[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, news, like as I was mentioning, that will make you reconsider your language.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Here is, uh, some news that aired about Mr. Silva.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I guess he held somebody in the home at gunpoint and here he's being escorted with his pants around his knees.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, as he was held up in this house, he posted multiple...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Outside the house. Uhm, stuff like this, check it out. Stuff like that? You know what I'm saying?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then it's funny he went from that to free me. Free me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I love the, I love a guy who's talking the most shit to himself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, that's this over here. No, it's not the monitor, it's this computer. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah. Good looking out. Good looking out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You wouldn't know about that cause you Caucasian.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, and I'll tell you, just to make sure I watched that video,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How about, how much can you give me? 20? I'd be like, alright man, I gotta go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] See? A lot of chicks are like, a lot of girls come up to me, uhm, after shows when they're like, how much to suck that dick? Sure. I'm busy right now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then they're like, I'll go, how much you got? And they're like, 20? I'm like.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He just sounds grimy. It's a rough, it's a rough, yeaah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is uhm, our man, we've played him on the show before, uhm, his name is,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can tell he takes care of himself physically. Uhm, really goes after it as a ho. But uhm, on top of that, he's also a rapper. I've been working on my raps. And as a rapper, uhm, even on the show, he got called out by one of the other hoes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, it's not just being in shape, it's the way that you present how you're in shape.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We want to talk about his new song. This actually came out fucking last week. So we played, yeah, we played. Yeah, I know we've played.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're breaking Breaking a Sweat, the name of this song. Uhm, if you listen a few episodes back, I don't remember the episode number, we can look it up. We, uh, we talk about his rap battle with Vin that we played on the show that they were on, it was on Jiggalos. So anyways, this came in, it's a song that he's put out, it's called Breaking a Sweat.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Whether or not this is a good song. I was like, radio stations do that, they're like, is it hot or not? Like, call us, let us know. You can't really call us, but you can certainly let us know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Alright, this song, what's the verdict on breaking a sweat?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's terrible. It's really bad. It's terrible. This isn't your best work. This is a really bad song, but in Nick's defense, you buy an album, a lot of times you go, you know, it's an accomplished musician and you say, this isn't their best song.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, these are all just the songs. Uh, there's Tippin' and Trippin'.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Groupie pitches, step up. What do you want to hear? I'm out of this world, we fight, uhm, it's up to you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay. It hurts my soul. I think we should, yeaah, we should give it a break after this. So this is our last shot. We're going to go with the highest viewed song on the album, uh, Tippin' and Sippin'. Let's see what happens. Here we go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes, I was on this episode of Yo M2B Raps. Man, I miss Yo M2B Raps. I really loved that show. That show...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This was on, what is it, original air dates, was it a weekend show? Friday, Saturday? I can't remember now. I used to never miss it, that's funny.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh yeaah, it's done. It aired 88 to 95. Damn, I feel like it was on longer than that. It's funny.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I was, and hearing that sound, it was a sound I'd never heard before, like, what the fuck is this?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah, no, I know. Uhm, it was pretty awesome though. I remember seeing Redman on there. A lot of people. Anyways, here's Eric B and Rakim.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So it's Eric B and Rakim, probably the first time they're on UMT Raps, and they're asking him, like, so what do you, what do you like to listen to? And his first, I think it's his first answer, is, I listen to my shit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tom, what's your favorite comedy? Me? I listen to my own shit, my jokes, so I remind myself of what I'm all about. That's what he just said. Who's that guy in the back?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just to make sure we know, we have a...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These guys are really trying to make it as musicians too, you know?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nah, get a fake one. Just all about the look, you know. Okay. I'll just start going to meetings like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because we were like, that's pretty cool. You got the god MC right there. That's, you know, Rakim. Uhm, is there anything we can put him up against? And then we have this from Del the Funky Homo Sapien.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's unmatchable. I'm the Nick Hawk of, you know, of the rap world. And so...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's what you would say you can't fuck with me on. And it was awesome.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I agree on that, but you definitely want to say that you cannot fuck with me on a mic. That's what it's all about.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, they used to have the real, kind of a, it's a wacky


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You don't know? Alright, well, uhm, we should, uh, we should get moving here.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, here's Auntie Fifi singing just for Christina.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, more submissions. We need more fill her up submissions and we'll play them next time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So please send them in to yourmomspodcast at gmail.com. There's no house, your mom's podcast.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can send a bunch of, you know, any email you want there, but especially, please in the subject line, put fill her up if you're sending a fill her up submission. Let's see, somebody sent a crazy loc song, is it good? Really? It's in the fan songs thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, well here we go. This is our interpretation of a collaboration between crazy locs and pillow pants. Okay. High and tight.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah, durr. Jackson, Jackson, Jackson's dick.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thanks for being here. How are you man? Oh, thank you very much for having me. Yeah, I'm alright. Yeah, it's, uh, it's been a long week, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I feel like it should be like November time, but it feels like we've been through the wars. We've had a ton of like good games already, but also a lot of like good news, bad news. It's moving, it's moving quickly. It feels like 2023 part two, right? For sure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Thanks very much. It's very kind of you to say, um, you know, you know, I'm a big fan of yours as well. Um, there's, there's many, many.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I, I agree. It's, uh, it almost felt like it was very reactionary, right? Which is not like Xbox to be reactionary. It seems that's all they've been doing for the last ten years. Uhm, you know, couldn't, it could have just been a statement.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, would it, could they have just put it out and said, oh no, you know, uh, Starfield and Indiana Jones are not coming to PS5, but we'll have more news on games later. I don't think they needed to, oh, they probably felt compelled to kind of do the big long podcast and speak for however long it was, like 20 minutes, you know, about different topics just because of how the fan base reacted, but essentially.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Where, you know, you do that, you kind of bounce between where's the summary, right? The Xbox Wire post that they had didn't really summarize all the points, and then to what, uh, to Ralph's point earlier, they kind of told, uhm, in the interviews they did with The Virgin with Steven Titillo, they kind of contradicted themselves a little bit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You have to read behind the lines with news, right? Like, a lot of this is just to manipulate the fans who are angry, who are just going to take them on face value, really. But essentially, they confirmed everything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, nobody said, I mean, unless I'm wrong, uh, the, the reports out, they didn't say Starfield was coming. They didn't say Indiana Jones was coming. It said that they were considering that they're exploring that they were working. That doesn't mean that they have to announce it today. Um, you know, the fact that they are working on these four games.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, you don't do that without the window open to work on more, right? If these games are successful, this is a test, right? It screams test bed, these four games.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sea of Thieves makes complete sense. Uhm, I'm surprised it hasn't been on PS5 sooner to be honest. I mean, it's a, it's a live service game. It's a big community driven game. Of course it's going to help all of the players on Sea of Thieves and Xbox that there are, you know, kind of there's additional console based games available to. The others,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's just a test, you know, like that's just kind of like.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, nobody has exclusives anymore. That's what he said. Like, there's barely any games out recently that are on one platform. Of course, why haven't we got Helldivers?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, you've just bought a publisher for 70 billion.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know? And now you're complaining that it's... yeah. It was an odd thing to say. It was.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Phil, Phil Spencer is kind of like, I don't want to say a law hunt himself, but he's very passionate. You can tell that, right? A lot of these interviews he would have pushed himself personally to go for. He would have wanted to have spoken, uhm, to kind of, from his motivation to kind of allay some of the concerns in the community.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As we know, you know, kind of good experience PR people usually would get involved and go, just don't say anything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which is, which is his own problem, right? I mean, I, we'd all prefer them to speak than not, but it's just a point, a soft point.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a Nintendo partner direct this week, which, uh, you know, according to certain journalists was initially planned for last week and delayed after this, this business update was announced. So wouldn't it be interesting if half of these games were announced in that? Um, then.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Phil claimed that it was a small number, uh, the number of kind of the core users moving over represented a small portion of the growth. He claimed it was mostly PC and mobile, but obviously we don't know. We don't know for sure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah. Well nobody's talking about the 2000 Laos.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, it's been a bit disappointing few months in general, isn't it? I mean, and this kind of bleeds into the PlayStation stuff that we'll get to, but it's just, it just feels grim, doesn't it? Um, you know, I just feel like I've been bracing myself for six months, you know, just bracing for the worst all the time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Again, something else we'll get to, you know, kind of the next Nintendo console was something to be optimistic for this year. Uhm, and then now that looks like that's gone. Uhm, it's...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, even, even, you know, kind of the, the stuff that was coming out of the PlayStation's earnings, it was very much pointing towards them making their own, their own cuts. Um, it's, uh, it's, yeah, it's, and I don't even know where all these jobs are going to go, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, I mean, there's, there's one of the biggest, um, uh, games industry job agencies in the UK, OPM. OPM. They've been around for 25 years. They just closed. They just, they didn't, they didn't like fold. They just decided that it was, there's, we're wasting our time operating in this market right now. Really?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, you, you don't, you don't know the full motivations behind it, do you? I mean, when you, you know, people start businesses to sell them at some point, right? You're not going to do it forever.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Of 25 years, I'm sure it was like 20, 25 years that was running. You know, maybe it's like, look, this doesn't look like it's going to turn around for a couple of years, which it probably isn't. Do I want to?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Bunker down and sit through that and come out the other end and build again, or do I just want to take the money and call it a day?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and one of the reasons it doesn't feel like it's been that long is back to what Big Feel was saying, is that there aren't really any console exclusives anymore. Especially what Sony was promising, uhm, pre-launch, we believe in generations, etc, etc. That kind of didn't come to fruition, and partly, you know, not their fault.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They couldn't have made as many consoles as they wanted to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, it doesn't feel like it's been running for that long and I do think that...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, right, right. But like, games-wise, it felt...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Games, games, I thought in the hardware, you're like, you already know, you were feeling like, yeah, I can see how we could conceivably move on in three, four years, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But even that, like, it had a reason, right, to sell that. It was, you can play your games upscale to 4K. Great, cool. I've got a new 4K TV. That benefit is not so clear now. I don't know what they would do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, some of the speculation was that they might do like a ray trace, uh, like an enhanced ray tracing, um, type thing, which maybe they could get me to pay for, you know?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it's not as clear a cell as a 4k, right? I mean, people would have 4k TVs. They understand what UHD is. That was a clear up cell.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, I mean yeaah, so technically they're right. I think a lot of the discourse around, uh, this quote in the earnings call, I'm not sure if it was a misquote or not that some of the sites picked up on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But certainly the quote that I transcribed that we were running, uh, with what it was that it was entering the same PSY was entering the latter stages, uh, the latter, sorry, the latter half of its life cycle.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 2020, we're going to have new consoles, but it'll be interesting to see what they look like because the other thing that came out of this, one of many things that came out of this earnings call was that they were making the point that these, these, these consoles are not getting cheaper to make. Unlike the last generation was the last generation where we had that advantage where


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Manufacturing the Sysmon chips for these consoles would gradually get cheaper. They're not cheaper. Like the newer Sysmon chips, I think, I don't know the technical details, but the ones that the Xbox series and the PS5 have, they're not getting cheaper. So...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's why you're seeing a lot of these problems now, you know, like, to, to try and, I mean 25 million consoles is what they were trying to sell this year, Sony.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which was like a super, super, uhm, ambitious number. And they plan to do that with discounting, basically. Like they're aggressively discounting.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that's hurt them now, you know, they've missed it. They said they're going to miss their target by 4 million, which is a lot. To angry shareholders, that is a lot, uhm, even though it's still like a super impressive number. And they said double-edged sword, they've done that by, by discounting the hardware, which is not getting cheaper.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So it does make you wonder that, especially with, you know, something, something's got to give basically, right? I mean, the biggest takeaway for me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I'm gonna say it anyway and someone can tell me that I'm wrong. I believe they made something like 10 billion dollars in revenue for this quarter. And it's a Christmas quarter, so it's a big one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So to make 600 million, they've got to generate 10 billion. Like, that is pretty unsustainable now. Because they're getting, they're getting on both ends, right? Uhm, games are getting more expensive to make, they're taking longer to make, hardware is, uh, is, is always gonna be, has been a loss leader.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the audiences are not growing. So this is the thing, is that something's got to give, and this is Xbox and PlayStation, is there even need to make cheaper games? Which is what Sean Madden was saying five, six years ago, you know, the ex-PlayStation US boss.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, he, he, I mean, he's not messiah. Lots of people would know this, but he was saying it openly in public that it's unsustainable. AAA development budgets. I mean, on PS4, when they're already playing 100 million plus, we now know that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, you know, um, horizon flipping west and the spider-man games on PS5, it costs like 250, $300 million to make.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, so if you're, you're making, you're paying that sort of money to make a game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Exactly, exactly, which is that is only going to accelerate the point, I imagine. I mean, there's only spec, people are only speculating, but because you don't have the actual numbers outside of Steam, but I saw some suggestion that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] PlayStation makes up a really small fraction of those, you know, five, half a, half a billion, uh, half a million even, sorry, players, uh, concurrent players that are there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was about to say, do you know what's really interesting about that story? Because I believe I wrote the original one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's, you can say it's a misquote. Basically...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So Sony's own live translation, right? They removed Bungie from the live translation. I mean, there could be a myriad of reasons for that, right? Japanese is like one of the hardest languages to translate on the fly, especially on audio because there's not much context in it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, you're missing context on it. If you're sat in front of someone, you kind of like get what they're talking about a bit more, the nuance. So it's to be, it's understandable that you'd get a better translation with time and what have you, but.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But yeah, the live translation, Bungie was not mentioned, um, by Sony's translators. It was broad like, oh, our studios need to get better at, um, I think they said like development timelines and how they manage their money and blah, blah. But yeah, they put out a transcripts on their, their investor website today and it's just laying into Bungie basically. Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'll tell you what I find interesting is the reporting recently around, um, there are certain like, um, clauses in their contracts about the management of the studio because they had layoffs recently and,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think it might have been IGN, forgive me if it wasn't. But allegedly that decision was motivated by them hitting certain finance, like not dropping below certain targets so that they continued to have control of the studio.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah. So if you were wrestling with that, you probably slagged them off in your investor call, right? They're rubbish. They need to get better. They need to get better. They need to be better at business. I think was, was a rough quote. Um, you know, needs to be better at managing their timelines and their money. That's the sort of thing you'd say if you're getting ready to, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So if you, if you see behind me, I've got a virtual boy, right? Sure. And I've got the majority of the Japanese library for it there. I think there's 18 games. So I've got about 11 there. That's more than, uh, PS4.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because that's the moon going round, is Virtual Boy had more exclusive games. There's a reason for that, because you're not really porting your Virtual Boy games to Super Nintendo, right? It requires you to strap something onto your face. And it comes from a different time, so a bit unfair, but also makes a valid point.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is coming back to what Phil Spencer was saying, like when he's like, he's basically saying like, you guys are kind of getting angry at us, but there are no console exclusives really now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it's, it's disappointing just from a fan's perspective. I mean, I'm going to have my old man moment. Um, but do you remember the Mark Cerny tech talk before the PS5 launched? He spent like, I don't know how long it was, but it was a significant amount of time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's going to change how games are made. They literally can, you know, you can, it showed how they built environments on every console, you know, with sightlines and stuff, right? And you now don't have to worry about that. You can have a big environment as you want.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How, you know, they had to put a trash can, you know, a hundred times, uh, on the memory of Spiderman because it had to be loaded inks wherever you are in the environment.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] About how now on PS5, you can literally stream the graphics faster than the camera moves, right? So getting fidelity to the level where you don't even have to, I mean, I know a lot of games work like that, but to an even more, you know, uh, on the, uh, the, the, the razor's edge line of, of streaming, uh, graphical data and,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I remember that talk and I was pretty excited about it. And then it's like, well, and now all of our games are on PS4 and I understand, you know, why they did that. And everyone does and no one's questioning the quality of their first party games because they're, they're usually like bangers, guaranteed bangers, all of them Sony's first party stuff.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Help you, you know, stop me wondering like what could have been, right? You know, so if God of War Ragnarok is, is like this with these huge environments and you know, these beautiful characters, what would it, it looks like if they didn't have to put it on a squeeze it onto a PS4?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, where games need to look better and be bigger. Like, I mean, I watched the, you know, the Last of Us Part 2 documentary they just brought out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, um, there's a, there's a, Neil Druckmann sits down on the team and he's like, right, you know, we've, we've, I think they shipped Uncharted 4 and they're like, you know, Uncharted 2 is, um, Lost Wars Part 2 is going to be.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Something else that Sean Layden said, you know, five, six years ago, these games, we've got our audience into this state where they equate value with length, right? And it's not the same thing at all. Like these games have been, I mean,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, I've not played it, but Jordan's been playing it and he's like, all he's been doing for the last two, three weeks is like going, it's still going.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's still going. It won't end. You know? It's, and it's...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That is how we've got us, the games industry has got itself into this situation, especially the platform holders where they feel like they have to, especially PlayStation, right? We're the home of blockbusters. That's what they are.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's what their brand has been built on now. You buy, you spend $500 on a PS5 and then spend a couple of hundred more on your headsets and your controllers because that's what you're buying into. You're not getting those elsewhere. You're not getting these humongous, stupidly humongous games, but now this is the medicine, right? That needs to be taken.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you look at something like Helldivers, I mean, I've only played it for a little while. I, you know, I thought it, think he looks pretty ropey.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like it doesn't look like, it doesn't, it certainly doesn't look like a Naughty Dog game, right? Or an Insomniac game. But it's fun as hell. It doesn't need to be. It's really great at what it is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I imagine they're going to carry on down the path that Jim Ryan has kind of set them in, which is they're going to put out all these, these live service games doubly so now that Helldivers has done so great and they're going to release more games on PC.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's the low hanging fruit basically, like if you want to expand your audience, that's what you do. And you have to look at, especially these days, what's really changed since the pandemic big time is that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, like, uhm, uh, what's the XCOM? Marvel game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like that, and then Mario Rabbids didn't do so well, and then, you know, you could, you can keep this countless examples of stuff like that, that kind of got left because, and meanwhile, your EA's doing fine because they got FIFA on the team, you know, Take-Two are doing fine because they got GTA online. Ubisoft are scrambling to get one of their own.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, if you've got one of those big games, I mean, EA got Apex as well, then you're, you're kind of right. And it's, it's interesting actually. I've not heard many people talk about this because in the PS4 generations, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was told a couple of times that Sony deliberately stayed away from that type of game because they didn't want to cannibalise the fair party.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, publishers basically. It's like where everyone plays, you know, GTA Online or Call of Duty on our platform anyway. So what we'll do is we'll make the big single player games that they don't want to make. And then we've got a, you know, a complete kind of offering on our platform.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, but obviously I guess that's where this, it's kind of led them to where we are now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I mean, I was going to mention that. I mean, at least that's, that's quite reassuring, right? That is reassuring to see that they'll go, you know what? We don't think this is working out. Don't work on that game anymore. You know, go do what you're good at, do single player stuff. Um, we kind of indicates that at least they're not going to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, have a Scotland Bowls situation where it's coming out no matter what, you know, rebuild it, reboot it four times until this thing is out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think that's natural. I think it's always, it's always been like that as well. Like you can trace back loads of studios, like big studios from 10, 15 years ago would have been people who left Bullfrog or Lionhead or, you know, they would have left those guys from the nineties.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I mean, when I worked for Playtonic, which was founded by the x-ray guys, I mean, I saw some of the motivation myself of this is how that sort of thing comes about.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Game, making games is like something that is, uhm, especially these days, right? You have the tools, anyone can make a game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So if you're an experienced game developer and you work at one of the big companies, uhm, you know, first of all, they're creative people. They've all got tons of ideas. I'd love to make a game like this. I'd love to make a game like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, but you're at the whim of uhm, what gets greenlit by the big corporation who, who owns you and you know, who's, who's looking at spreadsheets, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you've got the ideas, but you're, they're also empowered now. Anyone can, you know, go and set up their, they can go and make a game. The problem is the same problem that I had when I did VGC is that you just need someone to pay your salary for a bit, right? Until it becomes an actual business.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, so, I mean, the way they do that could be a myriad of things. Uhm, I know it, obviously it plays on it. We, we, we did a Kickstarter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we were lucky because they did have a kind of, uh, an existing fan base, the games they worked on, we could kind of kickstart that and it just needed to pay for one's wages until we got it out. And then you kind of move on from there. Um, yeah, I think that's something that's always been going on. Uh, I mean, they're also, you know, it's entrepreneurship, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, tons of these big independent studios that got bought by, you know, publishers were started by just some kids at Lionhead or something, you know, you look at like a media molecule.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For example, those were like, uh, lion head, bullfrog guys.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It says that that feels pretty natural. I think it's good. That's where the good games come from, right? I mean, you're seeing tons of like Blizzard spin-offs now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, yeah. Like, I'm certain that all of the good stuff's gonna go. I mean, Nightingale's just launched, uh, today. That's Aaron Flynn, the Expireware boss.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The difficulty you have now that you didn't have then is just how crowded it is, right? Now that everything's moved so aggressively over to digital.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The advantage you had having like a console deal or something like even 10 years ago, 10, 15 years ago was that they had guaranteed retail space and that's massive. Your, your games are going to be on store share on the Walmart and they're going to be in a good place. And so you've got a huge advantage. Whereas now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How many tens of thousands of games release on Steam every year?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like thousands and thousands, like you told, I don't want to, I did actually have the number in my head last week, but it's, it's tens of thousands and you're now, they're now all on the same, uh, shelf space as you, because the physical retail thing is just gone. You know, that doesn't apply anymore. You're all on the same stores.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, you know, even if a small fraction of those, uh, those games are good, right? You're, you know, look at, look at Power World.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Suddenly you're competing, competing with that, like 30 man team who, you know, kind of made the game off their own backs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I don't think it's a reaction because the best time to launch a Switch 2 would be this year, I think. Uhm, if they could. Because they're, you know, the other platforms are in a bit of a lull.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, GTA 6 is on the horizon. You don't want to be, you know, that is a, if there's, uh, there aren't many actual system sellers left these days, but that is a system seller. Um, you don't really want to be launching around then. This year is pretty spot on for them. So I don't think it's, it's something that they've done, um, tactically.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, so we, we, we, uhm, we reported the, the late 2024 date, uh, last year. That was our story. Uhm, so it was something that I understand they were planning to do. Uhm, but it's interesting that even at the time,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Didn't sound right. It didn't sound like something that historically fits with, um, you know, what Nintendo would probably be planning to do strategically with the console now because


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They launched, uh, Switch in, in, in March 2017 and the whole strategy behind Switch and why it was so massively successful at the gate is that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They planned to have basically all of their big hitters in the first year.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Let's, after Wii U, let's just go all in, make sure all of the big franchises are there. And Nintendo's all about going into that first Christmas and having a really strong lineup.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it works incredibly well, right? So that's why even people that I was speaking to, like, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the industry when I reported that story or before I reported that story were like, are you sure? Like if you, that doesn't sound like, why would they follow that up and then go late in the year? Cause they'd have more pressure to, in terms of that, that, that kind of lineup. So in that sense, it's kind of not surprising.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, that the, the, the, what I'm hearing, what we reported on VGC, um, it was broken by a Brazilian journalist, Pedro Henrique. Uh, so congratulations to him on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So it sounded like they briefed, they briefed publishers recently about the 2025 thing, but they wouldn't have briefed them why. My one person suggested to me that it could be because they wanted a stronger first party software lineup, which is what


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So they need to have, right? I mean, I think they're going to have a Mario Kart. I think they're going to have a 3D Mario. It's all going to be there. There'll be like a second tier Zelda game, like a Grezzo style one. There'll be like a Pokemon of some kind. I mean, they definitely had the next big Pokemon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, in the works for the next Nintendo console, I don't know what that means with the console slipping, whether that goes or what.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If, uh, if they'd have delayed Wii U, I mean, this was something that someone mentioned on social media the other day and it was really interesting. If they'd have delayed Wii U to the following like March, the first year would have been absolute wall to wall bangers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because the problem they had with that is they launched, you know, before Christmas and they kind of had Nintendo Land and New Super Mario U and then you had to kind of wait and then you had the other stuff next and really good games, but they were just spaced out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't think it's great for the games industry because I think we're kind of like, I mean, you look at our, what we're, the doom and gloom that we're talking about here.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think just the market, just purely the market could have done with a boost. I also think we need some innovation as well. Um, I mean, Christopher, Christopher Dring on gi.biz wrote a great piece earlier today, which was basically pointing out how.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, the, the audience, the console audience, you know, Xbox and PlayStation are.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To bring in new people into this audience because older people kind of go on to other stuff like across the entire market and young people don't necessarily come in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They, we do need, we are kind of like a little bit desperate right now for a, you know, a, a, a Wii Switch moment, Kinect moment even, you know, just to bring in some.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A new idea. That's what brings new people into games, right? You need a Wii Sports moment, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People, when you, people who bought Xbox and PS5 already had the last one. Nobody's bought a PS5 like, oh, I'm going to get that who didn't buy it. Spider-Man? You know, like the last of us remastered? Yeah, I'm going to go for it. It's...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was very, I mean, the last generation was the most important generation because you built your digital libraries.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's why Xbox has struggled. I mean, and Phil Spencer's talked about that as well, because...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Once you've got that, I mean, you can see it in everywhere, you know, all entertainment mediums that we use, right? If you own stuff there, you're kind of like, they've got you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that's why it's so difficult. So that does make me suspect, because Nintendo's been hinting quite a lot, um, about Nintendo accounts and that's our big plan for, you know, kind of avoiding the boom and bust we usually have after a good console. So I do wonder if,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Backwards compatibility might be a big thing on the new Switch. You know, you've got your digital games come over and maybe that might be a thing, but I do hope it's not just another, you know, more powerful Switch. I mean, I don't think it will be, but.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I hope it's, I hope they've got an idea, a new idea, something fresh, like beyond just, yeah, it's a, it's a Steam Deck. You can put it on, dock on your TV. What could it possibly be?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, you know the Nate, you know Nate the Hate, right? The podcast that he does for MVG, yea.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, he, he always puts up bits and pieces and it's usually what I've heard.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, so I don't know if that makes either of us more credible, but I'll just say that. Like, I don't think it'll have joycons, I think it'll basically be a steam deck that you can dock. And I've, I, my guess, right, is that...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When, uh, before Switch came out, Switch technology was already there, it's just it wasn't mainstream and people weren't talking about it because a Switch is basically an Nvidia Shield, right? Do you remember that?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that's what it is. It's, it's an Nvidia shield. So they're, they're, they're, Nintendo's like hardware, they're R&D guys and be like, oh, that's interesting, have a meeting with them, blah, blah, blah. And it's the same with like, the Wii.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The technology behind the Wii, the gyroscopes, the guy who had that pattern, he pedaled that around everyone. Like I'm pretty sure the other platform holders turned him down.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then Nintendo went, okay, we'll have that. So it's usually stuff that's just out there, like the kind of historically that fuels their innovation, right? So I wonder if they might just do a switch with a, a bit of a spin. So it's a switch and a Wii U, the two concepts combined, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And this is something that, that, that, uhm, I think Nate The Hate, uh, mentioned. And it was something that I was also thinking. Imagine instead of docking it, that you could wirelessly, uhm, kind of, dock it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you have your Steam Deck controller, your Wii U controller, your Switch, without joycons. And if you're gonna play on TV, you just press a button and it goes on the TV. It's streaming to some sort of dongle or something. So then, not only is that a cool little gimmick, okay, but now we're back to dual screen. Which Nintendo loves dual screen.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They've been forced to leave dual screen, uh, kind of design, uh, just in this last generation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I liked Wii U, it just, it was, it wasn't executed properly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, I mean, and Switch kind of proves that, right? You look at, you look how well the games have sold and everyone loves the concept. But it's like, as soon as you moved like half a meter away from your sofa with that controller, you got a signal last and it didn't work. And those early games, which had promise like Nintendo Land and stuff, which is a very underrated, um, game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They kind of like ditched the concept and just like by the, after the first year, all the games on Wii U, first party games, like you could just, you just, the game pad was like, it was nothing going on on it. It was just, you turn it off basically.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nintendo takes this existing technology, right? If I sat here and told you the concept of the Switch, where it launched, and the concept of the Wii, it wouldn't sound exciting.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because this is what Nintendo do. Like I imagine if you had a console, you could say, okay, yeah, but I've got my phone, I've got my V, handheld gaming's dead.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, you know, what, moving a thing to control a game? How's that going to work? Nintendo, the reason Nintendo are so successful is because they make software and hardware in together, right? They're a toy company. They make these amazing creations. You don't see that hardware and go, this is great. They need to sell it to you with a game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's one of those ways, it's like you fall into this trap every console generation. And I imagine it will happen less and less in the future when they're just PCs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When you're like, wow, if this is the first game, what are the future games going to do with these features with the 3DS is 3D and the Xbox one's, uh, you know, kind of HD rumble that it had and all this stuff that just never gets used again. We've got you in and now we're porting our games to PlayStation 4 and PC.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, that's what they did with Switch, right? Uhm, I think they, they, I think we will hear about it pretty soon after April when we go into the next fiscal year.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, probably because they'll have to start drumming up some sort of interest. Uhm, you saw like off the back of the reporting this weekend, their share price dropped like 8, 8.8%. It bounced back up to like 6, but it looks like millions off of their value basically, just because of the, the, the expectation that they would bring it out this year.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So yeaah, I'm, I'm, I'm ready. Talking of like, being ready to move to...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, uh, kind of the next generation coming back to our PS5 talk. Switch is honking right now. Oh, absolutely. It has been for like two and a half years. We've been like, come on guys, let's get this off this machine. I played Princess Peach Showtime recently.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean that's where the innovation is. That's where the innovation has been for, you know, 10, 15 years now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, large games can't even really afford to innovate on that scale. You know, from, you know, their objectives to the amount of people they have to appeal to. They kind of adopt the ideas from those games. I think we're all guilty for, you know, kind of not highlighting what's interesting in that scene enough.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But at the same time, it's almost like the, the, you know, the general gaming public curate that stuff for us. I mean, hardly anyone was paying attention to Helldivers before it came out or Power World before that came out. You know, these are blown up off the back of players, you know, and the reception to those games.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're on TikTok, are you, Andy? I love a bit of TikTok. Yeah, man. There he goes. That's it. Wow. All right. That's my, that's my doom scroll.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Develop, you know, you get into the conversation, you have developers on the show.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's interesting for developers because you guys are talking about things that are relevant to developers and you're not talking on a more surface level. Sure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Wait to already move it back. The uhm, you know, 10 years is a long time to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not talk about things, you know, and cause you and for the team, especially for me, it's not that bad because


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I, I've liked, I've kind of, to be honest, I've kind of enjoyed not being public for the last 10 years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It can, you know, it is my favorite part of development is not the, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The press stuff, it's being in the studio and making the game. You know, I'm not one of the developer who likes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Traveling the world and, you know, hobnobbing with celebrities and things like that. Cause it's, I really just like.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, can't say. And, uh, so it is, um, it is, it has been a little challenging for the team also, especially it's tough and I really appreciate their patience because we didn't want to go out and just be like, oh, we're making this game and talk about it in a high level or show CGI trailers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or just do a lot of sort of hype about it because I've sort of been down that road before and I kind of felt that it's not really what the audience wants and uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, you know, we tried to do a very different approach, but that meant the game being pretty far along before, very far along before we, you know, were able to have conversations like this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think I've got a psychological problem that I think if I ever stop.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's all gonna go away and I love making games so much. I think, you know, my biggest terror is that I won't because it is, it's my hobby and it's my, you know, my passion and it's.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What I, it's where I find a lot of meaning in my life. You know, my meaning is basically coming from, you know, my wife and my dog and my work.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, and that's a bit irrational, but so no, I didn't take, I really didn't take a break and I probably should have. I never really taken it. I'm in almost 30 years now. I started in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, in a year, it's going to be 30 years and I've been, I started looking glass and, um, I think that I'm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't, I haven't really, my poor wife, you know, like, I've started doing things like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Every year we go to Florida for two weeks now and rent a house there, but I work half the time and she's extremely patient with me with it. So I've gotten better.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I probably didn't take a vacation really for the first, you know, 10 or 15 years really of my serious vacation. It's really not a mental vacation from it. But on the other hand, I'm not complaining because


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I don't have that. I get to every, I'm not Sunday night. I'm not like, Oh, it's Monday. I got to go work. I used to have those jobs. You know, we were talking about this yesterday, you know, the day job and I'm eternally grateful. The fact that I have a job I'm passionate about, but the downside is it's hard for me to stop.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, so I didn't really take a break. I was already thinking about, you know, what was next.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] During, you know, trojanobioshockinfinite and uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, part of that was sort of like what I didn't get, we didn't get to accomplish on Bioshock Infinite. And so, you know, I started thinking about this, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not just what the next game would be, because that actually comes second for me. Usually my, I start with design elements, which is weird because I'm sort of known as a story guy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But you know, even with Bioshock, I started with the notion of like this concept of a predator.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And a protector and a protected class, you know, and I've told this story before. I was watching some nature show.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and I saw, I won't get too into Bioshock now, but usually I start with the design elements. You know, System Shock 2 is like, oh, what if we sort of merge, you know, RPG and first person shooter? And this game was really came at a lot of the frustrations I had with how,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Narrative games are being built, how I was built, how we were building narrative games, how I was building narrative games and trying to think like.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How can I achieve some of the objectives that I had in my head?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But that was, meant a lot of R&D and a lot of thinking and a lot of work.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because I knew there was going to be a long period of, as you said, R&D. And we had to build basically an engine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On top of the Unreal Engine, which is, you know, this sort of this, you know, this, this narrative Lego thing, which is, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was necessary for making the game. So before we had Judas or the Mayflower or any other things that you guys got to experience, we, we had.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Game development, I'm primarily a single player gamer, you know, so I really like single player games and I knew there was a lot of threats to single player games because, you know, the rise of, um, you know, live service games and things like that, which are all, you know, I'm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Different strokes for different folks. So that's, you know, there's, there's a lot of re a lot of reasons those games exist. A lot of reasons they're successful. They're just not the kind of games I tend to play that much. So I tend to make things that are kind of games that I want to play.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, and I'm very eclectic in my, you know, in the kind of games I play, so my games tend to combine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, like even System Shock 2 is pulling from, you know, uh, survival horror. It's pulling from, um, RPGs. It's pulling from System Shock 1, obviously.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, Bioshock is pulling from, you know, a lot of different sources. I tend to make games that, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I get inspired by other people's work and I sort of try to bring an eclectic, I don't even try to bring, I just end up bringing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Telling this particular story, this particular game. So I knew it was going to be a long time. So we had a relatively small team. We started with this sort of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This concept of how we would build in this very modular way, uhm, uhm, and uhm, but that took a lot of, a lot of research and development time and a lot of, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Kissing a lot of frogs before we found the princes, but in general, the concepts.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, and you guys would be a better judge of this than I am because, you know, your, your encounter get new. I'm so close to it. The approach mostly has been.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Successful in terms of achieving the outcomes we wanted and facilitating the kind of game development we wanted to do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, yeah, look, it's an issue of trust, right? Uhm, we have, I have a very good relationship with, you know, we're this weird little tiny


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Squirt of a label at take two, like, you know, they have a lot of big labels and we're a one product label, you know, ghost story, our own publisher. Um, you know, but.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, cause Teitu has this label structure and so Rockstar is a publisher, but uhm, uh, 2K, private divisions and uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And wear sort of this tiny little, you know, like bump on it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think that they know, you know, my bosses know that uhm, new IP is really important.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think, you know, I was very transparent with them about this is going to take a longer period of time. I think I probably didn't know exactly how long it would take.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it was necessary to, you know, to, to, to get there, uhm, because it, it just was a very complicated, you know, sort of technology task. And uhm, but then,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then you try a bunch of things and we, you know, once we have the basic technology function, we tried a bunch of things, you know, applying game design to that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some of it wasn't great at first and you know, or most of it isn't great at first. In fact, you know, we sort of have this internal philosophy, which is like fail forward.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, you know, you have to kiss the frogs, you have to fail, and the question is, do you learn from the failures or do you not learn from the failures? So for the longest time we've been, you know, bringing friends and family to, to,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Look at the game, you know, even when it was the very early stages and for a lot of long nights of the soul were like, oh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Crazy here, but you know, generally as a team I think the team has been really good about


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, it's, if you guys, yeah, one of the hardest things you could do is like put your baby in front of somebody and having them tear it apart. And we tend to do a lot of things are we put people in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, we're only seeing them behind the one-way mirror kind of thing. Cause you want that honest, brutal feedback. And I think the team is very good at


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Learning from that honest, brutal feedback and not getting defensive about it. And generally every time we take that feedback and act on it, we've seen improvements in the next line of testing. So we've had a pretty good mind in terms of people's reaction to the game, but we've been doing this for a while because, um, there's a lot of, you know, theory is great, but in practice,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now we have a, we have a saying here in one of our pillars of the companies we're player facing, meaning.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The audience, we're not gonna be there to explain the game to the audience. I used to joke about this with Doug Church when we were working on Thief. We used to say, we'll include a README file of why the game is fun.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're not gonna be there when the game, you know, we're not gonna be there to explain it. You know, that's why when you guys played it yesterday, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Here it is. And the game has to speak for the game or the game will speak for itself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can't argue with your audience, you know, like that's another thing I think young developers struggle with. They want to get into arguments with their audience. At the end of the day, the audience is going to buy the game or not.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so you have to be comfortable with hearing their feedback and look, I think we all know that sometimes that feedback can get really unproductive and really nasty, but you're not going to change the world. So I just try to find even in the meanest things. Sometimes I try to find.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Can I learn something from this and the group and you have to build the confidence of knowing I don't have to do anything. They say the honest is generally not going to tell you what to do. They're going to tell you what they don't like. And if you get consistent feedback of what people don't like, um, better take that seriously.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, in some degree, you know, why it isn't as I think more, you should, you know, you guys can tell me that from your experience with it, but I think that obviously I've got a particular, like, you know, like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Wes Anderson or like Scorsese, I've got a particular eye, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I've got a particular taste. So a lot of my games have a lot of similarities. Like I,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One of the reasons I think Bioshock holds up so well visually from what I, you know, what people tell me is because it's not hyper-realistic looking. So I tend to, I tend to lean into exaggeration.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One of the reasons for that is emotions project really well, you know, cause we don't tend to do, cause I'm not, you know, Neil Druckmann does something a very certain way, which has a lot of cutscenes and he is able to use that and he was able to transfer that skill set to making the TV show.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I'm, I don't tend to do lots of cutscenes and things like that. So not a lot of closeups on your character's faces.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so the characters have to project at a great distance. To me, the world is a lot of storytelling, so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We don't control the camera in the world, we're not doing pre-play stuff, so the world has to...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a lot of subtle work we do to make sure people see what we want them to see, even though we're not taking control of their head and playing them in the right direction.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I tend to lean into exaggeration. I tend to, you know, I'm very sensitive to color. You know, I tend to, um, I grew up, you know, we were just talking about Spider-Man before, you know, one of the great things about that early era.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Am I allowed to get nerdy about superhero stuff? You know, like the Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko era is because the printing technology was so rudimentary, they had about 15 colors and the colors would just like draw a number.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They tend to deal in these very iconic looking characters with big bold blocks of color. So you need to look at Elizabeth and Bioshock Infinite. She's usually a two color, you know, she's, you know, blue and white or gold, you know, so she has very simple.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, color combinations because it reads. So there's a lot of things about what I like. I tend to lean into exaggeration the same way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think, you know, probably from the conversation, it is an extremely different game from the games we made before because of the very specific problems I have with the previous games in terms of their linearity, the lack of player real agency and, um, the,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] World's ability to, like, you got to know Elizabeth really well in Bioshock Infinite, but she didn't really know anything about you. She knew something about Booker, but she didn't know anything about the gamer because the gamer really couldn't do much to change her perception. I think there, you know, we were talking about this yesterday. I think one of the biggest impetuses for making this game, we had a moment in Bioshock Infinite where, um, I was like, and this was late in development. Um, I was like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hey, it'd be really great if like, what if, cause Elizabeth has a lot of emotional reactions to Booker's violence and things like that. And, but it doesn't.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Go anywhere, you know, she runs away for a period of time because she's so horrified by, you know, kind of what a monster he can be. But you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That doesn't, there's no point where she leaves, right? Where you do enough as she leaves, but I have this, I have this impulse in a meeting, like very late in the development. It's like, well, what if you could, what if she could say,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That didn't have any real substantial ability to react to that kind of player choice.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There is no, it was too, there was no, there was no way to react to the player in that way and I found that frustrating and I found it to be a limitation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not a, not of the team or anything like that, just I had sort of designed a certain game, but then in the middle of it, I was like, oh, I wish we could do something different. And that's where the sort of concept of modularity and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I've sort of draw from a weird eclectic mix of stuff, you know, like Bioshock was, I had read the Fountainhead and found it weird and strange and interesting and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Colorful and so, you know, I very much informed, you know, that game also, but of course in that game Art Deco was a huge, you know, a huge inspiration for me and I'm just growing up, you know, I was born in New York and growing up in New York and my father worked in New York and going to, you know, Rockefeller Center and, and, um, a lot and just


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Being inspired by that feeling and the time period, you know, my family was, you know, a lot of immigrants from, you know, from Eastern Europe and that whole.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, Diaspora thing, uhm, so, you know, I.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, and all the people, you know, Bioshock is about refugees, you know, it's a lot of refugees, right? Refugees from World War II, refugees from, you know, the Bolshevik revolution. So I find all these weird things and I, and I, and I draw them and I try to draw them in and infinite. I would have been paying, you know, I just, I'm a history buff. So I just sort of turned into like the gilded age and this sort of amazing technological advancements that happened, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In a practically medieval world and then you're like, then there's movies and airplanes and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you know, tanks and, and you know, uh, and electricity in a period of like 20 years. And so I was really interested in that kind of mix of the old and the new.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I tend to, you know, I tend to watch a lot of movies. I'm a huge movie buff. And so, um, and then I play


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, and so, you know, I, I tend to really like sort of authority movies, you know, Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tarantino and uhm, Scorsese, uhm, so I tend to be really drawn to that stuff, you know, really strange experimental stuff as well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But then in gaming, I'm incredibly eclectic. Like I just play, I play almost everything. You know, I, I know I talked to some developers, like I don't have time to play games and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I'll play, I don't always finish things, but I'll play, I like just like trying everything and when they have like next fest or something, I'll just download all the demos and play all of them. So.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I've been playing a lot of games, a lot of the games that I've been playing over time, you know, I sort of draw them into what I'm doing as well and, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a nod to so many games that I'm in debt to, you know, for, for, for, for, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For, for all my games, but especially this game, it has a pretty broad, it's probably the most eclectic palette of, of inspirations in Judas than any previous game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I definitely understand people thinking that way and we knew when we released those trailers that people might think that because...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is one of, you know, it comes from the heritage, the visual heritage, you know, of how I think about presenting information, but we didn't want to sort of then say, no, no, no, but it's also all these other things because we wanted that really to come from.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Show it to you, to people like you and just say, here it is, warts and all. You know, you tell me what you think.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This game probably is more drawn from my life than any other game I've ever worked on. And there have been some small things like, you know, the experience of growing up, you know, around New York and with, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With, with, you know, sort of people came from Eastern Europe and all the, you know, being very inspirational for Bioshock.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a lot of, um, much more of sort of...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Personal stuff in this game. So, you know, Judas was always a character. Well, not always a character. I was like, kind of, cause we knew we had this game. We knew that we had a central character here, but I didn't really know anything about her. I didn't even know if it was him or her or anything like that. So.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't even know when this was, probably six or seven years ago. And this is interesting because we had several years before we even knew any of that stuff.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was on a run and I tend to do a lot of thinking, you know, on my runs and I, I tend to bring a voice, you know, I bring my phone and I have voice recorder and I wrote this first line just sort of came to me, which is very much sort of similar to like my, my own sort of personal life is I, um, I don't like eating.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In restaurants cause I don't like interacting with waiters and she goes on about how she likes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that, okay, the character who's really comfortable with machines, but really not really bad with people.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, you know, one of the great things about machines, your computer never gets mad at you. You never say the wrong thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, it's weird. I found myself doing that sometimes too, especially now with like Czech GPT and it's, it's sort of weird insistence on like apologizing and being very human and sometimes, you know, chastising you for asking a question. It's a bit, it's a bit crazy. I'm not a fan. You know, I'm not a huge fan of that. I kind of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I think, you know, I think this is not uncommon with gamers. I think, you know, my Atari was my best friend when I was a kid because I didn't have a lot of friends. So I spent a lot of time, you know, playing, you know, combat.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There was no, you know, one of the first games of combat and there was no AI with the enemy, so I'd be, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If it's a multiplayer game, I didn't have anybody to play with, but I would still play that. And, but the single player games like adventure and stuff like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was transformed at me because all of a sudden I had somebody who was a reliable friend who


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Couldn't screw it up with. And so I related to that line. And then I started developing the character out from that, you know, with me and Mitchell, my, my narrative director has been with me this entire time on this journey. And, um, and I thought to myself, well, what, okay, well, why, why, you know, who is she and why is she so, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Bad with people and why, you know, what is, how, what is that character?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, what, who is, what is that character and what is a world that we might build around that character?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the, the initial takes on the world, like fun. I can try to dig up the initial, like opening cut scene we did, which is so different. She was there, but there was all this weird stuff that was completely gone from the game. We didn't really know what Mayflower was. We didn't know what the society was. We didn't know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They have had the name Mayflower, I'm not sure, but we sort of built the story out from that moment and out from her.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The uhm, yeaah, well, it's not just Judas too, like there's bits of like Tom and Neff and Hope, there's, they're all have chunks of things that I've dealt with. Of course, it's all put through a lens of, of, you know, a lot of spaceship a long time from now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Dealing with a, a situation I don't have, but I think there are universal elements, you know, never TD with, you know, had very demanding mother who, I don't know if you found it in the audio logs with my mom, always disappointed in her, which, you know, and have some of that experience, but also, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Part of the reason I think I've been successful is I had a mom who was extremely demanding of me and the complexities of that. And again, yeah, it's all through a big lens. It's not like the Ken Levine story, you know, beat by beat at all, but there's a lot, I definitely poured a lot more of my personal experiences in and some of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I've also, from a writing standpoint, a lot of the key writing is not coming from me sitting down and trying to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right in a sort of dialect, like infinite is a, infinite and Basha both have a certain, uh, um, infinite and Basha one have a, um, tonality to it. That's more like period, you know, or even Basha.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But that where this is a bit more naturalistic. And so I've done a lot of the writing just by recording myself, like Hope's talking about her.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, the darkness that she's facing is just the stream of consciousness out to a.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To a, you know, a recorder. Uh, by the way, I want to be clear. I have a great writing team. We have great writers room. So it's not just me doing all this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But a lot of the sort of the inspiration, the original inspirational beats and the directional stuff is coming to me just sitting there trying to just.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Pour it out into a, into a voice recorder and then, you know, then we, then we massage it and polish it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like I never want to make a procedural game that was purely driven by math, you know, and, and, and, and, and algorithms, like, you know, Minecraft them, those games are great because, you know, obviously, cause you, you know, you can generate infinite amounts of stuff, but I was like, well, how do you maintain that sort of, you know, that, um, you know, the hand of the artists more.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] While allowing for the world, a way for the world to heal. So that was like, when I talked about Bioshock Infinite, if you did something radically different.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The world was so rigidly built, there was no way for it to react to you. So I'm like, well, how do you make a world that still feels, cause our audience is going to expect.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're not gonna wanna step down from us in terms of visual presentation. They're not gonna wanna step down from us in terms of narrative. They're not gonna...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, when you play, when I play Minecraft, I'm not expecting a robust narrative experience, right? I'm expecting a very different thing, but from us, people want.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The things they've had from us before, they want the characters, the world building and all that stuff. But I wanted to do that in a way where the world could pay intense attention.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, the basic concept, you know, the reason I thought of the term Lego is Lego's are a bespoke.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Handcrafted piece of brick, right? You know, and they've have, I dunno, when I was a kid, they only had a few of them, but now there's a huge library of bricks and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it's, it's not code or anything, but it kind of is like mathematically they, they build them and they machine them to know how to speak to each other. And, but then.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] User then creates, with these very few elements, creates an infinite amount of content.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that's sort of, I started thinking about that idea and how could you apply that to game development? And basically the system, we build handcrafted modular pieces. That could be.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A piece of art, it could be a texture map, it could be a, uh, uh, a sub-piece of a level.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it could be a piece of dialogue. And you know, again, we're not, we're not puristically generating. We're not sorry. We're not algorithmically generating. We have actors, you know, we have a full cast.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But we broke down a lot of the dialogue to what is the smallest chunk that can exist on its own.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then combine interestingly with other chunks and to make reactive sentence. So like for instance, if a character you're interacting with a character and they are mad at you, right? They might have a lead in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That they can pull from a bucket of like, I'm really pissed off at you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then there's another chunk, which is like, because you did X, right? And that X can be very specific, but those, those lines aren't recorded together, right? And they're not thought together. They have that Lego thing where we know that line, this type of line can lead up to this type of line, which can lead up to that type of line, but they're all modular.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they all, um, and, and they exist. So it's very difficult because you have to build and every piece of furniture in the game, every, every encounter, every piece of treasure is basically something we create


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then can be placed bias. We basically, it's basically, we train the game to be a good curator of content. So it knows what the player is doing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It can then react, oh, the player's been playing really stealthily for a long while, right? Let's, let's try to challenge that, right? And give them an encounter that's much trickier for a stealth gamer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, the player is doing this thing and the character is reacting to that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Bring in this character, not in a particular cutscene, not in a particular location, wherever you are.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Whatever you're doing and it knows, you know, through a very complicated system, like sockets, um, you know, like as you said, you're walking down a hallway, hope will show up. She's leaning against a wall.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And she's talking to you about arbitrary thing based upon what you've done.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In a level that's basically being generated through a bunch of tiny little Lego pieces.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Being put together every piece of furniture, every piece of damage you see on the wall, every poster, all those are being placed by a system.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At runtime. Now there are some parts of the opening of the game, just to be clear, is pretty bespoke. You know, the first couple hours and then when you open out and then what we call act two.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The level, the levels are primarily being, I want to say they're procedurally generated. They're, they are.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Pseudo procedurally generate in the sense that we have all this content and the game is putting it together at runtime to react to where you are, where you want to go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Making sure you're not seeing things that you've seen recently, you know, cause we, you know, keeping that, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Pacing, the visual pacing interesting, the combat pacing interesting. We have work to do in, in some of these areas, but we've made big progress in other areas. And uhm, and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We can tune all these things from like central values as well. So the game is like too combat heavy. We can tune values and are too stealth and counter heavy, right? Or too.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Gun encounter heavy or to whatever, we can set central values that say, well, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] After this much of something, maybe the player is going to want something different and then let's start spawning things a little differently in that direction. If you're working too much for one character, like you're working for Hope, you know, cause you're in this competition, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, the three of them are competing to fly to Proxima basically to get you off the ship.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And if, you know, if the player's working too much for one character, because we know that we want them to sort of spend more time playing the field. We want to push and pull between each of them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Building these three relationships, but they're each sort of vying for your favor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We want them to do things like show up and be like, hey, you know what, you've worked for Tom for a long time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, they can do things like, let me, if you go and work for me for a while, here's what I'm gonna give you. And we know what's in their inventory and we know what they need. And we can give like, hope is looking at you and saying,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, what, what does a person need? You buy a present for somebody. You're not just buying any object, right? You're, you know, that person that you're trying to like say, what do they need right now? You know, what would help them? What would make them smile? What would make them happy?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so we have the knowledge and so those aren't like pre-written. They're all.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Pull it together. So hopefully say, Hey, I know what she, you know, I've been watching you. You've been doing X, Y, and Z. And maybe you would like this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, or I'm watching you and I'm mad because you were helping Tom.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so we wanna, you don't have to do that, like the game doesn't branch over to that thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, she'll go over a level which, you know, which is being generated when you get there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the reward will be there, maybe around some tricky encounters, just something like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think you guys encountered something called mudslinging where


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, you get too trusting with one of the characters and they, the other character will show up and say, let me tell you about them. Go with me on this journey and you're going to learn what you're dealing with.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, so the, the Lego system, the narrative Lego system allows us.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To do all that stuff and to change the world and have that moment, if we were to go rebuild Bioshock Infinite and this, you could say Elizabeth could say screw you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and you know, and then you'd have to figure out what to do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The limitations of what we worked before, but yeah, the cost was a lot of time and a lot of blood and a lot of sweat and tears.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The uhm, no, in the sense that I think the system has worked out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At least from what I intended, again, the audience is going to be the determining factor in this, but we've been...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A lot of things work very quickly, like the, one of the first things we did was the speech concatenation system, which is the thing that puts different chunks of speech together to make larger things. And we tested and can people tell, you know, and since I don't always.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I know your audience is more sophisticated than most, but I sort of don't want to, you know, I haven't.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't even want people to know how the system works because, you know, they, um, but


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We tested that pretty early and that worked pretty well pretty quickly and that hasn't radically changed much. Things like, you know, the modular system for decorating the world.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That was mostly, it worked functionally, but we had a lot of art direction challenges of how do you make this look.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As good as our previous games. And that was, that was a much trickier problem. And cause, and then we just, and there is a tendency on a team and to fall back into old ways of hand crafting things because it's faster and easier. You know, there's a huge upfront cost to them in a systemic thing and any systemic, you know, you mentioned shadow mortar, by the way, which is one of my


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Absolute favorites and one of the, and another inspirational element for, you know, this game. I actually.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Slides of speech and, and, and, you know, their hats and they all, so you make, you couldn't have done that if all those guys were bespoke because you can literally generate millions of different orcs that feel different from each other and millions of different encounters. So I think, you know, that is one of my favorite games of all time and XCOM, of course, you know, both the original and, and Jake Solomon's, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] version of it, you know, and civilization, those are also modular Lego style games where they have a bunch of handcrafted chunks, you know, in civilization, it's tiles of, you know, rivers and stuff like that. And next comments.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, again, tiles and they generate levels on the fly and they generate events on the flight. You could go, like I talked to Jake about this. I'm like, dude, you could go, maybe we should get together one day and like do something where you have.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Same narrative support that we have in Judas, but doing a strategy game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, cause it would work. I think that you have much more narrative support where your squad mates are talking about what's going on and they're, you know, they're active and there's real narrative, but you're, you're still building up basically.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lego. And that game is built very much out of like a Lego concept. All the individual tiles are handcrafted and then the game knows how to hear us that we bring into a road tile sits next to a road top, right? Doesn't randomly go into something else.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, I haven't seen the talk in a while. So I may be back solving that I had more of the thing at the time than I thought I did. But I think it was necessary to have, if you want the world to be that reactive and still have the same kind of presentation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That uhm, that people are used to from us.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In development, we had, you know, we were pushing on the environmental modularity and the, and the.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The speech concatenation system, all that stuff is like one of the first stuff we did, so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I can't remember exactly when those ideas came about, but I know we started on them very early. We were still in the office in another part of Boston.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then we moved here, uhm, but yeah, it's been around for a long time, but maybe, maybe, maybe once you started sitting on talking about the problem or, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Those things came up. I guess I thought maybe I had more of that in that talk.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like if the audience can feel that and they can feel this feels like it's coming out of random number generator, we failed, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So again, you know, we have to deliver what people expect of us. We want to give the player what they had from us, but more, not less. And that's what.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But as we sort of started falling in love with the characters in the world.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I kind of felt like, well, I really want to go on this journey with hope and Tom and these characters. And to some degree to get that kind of emotional engagement.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, maybe there are people who can do it, you know, I think there are people who can do it better than I can, like, you know, you play, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some indie games where they get, you know, real emotional engagement with, you know, picks, very simple pixel art.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I think you can do that, but that's sort of, you know, my, I tend to be more cinematic.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I just, we need to build a system where.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They were just the users just getting a benefit from it and not paying a cost for it. That's part of the reason it's taken so long.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think that, you know, I'm not going to, I don't, I don't want to spoil anything for anybody. So yeah, there's


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Multiple ways the journey, multiple places the journey can take you depending on, you know, for instance, who you're end up being more aligned with, you know, uhm, there are some big twists and turns which will


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, either we'll get into later or we'll let the people discover it on their own, but


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We want the player to feel the journey, uhm, and I'm generally not.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Has been a fan of multiple endings. You know, I sort of notoriously didn't want to write the multiple endings for Bioshock. I wanted a sort of singular, more ambiguous ending, but.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're sort of setting out upfront that there's these three people and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's a different passing of it. Maybe there are other paths to that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Decisions and path and we want to, we want to support that and honor that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, we were playing, like we wanted the player to have the ability to


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we never set out, like, you know, there are elements of the game that, you know, you could probably recognize a lot of different inspirations to different games around the ship. You can probably, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Recognize some inspirations, you know, on the surface of the ship that we took from other places.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The loop is something, like, we never set out to make a roguelite. I don't think of it as a roguelite. We always, we call the game, you know, when we talk about the game, it's a Judas simulator.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What is it, what are the tools we can use to tell the story of this woman on this ship?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the situation that she's largely the responsible for.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, you know, you're the prime mover of the story rather than being a Booker or a Jack or a Jack, you know, showing up at, well,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] More of a prime mover than you thought in those games, but that's a surprise. But right from the beginning, you sort of know that the ship is in the situation. It is because of what you did.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so everything starts from that. Who's this character? How, what is their impact on the world?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, but we also wanted the player to be able to experiment and make mistakes and fail.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, and fail forward, you know, that they can try things, try experiment.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Fine. That's not for them. Fine. It didn't get them the progress. They want to then try again.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I kind of fell in love with the notion of the loop.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A lot of games falling from that, but I never liked, I don't set out to make a shooter. I don't set out to make an RPG. Like I wasn't, you know, Bioshock, you know, it's not, we'd have to call it something because.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, what do you, you know, what do you call it? Uh, you know, people categorize that, but I don't think of the game as a, as a rogue light.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think of it as a Judas simulator in that element and I think, you know, not, I think we want to keep some surprises for the player when you encounter that. It's not just, it's not just a shift of perspective from.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Once we sort of decided that would be interesting to let the player experiment with failure and come back because that's what rogue games, rogue lights do, right? You, you screw up by design, right?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then you start again, but you're more, you're more powerful and you're more accomplished and you have agency in how you're more powerful. It's not just a game.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, you know, I really fell in love with that loop, you know, playing, there's so many games I can point to, Dead Cells and FTL and, um,