Brian Reynolds Surrounds the Fun Part 2

Ep25 Brian Reynolds Pt2
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Alex: [00:00:00] All right, welcome back, listeners. This week, we are sharing Brian Reynolds part two, Electric Boogaloo. Does every studio do that when they contemplate a sequel? It's like game two, Electric Boogaloo. That's always the codename. I don't 

Aaron: even know what Electro Boogaloo means. Really? I've heard people say it, but I didn't know what it meant.

That's like from the eighties. It's like C on the flip side, right? Like that kind of thing. I should have done my research before 

Alex: I said it. It's a movie. No, it's a movie. It is a sequel to some eighties movie. 

Aaron: Electric boogaloo. Yeah. I don't know. Now we got to look it up. Yeah. We have the internet at our fingertips, but this is nice.

I feel like it's the nineties again, and it's appropriate with our guests. Like they didn't, right. Like they would be at a bar like, yeah, what's up? I don't know. Is it, what's the name of that guy? And you get everything wrong and you're having a great conversation. And no one pulled up their phone. 

Alex: Aaron, 

Aaron: I'm 

Alex: just 100 percent here present with you.

I [00:01:00] don't, I don't even have a browser open. You have an iWatch. Yeah, but she doesn't know anything. I ask her stuff all the time and it's like, Oh, so we're driving, we're driving across the country and I know we're about to cross from the mountain to the central time zone. I asked Siri, what time zone am I in?

She had no idea. Really? She literally like, I can't help you with that. 

Aaron: Is yours connected to your phone? 

Alex: It's connected to my phone. It's connected to like, you know, the cell network and the, the satellites. If you leave your house 

Aaron: with just the watch on, it can connect to the internet? Oh yeah. You can do anything with it.

That's new, right? Okay. Yeah. I never did that. My other one, I had like three iWatches. I got two from you and one, I think my dad, you know, I'm not going to complain about my technology. 

Alex: Yeah. I don't think so. We got it good. Yeah. It's pretty good. Oh, but I did want to mention, cause we were talking about history last week.

I'm onto a [00:02:00] new, Laura turned me onto a new book that I'm reading now called challenger, which is about, I've heard of this. It's kind of about the challenger space shuttle disaster, but it's really, it's about the space program, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And it's pretty fascinating if you like that kind of thing, you know, like.

Space. I do like space. I'm from Houston. It's a big deal here. Oh, yeah. So a lot of it's in Houston 

Aaron: Yeah, it 

Alex: does 

Aaron: it there's a really good museum out here for that 

Alex: So I'm enjoying it if I'm allowed to recommend a book before I finish the book I would recommend it 

Aaron: Okay, there's a movie coming out about the moon landing being faked or a fake filming of the moon landing No, it's got the Black Widow actress.

What's her name? Scarlett Johansson. Scarlett Johansson's in it And then, oh, you recognize the other guys. Anyways, it's got a lot of famous people in it. Interesting. Yeah, it's a really interesting, uh, thing. It's a very interesting con I don't know how much about that you're interested in. I do like a good conspiracy [00:03:00] film, you know?

Yeah, just the topic though, like when you talk about history, like how much do you think, okay, you know how like in Civ 4, or Civ 4 I believe you could do it, but I remember you could play as Gandhi, and you don't play as Gandhi, like you start to be like, nuclear bombs and stuff, you know, stuff that he would do, so how much of history, Do you think is real, you know, like if you had to just throw a percentage out there 

Alex: money mean 

Aaron: Like just like everything about history like how much of it 

Alex: like what we've been taught.

Oh, well, I was gonna say I don't think the historic, yeah, that's naive of me. Well, look, what is that phrase? The winners write the history book, you know, like I grew up here in the United States and I took American history and there's not really a lot of focus on. Native American history of, no, of, of, of our other 

Aaron: countries, right?

Alex: Yeah, but my point is, to your [00:04:00] point, Oh, I see what you, yeah, yeah, yeah. History is a story told through the lens of those who are telling it. The victors. Yeah. So you're going to get that version. So, yeah. I don't really remember the, um, speech at my graduation other than the topic was Know the source, you know, when somebody is telling you something, it's like the news.

Yeah, it's as important where it's coming from as what they're saying, you know, yeah. 

Aaron: Yeah, I totally took that sideways, but hey, it's a video game podcast. Because we have to get everybody ready because it's about to get real thick like the broth you just drank the top layer if you're listening to last week this week the next one is like A little thicker.

I would say 

Alex: maybe this is, we're getting to the stew. Oh, to the actual meat. Yeah. I see what you're saying. The chunks. It's almost a chili cook off today. Maybe, I don't know. It's good stuff. If you [00:05:00] want to hear from somebody who has successfully made. The transition from out of the industry, into the industry, top of the industry, and then over to, you know, like from PC to console, to mobile, to free to play.

Just an incredible journey early into Zynga and working free to play with Nexon. Just some crazy, crazy stuff from our pal, Brian Reynolds. So thanks for joining us this week. Excited to present for you part two. of our conversation with Brian. It's a good one, folks. Yep. And we'll see on the other side.

Brian, I liked your, when last we left, our hero was regaling us with the origins of Firaxis. It was you, it was three of you, right? You, Sid, and, 

Brian: and. It was myself and Sid. And Jeff Briggs were the three [00:06:00] original owners, founders. Some of the folks that, you know, later figured heavily also in my career, like Tim train and Jason Coleman, uh, and others were also those two in particular were very early joiners of Firaxis and they had both been at, uh, at Microprose.

Um, but that was the three of us that, uh, founded the company, uh, Jeff Sidden. And so Sid was the public facing genius, famous person. And Jeff was to run the business side. He was, he had been the producer and that kind of stuff. So he was to run the. Business, although he was also a designer. Um, I think we already talked about the strange different degrees we all have.

And, you know, he's a doctorate in musical composition, but, but anyway, his core role 

Alex: was to be, of course, you're going to let him run like QuickBooks in the accounting, right? The guy's got the PhD in music. 

Aaron: That makes total sense. 

Brian: Yeah, yeah, exactly. [00:07:00] And then I was, you know, another designer. And basically the idea was that, you know, Sid at the point he was in his career, he wanted to work on new, interesting things.

He was not interested in endlessly personally sequelizing, say, civilization or any of the other things he'd, you know, been there, done that on. And so he wanted to do new things. And meanwhile, I was perfectly happy to, well, we couldn't sequelize Civilization at that point because we weren't, uh, you know, we had just left the company that had Civilization, and so we had to kind of think outside the box, but basically to do something, I was willing to do something that was very much in the tradition of things that You know, Sid had done before that I had done before with Sid, and so, you know, having at that point done Colonization and Civilization II, I was, you know, perfectly [00:08:00] happy to sign up for it because we had to get a, you know, a deal from a publisher, and so we were talking to various publishers.

Yes. You know, big publishers at the time ended up signing with EA originally. It was, it was kind of through origin because origin was part, you know, it was more recently part of EA, uh, than it is now. And so they were still kind of using the branding of origin and, you know, externally, and it was even kind of sorta based originally in Austin that they were going to.

Yeah sort of interact with that. That was the original idea and then I mean within a year. We were mostly just talking to People at headquarters and that's how it all evolved. But that was the. So, but in that, 

Alex: those early days was Richard Garriott still there or was Warren Spector still there? Was that that era?

Brian: But Richard Garriott, yeah. Richard Garriott came out to pitch us. And by the way, this was like, you know, in my career, [00:09:00] no other set of, you know, developer signing with a publisher meetings has been, you Like the ones with Firaxis because every time I was ever involved in it after this time You know this time in 1996 It was You know, developer person or persons are flying out to publisher and trying to get publisher to give them some money.

This was publishers sending their best people to try to get Sid to sign with them, like literally everybody blew out and like Bobby Kodak personally flew out and wanted to meet Sid and, you know, that, you know, for Activision and, wow. They sent Richard Garriott and, and two other guys, one of whom we knew from, cause he had worked with us before.

So he was the familiar face and Richard was the famous person. And then there was the business guy. You know, we had [00:10:00] Ed freeze and Stuart Moulton, you know, the top guys for Microsoft games came out and, and so everybody was coming out. 

Alex: I was going to say, so when you guys left Microprose and started your own thing, was it scary?

Cause now it's, come on, Brian. Nobody's going to relate to this story. It's like, you know, the royalty of the world got on their private jets to come and court you. No, it was 

Brian: weird. It was weird. I mean, especially being, you know, I was just recently jumped up from being merely an employee or whatever. And so suddenly, like I'm sitting there in the room as an owner and a board member and you know, someone who's notionally important and so that was a different, but you know, because Sid was there in all his glory for publishers to want to sign, it meant that.

You know, that part all, you know, I didn't have to come up with any particularly [00:11:00] challenging answers to questions. I mean, what I was there for was to be the person who would reliably make a game that fit a marketing agenda. So there was, I mean, I was to make a game that the publisher would definitely want and would definitely see dollar signs behind, uh, and that game turned out to be Alpha Centauri.

I mean, I don't remember when we decided that that was exactly the game that was going to be the game. But 

Alex: yeah, I was gonna ask like, so when these folks are coming out, are you pitching them Alpha Centauri? Are you basically? Essentially, yeah. Let's do a game together. We'll figure out what game it is.

Brian: Yeah, it was clearly going to be, I know for a fact, it was definitely going to be in the style of a civil as you know, a four X game, there was never any question that we were promising them that I would work on a that. And Sid, I think, probably already knew that what he wanted to do first was a civil war game, but he had kind of left behind the [00:12:00] earlier prototype he was doing.

He decided it wasn't going to work. And so he got interested in a more tactical thing and just the way things were, we felt like, okay, well the, you know, the Alpha Centauri game is going to be the, that's going to be a big ish game, you know, a big game for us at the time. Yeah. And, you know, we weren't going to just go off into some wild new kind of thing that we hadn't done before.

We were gonna, we were promising that we'll with whatever game I was working on, we were going to stick to something tried and true and that they were going to be able to see, you know, quote unquote, easy dollar signs behind, they would be able to see a, a clear marketing plan and not have to, you know, burden their imaginations too much.

Uh, and then meanwhile, Sid was going to make things, you know, Sid was going to get to make whatever he wanted and they were going to publish it. And that was kind of the, that was kind of the deal, right? Uh, you get a Sid experimental game and you get a Brian [00:13:00] traditional game to fit in your marketing slot and for that you get to, those first two games, which ones sold 

Alex: more copies?

Alpha Centauri by a lot. And were you, uh, you know, vocal about that in the board meetings? Oh, 

Brian: no, not really. Other than, I mean, I mean, eventually thing, you know, obviously it'll eventually develop that, you know, that shockingly enough I left for Aksis and stuff, but I mean, I was totally fine with that arrangement going in.

Like I knew, we all knew that usually at least, you know, the thing that was sort of a sequel or a spiritual sequel or, or whatever, you know, we had to, at the time we had to talk very carefully because we couldn't. You know, violate civilizations. And I mean, eventually, I mean, within even the time I was at Firaxis, that changed and we were signed up to do civilization three, you know, just a couple of years later and then everything was just civilization again.

How did it 

Alex: make its way back to [00:14:00] you? So how did, how did Civ III happen? 

Brian: Okay. So after, so first. Uh, Gettysburg came out and then we got Alessandria out and it was pretty successful. It wasn't like a crushing success like Civ 2, but it was, it was a nice success. And, you know, we, we made money and had money in the, you know, flopping around a little bit that we could then have a fight over what we were going to do with it.

Uh, but meanwhile, Hasbro had bought out the old Spectrum Holobyte that

Microprose and one of the main guys at Hasbro at that point, one of the main execs for games at Hasbro at that point was a guy named Tony Parks and he had worked with us at Microprose and we had all really, really liked, you know, he was like one of the good bosses. And so we had, you know, followed with interest as he [00:15:00] left for Hasbro, not that, you know, Immediately had any whatever, but then all of a sudden when Hasbro, you know, the big money bag parts of Hasbro decide they want to invest in games.

And Tony manages to engineer that they buy out the whole micro pros thing. And then so suddenly now it's Hasbro and Tony want somebody to do Civ 3 and we're like, uh, uh, hi, Remember us. We could probably do it. You might yeah, you might be thinking that Sid and Brian don't want to do any more civilization games, but you would be wrong and And so anyway, that was literally the next thing a detail that happened in there What like when we signed with EA we were supposed to do I don't know if it was You Those two games and then another game or two game, you know, they had exclusive use of us for a certain number of games, however.

They weren't [00:16:00] super excited. You know, they were getting less, they weren't excited when Gettysburg only sold some. And so they weren't super excited about how this was all gonna go. What do you think that is, by the way, that Gettysburg sold less than to get a civilization level hit at that time. You needed to be able to sell, first of all, to the U.

S. and to Europe. I mean, now we have to be able to sell all sorts of other places, too. But that was in the 90s. That was kind of the received wisdom on where you can sell things. And it turned out, you know, first of all, that European gamers were not all that interested in the American Civil War. It's not that no human beings at all in Europe ever bought it, but, but relatively few human beings in Europe bought it.

And so basically you had already limited your market. You would already kind of cut your market almost in half, just from the get go of saying, you're doing a game about civil [00:17:00] war. And then on top of that, instead of being a game about all of the civil war, it had come to be, it was kind of one battle in the civil war.

And you couldn't even play the whole battle of gettysburg at once It was sort of the series of little campaigns that got you through all the encounters that made up the back So by then you're kind of getting to a pretty esoteric level of interest I mean we didn't you know, i'm saying this as if I knew this in foresight, but you know This is merely the the product of post mortem, you know I don't think any of us ever thought it was gonna like sell three million copies like You Civilization two had, you know, that, which is what constituted gigantic numbers in that day.

I mean, gigantic numbers now are much more gigantic, but that was, you know, that was what we would notionally hope for then. I mean, even Alpha Centauri didn't do civ two numbers, um, but it did, you know, it at least did, you know, a million and whatever, or whatever it is it [00:18:00] did. I don't even. I was, I was already gone before I got to find out how many it finally ever did.

Um, but it was certainly already north of a million units, but I don't think it ever went to like three. It made a nice tie, you know, it was a, and you know, and it, it got us a little bit of glory on the glory side. Cause we got a really high, we got really high reviews and got a, you know, a game a year award or two or whatever.

Uh, it's probably the artiest game I ever worked on. You know, the, certainly the most philosophy ish game I ever worked. Yeah. That was where my philosophy degree, Alpha Centauri or Alpha Centauri. Absolutely. Because instead of pretending like I was a historian, I was pretending like I was a science fiction writer.

And that took me a while, because I, at first I was sort of, um, thinking I needed to, it was sort of like a future history, I was approaching it more like a civilization game. And boy, I mean, A year, a year and a half [00:19:00] into our development, it was dry as dust. And, you know, we kind of needed to, Hey, I mean, I think, uh, you know, EA and maybe Bing Gordon, he w he ended up being our kind of consigliere at EA.

He was like one of the old EA founders and was still there doing marketing stuff. And, you know, and he kind of started giving us kicks in the pants. Like, is it really going to just be really dry space people's stuff? Cause there wasn't any, we didn't do any. Fiction, we didn't, none of that had happened yet in the first year, year and a half.

It was, it was more like, you know, like a documentary and 

Alex: numbers 

Brian: and yeah, space. Yeah. Documentary happened when some people went to Alpha Centauri and it just wasn't working and I'm happy to say that I did, you know, contribute that important piece of inspiration to the game, which is like, I kind of had to feel like, you know, what?

I just need to go read a lot of science fiction and I need to start pretending I'm a [00:20:00] neonata historian. I need to start pretending I'm a science fiction writer. And although I'm not a professional writer, you know, that's not my evocation. I was like, you know, I could do, I could do that, you know, like that I could do.

And so I started labor. Yeah. And so I just kind of thought up. Seven random characters and, and then, you know, with the technology started to, you know, for each technology, I would come up with an epigraph and somebody would say, Uh, say their little piece and we ended up getting voice actors to do it. And, and yeah, we went up to New York and found kind of Broadway actors with various, you know, authentic accents for the right countries that these people were supposed to represent and had them.

Uh, you know, so the guy from India had a Indian accent, you know, an authentic one because it was actual Indian guy doing it, that sort of thing. What did the Broadway 

Alex: folks think about the video games? You know, this was back in the 90s, you know, had any of them played any [00:21:00] video games? You remember? I do. 

Brian: I doubted at the time.

I mean, most of these folks weren't, uh, I mean, this was, these were small, this is a very small gig for any of them. And again, it's not like now. And if you're one of the famous voice actors, you know, you're more famous than I am as a designer, right? Some of those people are, you know, really commodities within voice acting specifically.

Um, but back then it was like, you know, it was folks between gigs would come and just do a little bit of it. 

Alex: It was like they were giving blood. They were just happy to get the free, the free cookie or whatever at the end. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Let's talk about the, how did Big Huge get started? Like, 

Brian: Oh, well, okay.

So yeah, first I got to have left for Axis for some reason. And well, we made some money with Alpha Centauri. Uh, and that I think is when we started to discover that some of us had different priorities for what we thought should be done with money. Uh, and [00:22:00] I will freely say that I was the one that thought we should, you know, pay it to ourselves and our employees, you know, just cash it, you know, like we made some money, you know, send me my check, right?

Uh, and I mean, they did send me some checks, but others. Wanted to try self publishing and because EA had kind of rejected doing any more Gettysburg follow ups You know Civil War follow ups and so there was the idea to you know Do some self publishing and use some of the money we made to do that and that didn't that didn't fit Like, I didn't want to do self publishing, period.

Like, all I wanted to do was make games, make cool game, make the biggest, coolest game we could make, get it, you know, vacuum up as much money as we could find, and then pay it to ourselves and our staff, and lather, rinse, repeat. And that was the only thing I thought I knew how to do, the only thing I wanted to do, and I did not want to I had [00:23:00] I was kind of poisoned by the experience of micro pros that I didn't want to like have money held inside a company for the future.

And so, you know, the divergent ideas of where we, you know, various of thought we want in, uh, you know, led to, you know, it leads to tension and less trust and all that stuff. Uh, and at the same time, I was just kind of. You know, artistically, I was actually, you know, after Alpha Centauri, I was kind of a little bit, you know, reamed out of creativity.

It's like, okay, now it's time to start on Civ III. And, you know, there was a little bit of. Temporary magic and, you know, getting back on the old, you know, in the old sports car and seeing how it's gears run again. Oh, right. History. We can, you know, we can have all these history things again. Oh, that was kind of fun.

And I think, uh, so Doug Hoffman and I were doing some of the prototyping on that and we came up with some stuff that I think actually did, [00:24:00] it was in the final game, you know, we made a little. Uncredited contribution to Civ 3. I think by the time we were done leaving, I don't think we were even considered special thanks worthy.

well, I mean, it was whatever, uh, you know, we, we went and we got our studio and, and we made the game, but anyway, I wasn't playing 4X games anymore for myself, you know, I was still kind of able to. You know, sometimes kind of get it up to make one, but I, what I was now doing for fun was playing like star craft and those kinds of things.

And then age of empires two came out and it was like, Holy Jesus. Does that fun and looks good. And it's about history, except they did this, you know, they did that only one part of history thing, you know, that didn't work for us so well for Gettysburg. But, uh, obviously they. Made it work for them because they sold a [00:25:00] gajillion, jillion units.

But it was like, why aren't we making something like this? Right. And there was not, you know, there was me and a couple of other guys that were really into those games. And, you know, and that was Tim and Jason and a couple other guys. And we would play it at lunch all the time. And pretty soon we would play it also not at lunch all the time.

And, you know, you know, it w it was our big hobby and we were kind of feeling like, well, we want to be part of something like that. And, you know, to be fair to Fractious, there just wasn't, you know, after we Signed with me saying, yes, let's sign, you know, deducive three and also, you know, another game and whatever with our tiny little team that we had.

Well, that wasn't. It wasn't a super realistic thing to think that, that, you know, we could also take on an RTS or something. Like, it wasn't like that was it. That wasn't a thing that was really available, at least not within the, you know, we would had to really [00:26:00] be outside the box, but because of the other, you know, the differences of priorities among the.

Partners and board members, you know, there just wasn't the level of trust it would have taken to kind of really think outside the box. And, you know, it became clear that maybe what we really need is to kind of, you know, uh, go our separate ways moment. And, uh, so me and a few of the folks left and started, uh, big huge.

And, and, you know, I knew. I was very confident in my skills as a designer and to a certain level as a pro, you know, a sufficient level as a programmer that I could, you know, do all that stuff. And I could have a creative vision for a, and, you know, and the, and the vision was always in my brain. Well, I wanna do, uh, RTS except it's all a history, not just the medieval part or something.

And which ironically meant I ended up, by the time we launched Rise Nations, we ended up competing with. [00:27:00] Rick Goodman, who left Ensemble because he wanted to do the same, you know, he also thought that, you know, why are we only doing one part of history? So he went and, you know, he was the guy that made empire earth.

He and his, uh, studio, uh, stainless steel studio, as he called it. But anyway, so, you know, that's a later, uh, part of the saga, but anyway, so we left and I still kind of had my Rolodex of people that I thought were cool at other publishers when we were pitching for access and. Uh, and my first choice was, was Microsoft because A, I was like, well, guy, you guys did a great job with the, you know, with Bruce's team, you know, ensemble and B, they seemed, I remember even back when we were talking to him for Firaxis, They were the ones, they wanted to spend a lot of money on the game, but maybe weren't going to pay us as much on the back end, and maybe that's why we didn't go with them the first time.

But I became very attracted to their willingness to spend a whole lot of money on the game because I wanted to make [00:28:00] an RTS, which I knew was going to be. You know, really effing expensive. I mean, compared to, you know, if we thought Alpha Centauri was expensive for, you know, three and a half million dollars, Rise of Nations, and this is dev cost only, I'm not even talking about marketing, was, I think we spent 9.

8 million or something like that making Rise of Nations. So, you know, you're, the, the curve of what you got to spend to even be at the table in that genre, and then, you know, we go on in time and genres after that or even more, even more crazy what you're talking about. Just to be at that triple A table at all.

It was just going up dramatically and it's continued to go up. 

Alex: And so Was this right around the year 2000, maybe late 90s? What year was this? Yes, 

Brian: it was, uh, yo, literally, I think I left Firaxis in late December of 1999. And so I think, you know, it's possible that Big huge got in court, you know, an empty corporation might've been incorporated in 99, [00:29:00] but I couldn't do anything competitive for, you know, I couldn't do any creative work for it for three months or something.

That was my agreement, you know, in the paperwork. So when you started big, huge, 

Alex: um, did you think back to like how things went at for access and you're like, Hey, why don't we talk about like, What do we look like in five, maybe 10 years? I know it's a long time, but like, are we all on the same page? Did you guys have that sort of 

Brian: conversation?

We did a lot more of that and that partnership. Has been maybe the most successful and certainly long term partnership that I managed. So this was Tim train, Jason Coleman, David and score, you know, not necessarily in that order. They were, uh, and they, I was saying, I was confident in my design skills and vision holding skills and stuff.

And I knew I was going to be, at that point, I was the one that was going to know how to. Talk to publishers and get publisher deals and all of that. But I knew I needed somebody that was really [00:30:00] going to hold down the programming end. Cause I was only gonna, you know, write crappy prototype code and stuff.

Uh, and we needed a kind of producer and eventual business manager. And so that's, so Jason was the chief engineer and Tim was the producer. And Dave was the art director. And so, you know, my strategy was, okay, let's, you know, make these guys owners. And then there'll be really, you know, there'll be really into it.

And, and that, which totally did in fact work, you know, so they had substantial, they had an equal vote to me and not quite as much equity, uh, was how that. That one went. And it turned out we were able to get a deal with ultimately micropros. Uh, nobody flew out to wine and dine us, you know, Microsoft, you did that deal with, uh, with Microsoft, right.

It was Microsoft that's right. [00:31:00] And, and so Ed freeze still at the time was the kind of main name, but we worked with, uh, Stuart Mulder, uh, and he kind of became my main person to, and he ended up being, sitting on our board for a while. And so he was kind of the advisor helper and we had, we had a great relationship.

We did a lot of work with Stuart Mulder when we got to Microsoft. I'm almost certain like the first time we were ever personally introduced was kind of in that period, you know, uh, that early two thousands period or something. Yeah. So yeah, in summer of 2000, we finally signed the deal closes and we get going and make our, you know, make our game.

And, and so anyway, that, that's how it got started. But in terms of the, You know, we did have the vision of, okay, yeah, we're gonna make money and write checks, you know, and we weren't gonna store up a bunch of money in the company to grow it or something. And, you know, I think further down the line, we [00:32:00] realized, well, maybe we want to have multiple teams.

And so then, But then the idea was, well, if we have multiple teams, we just need to get more publisher deals. And so then there's more, uh, cashflow coming through the company and we can still, you know, make money and write checks. And that was kind of, uh, I had a, a sort of anti growing a big company feeling going in and, you know, since I was sort of.

At the beginning, I was the sort of name around which the company was being formed. That certainly led to a lot of what happened, you know, in the culture at Big Huge. Right on. 

Alex: Is that the order of things? Did you go to Zynga and then come back? 

Brian: Yeah, Zynga after Big Huge. So what, like, I'll give you the accelerated version of the, you know, the later years of Big Huge.

You know, we did rise of nations. We should have immediately done rise of nations two, but, but I foolishly said, no, no, we need to do something else. So we did the fantasy game instead. I [00:33:00] think we flopped and we face planted pretty dramatically. I mean, I think we probably spent. 14 million dollars and sold 400, 000 copies or something, you know, it, we didn't have, you know, I never found the it for fantasy that I had found with science fiction, you know, I feel like I understand how to do a science fiction game now after almost face planting, but we did face plant with that or I face planted as a, you know, a design as a design visionary.

I definitely face planted. Should have done resign Nations two. So for the third game, we pitched Rise Nations two and we were gonna start doing it. But at that point, Microsoft, well first of all, RTS, this is kind of getting to be 2 0 6 and RTS as a genre because it's not very console and everybody has to, now you have to have a console part to be ginormous enough to fit at the AAA table.

They were like, well, and we had the, and we already have age who, by the way, also had a, [00:34:00] the forgetting to not do a fantasy game problem with a, you know, they did age of mythology, right? And I I'm, I'm sure they made money, but it was very clear. They didn't make nearly as much money as any of the actual age of empires games.

And so they had learned that lesson too. And anyway. They decided, yeah, we're going to kind of, we can't do that anymore. We're not going to do another RTS with you guys and sorry. And oops, the payoff for having had a really good top to bottom relationship with them was they did offer us some pretty good.

Work for hire ish stuff. They offered us the second X PAC for age three. You know, there was a, you know, I was like 4 million coming into our company, you know, work for hire, but so we didn't have to do any layout. Like that was kind of a, you know, the partnership we didn't want to, like, if we were going to do it, you know, we would rather just either go out of business or keep the team together.

And that was kind of where we. Hung our hat and they [00:35:00] ended up kind of coming up with that. And so that gave us enough money to make the expat and kind of keep people employed and we could siphon a little bit of. Our capital off to make our next pitches. And then we got this. We managed to finally check the studio has done console game box, which turned out to be very critical, uh, very soon by doing the settlers, a Catan game for Xbox, that's right.

I remember that game. That was a good game. Right. And so that, that's actually what I did that year. Cause I kinda lost executive function. Like when they canceled us, like I was just kinda ready to go crawl off and die somewhere. And I didn't have a lot of executive function to do any business stuff. And so Tim kind of jumped into the breach and did CEO stuff.

And I basically, I just kind of helped, you know, keeping fingers and dikes. I helped with the. XPAC [00:36:00] for, you know, cause I had a good sense of what the age vision is. And so I helped, I kept people from getting mad at each other, talking to on song, you know, I was good at dealing with IP holders and being friendly.

And similarly, I was very good at dealing with Klaus Teuber and his people, the Catan, the guy who designed, said it was a Catan the board game and Microsoft had picked up these licenses and they wanted all these. You know, Euro games to be put out on Xbox Live Arcade. And they were like, well, we got, we talked the settlers guys into doing it, who will do it.

And they were like, you know, and I don't know, because it's going to be a challenging IP holder relationship, but I was totally ready to just like, I didn't want to have to think about a new game. I was totally ready to get in there. And so I wrote the AI for that game, you know, like I was like writing the interface and the.

Like I was just doing all that shit, but we had to self fund that. And, you know, a company that just got canceled having to self fund, we kind of [00:37:00] were drawing on these last capital reserves from when we had sold Microsoft, some of our stock and burning through that. And we somehow managed to keep everybody employed and with zero marketing, like we did this much marketing for Catan live, but we just put it live.

And, and I, you know, I think both Catan LLC and. Microsoft were both kind of disappointed in us for, for that part. Although I think Klaus Torber and I were kind of friends ever after for the rest of his life, because he really liked what we did with his, I think we showed him how to make his game electronic successfully, and they were able to kind of.

Take that off to other platforms and do, you know, cause we certainly didn't come chasing after them for, Oh no, this was our, you know, our whatever, but we ended up getting, uh, I mean, the split for self funding was really good for X, like we got like 75 percent of the money off the back end and we ended up making this.

Amazing profit [00:38:00] from that, from this little side gig, just try to stay alive thing that we had done. And so we had managed to stay alive. And meanwhile, because you know, my genre was dead of, you know, RTS games weren't going to be AAA anymore and nobody was going to fund them. It was like, well, what are we going to do?

I guess it's going to have to be an RPG. What does that feel like? By the 

Aaron: way, What does that feel like that a whole genre you've been working on is just like, yeah. Nobody likes that anymore. 

Brian: It was odd, but I don't know. It was, you know, it was just things happen, you know, the world happens, how it happens.

Right. You know, if you're alive in 1930, you're not wishing the depression would happen or that the Nazis are come to power, but that's, you know, that's just what happened, uh, in your lifetime and now you get to. You know, live through it. And, you know, uh, by that standard, you know, the challenges we had, you know, we were facing were, were, you know, virtually nothing by comparison.

[00:39:00] So it was just, okay, well, you know, got a bad die roll on that one. Here's a lesson 

Aaron: in 

Brian: perspective 

Aaron: for you. Yeah, it's just, it's so weird. It's like we were, everybody was into RTSs for a long time and these kinds of games. 

Brian: Yeah, no, it looked like the future. I mean, and then, and then nobody was anymore. The whole vision was let's just go make those.

Cause that's the future. And then they weren't anymore exactly. And nobody was funding them. And you know, it just, the, the well dried up. And so it was like, okay, as a company, we need to like, you know, be in a big consult worthy shot if we're going to have any kind of, you know, fighting way. And, you know, kind of our motto at big, you know, big, huge, the name we named it that, and the idea was we want to be big and huge.

We want to make big game. It didn't mean we had to have a giant company, but when mean it meant we had to be always making really big gains and ambitious games. And so there was like, okay, we got to get that. And it. It became made clear to me by how [00:40:00] conversations started to go with publishers on getting an RPG contract that nobody really thought that, you know, that a Brian Reynolds team could probably do an RPG and, you know, and I thought that was kind of, personally, I thought that was farcical because nobody had thought I could do an RTS, but we did an RTS and we made a lot of money.

Nobody thought that we could do a science fiction game about it. Civilization, but then we made, you know, all of the, just from the beginning, nobody thought I could work on a strategy game. This is all the way back to colonization. Nobody thought, you know, can we really trust him to do a strategy game?

Cause all he's ever done was be a programmer. It's always 

Alex: easier to say no. Yeah. 

Brian: Yeah, that's right. And so, but I was, you know, given that I was kind of. You know, only partially mentally functional in any way. I was totally willing to go the let's hire cool guys that worked on oblivion and let them do [00:41:00] it.

And I could be some kind of nebulous creative director advisor, maybe at first we thought that. And so we signed with THQ to do a big ass RPG. And we thought they were really stable because they had been the number seven, they were the number five, and then they were the number three. And they had all this, what sounded to us like a whole lot of cash in the bank.

I mean, I've since come to think that maybe 300 million isn't as much cash for a publisher as you think it is, maybe. And maybe it wasn't actually in the bank. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I don't actually know. Uh, but we signed the, we signed the thing with them. But anyway, at the time we signed with them and that seemed great.

And then, you know, Tim deserves, you know, more of the credit for figuring out how to get them to then buy us. Because. Then everybody got hot and bothered about the Wii. And so everybody wanted a Wii. There, there was like, I don't know, there was about 10 [00:42:00] seconds in the industry when everybody absolutely needed a Wii game in their portfolio.

Yeah. And Tim came up with a fantastic little demo. Uh, well, this is what it would be like to do a thing on a planet that you controlled with, uh, I think we called it God, the game, you know, so it was sort of maybe almost, uh, Peter Molyneux ish in, in some of it's styling and it, and it might've turned out to be Peter Molyneux and it's, you know, amount of deliverability in the end, but.

It was instantly, wildly craved by THQ, but Tim was like, yeah, but we don't want to sign it with you because then you would just kind of own us and treat us like Microsoft did where they don't ever whatever. So we need to get a new publisher because otherwise we won't, you know, he, he had, I mean, we together had figured this out, but he was the, he gave it.

The perfect voice and they bought us for, for the Wii game, they bought us for the Wii game for two or three times the [00:43:00] amount of money that I would have gladly taken from Microsoft, you know, months before, like, you know, at least three times the money I would have been willing to personally, I mean, you know, the other guys, maybe not, but, but I was, you know, I was ready to just.

Good God. Can I get out of this, Tim? Yeah. Good job. Absolutely. Good job, Tim. And, but then a terrible thing. And, you know, he deserved to have more of a win from that than he got, because what then happened was THQ promptly, you know, like, like I think our deal like closed on like January 18th of 2008. I even kind of remember the day.

And I remember someone telling me that, you know, you might've been the very last. Acquisition out the door, like in the world before the market's all, you know, in 2008, the giant monetary, all that crap happened. And by the end of 2008, THQ calls us up and says, uh, Hey guys, we. [00:44:00] Can't actually afford to run you anymore.

So we need to sell you or close you. And so they started shopping us around, uh, you know, active vision and EA and whoever else, but nobody was buying studios, you know, at the end of 2008, right, except apparently for baseball players who wanted to get into video games. And so that is how. And so for something like three cents on the dollar or whatever, they bought, you know, 38 studios bought Big Huge from THQ.

Uh, so not from me. So THQ had bought from me, and all my plebnants were with THQ. And they sold you. And you were still there. I was still there, but, and that was the fantasy game. He wanted to, but I had had a good lawyer by that time. You know, I had figured out somewhere in this process, I figured out how to have a good lawyer and when we sold the company, my covenants were not [00:45:00] transferable to third parties, like the non compete not transferable, the non solicit not transferring, like, so basically what was going to happen.

Was the day the sale closed, I was going to be a completely free man. Like, cause it was an asset sale. So there wasn't going to be a big, huge old corporation anymore. And yeah, it was going to be dead. And along with it, all my covenants. And so they had a problem because like, you know, they brought us all up and they said, oh, let's.

you know, all, you know, come work for us and, you know, do an RPG game within the new world that we're going to make an MMO. And what was the name of the game? Do you remember? It was, uh, yes. Kingdom of Amalur. That's what it was. Right. Yeah. It was a, it was huge. And Big Huge ended up doing, with EA as the publisher, Kingdoms of Amalur The Reckoning, which is the only Kingdoms of Amalur game that shipped.

They did a credible [00:46:00] job, but at the time we were going up for the pitch, I remember, I mean I was skeptical already, like, okay it's a company about making an MMO, and the year is 2009, and they're really proud of themselves because they've Come up with a fantasy world. And they kind of read us the begats of their Bible, their design Bible.

And, uh, you know, I was already ready to go to sleep and I asked kind of critical questions about, well, what do you, where's the business model and doing an MMO in 2009? And, you know, heads angrily snapped around, you know, this was clearly not a, they were not interested in hearing, you know, anything that I was going to offer at that level of, you know, You know what's going on.

And so I realized at that very moment that I was definitely not coming along for this ride and because I had already figured out, I didn't have to. And so then they had to suddenly figure out what they were going to do about me because I hadn't. Signed anything, right. You know, and they're going to, they were mortally afraid that I could just [00:47:00] hire all their people or something.

I mean, they didn't, it wouldn't have actually been true. Cause you know, a lot of people were kind of probably pretty done, you know, working with the guy that can't even bring himself to make business decisions, you know, just recalling the recent years, I don't think they needed to fear me that much, but boy, did they, boy, were they afraid?

And, you know, there were some. There was some excitement there and, you know, I ended up getting out of it with a whole bunch of pretty good, you know, I kind of asked for a whole bunch of things I wanted and said, and in return, I'll only hire six people. And eventually I ended up being kind of the deal that I could hire up to six people in X amount of years and other than that, never 

Alex: seen like a quantity specifier on, uh, yeah, 

Brian: well, it was a thing and it kind of worked.

I mean, it ended up kind of working, but anyway, what that meant was. That I got out, you know, bam in summer of 2009 at the very [00:48:00] moment that Facebook games were suddenly, they weren't even really off the launch pad yet, but they were, cause you know, Facebook had only opened up to non college students in like 2008, late 2008, and suddenly there are these Facebook games and it was a perfect time.

And I don't know if you played any of them at the very beginning, but man was the bar low. And I was thinking. Mafia. I, yeah, I was like, I could make a much better game than that. And what I thought going into something like that was. I can make the game more fun and then maybe it can be less, you know, soul crushingly annoying to, you know, all the virality asks and all of those things.

And, and I was wrong about that. Like if you, if you make it more fun, then they just charge more money for it and make the same amount. You know, that, that ended up being how business works. And I was again, naive, but that was the vision in my head was, Hey, I [00:49:00] can make the games more fun. And I thought I would be, you know, there's like, you know, reach revenue and retention, and I thought I was going to be a retention guy by making games more fun.

It actually turned out I was the revenue guy. Like it turned out that what I had to contribute to Zynga was teaching them how to make those Facebook games, uh, make a whole lot more money. And the answer was make it more fun. Making it more fun meant that you could charge more money and then continue about your business model.

People 

Alex: are willing to invest more. 

Brian: What was the first game that you did for Zynga, like, in that way? Well, I was in meetings about Farmville. I was not the, I mean, Mark Skaggs really deserves a lot more credit, and he was kind of one of the C& C guys, you know, so he was another guy that came from RTS. Yeah, all of us RTS guys kind of washed up on the shore, you know, in 2007.

And, you know, Zynga, Uh, who, uh, by the way, you know, Bing Gordon was on the [00:50:00] board, you know, he was like the lead investor for like Kleiner Perkins in Zynga. So, you know, he starts picking up his 

Alex: Was that how you 

Brian: got on the radar? Well, I think originally Before the 38 Studios thing had been figured out, Tim and I had gotten on some planes and I think we had called up Bing and said, you know, Hey, do you see anything for our studio before we just have to Lay everybody off or whatever.

This is, you know, when THQ is saying we're going to close it, you know, they gave us the 60 day warrant act notice and all this stuff. Um, and so we got on some planes and, you know, and, and I was certainly put on the plane because Bing and I were, you know, had really good and Bing was like, Oh yeah, you know, you should come out.

I know this guy I'm on the board, you know, come talk to Mark Pincus and we kind of went out and I think, you know, Tim was kind of unimpressed or at least was unimpressed from the. Point of view of having it be [00:51:00] some way to land the whole studio. But I, at the same time became very impressed with it as a place to, you know, maybe land just me when I probably left big, huge coming up only months from now.

And so that's how it kind of all played out. But you know, there was certainly some being relayed and being, and I had been playing, uh, Whatever their clone of boggle was, was one of the early Facebook games that Zynga had, and I ended up, you know, and this was back when you kind of played with your actual friends on, that was one of the cool early things in Facebook where you ended up playing games with your actual friends.

And, you know, that was back before they totally burned that channel by making everybody have to send each other annoying requests and then Facebook. You know, anyway, things happen later, but back then there was this magical thing of, Oh, we can play multiplayer games, like with our real friends instead of with, you know, random kids that say terrible things about you.

Uh, and so [00:52:00] we flew out there and I kinda, you know, the hook got, it kind of got set for me. I also kinda, I thought about, you know, to try to expand myself in a different way. I actually wanted to go work for Valve. You know, tried to kind of pitch myself to them. And I think I was a little bit too weird for them or my, what they perceived my design philosophy was and how I went about it was too different from what they perceived their culture to be.

And so, you know, that, that didn't happen. That was probably my, my first choice was to go do the fun. You know, I was kind of like, well, I've, you know, I got some money, let's go do a really fun thing and maybe. I'll get some money, but maybe not, but it'd be really fun. I like to say that if they had hired me, then half life three definitely would have shipped by now.

Oh, yeah, that's a, that's a terrible and awful thing to say, but I swear to God, if they had hired me, like the, uh, you know, the, my entire. And it would have been to get half life three ship by, you know, even if all I do is, is bother [00:53:00] people to do it and don't have any actual talent for it, that was going to be my, that was my secret underlying agenda was I was going to go make them ship half life three, but that didn't happen.

And so the thing that was the most happening for me was Zynga and Zynga turned out to be like, that was right. When the rocket ship was ready for liftoff. And so like, I was there. Pretty well. Well, you know, again, in the theme of escaping disasters or into by random chance, life put me on that rocket ship and gave me options priced at rock bottom early levels.

And then by that fall, like I was there, you know, a month before FarmVille launched, you know, during w because Those games got made in like two weeks and four weeks and stuff. Like these are really simple flash games. And so literally I was there before they'd made [00:54:00] FarmVille, right. They were playing, they had some engine stuff that they had bought, you know, they had bought a company and those guys ended up being a lot of the FarmVille team, but the idea of, okay, we're going to do a farm thing.

And it's going to be kind of like farm town, but we're not going to. You know, whatever, you know, the, all of that was going on, like when I was kind of onboarding and stuff, but, and so then what happened for me was like, they put us initially doing some kind of, you know, mafia wars, adjacent things, but then like us meeting my little team in Baltimore.

And meanwhile. Three months later, the DAU on Farmville was in the millions, like millions of DAUs. I mean, they eventually, they were in like thirties of millions of DAUs, but it was just so much more than what they had expected or anybody expected that it was like, Oh, we need to do more flash games. And their other problem was that they had [00:55:00] unbelievable, you know, world crushing reach with FarmVille.

And they had absolutely microscopic revenue rates and they didn't know how to make revenue. And I was like, well, tell you what. What if me and my team, you know, make a Farmville adjacent game and it's going to be about kind of revenue ideas. And that's how Frontierville came to get made. And so it was kind of like, well, it's like farms, except it's, you know, on the frontier, it was sort of the history version of Farmville, if you will.

Uh, and was that your last game? That wasn't no no, because Dominations came all the way out there, but that was the one that, uh, and we, you know, we worked on it, got it together, argued about it, and then we put it out there, and it was immediately, like, its DAU rate was, like, Four or five times what farm bills was now our dau was a lot lower, but it got you know, we did decent I mean, I think we had you know, seven million dau and stuff on that game, which is definitely [00:56:00] not nothing and when you combined it with our You know revenue rate that was a lot higher because we were Making up so we a Made a lot of that like that game in terms of revenue brought into a company Made more money than every game i've ever worked on Before or after in my career combined Combined 

Aaron: It's called the Pioneer Trail now.

They changed the name. Yeah, well 

Brian: I know, that was like our idea for like, when we did an X PAC for it. It was like, well we'll have a, we'll have Frontierville and then we'll have the Pioneer Trail. Cause we couldn't call it Oregon Trail for obvious reasons. But Facebook wouldn't let us have one app with two names and it wouldn't let two apps talk to each other.

And so, you know, kind of foolishly, we let it be named the other thing. And that was, you know, that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but in its heyday, it was Frontierville and always, you know, will always be remembered by me as Frontierville. And so that [00:57:00] was, you know, of all things, the game that, you know, made the most money.

And although we didn't get paid directly in money from the game. thing, we did end up getting, you know, a lot of money when that IPO happened. And, but see, unfortunately for poor Tim, you know, he was still stuck working at the old company for the first year until he finally got spat out. And so he only, as he says, got to go on the Zynga freight train.

I was on the Zynga rocket ship and he was hoping to at least be there in time for the freight train. And. Out of the end of that, you know, Facebook games kind of had their come and their go over a few years. And, you know, I was certainly by then very used to, you know, genres drying up beneath me. And, uh, and also, you know, my initial naivety by, Hey, if I make the game more fun, it'll just be more fun.

And, you know, therefore I could. dilute the annoyingness of Facebook games by increasing the fun. It turned out, [00:58:00] no, I couldn't do that. And so I was a little disillusioned that it was always going to be, uh, you know, that that was just free to play. They came to be called free to play games. Right. And it was always just going to be an unending ask for either.

Virality your revenue and that's just what that 

Alex: Facebook very famously changed the rules on like what kind of messaging games were allowed to absolutely that's really what crushed the the performance a lot of games is the virality got. 

Brian: Facebook crushed it within itself. And you could say that, you know, that Zynga actually really helped Facebook build itself because, you know, there was a period when things like Farmville or why people were coming to Facebook for a while, they'd have it up all the time, people would have it running in the background.

I remember that, but then suddenly, you know, so then we leave. You know, I was, I was like, okay, I'm ready to be done. Uh, and you know, there were lots of other people that were leaving Zynga at that same time. And [00:59:00] when I said, okay, I'm ready to be done, they were, they actually said, uh, could you actually not like announce your quitting right now and we'll let you.

We'll actually pay you and you can vest stock for a few months and then we'll in it. So I ended up having this period of, you know, garden leave or just kind of, and I was kind of like, well, maybe, maybe I do nothing ever again. And, you know, concentrate on spending money or something. Um, And so I had this period of, I don't know, almost six months where I was really not doing very, I wasn't, I couldn't even start really taking meetings for a new company.

And then almost as a reflex of like, just because it's what I've always done. I started and partially also because Tim wanted to do something, you know, Tim was still hungry and he was like, can I come on your next thing? You know, does your next thing have room for Tim? And I was kind of, okay, yeah, sure. [01:00:00] Uh, let's do a thing.

And of course that would be Clash of Clans was huge. And so make the history version. You know, the train Reynolds business model played out and we pitched that, uh, various people, but Nexon is who picked us up. I then had my, and I had a great time flying around, taking, you know, it was a lot of variety of, Oh, it's fun to talk to VCs again and talk to, and we had a talent agent working for us instead of.

The weird way we would just show up on publishers doorstep in the old days. Um, and so it was a guy at universal, whatever at the time, Oh fear. And he was getting this no fear. Yeah. So, you know, fear was getting us intros to people and that was kind of fun. I had a great time making the deal. And then there was this like moment when I needed to actually show up in an office and write code and stuff.

And that was when I realized, Oh shit, I shouldn't [01:01:00] have done this. Like, I'm like, it turned out I had enjoyed this kind of five, six months of enforced retirement, and it kind of grown used to just sort of spending money floating around and I was totally happy to, you know, Put in a couple of pipe hitting hours, you know, on the phone or thinking weird business slots or whatever.

But if I was going to have to like get in there and do a first time user experience and, you know, fight over how is this design vision going to work? I was like, Oh my God, I want to be dead. And I went into Tim and said, like, I think we need to give it. I didn't say it in this many words, but I, my message was, I think we need to give the money back and not do this.

And Tim's message was, I don't hear anything you're saying, um, but we're going to have to figure something out. And so we, we kind of talked past each other for a while. And what came out of it was, and I [01:02:00] think people were, you know, other trusted people were giving Tim guidance of, Oh, you know, Brian won't be able to, you know, stay away for too long, just give him a while and he'll come back.

And so we kind of took it on, you know, I guess what I took on was I was willing to kind of implicitly lie to Dexon and this, I mean, it wasn't that I ever lied to them, it was just that. We had pitched this on, this is gonna be a Brian Reynolds game and now I'm not gonna hardly ever show up to the office or do anything.

So you were like, uh, ghost payroll. I, I was Well, I, I gave back, I gave back most of my salary and fortunately I had already given away the vast majority of the equity 'cause like, whereas the first time with Big, huge, I had the most equity, but everybody had the same number of votes. Like my mind going into back, you know, before this.

Second mental breakdown thing happened. Uh, my mind going is okay. Well this time i'll give away most of the equity, but i'm gonna [01:03:00] keep Okay, because I was like, okay i'm done Negotiating about what my vision for things is it's going to be the brian way but I don't actually need a whole lot more money. So, you know, come be the, you know, and again, it was like four guys came with me and one, you know, Tim was a nut, you know, was a repeat customer and we all had equal equity, you know, we just divided it five ways and so for dominations, for dominations.

Yeah. And so, you know, in the end, I mean, Ironically, I, you know, I kind of accidentally took the right amount of equity just for the guy that makes the deal and does nothing else. I mean, you know, maybe 20 percent is actually reasonably fair for the guy that can go get a deal and bring money in and, you know, You know, and contribute, you know, substantial vision for the game and, and stuff.

I mean, but that's not what I thought I was going to be contributing at going in, but it's [01:04:00] kind of more what I did contribute. But anyway, I mean, so that kind of halfway weirdly worked and, you know, I'm sure there's people at Nexon that would absolutely, you know, never recommend anybody work with me again because, you know, because I didn't show up and make the thing, even though the game did really well, right?

It did. It did really well. Yeah, it got nominated 

Aaron: for an award, like, game of the year. Yeah, and I 

Brian: would come to the design meeting every week and, you know, kind of, you know, we'd sit for a couple hours and argue about things and I would, you know, I would go to Board meetings, like with the Nexon guy and try to sound coherent, you know.

Alex: But that's such a complete journey, Brian, from the beginning, you know, like when you were working on colonization and Civ 2 and you were out, you know, in the countryside, just heads down coding by yourself all the way, flipping back to now, it's like, okay, I showed up to work to make the game and I like, I don't want to be here.

Brian: I don't want to be here. Right. Exactly. Well, and this was [01:05:00] before COVID, but we didn't know about working from home. And if there was some model where I just got on the phone for a couple hours, that probably would, you know, that could have always been. And I didn't think of myself that when we were setting it up, it wasn't like I was thinking, Oh, I'm going to do a thing.

And I'm going to be the. You know, I, I honestly, seriously thought I was going to be fully a part of it, even though I hadn't, you know, Is that just, you know, your 

Alex: perspectives changed or you're tired or it's like too much of the 

Brian: same pattern? I was tired and I was, and domination was always pitched. It was going to be free to play.

And, you know, I was already tired of free to play, but, you know, I did think that the history version of free to play, you know, had some, you know, had some more, Had some juice. They had some juice, exactly. And it, and it did have some juice. It's still, there's still, people still play that. I mean, I think that game key is still keeping like 50 people employed full time at 

Alex: Big Huge to this day.

Somewhere along that journey, like you started with Nexon, was that a publishing deal and then it turned [01:06:00] into an acquisition? And then it 

Brian: turned in at Tim, you know, and this time, you know, Tim and I, you know, and, and then we're going to do that thing, you know, where we, we convinced them they have to buy it.

And then we did. And I can't remember the exact mechanisms because by this time that was clearly, you know, part of Tim's role. And he was, you know, he was ready to finally, you know, he had missed the Zynga rocket ship, but he was finally ready to have, you know, Have some money in Mr. Train's bank account, you know, which was totally fair after several runs through this and, and yeah, and it got managed and I, and I guess, you know, I, it was probably yet another, and then we're going to make this amazing game and so you'd better buy us or we need to Pitch this other publisher or whatever.

And so they bought it. Uh, and that was like, I think 2016, my lawyer, who at that point, like somewhere wrong there had said to me, he's like, you know, Brian, maybe this needs to be your last company. [01:07:00] Yeah. Well, I think you're, I think you're right, John. I think that is exactly right. I think. I think I am, as far as, you know, an entrepreneur person goes, I am a used up husk of broken dreams, but I need to, you know, and so now what I do, like now that I'm fully out of the industry, I just kind of help people for free.

Like Jason Coleman has a company and he, you know, has a game and I'll, I'll just come in and play it for free or talk to people for a day about it and whatever, or someone else will say, you know. You know, someone, you know, it's, you know, I don't shop myself around, but for people I know that think they'd like being a grandparent, 

Alex: it's like, Oh, there's this really cute baby, but then you give it back, you know, you give it back to the parents, like being a grandparent.

Yeah. That's actually kind of true. Land dad games. You know, if I ever needed a, uh, if I ever thought Brian, I, I already have the URL for that, [01:08:00] so if you want to buy the URL, just call me. Oh, it's too late. Oh, yeah. The, uh,

Brian: Um, well, I can't remember what I was going to say, but yes, I do some open source stuff. Like there's this war, you know, playing board games online thing for, it was originally for squad leader, you know, very esoteric, you know, complicated game. And, and for some of these other kinds of board games, there's this thing called vassal.

That's just this free open source project. I think it originally stood for virtual advanced squad leader, but now you can. Play all sorts of things in it and I just code for that for free, you know, I just just so I I still enjoy doing some of those things I used to do back in the day, but the thing that I definitely under no circumstance go out of my way to avoid is.

Accidentally becoming responsible for anyone else's livelihood, right? Like that's the thing I, I identified that as the stress point, the, like, you know, you go to the office and you [01:09:00] suddenly realize, well, wait, if I don't come up with something, everybody's going to be out of work and. I'm sure you probably had the experience like when you kind of are starting up a small thing, you know, you, you know, well, who do you hire?

You hire a lot of your friends, right? And if it, even if you didn't hire them as your friend, then they become your friend at work, you know, because that's who you're spending all of your time around. And so then it's like, Oh, all of my You know, all my friends are fucked if, like, we don't get this deal, ship this game, do this thing, and it, and I've kind of identified that as the heart of, the heart of the thing I definitely don't want to do again.

And the thing I really enjoy doing is just kind of cranking around with code, or I really like to polish interfaces and, You know, nobody wants a, you know, some other guy to come in and change their interface all around right at the end of their game. So that's not a very useful skill to have, but, um, but you know, I, but it is available, but also I'm really good at time user experience.

Like I'm good at, uh, at looking [01:10:00] at someone's game and saying, okay, well, you know, if you want people to be able to kind of learn and get into it, you know, here's some things we could do. And so that tends to be more of the stuff that I actually do for people when they, 

Alex: when I ask. So, so that part, so, so important.

And I can totally relate to how you talk about the stress that comes along with the responsibility for, you know, making things work, you know? Cause I, I think. In some ways, if you're the person who has to like write the code, you're doing that against yourself or against the computer, like there's some domain that you have control over.

If you're the person who's like making the train go, it's like, You got to do that against the world. Yeah. And you have control over some things, but there's a lot you don't have control over and it can, I can totally relate. It can be a little stressful. So congrats to you for being in a place where you can, you can now, you know, afford to focus on the things that give you [01:11:00] maximum joy with minimum stress.

So that's a great place to be. 

Brian: You know, they, they, they. I've gotten to the place where I can just be a mad scientist and I can tinker. I'm a tinkerer. I'm a putterer. I can, I can putter with game design. Um, and it's, but that's only because I don't have to make a living. So I, I feel great empathy to everyone that, you know, is.

Making a living because I know how sometimes fucking miserable that was. You know, we all, well, it's 

Alex: been a difficult stretch. You know, you were talking about like how Yeah, things went in, uh, 2008, 2009, you sold the company THQ and things did not go well in that period of time. Yeah. We, we were sort of like navigating through a, not exactly the same, but just a challenging period right now, so.

Yep. So yeah, I agree. But Brian, how awesome. I was so nervous. A little bit, this was gonna have to be a three parter. Because you have had such an incredible, like, breadth and just so many different things that you've been able to do. Uh, [01:12:00] such an insanely ill conceived, 

Brian: uh, path. Remember, children do not try any of this at home.

Alex: It's, uh, some really good, some really good lessons in here, even if you're just thinking about like, okay, think a little bit about like what your relationships are going to be a few years out, because everybody might not want the same friends and, uh, it's always good to have options because options help.

You close a deal if you're trying to get a deal done or a weekend or 

Brian: a weekend. Or well, yeah, you know, what you do to sell a company is very different from what you do to make the, your, you know, putting your best possible game. See, I went in naively thinking I just need to keep making amazing games and then someone will buy us and everyone will have more money and everything will be great and, and no, we had to get.

A good deal more cynical. You have to get a good deal more cynical if you want to get someone to [01:13:00] purchase your company from you. Yeah. There, and you know, there's all sorts of tidbits about how to do that. Uh, but you know, this is, you know, I think we've probably hit the, uh, I don't know, my, uh, My laptop says it's 11 p.

m right now, which is not obviously that means its battery has been not working very well Obviously not 11 p. m anywhere on this continent, but so I have no idea how long we've gone, but i'm sure it's probably uh, Past our budgeted. Yeah, we 

Alex: did go a little over So thank you, Brian, for, for hanging out with us.

Really appreciate it. Congratulations on just your journey and where you've arrived. And I would love to send you an interface to look at if you want to give me some pointers, I would take them. Absolutely. 

Brian: Always happy to. Yeah. You got my address now. Or optionally get all the IP together for Alpha [01:14:00] Centauri and you know, we'll make it.

Oh, there you go. And by we, I mean, you know, mainly you. 

Aaron: I mean, you can't tell us his secrets. All right. 

Alex: Thanks Brian. All right. Thanks a lot, guys. I hope to see you soon. And yeah, we'll see you around. Yep. Talk to you later. Cheers. All right. Well, we all. It made it to the end. 

Aaron: Yeah, if you're here, there's no dessert, or actually this is the dessert.

This is where the dessert. 

Alex: There's one little story that I wanted to share because Brian mentioned Stuart Mulder over at Microsoft and Stuart was running the Action Arcade Strategy Group, which Shannon Loftus also mentioned. I was going to ask, but I was like, So Shannon was there 

Aaron: at the same time. 

Alex: Yes.

Yeah. So Ed Fries and Stuart Mulder were two of the folks that were, you know, basically putting together the games group at Microsoft in the very early days. [01:15:00] Folks that I worked closely with when I got to Microsoft. Uh, in fact, Stuart was one of the, was like kind of a mentor and sort of helped our studio integrate in along with Ed.

But my, my story is this. When we were finishing the game Oni, this was the game that we did in San Jose. We had a small team there, about 12 folks. We would every day pretty much, cause we were crunching, you know, it would like, we'd order dinner and then we'd go in the conference and we'd play Dreamcast for a little while.

It was golden eye, but eventually we were just playing virtual tennis. And that was the game that we were playing. And probably, I don't know, four months. It's a good game. Yeah. We were. Just constantly playing virtual tennis. So I virtual tennis might be one of the games I've logged the most hours in because of that experience.

And when we get to, when we get to Microsoft, Stuart Mulder invites. I think he, I think he invited me and my wife over to the house for dinner or something, and we go over, we have dinner and he had [01:16:00] little kids and we were just kind of like, getting, hanging out a little bit after dinner and he's like, Oh, let's, let's play some games.

You know, we're pretty competitive over here at the Mulder house. And he had a Dreamcast and he's like, what do you want to play? I'm like, I don't care, whatever. He goes. Let's play Virtua Tennis. Pretty good at this. I'm like, crack my knuckles, alright, put me in. We got something on the line here? It was just very amusing.

Wait, did you win? What did you do? Come on, come on, did I win? I won left handed with the controller upside down. He's like, how do you do that? Um, yep. He came up twice now in the last couple episodes, so it just rang twice. It started that memory. 

Aaron: That's a good memory. I went to a land party once, had a similar experience with.

It wasn't Duke Nukem. It was, um, the one after that. Oh my goodness, I'm blanking on the name. Anyways, we were playing, and I had been playing it by myself. Rise of the Triad? No, it wasn't Rise of the Triad. It was, um, the, where you play the, like, [01:17:00] monk? Oh, 

Alex: yeah, Shao, Shao, Shao 

Aaron: Lin? Shao Lin. 

Alex: Legends? 

Aaron: Uh. I can't remember the name.

Shadow Warrior. Oh, my Shadow Warrior. There you go. I just had, I just had broth, actually, for lunch, and it started to kick in. So I'm, like, getting tired. I'm gonna go take a nap after this. Whoa. It's all the salt getting old over here anyways. But, and I, the same thing, it's like, let's play this game. And I'm like, really?

Okay. And I just wiped the floor and nobody liked it. 

Alex: It's like my 

Aaron: only moment. 

Alex: Yeah. Just note to listener, it's not really a good way to make friends. If you go over to somebody's house and you go in like at a 10 and 0 run, you know, and you're kind of giggling on the inside, but all right, well, thank you everybody for joining us for this special two part.

Edition of the fourth curtain in which we got the full scoop from pal Brian Reynolds I hope you enjoyed it and we shall see you next time. See 

Aaron: you later, everybody Thank you for listening to the fourth curtain podcast The fourth curtain is a production of fourth curtain media [01:18:00] with community management by Doug Zartman Lovingly edited and mastered by Brian Hensley at noise floor sound solutions in Chicago to get a peek at upcoming Episodes or to sending questions to the show Visit our site at thefourthcurtain.

com and be sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening.