Hi, Brett here. I just wanted to let you know that this is an interview episode, which means we are not policing language as much as we normally would self-police. So I know some folks tend to listen with their little ones in the room on a, you know, some sort of Amazon device or whatever, you might want to give a pass on that for this episode and move on to whatever you're going to listen to next and come back and listen to this one in your ear pods.
Hello and welcome back to Dev Game Club, a weekly podcast in which two veteran game developers look at games from the past. to discuss their relevance and impact today. I'm Brett Duvill, and I'm joined as always by my co-host, a man ready to put four to the floor, double clutch, and drive off into the Texas sunset.
Tim Longo. Yes, I am. You sure are, man. Except when the physics bug happens. Well, sorry, I do. Low blow, low blow. I know, I know. We'll talk about it. We have two guests on to talk about that. Yeah, so I am very happy to introduce two guests today for our podcast, which is a bonus episode follow-on to Interstate 76. So I'm so excited about these. Yes, you can hear them in the background. So first off, I will introduce Sean Vesci. He is a veteran game developer from the early 90s.
Though I've never asked him exactly how it started, so hopefully we can talk about that today. Back at Activision in 94, worked on games like Pitfall, Mayan Adventure, MechWarrior 2, and Interstate 76, which we'll talk about today. But yes, I'm not sure what happened before that. After that, he founded 20 After One and later rebooted the classic company Cinemaware, which is a childhood favorite of mine or teen age favorite of mine. So maybe we talk a little bit about that.
Before moving to Crystal Dynamics as a creative director and later studio head, working on Project Snowblind, the Tomb Raider legend on the world and anniversary, which is where I met him. And later on, he went on to Elin Media as studio director and... creative director on Never Alone, which is a BAFTA award-winning game, working with Indigenous communities to bring their stories to life through games.
Amazing game there. Since then, he then founded Colaby and then Very Very Spaceship, which is currently still going on, specializes in AR gaming and other things, working with companies like Niantic. But then he just doesn't stop. So now he's also... started yet another company focused on gaming insights and playtesting software and experiences for developers to gain insights about their games through their systems called LiveAware.
the company so he just never stops welcome sean to the podcast so great to be here tim and brett Awesome. Now I'm going to go on to Zach, Zach Norman, who I'm meeting for the first time today via this podcast, but heard so much about from Sean over the years. Also going back a long way, as he has done many great things over the years, also seemingly a serial entrepreneur, which you're about to hear about.
flabbergasted to look at your your linkedin zach um he started back in activision in 94 as well it looked like um also on mechwarrior and interstate 76 and then moved to ea or rather jammed at, which I think became EA eventually in the mobile space for many years as a senior VP and co-founder there. But then I think you left the games industry around that point.
Apparently setting the speed record for electric motorcycles. That's right, out of Bonneville. Okay, we'll hear about that in a second. And then founding companies, everything from... phone texting alternatives to XR-based meditation, and currently even lawn solutions for dogs who live in apartments.
Which, as a dog lover, I'm like, what? That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, so who knows what he's up to now. Welcome to the podcast, Zach. Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here and tell the history as I remember it. Of course. As we said in pre-show, neither of us have good memories, so we'll see. It's fine for this game if it's an alternate history, so don't worry about that either. Right, exactly. So one of the, as you guys know, we talked...
We talked pre-show and kind of over email about this. One of the things that. We know the listeners like, and we like as well as just kind of like, because this is, this podcast is about. talking to old school devs about old school classic, you know, retro games and games that influenced the games of today. Everyone kind of likes to know how you got into it. So I'll start with Sean, but Sean, can you give us a little bit about
your journey to Activision, I guess. Oh, man. Yeah. Give us the truncated version if you want, and then you can hand it over to Zach when you're done. sounds good um i was an atari 2600 baby so grew up on uh activation games on the cartridge uh you know david cartwright david um
Oh, Jesus. Stephen Cartwright and David Crane. Crane, yes. Yeah, me too. And seeing those manuals in the back of the... of those games where they would say like i had this much fun making these uh as i hope you do playing and um it was just it was one of those things where like i had from a very early age knew that i wanted to make games for a living so Grew up on a Commodore 64, taught myself programming.
got into school, studied art, and answered an ad in some Usenet for Activision. I was hiring for a production coordinator on a... the pitfall to my adventure and so showed up for an interview with Oil paintings in one hand and a dot matrix printout of code that I had written for a game in the other. Amazing. And then she ran the job, yeah.
interesting uh path in but at the time there were no game designers you know and i having done a lot of coding and a lot of art ended up kind of settling right in as a bridge between those two disciplines and so um yeah It's an incredible, incredible journey. Holy cow. Usenet. Those are the days. I mean, come on. What was that, Brett? I said, look it up, kids. Yeah, right. What is that? I want R64. Tim, what systems did you grow up on? Well, so I was more on the...
The IBM side. So, yeah, but Atari, no, Atari, I've talked about it on the podcast a lot, actually. Pitfall 2. obviously pitfall one but pitfall two specifically being one of my favorite and adventure in two two games that really me over the years so activision for sure that the the 2600 days is like in my blood river raid and river raid yes and you're totally right on the manuals the manuals were like
That was the thing, you know, you poured over those things because they had all the artwork in them and stuff. I don't want to jump ahead too much, but we should talk about the manual on MechWarrior 2 because it was bitching. Do it? Yes. Please bring that back up. Yeah, exactly. Because it hits the genre for both games, right? The manual was important for these kinds of games. So we definitely should come back.
Did you, did you also answer the same Usenet? No, no. In fact, my origin story is a little bit weirder than that. Like his, like Veshi was like, he, he had a vision. Like I remember I was kind of, I was highly respectful of Sean because he was like, I want to be a video game maker. I didn't know that people made video games.
I thought they just showed up on my computer. I mean, literally, like, I was like, I mean, I'd never really thought about it. I mean, I knew, I'm being facetious, but, like, I knew that there were this cadre of people out there who were talented, and I was not one of them. I was basically, my story was I was studying acting. I have a fine arts degree in acting. and my dad is a screenwriter, and I kind of transitioned from acting to screenwriting, and I was writing scripts.
like for hollywood being a hollywood guy and so one of bobby's visions was he was going to take mediagenic and then turn you know take the stock and relaunch activision and he was going to do it in la and he was going to marry you know, the traditional video game, what was then, whatever, the traditional video game business with Hollywood, right? They approached me because I got this call from a friend of mine
who was like, Activision is looking for a writer and I think you'd be good. Now, you know, back up a little bit. I was a gamer, but like I was kind of, I mean, I grew up on the Intellivision and I had, you know, certainly Ataris and I had... I had a pong machine. I mean, I had the... a a a series of you know consoles but i didn't really start to game until i was in college and i got my first pc at essentially right like like 512 ram
And I was playing like Sim City and games like that and really into it. And so I came back to LA and I was writing these screenplays, but I needed a machine to write them on. So I built a machine. I built a computer. like a 386 or something like that at the time. So I was building machines. And so I get this call from a friend of mine. They're like, Activision is looking for Hollywood writers to help them with their projects. Would you like to come in? And I was like, yeah, that sounds cool.
And now I didn't know. Well, OK, so I'm trying to figure out how best to dramatically tell the story. So I get the call. I come in and I met with Alan Gershenfeld and Howard Marks, who are the head of the L.A. studio. And they called me and they said, hey, we like your writing sample that you submitted. Do you have any video game experience? I'm like, no, not really.
And he's like, they're like, is there anything? I'm like, well, I can make a computer. And they're like, okay, that's kind of cool. I can put a computer together. I can slide the video card. And this was kind of rare back then, right? And then they were like, anything else? Anything you can do in a video game? Like anything related to video games? And I'm like, well...
I can make levels with the doom editor. Oh, that was it. I'm like, I'm like, is that relevant? And he's like, they're like, yeah yeah that's relevant and so like they're like show us your levels and like i think i made a football game did you ever see that sean yes i made a football game and it was
The quarterback, basically on the line of scrimmage, there's this line of scrimmage. I use the doom editor. And the quarterback would grab the rocket launcher. And the receiver would grab the infinite armor power up. And the rusher would grab the punch. Remember the mega punch? Yeah. And then I think the other defender also had the mega punch. And the idea was like, if I could shoot the receiver, it was a reception.
Yeah. And he wouldn't die because he had the infinite armor on and then he could run into the, right. That was what they were like. They were like, uh, when can, when can you start? It was pretty funny. Like, And it was funny too, because just to fast forward a little bit into the job, when I met Vesci, I was like, oh my God, this guy's like on top of it. He's like, they were fighting fires and we'll go into the whole history of that game if you're interested.
but I was literally like, Sean, what do you, what do you guys want me to write? And Sean was like, And you figured it out. So then I was like, I started just writing game stuff, you know, like interesting game stuff. And it ended up, you know, much of it ended up going into the game. So, but yeah, that was, that was my origin story. I remember meeting Jack the first time. Oh, please.
so dynamic he was like came in he had a like an amazing knowledge of games he's completely being modest here an amazing knowledge of all pc games he's a huge battle tech fan we were in the middle of the biggest fight fire possible with mech warrior We were a ninja team brought in. FASA was going to pull the license. And we had, I think it was like... six months to show we could get more than two mechs on the screen or something.
And so we got brought in as this like ninja team to try to try to write it. And Zach showed up. And he had at his fingertips complete knowledge of the entire Battletech universe. Oh, that's right. That's right. I actually, I actually forgot a chapter in the interview. That's right. Because again, this is my drug out of the brain here. So Vesci was like, no, no, not Vesci. What's his name? Alan was like, Do you know anything about giant robots?
They were like kind of going to put me on the mech team, but I didn't have any idea what they were doing. Right. He's like, I'm like, they're like, do you know anything about giant robots? And I'm like, well, yeah. And I mean, I know. And they're like, do you know anything about FASA or the, or battle play? Well, I got to the semifinals at RISD on the tabletop game. Oh, no. Oh, no. And they're like, what?
Yeah, you left out a pretty important part there. That's right. I don't tell that story very often, so I don't have it locked and loaded. Yeah, that was one of the parts. Sean's right. I kind of was the perfect hire for that game because I knew the world. Right. Pretty well. I knew how the robots worked and all that stuff. In fact, wait, okay. I don't want to derail the whole conversation and you can cut this out if I'm talking too much, but check this out. So before I got the job,
I went into egghead software where I would. Oh, yes. I remember this. Right. And on the shelf, there was this box and it said MechWarrior 2, the clans on it. This is before I got the job. All right. And so it was, and it was because again, that she was talking, it was like what we, the team had been working on the game and they'd been failing.
They've been failing to deliver. There wasn't a lot of traction. The licensor had cold feet. They were going to draw the license away. And they had a clause where they could shut us down on the option. And so this box had been sitting on the shelf for a while, right, at Egghead, literally like three or four years. Like, I think the joke was that MechWarrior 2 had best of show at E3. No, yeah, was it E3?
Yeah, or CES. CES, right. It wasn't even E3 yet. Best of show at CES like three years in a row, right? Because it was not coming out. So I see the box and it's an empty box up on a shelf at Egghead. And I'm like, I want that game. And the guy was like, well, those guys at Activision are taking their time making that game, but I'll put your name on the list. And then I forgot.
Okay, that I'd done that. I ended up getting hiring and then Sean and I made the game in like six to nine months, whatever it was. We released it and I get a phone call. Hey, your MechWarrior 2 came in. And I'm like, oh shit. I told the guy on the phone, I'm like,
dude, I made that game. He's like, no, no, you didn't make the game. I saw, I remember you coming in. You're one of the nine people on my list that I called. I made that game and I'll come in and I'll prove it and I'll show you in the manual. I sure opened it up in front of him and I showed him my name.
Oh, man. Dude, that was the craziest time because we were locked in. I think the total time we were on that project was 11 months, but we were literally seven days a week. We basically lived out of the office. I don't remember how we would... We would show up early. We would work all the way through.
generally we would we would game till like midnight one o'clock then we'd start we'd start the next shift and just keep it rolling and it was like a full-on firefight to get that thing done it was we loved it We love it. It's so much fun. We have so many. I mean, yeah, if you do get a chance to listen to any interviews, I know you've listened to a couple, but there's so many similar stories to that of that.
You guys must have experienced that LucasArts, yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And it's not as much the firefighting... I mean, definitely the firefighting happened, but just like... Those days, right? The early development days of those times. And, you know, as you were talking about MechWarrior at that time, I do have a memory of that sort of like extended... period because it was a little bit of an infamous game because it was announced when it was.
And, Zach, your point about the strategy that Activision was trying to employ and MechWarrior being one of the ones because it was a licensed game and all this stuff. Of course, I didn't know about the disappointment that FOSA had and all that stuff. So like, yeah, that is a short amount of time to pull a game like that together.
Holy cow. Especially a simulation kind of base game. You know who was instrumental in turning it around was Tim Morton. Oh, what? Of Stormfront. Tim was part of the Tiger team. So it was like Tim, myself. Zach, there was a really small group of people who stuffed us in a corner and they were like, see what you can do. And Tim, at the time, this thing was a completely custom engine.
And it was running in like DOS protected mode or something. Brett would probably be able to give some color on this. But they only had access to like, you know. hundreds of kilobytes of memory and so they could only render two mechs on screen at the same time which was not going to fly and tim was the one who i mean like i remember like For two weeks, he didn't come out. He didn't shower. He completely looked like a homeless guy.
how to get out of the DOS protected mode and he cracked it. And I remember the demo we came in and he had like, it was like, three mechs on it was like three on three and it was a revelation because suddenly you had a real battlefield you know playing out and that was the turning point i remember they literally flew fast in to see that work and that was like okay we'll give you an extension to see if you can get this thing to market So Tim deserves a huge – he was one of the ones who saved it.
Yeah, I know Tim through one of our Twin Suns investors. So I need to now find a reason to get Tim on the podcast. Oh, dude, he'll tell you some stories. Yeah, he's definitely, he's also old school. Yeah, Blizzard. Okay, awesome. Well, thank you both for that. And just as an aside, Zach, I'm also a theater major. I also knew nothing about game development when I got here.
It's kind of a sister business in a way. It is, totally. It's like, you know, they're cousins. Maybe distant sometimes, but not traditional. Yeah. No, I feel like Brett can confirm this, but I feel like a... I have brought it up before in that I was directing and acting. So the directing part, which is a lot of what I do today, you know, it applies much more than I would have thought for sure. Sure.
of course yeah um yeah cool okay so so mech warrior yeah i had forgotten about kind of that and didn't know about the drama there so Should we transition to Interstate 76 then from there? Or how do we close off on the MechWarrior 2 part of it? because we want to get to interstate 76 especially but how did the two bridge
Zach, before we started recording, Zach mentioned that this era was so formative for both of us in such an amazing time. But for me, my fondest memory was... was collaborating with Zach because he, he's such a brilliant creative. And he was such a joy to work with and be around and the energy that he brought on these projects were like, it just fueled, it fueled my fire to, to, to do.
the part that I was there for. But I think Interstate 76 was really born out of that collaboration and that partnership. And so when, you know, when Mechware shipped,
It ended up being a big success and it was a turning point for Activision because I think it legitimized Bobby's vision. Totally. And what was interesting was we kind of... we kind of finished up that project and they were like well what do you want to do and so you know zach and i went away for a little while and we were thinking about different things and i'll let zach introduce kind of how the genesis of interstate 76 but um
I think through the credibility that we had gained from successfully delivering Mac, we were able to kind of ride our own ticket, which was really rare. And it opened up a space for something as unique as I-76. First of all, thank you, Sean, for such kind words. And I will I'm not it's not platitudes to turn around on you and say, you guys, when I walked in.
to Activision. I mean, I think I was wearing a suit the first day. And I met this guy, Sean. I was like, I had never met a technical, like a really technical person. Like I'd never really met somebody who understands technology in a way that I never probably could ever. And so he... And he was the glue that held the whole team together.
Meaning, yeah, there was engineering involved and there were glue, there was individuals who acted as the glue on the other side of the team. Sure, like Tim was like a glue, a member, a nucleus of the engineering group. But Sean was the nucleus of the whole team.
And like if there were tools that needed to be made, he would talk to the designers and we'd make the tools and the things would get done. And again, you got to understand this is before. This is when we wrote our own engines, guys. You got to understand like that's a different era. The era, I mean.
Um, it's like, it's like akin to like, imagine making a movie, but not only do you have to write a script and it has to be good and the story has to be good and the actors need to be good and the casting needs to be good and the scenes, you know, the, the, the lighting needs to be good, but you have to make a camera and the camera has to be good.
You have to make a movie theater and the movie theater has to be good. It's like all that shit, right? We were making everything. So like Sean, you know, I was always amazed. And I think that that's one of the reasons why our partnership was so strong is because. I think we overlapped in some ways, but we also were... And in terms of the way Interstate came about, I think it was actually – we basically, if I remember correctly, we were –
We knew we were smart enough to know that we should stick to vehicle combat. In other words, we had an engine that did a thing, right? And the engine was pushing, you know, relatively individually high poly count things around a terrain map. High poly count being 80 polys. Yeah, yeah. Two polygons, right? I mean, relatively compared to the background, which was like six polygons, right?
Yeah. By the way, actually a couple of years ago, I went back and I played Mechware 2 in emulation and I was sad. I was like, oh God, I remember it being so much better than this compared to modern games. But no, so I think we basically, Sean and I were like, we agreed in that philosophy. Let's think of all the different kinds of... you know, games we could do. And we thought about like Japanese, like, Samurai games and maybe on horseback or something and then
And I wanted to, at one point I was like really into the idea of meshing up like German, like a World War II flight combat sim with like dragons. We're like, what if the Germans... flew like like did the battle of britain on the backs of dragons right like Oh, man. With dragons holding bombs in their claws and dropping them on London. You know what I mean? That kind of shit. Oh, man. Like Americans flying in eagles, giant eagles.
You know, anyway, you know, we were, we were sim hounds though. Like we were all in the, Yeah, we were playing like, you know, Wing Commander and I was, you know, Aces of the Pacific and, you know, all those games. And so we were into that stuff. But I think I think we one of the things that I was super passionate about at the time was cars. I always have been.
And I was like, you know, and I was actually in the market. I was like actually out buying a must cars. I wanted to go buy like a Charger or Challenger or like some kind of Mopar or maybe a Mustang or something. And then I think we all just, Sean and I started talking about like, what if we made a game that was all about muscle cars with guns on it? And Sean was like, I like that idea. And I don't know how it came about, but we're like, but I think we could do a really cool 70s vibe to it.
The thing that I think after MechWarrior, I remember having a conversation with you where It was, you know, one of the things that set Mech apart was it did have a soul, right? It had a vibe and it had a, it was a complete world, you know, with the... with the storytelling and and the and the mission design and we wanted to carry that forward like what to its logical extent could we create a game that was literally um
uh filled with soul and funk music was so um it was so influential for us and that combination was so powerful the muscle cars and i think at the time too we were you know having been kids of the 70s sort of in the nineties sort of reflecting back on a lot of the, uh, blaxploitation films and, and, um, and Starsky and Hutch and all that stuff. And, and so all that kind of.
I will add this. It wasn't cool. Like the seventies was not cool. Like now it's kind of cool. Like it was not like nobody was thinking it would be a good idea to make a game in the seventies. Like a piece in the 70s. That was not a popular idea.
you're ahead that was a ways off you know yeah sure because there there have been you know exploitation films you know throughout the last maybe 10 or 15 years but uh but back in the late 90s that was not yeah that was not a thing too recent probably yeah
yeah the cycle the cycle hadn't happened yet there was something about the you know the hair and whatever and it was just it was in disco i think like there's still a hangover in the culture i mean grunge what was was what was current right so it's like How do you go back to something like the 70s?
It's interesting because we'd been away from it long enough. In other words, we'd been away from it long enough that it wasn't... like trying to still be relevant right yeah right right it was it was a cycle that was ready to start coming back you know i mean and again i think that you even see when you follow up games like i don't mean again what take this for what it's worth, but we saw strains of this kind of design stuff show up in GTA. You know what I mean? And so...
And it was early GTA 1 or 2 or whatever. And so I think – Yeah, we were out there, certainly out on a bleeding edge creatively. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I think that to Brett's point about like when the game came out, So we both, I got into development in 96 and bred, I think, 98, right? Yeah, very beginning in 98. Yeah, very beginning. So, you know, year-ish, year and a half later. And we were at LucasArts at the time. And to your...
Great point, Zach, about those days, which we talk a lot about on the podcast. We were also working in proprietary engines and the struggle of having to do it all kind of stuff, to your point. And I remember when this game came out, because of LucasArts, you know, we have the X-Wing TIE Fighter, the Totally Games, like... Totally Games being the developer, Larry Holland, who we had on as well. Talking about those days, we played TIE Fighter for the podcast many years ago.
And so Sims and then we both of us met working on Star Wars Starfighter, which was a console sort of Sim influenced action game. And so Sims were also in our blood as well coming from because LucasArts like, you know, did a lot of that stuff. But this one stood out so much. And I didn't get to finish it back in the day. I did play it, but I didn't get to finish it.
And ironically, I didn't get to this time either. So we can talk about that later. But on the series that we do multiple episodes on each game, we talked a lot about that. It's, it was such a signature title and, and, you know, and I'm obviously I have you on, so maybe I'm, maybe I'm tooting your horn on this stuff, but like, as far as like being a bold concept that in the time when. You had a lot, you know, we mentioned Doom already. You know, there was a lot of...
There was starting to be a lot of similarly themed games, if you know what I mean, right? Across PCs, especially PC gaming. Driven by id largely, then Epic. And it was hard to stand out. You know, it's even it's harder now, of course, but. This one just like, wow, this is something I would not have expected. And you mentioned earlier, Sean, that you kind of you got to write your own ticket because of your successes there, which was. you know, rare, but also seems like it must have been a key.
Because I just don't see how this game would have come to pass otherwise. But then because of that risk and because you had such a clear vision for it, both of you. I think that's why people still, it does still have a cult following and it's still, people still play it today, in fact, too, you know. So kudos to you on that. And I think that it's great to hear. We did the other thing we talked about, just so you know, too, if you didn't listen to the episodes is.
that being developers at the time too, we knew that constraints were really important. And the fact, like you said, Zach, that it's like, we knew what our engine could do. You know, this is our constraints. This is what, but even within that, you didn't go after another mech game. I would have loved to have ridden a dragon in World War II. just so you know. But you found something even within those constraints that is very memorable.
I think that Activision didn't have the license to do more mech Battletech games. Is that right, Zach? Well, I mean, put it this way. I don't exactly remember... Well, okay. They're smart enough to have made another game if they had the license. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So they, so they, that was, yeah, again, sort of a constraint, right? The necessity of, of going to original IP.
For us, I remember that being very clearly the goal. We wanted to not work on somebody else's IP. We wanted to do something original, and we wanted to do something that would be unique and memorable. Zach, do you recall the story of us when we pitched that to Alan Gershenfeld? I mean, I have vague – tell it. I have vague memories of it. I remember we had this opportunity. They gave us a few weeks.
polished up a pitch and we went and pitched to Alan and um and he kind of looked at us like really like we I remember thinking like he thinks we're totally crazy and he said it's a good idea it's a good idea I want you to go back and I want you to think of nine more ideas and then think of the 10th idea and the 10th idea I want you to come back and pitch to us I don't remember this and we walked out of that room and in the elevator we're like
this out. We were like, fuck that. We're going to make Interstate 76. We're going to do this. And so I think we got out of that with the resolve that we were going to figure out a way to get this done. And part of it was that use of constraints. So we pitched this on the premise that we would be using Mech2's engine.
And that would be a huge time saver. And that was part of what got us over the finish line. The other thing was we ended up... I remember we ended up cobbling together a demo and having a party of which the owner's guide that I posted on LinkedIn this week was part of the handout for that. I remember winning over Scott Lehman and Bobby and those guys, and we kind of – the rest of the system. Wow.
Would you say that you actually did get a big leg up or was there enough different in doing cars over your giant robots that it was a problem?
Oh, it was a complete disaster trying to leverage Mech2Engine because this thing was like, it was literally an engine that had been cobbled together and rewritten and like... uh stitched over over the i think the total production was like four years we were on the last sort of like that last sort of 10 months trying to save the bacon yeah save the bacon and so the engine itself was a complete it was a complete mess and and
I think we spent the first four or five months trying to leverage it. And the super secret, which I think I can finally reveal 30 years later, 30-something years later, is... we ended up like without telling anybody starting from scratch. We started a new, a completely new engine and didn't mention it to anybody.
And we didn't change the timeline. We were like, we can totally do this. We can totally make a new engine and we can totally make a new pipeline and get it all to work. And so I was surprised what I learned. Tim and Brett, that you track down, and Zach will be surprised. These guys track down Julio. You remember Julio Jimenez? Oh, I can do that. Julio was like this rock star engineer from...
Was he Colombian? Hard to say. I can't remember, but from South America. And any idea that we brought to him, we would say like Julio. And Zach would go in and be like, okay, Julio, we're thinking about doing this like dynamic train system where it. It tessellates the polygons in real time so we can get really high definition up front and low polys in the back. And Julio said, what, Zach?
I can do it. Any problem we brought to him, the guy would figure it out. We did a bunch of really innovative stuff with the tech. And you're right. So it's interesting because before you make a car game, it's very naive to think that a robot game and a car game are similar. I mean, they are similar in some levels.
But like Sean and I were wrestling with these things that we'd never thought of. Like, Like if a car is traveling at 100 miles an hour inside the simulation and you're trying to figure out if it's going to collide with another car. And you have to optimize that collision, right? Because I can't do collision detection every frame. This is software, right?
i can't do that every frame on every vehicle every time you have to basically do these wonderful things that sean and his team figured out how to do like to optimize the game so it would actually run right and like And, you know, trying to make these vehicles that move very, very fast and do physics on different kinds of terrain types and all this other stuff, it was pretty magical.
And we were making it up as we went along. Like one of the things that I remember having a conversation with Julio where I was like, Remember how we talked about how we're going to do the roads?
And you were like, Sean was like, well, we'll use tiles and that's the way we would normally do it. And I'm like, yeah, but we can't get that like really, really subtly dynamic flowing and undulating road systems with tiles because it just doesn't, it can't have enough resolution. There's like not enough. memory there's not enough tiles right and like so We figured out, we were like, let's trace a line through the world and then cut the terrain grid into...
you know, tessellated polygons based on that line and then do a, like a smoothing algorithm on it and then do a banking algorithm on it and we'll make all the roads that way. And then Dave White would go in and make a tool that, that like you went into some sort of Photoshop thing. let us lay out the roads with splines and it worked. There was no instruction manual. There was nothing. We were making it up.
wow that was not an easy game simulation as you know tim is like and brett they're like we were we were super we were geeking out every day just in terms of the how deep it went how deep the well went with like collision zones and stats on and weapons ordinance and the fight paths and like it was You can tell from the game too because of the detail there. It's interesting... Yeah, thank you, Sean, for breaking, finally, 30 years later, that news about the engine.
But exclusive here. But because we definitely, as I think you did listen to the episodes, Sean, but we definitely made that assumption. Of course, MechWarrior Engine was the cornerstone for this idea.
forward you know bringing it forward so it was a good plan we were we were able to rapidly prototype and that i think got us the green light on it because we were yeah i mean we couldn't have done it without the we could have done it without the story and we couldn't have done it without the demo yeah So good segue. So for influences, you mentioned some of the film influences, you mentioned the time, you mentioned music.
Like, can you two talk about some of the, I mean, you know, the story and, you know, the characters are very memorable. There's a poetry button. I mean, there's so many great. Like as far as like a vision goes, there's so, it's so cohesive.
And of course, yeah, mech games, like we get it, robots, and like, you know, there's... fossa had its thing going already like you said zach you even competed in in you know in the in the tabletop or what have you so so that was like a known thing but creating a world and and an alt history, et cetera, from scratch must have been super fun. How did you guys go about that? How did we go about that, Sean? I think we basically...
Well, I think what we work. OK, so we work backwards, I think, from the technical requirements and what we just told you, like we we knew what the constraints were because we said, well, we want to do muscle cars with guns. And then I think at some point I said, Let's make it a TV show. Let's make it as if the game was a movie. That's why it's called Interstate 76 because that's like Airport 77.
right you remember those movies like those movies and it was like they had this thing during the 70s where they put the year that it was made in the title yeah yeah that's what it came from like interstate 76 was like the year it took place right right right and and so everything everything creatively just worked back from that thing like what would this be if it was a TV show You know, that that that theme that we made was like, you know, like that whole funky beginning was all.
like a like the intro to a tv show and if you watch the game the way that the game begins with that um soundtrack it's it's it's literally made with credits it's a credit sequence from a tv show that's fictitious you know and so we basically just made characters that you would find in kind of a maybe a little bit more crass and kind of dark, almost a feature film combination of a feature film and a, and you know, a blaxploitation film and like, uh,
And like an action TV show like A-Team or, you know, one of those. And it all kind of came together that way. Awesome. Yeah, it's, it's, oh, go ahead, Sean. I was going to say in that. in that production in particular music was a driving force as well so we were you know we they had put us in the corner kind of office area like segmented away from everybody else within Activision and we would
1970s punk and we would play that and that music was a real inspiration, that genre was a real inspiration. It was sort of the heartbeat for a lot of things we would come in and play that. A lot of things just sort of naturally came out of that. Kelly Rogers.
producer at the time came down and he was like i want to figure i want to produce this soundtrack this original soundtrack he was really one of the ones who was an advocate for that and he he was the one kelly got the band together which was like It was our own Salazar. third eye blind and he pulled together this ensemble group and
I remember the first cuts that they produced, and they were showing us out of the demo reels, and Zach and I were just like, oh, this couldn't be more perfect. So good. It's just amazing. We knew we had something special when we heard the music. We were like, okay, this is going to be really, really, really, really good.
Yeah. Yeah, I was hoping the music would come up because in the Discord community, Brett, I'm going to forget who brought it up, but... it had come up people knew about the third eye blind bassist i'm forgetting his name but um and and the sort of focus on i mean did the soundtrack i think came out as well like it was it was definitely a a real corner, like a pillar of, yeah, a pillar.
I remember even in that first demo that we built, even from that point, we had selected background music, which just set the tone. And it really just helped to make the whole thing cohesive. But yeah, Kelly did a phenomenal job on that. So the TV show reference is a good one, too, in that now I'm thinking about sort of the...
The mission interstitials and things like that, it felt like the missions almost were sort of like episodes of the show, thinking back about it. I don't know why that didn't dawn on me before, but that really does ring true now. On the mission design stuff, like... If you remember, and of course, you probably had separate mission designers, so you may not remember because you weren't doing it yourself.
Okay, there's some laughter. We did them. We did them. Okay, cool, cool. The team was like 12 or 13 people total at his peak, dude. So this is like, yeah. Awesome. Okay, good. Well then, I mean, I wanted to ask about that because one of the sort of, we've talked about it with every sim oriented game we've played. And because we're the kind of podcast that goes deeper into this stuff than most podcasts, because we're all developers.
and I myself being a level and mission designer from the past like have a specific interest in this but One of the kind of notoriously difficult things, in my opinion, about simulation, mission-based simulation games, the mission design side of it is... you know the sort of like limit I guess I'll say limited tools you have to make missions kind of constantly surprising the player right because
Because it's usually some sort of vehicular thing that you're having to kind of like... Things are arriving. Things are leaving. Things are trying to destroy other things. Things are trying to escort other things. You know, I could probably reel off like the sort of basic bits that you have to work with, you know, and then, yeah, I mean, that's normally the missions in terms of like.
events you can fire into the sim it's like some new guys arrive you know or whatever well you know i'll one thing i'll i'll point out um But I do want to circle back a little bit to influences because let me just say this really quickly. I want you guys to understand, dude, TIE Fighter and X-Wing were extremely influential for me at that time. I was a major, major fan.
We called them cut scenes because you guys called them cut scenes. Yeah, LucasArts. It wasn't us, but LucasArts coined that. Right, meaning when we would do a cut scene and make one of those scenes in there, Yep. It was coming from my experience with X-Wing, quite frankly, like, right. And I'm going to tell us, I'm going to, I'm going to talk about missions in a second, but just let me digress for a second. No, no, please do. Please do. This is kind of an interesting thing.
so i was really bummed because when we were making mech it was called mech order to the clans and there were six clans okay and we ended up cutting all but two of them from the game And I was really bummed out, but I talked with, I forget who it won. It might have been Tim Schafer.
or somebody else who was, I know Tim was on, not necessarily on the TIE fighter stuff, but he was up there and he knew stuff or some of the other guys who were working on the, I was up at C at the CGDC when it had a C in front of it. because it was a computer game developers conference. Which, by the way, we have to circle back to that because there's some great stories. But the point of it is that...
One of the guys from X-Wing told me, yeah, we were a little bit bummed because we had to cut TIE Fighter from X-Wing when we released X-Wing. In other words, the first skew was supposed to be both sides. Yeah. And then I learned this valuable lesson when we were confronted with that same thing at Activision. I had no idea as a player that it used to have other functionality that was cut.
Right. And so that would become a valuable lesson anyway. So like those of you who are aspiring and making games out there, don't be afraid to cut stuff to focus on the good stuff because your players don't know what you cut. Exactly. Yes. But going on to the level design thing. So one thing about interstate that you got to keep in mind is it's not a level. It's not a arena based car combat game. All right. And that helped us with the level design because our competition was like Carmageddon or
Or, you know. Yeah, that's a great point. We talked about those, but that's a great point is fundamentally different. Totally different. Because we have the ability to say, okay, these guys are hiding behind this butte. Or you got to fill up at the gas station. Remember the gas parade, Sean? Mm-hmm. Right? So what we would do is we would make like a mission around like, okay, we're getting gas.
Right. And like, you got to get gas and the car's going to sit there for a while and you got to, you know, and then you got to like defend like Taurus while he fills up or whatever. I don't even remember what the mission was, but there was, and it was funny because. you know we would make special music for that level and then we'd make a special piece of geometry literally it was a gas station it was a circus themed gas station called gas parade
Right. That was the other thing. We were sending up everything. Like everything was like a little bit of a sarcastic joke. You asked before, I don't want to, I sound, I'm like totally dominating this conversation, but. Just really quickly, I'll let you know, like you said, what are your influences? I know this is going to sound completely crazy, but one of my major influences in terms of creative work on this game was the Watchmen.
Oh, interesting. Okay, yeah, the satirical, the satire of it. Totally. It's a twisted universe that's a little bit different than ours. Well, I'm with you. I'm a comic reader, so I'm with you. Right. I have first printing sitting in my, like, on back. Me too. I do too. That's rad.
So yeah, so yeah, first printing's Dark Knight, first printing's Ronin, all that stuff. So that was my era, that Baxter paper, like bitchin', like, you know, era of collecting comics. So Watchmen was so influential, and it was like, and Sean and I were both into it, and it was like... So creatively, we would twist history slightly to make it funny, right? And interesting. But if you look at the dialogue...
He talks about the characters. They're vigilantes. They're auto vigilantes. Right. Got it. They were the car driving equivalent of the Watchmen. Yeah, yeah, makes sense. And so Torque Daisy, Firefly, Spitfire, they're all dead, Groove. Like when he says that at the beginning, like he's talking about... You remember how the comedian gets killed? And that's how the beginning of it starts is that there's someone killing the watchman.
Yeah, of course. Somebody was killing the auto vigilante. I would never have pulled that influence. It all makes sense. We didn't hit that on the nose. Right. And again, it was just we were ripping it off because it was cool.
but that's the perfect kind of influence right you don't you don't want to wear it on your sleeve but right but then so so so sean and i well sean i remember we were like i'm like sean we need like terrain the different kinds of terrain and sean and the team went out and we're like okay like
different types of terrain that's slippery like the side of the road is different from the blacktop and then and then off into the desert is different from that so that we could the team could go and use tools and he made these amazing tools So we could lay it out. So your question was like, originally, how did we make it? I mean, Sean, talk about the tools. Do you guys made the most amazing tools for the design team? Like amazing.
do that, like lay the guys out. So these guys will start over here and they'll come over the rise and then they'll have speed and then there'll be this turning, you know, anyway, Sean, you tell us about it. There was a tool that we developed, I remember. Zach was like, I need control. We need to be able to... iterate on these maps. It was a terrain map. And we had heard about a technology where you could paint a bitmap and use the RGB values of particular pixels to represent the height.
And so we developed a prototype, I remember, where we were able to craft this in a way that we could literally paint a top-down view of the terrain. with a grayscale that was a highest point to lowest point, feed it to the system, and then Julio's terrain would literally render this. And then on top of it, we can lay splines for the roads.
And then we could put markers on the terrain in order to represent the different, like the gas station or these different physical and highly destructible structures and things like that. We could do placement of... uh the cars and and then do all of the mission design was done through an objective system that was all script based so we could we could we had total control over primary secondary tertiary objectives um the actions the the we had a
an AI system, a state-based machine for each individual car that could be configured. And so with Dave White and myself and a couple of the guys had put early versions, we just kept refining over time. It actually enabled us to create a multiplayer version of Interstate 76 where you could go in and we were able to... kind of make these tools available for end users so that they could craft their own and that was one of the most exciting kind of
dimensions of the product I don't know you guys were having trouble getting the single player version but the multiplayer version which still runs today apparently there's a there's a fan group that's got a server up and you can go in and play but allows for complete customizability of the terrain and placement of the enemies and scripting of specific events and stuff.
um as zach said i mean that was sort of the heyday back then because there wasn't you couldn't go to an asset store and pull shit down you had to you had to build all this stuff from scratch and so um it was just amazing That is amazing. I love that the tools came up organically and that Zach was bringing up how amazing they were. And that we also have the person on who can talk about the specifics of it too.
before Sean, the multiplayer too, which we didn't get to play, but also was, I think, a surprising element. And like you said, I mean, as we were playing, of course, because this isn't it's on God, but but it's not super readily available beyond that.
supported by it's hard to get it to run yeah unfortunately but in that search there's forums still out there that are active there's people still talking about the game all these many years later I would say every six months some fan contacts me yes that's amazing see that is that is why we're playing this for the podcast um and and on the discord too when we brought up we were playing it you know people people there in the community in our community knew about it too right
And we get email. We got at least one email where the person's like, thank goodness you're playing this. This game was influential for me. Um, yeah, but the tools like that, again, as a level designer, the tools and, and ironically I have on this podcast, one of my biggest, um, uh, partners in, in crime and that because Brett would be the one. to build those tools for us. And that's why we're doing this podcast together.
We've done so much together. But all the things that you were just saying, Sean, are things that Brett would have to worry about and figure out how to do for us. So it's like a weird circular thing happening here. But I'm sure Brett was having flashbacks on some of that. Because, you know, Starfighter was a lot of that. State machine based AI. Yeah, definitely. Finite state machine. Yeah, yeah.
That completely blew my mind when we were trying to figure out how we could, I mean, we had a very basic version of that in Mech 2, but it certainly, we knew that for 76 we were going to need to do something that was far more advanced because these guys had to react. They had their overall objectives that they were trying to accomplish. There was the overall state of the mission that they had to pay attention to. And you had the player who could completely mess things up in terms of...
how they would position themselves or what they would do. And so... It was mind-blowing when we first got the early version up. And then I remember that served as a really important springboard, actually. After I left Activision, I got recruited by Jordan.
Weissman who ran FASA. FASA got bought by Microsoft and those guys all ended up in Redmond. And then fast forward a couple of years, we were on MechWarrior 4 and he was like, I need you to come up here and help us with a finite state machine system. we went up and we i remember literally like bringing all the knowledge we had and the advancements we had made down 76 and that was that was the basis for the mech4's uh finite state machine
Wow. Yeah, it's also, and I know we're probably going to wind down here, right, Brett? Yeah, we're almost at an hour. Yeah, we have a few minutes. But the interesting thing about, so obviously we... I super appreciate you both coming on and having the partnership here, which I can just hear through the microphone, which is so amazing, especially after all these years. But it's interesting to hear the MechWarrior 2 history portion kind of paired with the Interstate 76 because we kind of knew...
We could feel, and I've always felt like that Interstate 76 was trailblazing in some interesting ways, and you're enumerating them here. But the fact that it was coming off of something that was kind of was in trouble and needed to ship and did ship and was well received and again, kind of put that era of Activision on the map.
But then you were able to kind of continue trailblazing in I-76 separately and do these sort of things on your own terms, I guess, if you will. Obviously, it sounds like it was challenging as well. There's a lot of things to learn. But Zach, your point about the mission structure versus some of the competitors out there. And you brought up, obviously, X-Wing TIE Fighter sort of notoriously... well-known. Neither of us worked on those games, but we had, again, totally games.
Larry Holland on to talk about them. Notoriously sim games with a good story to be reductive, right? Right. And that was also rare, right? Wing Commander started doing more of it later, but... But I do think X-Wing and TIE Fighter kind of started that like, oh, you know, because otherwise it was like Falcon and like these very hardcore sims. Yeah. But Interstate 76 had an identity. It had a character. Even beyond Star Wars, you know, that was very special.
Yeah, thank you to both of you and the team. 12 people or 13 people was a good tidbit too. Holy cow. And they had to rewrite the engine. And they had to, yeah. Let's hit that home a couple times. Oh my gosh, yeah. So it's funny that you say that that was a secret and that you didn't reveal that. We've had, because we've... We've played Fallout 1 on the podcast, and we had Tim Kaine and, oh my gosh. Leonard Boyarski. Leonard Boyarski. And then we played XCOM and had Julian Gallup on.
And both of those projects were similar in that they were kind of like Not that you guys were flying under the radar, but they were kind of in their own little track and making decisions that they kind of weren't really sharing all the time about what they were doing. But through the miracles of game development, it became classics.
Anyway, it's just a common, I think it's a common theme we've heard from time to time because you got to, I love the pitch story too, where you're like, you came out of there saying, you know. We're just going to do this game. He says do nine more pitches. We're saying no way. No way. We're stopping here. We got the one. Pump the brakes. You know it. You know it sometimes, right?
Yeah, I mean, when there's the passion behind the idea, you know, and you had your influences that you were coming in and the music, you know, was telling you a lot, too. You got to go with that. I mean, we also heard from that about, you know, with Alex Garden is that one of the biggest regrets. And learnings of his life is when he didn't stick with his gut on the sequel to Whole World.
And they didn't get to make what they knew was the right thing to make. And because, you know, he was, I mean, he was new to it and he was like, you know, well. They're telling me we had this big success. We've got to double down and do more of that. And they had a much grander vision that would have been another five years ahead of everybody else had they pulled it off.
Definitely a sort of a moment of regret. So I'm glad you stuck to your guns as it were. There is one little announcement I would like to make just at the end as we wrap this up. Oh, no. Are you ready? I'm ready. Sean knows what I'm about to say, I think, right? I'm making a car game. wait for real yeah Oh, yes. Another world exclusive. Two in one podcast. It is not a sequel to the game we've been talking about. I don't have those rights.
But it is a car game and I'll let you guys know more as it starts to shape up. Please do. Please do. Yes. Yeah. Plug. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely want people to plug stuff at the end for sure because we do have listeners.
Like I said, you guys hit on this before. I've been away. I've been kind of doing e-commerce stuff, and I've been doing VR stuff and mindfulness stuff and other things. But a couple of my long-term colleagues said, Zach, it's time. You've got to get back into this business and do a AAA thing.
And so I've pitched to Sean, so he knows a little bit about what I'm doing. But yeah, it's a secret right now, but it will be not so secret soon. We will be big fans and supporters. So that's great to hear, Zach. It's hard to get out, huh? I tried to, and then they brought me back. In fact, it was Sean's fault. It was Sean's fault to some degree.
Yeah, so I hear you. Well, yeah, we're happy you're coming back then. I mean, you know, be careful what you wish for, but you know what you're getting into. I've been making dog products and we just make them and they sell. Right, so like it's not hard. Exactly. There's always dogs. They always need, they have needs. Why do I have to keep banging my head against that wall?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the creative side, and you clearly are a very creative individual, as Sean has said, and you've proven here. So, you know, I think the world will want more, you know. So thanks. Yeah. Thanks to you both for being on. I want to be respectful of your time. Is there any final moments? Or also tell us a little bit about what you're up to as well, Sean, so that folks know what you're doing. We developed a platform called LiveAware, which is a...
It's a tool for game developers to allow them to effortlessly capture play experiences and player commentary and then the system automatically analyzes and presents back. that feedback so that dev teams can make better games and they can do it faster and more. including their audience in the whole process. And so it was really born out of a lot of these hard lessons through the years of working in a silo and not getting enough.
feedback and not getting enough time with real players as we built. And my business partner, David Berger, who Tim worked with at 343 for years. We kind of looked out in the industry to find tools that would help. And a lot of them were geared toward UX researchers.
community managers, something like that. And so we wanted to build a tool that was for dev teams they could use kind of from the earliest stages all the way through. So LiveAware is out. And if any of your listeners are interested, go to liveaware.io and sign up for a free trial. Go to doggylawn.com so you're docking shit on a piece of grass. Exactly. Exactly. Man, what a journey you've been on, Zach. Yeah.
Amazing. Yeah. That's a lot of fun. Yeah. Thank you so much for being on. Thank you both so much. I really appreciate it. Super fun. Super fun reminiscing. Always great to hear from Sean and. We always pick up our conversation like there's never been any time back. Yeah, if there's one thing that we're happy about, we got you two connected again on air so everyone can listen to the reunion. By the way, how do we get in contact with Julio?
How do we get to Julio Jimenez? I know. And we got to get Dan Stanfill in here. We'll do a follow-up. And Tim, I didn't know about Tim Morton, so I'll Slack him and say, hey, guess what? He's probably got some great stories on there. to share such a cool person as well yeah yeah so yeah and and we can these interviews are always like we could keep going because I know you you both have more stories clearly so
But, yeah, we'll be respectful of your time. And, yeah, thanks for coming on for this awesome game. Thank you guys very much. Welcome back from the break. I'm really glad you were able to connect with Sean. You mentioned that over the course of us playing it. Like, oh yeah, I know somebody. We should get him on. And then you had all the trouble playing the game. So I was like, well, maybe we're not going to do that. But we ended up making it work. Yeah.
John did listen to the episode, so he heard about all that stuff, and he obviously was bummed. But it was too good not to get him on, so I thought we still had to do it. uh and yeah i didn't even want to bring up the bug to these two anyway it would seem like wasted minutes but Full disclosure, to be honest, one of the reasons I wanted to play Interstate 76 from the beginning was because I knew I could get Sean on.
To speak, not only because it's a great game and I know it had such a big influence on things, but also because... And again, I didn't want to say this while he was here, but... He is more of a, I don't know if you can tell from the interview and kind of how he was carrying himself, but he's a pretty humble person. And he is much more of a force in the industry than I think really came off. And I just felt like he was somebody who needed to be on because he has really been.
He's, not to be too cheesy, but he's touched a lot of people's lives, I think, over the years. I learned a lot from him at Crystal. He's a great leader. Of course, I don't know Zach until this one, so I can't speak to Zach. Sean's always spoken really highly of them and I know they were good partners. So yeah, it was just great to have them on. And I know that Sean has always been really, really. which he should be. Yeah, he should be. I really enjoyed the game. Yeah, yeah.
Well, and it stands out as we talked about it. It stands out in this genre. I don't even know if people would even call it a sim on the surface. Right, yeah. I wouldn't have known back then it was a sim game. Because I was really taken in by the... just just to being different and you know we didn't talk about it but one of the things i thought about is like they had gone from this one ttrpg kind of base product and at that time you know because this was right when i was um
I'd been in grad school, but the internet had just become a thing. Wow, you're old. Yeah, well, for me anyway, I had my cradle computer. The thing that was exploding at the time was inventive tabletop RPGs. It was like the first wave of stuff that wasn't... First wave that I remember because I had access to like the internet so I could actually go find this stuff.
but all kinds of just weirder stuff. And alternate history was a big part of it. There was, I can remember something called Castle Falkenstein, which I think was an alternate history thing. There were a bunch of these kind of alternate history stuff. So it was actually, for people who knew role-playing games at the time, it probably doesn't seem that strange to think, well, we'll do an alternate.
history game, you know, video game. But those weren't common at the time either, you know, so it was just, I mean... I guess you could argue like secret weapons, a lift laughter or something or sort of, Oh yeah, that's a good point. They're more kind of fantasy, right? Um, Whereas this is literally, you know, just totally different. Like there, that's kind of like German air. What if the German air, you know, air power was like just really superior. It was kind of the.
It's kind of a fantasy thing, isn't it? Not a hugely alternate. There's a whole story to it, right? Although I guess the manual has a lot. Anyway, it did strike me while we were talking. I didn't want to waste minutes on it, but it kind of makes it up. Yeah, it fit into the era. But I mean, that's part of the thing we try to do is put things in context for their time. Because, you know, there's definitely plenty of listeners didn't play nor will they play or didn't, you know, at the time. Right.
Jeez. Wow. Okay. Just go ahead. Here, I'll take this knife out. Yeah, so a great conversation as always. I was really happy to. uh to get a chance to hear them talk and yeah like you said they clearly had a lot of rapport it was you know they were picking right up where they left off it it felt like You know, and that's a great thing to see. And there are lots of relationships that are forged by that kind of fire and respect, you know, and maybe someday we'll have some.
Wow. That's almost, you've been workshopping that or something? Well, I'm over here bleeding from that, you know, half our audience wasn't even born comment. I had to come back. All right. Well, let's move on to the outro. We don't normally read email here on our interview episodes. We do have a fun one.
about your misapprehension of how certain achievements work, but we'll get to that next week. You can send those to devgameclub at gmail.com. And we love, of course, to have your reviews on whatever platform you use. We like to read them on the air. Go ahead and let us know if you don't put it into iTunes. Those ones I do actually find. We're on the web at devgameclub.com and you can find my co-host twitching at twitch.tv slash. Tim Longo Jr. with a JR at the end.
Are we going to be going back to the Minecraft realm now that you once again have access? Is that the plan? That's a good question. I haven't talked to the folks about it, but we did have, for those who didn't see it or don't know, but we had a great group.
outing i guess i'll call it that's a good way to describe it i've watched i watched some of it yeah yeah so um so moors and and lost lake and i um I went in, you know, I'm back on the realm and, you know, Lost Lake has some things that he's trying to find in the nether and I haven't been in the nether for... probably a decade um and to his urging you know we went in with no gear and we just explored and it was terrifying and there's some other terrifying things they showed
the warden and stuff so um that game still amazes me i still think it's one of the most you know movie notwithstanding that's it's very the buzz is happening currently but separate from that nonsense um i just still think that game is just a revelation and those two specifically more is lost late are continuing their farming adventures. Yeah, they are quite creative. They hook up some pretty big machinery.
to generate all sorts of things. Yeah, it's so cool. And they give tours every time we play. The other anecdote I'll share is while we were streaming that night, K-On and Baron both downloaded, bought and downloaded Minecraft for the first time and apparently are going to start playing it for the first time. Well, Kaon's in the realm.
yeah exactly so i you know i hope they don't just go to lost lakeville and morrisville and just have unlimited resources well trash it but also like you know i as i've said many times for me one of the cool things about the game the survival part. So I don't want them to skip that. But, you know, hopefully they see the magic that I see. Yeah. Well, you can learn more about that both at twitch.tv slash Tim Long and Junior with JR at the end and on the Discord where there is a separate chat.
dedicated to Minecraft Realm Life, so you can find that there. or, you know, lots of other interesting discussions. Our intro and outro music was written and performed by Kirk Hamilton, commissioned by a friend of the cast, Aaron Evers, and our logo, that Discord, our merch store, lots of stuff, plenty of gifts by... mark garcia have fun polishing your paint jobs this week and good night good night