me now, where I get a little bit of nostalgia for the old stuff. I enjoy watching the new stuff, but I don't know that I'll pick it up again.Wulff 22:49 Yeah, I'm kind of on the fence about some of that. I don't think I touched it again until Diamond and Pearl for the DS. And that one held me even less than Leaf Green and fire red. So I kind of learned Lesson and I haven't bought another one since now, when go released Of course, it was free to play. I had a smartphone. My wife had a smartphone so we were like sure let's give it a shot. So we downloaded it and played the crap out of it for about two weeks. Were like our phones were just never ending we plugged inPalsh 23:24 yeah I invested in those cigarette lighter chargers two weeks from now I'm a millionaire because of that.Wulff 23:34 Oh invested it No we bought some that's what I mean by invested in chargers we we just bought itJake 23:41 I can retire on us cables and car chargers. I'd be rich by now. But for me, I I also work I worship the Gameboy Advance SP I love that system. It's one of my all time favorite system especially very handheld. I think it's King and what kind of sold me When I first saw the commercial and advertisements for fire read, and just that wave install Joe, you know, I had read, I put the hell into that game. Sure. And then you know when the game starts up, and you see ash first leaving town and that hero rock soundtrack kicks in. It just nails me it just hooks me right in. I love the hell it if I read, but then after that after I and I played that, I mean dozens if not hundreds of hours. But after that generation, I kind of fell off and I didn't touch it for years. And it really wasn't until which McCall it was new Gameboy called Gameboy 3dsPalsh 24:36 the 3ds watch mycologist chocolate,Jake 24:39 right, it's not a Gameboy. Hopefully, if you pretended really hard with the power of imagination, it could be the 3ds I end up getting 3ds and that of course every system has Pokemon games and I played Sun and Moon. I think I played the moon version. And I enjoyed it. I love how they took the game into 3d, a little bit of the models. They kind of I mean, they always alter the formula from generation to generation. But for sun and moon that kind of moved away from the idea of going to various gyms to battling Gym Leaders instead of this kind of weird Pacific Island you know quest fighting looking for these let these special Pokemon to learn from them. It was kind of a weird take on it. I didn't quite get into it. So I actually don't ever finish moon I got a couple hours into it and kind of give up.GP 25:24 And at this point, it's not that it's saturated. But he really you guys talk about like, Pearl and Sapphire and, and I just, I don't know what the differences are anymore. I think I would be tempted if I ever got like a super Gameboy. I think I would be tempted to find the the original two and replan. But aside from that and Pokemon Go like you know werewolf was talking about earlier a bit night we put in so many miles with the kiddos just wandering around Wichita, and we even we would go and take over Jim's Like actually we had one in Topeka to bring things full circle there for a little while Topeka and so I really did love polka when it first came out and again it's just the the de generation to drop down like man do I hope they do what they did with wow classic World of Warcraft. Just bring back g one everything and I'll be happy I'll go back through it.Jake 26:24 Well the fire fire red is is the perfect way to experience the first generation Pokemon again it's the same game just remastered it just looks better sounds better, but it's the same gameplay same story if you're into that there was there a storyWulff 26:39 Yeah, I think it added an island that had Pokemon from other generations like selected Pokemon, butGP 26:47 well that I can do pretty much itPalsh 26:48 Yeah, I would check that out. Like I said, I love the game when it first came out on Gameboy but one thing now going back to it and watching somebody else play it or playing it myself is the audio and it's just because mainly because Because of the sound is you know, so limited on Gameboy but the low health warning. I remember one time it gave me a headache to the point where I got a migraine. So now I just cringe when I hear. So I if I ever play it again, I'm just going to go for five red or Leaf Green.Wulff 27:17 Yeah, it's that sound kidding. Great. A. That is one thing video games have from any era, when they have that you're almost gonna die beep it just starts to get on your nerves. I don't know why that's a thing. Like I get it. If the game is really in your face with a lot of action and stuff. And it's like beeps delay, you know, Zelda is not that fast paced game. And they just throw those beeps at you until you get enough hearts. Pokemon is the same way you're in a turn based combat you all that's on screen is your Pokemon and health bars. You know you're dying.Jake 28:00 The top 10 worst sounds and video games i'd agree that the Pokemon death sound is probably up there linked to the past is probably number one but Pokemon death is up there.Palsh 28:10 I'll put it that number one it seriously it like wearable says it greats and it's just I think it's just because it's ingrained in my head now at this point where I had that one one experience I'm just like, oh no.Jake 28:23 What about the Pokemon sound effects themselves? Do you find those charming or just annoying? I thoughtPalsh 28:29 actually it was pretty impressive to go from watching the show, you know where they all basically say their own name was how the hell they make noises. But then when you actually play the Gameboy game, the original ones and you know Jigglypuff makes the same music that Do you know, it? They they kept true to that and I think even with the limited audio hardware they had, it was really impressive.Wulff 28:58 At least with some Pokemon it didn't Seemed like the they were trying to make it almost sound like they they were at least inflecting their Japanese names because a lot of them didn't have the same name in the US like bigger two and right you pretty much it least from Gen one a lot of them had very different names aside from that.Palsh 29:17 Anything noteworthy thisWulff 29:21 I think Squirtle was zinna Gamay oh wow yeah rolls off the tongue.GP 29:25 Yeah, I'm not hearing the difference my brotherWulff 29:27 had a my brother had a toy that he picked up at some toy store in Florida at one point I guess it was an important because all he said was like he hit the button and he goes and Danny You know, he was saying his Japanese name he wasn't saying the western name.Jake 29:44 My favorite Pokemon is trash bag. He balls to the trash fire.Wulff 29:51 Some Pokemon are just horrifying, like drif Loon. I don't know if you guys know of drift or not. I don't remember what generation It came from but it's a Pokemon that looks like a balloon. And what it does is it hangs out near children to try and coax them into grabbing this like going and chasing it down because oh boy, cute, pretty balloon. I must have a balloon. I'm a small child, and it'll grab their arm and steal them away.Palsh 30:20 Wow, that's like,Wulff 30:21 it just takes the children away. It's like Billy's balloon from what is that guy's name? Don Hertzfeld with all the little balloons taking the kids up into the sky and dropping them.GP 30:37 horror movies are you guys? Well, I'm sitting here thinking about penny. Well,Wulff 30:40 dude, this is a cartoon. Okay. Little tangent here. If you guys remember the Pop Tarts commercials with the really weird people, like the weird looking handwriting people were they were like chasing the Pop Tarts duranium. Those were done Hertzfeld animations for pop tarts. So Billy's balloon was an independent piece he did years before that, where it didn't have to be market friendly. It just exists.Palsh 31:11 Just exists.GP 31:13 Well, I have to chime in real quick for two things. One because I just remembered, and two is a callback to a conversation a moment ago. I completely forgot about this until just now. Pokemon Snap. I love that game. Still love that game. That game is rad. You guys can find me. I don't know if that game is popular or if everybody hates it, but I fucking love it. That's a great game. Okay. Wait, what?Wulff 31:37 It's think snap is pretty well received.GP 31:40 Okay, cool. And the other one. The other comment I have to get in here was about the most hated beeping noise in video games. And I would like to point out the soundtrack to 1942 because that doesn't just be Pichu when you're about to die. That's just the soundtrack.Jake 32:00 You know the real speed runs 1942 you have to blur the soundtrack otherwise cheatingWulff 32:04 oh my god have real speed run is to beat it in 1941GP 32:09 that is some some Marty McFly stuff that I'm not prepared for. That's okay, so yeah, that was my two cents. Pokemon Snap THUMBS UP 1942 shit soundtrackJake 32:23 when you guys mentioned like badly named Pokemon like Drake foon the one that stands out for me and ash, he's a favorite of mine in Pokemon moon. It's me muku. And it's let me just read the descriptions from Sun and Moon just so you have an appreciation for why like this one. Its actual appearance is unknown. A scholar who saw what was under its reg was overwhelmed by terror and died from the shock.Palsh 32:46 WhatJake 32:46 after going through all the effort of disguising itself, its neck was broken. whatever is inside is probably unharmed, but it's still feeling sad. Wow. It's literally a Pikachu. It's a rag on a stick With a crudely drawn Pikachu face in ears it's hilarious Pokemon as you can tell if it's a description What is this thing called? Me Miku it's just it's just hilarious I it's sad and disturbed but I love the Pokemon origin stories are terrible like they're frightening for kids game.Wulff 33:15 One Which one? The mimic you? Okay, my firstJake 33:19 sudden moon by a Maven in an earlier game.Wulff 33:22 Yeah That thing is nightmare fuel.Jake 33:25 I love it though, because it can take a free hit and then it's disguised goes away, and it's basically invisible to ghost Pokemon, but it gets that free hit no matter what. So it's a fantastic Pokemon. It's my favorite.GP 33:35 It looks like one of those yarn doll versions of a Pokemon from like little big world or whatever it was. Oh, sackboy Yeah, yeah.Wulff 33:45 Little Big, Little Big Planet. Thank you. sackboy was the main character.GP 33:49 Okay, I thought maybe it was a translation difference between the lower 48 in Canada.Palsh 33:58 There's a metric equivalent in there somewhere. Yeah, sure, sure, sure.GP 34:02 Yeah, so I at some point, I do feel like it's not that they haven't kept trying when it comes to the naming and designs of some of the late Gen Pokemons. But they have kind of become Forgive me for this the equivalent of like, Stephen King novel plots. It's like are you really trying right now? Is This Really? Is this really part of what you're What were you just joking? Like that's how that's where it's at. for me. It's like how, how many Pokemon are there as of September 2019. Something like 800 I'm sorry, I had a stroke. How manyGP 34:40 800 807GP 34:45 I can barely keep up with 151 that's all I'm saying.Palsh 34:49 Yeah, sameJake 34:50 Okay, Pokemon wrap. Let's go 123 anybody?Wulff 34:56 Okay, man, Pokemon GOGP 34:59 ninja. Ninja rap. Yeah, I thinkWulff 35:05 I just couldn't remember the Pokemon rap. So that's where I went.Palsh 35:08 Slow po YouTube dedeker route aerodactyl. That'sGP 35:13 right. We got we're going to have to pay some money. No polish.Palsh 35:17 Yeah. Okay. Let's go make instead let's go make a toe mimic you instead of Topeka, choo. Oh,Wulff 35:27 speaking of Topeka to you. They they actually did it again. Last year and 28th anniversary.Jake 35:37 Oh God, they did it again. Same city.Wulff 35:39 Yes. Same city for the 20 year anniversary of it. They did it again for a day. Okay. thought that was interesting, butGP 35:48 that speaks a lot to the mentality of Kansas. Here's what I mean by that. Topeka has to be come to peek at you. There's a place here that is called Hutchinson better now. North of where I live, and that is widely considered as Smallville what Smallville from the Superman mythos would be if it were real. And so where I'm going with this is the idea the ideology for Kansas tourism is, Hey, come here and we'll pretend it's somewhere else.Jake 36:22 It's like trying to bring back the rim sunglasses. They're terrible idea and tacky in the 80s to bring him back now in 2019 is just pathetic.Jake 36:32 Is that a thing? I've seen some people were in I'm in my city. Every every 10 years yeah,Palsh 36:37 that they Yes. You see a trend. Come back.GP 36:40 You say that. But the matrix is coming back. So that's cool. So it's hit or miss.Palsh 36:45 But yeah, never went away.GP 36:47 Yeah, that's if you come into Kansas ever. The state line sign says, Welcome to Kansas. We're sorry.Palsh 36:57 It's the Canada of the United States.Wulff 37:01 So, moving back on to the Pokemon I did actually get to try let's go recently Oh yeah, my kid got it a while back my brother actually got him the, the the poker ball plus. So we started playing that a while back and he he loves it he has a blast with it because he gets to pretend he's a Pokemon trainer throwing the ball and catching the Pokemon. It's a blast, right? And when we fired it up, it said that there was a gift inside the poker ball. And when it told us that the poker ball made one of the sounds that you know one of the Gameboy Pokemon sounds from way back when and I didn't know what Pokemon It was. It was like I spent ages I don't know, I don't even think I knew which Pokemon made what sound back was back then. You know. So we played far enough to see about opening up this gift and seeing what was in it and then we opened it and it was a freaking newJake 38:00 Wow that's pretty awesomeWulff 38:01 he's not even at the first gym yet and now he's got a mew is randomized or does everyone I don't know if everybody gets a mew or if it's kind of random for rare Pokemon in general and we just got really lucky or oneJake 38:17 of us part of it didn't look into the only way you can get them you in that game is if you pay the 6070 bucks for the Pokeball accessory oh wow like in the original game that I think they gave me away there's usually had some kind of like public event and they let you get access Yeah,Wulff 38:31 they did mall events all over the place. And you had to go wait in line and have your Gameboy and your cartridge just fired up trade get your meJake 38:44 wants to do that again recently with sun and moon or pokemon go one of the two there's a new one that is literally a bolt like a nut like a metal and steel not that's a Pokemon now I think his name is meltin and I want to say done locket. You had to go What was events?Wulff 39:01 But I do have to say I kind of enjoy how let's go plays it feels less tedious since encounters with wild Pokemon or just throw balls at it and catch it move on. There's no beating it up to try and catch it there's just smashing the A button over and over to get it over with because every interaction if it's not a trainer battle, it's over in like 15 seconds. If that is you try using enjoy. So that was actually kind of nice. Um, no, we haven't played it with the joy con yet. He's just been playing with the poker ball playJake 39:33 with the joy con because you can play with two players kind of in that game. I play with my kids and we don't have the pokemon ball. But joy cons are hot garbage with it. And you spend 10 balls trying to hit a goddamn Pokemon. But it's all trade.Wulff 39:46 Oh, he catches it every frickin time with the poker ball. Plus, it's ridiculous. The little tiny circle. He's getting excellent, amazing. Yeah, I don't know what it is. But he's also playing like five feet from a 42 inch TV. That At his eye level soJake 40:02 well clearly he's destiny a Pokemon master he just said him outside world with a baseball hat and a backpack and said Good luck.Wulff 40:09 Yeah, well he's not 10 yet he's only five he's halfway there.Palsh 40:13 Hell I'm 35 and I'm not ready for thatWulff 40:18 Alright, so let's let's let's touch on the anime and the movies a little more. I'm going to openly admit and open myself up for mockery here. I saw a Pokemon the first movie Pokemon 2000 and Pokemon I don't know what it was called Pokemon three. I don't know if that's what it was called. Something else the one with MJ. I saw all three of those in theaters. I never saw a single one of them to be honest.GP 40:43 I'm sorry. What was it? Hint hint? A No You saidWulff 40:48 I it was some big orange dog thing that looked kind of like a growl either andGP 40:54 it was bigger googling hint a right now and it's it's not popping up anything like what you're talking about?Wulff 41:01 That's that was the last one I saw that I was kind of like and now my phone crashed but but when I when I saw the first one in theaters, I legit teared up. I don't know if you guys have seen that movie, but toward the end,GP 41:17 I think the only one I saw was Pokemon 2000 and that was at a drive in theater. That was also showing Casper Do you guys remember that with Christina Ricci? That was like the double feature, and I think that's the only time I saw Pokemon 2000Wulff 41:37 pretty sure that movie came well before Pokemon 2000GP 41:40 Oh yeah, I'm not saying it was topical. I'm just saying that's what was playing.Jake 41:44 It was a classic. For me it was the less the movies and more the cartoon the first season and Pokemon the anime that's like a guilty pleasure for me. I watched it with my kids not too long ago and every time Pikachu I know it's me fine. I know his will never die ever. But anytime he's in mortal peril and he's just beaten up, and he gives that little cry and clutches them tightly like a baby. I should have single tier every time. I don't care who hates mePalsh 42:14 hates you. Everybody relates to you now.GP 42:17 Yeah. Who would show hate? Like how dare you have feelings toward this cartoon? Yeah,Wulff 42:22 it's it's funny how much more prevalent Pokemon is these days than it was when you know generation one released but with Gen one they had what two or three musical albums that released with the anime and it was ridiculous and I don't know what they they do that stuff anymore. I'm pretty sure it's just the games and plushies mostly at this point.Jake 42:44 In terms of merchandise. Oh, there's all kinds of merchandise. Yeah.Wulff 42:48 My my brother had one of the CDs that to be a master album. Attract microphone master. Turn offPalsh 42:55 the tape right the ghetto blasterUnknown Speaker 42:58 Exactly.Palsh 43:00 That's That's some 41Jake 43:01 but I went over overseas to Tokyo there. We actually went to other Pokemon centers, but we didn't even we didn't need to go to that store. There's Pokemon everywhere in Tokyo I guess that goes up saying but from cookies to juice, the vending machine to underwear, literally everything. And I still see a lot of that over here too. I still I still see the occasional Pokemon figurines and toys and stuff.Wulff 43:21 We went to the mall a couple weeks ago here and I saw a little like one of those stands and it wasn't really a kiosk but it was like a standalone vending machine kind of thing. But it was called a Pokemon Center and it had a vending machine on one side with a bunch of Pokemon merge in it, and then it had a poker decks on another side where you could like look at the different Pokemon and it was kind of wild.Jake 43:45 Well, I was just actually just at the CME in Toronto. It's basically a big fair exhibition in the UK carnival games, that kind of thing. And some of the prizes are obviously knockoff Pokemon merchandise, right? And I saw a family like with three kids and strollers One of the kids was clutching a I mean a gigantic Pikachu. Like it was probably two three feet long. It's huge. And this pair of guys and I mean, buff, gym looking dudes, six and a half, seven feet tall, just the toughest guys walking down the street or the the avenue and they see the kid with the giant Pikachu and they walk up, hands on hips like yo yo, would you get that Pikachu and the basketball game? Oh, thanks so much and then they just ran ran for the carnival game but the games to get their own tickets you know just to show you that the generation who love Gen one are all like you know 30 plus now for the most part and have that just love a peek into stuff.Wulff 44:45 Oh yeah, Pikachu. I mean, they knew that was a gold mine from the get go. It they were in Topeka you there was friggin Pokemon Yellow. I think to this day, they still brand pretty much Every console with a Pikachu to some extent, even if it's a limited release, ridiculous. But yeah, I gotta say I'm I do like the older cartoons. There's probably only one line I still remember from the original movie. Or maybe it was the second movie I don't know is from one of the movies, there was a really bad line that I choose, you know? No, no, no nothing. And I'm pretty sure it was the second movie because it was a bunch of people on a yacht. I don't know, it might have been the first movie I really don't remember, but there's a bunch of people on a boat and you overhear them talking like there's people at different tables eating and talking and it passes by one table and you hear a guy go, and I said, No, I just had crab bees and everybody burst into laughter. I was like, Oh my god, that is not a kid friendly joke.Jake 45:56 Even crabs is a Pokemon.Jake 45:59 Gotta catch mallGP 46:05 Okay, here's a question. Because I legit don't know, in the Pokemon universe, are there what we would consider normal animals? Like is there like a like a dog just a regular canine? Or is every single animal in that universe of Pokemon?Wulff 46:27 I feel like generation one the way we were introduced to Pokemon made it sound like there were other animals that were not Pokemon. But the further we get into the franchise, if you like, the less, that seems to be the case. Right? Which is really bizarre because I'm pretty sure oak said that all the Pokemon shared a lot of common genes. Okay, and so that means they're like, all these Pokemon are just weird mutants and we're just living on their planet.GP 47:00 Just how uneventful and underwhelming and potentially scary would it be to be like a dog? Or like a regular domestic house cat in the Pokemon world be horrifying, and you'd be let down to everybodyJake 47:17 with your account Oh, you're sure the cow will eat you will grind you into burgers but you know mu tanks or whatever the cow pokeyman is? Yeah milk bankWulff 47:27 andJake 47:28 Toro him. He's a Pokemon special. Eat that goddamn cow, rightGP 47:38 Okay, thereWulff 47:40 we go question can you carve up a milk and eat some of it leave it alive take it to a Pokemon Center and heal itJake 47:49 the question doesn't want you to think aboutUnknown Speaker 47:52 right yeah.Wulff 47:53 With the with the hard questions will be getting that cease and desist very soon.GP 47:59 There's always He's that kid at school who runs up and you're like, oh, man, check it out. You know, I got this cool new thing that everybody has. And it's the offering thing that you know, you had to get from the dollar store that that was me growing up so I can make this year. But that kid shows up with a pokey ball. He's like, Can I just check it out? I got like a Meowth. And he opens it and it's just like a cat. Like, damn it, Randall. You know, go back to the corner. That's horrible. That's how bullying starts. And it's not funny.Jake 48:34 Robots aren't real transformers. Back to eat and paste. I'm just picturing now somebody's taking a cat into Pokemon battle. just pulling in a cat carrier like the opponent's like charges are going from smokey ball. And then some guy with a cat carrier. Smell with go nuts.Palsh 48:53 And it's like I said house can literally a house. Yeah. And it's like way more feral than the He hasGP 49:00 a Pokemon delivers takes down the gear dose, and it gets disqualified but like kindaPalsh 49:07 like Karate Kid, you know wins with that illegal kick to the head.GP 49:12 Yeah, but at that point everybody had already stormed the man. I'm sorry. Effective.Palsh 49:20 Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, the press beat cancel. This is how we normally talk. Yeah, I apologize. SoWulff 49:28 I think it's almost time to hit be so let's go ahead and go around and see what everybody's favorite point in the series was. I think for me, it's pretty safe to say it was just Pokemon blue period. I that's I played the crap out of it. I played through it two or three times. I traded for every single Pokemon And that my friends and I figured out how to do the missing no nonsense and all that. It's blue holds a special place in my heart that no other entry in the game has in the French has been able to replicate.GP 50:02 Cool, cool. I think for me, my favorite moments, or era of Pokemon is the day after I was introduced to Pokemon, because I got the idea of what it was. And my mind was like being expanded to see what the rules were for the card game and then gradually introduced to all this other stuff. And it was just this amazingly fun idea. And so to be at the front door, of all the stuff that you know, you're about to learn, it's going to be awesome. That was that was magic. That was absolute magic. So for me, that was my favorite part.Jake 50:43 You know, for me, it's Pokemon. It's when's the spin off? That's the stuff I enjoy the most and actually quite like what they're doing today or nowadays with it. Detective Pikachu is probably good. Good spin on I believe there was a game on the 3ds for that. And I just love how to peek at you with a little character, and he's in he's in this combat situation or you think he's going to be with his friend there who has tried to peek at you. And he's like Pikachu use Thunderbolt. And detective Pikachu just looks at this guy and says use Thunderbolt. And to me, that's just like, the funniest thing in the planet, right? Like, humans order around animals do battle, and the animal turning to you and say, What the hell are you talking about? I love to pick at you that the recent movie, the CGI movie, I thought was actually really great. And I hope to do more crazy stuff like that. Like the mainline games are fun at all. But when they take Pokemon and put it into different situations that spin off, I love that kind of stuff.Palsh 51:39 Yeah, that's, that's really cool. I like that. And I haven't even seen the movie yet. So now I really want to see it. But for me, it's definitely I want to say Sapphire because I was playing it so much like it was probably from like August to December. I didn't really play anything else. I'd be watching the movie gravity. We're watching a movie and I playing the game. But I think it's just that introduction to Sapphire, by playing Ruby is probably my fondest memory of the entire franchise just because my friend came down out of the blue. And it's just one of those things like we were both at a high school and I just remember that it was just is a memory that I'll always cherish and I don't know. It was just cool. It's It was like a new era of video games for me, soWulff 52:27 I think that's fair. Alright, so I think we can go ahead and wrap upPalsh 52:34 this list of her favorite Pokemon real quick,GP 52:37 Ryan Reynolds.Wulff 52:38 Oh, I see. I can't talk today. debido Danny DeVitoWulff 52:47 could youGP 52:50 honestly, if I could have like a real life Pokemon. I'd want it to be a growl if they're so cool looking. Yeah, they are pretty cool. And I feel safe and cuddly? You can't cuddle a gear a doseWulff 53:04 I'm not even a cat person but I liked Persian don't know whyGP 53:10 I think that silence is a little bitWulff 53:13 it was a cat that could literally create money out of nothing soPalsh 53:18 yeahGP 53:18 yeah that's a great option only keptWulff 53:19 the least if you evolved it from mouth and Persian was way cooler than me out soPalsh 53:24 that's true that's good solid logic I'll agree with you for there Matt that it's not gonna be my favorite but it's respectable. Jake What do you just like the one you actuallyJake 53:35 I like them we're actually gonna go with Ryan rattle on that goes right right I love rock Canadian Ryan Reynolds is a fantastic Pokemon But no, I like the one I don't even know his name. But it's basically a steel ring with keys attached and that's a Pokemon. I love that one. I'm not I'm not even kidding. I don't notice they marryWulff 53:53 you coming up with the jinglingJake 53:54 key Pokemon is the best of all.GP 53:58 The okay real quick, just to Bring this whole thing home. Sick Jay, did you play with Gobots I think somebody who's played a trick on youJake 54:08 know Gobots I had one Optimus Prime and I had my toy that was itPalsh 54:13 turns out he's kept attacking YuGiOh or, or digium on all this time.Wulff 54:19 This is Pocket Monsters not digital monsters.GP 54:24 Also, I think if if you have a life that you know, you want to escape your life than the me the the Mewtwo sorry, is the Pokemon that you want. Because then if he's cool, he can just get in your mind and you can live whatever life you want. Yes,Wulff 54:41 that's true,GP 54:43 too, and introduce people like, Hey, this is my Pokemon. It's kind of a dick. Or you'd be like, Hey, I don't feel like doing anything today. Can you get in my head and making things that I'm on Jupiter.Wulff 54:53 So you're wanting you to be your own personal Total Recall.GP 54:58 That is exactly what I'm saying. That was perfectly stated where I was going to say he wanted a pet Dr. ManhattanPalsh 55:03 but okay.Jake 55:06 A pet What? Whoa, wait a minute 12 his penis and a Pokemon sounds good to me.Wulff 55:11 I got that reference.GP 55:17 Okay, first off, I have to point out stick Jake uses metric. I don't think he knows what bobbins means. Man I think Sorry guys, I'm sorry. I've loved this this episode, but I'm sorry that I've been the main reason we've gotten off track. I'm so sorry.Palsh 55:44 I think it's fine. minds fit my favorite Squirtle By the way, dicks.Wulff 55:52 Oh, yeah, there's a good question. What was your starters from Jen one Squirtle realPalsh 55:57 quick. I always go with the Pokemon if given a chance,Wulff 56:02 mine was CharmanderPalsh 56:03 sucka.Wulff 56:05 Being original I named him Bernie.Jake 56:08 I use I always wanted the fire type or the ones that look like a cat. I was a cat person and like half this team, and I usually named them stupid things like dog food, frozen peas, creamed corn, stuff like that. Don't ask me why, dude. My dude, no.GP 56:26 Actually, I was watertight to I went with with Squirtle. And I kind of want to change my answer to my favorite being cubone because of how heartbreaking The story is that yes,Palsh 56:36 I love the cubone Yeah, let's not bring it up here because I don't want to cry. But, uh, anybody who's listening, if you don't know the story of a cubone, you should check it out. Because it's Yeah, it is actually worth looking up. SoGP 56:49 just yeah, here's all you have to Google is whose skull is cubone wearing And if that's not the most emotion you've ever heard Yeah, I love it. Also, I mean but yeah, the key chain one is nice to J it's fineJake 57:05 I have look his name upWulff 57:09 anyway this has been presby to cancel I was your host this week thank you for having me for a second week now.Palsh 57:14 Who are you aWulff 57:17 werewolf? You can find me on Twitch and TwitterPalsh 57:21 w ar EWL ffWulff 57:25 I was going to leave it to the imagination this time but thank youPalsh 57:28 all right Polish take it away Hi my name is sick Jake you can find me on Twitter as well as a weight not I'm post one on you find me on Twitch at pulse 109 pls HWulff 57:41 and GPGP 57:43 know go for it. Go for it Jay.Jake 57:47 Thanks GP. For the record. His name is Cliff key cholesky the key chain Pokemon it resembles a key ring with four keys aspherical head and a small pink oval on his forehead anyway That's that's his life story. That's pretty much it. It's also dark and jiggli My name is sick Jake you can find me sick Jake on Twitter or on Twitch. I'm a part time by annual never streamerWulff 58:10 and then our resident derailer Gp.GP 58:14 Yeah, this is GP. Typical spelling. Sorry. And you can find me on the retro therapy, which is of course on Twitch. We're also on Twitter and Instagram, as the retro therapy.Wulff 58:29 Alright, thank you everybody for tuning in. band EQ pqPalsh 58:36 certain music here. Wait, that's not how the song goes.Jake 58:45 Special thanks for music go to Arthur, the ancient found on Soundcloud or the last ancient on YouTube. The more episodes please visit our website presby to cancel.com as well Feel free to like or subscribe at Apple iTunes, Google podcasts or anything. Where else you'd like to listen to your favorite shows? As always, thank you. This has beenWulff 59:06 a do againSpecial thanks to Arthur The Last Ancient on soundcloud for our podcast theme. For updates and more episodes please visit our website www.pressbtocancel.com, or find us on Twitter @pressbtocancel and Instagram @pressbtocancel.

Danny Cunningham and Dane Moore dive more into the Timberwolves 2019-20 schedule, and where they fit into the Western Conference. *How will Karl-Anthony Towns be matched up against some of the bigger teams around the league? *Is Robert Covington's return to the lineup being overlooked? *Danny: "You need to do the very most you can do to get Wiggins' value up for next summer" *Dane on Wiggins: "Stop asking him to get you $28 million a year, and say 'go get me $14'"

On this episode, we dive into the conversation around Sekiro and accessibility as we chat with Clint Stewart about his experience playing Soulsbourne games with an arm and a foot. iTunes Page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/noclip/id1385062988 RSS Feed: http://noclippodcast.libsyn.com/rssGoogle Play: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/If7gz7uvqebg2qqlicxhay22qny Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5XYk92ubrXpvPVk1lin4VB?si=JRAcPnlvQ0-YJWU9XiW9pg Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/noclippodcast Watch our docs: https://youtube.com/noclippodcast Sub our new podcast channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSHBlPhuCd1sDOdNANCwjrA Learn About Noclip: https://www.noclip.videoBecome a Patron and get early access to new episodes: https://www.patreon.com/noclip Follow @noclipvideo on Twitter Hosted by @dannyodwyerFunded by 4,501 Patrons.  ------------------------------------------------------------- - [Danny] Hello and welcome to Noclip, the podcast about the people who play and make video games. I'm your host Danny O'Dwyer. We've had a lot of people on who have made video games, so it's about time we've had someone on who plays them. And this isn't just anyone, this is a friend of Noclip and somebody I've wanted to collaborate with for quite awhile. So I'll let him introduce himself. Clint, how are you doing this fine Friday afternoon? - [Clint] I'm doing great, thank you. Hey Danny. - [Danny] Tell us a little bit about yourself. I'll kind of get into what we're gonna talk about in a hot second, but tell us your name, where you are right now, and what we're here to talk about. - [Clint] Alright, my name is Clint Stewart. I go by DisabledCable on Twitter and JehovahNova on Steam, bunch of other names. I think TreeLegDog may be one of them. I've been a gamer most of my life and almost seven years ago, I was injured very badly and I lost my left arm and I broke my back as well, so trying to learn how to play games one-handed has been quite the challenge. - [Danny] And you're somebody who can kind of speak to the accessibility question from somebody who has experienced playing games with no disability and experiencing games with a pretty heavy one as well. We've a lot to get into today. Before we sort of talk about, I guess, your experience more generally, I just want to let everyone know how this came to happen for this episode of the podcast. I've been wanting to do something with Clint for a long time because his insight into this is super refreshing and he's a very eloquent speaker but we've sort of struggled to get that project up and running. We're hoping to do it the future. But what happened in the past month I guess is this sort of general conversation that's been going on around Sekiro easy mode and accessibility, which I did a video on on Noclip. You can watch an episode of Bonus Level that's kind of all about that. And that was kind of my opinion on it but I thought, the way Noclip works is that we often ask the experts about these things. People who aren't, we're not just giving my option on the state of development or design or anything but we go out and we find people who are experts in these issues. Clint is an expert in this. Not only because of the way in which he plays games but also because he's a fan of the particular series in question. So pretty early on I kind of tapped him up and was like, hey, when you've played the game a bit can you come on the podcast and sort of chew the shit with us about this? So first of all, thank you so much for coming on and making the time. - [Clint] Yeah, thank you. I've gotta say to start off with too, you did buy it for me. So I gotta be, first off, I've never been called an expert and you did buy the game for me, so that's all. All that's out of the way and start now. - [Danny] Yeah, we don't let interns, we don't do unpaid internships or don't pay people who are contributing to our work so yeah, yeah, no. Absolutely, it's the least we could do. So before we touch on Sekiro, can you tell us a little bit about how you generally play games? Like if you're going out to buy a game today Clint, what are the considerations that you have to sort of take into account? And how do you actually play them? - [Clint] Definitely, and this is a great first question because it really made me think about the Souls games and games like those and just everything that I have to take into consideration when I buy a game. The last game that I bought that was similar to Sekiro would be Neo. And I had to refund Neo when I first bought it because they released that PC port with no mouse keyboard controls whatsoever. I'm used to some games mouse and keyboard not working in the menus or maybe I can't rebind the keys in-game but I can do it in the Razer Synapse software, but with Neo, it was just like no. You better buy a controller or it's just not gonna work. And just one of the only times I've ever had to refund a game. - [Danny] Is that rare? Does that happen often? - [Clint] That is extremely rare these days, thankfully. And enough people, I got on Twitter which my tweet might have got two likes. I don't think I got noticed by anybody but more than just me who's coming out saying, hey, this needs mouse and keyboard support. You can't release a PC game with no mouse and keyboard support. And I was hoping that maybe the Dark Souls, before the remaster that just came out, the community got together and made mouse keyboard controls work in that game as well. Because the first Dark Souls port was horrible. It's one of the worst ports I think I've ever played. And the community got, what was it called? The DS Fix, I guess the one guy made. But then they added on to it and added mouse and keyboard support, but they still didn't get the prompts right. So you would get a prompt on the screen to do something but it would say, it would be the controller prompt. You still wouldn't get the mouse and keyboard, which is extremely frustrating when you're trying to remember. You've just changed everything up and you think you remember what you did but then you know, that's extremely frustrating. Generally when I buy a game I look, does it have rebindable keys? And if not, that's not always a deal breaker, but does it just have mouse and keyboard support in general? Because I have two different one-handed controllers and I don't want to knock the guys that worked on those, that created them. One of them was the first guy who I'd ever seen even do this. He has a channel on YouTube. And each controller has it's own issues, but I mean for what they are, there really is no other choice if you have to play console games. I mean because they still haven't gotten around to adding mouse and keyboard support fully on the Xbox. I think PlayStation has some in a couple games. But even like Xbox, they just added it and they have a partnership with Razer, but yet if you were to turn on the Xbox and try to just use the mouse and keyboard, or in my case the mouse and footboard, which is the Stinkyboard, you can't do anything. You have to use a controller to navigate the UI. And then to find the games that will work with mouse and keyboard. It's a lot to think about when you're looking at games. - [Danny] Yeah, it's a whole lot of questions that most of us don't really have to consider at all. So when you're interacting with these games, obviously the bindable keys, you said, is a really important part of it. But what are you using physically? Because presumably you're not using both a mouse and keyboard. You're remapping this to a third-party peripheral, or sort of a-- - [Clint] So yeah, just let me explain that a little better. I use a 19 button mouse that's called a Razer Naga. Razer is the company that makes it and the Naga is the brand. And basically it's made for MMO. It's called an MMO mouse. Which I have used it in an MMO, and we can talk about that later. I think that's, one of the games that I used to try to teach myself how to play again was World of Warcraft. And then I also use a Stinkyboard, which is a four button footboard. Now both of these hardware have software tied to them as well that will allow you to completely rebind. You can make any of the buttons whichever button you want. And then the Razer software is even more powerful because you can make macros as well. And there are certain games like Devil May Cry 5, that just came out recently. That's a beautiful game. It's brilliant, it's a lot of fun to play. But for me as a one-armed gamer that was infuriating because you had to press three different buttons to be able to do some moves. And that was including having to hold down a button for lock on. So I ended up having to go in the Razer Synapse software and make a simple on/off macro for lock on, just so I could do some of the moves in that game. Out of all the things that they forget to add, like of course I would love to see ultrawide support or unlock frame rate. The game does have unlock frame rate, but just simple lock on. Being able to just toggle that on or off. Just like maybe you want to have sprint always on, have a toggle on sprint or a toggle on crouch. For lock on should be something that just needs to be industry standard. Do you want it toggable or not? - Wow. - Just help people out. That's definitely something I've come across in a few different games. - [Danny] Yeah, I hadn't thought about that consideration at all. When you're playing then, so you have a prosthesis, right? Like you have some sort-- - [Clint] I actually do have government subsidies, or I should say subsidized, because I had to go through a legal battle just to get Medicare and Medicaid. I've talked to you about my story before, you know what happened. They denied me disability. I actually got denied twice and had to get a disability lawyer to get disability. And then when I finally got in court the judge was like, oh my lord, son, we're gonna take care of this. - Oh my goodness. - And I was in and out of there in two minutes. - [Danny] On what grounds were they? - [Clint] You know what, the first letter I got back they were like, oh he can still bend over and lift things. I'm like, with what good back and what two arms? Did you even read what your doctor said? Ah, bureaucrats, man. - [Danny] That's incredible. So the judge like took one glance at you and kind of-- - [Clint] Yeah, soon as I got in front of the judge he was just like, I am so sorry sir, and we're gonna get this taken care of. Within the next three months I had an arm. You know, I think the government paid $90,000 for it, I wanna say. And it's very nice but it's very limited. I mean, it's the first version, right? Like if I had, I've got a few complaints about it, but one of the most being is how heavy it is. Because it's carbon fiber and it's got a battery. And also due to the kind of amputation that I had. I don't have a lot of arm left so it's pretty much just resting on my shoulder which is supported by my back which again, my L3 and L5 were severely cracked and my L4 looks like a spiderweb. They didn't think I'd be able to walk again. So that's a miracle in itself that I'm still walking and talking. So I count my lucky stars and I don't complain about too many things. But definitely this whole conversation around accessibility versus difficulty's really got me thinking. Your video is great that it looked at the nuance of it. You didn't just do one hot take or try to ride the fence. I saw your other tweet where you compared it to how you play racing games, and that really hit home for me because I would love to play VR games but yet you don't see me demanding them make all VR games playable for me with one hand because they're still creating that space. Like if I were to buy VR now I might be able to play Dirt Rally or maybe Elite Dangerous. They'd probably be the only two games I could really play in VR. - [Danny] Yeah so let's jump into that then there, since you brought it up. How did you feel then about that sort of, I mean it was a very broad conversation that sort of was almost like numerous different conversations that were bumping into each other. But just speaking from the heart, what was your initial reaction to the conversation about that and what was your opinion on it? - [Clint] Honestly, I really feel like it's a branding problem. I feel like, let's say they added an easy mode tomorrow in Sekiro or the Dark Souls games, you're not gonna care, right? Is it gonna lesser the experience that you had? No. Matter of fact, I could enable easy mode in my game right now because I ended up getting that mod. They patched it and then my workaround for the ultrawide fix wasn't working anymore so I found a mod that unlocks the FPS, does the ultrawide, lets you choose some camera adjustments. Where the game works now is if you target someone the camera automatically snaps to you. Or if you move at all, the camera automatically will snap back on you and this mod will disable that as well as give you FOV adjustment. I know it's something TeeVee was always preaching about. That really makes a huge difference when you're sitting really close to the monitor. Having a bigger FOV, it's huge. But that same mod will also let you turn down the speed, which isn't that how the guy from PC Gamer, I forget his name, but he was like, I cheated and I feel fine. - [Danny] Right - [Clint] I feel like it's just a branding problem, right? If we called it cheats I think everybody would be happy, because the people that don't care would just be like, yeah, I cheated, who gives a shit? And then everybody else would be like, you cheated yourself and the game. - [Danny] That's a good point. - [Clint] 'Cause it's all the same thing. We're just talking, like you said, we're talking around each other. We're all talking about different things but they do kind of correlate. I really do feel like it's a branding problem. Let's just call it cheats and be done with it. 'Cause even though I could cheat in this game I'm not gonna do it. I love this game. Honestly, the boss I had the most trouble with so far was a miniboss. It's not in the main bosses I've encountered. And I should say, I haven't beaten the game yet. You got it for me a couple weeks ago. I've been taking my time. I've been enjoying it. I've been exploring everywhere. - [Danny] Good, me too. You're way ahead of me, buddy. - [Clint] Oh, really? That makes me feel good. - Oh yeah. - [Clint]I'm like, he's probably gonna beat the game and be like, you're where? But yeah, the biggest difference for me I feel like with accessibility versus difficulty, like I recently beat The Witcher 3 as well. And that's a game that I had to start over because I ended up having to wipe my hard drive so I lost like 80 hours. And then I ended up like, I'm just gonna do everything. And so I spent another 150 hours just trying to clear my map. And so I finally beat that recently and that was a game I actually turned down the difficulty on a few of those last fights, just because they were annoying. The controls are transcendent in Sekiro, even more so than Dark Souls. - [Danny] Well, it's funny like you're talking about how you're adding all these things and you're saying you're not cheatingsome people could argue that you're playing the game at a way higher level. 'Cause you're playing with your foot and one hand, whereas most of us have access to two analog sticks. - [Clint] This game makes me feel like a ninja, it really does. I'm playing a one arm ninja, so the symbolism is not lost on me. I completely adore this. And the fact that you said maybe I'm playing on a higher level, I have felt like that has hindered me in some games. Take Dark Souls for example. Even on the remaster the mouse and keyboard controls are not perfect, they're not. I have to make a macro in that game for the jump attack and then like a kick I think, where you have to press two buttons at once. One of them's like forward and attack and the other's like, I forget exactly what it is. But I had to make that simple macro just because those buttons wouldn't always register because I've got W on my footboard. So I guess I should just tell you a little about this. I've got W and S on my footboard. So where those are very close together where I can press them very quickly if I need to. And the first two buttons I have on the Naga, there's a row of 12 buttons on the side, and the very first two where my thumb constantly rests are left and right, so A and D. I did it that way so I could press them in combination together because the Stinkyboard, when I first got it, it's first driver revision it wouldn't allow you to press more than one key at a time. So I couldn't, for instance, press two buttons on there at the same time. Where if I tie it to the mouse I'm able to do a Shift move to the left and move forward at same, it's kind of like a diagonal, you know. You're pressing three buttons at once to do what two buttons should do. And it's little workarounds like that that I've had to get comfortable with. I used to make a profile for each game that I would play. I mean, I've got a gigantic Sting library now. I started to realize, I need presets, right? Like this is the preset for action RPGs. This is the preset for shooters. This is my strategy preset. So I've just kinda had to learn just by doing, like okay, this is what I should do. - [Danny] Right, are some genres that are totally off the cards? You're saying up, down, left, right. Like Mortal Combat just came out. Are you able to play that at all? - [Clint] I have not played a fighting game since my accident and I would say, now I grew up playing Street Fighter. I had a Street Fighter callous. People that played that game will no what I'm talking about. If you played enough of it you would develop a callous. Depending on what kind of characters you like playing too and I never played the guy, the M. Bison kind of characters. I always liked the Ryu and the Ken's and the 360 characters like Zang and stuff. So my thumbs got destroyed, especially depending on what controller you used. And now with the setup I have I could play Street Fighter if I programmed everything or if I played with simplified control. 'Cause I think they introduced that in one of the games. It was like, you could do advanced moves by just pressing a button and I tried it and was just like, this is so boring. Now I haven't tried it since I've been hurt. This was several years ago. And I just know that the game wouldn't be fun to me, to play it that way. Like I'm not looking for something so easy that it's just mind numbing. That's not, I do play games to be challenged and to have a good time. Just pressing one button over and over's not really, that's not a good time. - [Danny] I think that's why I was so impressed by the fact that you were playing these games because for me, as somebody who has both my hands, I was incredibly intimidated to play Bloodborne last year. I'd never really played a Soulsborne game until last year and then the reason I played it was we'd just had a kid and I was spending hours and hours lying on the sofa with her asleep on my chest and there was nothing I could do except play games. And I thought well, fuck it. This is probably a good a time as ever to actually try and-- - [Clint]Are you playing with the baby on your chest? Wow. - Yeah, yeah. - [Clint] Heard about being cold and in the moment. - [Danny] It forced me to actually, I don't know, be very intentional. And I couldn't get frustrated because she'd wake up if I started to shout or move or get angry or throw a controller. So going back and playing the first Dark Souls which I did months after when the remaster came out, and also playing Sekiro, I found them very, very intimidating. What other games do you play? And is there something special about those Sekiro, Soulsborne games? - [Clint] So yes, yes. First of all they are brilliant. They're a masterclass in game design, whether it's the art team. Now, the only thing you could really knock against it may be the story. The story in the Souls game's pretty obtuse. You kinda have to go looking for it. Maybe you need to watch some lore videos. I am glad that this new game there are cinematics. There's like more of a traditional story. I do appreciate the fact that it's not quite so, they respect the player. And that when they teach you something, they expect you to have learned that and to begin, not necessarily master it right away, but begin to start working on it. There are so many times where after I've beaten a boss I've been like, okay, so let me see, what's the cheese for this strategy? Is there a cheese? And I'll look it up after just to see did I do it the cheat way? I actually thought that I had beat, what's her name? Lady Butterfly, I had thought I had cheesed her because how I killed her was I kind of, I love they have fake attacking in this game. Like you can act like you're gonna attack and then block and it will fake it. And that's very similar to World of Warcraft, fake casting. As a caster in WoW, you don't want them to interrupt your heal, like when you gotta get off, or the spell you have to get off, so you kinda have to fake. Like you're, I'm gonna cast, I'm gonna cast, use your interrupt, ha ha I got ya. That's built into the gameplay. So I kinda tricked her and baited her to get into a corner and then one of her really killer moves in the air, I only had to dodge twice and I'd be able to attack her. At least get like two attacks on her when she's in a corner. So I look up the cheese on her, and the cheese is like do this one move over and over and over and over and over. And I was like, holy shit. That's so cheesy. I did not, I thought I'd cheesed it but no, I didn't cheese it at all. - [Danny] You talking about cheeses is like, also sort of goes into the previous point you made about this being a marketing issue. The delineation between accessibility and cheats and then cheeses and strategy, because one of the things that came to my mind when were talking about easy modes in these games was the music box in Bloodborne, which is like, it's a fucking easy mode. - [Clint] I'm not familiar with that. - [Danny] So if you, you know, Father Gascoigne is a, oh, have you played Bloodborne? Of course, it's a PlayStation-- - [Clint] So yeah, I should say, yeah, it's on PlayStation. I haven't played it because I only have the Xbox one-handed controllers. I'm hoping they just add, they bring everything to PC. I know they're not gonna bring everything to PC but at least let me use mouse and keyboard, or in my case mouse and footboard on console. 'Cause one-handed controllers, no matter which one I have, they don't compare. For me, they have a one-hand, a mouse and this footboard, there's just nothing that comes close to that. Such a shame. I saw the tweet from the God of War guy and I'm like, yeah, your game's really aren't accessible to me at all, buddy. And I know it's, I know he wasn't thinking like that but I hate exclusivity, man. I really do. I wish you could play everything on anything. That's what I hope the future of gaming is, honestly. - [Danny] Yeah, I'd never even considered the fact that basically the PlayStation games are completely off the cards. So Spiderman. - Played Bloodborne, I haven't played Spiderman. Yeah, Spider-Man's the one that's killing me. Even more so than Bloodborne or God of War, is Spiderman. I wanna play Spiderman so bad. - [Danny] Metal Gear Solid V, did that come out on PC? - [Clint] Yes, that was on PC, yes. And that was actually a great-- - [Danny] Let me quickly explain that, the music box thing 'cause then I've got another question, just now that we've brought up the Metal Gear Solid thing. So in Bloodborne, they're one of the first bosses you meet, Father Gascoigne. Earlier, I'd say at least half of players run into this like windowsill where somebody, who I think you later find out then is his daughter, gives you a music box. And if you use the music box during the fight he basically staggers and you can use it infinitely up until I think, no you can use it three times during the fight. But it's basically a free hit. - Oh wow. - [Danny] And it completely changes the difficulty in that. I would say cuts the difficulty at least in half for that fight for new players. - [Clint] You used or did you avoid it because you knew about it? - [Danny] Yeah, the first time I played through it. The first time I played through it Bloodborne had been out for so long that at that stage, you know, I think I was working at GameStop when it came out so somebody did a video about that. So when it came round, the first time I played it I definitely did it. But in subsequent playthroughs I haven't bothered because I've gotten better at it by that stage. Which, you know, that's kinda how those games work, right? - [Clint] You use the skills that you have, right? That makes sense. The difficulty, they want you to learn. I feel like these games are trying to teach people patience and just not to give up. - [Danny] Totally, but at the same time they're not completely walling it off to people who-- - [Clint] I don't think so. - [Danny] No, I don't think that's the intent. I don't think it's some crazy hardcore. - [Clint] The quote that everybody loves to put up when they talk about, oh, it'll never have a easy mode. This is from Miyazaki, I'm sure I'm saying that wrong, the quote that everyone always loves to through up is, we don't wanna include a difficulty selection because we want to bring everyone to the same level of discussion and the same level of enjoyment. The next part of that quote is, so we want everyone to first face that challenge and to overcome it in some way that suits them as a player. That's the part everyone always leaves out. And I feel like with this one, they've really nailed it because they include a lot of options in terms of changing the keybinds. In some of Dark Souls, you couldn't change some of the keys at first. Like it was just completely locked out. The camera options that they added in, the fact that even include a selection now to show keyboard and mouse prompts instead of just, even though you changed the settings and maybe even changed what the keybindings were it still will show up Xbox buttons. That's so infuriating. - [Danny] Absolutely, and whenever I play PC games and I've got my Xbox controller plugged in that happens. And it irritates me, but obviously the other way round it happens all the time, I imagine. - [Clint] There's the other side of that too, where games like Battlefield, and I don't know if this works in the newest one, but it did work in Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4, as well. You could set up different keybindings, right? Like they've always allowed that. But then they also would allow you to set the plane to a flight stick. So if you had a cheap little joystick or something, or a controller even, you could set it to where when you've got it in the plane it would switch over to the controller. And then when you ejected, you could move back to mouse and keyboard. And I always thought that was brilliant and I wish more games would do stuff like that. Granted you're taking into account people have additional expensive hardware and that's the other thing people don't always think about is all this accessibility stuff is really expensive. I even saw the Xbox guys getting crap 'cause they're XAC was $100. When you look at what they did, they could have easily charged $300 for that. And they still probably would have been taking a loss. - [Danny] Another element of this that you brought up a second ago was the way in which the lore of Sekiro sort of marries with your personal experience as well. I've actually noticed, I'm not sure if this is just because accessibility's been part of the general gaming conversation more now than it certainly was in the past, but I've noticed this recent trend with player characters with prosthesis on their arms. Am I crazy or has this just suddenly appeared everywhere? - [Clint] No, it's definitely starting to be a thing. I got asked like what was my favorite disabled superhero maybe four, five years ago. And the only one I could even think of in gaming or in comics was the guy from Deus Ex, the remaster, the remake, or whatever. What's his name? - [Danny] JC, no JC Denton was, Jensen? What was it? - [Clint] Jensen was the guy from the last two, I think. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. - [Danny and Clint] Adam Jensen. - [Danny] We got there. - [Clint] Yeah, you got me thinking JC Denton and I was like. That's the original, but the remakes or whatever, the reimaginings. 'Cause he was the only one I could really think of and then since then you've had the chick on the Battlefield cover. There's people in Overwatch that only have one arm. - [Danny] Apex Legends, I think. - [Clint] Apex Legends as well. Well, they got a whole cyborg in that one too. - [Danny] Right, Solid Snake? - [Clint] Yeah, that actually, you know what, that hit me the hardest. That's something I could talk about real quick. - [Danny] Yeah, go for it, absolutely. - [Clint] That scene was so powerful. It totally blew my mind. Now, I didn't have exact similar experience where I woke up. I knew, I came into the hospital talking about chop me off. Chop it off, just chop it off. I know it's gone, chop it off. And those doctors and nurses looked at me like I was crazy. Like damn, how is he living? I don't know if I told you this story but they didn't even know about my back. I woke up after my amputation and was like, holy shit, my arm is gone. I need a smoke. And they were like, you can't go outside? I'm like, you can't tell me what to do. And then I fell on my face and that's when they were like, oh, we need to check something. That's when they found out my spine was all screwed up. But yeah, getting off topic. So Call of Duty, in the last two or three Call of Duty's, it seemed like they just kept having, Buddy would always get his arm chopped off. There would always be that scene where like, it's just gruesome and they're tearing the arm off or it's getting trapped in a door or something. And you see, you get dragged away and your arms left there. They did that, I know for at least two years in a row. That never bothered me or impacted me at all. I played that opening scene in Metal Gear and all, granted most of it is just kind of a walking Sim for the first hour, hour and a half. But that first 20, 30 minutes is very powerful because you wake up. And I do remember waking up in the hospital bed and being like, what do you mean I can't get up? Oh, you did what to my back? Oh my god, my arm is gone. That was very surreal, very powerful. And the have David Bowie playing over it too. And of course those guys come in and kill the one guy couple minutes later but it was a very powerful scene. I love Hideo Kojima, that guy is a genius. I hope I get to play his next one. - [Danny] What was it like, I guess as well, the subtitle for that game is Phantom Pain, which we've talked in the past, that's obviously a massive issue for yourself and for people in your situation. - [Clint] And trying to describe that for people is nearly impossible. I mean, it's a constant thing that I have to worry about and over the last, I wanna say the last year or so, it's gotten a lot better in terms of I'm not getting the spikes. Have you ever had a searing headache to where, or let's say stomach pain, where your stomach's hurting, right? But then you get those surges to where you just wanna double up and you can't do anything. Phantom pain is like that. It can be a constant aggravation. Just something's constantly in the back of your mind. Or it could constantly just be bringing you to your knees where you can't do anything else. There is no, I mean I've cussed out my mama before. I love my mama, I would never do that, right? I've been hurtin' bad enough to cuss my mom out. That's kinda how I have to explain it to people. It hurts bad enough that it'll make you cuss your mom out. And you the type of person that normally do that, that's saying a lot. It's a mindfuck, man. And I'm sorry for cussing, really no other way to describin' it. It is unreal. I wish there were words that I could use to give it justice. And for some people, I've heard stories of where it lasts 90 days, they lose a limb and 90 days later, they're fine. Maybe it aggravates them every now and then, but for the most part they're fine. But for some reason with me, this October will be seven years and I'm still dealing with it. So I wish I had an answer as to why, but I don't. - [Danny] Does that, presumably not just playing video games, but that must impact every moment of your life. - [Clint] Oh yeah, the first thing I did when I got my disability was not build some crazy super rig and buy this Razer Naga and all this stuff. I bought a chair. I bought a very expensive chair that was good, felt comfortable to sit in and supported my back. That was the first thing I did and it was, it cost me $400 but it was worth every penny. I still have the same chair. It doesn't need an upgrade. I'll be ready to upgrade this computer before I'm ready to upgrade this chair. That definitely helps a lot. But dealing with pain and dealing with pain management, I've had to learn a lot of things because when you're constantly, your head's constantly cloudy it's hard to think clearly about anything, much less be able to deal with, you know. Let's say I get a cold or something, sometimes that's enough to just ruin my day whereas having a cold before was no big deal, whatever. 'Cause it's just addition, right? You keep adding on the things. I'm grateful that you followed me this long on Twitter, man. I can't imagine you haven't wanted to just mute me before. Because I either would just go blackout for six months or just rage for several days in a row. And then be like, oh, I love this, I love that. - [Danny] I think that's everyone on Twitter actually. Myself included. - [Clint] I kinda noticed that a little. Basically there to just bitch. - [Danny] I mean, was there any then, you know, just in relation to the thematically, this has been used in games a number of times, what was your experience with what happens in Sekiro and his use of a prosthesis? - [Clint] It's genius, it blew my mind. Like I know it's game design, right? And this is not, like none of it's real. But it really got me thinking, well, what if some of this was kind of based on some history? Like how much of this, because when I first lost my arm that was, me and my friends were talking about it like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if it had a blade like the dude from Deus Ex? You think you could, what all could you fit in there? Would it fit grenades? And it's like, no man. Why would I walk around with, you know, not serious talk. Just friends being, they were drunk and being stupid. And just thinking about what all different things could you do with an arm? And then I'm like, I wish it was the future where I could just walk up to a system and be like, okay, I would like a soda from this machine. Or give me 10 grand out this ATM. Have you seen the anime where the little finger pops up and the little wires come out? Like that would be amazing. But yeah, I love the use of the prosthetic. And I feel like that balances some of the difficulty, especially early on. I've seen a lot of people have trouble with that first red-eye ogre. And when I came across 'em I had already done the memory and beaten Lady Butterfly, so I was super powerful. I felt super, I mean I had the flaming barrel, I had plenty of oil, and I totally messed that dude up. He might have killed me once, twice maybe 'cause I didn't know about the add with the spear. Oh man, there's definitely some moves that once you get 'em, they tell you how useful they are and they'll even warn you again. And some of the handholding. That's actually hurt me, and something I'm sure they didn't think about. So I have to take my hand off the mouse, go over to the Escape on the keyboard, hit Escape, try to get my hand back on the mouse before I get smacked. Nine times out of 10 I'm getting smacked. And I know they're doing it to help people and trying to remind them like, hey, this is what this does. But that kept getting in the way for me. I realize what they're trying to do and I know they're trying to make these games more accessible. And I think that fact that it sold two million copies in 10 days, that surprised me even. I didn't think this game would do that good. These games are notoriously hard. My brother said I can't believe you're playing this. Not because he thinks I'm too disabled, but because he thinks it requires too much patience. They all have the impression they're so hard that nobody can actually play these unless you just can control your rage. - [Danny] Yeah, they do sort of have a, I don't know, there's a sort of a mythic quality to this, which is earned in many ways, but there's an urban legend aspect to it as well which has kind of made it a bit ridiculous. One question actually we got from somebody. I put a call out on Twitter just before we went live for questions and one we got in actually rubs up against that which was, Video Attack asks, how much of the reputation for the series being obtuse and difficult do you think could be addressed with proper tutorializing and making more in-depth mechanics easier to understand? I love the series, but I don't always feel they've done well explaining mechanics to the player. I found that in the early games that was kind of part of the discovery of those games, was trying to figure it out. But Sekiro I feel like is so, I feel like you really have to defeat bosses in very particular ways, in ways that I maybe aren't, I don't know. Maybe I'm just lacking the patience for it a little bit or something. How do you feel? 'Cause they've definitely done a better job of the tutorials. It's interesting to here you say the tutorials were getting in your way. - [Clint] They've definitely done that. Yeah, and that's just for me having one hand. Let's say maybe I had decided to put Escape for whatever reason and I macro'd that, or put that on my footboard or somewhere on the mouse, then I wouldn't have this issue. But of all the keys that I could afford to re-keybind, Escape is almost never one of them. Escape and Map are the last two things I worry about in games So they've definitely done a better job in terms of addressing that. But I feel like it's only gonna get as good as it can. Again I tell you, this does this and this is when you should use this. Now whether you remember to use it then, when you're supposed to, that's not really up to them, right? So a lot of I think like is perspective. Like you can die to a boss 10 times and think, oh, this is bullshit. I'm never playing this game again. Or you could die 10 times and during those 10 attempts somewhere you see where you made a mistake. Maybe you panic, maybe you got overaggressive. I feel like their games are trying to teach you certain things but at a certain point they do expect you to put it all together. And not everyone is the type of gamer to have read the messages and pay attention to what it is. Maybe even practice what the move is and been able to put into practice at the right time. I don't really know what they can do to do that besides even more severe handholding which I think would just detract from the game, honestly. - [Danny] It reminds me a little bit of just how games have changed over the past 20, 30 years. And one of the instances where this sort of, at least from my experience, reads most clearly is, the first game I ever completed was The Secret of Monkey Island on the Amiga. And it took me I think three months. I was pretty young when it came out. I think I was eight or nine. And it took me like three months, a whole summer basically, to complete it. And then the remaster came out. I wanna say it was on 360 and PS3 maybe. And it was really cool and updated graphics and loads of cool new music and all that stuff, but they also had the tip system in it. And there were some things that you had to do in that game. Like to get to one of the little islands off of Melee Island, you had to use a rubber chicken and a wire to zip across it which kind of makes no sense. I remember being stuck on that forever. But in this thing, you could use a tip and it would like, I think there was three levels of tip. They would give you a little bit of a nudge, a little bit more of a nudge, and they would just say, just use the fucking chicken wire on the wire, right? And I remember thinking, oh that's a good thing, right? Kind of, 'cause it's helping people. But I guess it says less about how difficult games were and more about where our expectations of difficulty came from. Like when that happened years ago I didn't think, oh they made this game wrong. Or you know, this is stupid. I wish they did something to let me know how to do this. I just thought, oh I'm dumb. I don't know what to do to get to that island. Whereas these days we have this expectation that we sort of need to constantly be getting this positive feedback. Even when, like you said in the boss fights, often times I'll die 10 times in a row but it's because I was using the same tactics 10 times in a row. Other games might actually, some games if you play the boss fight for the third time, they without letting you know will make that boss fight easier. And they don't signal it. Games are constantly doing this sort of stuff. - [Clint] The new Resident Evil does that, I believe. I died one too many times in the police station and they were like, would you like to make the game easier? And I was like offended by it. I was like, hey man, F you. It's not my fault your buddy cornered me. I was trying to leave I was like, I appreciate the offer but at the same time, I was like, that would be great for someone who needs it. And it didn't offend me that it was in the game, it just offended me that they thought I needed it. I was like, hey, hey, I got this, man. Leave me alone. But I have no problem with it being in the game. I honestly don't care. - [Danny] And that was an instance where they told you. Where sometimes they don't even bother telling you. Actually, now that I think about it, there is another bell. Speaking of bells from Bloodborne. There's a bell in Sekiro, have you seen this one? The bell that you can ring and it makes the bosses harder. - [Clint] You know what? I've come across it but is that what it does? It makes stuff harder? - [Danny] I think it does two things. I think it makes one thing easier and one thing harder. Like I think it might increase the drop rate on certain things but it makes the bosses more difficult. I don't know exactly what it is. But definitely if you ring it it will make the game harder in some respects. - [Clint] I've come across it and the message was a little bit cryptic. It sort of made it sound like it was gonna be a harder game if you rang the bell. - [Danny] It's something like, don't ring the bell, or something. - [Clint] Yeah, yeah. I was like, I'm just gonna ignore this for now 'til I know what this is. I'm sure there'll be a lore video on it eventually that I can figure out whether or not I should ring it. This kinda makes me think of Wolfenstein, Doom. You could pick easy mode in those games and then have them like sucking on a pacifier. They're letting you know, like hey, you can play this way but don't you feel like a man about it. Like don't go bragging about it. And you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Why not? - [Danny] And it's pretty funny that you mention that because when this conversation was happening, I think one of the questions I put out was like, let me know a game you play on easy because you don't care. And the one I said whenever I'm in really bad turbulence on a flight, I have my Switch with me usually and what I usually do is I just put it on easy mode and I try and score as many goals as I can and it kind of takes my mind off things. But the one that so many people kept saying which actually, now that I think about it, I have totally done as well is the MachineGames Wolfenstein games. Those games are brutally hard and a lot of the time they're kind of, I don't know, I feel like a lot of us play it because we want to feel powerful but also we just want to see what the story, where it goes. So I feel like that's, again, a lot of people play on an easier mode just so they can get through it and enjoy the experience. - [Clint] I used to play the Call of Duty's on like the Veteran or whatever the hardest one was until I realized, I don't remember which, it was probably one of your videos or somebody's videos, where it was like, you know this is just a visible line you have to cross, right? As soon as you cross that invisible line you stop spawning. And I was like, oh shit. So you mean I've purposely just been driving myself crazy? 'Cause some of those games there's certain sections where you're just like, how the fuck, how did he shoot me, no way. - [Danny] That's your World of Warcraft shit. You are farming them. You're just sitting back and farming these dudes. - [Clint] Basically, and I'm thinking like, we're gonna make it. Oh no, here comes some more. It's just like, I'm killing myself and for what? Like I could be having the same level of enjoyment and my frustration level's not getting near as high if I just turn it to the appropriate difficulty. Now, whether or not they should, there's a whole 'nother can of worms, should they include it? Like if it's gonna takeaway resources and time and if they have a vision, I think you're getting more into the singular vision versus the design by committee, right? Miyazaki obviously has a singular vision for his games but he also, I don't think he enjoys the fact that everyone thinks his games are so hard. I don't think that's something he takes pride in. I think he wants more people to play 'em. I think he's pretty much said as much. - [Danny] So I guess yeah, taking everything we've talked about today, like the different ways in which games can be more accessible to people, the sort of amorphous conversation about cheesing and difficulty and cheats and how they all sort of blend into each other. As somebody who has experience in these games, who enjoys them, who has been playing them, as far as I'm concerned, on a much harder difficulty level than most of us, what do you feel about Sekiro and how challenging it is? And how you were able to play it as somebody with a disability? Where do you land on it? - [Clint] Honestly, since I downloaded that mod couple days ago, it really got me thinking. Because essentially I've done the same thing the PC Gamer guy has done, except I haven't enabled the cheats, right? Some people may say, oh, you're using ultrawide or unlock frame rate, like you're cheating. And I would say, yeah but I paid for that 2880. I want my frames. I paid for this ultrawide. I'm not changing the game design so much as I'm just adding things they should have maybe thought about if they're gonna release a PC port today. I love the challenge. I feel like each encounter, sounds cliche, but it's like a dance of death, right? If you get surrounded by two or three normal guys, they can kill you. The bosses are very, very hard. Now, granted I haven't beaten the game. I'm sure there's gonna be a boss where I'm just like, oh my god, I'm gonna die 20-plus times. But so far, the most I've died was maybe, actuaLly it was the guy after Blazing Bull. I can't remember the name. I've started calling him General Fuck You. Because every time I get to him he'd just be like fuck you, you're not getting past the gate. And he was such a bitch. He had like a grab and a sweep and then also like, it was the first guy I think I encountered that had three of the warnings and they were all different things. So it took me a while. And you're fighting that closed little section between the walls and it made the camp bit, oh that was a pain. I probably died 10-plus times to him. That's probably the only guy I've died that much to. Maybe Lady Butterfly, might have died like seven or eight, nine times, maybe. I love it for what it is. And I can't thank you enough for it, man. I've had a blast playing it. It's really made me think about a lot of different things. Eventually I'd like to make a video on it or something. Do something more. But you know, I appreciate being brought on this podcast, man. I've had a blast thinking about this and ways that we could try to improve the game for people with disabilities. And I feel like they've done the best job they could. These controls are super responsive. I think transcendent's probably the best way I can describe it. I don't feel like I'm using a mouse and footboard when I'm playing and I feel like I'm the one-arm wolf. - [Danny] Well, you are the one-arm wolf and we really appreciate you coming in. There you go, just in case you didn't already have enough really good internet handles. You can add that one to your repertoire. We really appreciate your time, plqying the game and coming on to talk to us today. For folks who want to follow you, where can they catch you on the Twitter and whatnot? - [Clint] DisabledCable on Twitter. - [Danny] Awesome, good stuff. And yeah, how much more time do you think you have with it? Just as the parting question. Do you think this'll be something you play for the rest of the year? Or another couple of weeks? - [Clint] Honestly, probably another couple of months. I tend to have, like I'll have my action game. I'll have my shooter. And then I'll usually have a role-playing game. Some of those can be interchanged, kind of be the same thing. And this has been my go-to. Like alright, this is my single-player game. If I'm gonna play something with my brothers it's either gonna be Destiny or Vermintide. Not playing any MMOs now. So this is, I'll probably beat it sometime, I would say in the next month, month and a half. Something like that maybe. - [Danny] Awesome, well we wish you well on the journey. I'll be right there with you. I'll be probably a couple of bosses behind you actually. Thank you so much for coming on. And thank you so much to all of our Patrons for funding our work. As ever, you know you can follow us on Twitter @noclipvideo. I am @dannyodwyer on Twitter or /noclip if you wanna follow us on Reddit. And of course this podcast is available early if you're a Patron. Go to patreon.com/noclip to support this show, get it early, and also support all the documentaries we make on our YouTube channel. - [Clint] Go hit up this man's Patreon. Come on, y'all. - [Danny] Thank you so much We've actually got another YouTube channel for the podcast, youtube.com/noclippodcast. If you wanna watch this one. Alternatively, we are available on basically every podcast service in the known universe. iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, and loads, loads more. Soundcloud as well. We fixed the Soundcloud. There was a problem with our uploads but it's all right and ready now. Thank you so much for listening. Subscribe, give us a review if you can. We've never asked really, much, so if you can do that on iTunes or whatever. I mean, give us a good review. Don't give us a review if you think it's shit maybe. Just forget this part of the podcast. Go do something else. But thank you for listening, thank you for your time, and we'll see you next time. Actually, hold up one second. One little thing to add to the podcast before we close it out. I got an email from Clint after we recorded who felt bad that he had, in the haze of the podcast conversation, forgotten to call out two important people that helped him quite a lot on his journey. The first person is his brother, Matt, who sent him the Naga which he used when he first started coming back to play games. The other is his friend, Kyle, who was actually building him a two button foot switch when they found out that somebody was actually making one commercially., the Stinkyboard, which he ended up using afterwards. Clint's journey to actually being able to play games was quite long. He was in bed for the best part of a year, had to play on a laptop. And then through the help of using those inputs over the course of the next couple of months, learned to play with his feet and learned to play properly with one hand. So he wanted to give a shout out to the two of them who helped him so much when all this was going on, six, five years ago. And I thought I should definitely make the point of sticking it into the end of the podcast. So thank you so much to Matt and Kyle. Clearly he couldn't get to where he is right now without your support and help, so thank you very much.

A bit of a change of pace this episode as Danny & Esteban get together to chat about their recent trip to NetherRealm Studios, and all the stuff coming to Noclip in March. iTunes Page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/noclip/id1385062988 RSS Feed: http://noclippodcast.libsyn.com/rssGoogle Play: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/If7gz7uvqebg2qqlicxhay22qny Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5XYk92ubrXpvPVk1lin4VB?si=JRAcPnlvQ0-YJWU9XiW9pg Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/noclippodcast Watch our docs: https://youtube.com/noclipvideo Sub our new podcast channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSHBlPhuCd1sDOdNANCwjrA Learn About Noclip: https://www.noclip.videoBecome a Patron and get early access to new episodes: https://www.patreon.com/noclip Follow @noclipvideo on Twitter Hosted by @dannyodwyerFunded by 4,666 Patrons. --------------------------------------------------------------   - [Danny] Hello and welcome to Noclip, the podcast about the people who play and make video games. I'm your host Danny O'Dwyer and this week, man, if you thought we went real casual with some of these recent podcasts, you've never seen casual like this week's. I'm joined by Esteban Martinez, a producer for Noclip, he's don't a bunch of work for us, including making his own documentary near the end of last year, our Spooky doc, a great insight into the fighting game community. Esteban's up in Philly, how ya doin', my friend? - [Esteban] I'm so casual right now, I'm just laying out on this couch in my pajamas ready to podcast. - [Danny] Is that how you edit? Do you sit on a couch, is that why your back is broken? - [Esteban] Yeah, pretty much, I just lay down and you know those like cool like lazy boy sofas, that's me, that's just the image of me with a laptop and that's how I edit. - [Danny] How do you actually edit because I edit, I've always, I did the standing thing for awhile and then edits take so long and I sit in like, I have a really nice desk that does do the standing stuff but when I bought my chair I didn't buy a particularly ergonomically sound one, I just bought like a nice leather one. - [Esteban] Yeah, I've been to your studio, I remember that chair, that chair hurts. So for me at least, not to get too deep into it, but I did spend a lot of money on the chair and the desk 'cause you're here at it the whole time so I've got a nice desk that can go from standing to regular position real easy and then like, I bought one of those Herman Miller chairs, the Aeron chair. - [Danny] Oh, yes, la de da! - [Esteban] It is the best purchase I've ever made in my entire life. Everything is just so comfortable, you focus more, my back doesn't hurt anymore, 'cause I used to have one of those $20 office chairs from Staples and I was like, this thing's actually killing me. Like, you know, you read all the reports of like, sitting too long will shorten your lifespan. I actually felt my life force draining from my body as I was sitting on this chair. It's like, all right, you know what, things are good, I'm in a new apartment, let's just bite the bullet and buy this chair. And I bought it and, look, I know you've had a child recently and I'm sure that's wonderful and joyous, but this chair, nothing's better than this chair, my first born will not be as good as this Herman Miller chair. - [Danny] God dammit, I got chair envy now. - [Esteban] It's really good. - [Danny] It's wise, its an investment in yourself, it's an investment in future medical bills that you will not have to pay. So really you're just, you're really investing in yourself. Fair play, we got a bunch of stuff to talk about today. This podcast is not just the two of us yammering on about ergonomics. We're gonna just kind of, I don't know, I feel like I need to clean the slate on everything we've done over the past couple of like weeks, like six weeks 'cause so much happened, and what's happening in the next 'cause there's also a lot happening. Like, I'm in the eye of the storm I feel right now and I kinda just wanna talk about all of it. So first of all, let's talk about the thing that both of us did, which is we just returned from Chi town, sunny Illinois-- - [Esteban] It was anything but sunny. - [Danny] Jesus, it was like, yeah, what was it, it was one of those temperatures that like, in like European it was minus 12 I think, so I think it was like, what was it, 15 or 20 in Fahrenheit? - Yes. - It was bloody freezing. Like, when we were flying in it was just frozen lakes. Every lake was frozen. - [Esteban] I mean, not even just flying in, when you stepped off the plane it was like, oh no, I messed up, I'm in the wrong place. - [Danny] Yeah, I had my, I had like a big jacket but I had it stuffed in my camera bag, in the bag with the lights in it, just to basically keep the lights from getting rattled around in the plane so when I got off the plan I wasn't wearing anything warm and that little gangway was like fucking, I felt like going through the six layers of hell, well the opposite of hell, freezing hell, which apparently is Chicago. But we were there to talk to mister Ed Boon and his friends about Mortal Kombat 11. It was like a press event, influencer event, and I've been kind of askin' him about maybe doing something post release, just kind of getting into, nothing confirmed or anything, but just kinda like askin' around just to see and they said, well, we don't know but there's this influencer and media thing goin' on if you wanna come. And I think that was like five days earlier and I emailed you and were like, are you free on Monday? I think you had just gotten back from Japan. - [Esteban] Oh man. - [Danny] Yeah, so kind of it all came together last minute. We were in and out, one day. We turned up, went to a diner, talked to Ed Boon, back on a plane, back to our respective cities on the East Coast, but what did you think, I wanna ask you what you thought of the game, 'cause we don't really cover that so much in the thing 'cause we're not doing fuckin' impressions here on Noclip. - [Esteban] Yeah, I get to put my journalist hat on now. Here's your preview of Mortal Kombat 11. - [Danny] Well you're like the fighting game expert here in my social life as well, but I also wanna know if like, I don't really consider MK a fighting game, to me it's always just like a fun arcade game I buy every time it comes out. - [Esteban] You just offended so many people right now. - [Danny] It kicked Smash off Evo. - [Esteban] That's right, get outta here, it's Mortal Kombat time. The game is great from what I played and what we can talk about but, you know, I've been a fan of Mortal Kombat, especially going back to the arcades, I was a big arcade kid growing up in Brooklyn so I played a bunch of the Mortal Kombats but especially coming from 9, like 9 was kind of like the big rebirth of Mortal Kombat or like the renaissance of the games. So they had a good track record with like 9 and then X was very good and now 11 just looks to be continuing that streak of just really quality games, lotta good single player stuff, good graphics, controls well, and man have the upped the scale on like Fatalities. - [Danny] Yeah, they're pretty wild, I didn't really appreciate how nuts they were when I was watching the trailers because like, that type of grotesque cinematography you're kinda used to in trailers a bit but when you're actually doing the fights and it happens, like, I love those those X-Ray things that were in, was that X or 9? - They were in both - They were in both, okay. Yeah, but they, I really like that, I guess they have the Fatal Blow system which is, they're basically just like mini Fatalities that happen during the fight. And then they have the Fatalities which are just like so absurd, there was one that I wish I recorded. It's Scorpion pulls the head off one, you know, the classic one. And the face, the like disembodied head with the like, almost looks like a tail hanging out of the bottom of their neck was just, like I laughed it was so disgusting. Did you have any favorite ones that stood out to you? - [Esteban] I mean, it's the one that's going around so much now, it's the Johnny Cage one. Not only is it, if you haven't seen it's homage to I think his Mortal Kombat II fatality where like-- - [Danny] Yeah, you punch off multiple heads. - [Esteban] Yeah, he just uppercuts you multiple times and just multiple heads came out in the old school games, like it made no sense. So in this one he uppercuts you and you hear a director off screen like, cut, cut, 'cause you're head's supposed to come off I guess, and so it's just multiple takes like in a Hollywood production and it's a really cool idea of merging his background lore to also this silly fatality existed in these older games. There was that one and Kano's is just, it's very simple where he just headbutts you and your head just explodes on the third one, very simple, very bloody, but just funny, it just made me laugh. - [Danny] Yeah, there's something about the slow mo thing that they do in this game where when the last strike that makes the person dead, as if they're not already dead at the previous couple of strikes, it just slows down in this comically grotesque way and then the word Fatality pops up and everyone on screen, either the person who's dying or the person who's just murdered them has just like the weirdest, the worst freeze frame face. So it's every, it's just so ridiculous, I absolutely, yeah, I'm really into it, no wonder, it's perfect like 2019 social media fodder as well. Like everyone's just sharing gifs of this stuff all day. - [Esteban] Yeah, I mean it's going everywhere, even in the Designing a Fatality, our video you put up, the Baraka one of him where just like, you're dead, you're already dead, he's already cut you up, he's cut you're face off, everything dead. No, he's just gotta go in there, stick in, grab your brain, and he like bites it and eats it and that's the last frame you see. - [Danny] That's what kills you, it's not the removal of the brain from the head, it's when Baraka had it for lunch. - [Esteban] He's hungry man, you know, all that fighting burns a lot of calories, you know, you just make the best of both worlds, two birds with one stone. - [Danny] The Johnny Cage stuff reminded me of when people ask what should Duke Nukem be in 2019? There's something about the tone of these games that they, they're like weirdly self serious in terms of their lore but they're so in on how stupid the whole thing is. Like just how stupid like, they just made these characters in in the early '90s based on what was popular in movies and ninja movies, both western and eastern, like Ninja Squad and some of the stuff coming out of Japan and they'd invent nothing and they had to sort of shamble a story around it but now they have to shamble a story around with like people who do motion capture and like famous celebrities doing VO but it's the same troop of like nutter, like what the fuck is Baraka, he's just a troll or-- - [Esteban] He's a Tarkatan soldier or general, Danny, don't you know the lore? - [Danny] God dammit, it's amazing. Yeah, I'm looking forward to playing it, they seem to be cramming a bunch of different stuff into the single player as well. Which I guess is the problem every time they do it, it's just that most people just wanna pick up and play but I guess they're stickin' a bunch of stuff into the towers. I didn't get to experience that much, what was that like? I know we can't talk about the campaign stuff at all but what was the towers like? - [Esteban] So the towers are returning from, I believe in MK9 they kind of started working on that feature and then they brought it to X. But the towers are essentially, think of like the old school arcade mode where you play like one character and you make your way through a tower of opponents. But they've added a bunch of stuff in terms of like, you have consumables, so you can summon Shinnok's hands to do like an attack or call in a drone strike or something like that, or even call in an assist like a Marvel 2, Marvel 3 style of like, you know, Scorpion comes and he throws his chain and then that sets up a combo, so it's pretty wacky and the computer for some reason at the press event that computer opponent was set to an incredible high level of difficulty for some of them. They had one where you fought the entire Cage family one on one on one, it was like gauntlet and you had like one life essentially and you just had to beat four people. But for a press event I was like taken aback for like how high the computer was set. So they're definitely gonna be challenging and they're definitely gonna be a lot of fun for, that's a bus, gimme a second. Philadelphia. They're definitely gonna be challenging and they're definitely gonna be a lot of fun for single players but I think that's, I think if anything Mortal Kombat and NetherRealm have leaned into the single player, right. We think fighting games in terms of like, just always two people or you go online and you play ranked or what not. But they really know that not everybody can do that or not everybody wants to do that so let's give them a story mode, let's give them these towers, let's give them the Krypt. Like the Krypt last game was essentially like Skyrim, like it was crazy, it was like a first person, or more like Amnesia, it was a first person horror game. I couldn't play, I'm bad with horror games so I couldn't play the Krypt 'cause things will just jump scare you all the time so I never unlocked anything in Mortal Kombat X. But they do that, they lean into the single player and I think that's what really sets them apart, outside of the gameplay, outside of the graphics, what really sets NetherRealm apart lately is them leaning so hard into the single player aspect. - [Danny] Yeah I guess it's some learnings maybe they've brought over from their little flirtations with DC but I was even, I went back and played the arcade collection, which actually isn't on Steam anymore, but I found a key for it, I bought it through Amazon weirdly and it spat out a Steam key at me and then I guess I installed it and realized I think the reason they pulled it is that it's got all that Games for Windows Live shit embedded in it so you have to create a local profile and do all that to get to the main menu. But I played through a bunch of the first three of them again just to get a bit of gameplay capture and just have a bit of fun and yeah, it just reminded me of like, oh yeah, this is what fighting games used to be, and also this is what most fighting games are to me still. It's like way harder difficulty, especially the arcade ones 'cause they were the arcade ports. Way harder difficulty and then it's you against, you know, just a stream of people, it's like a rougelike. in a different way. - [Esteban] How long can you survive on this one quarter, that's all you got. - [Danny] Right, so yeah, it's funny how these games are just like, yeah, it's all about setting up the scenarios. Like even the different fighters, they just do such a good job of like setting up the scenario even with the quips that they talk about at the start, you know, like having Baraka and Johnny Cage shit talk each other before is, it's funny. Yeah, sure, and it makes you wanna like, I don't know, do all the different duos up against each other and stuff so I'm lookin' forward to it, there's a beta open near the end of this month I think. - [Esteban] There's an online stress test I believe next week, so the weekend of the 15th I believe. - [Danny] Excellent. - [Esteban] So they did it with Injustice 2 last go and it worked pretty well, it was a little rough with the stress test but that's why they do it and I remember hearing good things, or decent things about Injustice 2's online netcode. So hopefully that comes true for MK11 'cause I know a lot of people wanna play it. - [Danny] Yeah, all right, let's move on from the game I guess, before we get into everything else, what did you think about NetherRealm and the studio? It's in like a weird office park, right? - [Esteban] Yeah, I remember us getting there and we were very confused 'cause, I think the biggest thing that confused me is like you have NetherRealm on one side and then you have like a kinder gym or daycare center on the right, and like man, these two things don't go together at all but all right, cool. - [Danny] And there's like a big sign, it's not like NetherRealm studios is written in like, you know, Impact on a bulletin board with all the rest of them, it's a fucking, it's the biggest sign on the, you know, the list of businesses and it also just says like NetherRealm Studios written in the gnarliest font ever. - [Esteban] Yeah, it's not hiding, it's making you well aware that it's there. - [Danny] We got a nice tour of the office. It kind of reminded me of like a bunch of Japanese studios, just a lot of, what do you call them, cubicles, not much light, the folks there seemed pretty cool, a pretty nondescript canteen, might get very high in our top 10 canteen video. But the sound stage is pretty cool, they have a really large motion capture stage, it's in the Ed Boon video. But yeah, apart from that though, I guess there was that main area, right, you filmed a bunch of with the-- - [Esteban] Yeah, I think the main area was kind of like what took the cake for me at least where they just had, you know, it's like a little small museum of just NetherRealm's past, they had like, I think the coolest thing I saw there is they had the original, I don't wanna call them figures, but originally the statues they used to make Motaro, Goro, and Kintaro and stuff like that and I forget who was giving the tour, but they said like, hey, we have these encased 'cause if we even touch them once they'll basically disintegrate, that's how old these things are. And they had props from the movie, they had the Goro head from the movie and they had all the various toys. They don't have an Amiga copy of Mortal Kombat II, Danny was very happy about that. - [Danny] Well they might, they said had a DOS one but he did say they cycle them out. So maybe they do have one, I almost brought my copy of MK2 on Amiga 600 for Ed to sign. His office was like right there, and also you said you noticed, I didn't recognize what they were but they were like these long rectangular logos and you said they were the cabinet heads, right? - [Esteban] Oh yeah, so they had the marquees, like the marquee titles for like Mortal Kombat 1, II, and 3 right next to like the museum, or the foyer I guess and they just had 'em right there and I was like, oh that's really cool, they even took pieces of the cabinet. You know, they have their own arcade too which we didn't get to go in but I saw three stations of the Grid which is like so rare to find even one. I was like, man, if it wasn't for this press tour I'd be in that arcade right now. - [Danny] Yeah, that was pretty cool actually. There was a lot of people on that tour so it was kinda hard to actually see anything and I felt like there were other people there who were way more jazzed to be there who were like long time fans or something so I was kinda happy to hang back and hang out weirdly with a bunch of ex press people that I know from London and San Francisco so it was kind of like a weird meet and greet as well which was really cool to catch up with some folks. - [Esteban] Yeah, it felt like you came into NetherRealm, you signed whatever you needed to sign, and then you said hi to Danny, that seemed to be the course of events as people were coming through the door. - [Danny] That's 'cause we turned up early as well 'cause they were all staying at a hotel I guess, we paid our own way of course so we kind of walked 10 minutes in the snow, sorry about that again. - It's all right. - To get there. What have you been up to outside of Noclip stuff, 'cause there's a bunch of Noclip stuff I need to get into in a second and I'm conscious I'm just gonna be rambling so what've you actually been doing? How was Japan, you we're at Evo, right? - [Esteban] Oh man, you know, not to go too far behind the scenes, but like, you asked me what I've been up to and I actually had to take a minute and just be like, what have I been up to? 'Cause I feel like the couple of weeks have been a blur. - [Danny] You've been nonstop, man, yeah. - [Esteban] Yeah, the biggest thing has been Evo Japan. I went to Tokyo for a little bit to do some work and also to just hang out before things got busy and then I went over to Fukuoka, which is a place I've never been before but it was very cool and I got to go to Evo Japan and shoot some stuff there and that was pretty awesome, I'm still recovering from jet lag, it's getting better. - [Danny] Well you were there for a while, you were there for like over a week, right? - [Eseteban] I was there for like a week and half, two weeks. - [Danny] Yeah okay, that's gonna take awhile. - [Esteban] It has been taking awhile. - [Danny] Yeah, East Coast US is also like the worst, it's like 13 hour difference or something, right? - [Esteban] Yeah, it's like they're like a whole half a day ahead essentially. So, Evo Japan was pretty cool but for the most part I've been, we went to Chicago, we did the NetherRealm thing, I've also been kinda skipping around on other secret missions on my own, I'll be able to talk about those eventually. - [Danny] Oh, you're gonna do that, yeah? - [Esteban] Yeah, I gotta do that, I'm gonna big time you right now, I'm so sorry. But the biggest thing I've been doing outside of editing and shooting is just getting back to playing games. Which is something I haven't had the chance to really do until recently. - [Danny] Yeah, I've not over the past month so please tell me what the fuck I'm missing 'cause all I've been doing is playing like Astroneer and Hades for gameplay. Sorry System Era and Supergiant, not that I don't enjoy those games anyway but, you know, I don't know nothing about Resident Evil 2 and the only game of Apex Legends I've played was like the day it came out, so what have you been up to? - [Esteban] I think the biggest game I've been playing recently has been Resident Evil 2. - [Danny] Oh, cool. - [Esteban] I got the remake the day it came out before I left for Japan or what not. And I kind of, I ran through the first campaign with Leon and that game is incredible. Especially coming from somebody who didn't like, I know of the original and I played a little bit of the original but I never like beat it, I just watched all these speed runs, stuff like that. But to see how they took the concepts of the original and evolved them for this remake and not one to one either, like you don't go through the same hallways you did in the same order or even if you do the same events might not happen at the times you expect them. They did a really good job of keeping everything familiar but not one to one copying it and just kinda pushing it forward. Like, if you look at what Resident Evil 7 did Resident Evil 7 brought Resident Evil back but it also pushed it into like a new realm, like it learned from things like Amnesia or it learned from things like Soma, where Resident Evil 2, this remake, is taking all the lessons they've learned from that game and trying to make the ultimate Resident Evil, trying to make that Resident Evil that when people talk about Resident Evil they're trying to capture that essence and that feeling and put it into this game and think they did a really, really good job. It's hard too, there are some mean moments in this game. And I know everyone's posting clips of Mr. X, he's one of 'em, he's just one of 'em, but there's some mean stuff and some mean tricks they pull in this game but otherwise I had a really good time playing this, I'm gonna go back and do Claire next soon. - [Danny] Rad, yeah, I'm looking forward to, I got it and played maybe two hours, actually that might be generous, maybe closer to one hour, and yeah, I was kinda taken aback. I'm one of these people who, like I completed the first Resident Evil a bunch of times, like I've played through that one loads. Res E 2 was never really my jam so I only played the start of it. And yeah, I actually didn't realize until I guess the week it came out that it wasn't just an HD remake of Res E 2, because Res E 1 have been HD remaked like four times by the time this one came around so I was like, oh, they'll just do the same thing. But yeah, now actually I just want them to go back and do this to the first game. - [Esteban] Yeah, I know a lot of people have been talking about that, a lot of people have been talking about Resident Evil 3. Resident Evil 3 was like the first real Resident Evil I actually played all the way through. 'Cause I'm really bad, I mentioned before, I'm really bad with scary games, even like, Resident Evil's not horror scary, like jump scare every five seconds, but it's like that sense of it could happen, like something could attack me at this point. But Resident Evil 3 was the first time the series really leaned into action where you're constantly on the run and Jill's armed to the teeth really. So I played through that, so a lot of people have been talking about, well what if they did what they did with this remake to Resident Evil 3, they already got the thing that's chasing you all the time and they've got the police station so I kinda hope they do that with 3. It's probably too soon to do that with 4 but I love 4, but it could use a little streamlining too. It's on everything, pretty sure it'll be on my phone in like five seconds. - [Danny] It's so much bigger of a game though I feel like. Like, Resident Evil 2 is like one where it's so confined, like the design of it is, you know, I mean, eventually, but it's not like Nemesis or Veronica where now these larger scale sort of things where you go off into parts of the environment. So yeah, I wonder, would it have the same effect 'cause that's what's so cool about this is that it's like, they've made the world of that police station and the city just richer, it's not like it's, you know, they've just made it more detailed than the way that modern games can and with mechanics as well, like adding a bunch of different stuff so it's a bit more emergent than the first one was. 'Cause the first games are just like horror Sudoku really, you're just collecting one thing and going to another. What else have you been playing, aside from your remakes? - [Esteban] I've been playing a lot of Tekken, getting back into fighting games. I haven't played, while I was in Japan they updated the arcade version 'cause it's been back a couple of characters and stuff like that so I actually got to play in arcades again. Part of the reason I go to Japan so much outside of work is 'cause I just like playing in arcades and it's hard to play in arcades in the states 'cause they don't really exist anymore. So playing a lot of Tekken over there, getting better, getting my fundamentals back, becoming a competitor, I might compete, we'll see we'll see. And then Apex Legends, I think everyone's been playing Apex Legends. - [Danny] Yeah, people have just been asking me to make a documentary about it, that's all, over and over and over again. I think mostly because we were just at Respawn for the Half-Life thing, we interviewed Vince Zampella presumably while they were chipping away on that thing. Yeah, that's cool, like I said, I only played an hour or two the day it came out. Have you consistently been still playing? - [Esteban] I play at least for an hour every day. - [Danny] Oh man, really, god, everyone's playing this game. - [Esteban] And it's like the first, we've played PUBG and stuff like that and that was okay, I could at least call people out and be like, oh, we're getting shot from over there, by the way, I'm down. - [Danny] I played PUBG yesterday. - [Esteban] Oh, look at you. But this is like the first, I really like Titanfall 2, in fact I still, Apex Legends had made me buy Titanfall 2 on PC even though I own a PS4 copy and play that nonstop so I'm switching between the two all the time. - [Danny] It's real good. - [Esteban] The gunplay is so good, not even talking about the campaign or the multiplayer, just the core of the game itself, but the gunplay is like insane. And then when you take that and you move that to like a battle royale, and yeah, you lose some movement stuff, like you can't run across the walls or anything like that, you don't have a double jump, but the speed of the game is still pretty quick. I think my longest match in Apex is maybe 25 minutes. And that's like getting to the end, that's last two squads. - [Danny] Which I think in PUBG I wanna say that's closer to 40. - [Esteban] Yes, PUBG's a much longer game compared to Apex but in Apex you have so many more options for engaging and disengaging with all the character abilities and the ability to use the terrain to your advantage. So like, you carry momentum when you slide down terrain and you can use that to jump further or, you know, when you're running and healing or walking and healing you can't run but you can slide down so using terrain to, if you're losing a fight, oh we can disengage, I can create a smoke field or whatever, get outta there and we can come back and try to figure out a way. - [Danny] Ah, this is why I'm scared of getting back into it now 'cause now like, I still haven't figured out guns and you're all learning how to be fucking ninjas in this thing and it's just gonna be like week two of Gears of War when suddenly everyone's figured out the timing of that shotgun kill and you're just like a lamb to the slaughter. - [Esteban] It's not that hard, like I went away for two weeks to Japan after the game came out and that's all we were talking about. Outside of fighting games we were like, man, everyone's gonna be really good by the time we get back, this is really bad. But when I came back I got like two wins Like, it's not hard to adjust and especially, you know, you're a really good shot so there's some weapons that you can take advantage of that other people can't, like long range fights are kind of rare. I feel like this game is more mid range to close range so they just updated some of the guns so that might actually change. But if you've got the reflexes or if you're just a good shot you'll be fine and then balancing that with this pinging thing, like this pinging system is so good in this game. I have not talked to anybody, I play randomly. All my wins have been from random teams. - [Danny] They're adding it to Fortnite now. They're actually like literally adding the same. To me it's the pinging system from Portal 2 just in a different game. It's contextual stuff to use. - It's super contextual. Like it's contextual to the point where like if we're in a building and someone hits me through a window or something like that I can hit the H key and my, or whatever key I have it assigned to, and my character will be like, I'm being hit from somewhere with a sniper rifle. - [Danny] Yeah, I'm doing like a day off tomorrow. I decided to turn the $20 tier on Patreon into I'm just going to like play games all day and stream it. - [Esteban] Yeah, I think that's a really good choice. - [Danny] Yeah, just to take some time off more than anything else. To have some like work dedicated time off 'cause otherwise I'll just never do it and I'll keep editing and keep burning myself out all the time. So yeah, maybe tomorrow I'll give a go at that. Let's get into what's coming up on Noclip and what's already come up on Noclip 'cause it's been a crazy couple of weeks here. The second episode of our Hades documentary has gone up, that was a lot of fun to put together. Shout out to Jeremy Jayne over in Berkeley for putting that one together. The name of it has already escaped me, what is it, what did we call it, we called it episode two? The first one is called, How Supergiant Secretly Launched Hades, the second one's called, the Chaos of Patching Hades, that's right, so it's basically all about them adding the Chaos update and the one that came after that. We kind of split the difference over a couple of months. We're at work on the third one which will be up in about six weeks time, we have like a, five weeks time actually, we have a calendar we're sorta working with that we're gonna make public soon enough that'll show you what's coming out for the rest of the year. There's also a Patreon Q and A video we shot with them which will be going up, I think probably closer to the end of this month and then also we have the behind the scenes from episode two, the deleted scenes rather, sorry, which will be going up, it's already been edited, just going through clearance with them to make sure that we didn't show a screen we shouldn't have and then it'll be up at some stage next week. The Astroneer documentary's up as well, delighted to get that one done and dusted. Shout out to Joe Dorada over at System Era and Samantha Kalman, a friend of Noclip for putting me on that story I guess two years ago. That was a hard one to edit, it's probably one of the more difficult human stories we've covered on Noclip and it was kind of a sensitive topic so I'm kind of, as relieved as anything else that we didn't sort of drop the ball on that one. People seem to like it which is good. Have you had a chance to check that one out yet? - [Esteban] I have not, I downloaded it for my recent flight and then I lost my iPad on the plane so. - [Danny] No, you didn't! - [Esteban] I also cried for my human interest story. Yeah, I got it back though, I got it back. - [Danny] Oh, thank god. - [Esteban] But yeah, I wrote up a bunch of cool stuff and like cool project stuff, got off the plane, got in my Uber, realized I totally left it in the little, you know, where they keep the magazines at. - [Danny] Yeah, how'd you get it back? - [Esteban] So, not to get too nitty gritty, but American, they automated everything, like they're lost and found stuff so you just fill out a form online. You know, hey, this is what it looks like, this is where it is, this is where it was last seen. And they either hold it for you at the airport or they can ship it to you. I was luckily coming back to the same airport and they found it and they gave it to me. - [Danny] That's nuts. I had those Airpods, I held out on getting Airpods for like forever 'cause I just thought they were needlessly expensive and ridiculous and then when you have a kid and not having dangly things in front of their face sometimes when you're around and doing stuff, it's kinda handy just to have one in while a podcast is on. You know, while you're playing with them with the toys for like two hours. So, god, I'm a bad parent, so I got them, but I was in the airplane and I fell asleep with them in my ears and I woke up and both were out of my ears. - [Esteban] Oh no. - [Danny] Yeah, and it was when we were like deplaning so it was, I was like jumping up around. I eventually found both of them but I had an absolute heart attack. Well that Astroneer doc it's up, it's about 50, 45 minutes long I think. The Jeff Gerstmann podcast is coming next after this one. It'll be next week I guess, from when you're listening to this, if you listen to this when it was the week it went up. I did a vote basically on what people would like to see from our backlog of bits and bobs we've yet to finish and this was the far and away winner so getting that done at the moment. It'll be more of the story style podcast we started out with and it's a long one, about an hour and 20 I think is what it's gonna land on. A lot of trips coming up for the rest of this month, I'm off to South by Southwest but before I talk about mine you're also going, right? - Yes. - But now with Noclip. What are you doing? Can you say? - [Esteban] I'm trying to figure that out right now. - [Danny] Okay, you're doing something. - [Esteban] I'll be at South by Southwest helping out with a stream for a very large company, that's all I can say. Apple, IBM, there we go. - Sure, why not. - [Danny] Yeah, get those International Business Machines. Is that what that means, I don't know. - [Esteban] That's right, buy stocks now. - [Danny] I'm gonna be there doing a panel at South by Southwest Gaming called Noclip, Convincing Gamers to Love Developers, which is not Noclip, Convincing Gamers to Make Love to Developers, which was the original rejected title. It's part of the game and design development track. I went on their website and they said it was, level beginner, which-- - That doesn't make sense. - [Danny] They don't know what I'm gonna talk about, I could go up there and talk about fuckin', I don't know, object oriented programming, we'll see what they think then. - [Esteban] Hit 'em with the intricacies of god rays. - [Danny] Yeah, we'll go straight into LUTs, an hour on LUT talk. Yeah, I don't know, I have like three version of that talk in my head and I'm basically gonna do a show of hands and start to see if people are either developers or working in PR or are just game players, not just game players, but you know, just game players, and then I'm gonna do it from there. I've got a couple of meetings as well and there's a couple of other reasons I'm heading out there. And the other reason is that it piggybacks right onto GDC and this our biggest ever GDC. This is the Game Developers Conference in sunny San Francisco. We are all heading out, well Jeremy still lives there. I'm heading over, Esteban is coming too. Jeremy is currently resting up at home 'cause he broke his foot, kicked a chair while he was making food apparently. - [Esteban] Shoulda bought a Herman Miller. - [Danny] He shoulda, yeah. - [Esteban] You guys are making mistakes. - [Danny] You can kick that thing all day, it just takes it. - [Esteban] Oh, it'll break your leg, it's made out of steel. - [Danny] So he's resting up at the moment. So that's, that's not the only reason you're coming but it was definitely like, we had like a mounting amount of interviews and I was like, we really need to bring Esteban, we're not gonna be able to do all this just the two of us. And then we kept getting more and more and more and I was like, yeah, we're probably gonna do that and then he broke his foot and that day four more people confirmed and we were like, yeah. I like called you up I think and was like, can you definitely please come to GDC? - [Esteban] So I woke up that morning and the first thing I see is a Tweet saying from Jeremy where he's like, I broke my foot, dammit. And then I was like, I bet in 15 minutes I'm gonna get a text from Danny that says, hey, are you free for GDC, are you still free? And then like 10 minutes later you were like, hey, are you like free for GDC still? And I was like, yep, yes I am. - Amazing. We have a ridiculous calendar so this is, we did this two years ago and it was really fun and we got a bunch of these little mini interviews, we called 'em Noclip Sessions then. We're not gonna brand them this time, we're just gonna make a bunch of smaller vids, kind of like the Corey Barlog one or the Ed Boon one. Just like a little, I don't know, not super long ones but interesting little chats. I'm looking at my calendar right here, man, and I mean, they're all between 10 and four during the day, we've got the studio of Patreon booked for basically the entire week. Now we have everyone from like mid tier developers, some massive indies, folks from Japan, some big western devs, and a bunch of interesting indies that people have been asking us to talk to, folks to do a unionization and, it's a crazy murderers row of names, some of which people would be very familiar with and some of which people won't. If you're gonna be at GDC we're not gonna be around that much but we will be at the showing of our Half-Life documentary as part of the GDC Film Festival, which is on at 4:40 p.m. on I wanna say the Tuesday, I closed my calendar like a silly boy. That's gonna happen at Yerba Buena I think it's called, yeah it's on the Tuesday, that's the 19th of March. It's gonna be at the Yerba Buena, I think it's called film, cinema or whatever, I forget what it's called, it's just that little one that's right there in the park. And yeah, we'll be around before and after to hang out and talk and stuff. I think myself and Jeremy are gonna get up on stage afterwards and do a Q and A or something, so that should be fun. So we're not an official meet or anything, we just kinda can't, like I used to work in SoMa in San Francisco and getting a bar for 20 people will be impossible. I feel like if Noclip did a meet up at GDC we'd get like 100 people so I just can't do it. So we'll be at the, if you're at the premier or the showing, it's not a premier, you can literally watch, almost a million people have watched it on YouTube already. - [Esteban] I don't know if you know, Danny, but that video's been out for quite awhile. - [Danny] We did this last year too with Horizon and it was amazing, sadly they had to turn people away. So that might happen this year again. The weirdest part about this is that the film festival's sponsored by Valve, who did not talk to us for the documentary. - [Esteban] Oh man, I'm sure they love this. - [Danny] Yeah, so this is gonna be a little awkward. Yeah, so we'd love to see you there before and afterwards, before or afterwards, whatever works for you even if you can't go watch the movie we'd be happy to come up and say hey. If you're not going to GDC though we're doing something weird, we're doing something new on our Patreon. They have this special offers thing which I didn't really ever want to do because I feel like our tiers our fair and cool and what not but just considering how big we're going at GDC this year it would be helpful to get a little bit more cash in the kitty as it were, so what we're doing, if you want, is we're gonna add this thing called an event pass, very careful not to put GDC in the actual name of that 'cause I'm sure we wouldn't be allowed to do that. Although, GDC tickets are pretty expensive. How much did it say when you, like $2,500 or something? - [Esteban] It was like 25 to $2,800 and you sent me this link that was like hey, just sign up for this. And I saw it like, GDC has like a little checkout and I saw $2,800 and I was like, is he out of his damn mind? - [Danny] Yeah, we have press passes so he didn't, you literally-- - [Esteban] You go through another page and then it makes it like zero, like a coupon code but you gave me a heart attack at once point. - [Danny] You literally get a coupon code for like $2,500. - [Esteban] It's crazy! - [Danny] Yeah, like can I redeem this somewhere else maybe? - [Esteban] Yeah, can I buy a mortgage? Can I put a down payment somewhere else with this? - [Danny] Can I buy 10 of these chairs, or three, I don't know how much they cost. But yeah, we're gonna put that in the $10 tier. If you're already in the $10 tier or up you'll get all this already but if you're in the five, if you wanna jump up. Basically what we're gonna do is live check ins every day so we're in the studio from Monday to Friday and I'm also there Sunday and Saturday, we might do those days too but we're definitely gonna do Monday to Friday we're gonna do little live streams from the studio. I was thinking about doing them longer day but I don't know how good the internet is in the studio so I don't wanna commit to it but we're definitely gonna do these live check ins where we basically host a little live stream and let you know who we're interviewing that day, stuff like that, like kinda insider bits which we kind of wouldn't necessarily feel comfortable broadcasting to the entire wider world but it'll be fun to do for some of our Patrons. Yeah, and if you have any questions for those people or questions for us we'll all be there. So that's our, yeah, Noclip at GDC event pass, Noclip games development event pass, let's call it. - [Esteban] Early access Noclip GDC buzzword keyword search influencer pass. - [Danny] There'll be a post about it in the next few days anyway, yeah. - [Esteban] It's the battle pass for Noclip. You can start it for free and then pay $10 later and get all the costumes. - [Danny] I did think about doing loot boxes at one stage where we do like a real world loot box but it's always got something good in it but then I like ran the numbers on it and was like, no one would ever pay money, the amount of money it would take to make everything be really really rad no one should ever have to pay blind. I think loot boxes are inherently evil so even with all good intentions I couldn't figure out a way of doing it. It's a bit of a shame. Yeah, so you'll be there too. You've been to San Francisco but not to GDC, is that right? - [Esteban] I've been to San Fransicso but I've never been to GDC, I've always wanted to go to GDC, I love the talks that they have there and it just seems like a cool place to be. - [Danny] Yeah, it's super cool. I'm not sure how much time we'll have to actually go to the Moscone Center, what I'm trying to do is make it so on the Friday at least we've got a bit of time so we can run in for awhile. But also we can so stuff in shifts, like I'm sure we won't need all three of us all the time over at Patreon but it's gonna be a lot, man, we're gonna come out of that thing with like 20 interviews and then we have to figure out how to cut them and who's cutting them and which ones are coming out and what not so a lot of stuff comin' to Noclip. And that's a podcast, basically. Just wanted to give an update to what we're doin'. That Jeff Gerstmann one will be up next, you know, you've heard all the stuff that's coming depending on whatever tiers you're in. Esteban, where can people follow you and watch you play video games? - [Esteban] So I, you can follow me on Twitter at Twitter.com/TheBesteban, that's where all my stuff is at. I'm also getting the habit of streaming at least once a week, nothing like crazy like Ninja like every day but trying to stream at least once a week. - [Danny] He's hanging out with Neymar at soccer games now, he doesn't have time to stream. - [Esteban] Yeah, come on. But I'm here to take his spot now, dyed my hair red and everything. So you can follow me at Twitch.tv/TheBesteban 'cause branding and I'll be up there, you know, it's casual, once a week we just play games. Right now I'm downloading Devil May Cry 5 actually as we're speaking. - Oh sweet! - [Esteban] As soon as that thing hits midnight. - Is that out tomorrow? - Tomorrow, yeah. So I'm probably gonna actually play couple hours tomorrow, get into that game, 'cause I love Devil May Cry, so that's it for me. - [Danny] I like those Nigerian movies, the trailers for the-- - Yeah, they're cannon now. It's crazy, I can't believe Capcom made them cannon. - [Danny] I mean, they fuckin' might as well be. Like, they make as much sense as the official lore as far as I'm concerned so. - [Esteban] Oh man, now the Devil May Cry Reddit is on fire, way to go, Danny. - [Danny] All our Patrons who love DMC are out. I did really like that Ninja Theory one though, that was quite fun. - Oh no, what have you done. - [Danny] @Dannyodwyer on Twitter, @noclipvideo if you don't follow us there. You know the drill, we're all over the internet, r/noclip on Reddit, we got a Patreon in case you didn't know. This podcast is on Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, loads more, and we have a YouTube channel, Youtube.com/Noclippodcast. We also make video game documentaries at Youtube.com/noclipvideo if you didn't know that. Patrons get all that stuff for the show early, this show early, sorry, for five bucks a month. Thank you to all of those folks for supporting our work, see you next time, Jeff Gerstmann will be up and then we'll probably do a post GDC wrap up as well but we also have a bunch of developer interviews coming over the next couple of weeks as well so stay tuned. Thanks, Esteban for hanging out. - Thanks for having me. - No worries, and we'll see the rest of you next time.

This week we're diving deep into game creation as Danny sits down to talk about design with Lucas Pope, the creator of Papers Please and Return of the Obra Dinn. iTunes Page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/noclip/id1385062988 RSS Feed: http://noclippodcast.libsyn.com/rssGoogle Play: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/If7gz7uvqebg2qqlicxhay22qny Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5XYk92ubrXpvPVk1lin4VB?si=JRAcPnlvQ0-YJWU9XiW9pg Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/noclippodcast Watch our docs: https://youtube.com/noclipvideo Sub our new podcast channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSHBlPhuCd1sDOdNANCwjrA Learn About Noclip: https://www.noclip.videoBecome a Patron and get early access to new episodes: https://www.patreon.com/noclip Follow @noclipvideo on Twitter Hosted by @dannyodwyerFunded by 4,756 Patrons. -------------------------------------------------------------- - [Danny] Hello and welcome to Noclip, the podcast about people who play and make video games. Our guest this week is an independent developer responsible for 2013's political passport checker, Papers Please, and the recently released seafaring dither punk solve-'em-up Return of the Obra Dinn. Today he lives on the island nation of Japan which makes me even more grateful for his time today as it's currently 9:00 a.m. here in Maryland, which makes it around 11:00 p.m. in Tokyo. But if the conversation flows we should hopefully get him in bed before midnight. I'm delighted to be joined by Lucas Pope. Lucas, thank you so much for making the time today. - [Lucas] Yeah, thanks Danny, I'm happy to be here. - [Danny] Do you feel like you have sort of a less busy schedule these days? I mean, you finished up on Obra Dinn and then I'm guessing you then spent a lot of time sort of fixing bugs and what not, has it eased off a bit now? - [Lucas] Yeah, definitely, it was exactly that basically, where I released the game and spent a long time fixing stuff that was broken, more or less. And then that's cooled off a lot now. I mean, the work stuff has cooled off but I was sort of holding off so many other things in my life with family stuff and everything else that once even that work stuff was done, there was a huge stack of things I needed to take care of after that so most of that also was sort of out of the way so now I'm finally able to kinda cool down a little bit and take it easy. - [Danny] Now you're able to do your podcast backlog for the previous four and half years. - [Lucas] More or less yes, actually exactly that. - [Danny] How's the game backlog looking? Did you get much time to play stuff over the development of it or? It sounds like it's a lot of work making these games, especially on your own, so do you sort of like disconnect from mainstream game releases for awhile? - [Lucas] A little bit, yeah. On the things that I would normally play, yes. I was still playing things like Mario games with my kids and Switch games and stuff like that but on the stuff that I should be checking on, most of that, yeah, was just stuck in a pile somewhere and I'm kind of going through that now very slowly. - [Danny] Awesome, let's go back in time just a little bit before we sort of dive into the design of the two games that most people will know you from. I feel like if there was a Venn diagram of people we talk to on Noclip, the biggest one sort of section would be folks who worked on Quake mods and you apparently fall into that department as well. - [Lucas] Yeah, represent. - [Danny] Was that your first sort of foray into design, what did you work on? - [Lucas] I wouldn't say that, it was my first foray into 3D design and also where you could put a tiny bit of effort in and then see it in 3D was just mind blowing. So I had done like small sort of C64 games or HyperCard games or basic type in kinda things before that but Quake was the one where you could just open up a texture in an editor and draw a few things and then you could play it in the game in 3D. It was like the kinda stuff you would dream about with SJI work station kinda things or when you see N64 and just blown away by the fact that it's 3D, Quake was where you could edit that stuff in 3D which was just kind of a revelation for me and a big change from what I was doing before, which was just kinda 2D simpler expected things in '96 or whatever, by that time most of the other kinds of games were pretty mature 2D stuff so Quake was yeah, kinda mind blowing. And again, it wasn't just the texture stuff, it was everything, you could make models, you could do animation, you could write code, it had this really nice Quake C system. So it was just really the perfect thing for me at that moment in time, just to be able to do that kind of stuff easily and then get it right into the game and actually play it. - [Danny] What was the aspect of it that appealed to you back then because, you know, you seem to be the type of person who enjoys many facets of this type of work, was there an aspect of it that spoke to you in particular back then, was it programming or was it, did you just like, I don't know, making something that actually sort of existed as quickly as possible in that process. - [Lucas] Yeah, probably that last one. I started doing textures which was the easiest thing, you could just take one of the textures and there were tools right away that would convert to the, you know, some PNG or BMB that you could edit and then it would convert back to the Quake format. So that's what I started doing. I guess at that time I fancied myself an artist, although it really wasn't very good. You could be not that great and it'd still look okay 'cause it was transforming so much to put in 3D. So I started with textures and I was at the time actually studying compute science so it was kind of a natural slide right into the Quake C stuff and programming some of the logic when maybe our programmer had too much stuff to do or something on a couple of the mods we were working on and I decided to just like slip in and write some system or fuck around with the code a little bit. And once I was kinda in that position of being comfortable doing art and then programming I, I mean, I kinda realized this before that time but it was I was very comfortable, basically, doing lots of different stuff and sort of not killing myself on any one thing. Kind of trying to decide where I should spend my energy and what would be important in this case, would it be better looking or better behavior or better sounding, I kinda like that engineering challenge of allocating resources and it worked out for me because, not that I could all those things very well but I was at least interested in doing all those different disciplines when making a game. - [Danny] Right, and I can sort of appreciate how you ended up then working as an independent developer. What I'm kinda interested in then is what was it like working at Naughty Dog where I imagine you were probably pigeon holed into a specific type of work, right? - [Lucas] Sort of, Naughty Dog was really nice because when I started there I was the GUI tools guy, which means making the graphical tool for the designers to use or the artists to use or things like that, and that was not a popular position. - [Danny] Right. - [Lucas] So, maybe I was pigeon holed but my hole was huge and on the other side of that was a huge space for me to play around in 'cause nobody else was directing me at all basically. I could decide, okay, the designers need this kinda tool and I'm gonna make and then they're happy with it, great, they need these features, I'll do those too, that sorta thing. So for me Naughty Dog was very liberating because I had all that space and no one else was really telling me what to do, but at the same time I was working alongside just brilliant programmers and amazing artists and it's kind of a dream position basically because I needed to integrate really well but kinda on my own terms and it just worked out perfectly for me 'cause I could make these tools and then the designers and the artists could use them and I could see the final result and when you have that caliber of artist or that caliber of designer they could use anything and it'll look good so, you know, maybe it wasn't even my tools that were any good but at least I got the satisfaction of seeing the awesome stuff they were making with my tools, so it was perfect. - [Danny] When we talk to independent developers, sort of these days you're getting a lot more, I feel like graduates who are jumping straight into it but of a certain generation. Like for instance, I was just over with System Era in Seattle, they're working on Astroneer which is coming out this week, and a lot of that crew are ex-343 people. Do you think that having that sort of triple A experience is kind of like, was very important to your professional development or was it the type of thing that just, you know, even if you were learning independently you feel like you would've got to where you are now? - [Lucas] That's a good question, I think, I wouldn't generalize and say triple A but I would say specifically Naughty Dog taught me a lot about production and about kind of seeing what's important in your game as you're making it and using that to triage and to cut things and to really focus on what you have decided is important about your game, that was all critical. I think there's a slight danger in working in triple A, the quality of things that the artists and designers and sound guys and everybody and the programmers create is super super high and just the sort of production style in general is that you have very skilled people and you can give them difficult tasks and they will do a great job. And that, in my opinion, does not scale down to smaller studios, you kind of have to cut more corners, you have to rely more on your tools and your pipeline and you have to make more concessions to just produce the same amount of stuff and that's kind of, I mean, a snapshot of what I do is I try not to compete in that way. I consciously say, there's no way I can match the art skill of a Naughty Dog or a triple A studio so I'm gonna try to kinda leap, not leap frog, but I'm gonna just gonna go a completely different way and not compete on those same terms at all. So part of the challenge of making a game for me is finding that way to not compete and to make sure that the things that I create are not gonna be compared one for one against what a bigger, more resourceful studio can do. So I wouldn't say like working at Naughty Dog taught me that I can just do anything with the art, like the artists can make the most amazing things and the game is gonna be awesome for it. It was more about just the style of production that they had there taught me a lot about focus and real kind of, think about what the final result is gonna be, don't think about the components that make it up as much. I mean, the components are important but one problem I used to have as an engineer is that I would want the code to be perfect, I wanted the systems that I was designing to be elegant and to, if an engineer looked at them I wanted them to think, yeah man, that's pretty good code he's got there. But what I learned at Naughty Dog was none of that matters, what matters is what happens when the player puts the controller in their hand. And a lot of the times those two things are connected but a lot of times they're not and it's a difficult lesson to learn if you're strictly an engineer all the time, to sort of back off on your number one OCD skill. - [Danny] Right. - [Lucas] Actually, what's more important is that, even if this is kind of shitty code here, it works pretty much, I can predict how it works and I know that the end result will sorta be like this and that feels really good to the player so that was a good lesson too. - [Danny] Right, yeah, we'll get into the sort of, the economy of independent development in a second 'cause I'm very interested in talking to you about that, especially somebody who sort of works from home, myself as well. But first of all I guess, that initial leap to go your own way, to leave the collaborative workspace of Naughty Dog, where did that come from? - [Lucas] Well, it started before Naughty Dog actually because in college I was working on Quake mods with a couple of friends, international friends, we decided to start a company in Virginia, not far from you actually. - [Danny] Yeah, was it Richmond where you grew up, in that area? - Yeah, yeah, in Richmond. - Yeah, cool - [Lucas] We decided to start a company together and we were small, you know, four or five guys, and we were workin' on weird games, different games that we thought could sell. So that didn't work out in the end and I ended up going to LA to get real work where somebody could just pay me but in the back of my mind, even working at Naughty Dog or working in serious games, I had always kinda felt not out of place, but man I really wish I could be working on my own stuff. And when it came time for Uncharted 3 I basically thought, well, I have a bunch of ideas that I want to do, small games, experimental stuff that I can do by myself or with my wife, who's also a game programmer so I'm just gonna try to do that now instead of staying around for the next sequel or whatever, I'm gonna try to do that instead. So it wasn't so much that I was rejecting anything about Naughty Dog, it was just I was kind of pining for the old times when I had less responsibility but also not a small piece of a big picture but kind of the only piece of a very small picture. - [Danny] At that stage was there projects that you had sort of on the horizon, like on your mind's horizon that you wanted to do or is it more a case of just having that sort of process where you could, you know, set your own destination and work on things the way you wanted to? - [Lucas] Well at Naughty Dog on Uncharted 1 and Uncharted 2 was pretty crazy, it was a lot of work so I didn't have a lot of time to think about other stuff. I was totally occupied with those games while I was working on them but there was a time when we had shipped, I don't remember the date exactly, but there was a time when I had some free time, basically we had just shipped something or we were about to ship something, some big milestone had finished, and I wrote a game called Mightier with my wife and it was experimental kind of puzzle platformer game. That was a lot of fun and just working on that was kind of the culmination of an idea I had been thinking about for awhile and we made it and it was a lot of fun and we got nominated for the IGF and that kind of put a little seed, you know, planted a little seed that maybe I should start thinking about these sorts of games more. And that's kinda just what happened over the next year or whatever when I was still working at Naughty Dog, thinking, you know, I gotta couple ideas here and there but actually none of that was a reason to leave, it was more just that Uncharted 2 had shipped and if I'm gonna leave now is really the best time. I don't wanna start working on a new project and leave in the middle of that, if there's gonna be a sever it's gonna be now so. We hadn't really figured out what we're gonna do when we left our jobs until we left, we left and we kinda just played around with a bunch of ideas and then came up with Helsing's Fire. It wasn't, you know, oh man, I really wanna make a Helsing's Fire, I gotta leave Naughty Dog to do it, it was more, okay now what are we gonna do with it, we've left and we decided to try this independent games thing, let's try this, a couple different ideas, and okay let's do this one sort of thing. - [Danny] It's been fun diving back into your design history, especially on your website, you have a bunch of games on there, sort of Flash games that people can go play right now. And it's been fun I guess backwards charting maybe some design influence that came from those early projects too, but the game that most people sort of know you from, even now perhaps, is Papers Please, which is interesting because it's a game that's sort of the elevator pitch for, not necessarily something maybe that you'd imagine people would get very excited about but obviously, as game playing experience, it's incredibly compelling. What do you think it is about Papers Please that actually sort of cemented its place within the gaming zeitgeist when it came out in 2013? - [Lucas] Good question, if I knew I could sell it in a packet. I mean, I think, you know, if you ask me I would say it's very different from the other games that are available so if you in the off chance want a game about checking passports you gotta come to me, basically and that was kinda my theory about me making games alone is my only chance is really to make something you can't get somewhere else easily. So Papers Please was kind of that and it was, I didn't have visions of grandeur with that game, I was sort of making the game that I would wanna play as a kind of analytical kind of OCD-ish kind of details oriented person. And I tried to capture good gameplay and weave it with a narrative just kind of, you know, as I would want to be in a game I play so I didn't kind of think, I'm aiming for a zeitgeist here, I was thinking, okay, I need to make something different and these mechanics I have work pretty well for this kind of story and if I can put them together in an interesting way then I would like the way it turned out in the end and yeah, it's a little bit of luck I think as well. The timing kind of worked out with the explosion of streaming games or YouTube let's plays and sort of things where Papers Please I think works pretty well in that format because you can role play as the inspector and, you know, somebody who's playing that game can be funny and can be fun to watch when they play it and I think that lined up pretty well with just the timing of when I released the game, which is pure luck, you know, that's not something I had planned. Marketing wise I didn't do anything for that game that you would actually consider marketing so, you know, there wasn't a whole lot of clever planning on my part for that, I was really just trying to make a game that I thought I would enjoy and everything else sort of, you know, fell into place. - [Danny] You say that that wasn't a lot of sort of marketing done around it, but it did have a very strong trailer, like I still remember the music, you know, maybe it's just 'cause I'm a video guy or whatever but I remember it was very well cut to the music and compelling, did you work on that as well yourself? - [Lucas] Yeah, I made that too. So, one of the things about picking game ideas for me, when I sit down I collect, as I'm doing anything I'm always thinking, okay, that might make a cool game, and I'll just write down a quick note about it. And I sort of collect those over time and then the ones that stick in my mind the most I sort of focus on those more. So something like Papers Please or even Obra Dinn, when I'm even thinking about the idea I'm thinking, how could I express this in a trailer? If it can't imagine right now a cool trailer for this then it's probably not worth pursuing. And it's kind of part of the decision I think about making games is at the very beginning like that. So it's not the idea that I like this other game and I wanna make a game like that, only better, it's that I wanna make this game and I can sort of see all the way through how it's gonna be, how I can market it, in air quotes, or how I can talk about it or how I can think about it for, you know, a year or four and half years or whatever it will take to get it done. So the initial idea is very important to me. So something like Papers Please where it's a game about checking passports, I can already kind of imagine that it, you can have a trailer just showing the guy denying passports the whole time and it can be interesting, basically. - [Danny] Last week had Marijam Didzgalvyte on who works for Game Workers Unite and we were talking about politics and games and political games and we talked about Papers Please 'cause it was actually something she wrote an article about years ago. Sort of, she's Lithuanian and she was quite critical of it because she felt like wasn't political in the way that she was maybe expecting. Were you trying to make a political game or were you literally trying to make a game about checking passports and the sort of, the wider theme that's very well presented in the game sort of came from that, like what was the impetus of this? Was it meant to be political or was it something that you were just compelled with that sort of, you know, that OCD nature of checking passports at border sections? - [Lucas] Yeah, I never set out to make a political game and I think for me personally, I couldn't start with the message and then make a good game out of it. If you gave me an assignment and said make a game that projects this message I probably couldn't do it very well. It was really the core mechanics that I had that I felt, first I can make a fun game out of it, for me, I can make it where you're just checking, you're correlating information, that could be fun, the mechanics of that could be fun. And then I started working on the narrative and I wanted that kind of complexity of that lack of clarity 'cause a lot of politics is about lack of clarity in my opinion so I wanted to express sort of how, not both sides are equal but both sides believe in their cause fairly strongly and it's hard to present that in a movie or a book but when you have an interactive medium like games it becomes a lot more possible to put the player in the position where suddenly it's not so clear cut what they would do in the situation. And it wasn't until I had the mechanics and some idea about the narrative that that became important to me to express that. And I didn't wanna make it very clearly for one side or the other because, I don't know, to me the game is a lot more powerful when the player's kinda stuck in the middle there and they're not, they don't have enough information really to even decide who are the good guys and who are the really bad guys so to me that's like life, you don't ever really know the whole story of anything and you still have to make decisions, you still have to live and work that way. So, yeah, I did not start out with a message and an idea that I wanted to teach the player something, it was more, with the tools I had I recognized there was an interesting way to construct an interactive narrative here that the player could enjoy. - [Danny] And then obviously the game went onto great critical and commercial success as well, and I believe the only other time we've ever talked actually was I believe you received, was it the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the IGF that year? - [Lucas] Yeah. - [Danny] Gamespot had me backstage interviewing everyone coming off and we talked for probably about 30 seconds but obviously you know, then you know, you were well known within the industry and within the independent industry but then you became sort of infamous within the wider game player community. So what was it like then trying to make a second game? Because suddenly, you know, you've got a lot of eyes on you and there have been many creators who have created a game that has been very successful and then the pressures of having that follow up prove to be too much, how did you sort of deal with it and how did the concept for Obra Dinn sort of come out of that? - [Lucas] That whole follow up thing, sophomore effort, you know, it's not my sophomore game, I've made a lot of games so there wasn't as much pressure in that sense, the can I even do it, or can I even make a game, that was fine, there was a lot of pressure of about how to follow up with Papers Please. I spent a couple years worrying about that, and that's, you know, one of the reasons why Obra Dinn took so long, it took me a long time to get tired of worrying about that, more or less, which is what happened. You know, I stressed out about it for two or three years and then finally said, I just gotta finish this game. Not, fuck it, but very close to, fuck it, I gotta finish this game, more like, damn it, I've gotta finish this game. - [Danny] You got kids, you know, you gotta be careful. - [Lucas] Yeah well, that's a good point, I got kids and they're growing in front of my eyes and if I don't just finish this game then I can't sort of focus on them again. I wanted to put the game away and focus on the kids more so that was a good incentive. And that's enough, you know, having kids was actually really important for me because even if Obra Dinn sucked and was a huge failure my kids don't care, they don't even know about any of that stuff and so that support was always there, whether Obra Dinn was good or not, so that helped a lot and that took a couple years to even see because of just kind of Papers Please was a whirlwind for me and it wasn't until things cooled off and I'd been working on Obra Dinn for a long time that I realized that like, even if it sucks I'm just gonna finish it and release it. But the other thing is kind of the way I make games is I try to get a lot of pieces together that I think will make a good game without actually knowing exactly how the game is gonna turn out in the end and changing things along the way, maybe the way I envisioned the game originally is not how it ends up but what I envisioned was made of these parts and then I just reshuffled them along the way and added a few things and took away a few things and then I released the game. And Papers Please was like that, and Obra Dinn was like that too. So from very early I had pretty good confidence in the pieces I had for Obra Dinn. I wasn't confident that I could actually make a good game out of it but I thought the individual pieces, there's probably a good game here, maybe I can't find it but I feel like these elements could come together and could make a good game so it's worth working on the elements sort of independently without seeing exactly how they're gonna work together, just having kind of a little bit of faith that they're gonna go together okay. And that pulled me through, you know, a couple down periods over the years as well. - [Danny] I've read before about how Papers Please sort of came from, you know, your travels and going to border guards and having that experience and, you know, that the idea sort of springs from that. How about the Return of the Obra Dinn, where did you come up with the sort of overall concept? There's one game actually that's on your website dukope.com, the Sea Has No Claim which I've really enjoyed playing, which has some sort of both graphical and sort of thematic connections to Obra Dinn, is there any connective tissue there or where did the idea for Obra Dinn sort of stem from originally? - [Lucas] I mean, the project itself started with, I wanna make a one bit 3D game. So I didn't have the idea of the ship or anything, the murder mystery, the watch, the flashbacks, none of that, it was really, let me sit down and try to make a one bit 3D game. And once I started doing that I had a couple different ideas I could do with it, one of them was set in Egypt, one of them would be on a ship, one of them was somewhere else, a power plant, and just sort of thinking about having to do everything I thought, well the easiest thing is gonna be a ship 'cause it's a contained space so I kinda just decided, okay, it's gonna be a ship and then I started researching. And at the same time I was getting my chops down with Maya again, I'd used Maya a long time ago but I hadn't done a lot of 3D stuff recently so a lot of learning was happening on the tool side which meant less focus on what am I actually gonna do with this so by the time I realized the ship was gonna be a huge pain in the ass and a ton of work it was too late, I was already committed to it. So that kinda gave me the ship idea, and you're right that there's kind of vapors of Obra Dinn in my other games, there's another game called Six Degrees of Sabotage which is kind of where you're recognizing connections between groups of people, which also is thematically similar to Obra Dinn. I thought about this a little bit when I was giving, somebody asked me for some advice about their game and my advice kinda boiled down to add a lot more people to your game and so when that happened I realized that the way I think about narratives I guess and gameplay really falls back on just having lots of people, something about having a lot of people and characters and interactions, to me is mechanically provides a lot of opportunity and also gives me kinda motivation for building an interesting narrative. So Obra Dinn is just a ton of people, and like I said, I didn't know exactly how they were all gonna fit together but I kinda felt, if you gave me 60 people there's gotta be something I can do with that, there's gotta be some way I can put this together. It's kind of like establishing the problem space and then recognizing not the solution, but that okay, I seen the shape of that problem before and it looks really interesting, I wanna try to solve that. - [Danny] When you look back at that, you know, the manifest of all those names, those 60 people, is there any ones that stand out to you, that became like little favorites of yours? - [Lucas] Well, an interesting element of the game is that I did not attach the names to those characters until kind of late. I modeled them randomly, I just created a bunch of random characters, dressed them randomly as well and then named them randomly at the end, or near the end at least. But what I tried to do is I tried to make a lot of people kind of human, so not black or white or not clearly evil or clearly good, maybe there's one or two fully evil guys there but you know, they have motivations that maybe could be justified in some way. So one thing that surprised me is that when I created the characters and I kind of assigned their stories and wrote all the scripts and things like that, I was thinking very mechanically at the low level, so I need to sprinkle enough clues around that the player can figure out who they are, and also at the high level of what do these characters mean to each other and how are they interacting and who generally is on this side or on that side. And I wanted to show that on these ships that it's, first off, they're very dangerous, people die all the time, and so your survival depends on, to some extent, getting along with people. And you know, you spend a very long time in a very small space with these people and it just by the nature of it, you have to get along. If you don't get along then someone gets hurt or someone dies or they get off at the next stop or something like that so I wanted to express that in the game, I'd read a lot of literature about these ships before designing the story and the characters and things, and some of the characters, when the player meets them initially they look like bad guys and I wanted to sort of set that up where your first impression is that this guy is a murdering asshole but as you see them more and more you realize that they're human and they have friends who were killed or they were put in these difficult situations that sort of flipped the switch in them or just made them worry more about their survival than everyone else's survival or things like that so one of the good examples of that is this guy Brennan, Henry Brennan, who when you first meet him seems basically just like a tough guy who's bloodthirsty and wants to kill people but if you think about in the context of a ship and what people's duties are, he's not doing half bad, you know, maybe he's a little bit aggressive but you kinda need somebody like that on a ship or you need people to do that sort of thing in these situations when there's, I can't say these kinds of disasters 'cause it's pretty fantastic, but when there's that kind of trial, you know, these guys are not necessarily bad guys, they're just the ones who have a clear vision of what to do and if some people get hurt in the acts then kind of that's something they also calculated. So Brennan was one of those guys and what surprised me actually is my wife was the first person to play the game all the way through and the whole game didn't come together until maybe two months before release, to be actually be able to play from beginning to end. And she really liked Brennan which was kind of an indication that the kind of set up that I was going for worked because he, yeah, he's pretty, he kills a lot of people, basically. - [Danny] His face kind of keeps appearing. - [Lucas] Yeah, he's a pretty aggressive dude but he has qualities enough that my wife was, liked him, basically. - [Danny] That's awesome, yeah. You know, I encourage anyone who's played the game to Google Henry Brennan and once the face pops up you'll know exactly who we're talking about. One of the things that stood out to me as well as an Irish person who, you know, I lived in London for a number of years too, was the voice cast for this game was tremendous. And, you know, even outside of that I felt like I sort of had an unfair advantage in that, you know, accents were very cleverly delivered. There was one actual accent that was from the north of Ireland that I thought, oh, that must be somebody from Ireland, there's a character called Patrick O'Hagan in the game, I actually went to school with somebody called Patrick O'Hagan so, can you talk about the, I guess, the work in getting all of those voices? How much did you know about different voices in the British Isles and Europe I guess as well, and also abroad, there's quite a complex number of languages being used as well. How much work went into that and did it come easily to you or was it the type of thing that took a lot more work than you were expecting? - [Lucas] That's a good question, actually it's one of my favorite questions about Obra Dinn and it's good to talk to you about it 'cause you know these accents. I do not know any of these accents but I knew that they were important and one of things I like about making games is to pick something like that that is normally not important and make it important. So, normally when you hire a voice actor they can do lots of different accents and it would've been very easy for me to hire a few Americans to do all those accents and just call it a day, but I knew that, first off, I would be torn up in the UK because they would know they were all bad. - [Danny] Absolutely. - [Lucas] I personally have heard people, foreigners do bad southern US accents so I know that feeling when it's wrong and I didn't want anybody to have that feeling but I had made this sort of critical importance on the accents. And it's the same thing with the audio in the game, I wanted to make a game where, it's not just that I wanted a game with great audio, I wanted a game where the quality of the audio was actually critical to the, I mean, it's kind of making it hard for me but the quality of the audio is important to the actual mechanics of the game. So in this case the accents of the characters was important to the mechanics of the game. So I basically had to just find native voice actors for every case and because I don't know those accents myself I have friends who were there at least who could help me decide if they're, you know, if it's not somebody, if it's somebody doing a Welsh accent for instance, it's actually kinda tricky to find good Welsh actors easily. One of the things I didn't do was I didn't hire a casting agent to go out and do this for me, I basically just went to Voices.com or Voice123.com and talked with their casting people and they would do it but all of those actors there kinda skew for a certain region so some roles were hard to cast and like I said earlier, a lot of different people can do a lot of different accents so it's not that when you say you have an Irish character you may get lots of people who are not Irish auditioning for that. And in some cases I would use those guys if I could play that there audition for a native speaker and they could tell me, that dude sounds Irish, then okay, he's good. What was most important to me was the performance. If their performance sounded convincing I wanted to hire them for the role. Then I would send it to somebody who could recognize that accent and they would say it's good or it's bad. Hopefully they would say it's good and I could use that performance and that actor. Sometimes they would say it's bad and I would say, well, okay, I'm sorry, I have to find somebody else. In one case, it was bad, or it was not the accent that I wanted for the region that I wanted but the performance was so good that I changed the character to be a different region, basically. So he was supposed to be Welsh but he had a straight up English accent, RP maybe, and so I decided this guy is, for the purpose of this character, I need the performance to be very good and his performance was excellent so it's more important to get that than it is that his location is correct so I changed his location in the game. - [Danny] Yeah, and I guess then sort of how that reacts to the mechanics of the game in that, you know, I felt like I had an unfair advantage 'cause I could pick out a Welsh accent and a Scottish accent as opposed to say, a north English accent. But then also, there's a lot of sort of classism going on on a ship, right, so you have second mates and the captain and all them, you know, and the bosun sort of had a, they're a certain strata of English society, well I guess in the case of the bosun he's Austrian, but you know, you're talking sort of well to do private educated English people but then you also have like you know, all of the midshipmen who were from sort of more working class parts of England. So, like, how did you account for the fact that people in the British Isles would probably have basically more information to solve these clues than, you know, people who weren't from there? - [Lucas] Well, it's a good point about that, and what's interesting to me is that I didn't know all that stuff, really. I didn't know that most of the people in the UK can pick out, within 100 kilometer radius, where somebody is from based on their accent. - [Danny] Totally. - [Lucas] And not only that, but their class within that region, they know where they are on that scale of, you know, working class or well to do. I had an idea about that but not really how specific it was, how powerful that skill is in most British people so, luckily, when you hire native voice actors and you tell them about the character they know, so they know how to read, they know how to perform, the actors know this stuff so on that side the authenticity was okay because I didn't know but the actors knew, that's one reason you know you hire good actors. On the gameplay side I didn't know any of these things. So for me, I can assume those clues are there but I can't rely on them, personally. So I had to supplement all those places where this guy's identity is revealed by his Scottish accent, I had to supplement that with some other clues somewhere else, for me personally but also for anybody else who's not from the Isles. So that was just kind of naturally baked in to the way the game was made by an American who doesn't know these things as well as a British person would. So I knew it had to be accurate but I also knew that I wouldn't be able to tell and it wouldn't help me personally so kind of a tricky thing to think about but it basically meant that I had to be okay with people in the UK would play the game and would have more clues than other people who didn't know those accents, which was, you know, I think a small sacrifice in my opinion because I didn't know how useful those clues were I couldn't really consider them as something really that I should worry about. - [Danny] Yeah, and I mean, as you've said, you know, having sort of accents in games are so often the opposite, they're kind of misleading, you have to kind of read the intention of the author in a way where as, I can definitely say that from my perspective, it added a richness to the experience that I really appreciated. So too did the just general sound effects of the game. A lot of this game involves, you know, sort of stepping, you know, not using your eyes at all and just kind of going into your minds eye and imaging the scene before it's eventually sort of presented to you at the end of the sound clip. Can you talk about the process of doing that because, you know, the production value on those is very, very high but also there's lots of clues. Like, you're telling clues in audio which we're not really used to in games. - [Lucas] Yeah, that was, like I said earlier, that was kind of a thing I recognized I could do and I really wanted to try it, basically. It was a really interesting challenge for me, is to make the audio mechanically important. I have done sound effects in a lot of games for myself over the years so it's something I enjoy doing. When starting this project I didn't realize the challenge really, the full scope of the challenge, it was extremely difficult and one thing that made it harder was I didn't record much of it myself. I recorded a few full effects here and there but most of it was sourced from sound libraries. So what I would mostly do is just spend a long time, a long time, searching sound libraries for just the right sound effect. And a lot of times not finding it and deciding to rewrite things or change things a little bit so that I could express what I wanted, something useful or some kind of clue or something. And I wrote the whole game so instead of, like you can imagine if it was a team of multiple people with the sound guys here and the story guys and design guys separately, it would be a lot harder I think, but for me, because I wrote the whole game I had every scene in my head, I can close my eyes and see the whole thing, in movement and where they are and what the ship is doing and everything else, it's all just in my head. So pulling out from that what's important sound wise was a little bit tricky. Sound is about focus, if you actually stick a mic in one of those situations you would be overwhelmed with the amount of things that you would hear. So part of the challenge there was figuring out exactly what I need to be playing for it to give the information to the player but also enough sounds that you feel like you're there. So it's not just the key sounds that you would need to figure out what's going on, but also to make you feel like you're on a ship in this place during a storm or whatever. And then balancing all those things together, yeah, it was a pain in the ass. And it was the kind of thing where I normally when I work on a game I jump around from here to there, so I work on some art and then okay, get tired of working in Photoshop so let me do some programming, let me do some sound, I do some music. For the audio sound effect stuff I had to sit down for a month and a half basically and just work on it straight. So yeah, it was hard and it required a lot of focus over a long period of time which I wasn't used to at that point so it was kind of a production wrinkle for me but in the end it was a lot of fun, it was a lot of fun and I, the thing I like most about it is that it's, it's like I said earlier, I wasn't just trying to make it sound good, I had a gameplay core mechanic goal with the sound that I tried to execute. - [Danny] You talked about how the ship, the idea of the location for the ship was sort of born from an earlier process and then you sort of went into that, the story telling process to try and flesh that out, one of the interesting things you said, like sort of making something that's not important important, one of those things in this game is I guess the language of seafaring. Like, I feel like everyone, once they've completed this game they sort of get boats in a way that maybe they didn't when they started. Was that an advantage maybe of, you know, from like a world building perspective or even from a puzzle perspective, that fact that like people don't know what a bosun is maybe or a midshipmen or topman. - [Lucas] When I started, when I decided I'm gonna make a game about an East Indian trade ship that has this problem I researched a lot about it and when I was building the ship itself I had to do a lot of research about how those ships are constructed, and that is a deep, deep. -Yeah, I bet. - [Lucas] Deep rabbit hole, let me tell you. People have been making model ships for hundreds and hundreds of years and those guys are crazy, full on 100% nuts. So every single piece of a ship has a specific name and they're all weird and funny and they're usually like, it was heard in Italian and then repeated by the Portuguese and then British started using it kinda thing. So that to me was super interesting, just how deep, how both wide and deep the custom knowledge is for sailing ships. And I didn't even begin to scratch the surface of that with the game because I knew that I couldn't, there was just too much crazy shit in there that I could've referenced that I didn't. I basically wanted just enough to add the flavor, like you say, but without confusing the player too much, or at least in cases where it wasn't that important. And what's funny is there's a glossary in the game that defines a couple of these terms, that was like in the last two weeks of the game I added that glossary. - Oh, really? - [Lucas] That wasn't in there, yeah. I had this idea that people would go search for it on Google or something, which, you know, what a terrible idea. - [Danny] I think I did, I think, yeah, I remembered looking at the glossary maybe 40 minutes in and I was like, all right, you know what, fuck this, I need to like learn about this sorta stuff. But I had Googled on my phone I think what something was, like a midshipmen maybe or. - [Lucas] Yeah, all the terms, nobody else uses them so you just gotta use a few of them and suddenly you feel like you're there kinda thing. So I recognized that very early, that the potential was there and I really wanted to do that. And, again, that's the kinda thing where there's not a lot of games that are gonna reference these terms as if they're important. They may throw them around just for some flavor but in this case you actually need to know what a topman is or what a midshipmen is so I also like that aspect of it, and I tried to pick words like that where they weren't totally abandoned words, they were kind of maybe, someone might've heard them recently if they read like a Patrick O'Brian novel or something like that, they would get the references. - [Danny] I could see that, yeah, there sort of evocative of what they are as well, some of them, you know, other ones maybe not so much. I've got a million questions for you about Return of the Obra Dinn but I feel like I should throw in a couple of Patron ones, seeing as they're the ones funding all this, is that okay? - [Lucas] Yeah, absolutely. - [Danny] Thanks so much to all of our Patron to help make our work ad free and they all get this show a day early, but of course, like all of our stuff, it's all free for everyone. Patreon.com/Noclip if you're interested in helping us out. The first one comes from Brett G, says, what do you consider the cannon monitor choice for Obra Dinn, Macintosh for the win. The art style of the game, very unique, I can sort of, I'm reading into what you're talking about, it's maybe a way for you to do a lot of art on your own in a 3D space without going absolutely insane. But yeah, what's the cannon monitor choice for you, which way do you play? - [Lucas] Definitely Macintosh, he's right, of course. That was the first color, that was the first and only color I had for a long time until somebody asked me, or a couple people asked me for RGB sliders-- - Oh, really? - [Lucas] For the black and white colors and I'm not a guy who's gonna put RBG sliders in because there's too many ones that look terrible, basically. - [Danny] You literally made GUI tools, like that should be right down your alley. - [Lucas] Yeah, my solution would be to give like the nine colors that looked good basically and not give those sliders to make the bad colors. And that's kinda what I did and I, so the Mac colors are the ones that for me, I developed a whole game on the Mac. And then when I was sort of playing through the game and testing it a lot I would try one of the other colors and the one I like the most, after the Mac, 'cause there's an IBM sort of brownish brown and white one that I like as well, I can't remember the name of it but it's not the green IBM one, it's the other one. It is a nice soothing color as well. - [Danny] Next question comes in from Chris Petter, says, did you draw inspiration from other detective games when designing Obra Dinn? If so, were there any aspects in how that genre has been tackled in past games that you wanted to rectify on your own? I was watching a live stream you did on the GDC channel recently and I was interested to hear that lots of the games that have come out over the past couple of years are first person detective games like the Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you actually hadn't played. Yeah, was there any games that did sort of inspire you with Obra Dinn? - [Lucas] I don't think so, not with the detective aspect anyways. I was visually inspired by the Macintosh games I played as a kid but design wise, no, I was trying to do something different and then games like Ethan Carter or Edith Finch or some of the Sherlock Holmes games, people would tell me that they're kinda similar to the old demo I had or they would suggest to me, check them out. But I kinda just, I felt like if I look a those games I'm either gonna change what I'm doing or try to do something different. I figured like the best thing to do was just not play those games until I'm done with. - Right. - What I'm working on here. Yeah, and Obra Dinn, like I said, I had the pieces of what I felt could make a good game but I didn't have the whole thing together in one piece until very late. So you could kinda say I didn't know what I was doing for a long time, which meant, if I'm inspired then I kinda would put them together in a certain way but I was putting them together in lots of different ways trying to figure out the best way to to do it, yeah, on the one hand I'm trying to make a different game so I don't want to take too much inspiration from anything. But on the other hand I don't really know what I'm doing so I'm even not together enough to be inspired properly I guess. - [Danny] Ben Visnes asked, when I played Obra Dinn I was struck by how consistent everything was. I didn't notice any information that would be misleading or a red herring, so my questions are, what was the writing process like, did you write every crew members story up front? - [Lucas] No, definitely not, and it's a good point he makes because I intentionally avoided red herrings. There were a lot of places where I had the opportunity to fool the player into thinking one thing but then revealing another. And I actually do it in I think, there's one death where the means of death is not totally clear and I did that intentionally there but for identities I tried very hard to make your first sort of supposition the right one. So not trying to fool the player, just because there's 60 people, it's just too much. When you start trying to put red herrings in and kind of tricking the player I felt like that was just way too much. I was really worried the whole game that I'm asking way too much from the player and the book itself is kind of my solution to that to help the player understand what is going on, who is who, to let them traverse the web a little easier. So I was very worried that the game is just way way way too hard the whole time I was working on it. So I consciously avoided red herrings like that. That doesn't mean there aren't any in the game, actually, there is an unintentional one, a pretty big one near the beginning of the game where I didn't realize it but there's some dialogue about a character that's referring to one character but actually if you play the game and you're not me who doesn't know everything you would think it's referring to a different character and you would be confused about that for a long time, and that's, yeah, I regret that that slipped through. My wife didn't catch it, I didn't catch it, it's only later on when people started talking about the game they thought, oh, this guy was that guy for the longest time and I, you know, kinda just sighed and regret that a little bit. So I really didn't want that to happen, I wanted it to be not tricking the player just because, not that I love the player but I was sure that it was just way too difficult and I shouldn't be fucking around like that. - [Danny] I mean, how did you even play test this? If you're saying your wife is the first person to play the game from start to finish, were you still like sending it to other people and having them give you feedback? 'Cause like I just can't imagine how you would possibly be able to put your self in the position of a new player when you know how everything works, you're the puppet master. - [Lucas] Yeah, this is another question I like. I didn't play test this game very much at all, I play tested and old build without the book and that's when I realized I need the book. But my solution was tools, lots and lots of tools. So one of the things I do when I try to solve a problem is I need to visualize the problem. So in the case of this game, there are ways you can build tools that let you visualize that there are enough clues everywhere for this character, for example. So you don't need to play through, you just can see, okay, there's a clue for this guy here, here, and here, that's enough. This person's identity is revealed at this point and then he, once you know his identity you can figure out this other guy's and this other guy's identity. And you can, without playing the game you can graph that on a directed acyclic graph, you can graph when identities are revealed. And that hooks into my kind of heavy dependence on tools to make this happen, is that I can write a tool that generates that graph, then I can just look at the graph and I can see, there's a problem here, this guy, you're not gonna know who this guys is in order to figure out who this guy is so okay, I need to add more clues in the scene. So basically figuring out sort of the problem space and then the way to visualize it for me was the solution instead of building something and having somebody test it, building it again and having somebody play it, that sort of loop of play testing I didn't need for this particular thing because I could express it and visualize it in a way that allowed me to just check it instantly, basically. - [Danny] Wow. The book is obviously a massive part of the design of this game which solves a lot of problems I'm sure for you, but I can't imagine how difficult it was to sort of figure out how to use it. It's almost like a diegetic interface in a way and also the ability for you to, I guess travel on the pages at least between the different death scenes. I remember hearing a bunch of people getting frustrated that they couldn't just, you know, bounce between, you know, teleport almost between the different death scenes after a certain point, but can you just kinda speak to the design philosophy of the book, was it really important that people, you know, got familiar with the boat and walking around it and that the death scenes themselves were sort of more isolated little pockets that they couldn't get too lost in? - [Lucas] I think so, yeah. That decision is kinda rooted in the original concept of the game where you didn't have the book so how are you gonna fast travel if you don't have the book? The book seems obvious in retrospect but I was pulling my hair out for a long time about how to structure and arrange the events on the ship for a long time in a way that the player could reference and understand easily. And actually if you look in the book there's a deck map which shows all the flashbacks, the location of the body of each flashback and there's like this, once you've finished them all there's like this really crazy system of arrows that connects them all and if you look at it it's just a jumble of spaghetti arrows and Xs and shit. That was originally my solution to letting the player understand, there was no book, it was just that map with arrows everywhere on it. So you can see, it took me a long time to get from that to a full book with a page for each flashback, divided into chapters with referencing and bookmarks and all that stuff. But once I had the book I realized how useful it was and how it contextualized almost everything in the game and the metaphor is so easy to understand that I got a lot of things for free basically by doing the book. And, you know, even having like a death on each page wasn't obvious from the beginning, I had tried a lot of things for how to arrange the structure of the book and sorta ended up with this one. So in my mind the book was always a supplement to helping you understand the story, it wasn't a way to navigate. And I have this long term problem with the Obra Dinn that there is frankly way too much magic going on. There was a real conflict for me between the watch and the, spoiler, the mermaids. And, you know, let's be real, if you had that watch you would get right back on that rowboat, go straight back to the mainland and just rule the world, basically. So I had a lot of really cool ideas about things to do with the watch and I cut them all. I decided, the watch cannot be the star here because if the watch is the star here then nothing else about this story is important at all. So I tried to downplay the watch a little bit, and likewise, the book, to me, being able to fast travel with the book is just too video gamey, too magical. Now, that's kinda dumb because it's a video game and there's a lot of stuff about this that's very video gamey and I personally usually lean towards being more video gamey when it's convenient to the player. But for some reason, maybe because of the way that the book came about and the way the game was developed, I just could not give up the player having to walk around the boat to go to different areas. To me, that way of showing the player's intent was just too good. To say like, you don't flip to a page and click a button to say you wanna see this thing again, you put the book away and you walk to it on the ship. And yeah, it was a really tough call for me because it is inconvenient for the player so it wasn't easy for me to say you're not gonna use the book but it just, to me I couldn't have you skip right to the flashback. I felt like, one of the problems is like, you skip right to the flashback let's say, through the book, and then you're, the way you're playing the game is by skipping around, so you would wanna skip out of the flashback too. But I've got this system where you walk through a door to get out of a flashback, so I could satisfy the first one and say you can travel to the thing. But then I've also gotta satisfy the fact that you can get out of it quickly. That kind of slippery slope to me was just, especially at the point where I finished this game, I was beyond done with this thing. I was so exhausted from working on this, and I made so many very big design changes near the end that it was basically like, I don't care if this game gets like a 0% because you can't fast travel, I can't deal with the design changes that that's gonna inject into this game. So, you know, I could justify it now and say that I don't want the player traveling around but really one of the really important parts of that decision is that it would've changed so many things so late at that point in the game that I just couldn't manage it. - [Danny] Another sort of, I feel like, aspect of the game that gives the player a little bit of help is the verbs. Am I right in saying that there are some deaths that you can sort of say stabbed or speared or there's a little bit of wiggle room there? - [Lucas] Yeah, there's a lot of wiggle room, actually more than I anticipated at the beginning. It's funny, when I first had the idea for the design of this game it was mostly about figuring out how people died, it was the means of death that was the important thing. It wasn't until I had a lot more of the game together that I realized, I mean, you can see how he dies, there's no challenge there, that's not fun, and so that whole idea of constructing a sentence became kind of perfunctory, I don't know, became kind of unimportant. The identity's important but how he died, maybe we don't really care how, not that we don't care, but you can see it, it's like okay, he died this way, maybe the book can just tell me, I don't need to answer it. But for me, always, the act of building a sentence as fun. This is one of those kind of like really carnal sort of low level joys, is just selecting those verbs and those nouns and those subjects from a list and then having a sentence at the end that you could read was fun, that very low level thing was fun for me. So I never wanted to give it up, I wanted you to have to select. But I didn't want you to get hung up on it, and that was a real, real big problem actually because I didn't, when I designed, there were too many things pushing on this games design basically. So when I designed the way people died, it was on context of how to make it interesting for the player to see and how to make it fit within the story of the events of what's happening. And it was not at all how to make a sentence, how to make it easily describable with a sentence. So there are a lot of cases where, yeah, he's getting hit by something thing, what is that, is that a spear, is that a spike, what is that? And I didn't want the player to get hung up on that so what I did is I made it you could say either speared or spiked. Now the problem with that is that actually doesn't help you get hung up on it or not, you still get hung up on it, you still need to select one of those, they're both right, but you don't know that when you're worrying about which one to put in, so that is kind of a failure but I still really like just the act of building grammatical sentences with the kinda cheesy book interface, I like that. And it became I liked it so much I put a lot of work into keeping it, so doing the things where multiple fates are possible or rewriting the fate system multiple times to support localization, which was a huge can of worms. - [Danny] Got it, yeah, I can imagine, especially with the subtleties involved in those words. You know, I'm not sure if I've picked the right one but you said there was one character where their death was maybe a little bit difficult to deduce, 'cause it could've been a few things, was that by any chance Charles the midshipmen? - [Lucas] No, but he's another good one. Actually, that was a case where he died in a very cool way which is little bit undescribable in the very simple sentences that I had. So yeah, I just had to kind of put a lot of options in for that one. - [Danny] Oh is there multiple options for how Charles dies that you'll get? - Yeah. - I was wondering, 'cause like at the point of his death he's like being burned and spiked and is just like. - [Lucas] Yeah, what's kinda cool about that one is that one made me realize, and I implemented this ina few other deaths, but this one kind of opened it up a little bit, he's getting spiked, he's getting burned, and he's also getting potentially stabbed by a crewmate. So I realized that your selection says a lot about how you interpret this situation in the scene and the guilt of people. So if you think he's being stabbed by, say you don't like this character who is maybe stabbing him, then you would put in, he's being stabbed by this guy and that would be in the record, and noted by the crown or whatever. And that kinda opened up a nice extra aspect of the game that I didn't originally intend. And so I went through and I kind of tried to grow that a little bit in a few more of the deaths. But the one I'm talking about that I intentionally made ambiguous it's somebody who's dying who you think is bleeding out but actually at the moment he dies something happens that is hard to notice. And his original death was, he is bleeding out. I wrote the whole thing that way, the scenes written like that, the voice actors recorded it that way, and it wasn't until very late that I realized the potential for a small subversion in what the player expected here. Which actually ended up working better because I had this kind of, I had this problem that I needed to kill people in lots of different and interesting ways, which is a weird problem to have. And some people die in really cool ways, really quickly, you know, an explosion or their head's cut off or what not, and some people bleed out. And I gotta tell y

Danny talks to Steven Spohn about growing up as a gamer with a disability, and the work he does at the Ablegamers charity to make games more accessible. (Recorded January 10th) iTunes Page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/noclip/id1385062988 RSS Feed: http://noclippodcast.libsyn.com/rssGoogle Play: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/If7gz7uvqebg2qqlicxhay22qny Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5XYk92ubrXpvPVk1lin4VB?si=JRAcPnlvQ0-YJWU9XiW9pg Watch our docs: https://youtube.com/noclipvideo Sub our new podcast channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSHBlPhuCd1sDOdNANCwjrA Learn About Noclip: https://www.noclip.videoBecome a Patron and get early access to new episodes: https://www.patreon.com/noclip Follow @noclipvideo on Twitter Hosted by @dannyodwyerFunded by 4,913 Patrons. -------------------------------------------------------------- - [Danny] Hello and welcome to Noclip; the podcast about people who play and make video games. I'm your host Danny O'Dwyer and today I'm joined by somebody who kind of has a finger in both of the pies we generally talk about; people who play games and also people who make games. We're gonna talk to him about a lot of different areas of his work and also the ways in which he enjoys playing games as well. He is the COO of AbleGamers, he is a fellow Trending Gamer nominee survivor. I am delighted to be joined by Mr. Steven Spohn. How are you doing my friend? - [Steven]I'm doing well. Can we just talk about pies for the next 15 minutes? - [Danny] I wanted to bring up the pie because I was trying to think about how you fit into the world of video games and, in a way, your work at AbleGamers is involved in both sides of the equation. You help individuals who have trouble accessing video games to get controllers and the means by which to play the games they wanna do, but you're also talking to game studios and hardware manufacturers about they ways in which they can make it so you don't have to do the other thing. - [Steven] Yeah. The truth is when I did the game awards video, one of the things that they captured me saying was that I don't know how I got where I am and I don't know what I'm doing and it was the absolute most truthful thing I had said during the whole piece. I don't know exactly what you would call my job. My job is literally whatever AbleGamers needs and sometimes that's talking to hardware, sometimes that's talking to developers, sometimes that's talking to fundraisers, sometimes that's talking to people with disabilities who need tech support, so I have really become the Jack of all video game trade at the moment. - [Danny] I've got a lot of questions about your work at AbleGamers and we've got some from the Patrons too. We've actually been, like, I feel like we've been working on the AbleGamers documentary, in some respect, either us having conversations or filming stuff like we did last summer, it feels like it's been going on forever and it's something that we eventually will get done. Today I kind of wanna talk a bit more about Steven; about how you came to be in the position you're in because, like you said, in a way I can't imagine anyone else doing your job, but also I couldn't imagine anyone doing your job until you did it. So, let's go all the way back. When did you start playing games or when did you start getting interested in games? - [Steven] I became interested in video games actually thanks to a friend I had made in high school. We were in a vo-tech class and we were doing AutoCAD designing and... - [Danny] Oh, cool. - [Steven] I, for just a brief hot second, I wanted to be an assistant engineer and then I wondered how much work it is and I said, "Nah". - [Danny] What was the name of the class? It sounded like volt-tech class. - [Steven] It was vo-tech. - [Danny] Vo-tech? - [Steven] Yeah, vocational technical school. - [Danny] Oh, okay, okay. - [Steven] Yeah, vo-tech is like the American, "We're not going to real school, we're going to fancy 'you're going to learn actual useful life skills' classes". - [Danny] Awesome. - [Steven] Yeah, like its where your mechanics go and all the people who are gonna do computers and what they do is, or at least in my school, you did your math and your science in the morning and then they shipped you on a bus during lunch to go to the other school. It's kinda cool. - [Danny] Wow, we had something similar in Ireland. It was called Leaving Cert. Applied and it was where all my friends who are tradesmen went. Like electricians and plumbers and then they all ended up moving to Australia anyway because the economy crashed and nobody was building houses. So you were in that class and you were learning AutoCAD. Was that the first piece of software you ever encountered? - [Steven] It was the first time that I had really worked on computers for more than a few minutes. Of course, everybody had Oregon Trail on their MathLab or whatever, but I grew up poor so we didn't own a computer and that was really the only time I got to have hands on a computer from multiple hours at a time. One of my friends there worked at a computer shop and he was telling me how he just got all these parts for computers secondhand because people would turn them in for repairs and then they wouldn't want them, so he would just end up fixing them and taking them home, and I was like, "That's amazing", so he started talking me into getting into video gaming and he told me about this fabulous game where you could go online and you could have a life and you could do amazing things like walking around the town of Britain and you could fight dragons and you could own a house, and I was like, "This is amazing", and so he sort of talked me into this persistent world, he was a Guild Master in his own right. That's how I got sucked in to Ultima Online and from there I just became super interested in the alternative reality that video games present. - [Danny] Was there an element of the escapism that appealed to you? Escapism is something that we all enjoy, but perhaps somebody in your position, maybe, was there an added element of escapism for you? - [Steven] For me it was the timing of where it hit me in life. I had gone into my senior year of high school and I had discovered friends and it sounds corny, cheesy; it's something that I'm probably gonna get up on a stage and give a TED Talk about one day, but it's interesting how our school system kind of segregates people with disabilities away from the main population if you let them. They'll put you in a special classroom and they will put you in a special room to eat lunch and they really keep you almost walled off from everyone else and I was super lucky that I had a friend who talked me into doing that and I made friends. Long story short, I sort of got a huge case of senior-itis and I just didn't want to do the school thing anymore. I wanted to go have a social life because holy crap having friends is awesome! And so I just wanted to go experience that and have fun with it and it was fantastic. The only problem was that I was just at the age where we were transitioning from middle-teens to late-teens so it was a couple of years of doing... - [Danny] Hell. - [Steven] Oh, hell! But also doing video games in your friends garage, to, "Hey, let's go to the club and pick up girls." and its like "Well, the club has a stair to get into it, so I can't do that, oh damn". So I started kind of being walled off by life. Just happenstance of things not being wheelchair accessible and here's my other friend going, "Hey, here's a world where your wheelchair doesn't eff-ing matter". I don't know if I can say swears on this show. - [Danny] Say whatever you want, man. - [Steven] Right, cool, so they were like "Who the fuck cares if you're in a wheelchair. Go play this world where everybody's equal", and I was like "Oh, this is my first experience where everything is a level playing field" and it was amazing, so... Was it escaping or was it choosing to forge a different path in life? I don't think I'll ever really know the answer to that, but consequently, through the butterfly effect, deciding to do that and take that friend's advice led me to where I am right now. - [Danny] You're an incredibly social person. I feel like everyone in the industry has met you and had a conversation with you. I've noticed that you're very good at advocating for people's time, which is something that a lot of people who like having friends and like being social, they sort of don't put themselves out there to, you know, they don't want to be a bother or something like that but I've always found you to be incredibly inviting and sort of proactive in your friendships, which I think is a really important trait, especially the older you get. Video games, in that way I suppose, have sort of provided you with a lot then, in terms of both your social life and your professional life. Is it fair to say that most of that sort of revolves around the world of games? - [Steven] I think it is now. I mean, you hit the nail right on the head. When you're in your thirties, going out and making new friendships is exceedingly difficult and we could literally talk for the rest of the podcast about the difficulties of living the disabled life and having to fit in to the norms of society. But as far as the video games industry has been, to me it's been a very welcoming and inviting place and I am super honest guy, you know, you follow me on twitter, we've been friends for a couple years now. I, to my own detriment, I am way too honest sometimes and I am sure that there are people in the industry who love me and there are people who probably wish I would just stop talking so much and I feel like if you don't have some people that think you talk too much then you're probably not making change and that's what I'm trying to do. I have terminal illnesses, I have a disability for those of you who don't know me. I am aware that there is that shot clock ticking and I don't talk about it a lot but I'm aware it's there probably more than your average person and I'm trying to use all the time I've got to do something with it. - [Danny] It's an interesting dichotomy you bring up there, in that, in many ways, who could say a bad thing about Steven and AbleGamers, you know what I mean? At least, who could say it out loud? But you are kind of creating problems for companies, right? Like you're creating a problem that, by the fact that you're even having the conversation with it was a problem that they thought didn't exist. You're fashioning it for them. Is that the case? Like, is it different now talking to companies than it was when you first started doing this work? - [Steven] The difference really is that I didn't make the problem. I shined a spotlight on a problem that was in the darkness. It was always there and the more technology advances, the less accessible it becomes, just by the very definition of advancing technology. So, we banded together, me and Mark Barlet and Craig Kaufman, and a bunch of amazing people, now AbleGamers, got together and decided that we were going to take this problem head on and we changed a multi-billion dollar industry. I tell you the weirdest thing that I could ever say to another human being because it is entirely factual, you could prove it, in fact, we're doing a documentary talking about it, so it's, you know, it's something that's kind of shock and awe to even try to talk about it, but here we are, years later, where developers went from laughing at us and walking away to now coming to talk to us, so, you know, it's pretty amazing. I am very fortunate in my position that I am able to walk all these different sides of the video game life. - [Danny] When you think about some of the ways in which you guys have changed the industry, the one that comes to mind right away, for me at least, because it's probably the most recent, is the work that you guys did with Microsoft on the, is it the Adaptive Controller, is that what the name is? - [Steven] Yeah, it's called the Adaptive Controller. - [Danny] What other stuff comes to mind for you, over the years? - [Steven] You know, I think some of the biggest were going into Harmonix and getting to talk to Alex. Sitting down in his office and doing the whole Rock Band thing and talking about the various ways that you might wanna play the game. The fastest way I can tell this anecdote is we were sitting in his office and we were talking about how, if someone wants to play the video game, how many buttons would they have to use at minimum? Could you do this if you only had three fingers on on hand? Could you do it if you were one-handed? You know, yes, no, yes, no. So we talked about that for a minute and I just came up with a question to ask; "Why did you come up with three buttons as the minimum to be able to play?" and his answer was, "Well, it's just the number that we thought was the smallest that people would ever wanna do". I said, "Well, what about somebody who only has the ability to push one button?" He said, "Well, we never thought anybody would want to be able to play Rock Band with just one button." I looked him in the face and I said, "I would." And the color just drained out of his face and he just nods his head and goes, "Okay, we'll have to work on that" and that was sort of a great beginning point for, not only my friendship with Alex, but AbleGamers as a company we have worked with Harmonix ever since and they've been really great partners of the business and I've made some good friends over there as well. It's this amazing thing of how, one of my friends put it best, my job title is to go out and be who I am very visibly and let people learn lessons from my experiences and I've been able to thread this needle of using personal experience and second hand experience from the gamers I've met along the way to then translate that into the friendships that I've forged in the industry and then turn that into making changes for other people. So it's this tightrope act of making sure to be friends with everybody because the only way that you really can get people to make change is if they want to. If they don't want to, they're not gonna change. - [Danny] When you think about changing those games, were there games when you were growing up that you were like "Oh man, I'd really love to play that", but then you realized that there were barriers in your way to doing so? - [Steven] Yeah, I can tell you that I wanted to play Dance Dance Revolution and that'd be a great sound bite. Of course I'm in a wheelchair but I've always been a very realistic kind of guy. I am a logic-based person, I have the weird sort or emotional Spock thing going on where I wear my heart on my sleeve and I will fight for anybody if I believe in them, but there has to be logic in my brain, also why this is a thing, and I'm never gonna be on Dancing With The Stars. I'm never gonna be a ninja. It's just not in the cards for me. So I am okay with that and there was no particular game that I wanted to play that made me start advocating for people. It was simply having a disease that was advancing slowly, taking away abilities one by one, made me go, "Oh, shit, I guess I need some technology" and somewhere along the way I discovered that it was a lot more fun to help other people than to help myself. - [Danny] What was it like then for you, trying to gain access to that technology? Presumably you were doing that before AbleGamers existed, so was it a case where your conditions were getting worse and you were effectively looking for solutions as the issues presented themselves? - [Steven] So it's interesting when you're doing a technology upgrade as someone with a disability because it's often a mismatch of just MacGyver-ing your way through technology. To eat potato chips, I used to use hot dog tongs as I couldn't lift up my biceps, but I could rotate my wrist so I would just pick up one chip at a time with a hot dog tong. It's the same thing with video games. I used a little tiny dental hygiene tool that has a little crook on the end of it, has a little rubber tip and I would use that to push W, A, S, D when I couldn't reach it and operate the mouse with the other hand. So I was already using technology, it was just this way... Doing things the low-tech way was beginning to start to fail, so I had to find a little bit more high-tech solutions. - [Danny] And how did you do that? Did you fashion stuff yourself? Were there people out there making custom rigs for people? - [Steven] Well, you know, I started doing it by finding ways to play video games with only the mouse and just getting rid of keyboard entirely. Fortunately, I had found a program called TrackIR which generally allows you to look around in the cockpit of a Microsoft Flight Simulator and when you're looking around, you're also telling the computer to push different directions and I found that you could use this to push keyboard buttons and it was a totally unintended thing that this program was offering. They were trying to use it to help people have a more virtual experience, more immersion, and I ended up using it as a disability tool and now I teach others how to do the same thing. - [Danny] That's incredible. So you sort of hacked it in a way to be quick key-binding stuff. How many buttons could you set up on a TrackIR? How many directional ways are there to use it? - [Steven] So the best way to think about it is to think about a dartboard. - [Danny] Okay. - [Steven] If you think about each position, each little block, being a different key then the laser pointer that is attached to the brim of one of my hats allows the laser pointer to move around based on the way I'm looking. - [Danny] Right. - [Steven] So I can move it to whatever block. The only downside of that technology, of course, is if you're thinking about moving in a straight line. If you gotta get to block number three, you gotta run through block number one through two. - [Danny] Right. - [Steven] So, it sort of becomes this interesting way of lining up the buttons so that they don't do the wrong thing at the wrong time. - [Danny] It sounds like key-binding is something that is one of the most powerful ways of allowing people to use controllers in these interesting ways. You say using a mouse only; I imagine setting up 'run' to be right-click or something like that would maybe fix one sort of problem. We talk about the hardware issue, but also one of the biggest issues in games that has sort of been slowly fixed over the past five, 10 years, well, maybe closer to five, is the ability to re-bind controls, which certainly has never been something that was standard and is a lot more common now. Is that a big issue with accessibility as well? - [Steven] Yeah, re-mapping has gotten a lot better. Now, re-mapping is almost as standard as closed captioning is for TV shows and movies. That's a lot thanks to the groundwork that people have done, demanding it to be a thing. It's not just a disability thing. Everybody loves for you to be able to re-map things so that they're more comfortable, so that your hand isn't stretched out in weird ways that the developers didn't quite think somebody would try to do. So it's good for everybody, it's good design and it allows us to be comfortable playing video games. - [Danny] So what other big games were you a fan of? Or what other games were you a big fan of, rather, back in those days, back in the Ultima Online days? Eventually those doors closed, but you could've got back into that fantasy world. So what other games are your favorites when you look back? - [Steven] Back then Diablo was huge, I loved that game. Star Wars Galaxies actually was the bait that Mark used to get me into AbleGamers. - [Danny] How'd he do that? - [Steven] Okay, so I loved Star Wars Galaxies so much. Star Wars Galaxies was, and maybe is, my favorite game of all time and they had just changed it to the NGE and the NGE made it more into an action simulator game, which took away a lot of the accessibility. - [Danny] Oh, really? - [Steven] Yeah, in SWG, the original vanilla version, you had macros, you had slash commands, you had buttons on the screen that you could click, you could do macro ability to do more than one action at a time. It was a very very friendly game for people with disabilities and they didn't even realize they were designing it that way. They were just trying to make it friendly for everybody. So, it just happened to be accessible and I happened to latch on to it as the most amazing thing since pizza and it was great and they changed it and then, right after that, they were gonna change it again for the combat upgrade and they were gonna make it into this, I don't even know what kind of 'Barbie Ken Dreamhouse' thing they were trying to do with this game, but it was just destroying it from the inside out and then then closed it so I literally told Mark that I would come work for AbleGamers, volunteer my time, and at the time I was just being a writer and trying to help the cause, and I would do it, but only if he would give me the email for Smedley so I could tell him off. - [Danny] And did you? - [Steven] I did, yeah, absolutely. - [Danny] Oh, God. - [Steven] I wonder if he still has that email. - [Danny] Did he respond? - [Steven] No. I was nobody then, so just an angry guy yelling at him, which he had a bunch of those already. - [Danny] How long is the email, do you reckon? Is it like one paragraph or was it like 20 paragraphs? - [Steven] It was like five paragraphs with expletives and doing something between rational explanation of why he should change it back to, you know, "I hope both your eyebrows catch on fire!" It was not my most refined moment but I was just so passionate about it. - [Danny] Yeah, shoot your shot, fair enough. So what have you been playing at the moment? We were playing a bunch of PUBG I remember last year and then you went off and joined the Fortnite gang. You said you could never be a ninja but there you are, every day, playing Fortnite. Are you still playing it? - [Steven] Actually, no. I don't play Fortnite as much as I used to. It is still a fun game for me, but I've actually began to fall away from first-person shooters a little bit. I've been doing the Rocket League thing, I've been really into Kingdom: Two Crowns recently, just playing that 8-bit life. Yeah, it's the third installment of this franchise where you're just a little dude or a queen that's got a kingdom to take care of and there's little greedy things that are trying to take all your money and beat up your people to get it, so there's no fighting involved so, I don't know, I'm one of those gamers that, I used to run a violent game like a Diablo and then I would run The Sims Online. I would just bounce back and forth to satisfy both sides of my brain, so I guess right now I'm just like, "I don't wanna shoot people, I just wanna watch little monsters be murdered." - [Danny] Okay so by that rationale, Rocket League is the violent game? - [Steven] Yeah, well, if you've ever seen me play Rocket League, it depends how many times I get scored on. - [Danny] Oh dude, I swear to God, I have never been as angry and stressed out as when I play Rocket League online. - [Steven] It's like a stress test, they should replace that at the doctor's office. - [Danny] I swear to God, I had to start playing on PS4 because then I couldn't type shit at people. Then I just started doing it on that as well, bringing up the little PlayStation keyboard. In between goals where you've hardly any time to trash talk anyone and you just figure out ways of doing it. - [Steven] What a save, what a save, what a save! - [Danny] Oh, yeah, totally and all that sarcastic stuff for sure, yeah. It's ridiculous. Did you do a 'Top 10' list or anything for 2018? - [Steve] You know, I think I'm one of the three video game industry people that didn't do a 'Top 10' post. - [Danny] You need to get Alex Navarro over at Giant Bomb to email you as well next year. - [Steven] Apparently, yeah. Next year I need to get on the list, I was like, "every one of my friends has a list, what the hell?" Damn. - [Danny] So what was the stuff last year that really caught your eye? Were you playing a lot of those games? Well, playing Rocket League I guess, since 2017. - [Steven]Yeah, it was a good year for video games, man. The one I wish I could have played the most was Spider-Man. Man, that looked like an amazing game. I couldn't personally play it, so it was actually one of the only games that I sat on Twitch and watched friends play from the beginning to the end. It was so good. I loved it so much. - [Danny] Is that because it's a console game and it's just the accessibility issue? - [Steven] It was the way that the accessibility was set up was just a little bit rough for trying to aim and change your weapons. Anything that has a weapon wheel just adds another layer of complication for people who have a limited number of buttons that they can push, so, yeah. Even if you were using a QuadStick on a console, the weapon wheel is just difficult, so, you know. - [Danny] How does the QuadStick interface with the PlayStation? Because obviously Microsoft now has a controller that's like officially doing it. Do you have to hack it to get it to work? - [Steven] Yeah, its just an adaptor. - [Danny] Oh, really, just like off the shelf? You just get it off Amazon or something, or eBay? - [Steven] Well no, it's not off the shelf, but there are adapters out there that let you use PlayStation and Xbox things, vice versa, depending on which console you need to use the most, so we can put a QuadStick on either one. It doesn't really work on a Swtich, unfortunately, looking at you Nintendo. But, yeah, PlayStation and Xbox works just fine. - [Danny] Is it the type of thing that they know about and they're cool with or they know about it and they're just gonna go, "Ah, whatever"? Like what is it that Nintendo are doing that stops people being able to make adapters for that? - [Steven] You know, I'm not really sure what I can say, legally. I can tell you that it's still works on Xbox and PlayStation and it doesn't work on Nintendo. - [Danny] Fair enough. Sorry, you were saying, what other games are you playing? - [Steven] The God of War series was, of course, super amazing. I had a lot of strange indie taste as well, like Tricky Towers was a really good game I found. Just something sort of different. I loved Into the Breach. I think the only one I've lost a lot of time into was Odyssey. Odyssey is just so good; I can't stop playing it. - [Danny] My wife is playing it too. It's the most game I've ever seen. - [Steven] It is ridiculous, it is. I mean there were so many good games that came out last year, but Odyssey is maybe the first one in forever that I've been playing off-stream. There's usually, for me, only two kinds of games that I play; either I play them for work or I play them for stream work. Don't you get it where it's like, I'm sure, just like you, I don't like play just to play very much, so when I do, a game's gotta be great and Odyssey was fantastic. - [Danny] Did you play the Origins? The one that came out the year before? - [Steven] I didn't. You know, Odyssey was actually my first venture into Assassin's Creed world. - [Danny] Oh, cool. It's crazy how people are, I feel like there's two groups of people; there's the people who played so much Origins that they just can't play Odyssey because it's just like, it's just so too much, too quickly and then there's people who didn't play Origins who are loving Odyssey because it's a lot of the same sort of systems and stuff that worked there, but in a much bigger map with so much stuff. It's ridiculous how much stuff is in that game. Like how much of the map have you uncovered? My wife's been playing for months and like a third of the map has been opened up. - [Steven] You know, I probably have got a little over half of it at this point, and it just seems like the game just keeps going and, I gotta say, I'm into it though. It's one of those games where I'm finding I don't mind how much time has been sunk into it. Normally by like hour 50 I'm like, "Alright, come on, we gotta wrap this up", but this one I'm like, "You know, I could probably play this off and on for the next year, I'd be alright with that." - [Danny] What is it about it? Is it the setting or the combat or is it the ticking off the things on the list? There's a lot of 'do these things' and then you do the things and they give you stuff for it and you're like, "Yeah, give me more things to do." Is it that? - [Steven] I think it's a combination of the story and the never-ending tasks. I love the bounty hunting system, oh my goodness. I love how you just randomly get hunted and then you get to kill them and then more people hunt you. It's just awesome. - [Danny] That's rad. What are you playing at the moment? So you're playing that at the moment still, are you? - [Steven] Yeah, I mean whenever I get spare time, that's where I'm sinking my time right now. That was after I beat Far Cry. I don't know if you got a chance to sink your teeth into that but, man, that was a mind trip. - [Danny] Yeah, that was another one, my wife is basically just on the Ubisoft open world ticket at the moment, so that was another one I watched her play a lot in the evenings. Had you played previous Far Cry games? Was that your first foray into that one as well? - [Steven] That was another first note as well. It seemed to be my year to break into story games. I guess now we're looking back at it and I liked it but, this is gonna turn into spoiler-cast if I'm not careful, but, man, the ending in that game. At the end of the day I am a writer who just happens to be doing other things right now and so I love, love, love a good story. So, if it had something that can just grab my attention and make me wanna find out what happens at the end, then I'm in. - [Danny] You're one of the first people we're talking to in 2019, I mean you're one of the first people we're talking to on this podcast, this is the 5th episode. I feel like I haven't been able to stop and take stock of what's coming out this year. Is there anything, I have a list in front of me here but is there anything off the top of your head that you're looking forward to? Because I feel like 2018 actually ended up being a fantastic year but I worry that we ended up going into a slower one, when that happens. But is there anything off the top of your head that's popping out that you're looking forward to in 2019? - [Steven] I don't know, it can't be a slower year than last year. Last year was just boom, boom, boom. I would say, right off the top, and the same thing everyone is gonna say is Anthem. If Anthem is bad then I am going to riot. I'm going to grab a pitchfork and I'm going to the studio and I'm gonna stand there and be like, "You guys fix it." I'm gonna do it in a very non-threatening way. I'm just gonna stand there and it's gonna be a safety pitchfork, there's gonna be little plastic things on top of it. - [Danny]Orange tips. - [Steven] Yeah, orange tips on it. I'm gonna have a peaceful vest on me and just be like, "I just want you to fix the game." - [Danny] Well you say you're a fan of stories, does that mean, are you a fan of Dragon Age and Mass Effect, the other BioWare games? - [Steven] Oh yeah, oh my goodness. Dragon Age: Origins is... So Dragon Age: Origins, I love it so much, so anybody who really is a fan of mine may have picked up my one and only book that I have out there and if you look hard enough at the book, you'll see that one of the main characters is actually nearly directly pulled out of the Origins video game. - [Danny] Oh, careful, this is fucking EA man! - [Steven] I did not steal their IP, but that was like my main inspiration. It was so good. - [Danny] That's awesome. - [Steven] It was like, you know, the character and the everything just was so great to me that I was like, "I have to create my own version of this and plug it in somewhere", and I ended up doing that. - [Danny] That's right, what's the name of the book? Where can you get it? - [Steven] It's a horrible book, you don't wanna go find it. - [Danny] Hey man, I a 33 year old video game fan. I don't read books, I just buy them and put them on my shelf. - [Steven] That's fair. So the book is called The Finder. You can get it on Amazon still. I got it under my pen name, Steven Rome. Honestly, I hired an editor but the editor really kind of let me down so there's grammatical errors and there's an audio book uploaded to it. I really tried pretty hard and it sold actually pretty well. So I've actually got a screenshot. Back in the day, you could put your Amazon book up to be downloaded for 72 hours for free and I put it up to be downloaded for free and it was downloaded as much as Game of Thrones was bought. - [Danny] Oh wow. - [Steven] So I've got picture of my book right beside George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones. - [Danny] That's rad. Yeah I see it here, right here on Amazon. Go pick it up everyone, 13.95 paperback, Amazon Prime, you can have it by the time your next bowel movement comes, that's the way Amazon works now, it's pretty good. - [Steven] Yeah, if you need bad reading material, then... It's so sad too, because it's one of those things. It was a good story in my head and then it's like you can tell there's a certain point in there that I just wanted the book to be done. So I was just like, "You know what, I'm just done with it", and it goes from a very slow-paced book to "Alright, it's done." - [Danny] Steven, I feel like people go their entire lives trying to write their books so do not kill, or kick yourself over the fact that your first novel wasn't exactly what you needed it to be. That's incredible. Are you writing another one? Are you looking to write another one? Are you too busy with AbleGamers stuff? - [Steven] You know, I am super busy, but this is actually AbleGamers' 15th year. So, as I was saying to you privately when I agreed to come talk to you, not only because we're good friends and I wanted to help you launch this thing and if three of my fans will come listen, that'd be great. You know, its one of those things where I'd like to get into the writing and doing some of my own flights of fancy that I've been putting on the back burner for so long because I feel like after 15 years I've put in a little bit of blood and sweat into the cause and now maybe I can do a couple of other things I wanna do before the shot clock quite runs out. - [Danny] Well, I think there'll be a lot of people who would be interested in experiencing whatever you put out there into the universe, so... Let me tell you about this place called Patreon.com and it lets people do their dreams and get funded by the people who want to experience those dreams. - [Steven] Really, I'd never heard of that, Danny! Do you have one of those? - [Danny] Steven, can I ask you some questions from people who pay us money? - [Steven] Nope! I'm out of here, bye everybody. - [Danny] Thank you to Steve for being here. If you wanna get your questions in, go to Patreon.com/Noclip. If you're on the $5 tier you also get this podcast early. You don't get it exclusively. We had some people be like, "Hey, I can't get the podcast" and we had to be like, "No, you literally can't, everything we do is available, except the behind the scenes stuff". But if you're on the $5 tier you get this beautiful podcast early as well as a bunch of other stuff and we put the word out for some questions, we got a bunch of them. I'm gonna ask about two or three of them here. This one's from Matthew Glenn, he said, "What accessibility feature should indies and small teams prioritize when hoping to be more accessible?" Any come to mind? - [Steven] You know, I think the thing about being an indie, and I've had so many great conversations with Rami about this, indies have such a luxury of being flexible. Being an indie developer is super hard, right? It is back breaking work in a mental way. It is blood, sweat, part of your soul going into this game and here I am telling you you have to do even more. To indie developers out there, keep in mind everybody on the accessibility side understands that you didn't need one more thing to worry about, but if you add things like re-mappable keys, you add things like sliders for all of your settings, or allowing people to edit the INI files instead of keeping them hidden or encoded. Allow people to move the game as much as they can, without breaking your game or altering it, ` then let them play it your way and you'll have more sales and you'll have happier customers. It's interesting how some games tackled problems. Let's take, for example, one of my favorite indie games of 2018 called Raft. Raft was a cool little indie game where you basically were on a raft, spoiler! You had to fish junk out of the ocean and build a bigger, better raft that had air conditioning somehow, I don't know. It was a fun game but the settings in it were bare and minimal and when I reached out to say, "Hey, I can't play your game because the mouse sensitivity is very low, you capped it barely above what you'd need to move the mouse across the screen if you got an entire mousepad, not to mention you don't have the ability to re-map, you didn't have stuff like that. And within two days they turned around; they added the ability to map the mouse, the added the ability to uncap the mouse sensitivity. These are all things that don't take developers a lot of time, but if you don't do them, they can lock people out of your games. I happen to be one of the people that gets caught up in those times when you're alienated, so I always recommend, you know, do as much as you can with little effort and things like adding settings and adding re-mapping are often relatively easy, nothing is "easy" in development, but if you do it early in development cycle, it's doable without too much cost. - [Danny] Raymond Harris asked the question, "Have you tried Microsoft's new accessibility controller, if so, what do you like and dislike about it? I mean you guys were involved in the whole R and D aspect of that, is that correct? - [Steven] I was privileged to be one of the people that Microsoft pulled into it first. Me and my co-worker Craig, we were the ones that were asked to come sign some NDAs and check this out on a low key, 'here's a tablet with a drawing on it because our lawyers won't even allow you to look at the real prototypes, so here's what it looks like' kind of thing. Yeah and then from there we brought in AbleGamers and we became an entire organization to help, not just one or two of us, but everybody had a hand in making this thing better, so it was great to get to be a part of that and it's honestly going to go down in my brain as one of the highlights of my career. I had a very small part in personally bringing about a controller that is now available in freaking Walmart. Well, technically the Microsoft Store, whatever. Walmart, Microsoft Store, same difference. I'm definitely not gonna get an angry message from Microsoft PR tomorrow, its fine, right? - [Danny] Matthew Rogers asked the question, "Do you find that people with disabilities often write off video games as a hobby and don't realize that there are organizations like AbleGamers out there?" - [Steven] I do. I think one of the things that my job has become has been fighting against the stigma of being a gamer, let alone having a disability, so, in a lot of ways, 15 years ago when I got into this game and when AbleGamers first started, we were not only fighting for people with disabilities, which, back in the early 2000s and early 90s, was not as welcomed as it is now and neither is being a gamer and both of those had negative connotations on them. If you were a gamer, you're lazy. If you were disabled, you're lazy. We had to fight all these stereotypes and yeah, I think that there are so many companies out there who don't even understand what we do, what I do and my daily operations and what my company does and what even is represented by gamers with disabilities being a part of the world. I don't know that everybody's quite yet aware. I think we're making it so. I think people like Danny are helping us push the narrative into the mainstream that it's not some little niche bunch of people that just wanna play a couple of games, but gamers with disabilities are everywhere. People like Halfcoordinated who are out there on the stage of Games Done Quick, who are out there pushing, me being on award shows pushing. I think we're all doing our parts and I think everybody who is listening can do their part by saying to their friends, to their family whenever the situation comes up, that people with disabilities want to enjoy every hobby, including gaming. I think it's gonna be interesting watching companies get involved more and more as they figure this out. - [Danny] We go back and look at the commercials of the 90s, where the prevalent idea of the teenage boy, the white teenage boy, right? The able-bodied, white teenage boy was the... - [Steven] Straight, able-bodied, white teenage boy. - [Danny] Yeah, lets keep going! Eventually we'll find that gamer. The one that gave birth to us all. Do you find that accessibility and people with disabilities have a place at the table now in a way that they didn't five or 10 years ago, or it is for people like you that are visible, but for most people it's not? - [Steven] Here's the thing. I think that accessibility has come a long way in a lot of ways thanks to the work that has been done at AbleGamers and our allies and our people that care about our narrative, right? There's no question, accessibility is better. Full stop, period, end of sentence. However, to continue the conversation, if you are not somebody that has a high profile, you do not have as good of a chance of things being made accessible quickly. I am extremely privileged, in that if somebody gets a hold of me and says, "I can't play this game because of this feature being in the way", chances are I can get to a developer and say, "Hey, is there something you can do about this?" Sometimes they can do it quickly, sometimes they can't. I've had developers literally, and I will not tell you who, go behind their bosses back and find code and tell me slash commands in engines to get around the accessibility things because the publisher didn't want to deal with the problem and the developer cared enough that they were like, "Just tell them to do this and it'll be fine." Okay, cool, I am super privileged in that I can do that, but there's not a lot of people in my position that can do that and I can't do that for every single person all the time. Everybody at AbleGamers has their people that they can turn to and they can make magic happen sometimes, but there's only so many of us and only so many hours in the day, so you can't do that for everybody. What happens if you're a gamer who can't play a certain game and its because of a feature in a game and there's nothing that can be done until that feature is changed? Well, you can tweet and you can email and you can send a feedback report, but you have to wait your turn, right? So there's definitely a position of privilege there for people like you and me who are in the game industry because we have the right ears. We try to do that honorably. Danny and I try to use our power for good. At least I do, Danny, I don't know... - [Danny] No, no, honestly please don't even say us both in the same sentence because you give me credit that I do not deserve. The work that you've done is literally changing people's lives. Maybe I'm making people smile a little bit, but you're doing some work that is really affecting people in incredibly important ways. - [Steven] I think we all have a different part to play though. I think that everybody who's listening has their part to play. This magnification of positivity that I have turned my "brand" into, if you will, is 100% honesty and compassion. We're all playing a part. I think anybody who's listening to the 75 minutes of this that we've done so far is doing their part by absorbing this information that they might not have known, about the struggles of people with disabilities. They may not have known that these are problems and issues. Now they can watch out for them. Now they can be an advocate. But, to get back to the original question, you do everything that you can and I think that we're in a position that we can make as much change for as many people as we possibly can, but I think that there are minority groups who are very vocal. The LGBT community which, of course, I support and Blacks in Gaming is one of my favorite GDC groups. I support every minority I can because I know my own struggles and while I may not know theirs, I know how difficult mine were and I can imagine and empathize with their struggles and I try to amplify where I can. The problem that I always find, and it breaks my heart, is that I'll see people that I respect so much in the industry, tweeting about how we need to support races, genders and sexualities and then they'll leave out disability and I don't understand why we're still not putting disability on the same level as these other minorities. Because guaranteed every single one of those groups, there's also people with disabilities within that group. So I would like to see when we're all unifying a bit more, to say that my LGBT friends who are disabled need support, my black friends, my latino friends need support. We are all in this together and I think that if we continue to amplify each other, we'll make this battle just a little bit easier. - [Danny] Is that why you make yourself so public? Like, you talked about your brand, right? You don't strike me, I'm not gonna bullshit you, you don't strike me as someone who suffers fools, you've got an incredibly intelligent head on your shoulders and you talk about this like feel-good brand that's really really important. Do you have to be watchful of people who would try to utilize that for their own optics? Like who would try and manipulate or would try and use the feel-good narrative to make their brand look good and then ultimately not really invest in your mission in a way that is substantive? - [Steven] Oh, absolutely. It is a hard and fast rule at my place of work, that no one with a disability is to do work without being compensated in some way. It does not have to financial because sometimes the government frowns upon that kind of thing, so maybe someone who is on government assistance can't take a payment because then that could endanger their insurance, and that we would feel horrible about, so instead maybe they get a copy of the game. Maybe they get a free tablet. Maybe a new webcam, who knows? It's that you don't use people. You utilize their skills, you utilize their experiences, you do not use them. And I think that's something you have to watch out for, and again, just anybody who has followed me so far, or if you plan on following me, Danny knows all too well that I am a lover but I'm also a fighter. If I see an injustice, I will strap on a sword and I'll go to town. I have no problem with picking up the battleax and running into the fight. I am not somebody who thinks the world is rose colored and we can just all love each other because that's the right thing to do. I think sometimes there comes a time where all people must fight. - [Danny] And whenever the battle happens, I'll be, hopefully, standing right beside you, swinging my morning star as well. Steven Spohn, an absolute pleasure to talk to you as ever, my friend. Where can people follow your work? What are you up to? Where can they consume your delicious content? - [Steven]I don't want that advertisement on my phone. My most active place right now is Twitter. I find it's the best place to amplify positive messages to fight some of the darkness; you can find me @StevenSpohn and you can find me on Twitch at the acronym that is my name: SteveInSpawn, like the comic book character, and I stream on twitch five days a week, just trying to showcase that people with disabilities are out there and we're not innocent snow flowers that don't so anything but sit around and watch TV. We're out there playing games, we make dick jokes and we're funny and inappropriate and we're just human beings like everyone else and I'd encourage anyone that has a disability that happens to be listening to the amazing Danny O'Dwyer, that you too should go out and live your life as visibly as you can because that's the only way that we're gonna change the world. - [Danny] Steven, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. We'd love to have you back on if you're up for it again in the future. - [Steven] I'd be more than happy, Danny. Thanks for having me. - [Danny] No problem. Thank you, as well, for listening, everyone out there. We don't know who's up next week, but if you follow @NoClipVideo on the Twitters, you'll get an update over there. I'm @DannyODwyer on Twitter. If you have any feedback or any ideas for guests, you can also hit up our sub-Reddit, r/Noclip, or if you're a patron there is always a Patreon post you can just jump into, or hit us up on the DMs. The podcast is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, the whole sha-bang. Anywhere podcasts are sold, stick 'noclip' in there and hopefully we'll pop up. We also have a new YouTube channel as well. If you type 'noclip podcast' into YouTube, we'll get that short URL soon enough, but until then if you hit that up, you'll be able to watch, slash, I mean 'watch', it's just a static image, pretty much with some gameplay in the background, but it's up there on YouTube. We also have full transcriptions as well. We don't talk about it very often. We do closed captions on all of our videos, but we actually also provide full transcriptions of the docs if you go to our Libsyn page, so that's like noclippodcast.libsyn.com and there's a link in all the descriptions no matter how you're listening to this and you can go check that out as well. Patrons get the show early. $5 if they're on the $5 tier. Thank you to them for making this ad-free and making it possible in the first place. Patreon.com/Noclip if you're interested in that. I hope, wherever you are, this finds you well. I hope you're enjoying some video games and we look forward to talking to you again on the next edition of the Noclip podcast, next week. See you then.  

In the first episode of the all-new-format Noclip podcast, we talk to Mikey Neumann about media criticism and his time working at Gearbox on games like Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Brothers in Arms & Borderlands. (Recorded January 8th) iTunes Page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/noclip/id1385062988 RSS Feed: http://noclippodcast.libsyn.com/rssGoogle Play: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/If7gz7uvqebg2qqlicxhay22qny Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5XYk92ubrXpvPVk1lin4VB?si=JRAcPnlvQ0-YJWU9XiW9pg Watch our docs: https://youtube.com/noclipvideo Sub our new podcast channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSHBlPhuCd1sDOdNANCwjrA Learn About Noclip: https://www.noclip.videoBecome a Patron and get early access to new episodes: https://www.patreon.com/noclip Follow @noclipvideo on Twitter Hosted by @dannyodwyerFunded by 5,035 Patrons. -------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPTION; - [Danny] Hello, and welcome to the NoClip podcast, the fourth episode of the NoClip podcast. Though, in many ways, kind of the first episode of the NoClip podcast. There's a whole new format. Less edited, less produced, more chatty and conversational. If you still like those ones, don't worry. They're still gonna drop in on the feed. But generally it's gonna be a weekly show now, just me sitting down with a bunch of interesting people from the world of video games be it people who are in development or people who are streamers or journalists or maybe just somebody who plays games who's got an interesting story. Speaking of interesting stories, we have a person here who writes quite a lot of them. Or at least did in a prior life at Gearbox Software. Today, you can find him as a... I don't wanna say film critic. Maybe film connoisseur? Maybe he prefers to be called a YouTuber? I'm not quite sure. Let's ask the man himself. I am talking, of course, about the one and only, Mikey Neumann. Mikey, how you doing today, man? - [Mikey] I'm good. Now you've given me like an existential crisis to worry about 'cause I used to worry. Like, what do you call yourself? - [Danny] Yeah, I don't know. The one that keeps coming to mind is like content creator, but that sounds worse than YouTuber. - [Mikey] Yeah, I get in trouble a lot 'cause people call themselves content creators, and they're people that I think are making incredible art leone. - Right. - [Mikey] And they're like, I'm a content creator. And I'm like, that's so dismissive. And they're like, why? The only one dismissive is you. They're just words. - [Danny] Yeah, I feel like the people who are actually content creators are those 3D model farms that game developers use that are in Singapore. You know, like the outsourcing places. Like that's content creation. They're making fridges and tables, they're creating content. - [Mikey] Teaching moment, for real, you actually do have good relationships with those different outsourcers. They tend to be with artists and designers 'cause at the height of a game, you might be using eight to 10, even more. Like if you're Red Dead Redemption, I'm sure they use like all of them. But it's not just throw it over the fence. I think the good games and good studios build a really good relationship with those outsourcers. So, it's never just throw it over the fence. - [Danny] Yeah, it came up in our Horizon documentary, and we'll get more into the development stuff in a little bit. But I remember we were talking to... Is it Herman? God, I should remember his name, just feels terrible. The lead over there at Guerrilla, and they're not that big a studio, but Horizon Zero Dawn is a really big detail game. So, they basically created an outsource management team within Guerrilla to do that. And he said it was like the game changer for getting that game out the door because before it's just there's too much stuff to make now, and it's 4K, and it takes forever. - [Mikey] And you call it content because it does describe all of it 'cause content can be sound effects, it can be how using those sound effects in the audio engine. There's so much content that I think, in the game sense, that word actually does work really well. - [Danny] There you go, we've solved it. You're not a content creator. So, we now have to figure out what your real job is. Yeah, Herman Hulst is his name. It's funny 'cause we're gonna get into development shot, which I feel like we do at all that often in the world of video game podcasts. I mean, there are some really good ones out there that do this sort of stuff for developers, but I'm hoping we can sort of break a little bit of new ground on this one. But we're not gonna do that for the first section 'cause I just wanna talk to you about what you've been playing at the moment. - [Mikey] Number one, I'm not really ranking them, but it's sorta like... I order them like how much I'm playing them. - [Danny] Okay, quantity, not quality. - [Mikey] Well, yeah, just to properly describe how much I'm playing Slay the Spire. It sort of combines everything I love, which is like a strategic, rogue-like, card collecting, card deck building, RPG, climb a tower. It checks all my boxes. - [Danny] I think those are the same boxes that make me fearful. I think any one of those. I mean, I love rogue-likes, but I think it's the word card, and I think it's the screenshots when I see cards. How much is it a card game and how much is it just the cards are a part of the interface? And you're just there-- - I mean, the cards are the game. I mean, it's an attack and defend game. You're making choices about how much damage you're trying to do, or how much you're trying to protect against. So, it's math fighting in the same way that one of my favorite games ever, and I used to exclusively play against UD engineering students because they were the best ones, Virtua Tennis. Like the first one. - Oh really? - [Mikey] It's math fighting. - [Danny] How come? - [Mikey] Because it looks like tennis on the surface, but actually-- - [Danny] It's virtual. - [Mikey] Well, it's Virtua, thank you, sir. - I'm sorry. - [Mikey] Sir. No, it's... And Mario Tennis ended up using these mechanics, and a lot of other people did. Never as punishing as Virtua Tennis where like you select a spot to hit the ball from, and the faster you get to that spot, the harder and better angle you can hit it at. - [Danny] Okay. - [Mikey] So, your ability to setup in time sort of makes it like you can hit it better and make it harder on the opponent, but they're also doing that to you. So, the exchange of basically fighting with angles and timing is Virtua Tennis. It looks like tennis because that's how tennis works, basically also, just not as mechanically solid. - [Danny] And just speaking to that sort of beautiful era of games when they were mechanical to the point where you could predict things. Obviously, sport games now are like kind of, they're supposed to be these massive simulations that are ultimately sort of like, you know, there's a lot of RNG involved in what they're doing. But that was not the way it was before. - [Mikey] I was waiting for that term. I was like, when's he gonna say RNG because Speedrunning grabbed a hold of us. I like that because it put it in the Lexicon. - [Danny] It's the wrong term though, is it? Or is it too broad? - [Mikey] It's sort of like, god, you're gonna get me in trouble. One of my old pet peeves was, and I try never to bring this up anymore. But if you watch Speedrunning or Esports, really, people say hitboxes in place of the term collision. And it drives me bananas 'cause hitboxes were what we used in Counter-Strike and Half-Life because you add rudimentary boxes sort of overlayed over the model, and that was collision. Collision's not that simple anymore. - [Danny] Actually, this is really what I wanted to get into later as well, which is the sort of disparate ways in which we do communicate about this sort of stuff. Do you think, in using the word like hitbox, it's reducing it? Like it's not talking about it in the way it should be? Or does it just irk you because it's the wrong term? - [Mikey] I think it irks me because I'm a pedantic moron. I think what isn't annoying about it is that the term hitbox is quote unquote sort of grew up to mean collision. Which is sort of synonymous, they're just not generally boxes. Collision tends to be people-shaped in people-shooting games. - [Danny] What other games you playing? - [Mikey] The one that's your fault, and I'm about to get back to Zen, I'm playing Half-Life one again. - [Danny] Oh, wow, okay. And that's, you worked on-- - Direct result of watching your incredible documentary. - [Danny] Thank you, you're too kind. Sorry we didn't actually meet. We did have lunch after I interviewed Randy Pitchford for that documentary. - Yeah, I met you at Gearbox, it was a fun day. We went and got barbecue. - [Danny] It was delicious. We ended up talking a bunch about Counter-Strike and Half-Life stuff 'cause of course you worked at Gearbox during a lot of that time. All of that time? When did you start at Gearbox? - [Mikey] Actually, specifically, 2001. - [Danny] Okay. - [Mikey] This is actually... You know how you can't find a word 'cause I almost said this is awesome. And then I was about to-- - Thanks. - [Mikey] I was about to say, no, I was like, it was awesome, 9/11 happened two months in, and I'm like, that's not awesome at all. Awesome in magnitude, not in quality. - [Danny] Good save. - [Mikey] Thanks, but we're working on Counter-Strike Condition Zero, a game at the time you could play as the terrorist. - Oh yes. - And we're like, that's not great. Everybody, is that great? Oh no, that's not great? Okay, and then I remember it became counter-terrorist only. And the game actually got better 'cause we did a game that will never see the light of day now but. - [Danny] Yeah, so how much of the Gearbox stuff was actually in the one that came out? Because it got passed, I think Gearbox was the second team to work on it and it ended up going through Turtle Rock and then Ritual, and it changed. It was like Valve's weird version where they wanted it to be a single-player game. - [Mikey] Well, it was Rogue first, right? - [Danny] Yes. - It was Rogue? - Was it Rogue? Yes, I think it was Rogue. Then you. - Yeah, the Alice developers, I believe. And by the way, I could be totally wrong. I'm just going off the top of my head here, memory-wise. It went Rogue, Gearbox, Ritual. It's still in Dallas, actually, they just drove it across the street. And then, Dallas isn't really that small, I'm kidding. And then it was Turtle Rock, which Valve ended up having a really interesting relationship with. - [Danny] Right, 'cause of the Left for Dead. But when you played the released version, was there any of the Gearbox DNA in there? - [Mikey] I don't know how much I'm permitted to say. - [Danny] Right, that's fair enough. - [Mikey] I mean, it's been awhile. I don't know. I don't think so. Off the top of my head, I would imagine no, but again, I haven't looked at it or anything in a long time. I think everybody that worked on that, which is really interesting and something I can say, is I think everyone did really cool work with what they were given and what they were trying to do. Ritual made some really cool art that Turtle Rock ended up using in their version. And Rogue had some cool stuff that we... To me, it was a lot of cool stuff and not necessarily knowing what to do with that brand at that moment. - [Danny] Yeah, bit of an impossible task trying to make a single-player portion of this beloved multiplayer mode. It's almost like you're trying to paddle the wrong way up the stream. - I can only speak for ours, and I can really all I can say is that it was really fun, and stuff we added did make it through like the Galil and the FAMAS. That was us that added that to Counter-Strike, and that ended up mirroring all the way back into 1.6. It's really interesting how that all kind of bounced around. - [Danny] Crazy, yeah, and people still play 1.6 today. And people still playing Half-Life today. So, what was it like going back and playing Half-Life? Considering you're sort of history with the franchise. When was the last time you played it? - [Mikey] Right when Half-Life Two came out. - [Danny] Okay, 2004. - [Mikey] Yeah, it's been a bit, it's been a bit. - [Danny] What are the parts that sort of shout out, or any specific levels or moments of it that you really like? - [Mikey] I think what I was doing was sorta, 'cause to me, what I really wanted to see again was that feeling of being Gordon. Half-Life one does something so brilliant, I've never seen any game replicate it, including Half-Life Two. Which is you're just a dude who is late for work. And everyone is like, ugh, Gordon? Ugh. And you feel like a piece of garbage. You're an MIT graduate, and they're treating you like nobody, and I just love that because it weighs into all of the gameplay through the whole. Like that guy hiding in the trashcan that we all threw a grenade into. But, you know what I mean? I love that sort of moral gray area that they played with because undoubtedly the hero, but they don't really treat you like one. - [Danny] Yeah, it's not like a sort of traditional, I don't know, hero. There's the mountian, go climb it kind of hero's journey type thing. It's a bit more of the everyman. - [Mikey] And you get to Half-Life Two, and every person you meet is like, Gordon? Gordon Freeman, the Messiah of Black Mesa? Oh, Gordon! I've heard every story about! You know, like everyone reacts huge to you, and it made me feel like less of a hero in a way. It sends me back to all those thoughts. - [Danny] Does it make you feel like a bit of a fraud almost? Because it's likehe kind of lucked his way through, like it wasn't exactly a charitable mission he was on. He kind of just had to survive in the first game. - [Mikey] Yeah, and there's like weird alien suit-wearing men that pull all the string. He's really not in control of anything. - [Danny] Right. - [Mikey] And it was funny 'cause what your documentary did that has never been done was you gotta remember, Half-Life Two was, obviously you remember, but it was huge. And it came out and it was massive and everyone loved it, and they're like wow, this is the best first-person shooter of all time. And I'm like that ends on a massive cliffhanger. - [Danny] It's funny, I forgot about that element of it. 'Cause to me, I just thought, oh people want more Half-Life. - It's huge. - [Danny] But actually, when I went back and replayed Episode Two as well, it's kind of like, oh yeah, this does totally suck. It's bizarre. I think it was difficult to separate the baggage from the game. And even the memory of playing of the game. You were talking about turning up late for work. When I went back to play it recently to capture footage, I tried to as much as possible to remember the first time I played it, and you do get that sense of when you turn up for work late when people are already making their lunch, and they're already sitting down at their desks and you haven't even gotten into your uniform yet. You know? That way about it, which I feel like now when I play Half-Life, I'm thinking this meta-version of Half-Life that's just me playing my nostalgia, not necessarily playing the game. So, it's cool that you actually got to go back and play these games. You haven't played in quite a long time. Kind of feel it authentically that first time. So, are you interested in playing the episodes? Or are you gonna just be pissed off by the end of it? - [Mikey] It's tough to play Half-Life Episode Two and not just feel sad. You know what I mean? 'Cause there's a lot of effort spent on no, it's not over. So, you gave us a massive cliffhanger and then said but it's not over. But it really it was. That's a huge disappointment, I think, that has weighed on people for a long time. I wanted to say that your section on Half-Life Three actually did give me closure. - Ah, nice. - As like a game player. I was like, it doesn't matter. All these people are making all this cool stuff, that's fine, go check that out. It is what it is, I guess. - [Danny] Right, it felt like, you know? It just felt weird to do with the doc, and for that to end on a cliffhanger would just suck. Everyone was saying you should release it in three parts and just never release the third part or something. Even the idea of making anyone watch a retrospective on this game, and then to make them feel shit about it again by the end just felt really wrong. Although who knows now? Eric Wolpaw has rejoined the Campo Santo-infused Valve. So, I don't know, maybe they're making games with writers again. - [Mikey] Yeah, well they're definitely making one 'cause they brought everyone from Campo Santo in. I think you could say the same nice things about Portal one as well 'cause Portal one, you start in a cage, you're a prisoner, and it's like you are trapped. And the climax of that game is the realization for the player, oh I can escape. And that twist was my favorite thing ever 'cause that moment when you're going up that ramp with the stair car on it, that moment I was like, oh sorry GLaDOS. - [Danny] So, it's similar to Half-Life one and Two then where, in a way, they just kinda have to... Everyman, everywoman, aspect is completely lost. The twist is gone, and now we have to kind of, I don't know, justify the lure of the first game in the second game when also just not making the first game. Did you like Portal Two? - [Mikey] Absolutely. I thought the writing was incredible. There's so much good content in Portal. I got to that word, and I was like caution signs, but Portal Two doesn't have that central promise. And I think that's what fantasy fulfillment is about. Portal one, you're in this scientific facility getting lied to about cake. And that's kind of the, you know what I mean? That's kind of the game, and you get to accomplish the fantasy of, you know what? I hate you, I'm getting out of here. I'm not living this life anymore. And you get to feel what it's like to be a prisoner, and then escape. You get all those kind of emotions. I don't know, I just like games that give me something more that sort of inform my actions in an interesting way. - [Danny] You enjoy good writing, which makes sense because that was your job, right? - Sure, sure, sure, sure. - For a decent amount of time. So, when did you can start doing writing at Gearbox, right? That wasn't always your focus, right? 'Cause even before you were at Gearbox, you were, was it Dave Defeat was the mod that you were working on? - [Mikey] Yeah, I did art on Dave Defeat way way back in the day when we're still rockin' DoD WAD files. - [Danny] Hey, man, John Romero is still selling them in 2019, so. - [Mikey] There is... wait, really? - [Danny] He's making a Doom WAD, yeah. But it's unofficial like he's releasing the Wad for free, but they're putting out a special edition box of it. And I forget what it's called, I should remember what it's called. I mean, if you type in John Romero WAD, it'll pop up, I'm sure. - [Mikey] I don't feel like that's what I wanna type on Google. - Yeah, maybe have safe search on when you do that. - [Mikey] That's cool though. I love John. That's super smart. - Yeah, that's rad. - [Mikey] Super neat. Back on DoD WAD files, if you go into the Day of Defeat box copy, there is, in fact, a WAD file called Mike Zilla Loves Ketchup.WAD. 'Cause I used to rock Mikey Zilla back in the day. - [Danny] That was your handle? - [Mikey] Yeah, I figured I could just shorten it to my name, which made it a little easier. - [Danny] That's great. Does that mean that Valve had to pay you for the WAD, Mikey Zilla Loves Ketchup? - [Mikey] Yes. - [Danny] Fantastic, congratulations. What was the first game that you were writing then? Was it one of the-- - Brothers in Arms. - Brothers in Arms? - Was the first credited write 'cause I was pushing some stuff even before that. But, again, I was a texture artist that painted sky boxes, and I'm over here being like, I can write, and they're like okay kid, we got it. 'Cause you also have to understand that I started at Gearbox when I was 19. - [Danny] Oh my goodness. - [Mikey] Yeah, I was a baby. - [Danny] So, what did writing look like on a project like that if you're just getting involved? - [Mikey] I mean, if you're a guy that fancies himself a screenwriter, not naming any names, me. Like I did. 'Cause we were trying to define what video game writing even was back then. Brothers in Arms one, I was working with this programmer, he's still at Gearbox. His name's Neal Johnson, he's one of my favorite people. He coded the battle dialogue system, which is all the barks and shouts and like, reloading! No one had done that. All the games kinda came out at the same time 'cause we all kinda solved that problem at the same time. But I remember thinking it was genius to figure out the exact number of variations you would need. 'Cause also when somebody said reloading in a game back then, they said it one way, and I had 20 variants per character, and depending on which character they were, they said it differently. Some people were more scared of bullets, while others were less, and that wasn't like a programming thing so much as just trying to be clever with the systems we designed, you know? Like make characters feel individual. - [Danny] So, the writing, it wasn't just a case of writing a script or a documented setting often team. Like you're part of a collaborative process of just trying to figure out narrative as a whole. - [Mikey] Yeah, and part of being a game writer is finding value in the bad thing. And by that I mean the thing you wouldn't want 'cause you're not, the writer is not the person that just decides everything. You have to write a game based on what you have, and I remember the voiceover stuff with Matt Baker and the Brothers in Arms games, with the red line on the screen where he's just talking like this. That was created because we had a load, there was still loading to be done. So, I could have a moment to just bloviate about the existential crisis of war. I remember, and I'm gonna paraphrase the lesson I learned, not necessarily the words said. But Randy Pitchford, when we're going through Hell's Highway and I remember, 'cause that game was really important to me, but I was like I'm gonna make everyone feel terrible. And you're gonna be like, war is bad, and everybody already knows that, man. But I was gonna go for the jugular and just, 'cause heart socket's paralyzed and all this horrendous stuff and I remember after that game did okay, Randy said to me something to the effect of it's hard to sell people loss. - [Danny] Right. - [Mikey] When you're making a product, your first instinct shouldn't be, I'm gonna make everyone cry all the time and you gotta feel terrible, and I'm gonna, you know? And it was just really interesting 'cause I never thought about it in those terms. And I don't think that's an absolute statement, but it's a good statement. You can't just sell people bad all the time 'cause they'll stop buying it. - [Danny] So, Hell's Highway didn't do particularly gangbuster you're saying because that's my favorite Brothers in Arms game. - No, it did really good. It just didn't, I think, it didn't position itself as what Call of Duty was positioning itself as by that point. - Right, yeah. That was a game that was part of the sort of before Gearbox got the IP back, right? 'Cause Ubisoft were publishing all of those games. Is that right? - [Mikey] Yeah, Ubisoft published all the Bros in Arms games, yeah. - [Danny] Right, do you have any insight into, we had a question actually from one of our Patrons. Let me see if I can get it here. This one from Raymond Harris, he said, "What ever happened to that new Band of Brothers games, the..." Sorry, I'm gonna have to repeat this question 'cause I'm sure he meant Brothers in Arms. - [Mikey] Oh, yeah, I've seen that mistake made a record, a hundred million times. - Really? That's so funny. - [Mikey] It's the most common mistake. It's interchangeable though 'cause people will call Band of Brothers Bros in Arms. The thing is, they're actually kinda close together and hard to keep track of. - [Danny] Yeah, I can see that. - [Mikey] Which I think ended up helping both of them. So, it's fine. - [Danny] Yeah, there's probably not many people who were buying box sets of Band of Brothers and trying to stick them in their Xbox 360s and wondering why a movie is playing. But Raymond asks, "What happened to that new "Brothers in Arms game that disappeared into the darkness?" I'm assuming he is referring to Furious Four. - Furious Four. - Which was-- - I cannot in any way comment on anything. - Oh really? - I'm sorry. - Okay, fair enough. We found-- - I'm not even sure I know all the story, but absolutely not. I was the Creative Director of that game. - [Danny] Oh you are? Oh my goodness. Okay, I can tell why you probably can't talk about it then. Let me ask you a different question then. What is your most proud moment of working at Gearbox? 'Cause we haven't even talked about all the work you did on Borderlands, which was a lot of writing. - [Mikey] Well, we're gonna segway in very naturally here. When Borderlands one came out, I still had this dream in my head that mattering. Like Brothers in Arms was still the thing that mattered, and Borderlands was like, ha ha, goofy fun. And I was making that distinction in my head like, Brothers in Arms matters, Borderlands is just fun. Which is a bad distinction to make, and I don't think fair. For whatever reason, whatever arbitrary guideline led me to this, I always had this dream that I would of made it when someone tattooed a line I wrote onto their body. And in my head, that... And I can only imagine that other writers have done this as well, but in my head, that only applied to Brothers in Arms. I was like, your writing such beautiful soliloquies. Thinking that mattered, and I remember the first line anyone ever tattooed on their body. Do you remember Zombie Island of Dr. Ned? First DLC for Borderlands one, and it's right at the beginning, Claptrap wheels up one of the other Claptraps, and he looks you right in the face, and he goes, "I pooped where you're standing." And that was the first thing anyone ever tattooed on their body that I wrote. They came up to me at a con and they're like, "Check this dope shit out!" And I was like, yo! - [Danny] Where was it tattooed, crucially? - [Mikey] Right on their arm, right on the bicep, just a massive Claptrap with a speech bubble that said, "I pooped where you're standing." And at that moment, at that exact moment, I went, all that matters is that you entertain them and give them joy. That became my whole thing after that one moment. - [Danny] How big was the writing team on something like Borderlands? - [Mikey] Borderlands one, it sorta passed through a few hands. Ultimately, I wrote the words that are said. I actually sort of think of it like Speed. The process of Borderlands one was sort of like the script passed through a few hands, and then I just rewrote all of it. Exactly the number of lines and the way they would go, and the reason I use the Speed example is if you look back at the movie Speed, the movie was written and ready to go for Jan de Bont to direct, but the script was kinda weak in terms of character. - [Danny] Right. - [Mikey] So Joss Whedon, back when he was a script doctor for Hollywood, he was hired to rewrite every single line in Speed by the person who says it at the time they say it at the length they say it. But rewrite all the lines. - [Danny] Wow. - [Mikey] But keep everything exactly where it is. - [Danny] So, the production can change, nothing else can change, but we're just go in and ninja this part of the production, change it. Go in, change it, go out, and nobody's none the wiser. - [Mikey] Yeah, so I got a big plot 'cause all the plot stuff was pretty much in place. So, it's a little loose in Borderlands one, but that's on purpose. When I got it, it was just make it funny. And that wasn't even a decision I think everyone agreed on at the outset. - [Danny] Was this because of the sort of the big change that happened? 'Cause obviously the Borderlands, the graphics, the art side of that game was obviously changed in sort of, maybe not the 11th hour, but pretty late in the process, right? - [Mikey] Yeah, it's funny 'cause if you type healing bullets on YouTube, you'll still get this video and like I, so long ago. I'm such a baby in that video, but I did an interview at PAX about healing bullets. And the thing that basically made me realize that game should be funny and try to get you interested in the world and the characters was we were play testing it, and the game was pretty much what it was. It just wasn't over-the-top with title cards and it's goofy. Roland has a box in his skill tree for if you shoot your teammates, it will heal them. But the gun you have determines how much you can heal. So, if you have the bombest shotgun in the whole world, you can be a combat medic in the middle. But if you just wanted to be a long-range sniper, you could literally snipe health into people. And I was like, and I had nothing to do with this decision at all, and I was like, wow, you don't care about realism 'cause why would you. That decision is show genius, I can't even. And that was the moment on Borderlands where I was like, oh, this is funny. This is a game that does not care about the existing restrictions of realism, and just make it make sense to that world, you know? - [Danny] It's interesting to hear you talk about the process because I think, maybe this is just my assumption, and we have a pretty good divide I feel of people who work in development and people who are, you know, just people who play games like myself who watch ourself and listen to ourself. So, maybe I'm speaking for other people as well, but I feel like whenever I'm thinking about writing in games, I think about writing in film where it's like if something gets done really early in the process, and then it's locked down and it's content-locked, but it sounds like that's not the case at all. - [Mikey] I don't think that's the case in Hollywood either because I think there's a desire to make it appear like that's the case, but you see screenwriters on movie sets a lot rewriting a scene while they're shooting the scene. That's insanely common. So, I think writing is just more complex than people think it is in general. - [Danny] Do you miss it? Has it been two years since you? - [Mikey] Yeah, it's coming up on two years. 'Cause I think... It's hard to remember 'cause I was out of the hospital for multiple months, and then I finally one Sunday just kinda resigned 'cause it was time. - [Danny] For people who don't know, were you diagnosed with MS around that time? Or had you been suffering with it for a longer time and it was getting worser. - [Mikey] No, it was just an incident. That's a whole other... That'll be a podcast all its own. - [Danny] Right, yeah, and you should go check out. Is all that stuff on the FilmJoy YouTube channel or is that a different YouTube channel? All your retiree stuff? - [Mikey] There's a short film called Get Off the Floor on FilmJoy that fills you in on all the stuff that happened last year, which wasn't technically MS that caused the original thing, but then it is exact... When you have my body, all of that stuff just mixes all the time, and then you find what fixes it, not necessarily the key to solving all of it. But just enough to get better for a second, and you just accept that and move on. - [Danny] Right. I mean, obviously, you're working for yourself now. You're working on your own project. I can empathize with you a lot on the struggles of kind of that thing 'cause we kind of got very similar styles of projects, I feel like mostly. But what are the things you miss most about game development? Is it working with other people? - [Mikey] Yeah, absolutely. I don't need to listen to the other options, yes. - [Danny] And what else? Is it just a social thing or is it like collaborating or? - [Mikey] I think I am most effective in a collaborative space. And I've sort of designed this new life and new persona that doesn't do that. I think, we have a show called Deep Dive where me and my friends watch bad movies. I know, so creative, right? But Deep Dive, the rule is, and the rule to like be on the show 'cause I made us all agree to this upfront. And they're all better at it than me now, but the rule is you have to find something to love. We're not here to make fun of it and destroy it. 'Cause people spent effort on it whether you care or not. - [Danny] Actually, I wanna talk to you a little bit about that 'cause recently I got into a bit of a... I don't know if I call it a beef on Twitter, but I said something on Twitter and I really pissed off a bunch of game star lists. - [Mikey] Oh, I did that this morning. - [Danny] Oh, did you? - [Mikey] I did it yesterday too with Speedrunners. - [Danny] Oh really? I was making a point that I was really irked that so much of, not just YouTube, but also so much of the sort of op-ed space of games coverage was... Critiquing games is fine, but just saying games are bad because you don't like them. Saying you don't like something and saying that it's objectively bad because of x reason when I imagine just from, I feel like I empathize with developers more now that I hate watching videos or reading articles where people say, oh the developers should have done x 'cause it's like they fucking know, and they made that decision because of something. It was a decision, not an error. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. So, I wanted to ask you, as somebody who sort of has been in the development world and now is essentially sort of like in the criticism world, is that something that used to irk you when you'd read things or listened to podcasts from journalists and they're talking about games, and you kind of shrug your head and say they don't know what they're talking about? How did you feel? - [Mikey] I think, well one, yes, absolutely that irked me. Yeah, like I'm responding to it. I think it informs my entire being because I spend all of my effort to be like, wow they really tried in these ways, and it's worth respecting these people here for this. Just point out the good stuff because bad stuff, quote unquote, I don't know. What ever thing is making people mad about games right now, they'll also tend to be like, and here's why 'cause one person just hates gamers. And it's like, probably it was some cross section of money, personnel, and time. - [Danny] Right. - [Mikey] You know? You have those three things, you have limited quantities of all of them, you must decide the best way to... Generally, it's actually just business that causes stuff to be quote unquote bad. It's never someone was like, yeah, let's get 'em. Let's show 'em! - [Danny] Does that extend at all to the way in which Gearbox itself was reported on? 'Cause I feel like there's been quite a lot of anti-Randy sentiment in the media over the years. And obviously someone you worked with closely. - [Mikey] That is the most unfair question. 'Cause I can't really answer it, but I can say I think everyone has a not great reading on Randy, and that's on purpose. He's one of the most personal, personable, kind, caring people who is very serious about running a business and rewarding his employees and doing that. And it matters so much to him that he's just willing to take the bullets for the... And I think that's very respectable. It's huge, that's what a boss is supposed to do. I think Randy's a great boss. I said it! - [Danny] Quoted. So, I guess you say, is that why? I mean, the name of the channel is FilmJoy, right?. Was that a big part of sort of passion behind it was to try and not glad-hand, but just to speak to a different facet of film and not just sort of go for the easy thumbnail or the easy title? - [Mikey] It's also sort of about even though I'm not necessarily part of the business, I understand the entertainment business and I have a lot of friends in that business. It's explaining that things you don't like are often more complicated than you think they are, but it's okay to love stuff and to celebrate it. So, I try to use that methodology where even if I needed to talk about something that people perceive as negative in my opinion, you then kinda show them why we're the value of the thing in a way they haven't thought about it. A lot of times, it just comes down to perspective, honestly. You can give someone a perspective on a movie, and it will change the movie entirely. - [Danny] But now we live in a world where Lindsay Ellis is making amazing videos, and loads of people are watching them. - [Mikey] You have this sort of cabal 'cause we all know each other, and we're all friends, and we're all supportive of each other. But we're also trying to make people happier and looking at art as art because if there's one goal, I think for me, it's that let's appreciate the struggles of art. Let's appreciate the failures of art for what they are, or what they went for. Let's not just look at movies as this throwaway thing. That you just go to a theater, you turn your brain off. My least favorite piece of advice people give, just turn your brain off! All die! - [Danny] Do you think we have someone like that in the world of games? 'Cause it kind of requires somebody to be like, have experience in the field, or be a scholar of that field. And I think we've really good critics and some good analysis. People like Mark Brown or Super Bunnyhop. And loads-- - Mark Brown's great. - [Danny] You think he's the closest, probably, we have to somebody who does that work? - [Mikey] Intellectual, I would say, like Mark Brown is more in that Lindsay Ellis direction, which is highly valuable and highly great. I would put up, and this isn't intellectual criticism, it's emotional, which kinda is more in-line with me, I would say that the video game creator on YouTube that speaks to sort of my direction is NakeyJakey. - Oh yes. - You ever heard of him? - Yes, he did a, he has a really good Red Dead Redemption video I've watched recently. - [Mikey] But it's like mature and it makes good points, but it's also from a place of, I love everything and I wanna keep loving it. Here's some thoughts, here's some, I don't know. I really love his content. - [Danny] Alright, let's jump into some Patron questions. These are questions from the folks who support us on NoClip, patreon.com/noclip. Also, if you subscribe with the five dollar tier, you get this podcast early. Would you imagine? And you also get to ask a bunch of questions. This first one comes from Tony Voots Zaninga, which may or may not be that individual's legal name. "What is your favorite movie licensed game?" Anyone's pop out in particular? I'm a big fan of a Die Hard trilogy on the PlayStation one. - [Mikey] That's funny. Does the West... wait, what was the company name? The people that made Command and Conquer. - Westwood. - Was that Westwood? - Yeah, yeah. - [Mikey] Do you remember that Bladerunner game? - [Danny] Oh, yes, I do. - That point and click. - I thought you were gonna say Dune, but yes, that Bladerunner game, absolutely. - [Mikey] Also, Dune is good too. But the Bladerunner one is kinda the movie, kinda not. It's tough to say. - [Danny] What is it about it you like? - [Mikey] I am a sucker for point and clicks, so. - [Danny] Did you like the old... I've recently been re-watching the Indiana Jones movies 'cause my wife had never seen them, and we were talking about Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which I played on the Amigos old Lucas Arts one. Did you ever play that one? - [Mikey] Yeah, you actually just reminded me of another Randy quote. It was, "Fate of Atlantis is the third best "Indiana Jones movie." And I was going like, yeah. - Yeah, I could see that. - Yeah, 'cause like it could be fourth, but it caused a conversation where we're like, is Fate of Atlantis a better Indiana Jones movie than Temple of Doom. And I was like, if you can create that conversation in one question, awesome. - [Danny] That's interesting 'cause Temple of Doom is my favorite one. That wouldn't be my number three. - [Mikey] Yeah, but it could be number four as long as Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls is not your number one. - Absolutely. - I respect the opinion, and I give you the floor if it is. - [Danny] The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull deserves to be in the top three best indie movies? - [Mikey] No, if it was, I respect your right to have that opinion. - Okay. - [Mikey] I'm not gonna be like, no. I'll make the joke 'cause Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is eh. But it also actually does have some really good scenes in it, and I don't know. It's worth a re-watch for the first 40 minutes. That scene with Harrison Ford and Shia LaBeouf where they're passing the beer off the train back and forth, you know what I'm talking about? - Yeah, that's, yeah, that's pretty good. - That's classic Spielberg. The rest of the movie isn't, but that-- - [Danny] That is, it's like a... I think it's a oner, is it? You know, one of his shorties that's sort of like, it plays with props and has your eye moving around the frame, where is then you go to the fridge nuclear explosion andit's a hard swing. - [Mikey] But even that 'cause that scene destroys Indiana Jones, but it also welcomes it into the nuclear age in a single shot 'cause the one of him against the mushroom cloud, even though everything leading up to that is like, what? That shot is so iconic of a world where Indiana Jones entered the nuclear age. That was a perfect shot. - [Danny] It's coming up. I keep telling my wife 'cause the Blu-ray pack I got came with all four of them, so it's on the list. So, I guess I'll know soon enough. - [Mikey] Oh, hey, what you do today, Mikey? Oh, I went on Danny O-Dwyer's podcast and defended Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to prove that I know movies. Oh, my show's canceled? Ah. Okay. - Kristoff Shepherd wants to know what games you played last year that you think were sort of like under-deserved or underappreciated. Was there anything that popped out to you? - [Mikey] Last year? - Yeah. - No, actually, I can't answer that 'cause my body didn't work for most of the year, so I skipped out on a lot of games. - [Danny] Did you really? - [Mikey] I couldn't play. I would do the Rocket League test every day to see if my fingers worked. - Wow. - [Mikey] When I got out of the hospital, it was five months before I could control a game like Rocket League sort of where I was. 'Cause I played hardcore. - [Danny] God, I'm so sorry. It's that fine motor skill that-- - [Mikey] Yeah, my professional gaming career has ended. - [Danny] You don't have the... What is it? I thought that happened to all Cannon Strike players when they reach 30 anyway, right? You lose your fine fibers in your hands, and suddenly you can't be a Starcraft pro no more. - [Mikey] Well, I'm also, at this point, 40 to 60 percent blind, so. Those dreams have sailed, they have gone. I'm not gonna be the number one League player. - [Danny] Does that inform what you're deciding to play now then? 'Cause I know it's not like you're feeling completely perfect now or anything. It sways on a moment to moment, day to day basis, right? - [Mikey] There is... So, specifically, one thing I cannot do at all is play VR games. - [Danny] Right. - [Mikey] 'Cause my balance is so bad that if I stand up and put that on, I would immediately fall over. - [Danny] Really? - [Mikey] Yeah, you ever do that thing where you're trying to stand on one leg and close your eyes? You just can't do it? That's me most of the time with my eyes open. But if I cover them up, I'll just fall over. And I can't really see in 3D anyway, so it doesn't matter. - [Danny] So it's not like even Astrobot sitting down or anything would be doable? - [Mikey] 'Cause it's also just like how bananas the game is. I mean, we were talking about what games I was playing, and like Slay the Spire and Half-Life are pretty chill. I could do Mario Party, I'm good at that. Still got the Mario Party gene 'cause some of those games are just smash a button. - [Danny] Do you like the new one? Have you played the new one? - [Mikey] I think the new one is the best Mario Party they've ever made. - So do I! I don't know why people don't like it. It's me, you, and Dan Ryker are the ones that actually enjoy the new Mario Party. - Hell yeah. - [Danny] I think it's great. I think the dice stuff is wonderful, and they, not to use the term RNG again, but they pulled back a little bit on the random bullshit at the end of each game where like it doesn't matter how well you did. - [Mikey] The thing about Mario Party is it doesn't matter who wins or loses. You're playing to have fun with your friends. Don't forget that part. Don't forget that step. It doesn't matter, nobody gets anything for winning. It's fine, the game will lie to you and bullshit you out of a star. It's okay. You're playing 'cause it's fun. - [Danny] But Mikey, we're so used to video games letting us win all the time. If we wanted to lose at games, we'd play board games or card games. - [Mikey] If you don't like RNG, play checkers. - [Danny] I got a question from Raymond Harris here, let's make this the last one. He says, "What is the culture like working at Gearbox?" Yes, you were there for a long long time. From my very brief time in the office, it seems like there were a lot of people who worked there for a long, 10 years. Is that the case? Has it grown a lot in the time you were working there? - [Mikey] I was like employee 32, somewhere around there. When I left, it was like, god, between 300 and 400. I don't even, it's over 400 now. - [Danny] And would that have just been in Dallas? - [Mikey] Yeah, that's just in Dallas. - [Danny] Just in Dallas? 'Cause they also have that studio open in, well everyone has a studio in Quebec now-- - I never went to that studio, so I don't know anything about it, but yes. So, it's massive, and I was part of building that thing. Like helping build that with all the amazing people there, but the culture was supportive and nice and you made good money, and people stuck around. That's still true. So, it's great there. - [Danny] Was there much of people bouncing between there and maybe age work in Richardson down the road? There's a couple of other studios around the sort of greater Dallas area? - [Mikey] There were, like 3D Realms was out there. - [Danny] Of course, yeah. - [Mikey] God, it's been so... Like now, I feel like... 'Cause the Words with Friends guys are or were here. I haven't thought about it in awhile, but. - [Danny] And that was the biggest game in the world for a hot minute there. - [Mikey] Yeah, and then they got bought by somebody. I don't even remember. It's so complicated, but I remember they were out there, but other than that, it's id and Gearbox pretty much. id, actually, when they built their new building, it was right down the street from Gearbox. So, the employees that knew each other, we'd eat lunch all the time together and catch up, especially after Doom came out, you know? The reboot. - [Danny] Right. - [Mikey] And we're like, this is the greatest shooter ever! It's just fans. The reality is a lot of game makers are just fans of each other. It's okay that they're friends. - [Danny] It's also cool that there's so much history between those two studios, and the RPG 3D Realms. And so much of that studio also being at Gearbox. - [Mikey] I remember one of our first interactions that I remember. I'm sure there were ones before it. When we did Tony Hawk Pro Skater Three for PC, we added the Doom guy from Quake Three, I think. - [Danny] Right. - [Mikey] On PC, if you type the cheat code, it's either iddqd or idkfa, but if you do that in Tony Hawk, it gives you the Doom guy. Well, we did that with id. They gave us the actual re-Doom guy model. I think, again, not sure, it's been awhile, but. - [Danny] That's awesome, especially from somebody who runs a company called NoClip. I remember walking into the studio the first time and then being like, oh yeah, we really like the name. And I was like, that's good to know 'cause I was worried Bethesda were going to sue me. - [Mikey] I never actually thought about it in context now. You typed, idkfa was weapons. Iddqd, I think, was keys. Yeah, specifically noclip was noclip, right? - [Danny] Yeah, yeah, noclip was turn off collision. Clipping, clipping, clipping, clipping. - [Mikey] One of those sounds like a cheat code, and one of those sounds like a programmer, you know what I mean? Half of those probably were cheat codes, and half were actually just test things. Which is really interesting. - [Danny] It's different to like Impulse Nine or Impulse 101 we used to do for-- - Right, oh god! Impulse 101! You take me back, Danny. Wow. - [Danny] Mikey Neumann, thanks so much for coming on. Before we let you go, can you tell us what you're working on? What's going on over on... It's patreon.com/, oh sorry, it's patreon.com/movieswithmikey. It's youtube.com/filmjoy, that's right. - [Mikey] Yeah, youtube.com/film joy and go check out our stuff. I have a big cork board across the room. I just did my schedule for 2019 and Movies with Mikey episodes. There's some real good stuff on there. Actually, I should hit my 100th episode this year. - [Danny] Congratulations, and congratulations on over 200,000 subs on the channel and on finishing your monster, three-part Harry Potter Series which myself and my wife have been enjoying. We still haven't watched the last section of it. Does it feel good to get those out? Just to have them done when they've been in your brain that long? - [Mikey] It felt amazing up until the Pottermore Twitter account tweeted that stuff about students shitting in the hallway and just erasing it with magic, and I was like... Ah, cool, cool. I tried to talk about how this is a serious exploration of death, and it all just disappeared in shit. Like that destroyed anyone talking about my thing. Now, it's a business, and that's the thing the third episode's about is like how Harry Potter is actually an exploration of multiple sclerosis. Which I didn't even know when I started it, and that messed me up when I went into the last episode and I was reading all these old interviews with J.K. Rowling about... So, when J.K. Rowling was 15, her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and just under the 10-year mark after that diagnosis before J.K. Rowling is 25, it kills her. Her mother passed, not directly, but it was MS, and you don't see that a lot. Harry Potter is about dealing with the death of your parents and not accepting simple answers. That destroyed me to know that the disease I have leaves these holes in people, these Horcruxes, if you will. That was so monumentally world-shifting to me that I was like I can't talk about any of this other stuff, even though it's interesting. - [Danny] Mikey, this is why I love talking to you because whenever I'm enjoying a movie or in our chats up in Dallas, playing a game, I feel like your analysis always gives me further sort of layers to either enjoy or understand something, or understand myself, or how I should react to it, or even wide our culture a little bit more. And I think that's really important. Thank you so much for your work, man, and thanks so much for coming on today. I'd love to have you back any time, any time we shoot the show. - Any time you want me, man. - [Danny] Appreciate it, dude, and thank you so much for listening to this, the fourth, slash first episode of NoClip podcast. We'll be back next week with Stephen Spohn, the CEO of AbleGamers. Good friend of mine. Talk about all the games he's playing and the work that he does. If you have any suggestions for guests or questions or anything, go over to the subreddit that's r/noclip. Hit me up on Twitter at Danny O'Dwyer. The podcast is available on everywhere podcasts are sold, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, FlamBlam, all the Google Play. I made one of those up. We also have a new YouTube channel as well, which doesn't have a tiny or a small, sexy, URL yet, so you're just gonna have to take my word for it and type in NoClip podcast into Google or into YouTube and it should pop up. Yeah, five bucks a month to get you the show early, but of course, these are all free anyway for everyone. Thank you so much for supporting our work. Thanks to all our Patrons for keeping this stuff ad-free, and patreon.com/noclip if you're interested in that. And youtube.com/noclipvideo if you wanna watch our documentaries. Mikey, thanks again. Thanks to you for listening, and we'll see you, would you believe it, next week.