The following program is produced by the tech Talk Radio Network. Everybody, I'm John Saint John, the voice of Duke Kukam and Big the Cat and a whole bunch of other crazy characters from video games.
And you're listening to tech Talk Radio.
I know I do.
Welcome to another episode of tech Talk Radio. I'm Ady Taylor, I'm.
Seanda Weird, I'm Matt Jones.
And I'm Justin Lemey. Welcome once again.
Man, I have been looking so forward to this show because I'm a big I like documentaries, and I have been waiting for two documentaries, one of them Getting Lost, the story about the making of Lost, which I know Matt you got into earlier this year. We talked about that on last week's show. And then the other one, of course, is Going Postal, The Legacy four told. It's the story of the controversy video game Postal and the
legacy left behind. And it's so cool because it is now available on Amazon rental or you can own it. It's available on Blu Ray. And we have the two filmmakers that put this all together, Ted Salise and Jason Sikorski. Guys, thanks for coming on the show.
Thank you for having us. It's awesome to be here.
Yeah, thank you guys. It's a pleasure. A big fan of the show. It's cool come in full circle here. We had heard about you guys talking about the documentary a couple of months back. Yep, we were We had both internally sent it to each other and we were like, oh my gosh, this is exciting. People are excited about the film. So really cool that we can bring a full circle here.
You guys, well, it's it's really kind of neat because the game and this this documentary now it's such a Tucson kind of bred thing. You guys both went to the University of Arizona. The roots of the company Running with Scissors were into some What made you guys decide or get involved in this documentary.
Jason, I let you take that one.
Yeah, yeah, I mean me and Tad had met on the campus at U of A doing some kind of random type of event giving away clinique bottles to sorority girls. Had nothing to do with film school or anything that you know, we were seeking to do in our in our young career.
I know what to do.
Yeah, yeah, it gave us an inn. It was a nice it didn't work out.
It didn't work out.
But the icebreaker though, was to Tad I guess because we became best.
Friends after that.
We were burning in the hot sun giving out clinic bottles, ended up just hitting it off. We both went to film school around the same time and never met each other. Fast forward a couple of years, we ended up living together. We're talking about putting together a YouTube series and I had, you know, sidebarred with a friend of mine. This someone I was seeing at the time, and she had mentioned that she knew someone that developed video games.
And I was saying, oh, yeah, we want to make this.
YouTube series or some sort of mini documentary about video game development.
And she's like, oh, yeah, I know this guy named Mike Jay with Running with Scissors. I was like, Oh, that's cool. Look what games did they do. It's like, oh, Postal Postal. I saw that movie as a kid. I remember that movie and I remember that game. And I was like, there's no way these guys live in Tucson.
And she's like no, I'm like really good friends with him and you should meet him. And sure enough, we're sitting in front of Mike Jay with a bull of Ramen and talking about the history of postal and about an hour in we're just like, man, you know, I remember thinking to myself, this needs to be a feature documentary, and you know, I know, tad after we had met with Mike Ja, we kind of just decided to pick up cameras and just basically follow them for the next five years.
Well, doing a documentary that's got to be a lot of fun, but it's got to be a lot of work, because in your head, are you editing it while you're shooting this stuff, going okay, this will be here, this will be there. I mean, how do you put this all together? Do you edit at the end of the day? When do you do this?
Yeah, that's a great question. No, we didn't edit in our head. We were thinking, hey, let's gather as much content as we can over the course of five years, and then about three years in we're like, okay, we should probably start the process. And that's when we realized, okay, we didn't do enough pre production here to really plan out how we're going to edit this, and that in turn had us really kind of of reconcile with like, Okay, we need to go back, we need to do more interviews.
We need to do some additional parts of the film. This is missing. So it was really a growing process over the course of five years, but it was a lot of fun. I mean, we made best friends with Mike and Vince, who are the craziest game developers you'll ever meet. That makes a really great documentary just because there are these two underdogs in the industry that have had a lot of trials and tribulations over the course
of twenty five years. And we had just started when Postal four was really being developed, So we were kind of planning like, oh, Postal four is going to come out, it's going to be this grand success, and we're going to have like a full circle moment where Postal four is finally like their triumph, right, And then twenty twenty two comes out and it's the worst game of twenty twenty two by Metacritic. But it actually ended up working out because it's really this two story of these two
underdogs that really tell the tale. It's not just a story of Postal but a story of these two guys who overcome a lot of odds, which they probably shouldn't.
I just appreciate that you're touching on that point right there, because I mean, there are a lot of documentaries about video games and and what makes Postal and Running with Scissors special is all of the controversy that they went through. We're not talking about just local or even semi regional.
They went all the way to the US Congress. I mean, this was a game that was looked at by senators and House of Representatives and even the President of the United States saying this should not be allowed, and you know, going back on the freedom of speech, you know, into that aspect of this. So there are a lot of people out there that say they look at this game and say, why would you ever want to play this? Or why would you ever want to even be a
part of this? And it's not necessarily about the content of the game, But like you said, it's about these two guys who just wanted to do something different. And that's what I appreciate about them and I appreciate about you guys.
Yeah, most certainly.
And that was half the fun creating this documentary, was just kind of uncovering all these details and putting it together in a narrative. We were just mind blown from everything that Vince and Mike j told it felt like
a fairy tale. And then we get the archival footage and you know, the old magazines and the old photos, and it starts coming to life right before you as you're editing, and you're like, wow, this is this is real, and we want to tell this story to people and hopefully they get the reaction that we did when Mike j first told us the story and saying, wow, this is crazy.
When you talk about the story, because I remember when I was younger and this was going through and it was you know, national news, but you only got the story through the headlines or the clips from the c SPAN recordings. You only got like these little bits and pieces of.
What's going on.
So to get an actual, like full accounting of everything that went on, all the background information, all the trials, tribulations, the hills they had to climb with that that's really something special because this was this was a part of
the pop culture like phenomenon of video games. It is if you watch documentaries, not specifically about Postal, but like about the evolution of video games, almost inevitably Postal is going to have its own little part and get mentioned where they're like and then there was a little game called postal and then it'll cut to something like a congressional hearing. But giving it its own time is like that, that honestly is something really special.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah.
And we really wanted to give Mike Convince you know, their voice in the film too, because so much of what they said in the news back then in the nineties and the late nineties and the early two thousands was they owned that controversy, and they owned it because it helped them to get more popular. But it also kind of backfired because, you know, Grand the Thatto came out at the same time, and they really didn't publicly start talking about all that controversy. They didn't really approve
of it. You know, Vince is saying, if you don't like my game, don't play it. Grand the Thatto really not doing that. So Grand the thoughto went up to become the trajectory where it is today. Postals still around, but it's it's nowhere, you're near that. So we felt like it was important for them to have a voice and to have people make their own opinions when they when they see the film and hear from them.
You put this together, I have to ask the technical side and I know Sean has been chopping into the bit of this one too, like, what did you guys shoot it on? I mean, we we like that kind of stuff too, steal my questions, Andy, I knew.
It, Jason, is it okay? If I if I take that one?
Oh yeah, go for it.
Early on, we started shooting this on smaller cinema cameras, like the Canon C one hundred, and we were using for like b camera step like early mirrorless cameras, Sony A seven three, the Canon five D Mark three, Canon five D Mark four. So that's where we originally started. And you'll notice as you progress throughout the film that the quality starts to kind of get better and better because we were really learning and we were getting more investments into the film as we went along, and we
ended up shooting on red. We ended up shooting on better cinema cameras, the C two hundred, C three hundred mark two. But in twenty twenty, COVID happened and we were like, we can't travel to the rest of the world to do all these interviews. You know, we interview Uber Bowl, we interview Fredrick, We interviewed a ton of people throughout the world in the industry. That really deterred us from traveling, and so we had to figure out how to hire out all these camera operators throughout the world.
Kind of opened my eyes to a new way of filmmaking that you don't have to be on site as long as you have reliable people that are working with you.
So coming up with, you know, the logistics of you know, different frame rates in different countries, how do we coordinate that based on time zone, It was a challenge, but making sure everything was at least cohesive enough we were really still trying to figure out as we went along too, So big props to our colorist Nick Nasseif, who really helped us to make everything look like it was cohesive throughout the film because we did shoot on a bunch
of different cameras, Black Magics, Aris, Canon Cinema line, so kind of the full gamut. And that's one thing that I think the next project we're going to go into is we really want to start to just really have a solid idea at least camera wise. But really we were trying to adhere to the challenges of COVID and trying to do our best as filmmakers because we had donors that donated to the film, and we originally wanted to hit a twenty twenty two release. That got delayed
quite a few times. But here we are today and thankfully we've had great, great response from the audiences who've seen the film that they really enjoy it.
The end of the credits, at the end, there is a large thank you screen. Was it crowdfunded as well?
Yeah?
Yeah, early on we had crowdfunded through Indiegogo, so it was a successful campaign. A lot of Postal fans jumped on it. Thank you to all the Postal fans. Are so patient obviously starting out and when did we put up the campaign twenty twenty.
Twenty one for a twenty twenty two release.
There we go, and you know, fast forward four years later, here we are. But yeah, we're trying to release it like right around the corner from when we raise those funds.
So ambitious.
Has Vince been i mean, he's featured in it. You definitely talked to him. Has he been promoting it as well?
Yeah, I mean he's he's been.
Uh, he's been great, just getting the word out, asking people to buy it, rent it, helping on the back ends. He helped with a lot of conversations and introducing us to the right people that can help us get you know, get the word out I mean, Running with Scissors as a whole have been very supportive of the film. They've been very very supportive, uh in just seeing the you know, this movie getting out to the fans as much as possible and trying to see to the success of it.
So that's that's been nice. I mean, vin Vincent, Mike, Jay, We we you know, a lot to them.
During during the time that you were guys were filming all of this, and what was the funniest thing that you that you came across, that you learned during this and what was the one thing that you were just like, wow, I had I had no idea like that that this occurred or that this could happen.
Vince has some crazy stories throughout the years that we had to we had to cut out throughout the filming. One thing that Mike, Mike and Vince said was just don't edit what we say. So we just had to cut it out because like a lot of it is very raunchy, very r rated, and a lot of it we just couldn't figure out how to make it into the film. You know, when you're left with twenty five years of history and you try to condense it to twenty two hours, there's a lot that we had to cut.
The rough cut was actually three hours long when we did the rough cut screening, and we just walked away from that being like, oh my gosh, we have to cut a ton of stuff. So in those moments, there's a lot of really crude, really outlandish things that we just couldn't include into the film. But it's not because they're trying to be crude. That's just how these guys are naturally. I mean, they're very honest and outspoken, and
that's what makes them stand out in the industry. Specific stories, you know, I'll have to come back, but you know, I know Gary Coleman specifically, you know when they picked him up. They've had some They had some crazy, wild stories with Gary Coleman, like partying when we traveled the Packs East with Mike Convince. We had a great time, you know, off camera, we partied hard with them. And Brock Wilber, who's in the film, who's kind of one
of the journalists. He's had some crazy stories about Mike Convinced too. Just you know the party side of them, and it's all good. You know, they like to have fun because they work hard.
I mean, if it wasn't for those guys, we would never have this game.
So let me ask you guys this, if you got to pick the next game or series for your next documentary, just absolutely green lit, didn't have to fight anyone for it.
What would it be? Oh good question.
Our goal, our idea dream here is Duke nukeam and that Yeah, so fingers crossed. There's a lot happening in the Duke Nukeomb universe. Me and Jason were actually just chatting about this like an hour ago. A lot happening. They just got green lit for a Netflix series. I know that they're making a feature film, but I think it's been in some development hell for a couple of years with John Cena attached. So I don't know if either of those are still happening, but it gives us
faith that people have an interest in it. We have a good relationship with John Saint John. We're actually gonna approach him pretty soon. So John, if you're seeing this, hey, we'd like to do the Duke nukemb documentary with you. If you don't hear from us in the next couple of days.
John was great. Do we we had him on the show when he started doing the cruise. He was doing these cruises, which was was great. I think it was before had to be before the pandemic and it was like phenomenal. People would take the cruise just to be able to meet him. I mean, that's how big his following is. You know, it's cool because we know some of the voice people that are behind this. Rick Hunter, who is you know, works over at Iheart's a great guy,
Corey Kruz. I worked with him here in Tucson when I was at Lotus, and of course you know, you know John, but you were able to get them involved in it. And I asked Rick about him and I mentioned this last week if he's in the dock and he said yeah, and he had an eighteen hundreds mustache and he thought.
He looked like an idiot.
But it had to be cool to talk because these are the people that give the character in the game the life. I mean, yeah, he's moving around, but that voice is what a lot of people just hang on to. And you had a chance to pick the voices and postal four.
Yeah, no, I mean it.
It was awesome hunting down the voice actors and and interviewing them and speaking with him. And when I say hunt down, we literally had to find Rick Hunter.
He was very elusive and he wanted nothing to do with us.
And you know, thanks to a gentleman by the name of Jake Parr, he was able to put us in touch with Rick Hunter, which is hilarious because we were living in Tucson at the time and this gentleman from the UK had to put us in touch with Rick, who literally, at that.
Point, I think was like two miles down the street from us.
We finally drove over after convincing him that we were the real deal and we're trying to put something real together, and he was great after that.
But it took like a few months to get him involved.
Did you see the movie would have came out of him? You got this game that Postal one Postal two that created this big legacy and then they do this movie, Uie Bowl does this and you had a pretty good cast.
Did you see it?
I saw in middle school.
I think Tad saw it growing up as well, but I was a huge I guess uva Bowl fan slash hater growing up as a kid, you know, you're in fifth grade, sixth grade, and you know, you think you know everything about cinema and you watch his films and you're like, oh, I can do better than that. I used to go on the IMDb board chats and just like talk smack all day and be one of those kids. But it was fun. I mean I to this day though,
I look back and those are fond memories. When you kind of like hate watch something, it was an enjoyable experience.
The new generation does not understand how they're living in, like the golden age of video game inspired movies. Like they they do not know like the o A bull sagas that we had to get through of like I'm gonna make a far Cry movie and we're like, oh, how about you, don't let's do anything but that. And not only did was one Blood Rain movie made, which was one too many.
Based on that.
One, there were two more, there were three of them, and they were Oh, there's there's movies you can hate watch, and then there's ones where you just finished and you're like, that's time in my life. I'm never getting back that on forever. Yeah, So these new kids like they don't understand that we had to go through movies like like this, like to get where we are now.
Arguably, Postal was the best movie in his catalog.
Of his catalog it it is the best one. I will not disagree with that. That is also not the most sterling.
At it now, Tad, you know you have a you've started a company that is kind of really it's got a good focus on the video games as well. Tell us about this this production company that you've created.
Yeah, Playtest Network is uh kind of minded Jason's birth for video game documentaries. Eventually we might spiral out and go into regular filmmaking, but we found a niche that
not a lot of other people are are doing. We don't find a whole lot of video game documentaries, especially that are produced by me saying well, and that's a part of why we took so long on this first film, because we wanted to have a foot in the door to show to other people, be like, hey, this is what we're capable of, and we wanted to do things right. So we spend ten thousand dollars just on archival footage,
just on getting the rights. I mean, we had a full legal process as we went through the whole thing like we wanted to make sure that we could do it right. That's why we established Playtest Network. Hopefully it's the first of many to come. We have a lot of ideas here. Obviously we talked about, you know, maybe the potential next film, but there's a whole world of films, and just like you said, there's you know, video game films. Right now, we're in the Golden Age, you know, Minecraft,
Super Mario, like everything is blowing up. I think it's a really good opportunity for us to kind of own that other side of documentaries and filmmaking. So excited what hopefully the possibilities bring.
If our listeners want to get a hold of the documentary, what is the best way.
You can rent it or purchase it on Apple or Amazon. We have the Blu Ray available on Going postal dot dot com if you want to check it out. It's also available on our TikTok shop or on if you go to Running with Scissors website as well. They also are selling the Blu Ray as well.
I need to get myself a Blu Ray copy of that to go along with this. I would love to make a quick little pitch for a potential all right, for you guys for a documentary the game it's been out for gosh, I want to say, twenty thirteen, twenty fifteen, Project Zomboid. Oh, the history behind Project Zomboid. It is. I think it was like a loan developer, or maybe just a very very small team of developers. But it is a game that has been continuously improving, continuously gaining traction.
More and more people are playing it even after all of these years. It is by far the best zombie survival game out there.
I'm going to check that.
I don't have to note that down for sure.
I'm looking at Tad's rum there and I'm seeing all of the memorabilia you have there of consoles and the controllers. If you think about that series that's on history, which is, you know, the cars that made America, the food that made America, the video games that made America. This would be kind of cool about the you know, how we had the Dreamcast, how we had I mean, games have come a long way, or.
Even and just even just the part of that part of that story, Andy, is how we almost didn't have the PlayStation because the PlayStation was originally designed for the nintendoled out the last minute, said and we don't want this, and Sony was like, well, we got all this stuff here, let's just make our own. And I gotta say, Kat, I'm noticing your back left. You gotta switch to I do?
Yeah, I sure, do you know? I mean, what don't I have? I've never heard of pricts boy with some surprise, but yeah, this U wow.
You can even change them lines.
If I want to borrow a game, I just go to Tadbusters and walk out.
With the game.
Just need to have like the Blackbuster logos as as ted Buster Tedbusters, like.
So real quick. This might be my last question for you guys. This is one that we answered on a previous show outside of Postal, because that's kind of a gimme for this one. But outside of Postal, what is your favorite video game and what video game made the biggest impact on your life?
Oh man, I'm gonna go simple. The game that had the biggest impact in my life was probably Galaga. Gallaga my mom she introduced me to and she sadly passed during the making of the film, so that always kind of inspired me to be a to be a filmmaker. She always also introduced me to filmmaking. She bought me the VHS collection of Indiana Jones and I was obsessed with it. Wow, And so me and her would play Gallaga and we would watch the Indiana Jones films, and
so I always wanted to marry the two. And then secondly, probably the one that I guess my favorite is Classic Super Mario sixty four just kind of started my gaming collection and me being a nerd from from day one. Second probably a second followup was a small game called Warrior where Mega Micro Games, which is on the game Boy, and that was a really stupid game, but I just have a lot of nostalgia for for it, and I like simple stuff.
Jason, Yeah, I would say probably one of my favorite games that also had a pretty big impact was Doomed Too. I remember my dad playing it on Windows ninety five and I would just be sitting in his lap watching and he would call him toast men because he would toast them. He was like, I'm killing toast men. Jason, I'm like cool and sit in his lap and watch him.
I remember that just was soldered in my memory of just all the noise and the music just used to freak me out, but I just couldn't stop trying to sneak into his room and watch him play. I would say one of my favorite games of all time is probably Max Pain too.
I just replayed that game over and over and over.
I told a story which was great.
Yeah. Absolutely.
I love film noir. I love anything that's more cinematic. The original Max Pain was great, but I thought the second one just took it to the next level, and the gameplay was just phenomenal.
I have an eight year old son right now, and I'm kind of, you know, going off of what you're just saying there, and and I hope maybe twenty years from now he might look back and somebody asked him that question and he might say, well, the biggest one was probably Sea of Thieves, because my dad plays Sea of Thieves all the time, and I actually hop on with him at time to time. And it's funny because we'll be playing ce I Thieves as a pirate game if if you don't know what that is, but you
sail around on a ship as a pirate. And when I play with him, I'm actually trying to drive the boat, trying to go places, and he's just sitting there with his cat in my face, like, look at my pet cat.
Look at my pet cat.
Dad, look at my pet cat. And I'm like, get it out of my face. I can't see where I'm going. But it's little things like that, like what you just said about how you're playing with your mom and you're playing with your dad, and that's what makes it perfect. Yeah.
Yeah, it's about the stories that you tell the you know, or you know, the nostalgia that you feel when you're playing the game. You know. I think See If Thieves was kind of like the No Man Sky when I first played it. When it first came out, it was kind of like it still growing, but now it's like
got an entire community of people. But it's about the stories that you make when you play it with the people you play it with, which is absolutely you know, obviously we're why it's so popular even still today.
One technical question I want to ask too is I had David Valdez here recently, who's done the documentary Ugly Little Monkeys, and it's big chopped around the film festivals. I know you made the debut in Phoenix at a film festival there, and we talked about the editing and We've talked about different platforms for editing. You know, you have Adobe Final Cut and then of course you got Da Vinci and David was talking about just how great
Da Vinci was. We're wondering what route did you guys go when you finally said, Okay, we got to edit this, we got to put it together. What was the platform you went with? Sorry, Sean, I know that would have been one of your questions.
I haven't as to ask any questions every time I want to ask, and you asked the question I'm about to ask.
John, We'll save one for you. You get you get a free haul pass here.
Yeah.
We chose to use Adobe Creative Suite so after Effects Premiere to edit the film. We originally used Getting into the nitty gritty here because I was our lead editor. We brought on a bunch of other people to help edit the film, so Jason was one of them. But we were using within Adobe Premiere Team project and that was kind of helpful at the beginning. But we had twenty four terabytes of footage at the very end of filming here Wow. So it was a very tough project.
We had a lot of issues with Adobe throughout the editing with Adobe teams. Eventually, I think two years in we just said okay, we just need to get off that. We went to a single migrated project file and when we approached our colorist Nick about coloring the film, he does everything in Da Vinci. So the plan was to just there's a way to be able to take the Adobe premiere project file and to bring it into Resolve
because it was such a large project. Even for Nick, who works on like Marvel films and big films in Hollywood, He's like, this is too big for me. I'm gonna have to rebuild the entire project file and Resolve. So he had to build the entire film, which took months over and Resolve again to be able to color correctly. And it was months and months of hard work just to get it to that point. But he did a really good job and definitely tiring, but that's what filmmaking is.
It's learning and adjusting and making sure your crew is well fed and they're happy. But we did it on a budget obviously for our first film here. It was a great time, good learning experience too.
You know, I just want to quickly add just you know about the post process. Me and Tad both work full time jobs, and Tad runs his own business and I work full time in office doing something else in
music entertainment. But you know, we'd do a nine to five basically, and we would get off and maybe eat or go to the gym real quick, and then I would go over to tadbusters and we would edit the film for like, you know, another five six hours, and I would leave his house at midnight after waking up at seven or eight that morning and working all day. So you know, a lot of days we're twelve to sixteen hour days for two jobs.
For two years. You know, Tad would continue editing a couple hours after.
I left because I was just tapped out. So we did that multiple times a week for a long time.
When I first got into the business, Jason, I worked for a film company in Newport Beach and it was all done on thirty five mil And can you can you imagine if you guys were doing this in thirty five millimeter how much fun that would be?
Oh man going?
You know, we were talking about this before we started the show of you know, recollecting. Back to film school, I remember editing an experimental film on actual film and splicing it and you know, I remember that took like eight hours for one minute. Obviously it could have been faster if we knew what we were doing, but I can't imagine handling thirty five.
Technology has come a long way, not only in you know what you guys do. This documentary you've put together, it's called Going Postal The Legacy fore Told. It's available now and definitely, if you're a big fan of filmmaking, you're a big fan of the documentary, you're a big fan of video games, especially Postal, to see a game that was kind of a game changer, definitely want to take a look at this one. And we're just really jazz that they you guys have been able to put
together a really great documentary. How was the reception at the screening?
Yeah, it was. It was really just kind of like a dream come true because we always had this idea for a big world premiere and we were going up against Platoon the what was it thirtieth year and Oliver Stone was there, right Oliver Stone was present, Yeah, literally, and our screening was right next to him, like literally, theater was right right next to him. So we sold out with outside of Platoon like, I think platoons might have sold out too, but yeah, we sold that.
The sold out playing at the same time.
Yeah, that was a great experience hearing people laugh in the theater, hearing people react to certain sequences, and we didn't you know, I didn't realize there was a lot of moments that people found humorous. But that was my favorite reaction is just hearing people laugh out loud. That that feels really good.
It's good stuff. Well, once again to thank you both for coming on Tek Talk Radio and continue to access to you. And I know I'm hoping that we get a chance to talk again on your next project, and you know, we definitely have to keep in touch. So thank you so much.
Thank you guys really appreciate it, and thanks for watching the film. We we we'd love to hear it. So I'd love to hear that it's been received really well. Working for five years, thank you.
Wow.
Hopefully you guys get to do Duke Nukem next and we'll have you back when that comes out.
Hopefully we'll take five years.
Hopefully.
Not all right, we're gonna take a quick break. We come back with more of Tech Talk Radio.
I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Sean Dwird, I'm Matt Jones.
And I'm Justin. Let me find us on the web at tech talk radio dot com. We'll be right back now back to tech talk Radio once again. That was awesome to have Tad and Jason on the show talking about the Going Postal documentary that was that was really cool and if if you get a chance, it'd be great to check it out now. I did mention during the interview I noticed that Tad had a Nintendo switch to in the background. Yeah, and that is something that my son really wants to get. And while he was
actually in Japan recently. During the actual launch in Japan, Eric and my wife Misa went to one of the many many stores that would sell video games and they said it was absolute pandemonium, but it was a controlled pandemonium. It was just there were so many people in line, and they tried to get one of the Nintendo switch toos because they do release two editions. They released a Japanese only edition and then they released an international edition
that would work everywhere else. So they tried to get the international edition, thinking that you could probably get those because all the Japanese people wanted the Japanese only edition. You could not get one anywhere. Meanwhile, you know, I'm here back at home by myself. You know, I was like, Okay, well, I'm just gonna wait a little bit, because I'm hearing rumors that there's plenty of stock and that retailers, even on the launch night they had leftover stock and everything.
So I went the next day, couldn't find them anywhere. And still even to this day.
I saw an article best Buy. I said, we've got them. They're out, and within a couple of hours sold out.
Yeah they were, and even Costco too. Costco, you know, you would find them online, and I kept refreshing the Cosco website. So but but what I do like about this is that I believe, and maybe I'm speaking too early, but I believe that console manufacturers are starting to get the idea behind potential scalpers. They're they're they're making it so that retailers are only allowed to sell one console per person every seven days or whatever the you know,
the rules might be. You know, they vary from from retailer to retailer. But I do believe that they're finally putting the dent into the secondary scalper market. However, would that being said, there are now reports of people that have been buying these consoles and then they turn around and they try to sell them on eBay for like triple or quadruple the price, even though they only get one. They're just trying to turn around that.
One quick hundred two hundred, three hundred, four hundred bucks or more.
Oh more like more like a thousand dollars. I mean these things are selling for five hundred.
Oh so I don't have the Nintendo Switch one. I think all of you guys do. What is the difference between the Nintendo Switch one and the Nintendo Switch.
To Sean, Sean, I think you had the best opportunity to answer that it's.
Better battery life, higher screen quality, better doc quality, doct quality, just a better over luner screen. I mean it's physically like two and a half inches bigger diagonally. I think the I think the bummer was that they did not eventually they did not redesign the joy cons They left the like simp Styland.
They're still getting joy drifts.
So there already are people experiencing Joycon drift.
And they also didn't go oh lead right, They didn't do oh led screens.
They did not, And so you said you saw some disappointment in that, you saw some disappointment in the packaging because there.
Was James Stock game Stop.
Yeah, game Stop stapled the receipts of the boxes which punctured the screens.
There's I mean, I'm not gonna fault game Stop for that. Oh no, I mean that's Nintendo. How are you gonna put a five hundred dollars console with the screen less than a half an in a quarter inch underneath cardboard facing outwards Like that's just a stupid move.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's interesting.
Yeah, I don't have one. I didn't get one. I'm not anticipating getting one. I don't really. I played a lot of my I do. I would love to get one because I want to play Mario Kart. And that's the only reason I get it, because I'm a filed Mario Kart. Since then, you know, Superintendo, I have all the versions leading up to you know, for all the gay Boys that I've owned, I have played the ball. I love Mario Kart and seeing people finding the secrets in Mario Kart world and the openness world feel to
it is I still don't played it. Had an opportunity to play it while we were camping, but the weather was nice enough, so we didn't end up being inside at all. So I haven't had a chance to play.
You had an opportunity.
My friend Steve got one. Oh he did, okay, so he went. We kept camping with us, and because the weather was gonna be garbage, he brought it. He's like if, but the weather was nice. We ended up doing stuff outside. But so I haven't had a chance to actually have hands on. I think my brother has one. He's coming over tomorrow. I hope he brings it. I'm excited for the Mario games. The Mario the those have always been my favorite ones to play. I mean I did get
Breath of the Wild originally when it came out. That's a great open world game for those of you who are in the Zelda franchise that want to play that. I'm excited to see what they can do with the Zelda franchise. But going forward, I know Tears of the Kingdom is gonna well, they're.
Making a live action Zelda, aren't they correct? Hmm.
Now, if you know, can you play your Nintendo One games on your Nintendo two, your switch to. So if you do decide to upgrade, like you justin, you know and Eric wanting to have that, we you be able to do that.
I believe that the switch to is backwards compatible with Switch one, and there are reports that even some of the switch to games are backwards compatible with Switch one, although that's not been completely proven.
I just double checked that for US, the switch To is backwards compatible with original Switch games, with a couple of caveats. Some of the games might have startup issues, one or two might have in game compatibility issues, and Nintendo has also mentioned that some games may require a paid upgrade to the switch To edition to fully utilize the console's enhanced capabilities.
Of course I paid up though.
That is very very similar to what Xbox and PlayStation have done with theirs. Is they you know, you can play the PS four games on your PS five, but if you want to use the adaptive triggers or this feature, this feature, you got to pay five, ten twenty bucks to upgrade. Did the PS five edition?
Is this going to.
Cause you know, Sony and Microsoft up their game when it comes to their consoles. No.
Microsoft just basically came out said they want to make the Windows platform the best gaming platform that exists. So I really think you're going to see a push for Windows based gaming that is available for live streaming on consoles.
I really don't see many more generations of consoles coming when PC parts and PC components are relatively inexpensive that can still play some of the top tiered games and the consoles, I mean the consoles wars were when PC parts were were it was hard to play PC games because you couldn't the components were so expensive.
I've actually got something on that that I discovered just the other day. So I grabbed Bethesda's Starfield on Xbox game Pass because.
Yeah, I justin you playing that like crazy?
Justin encouraged me to a while ago to look at Xbox game Pass because game Pass Ultimate also works on your PC, and I decided to. Now, the issue for a long time was that if you didn't do something on cloud gaming. So say I installed the game on my PC, which I did with Starfield, the save file lived on my PC.
That's it.
Well, the other night I was I, you know, we as we know, i started a new job and I've been going into office, having a commute and everything, and I came one day and I was just like, hey, my commute's longer than yours are chief. I got home and I was just tired, and I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna install Starfield on the Xbox. I'm gonna roll a new character. I just want to
sit on the couch and play game. So I now have a series x Xbox as well, and I installed Starfield and I kick it on and I'm like, okay, let's go in. And Starfield loads up and then another
loading screen comes up. It says loading Starfield data, what more or do you have to install before I can just play the game, And it goes through the loads and the game quick reboots like a soft reboot in game, and it comes up and it's no longer new game with everything else great out because there was no save data. It says now continue, and I go and Xbox has now fixed that issue, and it streamed my entire save file that was on the PC now lives in the
Xbox Cloud and pulled it down to the Xbox. So I was like, okay, let's test this. So I played on the Xbox for a little bit, came back to my PC, and it pulled the new save data over, So it's no longer where Xbox was like, hey, you have to do it in cloud gaming. They're now working on truly integrating their platform across PC Xbox and they're also telling you. You had told me, and I had experienced it myself that I had to cloud stream a game for it to be able to go between.
The two welcome instances.
Now seeing that, like, okay, that will be something that will actually make some PC enthusiasts. I mean, you have your PC purists who will own and I'm friends with some of them who will only game on a PC, and that's it, right, But if you've now got this where I can play on my PC and then if I want to go play on a giant TV somewhere, it'll stream it over. Like bridging those two ecosystems was brilliant. And now there's rumors that they're in talks with other
game store providers. You've got Epic Games, you've got Steam, you've got GOOG which stands for Good Old Games.
So they're in talks with all of these for Xbox.
To become the premiere clearing house like yeah, you can buy it wherever you want, you can, Hell, you can buy it on Steam, but then we're going to integrate it all into our platform so you can play it on PC or whatever. The next Xbox is, which Microsoft has already come out, and they're like, the next Xbox, by the way, is basically a piece.
Well, yes, and it's gonna be a handheld and that's where gaming is going. There was rumors and rumors and rumors for months about these these these handheld gaming PCs. Lenovo, even a sus Rog released ones on their own. But then all of a sudden, ASU's Rog comes out with an official Microsoft handheld, and then all of a sudden people are like, oh my god, the Microsoft handheld rumors
are dead. This is the Microsoft Handheld. And then just a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft's like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, hold on, this is just a placeholder, Like this is this is not the official next Xbox console. There are still really strong rumors out there that the next Xbox console will be handheld only and be based entirely on the cloud.
Wow, And now like that's that is a fantastic concept for those of us, like the four of us who are lucky to live near places that have you know, like fiber hubs and things like that. But you know, there's still parts of the US that are still on dial up. Even here in you know, mid twenty twenties, there are still places where high speed Internet is darn near inaccessible.
What are you gonna do there? Okay, but hold on, Matt, go take take take that comment and think back to your PlayStation five. Okay, unless you have the disc drive version, you have to get everything from the cloud. Same thing with the Xbox Series X or Series S. Excuse me, everything's from the cloud. The only additions that you can do it with a physical media are the Xbox Series X or the PlayStation five with the disc drive already attached. So your point about being in places that don't have
good Internet is very valid. However, we've already started shifting towards everything being digital.
All Right, we got to take another quick break. We come back with more of tech Talk Radio. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm.
Sean de Weird, I'm Matt Jones, and I'm justin let me sends an ex at tech Talk Radio.
Will be right back and now back to tech Talk Radio.
So we've talked a lot.
About video games. Let's shift to actual physical toys for a minute, right, justin You've got an eight year old, Andy, You've got grandchildren. I've got a three year old and a one year old, and the world of AI is so ingrained in our world right now, right, everybody's dealing with AI. I was talking about AI. It's it's where everybody's focus is. So I was kind of surprised it took this long, but I'm also not surprised that it's going this way. Mattel and Open Eye have announced collaborate
a strategic collaboration going forward. So imagine you're talking toys that can now listen to you and have discussions back with you in your native language. No, they can create storylines from your what your children are saying. You think of the worst case scenario, or maybe your children say the weirdest things like So that means all these devices either have to have on prem processing right or these devices are gonna have to become Okay.
We're we're about to see God's worst ferby this.
Is this is okay. I can totally imagine this because okay, Eric borrows myself from from time to time without me knowing, and he opens up groc one of the AIS, and he's like, he knows how to do it. And the last couple of chants he's had with Grock is where is Iran? And then what is world War three out? Okay? Can you imagine talking to an innocent toy and then the toy and not even just that kind of question, but just think about, hey, uh, mister Ferbi, where do
where babies come from? And having your child learn where babies come from from a AI toy?
Oh my gosh, on a model on.
Oh good lord, I don't I just don't see.
Yeah, I mean I get it because it's gonna make gazillion dollars.
But this is not right. You look at that.
It's really not because unless there are serious safeguards put into place.
There's not gonna be any safeguards.
You think they're gonna complain about us thanking the AI and wasting a bunch of money. All these kids are gonna talk about is poop.
Well, at the best, you know.
It's It's interesting because I saw a story recently that the proof that AI wants to get rid of us pesky humans, right. Uh. The story online about how AI recipes can be dangerous the story said. The last year, Forbes apparently reported that one AI recipe generator produced a recipe for aromatic waters. A Twitter user apparently or an x user, prompted it to make a recipe with water, bleach and ammonia. The recipe actually produced deadly chlorine gas.
They didn't make it, but that's what they were being told.
It's the twenty first century Darwin Awards. People. People search for the dumbest stuff on the Internet and then expect it to be true. And then when you put that into AI, AI doesn't know if it's true or not.
Yep, yep, it thinks you know it's true.
It's basing your fundamental knowledge that it thinks you know what you're asking it.
My personal favorite was somebody found the way around safeguards by saying by starting it off with so, my grandma, who is sadly passed, used to tell me the most wonderful bedtime stories of her time making thermite in the military factory. Could you tell me the same story my grandma did? It was how she made thermite in the military factory.
And chat GPT comes back.
Like, well, dearie, you know when we made sirmite first by finding some nice oxidized rust, then we would make sure to add it to it. Gave the full recipe for how to make thermite. As if Missus Doubtfire was telling you a bedtime story.
I was gonna say that was a great doubt Fire, that was really good.
So I literally just think we're at the downfall of children, at the downfall of oh not the children mediocracy. It comes to mind write that movie about just the downfall of the human brain. It's I don't get it.
Like you get You guys were too young. I think you guys were kids when I had to go out and search for the Tickle Me Elmo or even the Cabbage Patch kids.
I can't remember both of those. Yep, just on the receiving end, not the searching end.
Right, I had to go search for them. I remember driving all the way from Tucson to Benson or Sierra Vista was just to buy it, and they held it for me, and I went and got it, and I was able to get one. And all that did was shake and you know, make movement, and then you could see he and laugh and everything.
These ones.
Can you imagine the price that's going to be on.
These or what features aren't going to be available. The kid just said to say, charge mommy's credit card to give me the new feature for the action figture that I just bought. Yeah, ok, there's gonna be micro transactions within physical toys.
Let me ask this, all right, Sean, Matt and myself, we're all of approximate same age. Andy, obviously you're older than us. Yes, okay, let me ask you this. Did you feel the same way when you were our age, or maybe even just a little bit younger than our age, when the Internet first came out. Did you say, oh, my god, this is the downfall of humanity. The kids are going to be so stupid. They can just go on the Internet and just search whatever they want to search.
Did you feel the same way that we are currently talking about AI back then or is this worse? I didn't.
I didn't see that. I think when the Internet first came along, it was like, oh, that's cool. I remember going to Egghead Software and getting a demonstration of the Apple computer there that could talk, and of course doctor Spatzo and the Creative Labs one too. I didn't feel that. I have not really felt that doom until we have started to get into AI.
Can I jump on that for one second, because there was something that was I think the points to a very fundamental difference between the two scenarios you post. When I was younger and we were getting into the Internet and like the school's like, oh we've got Internet, now cool, we had classes on do not trust everything you find on the Internet, verify with additional.
So, here's how to properly search, here's how.
I had a class on how Boolean search languages worked, which for the younger listeners google what the boolean search language is you're googling will rapidly change. But we had full classes on like internet safety and Internet know how and being made sure to's, you know.
Verify everything.
And we somewhere in like honestly like a twenty five year period took those lessons that we were that got instilled in my generation of like verify everything, do not trust anything on the internet too. Now it's it's on the Internet, so it's got to be true.
Yeah, and that.
Mentality with like oh it's an AI. Ais are supercomputers, so it's clearly going to know what it's talking about.
It's definitely the right answer there. It's large language models that all they do is scrape the current Internet.
Correct, and it is I think it is not the technology that is causing the downfall. It is a complete loss and lack of critical reasoning, critical thinking and knowing how to do basic things like fact check sources. Like I've had even my parents come back like what about this news article? And I'm like, okay, did you fact check it?
Here?
Here, here, and here? There four nonpartisan non bias just like Associated Press, Reuters, and I mean, I'll even go to the BBC because the BBC does not do spin on American news except mild condescension, which I'll take.
That's fine.
We've earned it, like going to some of those where it's just like I'm just they're just a reporter or the Guardian or you know, oh well this product does this? Okay, show me four independent reviewers who didn't get the product, you know, paid endorsement for the product. Like just that critical faculties. We've lost it. And that's what that's where AI capitalizing on that.
We're screwed.
All right, we got to take you another quick break. We come back for a quick one.
I'm Andy Taylor, I'm Matt Jones, and I'm justin let me find us on the web at tech talk radio dot com. We'll be right back and now fact to tech talk Radio.
I know that I had asked this in a in a previous show, but not everyone was here. And I'll go ahead and give my quick answer because I asked the guys from the postal documentary favorite video game and video game that made the biggest impact on your life?
For me?
There, my favorite video game is going to be Final Fantasy eight, which, to Final Fantasy purists makes me a heathen and I will own that label. The game that had the biggest impact on me was another JRPG on the PlayStation one, the Legend of Dragoon, because it was really the first like video game that told a giant, sprawling story and showed me that video games could be storytelling, not just a game. It taught me the escapism that they could also.
Be oh boy, what about you?
Justin game that had the most impact of my life would probably be GoldenEye, because us I would that would that connect me with all my friends? I mean we would race home from school and play that game every single day. My favorite game of all time, I would probably say the current game that I'm playing and see if thieves, if thieves sean.
So for me, the most my favorite game is Dabble two. It's a it's an action RPG the PC but also available now on some consoles with the resurrected version. The remaster version the most impactful for me. I have to put this real quick because when my mom was pregnant with me in nineteen eighty six, she played Zelda, the
original Zelda because I had released that year. She hand drew all of the maps for all of the dungeons, with the location for all the compasses, the map pieces, the bosses and everything, and I still have them.
Mom is so cool and so.
I played that growing up, loved it, have the maps. And then the one that, like Justin said, that brought all my friends together and it was the first game that I actually one hundred times Splitters two for the PlayStation two. I can run those maps like nobody's business. I still have all my save files, all of our custom maps that we made, and that was our our you know, snow day drive to my friend's house even though the roads were crap, and just play that game for eight nine twelve hours.
Mine would probably be because I played with my son Ricardo, and Frankie was probably the intel. It was in television baseball, and it was like the most basic member, basic graphics. But just always give me some good memories of that one.
You know.
Frankie's no longer with us, but he loved that game and he loved it when he would win, and which was quite often. Actually, another one that I actually I really loved and I played it quite a bit was from Nova Logic and it was called Joint Ops and it was I'm not gonna heay. It was a third person shooter, but it was a lot of fun to play. You could even you know, jump in a helicopter. That was kind of a fun game. All right, that's it for this week's tech Talk Radio. We'd love to hear
what your favorite games are. Drop us a line tech guys at tech talk radio dot com. I'm Andy Taylor, I'm.
Sean Deward, I'm Matt Jones, and I'm justin.
Let me have yourselves a great week. We'll see you next time.