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Kevin: Welcome to Arcadeology, a podcast about video game history and design. I’m Kevin and today we are speaking with industry veteran David Fox about his time at Lucas Film Games, his exploration of immersive entertainment, and his reunion working with his old Lucas Arts crew on Thimbleweed Park.

This will be a two part episode with the first part focusing on the early days of the point-and-click adventure game genre. The games he worked on at Lucas Film include Rescue on Fractalus, Labyrinth, Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And while he was the Director of Operations, the studio produced Monkey Island, Loom, and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe.

Without any further ado, let’s get on with the interview. David, thanks for coming on the show.

David: I am happy to be here.

Kevin: Prior to joining Lucasfilm Games, what were you working on?

David: Before Lucasfilm, I was doing a non-profit micro-computer center with my wife. We started the Marin Computer Center in 1977, and we ran it for about five years. After that, we ended up turning it over to the students, the kids who were running it with us, who were volunteering. And we ended up with … Oh, I think by then maybe 40 or so micro-computers, lots of Atari 800s and 400s, and Apple 2s. Our first one was a processor technology Sol-20. Looked very cool, but it didn’t last past a few years.

And during that time, I would get programs from other people, from other companies like Adventure International, and we ended up doing conversions for them, by converting the games to other computers. So like we got the Radio Shack version, the TRS-80 version, and we’d convert it to like an Apple 2. By being in the code, and seeing how they did coding and games, that was kind of my education on game design and game programming.

Kevin: So you were basically creating ports.

David: Yeah, we were porting mostly from Radio Shack to Apple 2 and to CPM. We ended up … Did a couple of books while I was there, and the last one I did was on computer animation, called Computer Animation Primer, and the entire text of the book is online so people can still look at it, but the first half was kind of on overall animation. State of the art at the time, early 80s, ’81, and the second half was how to do animation on your Atari 800. Lots of programs, and combination of mostly using Basic but with some assembly language routines.

And during the research part, I contacted Lucasfilm, which was in my neighborhood coincidentally.

Kevin: Right down the street.

David: Not quite that close, but, yeah, it was in the same county, and they had just started up this new computer division a couple years earlier, so I hung out with them, and got to interview them, and talk about where computer animation was at then, and where it was going, and got some sample clips that I could put in the book. They had a flip book thing where you could flip through the book and in the corners see animated little videos. That was just a nice connection.

About a year later, after I finished the book, I heard from one of our computer center members who actually worked at Industrial Light & Magic that Lucasfilm was starting up this new games group, and I immediately contacted [Ed Kapnall 00:03:48], who was the head of the computer division. He said, “Yep, we just hired the new manager in the group who is starting in a few weeks, and I’ll make sure he contacts you for an interview.” And that’s pretty much what happened. I ended up becoming the third person hired for Lucasfilm Games after Peter Langston, who was the manager, and [Rapoor 00:04:14], who was already in the computer division but transferred over to the games group. That’s how it happened.

And the book that I had, my Computer Animation Primer, I think was one of the things that sold it because it showed that I knew a little bit about animation, but I also knew about the Atari 800, which, again, coincidentally, was going to be the first system we were going to do games on, because Atari had given Lucasfilm a million dollars to help start the games group. It was kind of like if I had thought backwards and planned this all out, I couldn’t have done a better job of doing all the different steps, and just being in the right place, and having the book. Having computer center, where people from Industrial Light & Magic could be members, and that whole part. Everything. So it was cool.

Kevin: It was just a beautiful confluence of events.

David: Yeah, it was all planned, I’m sure.

Kevin: That’s awesome. The first game you did was Rescue on Fractalus, correct?

David: Right.

Kevin: And after that, one of your earliest credits is a video game adaptation of the movie Labyrinth. How did that project come to you?

David: When we first started, when I was working on the first game, Rescue on Fractalus, I had intended it to be a Star Wars game. This is my chance to actually be inside of a Star Wars movie by doing a game in the Star Wars universe. And found out within the first couple days I got there that we weren’t allowed to do Star Wars games because the rights to Star Wars had already been sold to other companies for big bucks. Like Atari for the arcades, and I think Parker Brothers for the home computers, or home video game system. And so we didn’t have the license. It wasn’t available.

They kind of said, “Okay, well, I guess we can’t do games based on Star Wars.” And a couple years later, they were doing … Lucasfilm was producing Labyrinth. It wasn’t the family jewels. It wasn’t [crosstalk 00:06:21], and I guess they felt safe with letting us experiment with trying to turn it into a game. So they basically said, “Hey, would you like to do this?” Steve Arnold, who is now our General Manager, asked some of us if we were interested, and I said, “Sure, it sounds cool.”

We had the script, we had some test video footage on a video tape, and got the idea of what the movie was about, and went from there.

Kevin: That’s neat because how that kind of turned around on itself, in that since Star Wars was untouchable, it was like, oh, well, just play with this. Here you guys go. Try this.

David: Right. And then we got to a brainstorming session in England. A group of us flew out there for a week and met with Douglas Adams, of Hitchhiker’s Guide fame, and he was a friend of Jim Henson’s, who is the director of the film. It was Douglas, and [Christopher Surf 00:07:18], who was a longtime friend of Jim Henson’s, who was a song writer and writer for Children’s Television Workshop, and then on our end it was myself, and Steve Arnold, and [Charlie Kohner 00:07:31], who was the technical lead on the game, and Brenda, who was from Activision, who is our publisher for this.

Kevin: Very cool. So Douglas Adams, he had some input early on in the game’s development from what I’ve read. And what presence, if any, does he have in the final product of the game?

David: I think he had a couple of ideas that definitely made it through. It was his idea to start off as a text adventure, and then open it up into a graphics adventure part way in. I think the analogy was kind of like the Wizard of Oz movie where it starts out in black and white, and when they make it to Oz, everything’s in color. So here we start off in old school text adventure style, which is pretty much most of what adventures were at that time. I think still [crosstalk 00:08:23]

Kevin: The colossal cave adventure type style.

David: Yeah, or even the Infocom adventures were still really popular, and Sierra was also doing graphic adventures, but they were I think at that point … They weren’t that sophisticated. Maybe they had gotten into animation. The first ones they did were basically screen shots with text for the text adventure interface.

So that’s what we did. It was a really short text adventure. I was a little worried that people would start this and think that we had lied about what kind of games we were going to be doing. We had all these pictures of graphic adventures, and then they realized it was really a text adventure, but we tried to keep it as short as possible. And then when you get to this movie theater, and the movie theater happened to be playing Labyrinth, and you end up getting sucked into the movie. And from that point on, you’re in the graphic adventure.

Another one of his ideas had to do with “adumbrate” and this is a spoiler. I won’t even say what it is. There is the word “adumbrate” and it was used on a specific character in the game. I had no idea what the word meant, and it kind of means “foreshadow.” And it’s kind of esoteric, and it’s probably our first “what the fuck” types of things in this game, where people have to do trial and error across everything in order to find it, which is probably not the best way to do that.

Kevin: Yeah. My friend, Phil the Conquistador, he refers to that as moon logic.

David: Yep. I think we called it graphic adventure game logic also.

Kevin: Yeah.

David: And, you know, later in doing games, when I play games from other companies, and when we do our own, I always really hated it when there was a puzzle where I’d be hitting my head against the computer screen for an hour or two, and then finally give up and try to find what the answer was, and thinking “There’s no way I ever would’ve thought of that.” And to me, that’s an indication of not a great graphic adventure design puzzle. If you say, “Oh, I should’ve thought of that. Of course, it makes total sense,” then it’s on the player. And if it’s like, “I never thought of it,” it’s on the designer.

Kevin: One of the things about Labyrinth was that it didn’t have the straight up parser interface that Sierra was doing. What inspired you to move away from that?

David: We actually were planning to do a parser originally, and we realized … First of all, we were on a really tight schedule, because we had to try to hit the game completion point at the same time the film was coming out. I think we had six months. Six to eight months. We ended up realizing that there’s no way we could end up doing a rich enough text parser to compete with, say, Sierra’s text parsers, or Infocom’s. And so people would immediately think that ours was really stupid, and really bad, and so we said, “Okay, what if we could come up with an alternate interface where we give you the options, and you have to choose from a certain set of options that are all right there?” I think it was my idea to come up with a … I called it a slot machine interface, because you kind of have two wheels of scrolling words for verbs and for objects. You just basically scroll and choose the one you want. That way, all the options are right there, and you have to wonder what you could actually do.

So we all hated the “guess the parser” style of interface, where you were actually typing in “bush” or something and it was supposed to be “shrub,” or vice versa. The programmer had missed a synonym for the word you were using. This totally avoided that, because you knew what the options were.

Kevin: Pretty interesting. I remember actually Ron Gilbert mentioning that in a post mortem for Maniac Mansion. The exact phrase, “Guess the parser.”

David: Right. Right. I think that was probably his phrase. And the Maniac Mansion came after Labyrinth, and I don’t know to what degree Ron was influenced by our UI. He came up with a much simpler way to do it, and more intuitive, because all the words were not only right there, but you could see them all without having the scroll through them, as was the inventory. You do have to scroll through inventory once you get a bunch of them, but it was an easier way to do it. Just much more refined. And that’s of course what we ended up keeping for the next multiple adventure games.

Kevin: Yeah. I mean, that UI or some version of it is I believe until … I guess I want to say Full Throttle? Or Sam and Max? That’s when it really starts fading out the word-based UI, if I recall correctly. But that seems like it was around [Tim Schafer’s 00:13:32] era.

But speaking of Maniac Mansion, when did you get involved in Maniac Mansion?

David: Well, Brian and Gary had already worked out the design, and then Ron spent close to a year working on SCUMM, on the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, which was the programming language and the whole system behind it. And I think he first tried … Attempted to code the game directly in 6502 assembly, and that was just … Would take forever. And then he chipped Morningstar, who’s also one of our people in the games group, who did Habitat game, suggested doing … Basically creating an interpreter, so we could write the code in English, and it would compress it into P-code, and then it would be [inaudible 00:14:24] convert that to other platforms, too. And that’s what he ended up doing, but it took him close to a year to write that.

So when he said … I think I had come off of Labyrinth recently, and he said, “Hey, would you be interested in helping me for a month or two on this game? It shouldn’t much longer than that to code it.”

Kevin: Famous last words.

David: Yeah, I know. And I said, “Yeah, that sounds great.” So I came on either … Nothing had been coded yet. He might have had one room up as a test room, so I was basically coding while he was finishing up the system, and creating tools as I was doing it, and so I had a lot of impact on saying, “Hey, I really want something to make this easier. Can we have a shortcut for this?” Or I spent two hours trying to get something to work and realizing it wasn’t my bug, it was in the system. And so it was kind of … That made it take a lot longer because I’m basically coding on a moving target, or something that was maybe pre-beta in terms of it being ready.

But I ended up being on it for maybe six months, and got most of the game done, and then had to go onto my next project, but Ron was left with cleaning up some of the bugs. I don’t know how much longer. Maybe another month or two.

One of the choices that he and Gary made early on was to have multiple kids you could select, and you had to have testing across all the various combinations, which was enormously complex. Way more than just if you had a set number of kids, and you had to make sure that you could win with any combination you chose. So I probably did 70 or 80% of the scripting. I did most of the wiring of the rooms, and a lot of the cut scenes, and Ron did a bunch of them, too. He did some of the writing, some of the more complex ones, or whatever. He might’ve taken those and done those. It’s hard to remember who did what.

I remember spending time working on code that would get one of the characters from their room. Like Weird Ed from his bedroom all the way down to the front door to answer the front door, and trying to do it realistic enough that if you happened to be wandering around the house, and he was on his way down, you’d see him come through the room. So it really felt like there is a space, and really we’re moving through that space rather than just popping him to the target room.

Kevin: As a kid, I think I assumed, “Oh, that makes sense. He would walk through all the rooms,” but later, as an adult, I’m like, “Well …” I think a lot of people, a lot of game designers, would just kind of take that shortcut. Move him from here to here. Just teleport. But to me it makes sense that, oh, I had Bernard out in the hallway, and Ed actually caught him on his way down to the door.

David: Right. Right, and we had to do the same thing with Edna. I think they were the two characters that would wander. Oh, I guess with the tentacles, too.

So it was hard because those were possibly of getting really buggy. I think there are a lot of issues with those. I know with Thimbleweed Park, which I’m skipping ahead … I have a routine that did that also, and that was the source of a whole bunch of issues during testing. Would it remember what was happening when you saved the game? If we restored it, where would the person be? It was more complex, so it was cool to do it, but it sure was a headache.

Kevin: Right. A little overambitious.

David: Yeah. And I think this was the game where Ron kind of invented the word “cut scene.”

Kevin: Yes. Yeah.

David: I don’t know if there were cut scenes before, or if there were, they weren’t called that.

Kevin: Yeah. It’s funny, I’ve actually spent a little bit of time … I was going to do a video on the origin of the cut scene. I spent some time looking into it, and, yeah, from every source I see, the first time the phrase “cut scene” exists is Maniac Mansion because I guess it was in the code. It “cut scene.” I think some earlier examples, people consider those little interstitial animations that would play during, I guess, Ms Pac-Man are considered cut scenes as well, just not as complex. But, yeah, it is an interesting topic. Something that is so ubiquitous now in games is originating from Maniac Mansion. I find that really cool.

David: The fact that we were at a film company probably had something to do with that, because some of us, a bunch of us, were really interested in story-type games. Other than Rescue on Fractalus, that was the only game I did there that had any kind of action. All the rest were graphic adventures. And that felt like my style. I was actually introduced … If you remember, I was doing those conversions of text adventures back at my computer center, so it was kind of a good fit for me.

Kevin: So correct me if I’m wrong. I’ve read that you wrote most of the dialogue in Maniac Mansion.

David: Yeah. I can’t remember. I would say in terms of dialogue that happens when you’re interacting with objects … So it’s less interacting with other people. I probably wrote almost … Like 95% of that. If it’s dialogue in a cut scene, then I don’t know. Maybe 50%, 70%, somewhere in that range with Ron doing the rest. I didn’t know what tone he was looking for, so he had to do a lot of the dialogue in order to establish the voice of the various characters, so it would be what he wanted, and I had to kind of match what he wanted. So that was kind of the way we did it. Because I was coming into something which came out of Gary and Brian’s heads, and wanted to match what they were looking to do, rather than take it off in my direction.

Kevin: I remember hearing somewhere as a kid or a teenager that, originally, when Bernard was referred to as a “tuna head”, it was originally supposed to be “shit head.” Is there any truth to that?

David: That’s probably true, and “tuna head” was definitely Ron’s. I didn’t come up with that phrase. It’s probably likely that he wrote the opening cut scene in the very beginning of that game, and that’s where I think that came in. Right in the very beginning. There’s no way knew [crosstalk 00:21:23]-

Kevin: Nobody could get away with that either.

David: Yeah, right.

Kevin: Except sneaking in the microwavable hamster. Who was responsible for that, by the way?

David: Oh, that was me.

Kevin: That was you?

David: Yeah. There was a hamster, there was a microwave, and I just had this … I was probably wiring up the microwave in the kitchen and said, “Oh, what if …” And I went to Gary without telling Ron, and I said, “Could you please give me a blood animation for the front of the microwave?” I don’t know if I told him what it was for. I might’ve. And then I coded it up, and I brought Ron in there and said, “Okay, try this.” And he did it, and he laughed a lot. I wasn’t sure if he was into it, so it’s kind of more for him. I did it as a joke, and it had to stay in the game.

Kevin: Yeah. Famously, it stayed in the initial batch of the Nintendo version of the game.

David: Yeah.

Kevin: And that was a whole thing.

David: It’s not game related. It was like an Easter egg, so they caught the stuff that was in a lot of the game, and they did a lot of … There’s a whole great article that [Doug Crockford 00:22:39], who was in charge of the conversion, did describing all the things they had to change in order to meet their standards. Even I think there was a pinup calendar of a mummy.

Kevin: Yes, yes.

David: She’s fully clothed in bandages, but she looked like she might be naked, so that had to go.

Kevin: Yeah. There was a statue in the hallway, if I recall as well.

David: Yeah.

Kevin: Nintendo was extremely strict back in those days.

David: Yeah. They didn’t mind as much with the violence stuff, so I don’t know if they would’ve minded with the hamster. I don’t know. Maybe they would’ve if they had seen it, but for anything that had a sexual connotation, that’s where they were really killing us on.

Kevin: Zak McKracken, quite possibly my favorite game as a kid, even though I’m not sure I ever beat it until I was older. Where did the ideas for Zak McKracken come from? Because Maniac Mansion, it seemed like it was a pretty straight forward … It’s a send-up of 1950s horror films. Zak McKracken is … It’s so wacky, and I mean that in the best possible way. So what influenced you to design that?

David: Well, I think a couple of things. One, I was really tired of being locked in a mansion, and I wanted to expand out, and have something that felt like much greater territory. So why not the entire planet and Mars? So that was kind of the push, but I was back into this from the 70s, and I was very interested in new age-y kinds of stuff. I believe in a lot of that stuff. I probably still do. I definitely did back then, although it wasn’t something I thought about a whole lot. But the idea of doing a game where I could introduce a bunch of these new age-y concepts in a game without them being heavy, and like trying to beat someone over the head about them was kind of the push.

Steve Arnold, our manager, was also supportive of that whole theme, and he had a friend up in the Seattle area named [David Spangler 00:25:03], who was a spiritualist, and wrote a bunch of books, and was very well known, and he thought that it would be a good idea if I went up there and brainstormed with David on different ways to bring in a whole bunch of these ideas into the game. So that’s what I did for a couple of days. I flew up there. That’s probably where Mount Rainier comes into the game, because it was in David’s backyard essentially, and we just wrote down all the different places of power, or where anything mystical has supposedly happened on Earth, and came up with different ways we could squeeze those in.

David was the one who told me about the first UFO sighting around Mount Rainier in 1947 I think it was. That kind of became the impetus for Zak going out to that area was a combination of story on the 50 year anniversary of that. We put the game into the future, even though we created the game in 1987, ’88. It took place nine years later.

So very much like Labyrinth, I had this list of great ideas, and I had to go back home and figure out how to take all these ideas and put them into a cohesive game. And so I spent the next two or three months working that out and coming up with a story.

I had a design doc that I passed around, as was the custom of what we did at Lucas. We’d usually share our work with other designers and get feedback. And Ron felt that, even though it was intended as a comedy, that it wasn’t funny enough. It wasn’t out there enough. So we had a brainstorm meeting in our division, in our group, with a bunch of the designers to see if we could ratchet it up a notch, and that’s where Zak’s name came. We actually used a phone book, Marin phone book, and first his name was going to be Jason, and Zak and McKracken came out of two separate names in the phone book. That’s where we came up with the title of the game. I knew there were aliens, and they were trying to brainwash you. We came up with Alien Mindbenders by going just on a white board and just coming up with all these things. And then just kind of pushed it.

An idea that Zak originally was going to be a mainstream media reporter, and instead we put him into a tabloid newspaper, where it was all schlock and fake stuff. Fake news.

Kevin: Fake news.

David: Yeah, fake news. And that just pushed it enough into that other direction. I mean, when I went back a year later and looked at the original design doc, everything was there, so nothing really changed in the design. It was just kind of twisting it a bit more to put it into wacky land.

I started working on it and realized this was going to take a long time. I knew how long it takes to code one of these games, so we invited [Matthew Kane 00:28:23], who was already there working on a project in the education group … If he’d like to come in and become a co-designer and scripter with me to help me code the game up. So he came on pretty early, and after the design was done, but before I actually started coding. So very much like my role with Maniac Mansion. He was came in on that stage in Zak.

Of course, even though the game was designed, as with Maniac Mansion, it was designed fairly loosely. I knew what the rooms were, [inaudible 00:28:58]. I knew what the objects were. I knew what the puzzles were. But not any of the dialogue, or the interactions, or a lot of things that come when you actually see the art, and you actually start putting it together.

It’s a long answer to a short question.

Kevin: No, it’s very fascinating. I always loved the game, and I know it has, of all the original Lucasfilm Games graphic adventures, I feel like Zak has always had this cult fascination. But what’s it like to have that cult following, more so than other Lucas games? Because, over the years, I’ve kept tabs. There’s always been fan sequels, and fan remakes, and just people out there wanting more of that specific weird little universe.

David: What’s weird about this … First of all, this, of all the games I’ve done, I’d say this was probably the closest to my personality, my heart, my areas of interest, and so it’s probably my favorite games of the ones I’ve done. If you think about it … And Rescue on Fractalus, yeah, but that was my wanting to be in a Star Wars movie, so that was why I did that. Labyrinth, the story was established. Maniac Mansion was established. And I did Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the story was established. So I was basically in those three games, and using other people’s characters and story to help create a game, whereas Zak, of those games I did there, was probably the only one where it was completely from my imagination. Yeah.

I’ve said this before, I think all of us assumed that these games would have a lifespan of maybe one, or two, or three years, and basically, they’d die when the computers we designed them for became obsolete. So I kind of let go of it. I basically left Lucasfilm after 1992, and did another couple years in gaming. Then kind of went off into other directions for quite awhile, and it wasn’t until I’d say 2004 when I was invited to speak at a couple of conferences in Norway and Finland that I found out that people still not only knew the games, but someone showed me Zak running on his Nokia handheld phone, his mobile phone, in a Commodore 64 emulator on the phone. And this was before smartphones. This was, again, 2004. This is just a phone with a color screen, and it had a little joystick, and you could actually play the game.

So the idea that I totally missed was that, as computers and phones and everything else became more powerful, you could do emulators, and have things run even faster than they did on the original platform. It was how fast the speeds of the CPUs were going.

So when I gave the talks there, I was blown away that everyone knew those games. That they not only knew them, but people came up and asked me to sign their box of them. I think eBay was around then. People were buying these games in pristine condition for hundreds of dollars, or thousands sometimes. And I’m just hitting my hand to the head, like, why didn’t I buy a box of these games back when I could’ve? I had no idea they’d be collector’s items, or that any of the shirts would’ve been collectors’ items. None of that even occurred to me that that would happen. We thought we were doing the equivalent of a black and white silent film, where the projectors would go away, and you wouldn’t have any way to play them. So that was amazing.

Then I heard that people, especially in Germany where most of the fan base, I think, is, that there were multiple fan based sequels that were made based on the game. Whenever I heard about them, I would be honored, give them my blessing. I didn’t want to participate too much because I felt like that would be going a little too far.

This is the 30th anniversary year for Zak, so there’s this guy in Italy named [Daniel Spedani 00:33:45], and I might be mispronouncing it, who has been doing these fan short videos of various video games, and a lot of them are the Lucas adventures. He did one on Zak awhile back, and I guess he’s been getting better and better on them, and he decided to revisit Zak, and do a new one. I guess there’s a small Italian film festival that heard about that, and invited him to screen this video for the premiere at the film festival. Then they decided to reach out to me, and asked me to come out to speak on this afterwards. And I’m going to Italy to give a talk about Zak after we see this video that Daniel is creating. It’s really exciting to do that, and to know that people there actually know about the game. So Italy, too.

So, for some reason, I don’t know … Our games in the United States … Sierra had been doing adventure games for many years before we started, and they had this huge installed base in Europe. I don’t think they ever bothered to either do distribution, or to do translations, and so when we started distributing our graphic adventures in Europe, they kind of filled this gap where there was a hole.

Kevin: That Sierra had left.

David: Sierra hadn’t done yet. So that’s, even now, say with Thimbleweed Park, a huge proportion of people, the backers, were from Europe.

Kevin: Oh, interesting.

David: Yeah, and I know with Zak, the biggest fan base is in Germany. I’m not exactly sure why, if there’s a match with my sense of humor and theirs, or Boris, who did the translation, did a really, really good job, and that helped. A combination of those things. I don’t know, but I’ll take it. It’s really fun.

Kevin: Most people, most gamers I talk to kind of look back on that era … Most of their connection tends to be initially to the Sierra games, and I am strangely the opposite. I never played a single Sierra game in that time period. It was all Lucasfilm games, and eventually Lucas Arts. So I have this weird perspective that is very skewed towards the Lucas games, so that’s fascinating to hear. That’s kind of how Zak spread far and wide is because Sierra never really spent much time on their localization elsewhere.

David: I think we also had this … We set up a kind of a competition with Sierra in our minds. I don’t think they really noticed us that much. There was this frustration that we’d do this new game, and it would sell okay, and they’d do one, and we thought their game was not as good as ours, and they’d sell ten times as many copies in the United States. And this frustration, why aren’t people recognizing our games here?

We ended up doing a softball game with them. The Lucasfilm games team, and the Sierra team. At Skywalker Ranch, there is a softball field, so we did it there, and they totally creamed us, which made it even worse. We invited Ken and Roberta to a screening of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. That’s one thing that they couldn’t do. In my mind, I’m thinking, “Okay, try to top this. We have a big movie that our company is doing.” And we were, at the same time, showing the game at the screening, so we had a separate area.

But we’d see stuff that they were doing, and realize, oh, shit, we now have to up our animations levels. I remember working on Indy, and we saw one of their new games, and it had way more full screen animation that they were doing, and we hadn’t done that yet, so we had to go back and create an animation system where you could do much more complete animations. I think in both and Zak and Maniac, there really weren’t any special case animations. There’s really walking, and turning, and even with Zak falling down, I just rotated him. Had him faced front, left, back, right, and over and over again to kind of fake animation. A lot of it was in your imagination. Now we had to do Indy, with being the plug in the catacombs I guess it was, where you actually see a whole pay-off. We were trying to compete with them, and make sure we were not being left behind.

I’m guessing they never paid any attention to us. It’s kind of like the flea biting the elephant.

Kevin: Right. They had their own things to worry about.

Thanks for listening. Part two will come out in two weeks from today, and in that, we will be discussing the second phase of David’s career. If you’d like to find me on the internet, you can check out my YouTube channel at YouTube.com/Arcadeology, or follow me on Twitter @thearcadeologist. Take care, everyone.

 

Podcast

Tracscript

Kevin: Hey everyone welcome to Arcadology, a podcast focused on video game history, and design. My name is Kevin. Today we are speaking with video game trailer editor, M. Joshua Cauller who has edited trailers for games such as That Dragon, Cancer, and Darkest Dungeon. Before we get to that, some announcements first, my next history video will be on the history of StarCraft. I’m currently editing the script and we’ll be sending that into production soon. I’m also working on my first game design deep dive on RPG mechanics.

Finally, if you haven’t already, please make sure to subscribe to the podcast on the platform of your choice and leave a rating. It would mean so much to me. Clever five star reviews will be read aloud on the podcast. And now without further ado, let’s talk to Josh.

Tell me. How did you get into editing game trailers?

Joshua: All right. So, the most obvious starting point would probably be That Dragon, Cancer. That Dragon, Cancer was like the ballooning portfolio piece that I did as far as game trailers go. To really understand how I got into that, it comes back to faith, belief and how those aspects inform games. Which is to say, pretty rarely. It’s not usually a component that’s discussed or explored.

And so, I noticed back in 2012, Journey came out. I played that and of course, for everyone, it was like a transformative experience and so many things that that people say about journey. But there was this one element of the game and people talk about the pilgrimage and the people that they meet. All that I was like, wait, this game invites people to have a religious experience. That there’s your input as a spiritually oriented being was relevant. So I was like, all right, I’m going to see where this rabbit hole goes. Because I always wanted to make a game myself. But it took me a very long time to realize I didn’t actually want to make games, I just wanted to have made games.

Kevin: Yeah, I know what that’s like.

Joshua: As soon as I finished Uni, I was like, all right, I have to find out who else is exploring this avenue. Who else is really taking this seriously. It stopped being a pipe dream concept of way down there. And I was like, all right, let’s see what’s real. So, I started finding other people who were writing about games not in this really gross religious way, which a lot of people do, but in a thoughtful, engaged and honoring way that really engaged with game developers.

That’s when I found Gamechurch, which I’ve written with for and around for at least five years. I’ve since disconnected but the formation of that community and website was really what blossomed me into thinking about games on a larger and more diverse spectrum. So, that ultimately led me to … Sorry, I know this is a little-

Kevin: No problem.

Joshua: That’s what led me to writing, really, really being curious and just going out and finding everything that’s like these weird, wild, creative games. So, back in 2012 … No, it was 2013, I think, when That Dragon, Cancer went public as a concept of a game. I could be wrong, but they were just trying to get funding and make something to announce the game. And that’s when I found Ryan and Amy Green who were making this game. I just started talking to them, and finding other people who were doing that sort of thing.

So, fast forward to 2015. I’ve only been making game trailers for three years now. Officially for three years. And it’s just been so all consuming and exciting that its worked out well for me and my family that I’ve been able to make it my full-time gig. Which is to say is probably a bad idea to say, “Hey, I’m going to start a new business.” And just jump full-time into it.

Kevin: Right.

Joshua: But all that to say that, it was game journalism, it was my 12, 13, 14, however many years I’ve been doing marketing, video production, websites, all those things. Similar to you, I also went to an art school. I went to what became an art institute school. But a school back in Central Pennsylvania called York … No, what was it called? Bradley Academy is what my college was called. What was it called? But yeah, Bradley Academy, I went there because I didn’t really see any other option when it came to school. I was just kind of, I need to create something. I don’t want to go to school for anything else.

All I like to do, the only things that I resonated with in high school were making really weird videos. So, I was like, all right, maybe I might as well try to see if I can make money doing this. Eventually, it led to that and a million different kinds of disappointments and pitfalls and small achievements, and back and forth. And then when I found myself unemployed again, I was like, all right, what I really want to do? And I was like, I really want to make trailers.

All the connections just came together of the relationships with other developers that I had formed over time, writing for Gamechurch, and here we are. I always say, the trend that I find throughout the whole thread, and somewhere in the middle of that, I met Jason Vandenberg from Ubisoft, the fore runner guy. He was lecturing in Harrisburg, and just talking to high school students about how to get into making video games. His talk was essentially about how to not and why you shouldn’t.

It was the best talk that I think that I’d ever heard. Because I was like, yeah, I really don’t want to make video games, do I? No, I do, but I don’t. And coming to terms with that was actually what got me to the point where I was like, all right, I need to start small. I think that that’s the key for anybody who wants to create or make anything in this industry is that you think that your big ideas are going to be what gets you there, and they’re actually what’s holding you back. It’s when you are able to take these big massive things and distill them down to that one single little tiny mechanic with the ugly graphics or maybe you don’t even get there. Maybe you’re just where I was, and just writing stories in your spare time. They’re really crappy and terrible and meta, but not going anywhere.  And then eventually, whoa, it makes sense. And suddenly you’re like, make it shorter and smaller and it resonates with one person and that’s enough to get you to your next step.

Kevin: That’s awesome and I feel like your story actually it’s very much in line with some of my previous guests. Adam Dolan, for example, who worked on God of War, it was just a long time of, he had his goals, but he wasn’t going to be able to get there. He wasn’t going to go straight to the top of the mountain.

Joshua: Oh, no.

Kevin: It was basically just keeping at it, and the proximity. Just being around the people that you want to work with in the future, is eventually what helped out. I hear that when you talk about your network connections were what allowed you to transition into doing what you are doing now. Now, you met some people. You were there, and that helps a lot. Just being there to talk to people.

Joshua: Mm-hmm (affirmative) That’s entirely what it is like. The thing that I hate and absolutely adore about the game industry is that it’s entirely about relationships and networking. I said it that the part that I hate is just the fact that I have to get out of my house. If you get me on the on the line like right now, and I come alive and full of energy. But as soon as I get off this call, I’m going to be like, mush. Because human interaction, I love it and it drains the crap out of me.

Kevin: You enjoy while you can do it. But it’s only for so long.

Joshua: Yeah, exactly. I don’t get energized by this … I get energized while it’s happening, but I lose all my energy as soon as it’s done.

Kevin: No, I totally understand. I’m very much the same way. So, getting into the nitty gritty of editing these games trailers, how much direction do you take from the game dev versus how much is your own input and creative juice?

Joshua: One of the first people that have made a trailer for was a guy named Thomas Henshell. He’s making a game called Archmage Rises, which is so ambitious, that we made a trailer for three years ago, and I don’t know when it’s going to be out. Fantastic, brilliant simulation of mageness that’s trying to be something like meta over what RPGs are.

Anyway, that’s … One of the things that he said was, whenever you … He was like my business mentor helping me to get this thing up started. His advice was, whenever you make a new business contact, walk into the room, pick up the felt tip pen or, sorry, the dry erase marker, and just start drawing on the board. if you can. Don’t be a dick. But just start … And don’t draw a dick. That’s a bad idea too. But draw whatever is relevant directing. Because a lot of the time, the ultimate thing that people need when it comes to business creativity and all those things, is they just need someone to be a soundboard.

Most of the time is entirely about being a sound board. So, I could be completely wrong, going in the wrong direction in every way. And then someone comes up to me and says, “Actually, that’s not what we’re looking for.” That’s actually a good thing because then we know in the grand scheme of things where we’re not going. We ruled something out. That helped us to gain orientation to what we’re going to be going towards.

To give an example, I was most recently working on The Darkest Dungeon trailer, which the original Darkest Dungeons trailers were something I really really looked up to you because they were done by Marlon Wiebe, who does amazing work. But Marlon has, I believe since been acquired by the Crypto and the Necromancer team. I’m forgetting their studio name at the moment. But he … Brace Yourself Games. He’s with Brace Yourself Games, and so that opened up a window for me to step in and pick up where he left off with their trailer.

Chris [inaudible 00:10:36] is this amazing Creative Director for Red Hook Games, for Darkest Dungeon. He knows exactly what he wants. When you give him something to sound board off of. That was what our relationship was. I’m like, all right, this is what we want to do with the trailer. He came back to me and said, “All right, well,  actually how about we add some flashes here, some [inaudible 00:10:59] and actually this glow that we’re using on this particular element over here that looks a little bit JV. So, let me go back to the art table and elaborate on it.”

That’s kind of the working relationship that I’d say is a little bit more when you are working directly with a creative director who’s really established. More often than not, I’m coming in as the creative … A little bit more of the creative director, which is super weird when I don’t know the game as well as the developer does.

So, a lot of it is me just trying to learn on the field as quickly as possible. I’m the kind of person, I love asking way too many questions. People who will hang out with me usually get overwhelmed with the amount of … I would love to say that that’s from my game journalism background, but when I was a game journalist, I was mostly an introvert, who just played the game and wrote about it. So, I didn’t actually ask people all the questions. But the truth is, to get to know someone, you just got to ask a lot of questions. That’s what it really comes down to.

Kevin: It’s interesting because, I looked at The Darkest Dungeon trailer and obviously you had to play around with game assets on a different layer. Because I noticed you … I was just watching it before I talked to you. So, there’s some layers-

Joshua: The Color Of Madness trailer, yeah.

Kevin: How often is the game dev willing to just say, “Oh, yeah here’s these files to play with.”

Joshua: Here’s all of my assets. Have a great time. Honestly, it’s weird because I’ve worked with some really obscure developers, and some really famous ones. I don’t think that people have ever been like, “No, you can’t have these art assets.” But I’d say that those who are far more established are like, “Yeah, sure, whatever you want. Here’s everything.”

That’s actually really fun to play with. But I’d say that with The Color of Madness, The Darkest Dungeon trailer, the main thing that I came down to was, all right, I’m going to throw all these art assets that you’ve provided because there was at least 10 times what you saw on the trailer. And here’s what I think is going to go here. Here’s what will go here. That’s really what the editors, what I’m doing most of the time, is saying, here’s 10 times the amount of what we’re ultimately going to be seeing at least. And how do we turn that down to the bare bare bare minimum?

The weirdest thing about being a trailer editor is that it causes me to be very cut happy. What I mean by that is, I just want to cut everything. I just want to delete everything, all the buts, ums, subconsciously speaking. Anything that gives you a chance to breathe, I want to have control over those moments. That gets really didactic when you’re dealing with a 30 plus hour RPG. But that’s the fun of it, is trying to figure out the shorthand shortcuts to really get down to, how do we … All right, how do we take this 30 hour RPG and turn it into 43 seconds?

Kevin: Right, how do you boil it down into the essence of what the game is really going for?

Joshua: Yeah. So, I would encourage anybody who’s listening to this, who’s a writer, or a remotely creative person in any way, shape, or form, get really comfortable with shitty first drafts. Because everything that comes down to what you are thinking in your mind things are going to be at the end, which is the perfect. The absolute astounding, beautiful, masterpiece. You got to get through that shitty draft first. You just got to make things really, really, really terrible, and it’s going to be dumb and stupid and your client you would think would not like it at all. But that’s how you start the conversation.

It’s only after you get all these really crappy, rough ideas down on paper, throw it out there that you can start pairing everything back. And that you can start honing things in. Because if you’re trying to get everything perfect the first time, you’re going to be paralyzed, right. I get paralyzed when I have a million things, and I’m like [inaudible 00:15:05] I get overwhelmed too.

Kevin: No, totally.

Joshua: It’s just, try to get out of that overwhelmed state and just getting anything down on paper.

Kevin: Yeah. And there’s actually … You’ve probably heard, there’s that really good Ira Glass quote.

Joshua: Yeah, that was what I was implying.

Kevin: He talks about the gap between your own talent, and your taste. You want to be creative because you have taste, but you don’t necessarily have the talent to start with. You got to get used to closing the gap.

Joshua: By just making a lot of work.

Kevin: When I would do a lot of screenwriting back in Grad School, one of the things that I always talked about the first draft, I used to refer to the first draft as a vomit draft. Basically, it’s just everything it’s on paper, and it’s not very pretty to look at. But it’s all the thoughts I have for this particular story are now on paper. Now, I can refine them.

Joshua: Absolutely. Exactly right. That’s entirely … The biggest enemy of creativity is your own desire to be a perfectionist. What I mean by that is simply just getting anything out there at all in any way is progress.

Kevin: Yeah. So, you mentioned The Darkest Dungeon, original Darkest Dungeon trailer as being a bit of an inspiration. Are there any other trailers out there that really inspire your work or motivate you to keep going?

Joshua: Actually, I’d say that most trailers just zap me of creative energy.

Kevin: Okay.

Joshua: What I mean by that is not … I absolutely love trailers. I would just spend all my time watching trailers if you just put them in front of me. But my absolute favorite part of going to movies and stuff like that, or E3 or whatever, I don’t care for cinematic versus gameplay trailers. But my attitude with trailers is when it comes to what’s the most inspiring to me, my personal flavor or voice, whatever when it comes to trailers, is actually bridging the gap between player and developer. The developer tends to … Because of the way that games are made, they have to be focused on features and this layer and that layer, and these pieces all coming together. Whereas they’re not thinking about, all right so what does my mom think about this when she has it in her hands and can actually play the game? No one necessarily thinks about the lowest common denominator of player in the process of what the experience is actually like. Because usually that’s really unhelpful when it comes to getting the experience across.

But what I personally I’m under the assumption of and my assumption going into making game trailers was that, the game trailers need to be as close to the player as possible. When I started, it was still kind of like in the beginning of the boom of Twitch streamers and people who are really testimonially playing through game experiences. I had my assumptions about how that worked and why it didn’t work or whatever. I’m constantly being proven wrong in everything. So, that’s my assumption in everything that I do is, I’m probably wrong. But my main takeaway was realizing that there are connections the closer that we get to what the player experience is actually like, that if you can somehow bridge that literacy gap whether you have really complicated and convoluted mechanics, or whatever is the emotional layer underlying motivating the player. What is people really feel on the inside of their chest cavity that makes them respond to things.

That’s been kind of what inspires me more is the connection with people not as much just the finished outputs. Because if all I do is sit around and watch trailers, all I’m doing is sitting and watching polished masterful pieces. When I don’t actually see what blood, sweat and tears are going into things. That’s actually more motivating and inspiring to me is when I see complete garbage that leads to the crystalline diamonds, that’s what’s really inspiring to me.

Kevin: Cool.

Joshua: Sidebar. Playing off of that, so the new No Man’s Sky trailer just went up today. It’s all about the multiplayer blah blah blah. The thing that psyched me up beyond no belief about this trailer, is that they have some shoddy camera work in there. What I mean by that is, there’s a couple points where the ship takes off and as it’s flying through the woods, you can tell that the player’s leaning a little too closely to the trees, and isn’t doing a great job piloting, and there’s a point where the player character is turning just a little bit, and the camera looks a little tiny bit shaky. Those are the moments to me that are saying humbly, transparently this is actual …. Not only is this actual players, this is actual gameplay. We’re not trying to be super polished, you’re not trying to super amazing, we’re just trying to convey what things are actually like.

Kevin: That’s super important for them in their particular instance because-

Joshua: Their early trailers were so super polished.

Kevin: They early trailers were very polished, they were very staged and scripted, and even if it was in gameplay footage, they had triggers that were scripting certain events to happen as they played through. It’s very important for them at this point if they want to keep basically, drawing people slowly back in-

Joshua: Bring people back, yeah.

Kevin: To bring people back after the … It was a disaster. Their launch was a disaster [crosstalk 00:20:55] I had certain sympathy for them, but at the same time is like, yeah this did not go well for you guys.

Joshua: I looked and I played the game for the first time last month. So, I felt like that was the right way to go about to get a $15 used. But now I’m getting a brand new free update.

Kevin: Yeah, why not.

Joshua: It’s a regular in the game, come on.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s regular in the game. It’s not whatever was, a $60-

Joshua: A $60 retail copy, yeah.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. As we close it out, I was wondering, five years from now, what are your goals and ambitions with trailers? Where do you see yourself going with them?

Joshua: For me, like I said, I always got into this because I’ve really really wanted to make video games. Initially,  that’s what I thought that I wanted to do. To be completely transparent, I don’t know that that’s gone away entirely. The more that I work and the more that I network, the more that I’m going to just accidentally have a back pocket full of trailer or game making skills and relationships where if suddenly someone said hey, let’s collaborate on this. And we made a Game Jam style prototype on something it would just snowball from there.

I know that that’s only the first 90% of game development is 10%, and then the last 10% is less 90. Meaning, you think you’re done, almost done, and then it’s actually the second half. And far more than that, just finishing the product. But the games … I have some really ridiculous game concepts that are really really really exciting to me, and I would love to share because no one is ever going to copy these ideas. I don’t even care. Honestly, the one thing that really really excites me.

We just found that we’re pregnant with our second baby.

Kevin: Oh, congratulations.

Joshua: I’m really, really excited about that. For both times that we’ve gone through this parental process, we went to a midwife. I’ve learned that these midwives are these amazing, powerfully smart and capable women who are way more brave than probably most professions out there. So, I would adore the opportunity to make a game about midwifery.

Kevin: All right. Why not?

Joshua: They would require a lot of very uncomfortable research in more ways than one. But the reason why I knew that games aren’t that far away from this concept is because I was recently playing a game called Pillars of The Earth, Ken Follett’s Pillars of The Earth. I thought that it was going to be a narrative like a visual novel style game. But it’s a lot more elaborate than that. Much more of a point and click adventure. Within the first half hour of the game, I was explaining the concept of awe through cathedral architecture to my characters children. And also, in the midst of that process delivering his character’s third child in a really really messy circumstance.

You didn’t get into the mechanics of childbirth and that sort of thing, but the thing about games is that they’re so oriented around the topic of life and death. But they very rarely actually get into the … Very few of … Any resources out there actually get into the, for lack of a better term, mechanics of new life.

Kevin: Right.

Joshua: It’s very uncomfortable of a subject, and there’s a lot of reasons why people are uncomfortable with all those things. Anyway, all that said-

Kevin: I totally understand. There’s … And it’s done both in the spectrum, because there’s certain, I know there’s people out there … It’s called Death Positive, where you’re trying to like, we can’t just have death as this thing that people fear. We have to acknowledge that as a natural part of life and all that. And they’re trying to de stigmatize the idea of death. And I believe-

Joshua: That’s something that you can’t talk about, or that you can’t engage with, the subject of … Right, exactly.

Kevin: So, I can imagine that on both ends of the spectrum, that the mechanics of early development and the mechanics of death, they’re both out there and untapped conversations to be had.

Joshua: Yeah. So, what’s more … There’s actually something fascinating that I found through one of my nurse friends. She said that within her medical profession, they would rather fight … Every nurse, every medical practitioner she knows would rather spend 10 minutes trying to bring back a dead person than trying to be there for a birth. The reason why is there’s far more on the line of what is or is not. It seems like at least within the medical profession when it comes to birth. So anyway, this is a weird and foreign concept. But these are the sorts of things that are really exciting to me.

Kevin: Yeah, you want to explore them.

Joshua: Yeah, and the subject of faith and belief. I feel like there’s nothing that’s quite more despairing and unpleasant of an idea than a Bible video game. Honestly, yeah. I played a ton of them and I love the idea, but they so often forget to get into the tensions of like, what are the actual tensions of the characters in the story? Or what are the actual questions that the heroes, for lack of a better term are actually going through?

Anyway, these are all the kinds of game mechanics and subjects and themes that I’d love to explore far more. There’s a lot of people who are out there, who are … There’s a few developers out there who I think that are really doing some clever and amazing things on that thread. One of my favorite, I’m just going to give a shout because one of my favorite game developers out there is Jay Tholen, and what he did with Dropsy The Clown, which seems like it’s a game about a creepy clown, but it’s actually about what it’s like to try to love people in a sincere way.

Anyway, so those are the possibilities. But ultimately, I don’t know that I’m ever going to be to stop making trailers. To fully answer your question, I don’t know that I’m going to be able to, because I love making trailers, I love short timeframes, I love … It typically takes me like four weeks to make a trailer. So, about a month to make a trailer. And that’s probably a long time for what people would think it would cost or take in terms of time. But that’s not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things.

When it comes to actually making a game, a game typically takes at least two years and a lot more resources.

Kevin: Right, exactly.

Joshua: So, I would love to … I probably am going to be making trailers for a good while, but I would love to be able to make some really, really weird stuff that makes people uncomfortable.

Kevin: That awesome. So, Josh, where can we find you on the internet?

Joshua: Just find me @MJoshua on Twitter, or mjoshua.com.

Kevin: Cool. All right, Josh, thank you so much for being on the show.

Joshua: Yeah. Awesome. Thanks so much, Kevin. I really appreciate it.

Kevin: Thanks again for tuning in everyone. Your patronage means the world to me. I’ll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode. And until then, follow me on twitter @theArcadologist. Take care everyone.