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The Joy in Melancholy

January 9, 2021 by arcadology Leave a Comment

Spoiler Warning: This podcast contains spoilers for Red Dead Redemption 2, Doki Doki Literature Club, The Last Guardian, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Inside Out, Up, and Mother 3

Episode Description: In this episode, we took a look at how Melancholy can provide release and catharsis for video game players. Personal stories about their favorite moments come from Dylan Perry, Lady Pelvic, Max Marriner, Kate Kadowaki, and Megabite.

Transcript
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Kevin: When I was a kid, I started having these melancholy dreams about the end of the world. They usually took one of two forms. Either the sun would vanish or the sun would rapidly go through the final stages of its life cycle until it consumed the earth. The result was the same in both cases, an overwhelming sadness during the last seven minutes of life, as I realized that nothing could be done. When I would wake up, I would have a massive unshakable cloud hanging over me.
It's ironic, then that I've spent the better part of my life enjoying sad and melancholy moments in media. There's something cathartic about experiencing it second hand. It allows me to release the troubles that I have in the pit of my spirit, in a low stakes environment. And in that moment of release, there is a joy in allowing my emotions to flow through me. So today's episode is a discussion about moments of sadness and melancholy found in video games. I spoke with some friends who provided their favorite scenes as well. Welcome to Arcadeology: The Joy in Melancholy.
Somber safe havens.

Dylan Perry: I was really surprised by, I guess you would call it the method of storytelling within the camps, and in particular, the melancholy that it produces and how effective it is at instilling this kind of just this hanging feeling of sadness or of melancholy.

Kevin: The safe haven or home base is pretty common in open-world games. Some games allow you to upgrade the base or recruit others to stay there. Other games use it as a way to hide upgrades or display trophies. Many games use it as a way to reinforce recently experienced themes and plot elements that have been presented in the main storyline.
Dark Souls II. Strangely, Dark Souls II is what inspired me to write this video. Specifically the score to the area called Majula. It's often thought of as the lesser game of the trilogy, but it has a soft spot in my heart. Majula is the safe haven of Dark Souls II. It is strikingly different in appearance compared to its counterparts in Dark Souls I or III. You come to Majula after a brief introductory area that is dismal, dark, and dreary. Then you exit the cave and the sun greets you with the sound of waves crashing against the beach. This moment is not something that players of Dark Souls would have come to expect. Majula is tranquil. You're in no danger here, except perhaps from the skeletons in the basement of the mansion. And yet in that tranquility is the melancholy that I noticed.
The driver of that melancholy is the surrounding area. Despite the sheer beauty of Majula, lands corrupted by the presence of the dark signs surround your haven. One direction takes you toward a fallen castle overrun by the forest and its soldiers long since hollowed. Another course takes you toward Hyde's Tower of Flame, also plagued by the elements. In this case though, water.
Majula stands alone in the world of Drangleic. Beautiful, tranquil, but shockingly alone. The characters that take refuge in Majula are for the most part, crestfallen. That loneliness paired with its beautiful score that accentuates the mood creates melancholy. It reminds me of something in film studies called montage theory, in which two images spliced together can create an emotion that isn't found in either of those images separately. For Majula, the tranquility set against the darkness is evocative. When I'm feeling contemplative, I can load up Dark Souls II and have my character sit in Majula, and just be.
Red Dead Redemption II. Another somber safe haven can be found in Red Dead Redemption II. I love a good Western yarn, especially when they're downers. Sergio Leone had a habit of crafting frontier films that portrayed the west as rough and ultimately a grind on those who lived the life. Once upon a time in the west begins with death, and the film continues telling a tale of revenge long since deserved. Video games have not ventured into the Western genre that often. However, Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption franchise has set the bar exceedingly high in capturing what made people so interested in old west stories. Mixing a bit of the reality of the frontier's demanding lifestyle, with a dash of the mythologizing that made the stories fascinating. There are several moments in Red Dead Redemption II that strike a chord of sadness and melancholy.

Dylan Perry: I was really surprised by, I guess you would call it the method of storytelling within the camps. And in particular, the melancholy that it produces.

Kevin: Dylan Perry is the creator of the Skyrim mod pack known as Ultimate Skyrim.

Dylan Perry: I should illustrate how it works, I suppose, for anyone who's not experienced the game. Essentially you have your home base, which is the campsite. And when you revisit the campsite, you'll have fellow members of your outlaw gang just going around, interacting with the environment or playing idle animations, or in some cases they are interacting with each other. Just doing things that make it appear as though they're really living in this space and occupying the space.
So you can go up and you can speak to all of these characters at your leisure, they'll reference recent events or maybe just the personal relationship they have with your character. But as the story progresses, it's not a happy story. It's a story of the end of the frontier and the dissolution of the outlaw lifestyle, you could say. Society is encroaching. There's really no such thing as untouched frontier anymore. And people who have made their living outside of the law and outside of society are slowly being forced to either acclimate or die, essentially. And this is where the melancholy comes in and where I feel like the game is very effective.
You'll be at camp and you'll speak to these characters, and you can just ... When you hear it in their voices how things are really, really starting to get to them ... And it depends on where you are at the story. At the very beginning of the story and people are a little bit worried, but they're still fairly confident in their ability to continue on with the lifestyle that they have, the further along the story progresses, people start to ... The cracks start to show it. It feels almost voyeuristic. It's not just shoved in your face. It'll happen in ways that feel indirect. And I feel like that's the part that I feel is unique.

Kevin: Subtlety. Unspoken pressures of a life that seems to be evaporating before your eyes. The campsite and RDR II represents melancholy almost in its platonic ideal. It does this through fantastic character animation created by the people at Rockstar. The resignation and defeat to me reminds me of the Ray Bradbury short story, The Last Night of the World.
A recap, if you haven't read it. All the adults on the planet earth begin to have the same dream that the world is going to end tonight. The story centers around a couple who reveal to each other, that they've had the same dream. They quickly accepted as real given that everyone they knew has been subjected to it as well.

Kevin: Given that everyone they knew has been subjected to it as well, the end of the world isn't some catastrophic thing in the story, but rather the closing of a book. At one point, the wife asks her husband, "Do we deserve this?" And he responds, "It's not a matter of deserving. It's just that things didn't work out." The vignettes at the campsite, recall that conversation, people stuck in the between space, whether they deserve the curve balls that life has thrown at them and accepting the fate that their way of life ultimately is over.
Character deaths.

Speaker 1: And as someone who plays Jared inaudible a lot, death is nothing new, right? I see death all the time in Jared. You know what I mean?
Tragedy strikes. That's how we kind of get the plot moving forward.

Kevin: Character deaths are sometimes considered an easy or a cheap way to generate emotion. Sometimes you can see it coming from a mile away because the story telegraphs it from the very beginning. But when they are earned, they can do an amazing job of shifting the mood or raising the stakes in a story.
Mother 3
Nintendo has never officially released Mother 3 in the United States, much to the chagrin of EarthBound fans. However, fan translations of the game have allowed players outside of Japan to enjoy the quirky JRPG.

Speaker 1: Fans go at it in fan translations. And when the fans want something, they get it. And Mother 3 does an incredible job making you want to cry within the first, let's say, two hours of the game.

Kevin: Lady Pelvic has a YouTube channel focused on JRPGs and wanted to speak on a scene from Mother 3 that she found particularly sad.

Lady Pelvic: So the scene I'd like to discuss is in the beginning, Claus, Hinawa and Lucas, they're all up in the mountains visiting their grandfather. And Hinawa is the mother and Lucas and Claus are two twin boys. I think they're 11. They're very young. They're playing with Dragos, which are just gentle, friendly creatures. They're like Tyrannosaurus Rexes really. And Hinawa was just such a kind and loving mother and everything's great and beautiful. Then we have Flint who's the dad. He's back at Tazmily Village.
What happens is the Pigmask Army attacks and Tazmily Village is this is wholesome loving place. And the Pigmask Army attacks the forest, which separates Tazmily Village and up in the mountains where Hinawa and her children are. It turns into Flint, the father trying to find his family and finds, I think, Claus or Lucas' shoe. They find a ripped piece of Hinawa's dress. You travel up the mountain, you see a Drago, but it's not even a Drago anymore. It's kind of bionic now. It's half machine, half Drago and you fight it. You're about to kill it or you do kill it. But this baby Drago comes to protect it. And it's like, no, kind of protecting its mother. And it's really sad.
So you find your children though. You regroup, you find your children, but you don't find your wife. But Bronson, one of the villagers, comes up to Flint and was just like, "Hey, so good news and bad news. What do you want first? Actually, no, we're going to give you the good news. We found a Drago fang, which is great for making weapons. Now the bad news... " And you, the player, know. And this is the game changer right here. You, the player, knows what happens. After Bronson says, "We found the Drago fang pierced within your wife's heart," I mean, the music fades out. And then you hear these pangs of the piano, which in my opinion, represent Flint's heart. You just hear [inaudible 00:13:19]. And then the melody spreads out and, oh my God, you just feel your heart sink with Flint.
Flint just crumbles to the ground. And he just punches the ground. And everyone around him are just kind of creeping toward him like, "Hey, are you okay?" Maybe trying to put a hand on his shoulder and he just swats it away. And his two young baby boys are right there watching this. His dad, there's a campfire in the middle, he grabs a stick and just swashes it around. And you see one of the villagers run up to Claus and Lucas and kind of shield their eyes because they shouldn't have to see their father break down like this. And they heard their mother is no longer with them.
And it's the music and seeing a real raw just genuine reaction because most of the time in JRPGs we see a character just kind of crumble, get sad or just cry, maybe hit a wall. But to fight against other NPCs or to get angry and get angry in front of his kids. And it was just so heartbreaking. And what made it heartbreaking is one, so quickly with only two or three hours in the game you fall so in love with Hinawa. She's an amazing mother. And to see this great family torn apart is just heartbreaking.

Kevin: It may seem like a common trope to build a character up only to take them away. However, Mother 3 has an added layer of nuance because of the graphics. Someone, unaware of the depths of sadness the Mother franchise can plunge into, would be completely disarmed by the art style of the game, much in the way that Dan Salvato's Doki Doki Literature Club hides a horror game underneath the veneer of a quirky and cute visual novel, Mother 3 does the same by misdirecting the player with graphics that obfuscate the upcoming emotional turn.
Disney, for example, has also pulled this trick, mixing bright and cheery animation with darker subject matter. Bambi's mother dying at the hands of a hunter. In the film Inside Out, the imaginary friend, Bing Bong sacrifices himself to save Joy and Sorrow and in turn fades from existence. And the film Up opens with a montage that begins with a childhood crush and then ends in absolute sadness, setting the stage for the melancholy undertones of the film.
In these examples, the juxtaposition of art style against the execution of the scenes enhances moments that are sad on paper. The death of a character's wife or parents on paper is sad, but the execution of the scene, and in this case, the use of juxtaposition, enhances the sadness and melancholy.
The scene ends with Hinawa walking off into the light.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Another character death used with tremendous effect is in Red Dead Redemption 2. Kate Kadowaki, co-host of the Free Play Podcast comments on a moment that she found powerful.

Kate Kadowaki: The scene that just I remember it broke my heart and soul when I saw it was this moment where you as Arthur Morgan are walking or riding along with the chief of the Wapiti Indian tribe. They were talking about having children. And at this point, you're like, well, I know that Arthur Morgan doesn't have any kids because we've been playing as him for a significant amount of time. It's never come up. And all of a sudden there's a dialogue option that shows up that says, "I had a son." And you're like, "You have a kid?" And the second part is like, wait, had.
I, honestly, in that moment, I just kind of stopped playing and just sat there. I never would have expected that moment ever in this game, ever. And then there it was. I'm like of course I have to pick that and the option to not pick it was also there. And I'm like, not pick it? How could I not pick it? And it goes so fast and you don't...

Kate Kadowaki: And it goes so fast and you don't have to pick it. That's, to me, it was like, this is such a big moment in Arthur's life that he's opening up about and you might not even choose that option to discuss with this other person. Well, of course, I'm like you got to listen to this. I mean, I need to know. At this point, I need to know. I've spent so much time with Arthur, I felt like I really knew him. I felt like I've known his family that's in the gang and where he came from and his life's beginning and his life story, and here's just this heartbreakingly real thing here. So his son was unplanned and I think it really, that experience shook him, because it kind of made him question the whole, "I'm in a gang. We travel around, we do all this kind of stuff. We don't have a home."
And I think that this relationship with this woman whose name is Eliza, started planting the seeds of something, the opportunity and the chance for something different and something better and something maybe a little more pure than outlaw life with Dutch and Hosea and the little merry band of whoever's in the gang at the moment. He would come back and visit Eliza and his son, whose name is Isaac. And I think he was, Isaac must have been about four when Arthur came back to like bring them some money and stuff and stay there for a while. And he said, "Oh, there were two crosses outside the house and nobody was home," and they were gone. And just oh my gosh, I'm like this to me Red Dead Redemption 2 is a really tragic story as a whole and this little moment was just, it just so reflected Arthur Morgan's life as a whole. Like goodness and what he wants is just right there and then for some reason, it just doesn't happen for him.

Kevin: This is new hidden information that colors our interpretation of a character more sadly. It is safe to assume that Arthur Morgan has lived a life with more sad moments than happy ones.
He spent most of it running with a gang and living on the fringes of society. This twist blindsides the player, shining a light on the depths of sadness that his life has previously plunged. I like the way this is handled. The loss of a child affects parents differently. I know of people who will continue to commemorate that child after death. An example of this is That Dragon, Cancer, a game based on the true story of a family struggle through the final years of their young son's life as he lost his fight with cancer. Created by the child's parents, the game alternates between the heaviness of the cancer diagnosis and reveling in the joy of being a child, but never for long. It isn't until the very end after his death, where the player is allowed to spend as much time with him as possible, enjoying pancakes and popping bubbles.
The game is a beautiful tribute to his life and a stunning act of remembrance of the pain and struggle the family went through. And that is beautiful. On the other hand, I know of people who are so hurt, so wounded by the loss that they burry the pain deep and they never speak of it unless something triggers them to do so. And while grief is something that needs to be dealt with, I can sympathize with how difficult it would be to have to bury your child. Typically, in media characters who have suffered that great a loss have it consistently foreshadowed. And when we learn the whole truth, it is something that we as the audience have suspected for a long while. This moment, however, rings just as true, and the revelation is even more painful for it. As Kate mentioned, the mere act of including a dialogue option in the past tense hit her so hard that she had to take a moment to collect her thoughts. It has the brevity and punch of For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Turnabout endings. The conclusion of a story is ripe for emotional impact and sometimes additional story can morph a happy ending into something much sadder. Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. Strong writing built the Phoenix Wright franchise. Aside from the point and click elements, it's the entirety of the game. Indeed, it's a bit wacky, but the snappiness of the dialogue and the twists of the mysteries make for a good time. Occasionally though, the games have had moments that have dipped into a more modeling realm for the sake of showcasing something other than the can-do spirit of plucky upstart attorneys.

Max Marriner: It's specifically the moment in which you realize that the main character of the Ace Attorney franchise, Phoenix Wright had in the time between the previous game and this one been stripped of his title, disbarred and shamed for seven years.

Kevin: Max Marriner is a video creator who produces essays on a wide range of video game and film topics.

Max Marriner: And it's like a huge shock because it comes off the back of him essentially clearing the name of one of his best friends for the third time in the final installment of his trilogy. In the marketing for Apollo Justice, you notice a few characters, like you notice one, Emma Sky in the background, you see one other gentleman whose in very casual attire with a beanie and you never notice at first, because he looks very generic and most importantly, his hair is covered up.
And then in five minutes into the first trial, Apollo's very first trial ever, it turns out this man is indeed Phoenix Wright. It's horrible. And the worst part is Apollo knows like he is our main character, our surrogate for this new era, is very aware of what happened. And what brought me great sadness is that Phoenix Wright is my favorite video game character, it was just like a shock to my system. Everything that had happened, especially in the incredibly emotional final trial of Trials and Tribulations, my favorite video game, was just undone.

Kevin: The power of blue moments is that they can be galvanizing to a player who has only been tossed between quirky mystery solving and suspenseful mystery solving for the large portion of the series.
By emotionally dipping down here and twisting Phoenix Wright's happy ending from the original trilogy of games into something sad and disappointing prods the player in ways that are interesting and unexpected. Happy endings are not guaranteed and examining the failings of protagonists after their supposed victory is juicy melancholic pulp. An example of this can be seen in Aliens. When Ripley discovers that despite her hard-fought victory in the original movie, when she wakes up from stasis, she discovers that she has outlived her daughter. By muddling and complicating the emotions tied to the original ending, when successfully done it can generate new, more powerful and nuanced feelings of sadness and melancholy.
Loneliness and inevitability, Shadow of the Colossus. one of the first games to have a deeper than surface level emotional effect on me was Shadow of the Colossus. The game sets your protagonist, Wander, off into a lonely world on a mission to slay these fantastic beasts, the Colossi, to resurrect a girl by the name of Mono. Over and over you guide Wander into different settings, seeking out the native Colossus to destroy it. It's striking in a way that stirred a sense of melancholy because after each time you fell one of the mighty beasts, you begin to consider whether you were actually on the right side of this country. Each Colossus is ingrained into its habitat. It's not an invasive species that must be ripped out root and steam, but a creature in its...

Kevin: inaudible that must be ripped out root and stem, but a creature in its own home. The game does a lot with a little. Instead of crowding the lands, Shadow of the Colossus uses tranquility to leave the player mostly alone with their thoughts. The score is sparse. The user interface is minimalistic. There is only the quest and the time to think about the nature of the pursuit. Shadow of the Colossus doesn't spoonfeed you emotional stimulus. Instead it uses the negative space, customarily occupied by all sorts of signposts to allow your mind to wander. At least that's how it worked for me.
The Last Guardian. Team Ico's works have a long tradition of creating minimalist games, occupying melancholy spaces. Their most recent game, The Last Guardian is no exception.

Megabite: The moment that I thought of when thinking about melancholy and games is kind of near the end of The Last Guardian, in fact, like right before the ending.

Kevin: Megabite produces video critiques on his YouTube channel.

Megabite: Where you kind of come face to face, you're working with Trico, the animal companion to kind of escape this ancient temple or city or something like that. And when you come to the end where you're really going to escape you end up coming face to face with this thing called the Master of the Valley, I believe is what it's called. And it's sort of this green and black, like pulsating orb that's, it kind of has that aesthetic where it's like, maybe it's part magical and mystical, but it also kind of looks almost technological, like maybe it was created or something. And just kind of coming face to face with the realization that this was what was behind everything, not only what you've experienced in the game, but also what obviously happens before the game to lead to the fall, potentially of this big city and everything. And kind of just realizing the almost faceless nature of it was just really chilling and kind of gave me that melancholy feeling.

Kevin: In this case, the source of the melancholy is the reveal that there is no anthropomorphic villain to this story, but rather an almost faceless force. There is no human connection to be made, nor is it beast. It's just there. And it is your antagonist for better or worse. This moment ties back to my dreams coincidentally. There are things in life, encounters in games and so forth with which you are unable to bargain or reason. They're just inevitable forces that are in your way.
I hope we've shown that there is no one singular way that games can demonstrate melancholy or sadness. The juxtaposition of conflicting elements, the use of negative space and design, stunning narrative twists and turns when used carefully and judiciously can all draw a player close to the targeted emotional state. Of course not everyone who watches this video will necessarily buy into the concept that games can have that raw emotional power. And honestly, I understand. There is a level of openness that you must approach games with that some people aren't comfortable doing and that's okay.
I remember years ago, after watching a film called Blue Valentine, I lamented to my old directing professor that the film was too emotionally manipulative. My professor, with his shock of white hair, wild eyes and thick Slovakian accent exclaimed, "What is the point of partaking in art if not to be emotionally manipulated?" At the time, I didn't quite grasp what he was saying, but now I believe I do. When interacting with something, whether it be art, movies, music, or games, it's important to open yourself up to the experience. For games, that means that while you play, the game is playing with your emotions, whether that's for the sake of joy, fear, or sadness, your openness allows you to experience things as intended fully.
That's all for me today. If you liked this video, leave a like and a comment down below and consider becoming part of my Patreon located at patreon.com/arcadeology. For the most recent updates on my videos, follow my Twitter at twitter.com/thearcadeologist. Again, I want to thank my guests, Lady Pelvic, Kate Kadowaki, Dylan Perry, Max Marriner, and Megabite for joining me today. You can find links to their channels in the description below. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.

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Filed Under: Podcasts Tagged With: dark souls 2, mother 3, red dead redemption 2

Interview with David Fox – Part 2

August 22, 2018 by arcadology Leave a Comment

Transcript

Kevin: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Arcadology, a podcast focused on video game history and design. My name is Kevin, and today is part two of my interview with David Fox, formerly of Lucasfilm Games. His most recent project, Thimbleweed Park, is available now on many platforms. Let’s get into part two. You were, was it ’84 to ’92 you were with Lucasfilm Games?

David: I was there from ’82 to-

Kevin: ’82.

David: Well, I was at Lucasfilm ’82 to ’92, and then in 1990, I left LucasArts, we had just changed the name, to this small group within Lucasfilm which we named Rebel Arts, and we ended up, to do location-based entertainment. That was really my big interest. I had been dreaming of doing immersive types of entertainment before I got there, and every time, when I first got there, I told Peter Langston, I told Steve Arnold, “I really want to be doing immersive theme park-type stuff, interactive Disneyland.” They’d say, “Oh, that’s great, but right now we’re doing Atari 800. Maybe later.” Steve, when Steve came on, he said he actually had a big interest in that too, but knew that it was too soon.

David: In 1990, Steve asked me to become the Director of Operations instead of doing more games in order to try to create more of a structure within LucasArts. Everyone had been reporting to Steve, and we now have like 70 or 80 people, and it was impossible, so I kind of hired middle managers, really, someone who’s going to be head of the art department rather than just two or three artists. We had a lot more, someone who’s in charge of customer support, and QA, and the different groups. They reported to me, and I reported to Steve, and I think the programmers and designers all reported to me, and then I reported … I was kind of in the middle of a lot of that. He said, “If you do this for a year, then we’re going to do a location-based entertainment project that you could be a part of.” That’s pretty much what happened. I did, for a year, kind of hired the people in.

David: I hired someone who would take my role as the Director of Operations. It was Lucy Bradshaw and kind of got my role duplicated, and she’s actually someone who really wanted to do that role where I was always kind of not that interested in it. I was much more interested in doing the creative part of the game design, and then I got to do this project. The main project was called Mirage, and it was a joint venture with Hughes Simulations, Hughes aircraft division, that did professional flight simulators for all the airlines and for military. They did the tech part of it, and we did the design or the game part of it, and also the theming of the actual pod. I was in charge of the game design and basically the software. They implemented it under our direction. We did the art design, and they implemented that as much as we could.

David: At the end of a couple years, we had a really cool working prototype which was kind of a very large pod with two side-by-side seats. It had an Amiga computer as a heads-down display so you can kind of see a map of where you’re going, and I got to do my Star Wars game, finally, so I kind of took the idea of Rescue, where you’re flying through canyons, and we were allowed to put into the Star Wars universe, you were flying an X-wing, and there were TIE fighters you had to shoot. It was multiplayer, so we had other people at other stations who were flying the TIE fighters. We’re basically playing a video game on a million-dollar flight simulator system. I think it was a million-dollar Evans & Sutherland ESIG-2000 was the graphic, the image generator for this, and we’re looking out this window which has three projectors bouncing off of a collimating mirror, so instead of focusing at three, or four, five, or five feet away, you’re focusing at infinity, so you’re, looks like you’re looking out through this vast landscape that stretches out beyond.

David: There’s no motion. We didn’t do motion. All the other parts, surround sound, and music from Star Wars, and it was just a very cool experience. Then Steve Arnold left Lucasfilm to go work for Bill Gates, and there was really no one in the company who was this huge proponent of location-based entertainment. When it came down to, we’re actually looking at what it costs to produce this, they decided that it was just too expensive for anyone to buy. The rights ended up being transferred to Hughes for them to try to sell it, and our group closed down.

David: After having done this for a couple years, and the idea of going back and doing computer games on, I guess on PCs then, just seemed like the wrong way to go. I left, and was trying to do VR, back VR projects, and it was just too early. The tech was just too clunky, too expensive. Hughes ended up showing the Mirage at the IAAPA conference in 1992, which happened to be in Texas, near where they are, and I got to go and see it. It was, turned out it was just too expensive. No one, no theme parks wanted to purchase it.

Kevin: It hasn’t been until much more recently that the technology is, I guess makes it … I want to say, one of the most important things for this kind of, that kind of setup is fidelity. Right? High fidelity, because that-

David: Right.

Kevin: … really gets the person who is using it to buy into the environment. Now, with VR headsets becoming really affordable, it’s kind of becoming more ubiquitous to have that kind of experience, but, yeah, that was definitely bleeding-edge, so to speak-

David: Yeah, it was.

Kevin: … in the early ’90s.

David: I got cut, because I couldn’t get to do it.

Kevin: Yeah, bleeding edge, and you got cut by that edge.

David: Yeah. It’s cool now. I mean, I’m so, super interested in this stuff. I haven’t … I got to work on a project in the early 2000s for about a year called Xulu Entertainment. It’s spelled with an X, X-U-L-U, where they were doing, it’s a very similar thing, but with off-the-shelf tech instead of high-end stuff. They’re using graphics cards from PCs, and they actually did have some motion simulators. They ended up running out of money, I guess, and got closed down. Then I did get to do a, design a overlay game with my wife, Annie, at Tokyo DisneySea, with Disney Parks. In its final form, it’s much more of a, like a scavenger hunt style game with a map, but it was really fun to work in a real theme park and do something which used the environment to do an interactive game.

David: More recently, just getting to go and try out The Void in Orlando and it’s multiple other places now, where it was, again, it’s a Star Wars game, and it’s in VR, but the big difference is that, unlike in most VR experiences, if you reach out and touch something in the environment, you’re just touching air, or your bedroom wall, or whatever, but here, you’re touching, when you reach out for a doorway, there’s a doorway there. There, if you see a chair, you try to reach and sit down in the chair, there’s a chair.

David: They do a great job of matching the physical space and the virtual space together so that you very soon trust that when you see something, you can actually touch it, and that’s the way it should be. I mean, it’s like, “Well, yeah, of course. This is how it should really be in a game.” Of course, you’re not tethered. You can walk where you want to. I recommend that as a must-try experience for anyone who can.

David: They have locations on Las Vegas, and New York, and Orlando, and Anaheim, and Glendale, and I think they’re opening new ones in both, multiple places. I think that’s what we’re going to see first before a lot of people get it for their homes. You have to have a fast enough computer and spend the hundreds of dollars for the headset, and the tech is changing really fast. I think most people are going to experience it in a location-based entertainment setting, as opposed to in their bedroom or something.

David: I know there’s another company called, I think it’s called Periscape, so it is, that is doing virtual reality stations at JFK Airport, and they’re going to be putting it in other airports, too. You’re basically, walk up to the station, and you can play a game for, I don’t know, whether it’s something, maybe in the dollar-a-minute range. Other people can watch, and you have a place to put your belongings in a little locker, so people don’t grab your stuff while you’re in VR. I think mostly, they’re doing off-the-shelf games, but games, still, that most people don’t have any exposure to, just because they don’t have the equipment. I think we’re going to see more of that come up first.

Kevin: Yeah. No, I totally agree. There’s also kind of a lack of content. There’s not a ton of developers creating things for VR, at least not as many as standard software or standard games. Occasionally, a big triple-A studio, Bethesda, for example, they’ll create Skyrim or Doom in virtual reality. Those are one-offs. It’s not a common thing yet, but yeah, I totally agree that it’s going to be more installation-based until people are used to the concept, and then you’ll see it spread.

David: Yeah, and I think you’re going to end up with, most companies doing games are going to lose money on those games, so unless you have really deep pockets, or you can just do it as a, almost a throwaway game-

Kevin: Yeah, no, it-

David: … because [crosstalk 00:09:58] I don’t think you’re going to make your money back yet.

Kevin: Yeah. Yeah. You have Electronic Arts, and Activision, and those giant companies that’d be like, “Yeah, we’ll just do it just to do it.” Electric Eggplant that is something you co-founded with your wife, correct?

David: Yes.

Kevin: What does the company do?

David: Well, it’s really mostly the two of us, and then we bring on other people as we need to for projects, but we’ve, combination of published books, and we’ve done consulting and for games, and for VR, and more recently, around the time the iPad came out, I decide, “Okay, it’s time to get back into doing production,” so I kind of dove in and took some of my wife’s books, which were graphic-novel-style books, and did kind of a comic reader, comic book reader for that platform. Then did a, we published a Rube Goldberg game called Rube Works. For those who don’t know Rube Goldberg, he’s the famous cartoonist from the last century who’s known mostly for his crazy contraptions, Rube Goldberg machines, chain reaction machines.

David: Went through the website for rubegoldberg.com and ended up talking to his granddaughter, Jennifer, Jennifer George, and I got the rights to take his original cartoons and turn them into a game. Unity Technology funded the game, and it was going to be under their new Unity Games label. Then, when they decide they don’t want to do that, we got the rights back, but the game’s out on Steam, and on iOS and Android. I think that’s about the time I heard Ron and Gary were doing another, doing this Kickstarter for Thimbleweed Park. I wasn’t involved in the design. I got to look at their Kickstarter pages and gave feedback, and then once they actually blew through their original goal, they knew I was interested, and they asked me if I was interested in coming on and being a programmer or scripter. I was.

Kevin: Do you talk to Ron, Gary frequently, or how long had it been since you had communication with them?

David: Oh, we talked to them off and on. Both Ron and Noah Falstein helped me with the design of Rube Works, brought them in a couple times for brainstorming days, and take them out to lunch, that was pretty much the deal. When Ron was doing some iOS games, I would playtest the games while he kind of stared at me without saying anything and watched me struggle. We’ve had kind of this sharing off and on over the years. Noah, also, has been a friend. He lives near me, so he’s probably the one I’ve been in touch with the most. Yeah, there’s several people who I get to interact with.

David: It wasn’t, definitely wasn’t out of the blue when they decided to do this, and so I was really encouraging. I thought they should go for it when we actually decided, “Okay, yes, we have enough money to bring on some other people,” so myself, Mark Ferrari, who’s also great artist who worked on Monkey Island, and I think did some other graphic adventures. I think he might have … I don’t know if he did anything for Zak. I don’t think he did. He might have worked on the 256-color version a little bit. I was definitely nervous, because I didn’t know whether we’d still have whatever magic we had back them. I remember the very first brainstorming session we did down in Santa Cruz, which is where Gary lives, and got in this room, and we started doing it, and it kind of felt a little awkward for like five minutes, and then everything just clicked, and we just, we were doing it.

David: It was probably the most fun project I’ve had since my days at Lucas, and whenever I think about being at Lucasfilm, I remember the collaboration, and the camaraderie, and brainstorming sessions, and hopping into someone’s office and giving them, getting some help on the spur of the moment. This was very much like that. The difference was, the offices were virtual. We used Slack instead of walking over to someone’s office, because we all worked at home. We’d use Slack for voice meetings, and for contacting each other for stuff, and that worked. It worked really well.

David: For brainstorming, it didn’t work as well, because we’d, you know what, [inaudible 00:14:13] use whiteboards, and so early in the game, we had, I think, three, maybe, brainstorming sessions where we did that in person, but the rest, it was just, was really good, and we had an international team. One of our animators, Octavi, is in Spain. Our main tester was in England, Robert, and we had one who was, she, Czech, Czech Republic, I think. Kind of people in pretty much all time zones. That, it was great. It was really, it was great fun.

Kevin: I had this memory of the point-and-click adventures from the … I played them pretty exhaustively my early years, and I want to say, from the age of like five to, really, through Grim Fandango, which, I think, was, a lot of people consider to be one of the last great ones of that era to come out. I remember being a little nervous when I fired up Thimbleweed Park and I was like, “Is this going to trigger that same emotion, that I think I was having back then?” It did, and I thought you guys did a tremendous job designing it through … It’s almost like it was designed through the rose-tinted glasses of looking back on those games. I think it communicated well the feelings for the people who had played it back then, and for newer players who were just coming on board.

Kevin: I mean, I thought it was a tremendous success. One of the things that I thought of, after playing through the game and playing the ending, and I don’t want to spoil the specifics of the ending, the way the game ends, it felt like a little bit of a swansong for the point-and-click genre. It was almost like closing the book on, being like, “All right, well, this is it. This is kind of this, the genre, this UI, this style, here’s a nice bookend to it.” Was that accurate, or is that just something that-

David: I think there might be something there. I don’t think we ever said, “Okay, this is the last graphic adventure we’re ever going to do, so let’s make it like that.” I think, maybe, in my mind at least, thinking that, “This may be the last one, so let’s put everything we can into this, all the references, all the Easter eggs, so that … ”

David: Of course, since this was a Kickstarter, and the people who backed it were people who wanted exactly that kind of game, we were doing a huge amount of fan service and trying to give them exactly what they wanted. To the detriment of the game, possibly, because I remember when the reviews first started coming out from people who weren’t backers, a lot of people were … There was this universal, not universal, but common theme that it was too self-referential, or too many Easter eggs, too many in-jokes. That’s when we did a revision with the checkbox-

Kevin: Oh, turn off the in-jokes.

David: … to turn off, yeah, turn off annoying in-jokes. We set it to off by default, because we figure, “Okay, people who were willing to do it, they’d hear about it, they’d go back, and they’d turn it back on,” but for most people who, at this point, most people who bought the game probably didn’t know as much about our old games as the people who were the backers were. A few other things like that, so we actually did several revisions, and added, also, for people who were more casual gamers, I think we added the easy mode, where we essentially cut out a bunch of parts of the game, made the puzzle self, pre-solved, and we also added the hint line interface, so you could call up this phone number in the game to get incremental hints without really spoiling stuff.

Kevin: Which is-

David: [inaudible 00:18:29].

Kevin: … yeah, in itself, kind of a reference to the old Lucasarts hint line.

David: Right. Exactly, without having to pay, what, a dollar a minute or something. I think all that just helped for the, helped broaden the interest in the game for the people who weren’t just huge fans of the old games.

Kevin: Right, right. Of course, the most important option that you guys had the menu was the toilet paper setting.

David: Right. Yeah. I think that was, where’d that come from? Mark Ferrari do the bathroom, and he had the toilet paper, in my mind, backwards. I never do it that way. I think we had a screenshot of that room, and there’s this huge, mostly tongue-in-cheek, uproar on social media that we were, “That’s the wrong way to do the toilet.”

Kevin: I remember-

David: “How could you do that?”

Kevin: … seeing … I remember, I happened to be on Twitter at the time, and there’s just like, was like, “Wait. What?”

David: Yeah, and so we went with it and just, we were, we kind of helped turn it into this huge kind of fake uproar. Then I think, I don’t know, it was me, or one of us suggested having an option to reverse it, and so we had Mark redo the art, and had the option where you could turn it the other way. Of course, it wasn’t just the bathroom. It was all toilet paper rolls in the entire game we switched. I mean, people started showing on Twitter, I’ve seen this dozens of times where people would find the original patent drawing, the guy who invented toilet paper rolls. It would show that in the drawing, the paper’s over, so it’s away from, it’s just away from the wall. I did learn that in the case of if you have a cat and you should do it facing the wall, because when the cat starts pawing down on the roll, it just winds it. It doesn’t unroll it. It’s the cat setting over the normal people setting.

Kevin: Right. That’s funny.

David: I think we did a bunch of polls. I think it’s 25% use it backwards, in my mind, and 75% have it over, in the over mode. It’s pretty funny.

Kevin: Final question, kind of the future, so to speak. Thimbleweed Park was kind of a getting the band back together one last time type of game, it felt. I don’t know how true that is, given that you guys do converse on a regular basis. Do you have plans, or would you want to work with Ron going forward? I know he’s toying with some RPG idea that I’ve been casually following, as he posts updates on his blog, but would you like to try to recapture that magic one more time, or …

David: Yeah. I don’t know whether, if we were to do this again, whether would it be another 1990s-style point-and-click game. I would absolutely work with Ron and Gary again on a project that was, if I found the project interesting, I’d say absolutely, because it was such a, for two and a half years, it was having a really good time. I mean, it’s hard work, but it was the kind of hard work where you think back and say, “Wow. That was, I’m really happy I did that, and I’m proud of what we turned out.” Yeah, pretty much almost any project … I’m actually doing some work with Gary right now on a prototype, something he’s playing with, so kind of reconnected with them, and I would do it in a heartbeat if it was a fun game, a fun thing to do.

David: If it was, there are probably some game ideas I probably wouldn’t be that interested in, but if it was story-based, for sure. I mean, the idea of eventually doing a VR graphic adventure game would be really fun. Yeah, I’m open. If I think about where my emotional poise, the immersive stuff is still really strong, it would be a hard decision if I was given, say, “Okay, let’s do another story point-and-click-style game, or an immersive theme park experience.” That’d be really tough choice. I might go for the immersive experience. It’s just because I haven’t done that yet, and I’m not sure how many chances I’ll have to do that. No regrets at all for doing the game, and lots of warm feelings, still.

David: I think that was universal in the project. I mean, everyone in the project still, you still have our Skype channel … Our Slack channel open. We still share stuff on it, and I still feel connected to some people who I’ve never met in person who are across the other end of the, who are in the UK or parts of the EU, and hope to meet them someday.

Kevin: One of the interesting side notes is Jenn Sandercock, who worked with you on the game, just had her own Kickstarter. Was it Edible Games, or …

David: Uh-huh (affirmative).

Kevin: What … Across the threshold, so it’s pretty neat to see the momentum of people who worked on the project continuing forward.

David: Yeah. I’m really happy that she got the Kickstarter to go through. Yeah, and I’m, obviously, I’m a backer.

Kevin: Right. Obviously.

David: At a high level, and can’t wait to taste it and find out. My wife and I both, especially my wife, is a baker, but I do some of it too, so this is a good match for us, so I’m looking forward to playing games that we can eat the pieces afterwards.

Kevin: That’s awesome. Well, David, thank you so much for being on the show.

David: You’re very welcome.

Kevin: Thanks for joining. I’ll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode. Until then, follow us on Twitter @arcadology. Take care, everyone.

 

Filed Under: Podcasts

Interview with David Fox – Part 1 – LucasFilm Games

August 8, 2018 by arcadology 1 Comment

Podcast

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Transcript

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.

 

Filed Under: Podcasts

Game Trailer Editing with M. Joshua Cauller

July 29, 2018 by arcadology Leave a Comment

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.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Podcasts

Community Management with Stacy Place

July 11, 2018 by arcadology Leave a Comment

Filed Under: Podcasts

God of War with Narrative Designer Adam Dolin

June 27, 2018 by arcadology Leave a Comment

We spoke with Adam Dolin, narrative designer for the new God of War game, about how he got his start in the video game industry as well as his work on the game. There are minor spoilers for God of War in this episode.

Filed Under: Podcasts Tagged With: god of war

Gaming and Moral Panics ft. Phil the Conquistadork

June 13, 2018 by arcadology Leave a Comment

Moral Panics. Often they are the result of a rage against something that is misunderstood, frequently perpetuated by those that would stand to make a profit. In this episode we speak with Phil the Conquistadork about moral panics and specifically, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s

Filed Under: Podcasts Tagged With: dungeons and dragons, moral panic

Video Game Modding: An Interview with Ultimate Skyrim’s Belmont Boy

May 29, 2018 by arcadology Leave a Comment

We speak with Dylan, AKA Belmont Boy about his video game modding and his project Ultimate Skyrim, a massive modpack for the Bethesda game Skyrim that redefines how you play the game.

Belmont Boy

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/belmontboy

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Belmont_Boy

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ultimateskyrim/

Arcadology

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/arcadology

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Arcadology

Filed Under: Podcasts Tagged With: game mods, skyrim, the elder scrolls

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