Hello, and welcome to episode number one hundred and thirty five of the Cheese Stakes to Get Charis podcast presided by fox PHL The Gambler, one of two point five FM fourteen eighty AM iHeartRadio where wherever you get your podcasts, you can download this show and listen to it. My name is Jason Finnelli and I am the Esports and Game Againstider four fox PHL The Gambler, And after our special episode earlier this week with Megacat Studios and those fine folks talking about
Russell Quest, we have yet another fun interview segment for you. This episode one major talk with one developer from a game or sorry, the representative from another studio doing a really really cool project that I am very excited to present to you right now, so today on She Steaks and Controller's episode number one hundred and thirty five. Very excited for multiple reasons. If you remember, is past November, I had the honor of reviewing Atari fifty for the switch
I played it for for Game Informer Online, not their magazine online. That was made by Digital Eclipse, who has taken it upon themselves to turn their products into digital museums, which I really appreciate they started with Atari, but now they're getting a little a little more focused, a little more. They're gonna spotlight one game as opposed to an entire company, that game being Karatica, which or Kara Taka. However, we've tried talking about pronouncing it,
and I still got it wrong. But either way, I had the editorial director of Digital Eclipse here, Chris Kohler. We're going to talk about this project, and I am very excited to do so. Chris, how are you today? Very good? Thank you for having me. Thank you for that review of Atari fifty. We really appreciated that. UM. Thank you for checking on the pronunciation of of Kronica and everything. It's you know,
as you know, we we address it in the product. There is a video actually in the interactive documentary The Making of Karnica U, in which you know I pronounced I mean I speak Japanese. You know, a Japanese would be like Catica. Uh Um, I say Karatica in English, you know, giving a little bit more rum, just because that's sort of what's natural in English. Um. Jordan Mechner, who created a game in the ninteen eighties, didn't know Japanese and you know, it's not like it's just nineteen
eighty four. He get just put on put on YouTube to find out how to pronounce it. He always said karataka. Um, some people say karatcha, and really it's just like just just pronounce it how you want. At this point, it's like it's it's you know, it's just gonna be impossible to get everybody to agree and the and it's like ultimately we're all varying degrees of off of what the original Japanese pronunciation is going to be because that sound
that stop just doesn't exist in English. So just just forget it. It's fine now. And it's amazing what one two letters in one syllable will do. If you just take away the car and it's karate or karate, people have way less trouble with it. But I imagine that was already copyrighted back in the age exactly exactly, yeah and right, And I tend to say like more like, you know, I grew up you know, calling you know karate, you know, and it's there's it's not there's no raw and
there's no tea in there either. It's caught up, you know, the empty hand right, So it's like, I don't know, it's just at this point it's been forty years and you know, we're no closer to a cure. Yeah, I understand. The Japanese language is a very complicated thing. I'm actually teaching myself right now thanks to that green owl on Duo Lingo, slowly getting through it, and it is quite a challenge, but a good one. I do appreciate it. So my first question about insert pronunciation
of game here. What so you went from Atari fifty and that entire history of a major company, fifty years of research and prototypes and design docs and all this to one single game two years worth of whatever Jordan had worked with at the time. So my first question is a simple one. Why this game? Why Kara? What was the reason for this to be the first time you try the single game documentary as opposed to the company wide doc.
Well, the funny thing is, and you would have no way of knowing this, of course, but I will tell you, is that really we went from Karatica to Atari fifty in that when I started working at Digital Eclipse in twenty twenty, the first thing that I was put on was this project that was that had been going for a little while called the Making of Karnica, and I kind of came in. The people who've been doing creative on it were both gone at that point, and so nobody was you know,
nobody was in had the reins creatively, and I looked at where that project was and I was like, you know, I kind of I took a step back and I started doing I kind of started doing the research from zero again because I was like, I don't want to base my decisions here on what's already in this this sort of like early early version of the product. I want to go do the research again. So it's like, Jordan, the thing that makes Chronica so perfect. There's a lot of things that make
Charnica perfect, and I will get to this to answer your question. One of the things that makes it perfect is that Jordan Mechner was a total like documentarian himself and a pack rat who saved absolutely everything. So as he was going along in college, like freshman year of college, he was making this game as a freshman at Yale University. That's when he started. In nineteen
eighty three is when he started on this. Okay, he was writing a journal, a daily journal, that he kept up that he's actually kept up through his whole life. And he started writing a journal around that time and daily documented the process, everything that he was doing in at college, but also everything he worked on on that game. And so we had something that very few people have if you're trying to look at the history of how a
game was developed, a daily log of everything that he was doing. Not only that, but you know what he was feeling he was doing it, you know, So all of his teenage angst is right there on the page. And Jordan has published those journals and you can you can buy those and
read them right now. And then additionally, he did all of his designing like on paper, and he saved all the paper, and so all the paper, all of the design documents for Krotica, just just stacks and stacks of stuff is all in the care of the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, who we kind of basically partnered with to put this out. They gave us access to all the Jordan's materials and were extremely helpful. So basically at that point I go back and I'm like, okay, I'm
gonna read Jordan's journals. Of course from start to finish, I'm going to um go to the strong and you know, redo the research and say, what do you guys have. I want to make absolutely sure that we have
everything pertaining to Karnica. Found a bunch more stuff, found a lot of Chronica stuff in the Prince of Persia folders where it had been you know, sort of accidentally missorted, and start to realize that there is a way to tell this story, Like there's so much information journals and design documents, and then then we start looking at the contents of Jordan's floppy discs because those had been preserved about ten years ago and by Jason Scott and the Internet archive folks,
and they had like gotten all of Jordan's floppies and you know, done like very expert level stuff to try to get as much data as they could
off of the shoebox full of floppy discs. And so there were like graphics, cut content and things like that or like in development versions of Kerotica, so we had as much It's like no other game from nineteen eighty four is this well documented, unless I mean there's probably like there's probably something similar for like Super Mario Brothers, but it's in a vault Nintendo and we'll never see it, you know what I mean. But Miamoto wasn't writing a diary,
nope. So by taking all these parts, this was the This was the fun as a former journalist, you know what I mean, Like, this was the fun part. Because now I've got a diary in which he explains what he was doing that day. I've got images off with floppy disk, and I've got scans of paper documents and he can start connecting the dots and
matching that stuff up. So now, as opposed to a typical collection where it's sort of like, here's a design document, I can say, here's the design document, here's what Jordan said when he was writing this, here's what came out of it as an original, you know, or as a sprite on his floppy disc, and show all of those things together and lay
it out all chronologically. So from a content perspective, Keronica has enough supporting content to let us do and Atari fifty size is essentially it's the same thing as Atari fifty where we've got five you know, chapters essentially that you can
go through. It just gives us the ability to do that as as and then as far as the game itself, one of the things that we want to do with the gold Master series, which is this line of independently produced, self published, interactive documentary style games, is um, you know, we want to tell some of these stories of video game history that aren't being
told. And one of the stories that's always told about video game history, and I'm guilty of this myself, is this idea of like there was Atari and then Atari die and the video game industry crashed and there was this black hole, and then Nintendo came riding in on a white horse and saved video games, you know, and that's like, there is something to be said for that in terms of the game console business in America, right, But that's but that's it right on. First of all, for the rest of
the world, that's not the case, and certainly on personal computers, you know, that's where gaming kind of shifted to and we just don't hear about these stories. And Jordan Meckner's Coronica was a profoundly influential game when it came out in nineteen eighty four, in the middle of what some people just sort
of consider the nothing time. It came out in eighty four, it sold a ton of copies, and importantly, it made so many innovations in terms of the way that video games had presented cinematic scenes or cut scenes animation.
Jordan used rhodoscoping okay to achieve lifelike animation inside of this game. In terms of soundtrack, Jordan's dad, Francis Mechner, who is sort of one of the heroes of our story, was a classical pianist as a hobby, and he composed the soundtrack in an era where games certainly on the Apple too and
on most other platforms, really didn't have music scoring them. And but he did in a really smart way because he used this life motif approach for every character, every emotion, every setting had its own little stinger of music. So that lifted the emotional kind of, you know, m weight of the story as well. And so Keronica makes all these cool innovations and it feels
like a little movie. Basically. That's how players perceive it is the first time they're playing a game on their computer that really felt like they're like the hero of an action movie. And that was so profound and it inspired a generation of game designers we have. We went out to people like Tom Hall,
the co founder of ID Software. Uh. John Tobias, the co creator of Mortal Kombat, is in this um and they're in this discussing like how profound an impact you know, Coronica had on them, And we can in that way connect the dots and show um why this game, which was, by the way, you know, as I've kind of alluded to, is the debut the directorial debut title of Jordan mcner, who would go on
to create Prince of Persia series. Prince of Persia stands the time Prince of Persia, the Hollywood film you know, Um, Coronica was like this um little um, like little egg, you know, this little sort of like the tiny seed from which Prince of Persia would grow. Um. And so
it's important to look at it that way as well. And so as far as it's importance to the industry, as far as it being a story that has not really been told, as far as it being an amazing story, it's a there's a wonderful father son story at the core of this whole thing, because you know, Francis Machner not only did he dad, he's the dad of the year, Like not did he compose the soundtrack to his son's game, you know, support his his teenage son in any way that he
could to make this game amazing. When Jordan wanted to rhodoscope somebody, his father put on his wife's karate outfit and went out into the woods behind their house in upstate New York and ran around in this karate outfit while Jordan filmed him with a Super eight camera and captured his dad's running and jumping and climbing motions and then rotascoped them into Karatica. And so when you see the Karatica
running around, he wrote a scope two people. His his mom's karate teacher for all the karate moves, and then his dad for all of the ancillary stuff like running and climbing and things like that, the non martial arts moves. And that makes the two of them tied for being essentially the first like mocap actors ever in a video game. And again it's his untold story that, like, you know, Francis mcner is this like unsung hero of video games. For all the work that he did on this, you don't really
hear about him. And so we want to make we want to get that story out there. So it's a story that we're passionate about telling. It's a really important game. It's a story where we have all the ability to do it, and so um we had to. I was working on this and we had to shelve it for a while because so many other big projects coming in that needed all hands on deck. I was working on this before
we signed Blizzard Arcade Collection. So it was this, It was this lightning rapid like you know, Blizzard Arcade Collection comes in, needs you on that teenage Mutan Nincha Turtles, the Calbunga Collection, We need you on that. We actually, after Kalbunga Collection, we'd like had a kickoff meeting for Corotica
to get it going again. And while that was happening, like, we signed Atari fifty and Atari fifty was just this great opportunity though, because Atari needed something different and we're like, you know what, We've we've got this interactive documentary approach that we've been workshopping internally that we've been designing Corotica to that, and so we were able to put the brakes on everything else get Atar fifty out the door in like record time because we had to do it for
the Atari fifty ten overs re year um. And then once that was done, finally had the time and the bandwidth to go back. Uh. And and not only the Karatica, but other stuff that's coming up later in the gold Master series that we're working on now. UM so yes, um yeah, it's a series. We've announced it a series, um and so and so that's happening. So I hope that gives you a little bit of insight
into why it's that game. Now. This is not to say, like other stuff in the gold Master series might be um, a bunch of games. It might be one developer, it might be one company, you know, going on. It's not necessarily this could be one game. But in this case, you know, it's it's like it's um, it's it's really all. And the thing is, there's actually fourteen games in the making of Chronica, because there's Karatica for the Apple two, which was what Jordan created.
There's the ports to the Commodore sixty four and the Atari eight hundred. Um. We even speak with in the video in the video sections of the cook who actually did the conversion programming for the Atari and the Commodore versions. So we get into the details of like what was that, like, you know, what's it like to support something from He's one very very different platform
to another. Right, you have Jordan's original game shooter that he made called Death Bounce, which is what he was trying to pitch before Karnica that got canceled, but it's in four different prototypes of that are in the game, several prototypes of Karnica, and even Asteroid Blaster, which was basically like Jordan cloning asteroids, that's in it too. So across all of these things,
we've got fourteen different playable games in various stages of production. And again, like Autari fifty, as you go through the timelines, when those versions come up, you have the chance to play them, and you have the chance to check them out and then go back to the timeline and resume your sort of historical journey through the documentary. So that actually answers a question that I
had on the pace. So with Atari fifty, you're going through the history of the company and you just put in the full games that they you're talking about in that particular, you know, year here with one game, are you breaking up the game into sections and they play those sections or do they play the whole thing and then get the history. But if it's now like fourteen different prototypes and the full games and stuff like that, it kind of
makes more sense in my head as to house. Yeah, I mean, I think it's just important to note here that like you as the player, have the option to dive into one of these deeper sort of segments that you know, just as if you were at a museum, you know, and you're going through the museum. You could either start at the beginning of the museum exhibit and just walk really fast through everything and just look at things that
interest you and then be done. Or you can spend all day in there and just start at the beginning to exhibit and then just go from you know, station to station, and if there's an interactive part of that, you can stay there and interact with it and exhaust all of the utility out of that before you move on to the next part of the museum. Depends on how you're feeling that day and just how deeply interested you are. So if you just want to kind of quickly go through the story, you can do
that. But if you want to stop and play a game for a while, you know, you can do that. As well, and you just nothing is a lott you know what I mean. You just have the freedom to just go where you want to go. We'll try to guide you to what's next chronologically, but you have this choice, like do you want to
play Jordan's Asteroids clone? Um, we even have watch mode for all of the games, so it's like, if you just want to watch a little playthrough of somebody playing Asteroids, you know, do that we don't and that
gets even that's that's even more important. You're talking about the game like Kronica, which is actually kind of difficult, So it's like, if you just want to watch somebody play You even have chapter select in the watch mode, so if you want to just jump to a certain part of the game and check that out, you know, you have the option to do that as
well. Um And for the Apple two version of Kronica, we have director's commentary on the watch mode, so you can watch somebody play through Jordan's original version um while you listen to Jordan Nor and Francis mcner um talk about extemporaneously to sort of talk about the various things that you're seeing and the little bit of the behind the scenes of how that was put together. That's awesome.
Um, I'm wondering, is he like reading through his journals and remembering his angsty moments as he's going through these or is he just kind of talking about what he was doing at the time he is reacting to what's going on on the screen. Basically what we you know, we we had once we got the playthrough and we knew that that was going to be that, you know,
we had to do it in order, right. It's like, the playthrough is not just a video, it's it's actually like an It's uses emulator save states because you can you can jump into the playthrough at anytime and start playing. That's why the chapter select allows you to say, I want to practice that fight against the bird, just jump right to it and then jump in and start playing. So it's cool chapter select. Um. So we had to make sure that that was one hundred percent done before we went to
Jordan and Francis and actually visited them in New York City in April. Um, so it wasn't that long ago and just uh sat them down with the demo, played the watch mode set up like my phone and just recorded them. Um. It was a very ad hoc thing because we weren't really sure if we were going to be able to get them, you know, because it was so late in the process. But it was like, we have you here, let's do this, um and so, and it one up
being very insightful. It was just it was one take, totally just you know, off the cuff. But it's but it's really brilliant. It's really fun to listen to. That's cool. And we mentioned we talked to a little bit earlier about Prince of Persia and how this game kind of set the table for that. Uh is that reference In the latter half of the timeline documentary portion, do you get into like what parts of Karatica became part of
Prince of Persia formula and how that's how that flow works. Yeah. So after Karatica, you know, it was a big success, and you know, Jordan and his publisher were both like, we got to do Karatica two.
So Jordan starts messing with new designs and things like that, and he was inspired, as you'll see because there's an entire chapter that's just called Karatica two U. He was fired by games like there's a broader run game called the Castles of Doctor Creep, which was like a more like um it had more like traps and platform kind of stuff, and he was thinking, gee, I'd like to do something like that. So we actually have a lot of screenshots of in you know, sort of in progress stuff where he was
working on a more platform type Karatica game. He was using the Karatica characters. He was thinking maybe Princess Mariko would be playable this time, and story treatments and stuff like that. Um, but the game you kind of see it like once you get to the final like you know, mock up of Karataka two, it starts to look a lot like Prince of Persia, not in terms of the character designs, but in terms of you know, the
traps and doors and things like that. And that's kind of where we stop, and we're like, you know, at past this point, it became a new project, you know, which was originally called Bagdad and that became so we stopped there, and uh, you know that, you know, I don't want to say too we continued because we don't have the rights to do diversion, but it's like, but the story goes on from there, yeah, right, and then people can do their own research and filling exactly
from there. Yeah, so you talked about also the black hole in the gaming industry that was filled by Apple two, which is what this was developed on. Do you take some time to go through that platform as a development platform? To you to repeat myself, do you go into like the technology of the Apple two and what was used to make this game as you did with the Atari consoles in fifty, not super deeply, we do, you know, in these interactive documentaries, as we do with with Atari fifty.
You know, we want to make sure that we're not just sort of taking the game ram and just sort of plunking it down their right context. So we do want to make sure that, yes, people understand like what's the difference between these platforms. So yeah, as you're going through the timeline, so as we get to the introduction of like the Apple two or the Commodo sixty before the Atari, you know, we talked a little bit about well, when was that released, what were its strengths? You know, so
we talk a bit about that. You will glean some of that, especially from a lot of Jordan's commentary about the Apple two and what it was capable of, what the Commodore and the Atari were capable of versus that when we start talking about ports, there is, but ultimately it's kind of out of scope to really start getting into, like, you know, the nitty gritty of the how the Apple two works, even though it is very interesting and
to understand that platform does help you understand like why does Chronica look like that? Why does it use those colors? Well, the Apple two could only generate, like you know this, this small handful of colors, so every game has that orange blue kind of aesthetic interest. And the interesting thing about that that I found out as I was doing this is that, um, the Apple two doesn't have color hardware. Steve wazni Acc basically figured out a
way to use it. The Apple two. Technically the hardware could only do like, um, you know, luminants basically like black and white, right, but he figured out ways to send signals along that black and white pathway basically to juice you know, your your monitor. You'd have to have color monitor obviously, but he would get the monitor to be able to display those colors um and and like if you it could only kind of display them in certain areas. So if you shift a pixel over that was blue, it
becomes orange, you know what I mean. It's one of those things where it's like that's what Apple two programmers had to figure out. It's like color was not just put this color there, it was And that's why when you look at Chronica and other Apple two games, you see like, um uh, what seems to be like sloppiness of the colors. You know, you'll see like something that's orange and it'll have like a blue pixel in there somewhere.
And that's literally just because the Apple two is doing color in a very strange way without color hardware. Um. So that's something that would be like a little too much to include. Um, although it is a really interesting story that is. Um maybe if there's ever a gold Gold Master Series on the Apple too itself, it would be a good place to put that.
And you know, I think and that's a really good observation because it's like with the Gold Master Series, like it doesn't necessarily have to be about like a game or even games, you know what I mean, there could be It's like it's it's and that's what's important to get across here is like we're not like selling you Kerotica, No, like I don't want to sell you
like this just this game. Ram. This is about selling you the story, the documentary, even if you don't, if you aren't really interested in the game, that the pitch here is like the story is so interesting. Yeah, that it's it's it's the meat. It actually is the core user experience. So if someone were to come to you for a potential pitch in this gold Master series, if you even accept them, what would be your
vironments would you? What would you and Digital Eclips want or need even in order to even consider doing something like this for another project, whether it be a single game or an old developer or even the platform. As we've talked about, what sort of information and how much of it would you need in order to have that jumping off point. I think ultimately we would just want to make sure that it's something where there could be just a variety of different
things. I mean, maybe the game itself is so well known that people are already so passionate about it that we'll just figure out what the story is and tell that story. But if you were to come to us and say, well, I've got this game and nobody's really heard of it, but
the story behind it is so fascinating. You know, I think we would we would take that as a really interesting challenge of can we take something that's got no fan base whatsoever, but the story is so good that we think that if we get it out to people and put that context around it, we will actually create fans of this game. Um, I think we would
like that challenge as well. So it's really just like I feel like everything has a potential argument for it, you know, whether it was you know, you know, like whether whether it's it's already got fans, whether it doesn't have fans. But if there's a good story there, if there's a story that we can tell, it's something I could think of at least two or three different projects off the top of my head that I would love to see get this treatment. But we can, uh, we can bypass that.
I don't want to. I don't want to start saying you should do this, because that's I'm sure you get enough of that on social media and stuff like that. It's not you know, ultimately, well, I mean,
we we do, and we like cards on the table. It's like I like to hear like you should do this, especially when it's something that's like on social media, and it's kind of quantifiable because ultimately, it's not like we're sitting around with a big list of games and we're going, let's do yeah, yeah, yeah, No, it's really trying to convince rights holders to go in with us, you know, and take a chance on
us and do it this one. Um. And so if we have more of a sense of what do people want, you know, that gives us a little bit of ammo. That's like, oh, you know, we have all you know, fans are asking for this, like this is what we hear about a lot. So it's it's it's good to hear. But also it's like, don't don't you know, mistake the process of um,
you know, we're we're just picking whatever we want. I wish maybe in twenty years if we really establish ourselves people falling all over ourselves to you know, get digital clips, to uh, you know, to include something in the Gold Master series. But yeah, that would be yeah, that would be awesome. Um. So I want to ask also, I know we kind of touched on this a little bit, but did you find focusing on the one story and the one game, even with the wealth of information that
you ended up finding from the museum up in Rochester. Did you find this to be a little more challenging to build enough of a story to get through those five chapters as opposed to the first time you did this, where you had fifty years of information to dig through. This one a little bit more focused. I'm just I'm just wondering how challenging it was for the team to get that story. Did it become apparent like right from the jump? Um?
Yeah, I mean within like the first once I really started reading the journals and once I really started looking at and asking because it really you my first week or two with it at the company back in twenty twenty, because literally this was what I was put on and I was just like, okay, you know, let me get the information. Once you start looking at
it and realizing there's just so much there. But I think that you know, I also had a twenty five year career in journalism prior to that, and I mean, so much of that is um, you know, there's all this information out there. How do you perceive what's important? How do you start to see a story take shape in this sort of mass of of seemingly unrelated events and so writing big magazine features, big five thousand word features. You started to develop a little bit of a sense of oh, that
can go in, that can go in. That's important once you start connecting the dots. I mean, I think that's that's that's kind of the big thing. So maybe it's something that somebody without that experience might not have perceived. But you know, in from my sense, it was like, yeah, yeah, this this, I mean, there's a huge story to be told here, and we just gotta you know, we just gotta put it
all together. Now. In retrospect, you mentioned that, UH, Karatica was actually supposed to be first, and then a Tori fifty kind of took over in this documentary style format. Do you actually think that going through a Tori first ultimately benefited Karatica as opposed to if you had launched them the other way around? You do you feel that having going basically doing the trial run
with fifty years of Atari made this one even better in uh? In retrospect, yes, absolutely, yeah, one hundred percent, because there's there's so much that, like you know again, like you know, Coronica was in the works, but Atari, it's like we had a deadline and we had to finish it. And finishing something is very important, you know, because you do ninety percent of the work and then after that you do the other ninety percent of the work at the end. You know, it's like just
just getting something completely totally finished out the door. You know. It allowed us to really just like bang on a lot of our you know, initial ideas and like preconceived notions and and really you know, test it out in a product, and then of course it's very fortunate, you know, we
released Atari fifty. Reviews were very good, and importantly there was a lot and there were a lot of people who thought what we were doing because as the first sort of test flight, it's like what if people don't understand this? What if people hit start on Atari fifty and they're like, where are my video games? What is all this stuff? You know? I mean that could have happened and what is yeah, yeah, like where's asteroids? I can't find asteroids? You know, um, And we did a lot
to make sure that both of those types of players. You know, if you just wanted a list of games, we gave you a great games carousel that you know, sorted and you know, had you know a lot of information about each of those games to help you make that decision of what to play. But if you wanted to go through the timelines, that's your primary kind of you know, user experience. You wanted to make sure that had access to all of the games that way as well. Um, and the
fact that people picked up on it. Uh. And and you know what's interesting with Atari fifty is that, um, when Atar fifty was announced, I think a lot of people paid it no attention and we're just like, oh, it's another collection of Atari games. Okay, I don't and I
made that I will admit I made that assumption as well. Well. The Game Informer review came a week or two later, I think, after the lease, and you typically don't say that happened with IGN as well, and that happened with there wasn't a review, but that happened with Kotaku's coverage as well. And I think that that's actually that's actually great because what it means is it came out and there was this sense of oh, oops, like we should have you know, we should have covered this. This is something
different, this is something unique. We actually need to go back. And you know it's not often that after that initial review cycle somebody's gonna go back, you know, uh and and cover him. So it's it's wonderful that that happened because it really it made it very clear that people were picking up on it. Oh, this actually is something different. And the benefit then to the Gold Master Series is now we're like, here's our next interactive documentary.
We've got tons of people already who are just like, oh, like Autari fifty, this is gonna be good. You know. So it really that's that's that's very helpful. UM. You know, for for us, we're launching the UM launching the indie thing. That's more of a risk, where the risk is all on us, where it's where it's being announced, you know. Very fortunately we're really lucky, UM, very grateful to have it announced on the ID Xbox showcase. That was definitely awesome, UM and
uh. But but still ultimately there's no big publisher here, like with a
big marketing machine. It's just falls to us UM. And so you know, it's so it's so it's scary, UM, and it's risky, but it is what we believe we need to do UM to treat you know this these classic games which we believe are they're not just like old you know, products that you sell in the bargain bin, Like, this is the foundational art on which the video game media is based, and we believe we need to treat them with more respect um and so this is a way that we're
trying to do that. Now you're you touched on something that I wanted to make sure I asked you about. One of the last things we talked about, because I imagine it's going to be a heavy topic here, and that is preservation. Last last week, that report or two weeks ago, the report came out that eighty seven percent of games ever released are no longer available in any platform. Blew my mind just because I assume that you could still get some of the weird games that I played as a kid, because I
still have them, so people probably still have them. But no, a lot of those games aren't available anymore. Did you see that and start to think, Okay, maybe we're onto something with this Golden Master series. Maybe we can bring that number down by getting some of these titles back out into the forefront or the spotlight, even if it's a little spotlight like like Keronica.
As as great and foundational as it is, it like only for old folks like me and you older folks, not old folks who have been playing games for a long time. We know about it, but but the youth now won't until this. So do have you guys kind of like taken up that mantle a little bit? Like all right, if there's a preservation issue and they're not going to do anything about it, if they'll partner with us,
we'll do it. Yeah. So, I mean we believe there's a role for everybody in all kinds of different organizations as far as game preservation.
You know, the Video Game History Foundation wants to make this extremely salient point because they're arguing for um, you know, alterations to copyright laws essentially that allow UM libraries and institutions to provide for video games remote access because ultimately it's like eighty seven percent of games, um, you know, according to the study, the only way that you can access them is either um A you know, piracy or B you just can't. And so if if library it's
just simply can't do it. I mean there's there's games. Look, if you want to go pirate a laser active game, you can't do that, Like you have to have a laser active, you know, set up. But if libraries and institutions were able to set up and provide remote access for these things, then that would give researchers UM or quite frankly, not just researchers, but just you know, everybody, the opportunity to play these things within a legal framework where they do not have to I mean it when we're
talking about UM. One of the other things that we want to do with the Gold Master series is bring back computer games because a lot of times what you see our collections of console games, but when you start looking at the libraries of of computer games, you don't actually see personal computer games being brought
back as much, and you you don't see them on game consoles. Because it's one thing to re release a computer game for a computer because Karnica, you know, used keyboard controls, right, and you needed keyboard controls to get through this. So what we're doing, and we have engineers essentially working on this for Karnica and for other stuff in the Gold Master series, it's
a big task, a big expensive engineering task. Have a highly paid engineer sit down and spend days and weeks essentially taking computer games and bringing them up
so that you can use a console controller to interact with them. Uh, and so with Keronica, it's like even if you wanted to just you know, pirate it, you know, you're still dealing with all of the intricacies of like like it's it's like I I use emulators all but time and just getting a computer game running and be like, okay, we get this Apple two emulator. Okay, well how do I mount a disk image? You know? Once I do that, what do I have to type anything?
I mean, god, you know I'm abusing like a you know, a Commodo or sixty four emulator. It's like for for people who grew up with Commodoor sixty four, they're like, oh yeah, type load Comma you know as ampersand you know, so like you know all the stuff and you run the and you and you then you run it. But it's like I don't
remember this. I have to go look it up, and I have to go look this information up, and this information is on some forum posts like there there there were times when I'm trying to emulate something and the answer is buried in some forum post from two thousand and eight, and it's like this
is not sustainable, No, can't keep doing this like. This is why when the Video Game History Foundation points out these games are like critically endangered, it is because all of the rigamar role that you have to go through and this sort of fragile ecosystem of like homebrew hackers and pirates that are propping it all up is it's it's it's it's not sustainable and it's disrespectful, and it's something that you know, we should be working a lot harder to now from
the Digital Eclipse perspective, we can't save every game by putting out products like this, you know, especially because look, we're making the making of Chronica, but it's like when does our game become incompatible? You know, it's like what happens twenty years from now, through no fault of our own, where if we can't go in because you know, what if the development in froment for the making of Keronica gets deprecated decades down the line and we can't
even update it anymore. What if the storefronts that it's available on all shut down. You know, then either the way that somebody would access my creative work would be through what would hope remote access via a library. I don't want this to go away, But I understand that it will unless there's institutions that are able to provide it to people, or they'll just pirate it, you know. And so but from our perspective, you know, we all
we can do is like the work of like we're what is it. It's like, you know, it's just it's a massive forests and we can save like one tree, you know what I mean, like by through doing this, but I mean I think it's very what we're what we're doing ads to preservation absolutely, especially you know, even with like Ninja Turtles, the Cowbunga
collection, thank you very much. And there's thousands of pages of design documents from Konami's internal archives that now exist in extremely high quality you know, I think four K on some consoles, you know, digital form. Whereas in the past, before we embarked on that project, they existed as a piece of paper in a building in one of the countries that is beset by the
most natural disasters of any place on Earth. If if an earthquake didn't get them, a typhoon was gonna get them, you know what I mean. So it's like by doing the project and by having it because if somebody other than Digital Eclipse had done a Turtle's you know collection for Konami, they might not have said, yeah, we want every document, you know, and
people are just like, why is this collection? However many gigabytes it is, it's just x number of ROMs, and it's like, no, because we successfully argued that it needs to be this, and so from a preservation
standpoint, we actually did do great work on that. And so that's the same thing with you know, with you know, making a chronica and things far in the future is just getting those those physical documents, turning them into digital documents that are now everywhere, you know, everybody has them, and it helps preserve that information in a in a really substantial way. And so
we feel that pressure too. But then also we know that that bonus you know, that what was considered, you know, you speak through the bonus content. Really, for some people is the whole show right now? Do you think, I mean, obviously game companies can be doing more to preserve their own games. I don't. I don't think that's that's our opinion.
That's it's total, it's absolute fact. Would Digital Eclipse ever consider partnering with a big publisher if for no other reason than to just show them how you do it. It's if you're not going to use us, at least let us show you what we're doing so that you can maybe do it yourself. We'd love to do it for you, but I see, yeah, I mean, like you know, it's sort of a consulting sort of way.
Yeah, you know, hit us up like we're we're down for We're down for whatever, you know what I mean, Like we this is we're we're not like we're not like desperately, like we're not going to go out there and be like you you may not, you know, do something this way.
If everybody, if everybody starts doing if everybody adopts our approach to uh classic game or archival game releases, will feel very proud that we were able to, you know, essentially flip the script and change the way to say this is like it's a you know, it's it's our business, but it's really it really, really is a cause that we all believe in, Like we want to preserve video game history, want to do our part, and
we want to treat these things with the respect that they deserve. And if that gets other people doing that, great, If that gets other people saying, oh geez, like Digital Clips is a really good job on these. We gotta hire them to do our next thing also wonderful, you know. So yeah, now I'm wondering is there any and if you if you don't want to answer this question for fear that people might think that you're working on it, that's fine, But is there any older game that you would love,
like from your youth? But you're like, man, I haven't played this in a really long time. I wonder if this is one. Like if you were the Twitter feed right right right, yeah, if you were the guy on Twitter saying, hey, Digital Eclipse do this, Yeah, what would that be? Does? Okay? So does Shagara Miamoto listen to your podcast? I had, I had, I had Reggie Feesam episode one hundred. So maybe okay, okay, so maybe he does. Yeah,
so Miamoto just call me. You know, you have my number. Um No, I mean seriously, Like it sounds crazy, but like I will say this all the time, like absolutely, Nintendo get in touch. You know, like I think that what we do could actually compliment um, you know what they have as far as the the online subscription service. You know,
the context is not there. And the thing is, the pitch to publishers is really list Like, if you're just taking the games and putting the games out, the audience that you have is gonna be people who are already kind of like excited about those particular games. But it's like, we can
help create new fans. So if there's something that is dormant, you know, by putting these things in their proper context, you know, by doing it, whether it's the interactive documentary format or whether it's something like cow bunga collection, you know, but by putting this stuff in context and introducing it
to new audiences. And like, one of the things we found with Atari fifty is that there were a lot of people who, just anecdotally on social media or interviews would say things like, I don't really like Atari that much. I've never been an Atari fan. I did not grow up with Atari.
I've never been interested in it. But in going through the documentary and learning about these games and learning about where they came from and why they were important and who worked hard on them, and learning what to look for when I play these games, then after that, when I play the games, I become more interested in them, and like that is that is the magic of doing it this way, which is getting somebody who did not have any
interest and getting them to the point where where they do play that game. Suddenly now they're a fan of food Fight for the Atari XL or whatever it is, you know, and so like that's what's so important about this and so that's really my that's really my pitch to to, you know, to publishers and like why you want to let us do it and why we want
to do it this way? Yeah, And which makes a lot of sense because, like as you mentioned Nintendo, I could think of a ton of games in their portfolio that I haven't seen the light of day in years that could really benefit from this sort of complimentary service. Like you're saying, Star Tropics is one that comes to mind immediately, right because nobody knows what that is outside of like us and Eric Bailey on Twitter, who I talked to
every once in a while, he's always mentioning Star Tropics. That would be a perfect idea. Every company has games like that that are deep buried in their archives and haven't come out and forever even if at all, And I just think there's a lot of merit to that not just in the preservation of what did come out, but also in the history of these companies that we
may not know about. I feel like you might even have a possibility of and maybe you might not agree with this of a series where it's just all unreleased games or all prototypes from a company that never saw the light of day until now. And here's why here, you know, stuff like that.
Would that be something that you guys would be interested into? Yeah, I mean, I think again, like Coronica, is this really really great test bed for so many things that we want to do because we haven't really even gotten into a lot of this stuff about like you know, I mean, one of the other things that we do in making of Kronica is so we knew that Jordan used rotoscoping. The Strong Museum had preserved and digitized that super
eighth film of his dad running around. We had all the steps in the process because what he did was he he filmed his dad, He took the film with a movie editing device and then traced the frame onto a tracing paper, and then he took a device called a versa writer, which was this very very early like device with like a stylist for the Apple two, where you had your stilus and the silus was attached to a mechanical arm basically like
on a tablet, and you moved the mechanical arm around you're drawing, and it would start recreating that on the screen in front of you based on the movements of the arm. And then he that's how he digitized all the frames. It's an incredibly laborious like like process that took months. And then once he had the digitized you know, versions of the tracing paper, was able
to animate that and that's how he got like human animation. We have an interactive thing called Rotoscope Theater in which I went back and took that video, found the exact frames from the video that he traced with tracing paper that he
digitized. That became Chronica Man on screen and you can compare real life footage of Francis Mechner with final in game sprite as if you're in like photoshop, lay them on top of each other and see how the real life maps to give and you do it in an interactive way, and so that's kind of like that's something else that we can do. So Chronica is like a test
bed for a variety of different things. We have a fifteen minute audio only podcast in the middle of making of Coronica in which Kirk Hamilton's Yes m former
co worker does the Strong Songs podcast. He basically does a little mini Strong Songs for the Chronica soundtrack and he and he just breaks it down as far as like this is why this music is so good, and so we're just like we're putting everything in the kitchen sync into making a Chronica in terms of weird while wacky ideas, you know, the director's commentary and all that kind of stuff to show like here's just here are just some ways you know that
we can do this interactive documentary format. We can tell the story of this game in a variety of different ways. And so going on in the process in the future, it's like there's we'll come up with even more stuff than we can do and it'll all depend on The first step in this process is well, what's out there? You know, like, what does the company have internally? What can we go research and find on our own, And then the shape of it sort of follows from the information that we have.
That's awesome. Do you hear? These are the lengths that these folks are going to make sure that the history of video games is told in a way that is scinct and informative and most of all, entertaining. And I have a feeling that the history of Karatica or Carroteca or whoever it's pronounced will be one that is told very effectively, just as Atari fifty was last year. Chris Kohler, thank you so much for your time and your information, and
the interview was great. I look forward to seeing the history of Carrotcha went making Karatica Whoa when it comes back, and I look forward to speaking to you again soon when we're talking about the next great gold Master series from Digital Eclipse. Chris, thank you for your time, Thank you so much for
having me. And with that, we are at the end of episode number one hundred and thirty five of the Chief Stakes End Controllers podcast, as always presented by Fox PHL The Gambler one or two point five FM fourteen eighty AM and iHeartRadio. If you're listening to these words, you've gotten to the end of the episode, and I very much appreciate your time, and I hope you were entertained and informed, and I will be back again next week with
the greatest and latest in video game. So I hope you have a fantastic weekend or if you have a better week right behind it. And like I said, we'll be back again next week with more cheese steaks and control. Baba h