Donkey Kong Bananza, Fantastic 4 Games + Twisted Metal with Mike Mitchell

This is a head gun podcast.

Hey, buddy, I'm Tiger Weiger, and this is my video audition for the role of Link in the Legend of Zelda movie.

I know I'm a little older than you're targeting, but I think I can bring a lot to this character.

I'm very passionate for the franchise.

Anyway, let me get into the lines you had me prepare as link.

Okay, here we go.

Three, two,

one,

action.

Whoops.

And scene.

Ignore that last part.

That last part wasn't part of it.

Just ignore the last part.

The rest, the rest, you can, just ignore the last part.

Anyway, thank you so much for your consideration.

I look forward to seeing the movie in theaters starring me.

Oh, and uh, I know it's not in the script, but I can also do this:

do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

Not part of it.

We visit our old friends Donkey Kong and Johnny Storm as we discuss, I discuss, Donkey Kong Wonanza and my time working on Fantastic Four video games, plus a chat with Twisted Metals Mike Mitchell this week on Get Played.

Pod on.

Wow, it's Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between.

It's time to get played.

I'm Tiger Weiger.

Matt and Heather are both unavailable this week, so I am flying solo.

I've heard of solo leveling, but solo podcasting?

That's right.

Gonna be a bumpy ride.

Basically, based on our schedule, the choice was no episode, i.e.,

we would have an unlocked anime or an unlocked classic episode in the main feed or a Weiger solo episode.

Jesus Christ, I fucked up saying my own name.

Bad sign.

It's like a plane that crashes while taking off.

Just doesn't even make it off the runway.

It's like straight into a building.

It's a Weiger solo episode, just me, and that's the decision we made.

You know, I was like, I could leave the feed vacant.

Could not have a new plate episode for this week in a very consequential year of gaming.

But I stepped up to the plate.

And you know what?

I'm going to reverse momentum here.

I'm about to knock it out of the park.

That's right.

Jack up those expectations.

Also, I just want to address, maybe some of you are concerned that what happened is I murdered Heather and Matt, and I am recording in the Headgum Studios alongside their fresh corpses, possibly, I guess, holding Rochelle hostage, making her record my audio-suicide note.

That's not what happened.

Gotta admit, be compelling audio.

Who will be sharing that episode?

As for what to expect on our journey together, The Fantastic Four First Steps is about to release, which I'm actually kind of excited about in a way I haven't been for an MCU movie in a while.

And I have some history with the Fantastic Four franchise by virtue of my time in game development, where I worked on two Fantastic Four games.

And so I just figured I'd talk about my time doing that and what it was like working in game dev back in the aughts and what my experience was personally and what our experience was as a team trying to wrangle that IP, which is once again topical, into a game or games in this case.

So we'll talk about that for a bit.

And later in the episode, I have a chat with my Doughboys co-host, Mike Mitchell, about acting on the Peacock series Twisted Metal.

Great show.

I know what you're thinking.

Weiger, how'd you pull that booking off?

Yeah, I wear pretty long sleeves because I got a lot of tricks up them.

Maybe able to pull some rabbits out of hats.

Sometimes that includes locking down Mike Mitchell for a podcast record.

Gonna be a lot of fun, but first, let's get to the big news of this week in gaming.

From the Blue Sky account Steam DB, quote, Steam has had it a new rule allowing games that violate the rules and standards set forth by payment processors and card networks or internet network providers.

At the same time, many incest-themed games were removed from the store.

This is fucking bullshit.

Censorship is wrong.

What's next?

I'm just saying it's a slippery slope, people.

No, I mean, it honestly is a little bit of a,

you know, harbinger of sorrow, if you will, to quote a Metallica song.

I could just see the sanitization of the Steam store's content on the horizon to appease, you know, whatever, totalitarian governments, including our own,

or just various corporate interests.

For the most part, Steam has been pretty good about that sort of thing.

But, you know,

it's a little bit of a bummer to see them sort of starting to kowtow to the demands of, you know, payment processors.

What are you going to do?

It's interesting, like, like, I'm such a Steam guy, as I have been for a long time, especially as a, as a PC gamer.

And it's just, it's been so transformative for gaming,

in particular, indie gaming, but all gaming, and just as a digital distribution platform that seems to be, for the most part, a fairly benevolent force.

And, you know, there is a bummer future where Valve is bought by private equity or something, or

the Steam asset is sold off to some predatory corporation, and kind of what's cool about it is stripped away, and all these restrictions are placed upon it.

And it, you know, as we've seen, as we've witnessed things like Tumblr, it doesn't take much to turn a thriving platform into a digital graveyard.

So hopefully that's not the case.

But, you know, minor bummer out there.

The big news, of course, is that the Zelda cast was announced.

I'll just read this from IGN.

Nintendo has confirmed the lead actors for its upcoming live-action The Legend of Zelda movie.

Zelda will be played by Bo Braggison and Link by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth.

I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing either of those names correctly.

Bragason, 21, previously appeared in Netflix fantasy adventure series Renegade Nell, as well as BBC crime drama adaptation The Jetty.

Ainsworth, aged just 16, has only a handful of roles to his name, though notably appeared in Netflix horror series The Haunting of Bly Manor.

I think in the aftermath of the Mario movie and the the way that was cast, and you know, I like the Super Mario Bros.

movie on balance, a lot of us were concerned that Nintendo was just going to be star chasing with its IP.

And this actually makes me think that instead what they were doing is

giving a lot of authority to Illumination

and how, you know, they cast movies, because Illumination very much does have that philosophy, that star chasing sort of perspective, as we see chiefly in Despicable Me, but also in Secret Life of Pets and what have you.

I mean, if you look look at the Despicable Me franchise, it's just like perpetually placing some of the most zeitgeisty people at the core of its casting,

or just big stars, you know, Steve Corell, the time Despicable Me One comes out in 2010, Jason Siegel, very hot.

Also, funnily, Russell Brand, who's in a few of the movies.

But yeah, consistently, that's just how they've cast things.

I mean, I think I can say vaguely that I did some work on an illumination project, and very much, that's just sort of their internal calculus.

And so, again, just going back to it, I believe what Nintendo is doing here is they're just sort of like, look, the, the, whatever Western collaborator we're entrusting with our IP, we're just going to let them do things the way they're doing them.

I, I, yeah, I'm not saying that they're, they're completely hands-off in the process, but it does kind of feel like they're sort of trusting their process.

You know, and so it feels like what they're happening here with Wes Ball directing the Zelda movie, they're just sort of saying, like, you know, do it the way you want to do it.

At least that's purely inference on my part.

I could be completely, you know, wrong or full of shit.

But I also feel like casting unknowns, or relatively unrelative unknowns, I should say.

They have credits, but you know, they're not household names, is the best hope for this movie and actually gives me some optimism for it.

28 Years Later, I'm sure a lot of you have seen.

If you haven't, check it out.

It's a fantastic movie,

one of the best of the year so far.

And I don't think it relies on having seen previous films of the franchise.

In fact, I can say Natalie saw it without having seen the previous 28 movies.

28 movies.

Sounds like there's 28 movies in the franchise previously.

That'd really be something.

Meaning 20, the previous 28 movies, meaning 28 days later, 28, is it weeks later?

It can't be weeks.

Is it weeks?

It maybe is weeks.

I wish someone was here to tell me if it was weeks.

Oh, there's no way to know whether or not it was weeks.

Anyway, the kid in that movie is, again, a relative unknown, and I believe only has a few credits.

We've talked about him before.

Is Alfie Williams the actor?

Just absolutely a fantastic performance.

And so you hope you can wrangle something like that out of a

child actor, a child.

One of them's 21, one of them's 16, so

an older kid, but out of a young actor.

And again,

I think this puts me in a place place where, okay, it feels like they're maybe having a little bit of creative leeway.

They're not just having to star chase, you know, by command from the top.

And so hopefully that the results in the kind of movie that the Zelda franchise deserves.

All right.

We should get into the show.

Hold on.

I missed a call.

My phone on Do Not Disturb, which I guess I should be doing.

We're recording.

Looks like I missed a call from maybe the merchant.

Let me just play this voicemail here.

Hey, it's me, the Resident Evil Merchant, and I can't be there this week

because I joined a cult.

And

that might be in over my head.

But I want to ask my friends,

what are you playing?

Wow.

Thanks so much, Resident Evil Merchant.

Really nice of them to do that.

on their off week.

I have been playing Donkey Kong Bonanza.

And let me tell you,

I'm having the time of my fucking life.

What a fucking video game.

Oh, banana.

Just been saying that to myself for two days.

Oh, banana.

That's from Donkey Kong 64, right?

Is that the genesis of that?

Awesome to have it again.

If that is correct, actually, where it's from, that's not a Mandela effect.

By the way, speaking of DK64, where's everybody on the Donkey Kong rap?

Because I feel like My personal journey with the Donkey Kong rap mirrors my experience with the Star Wars prequel trilogy, whereas they originally came out and I was kind of like, what is this?

I don't know if I like this.

And then some time passed and I was like, wait, I think I love this.

And I'm not saying the prequels are flawless films, but they're ambitious films.

They're interesting films.

And that trilogy is cohesive.

And I think it really lands a plane.

Unlike the Disney trilogy, which, you know, really peaks with Last Jedi and then Rise of Skywalker is a fucking mess.

I feel like it's a grandpa meme now, the bro shake from Predator.

But if that meme still existed, if that's not a

meme from a land before time, I feel like you'd have like Last Jedi lovers, Last Jedi haters on each side, and in the middle where the bro shake was happening would be Rise of Skywalker sucks.

We can't get into it.

But seriously, what the fuck was going on with Execle?

How'd they build all those star destroyers?

In a bunch of fucking Union shipyards up there on this remote planet hidden by the Sith?

The fuck are you talking about?

It also conflates the Sith with the Empire, which is like, that's less interesting than the idea that these things are separate with their own agendas, their own sort of spheres of influence, and

Palpatine and Sidious are manipulating them both.

Anyway,

back to the Donkey Kong rap.

At first, I was like, you know, I'm playing Donkey Kong 64, and that game's a bloated mess in a way that Donkey Kong Bonanza very much is not so far.

I also 100% of that game for some unknown reason.

Fuck, was I doing with my life?

The Donkey Kong rap.

So they're finally here performing for you.

If you know the words, you can join in too.

Put your hands together if you want to clap.

as we take you through this monkey rap.

Starts pretty strong.

DK Donkey Kong, we all know.

I think a lot of the verses are kind of forgotten and people kind of focus on the first verse.

And I'll just do a little bit of this.

He's the leader of the bunch.

You know him well.

He's finally back to kick some tail.

Fine.

His coconut gun can fire in spurts.

If he shoots you, it's going to hurt.

That's where it loses me

and a lot of other people.

Spurts and hurt feels like a bit of a strained rhyme.

That said, Grant Kirkhope, the composer, whose music makes an appearance in Donkey Kong Bonanza, as does David Wise's compositions in, you know, adjusted, remixed forms, was trying to

make a funny, jokey sort of rap.

It wasn't meant to be taken at face value.

So I think once I later hit on that, they're like, oh, the composer was in on the joke.

And not in a way, not in like a Tommy Wissau, like retconning, like everyone's laughing at this thing that was my passion project.

So I'm just going gonna all claim it was a joke all along so i seem like a genius genius but like in an actual like no this is a this is a believable earnest sort of way

it made me actually appreciate it and i think it was go back to my back to my prequels reassessment and back to kind of the timeline you know for this

uh change of heart

when the song appears in smash brothers melee

Then I'm just like, wait, this is fucking great.

I love the DK rap.

That's how quick that turned into nostalgia for me.

It may honestly have just been hitting me too.

Like, this hits me as a cynical teenager, and then I reconnect with it as a more earnest adult, even though it was just a few years.

God, how long was that?

Was the

delay between Donkey Kong 64 and Melee?

Five years?

No way to know.

Less than that.

Yeah, less than that.

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Anyway, Donkey Kong Bonanza, which I'm supposed to be talking about, designed by a Nintendo EPD.

Kazuya Takahashi, one of the directors, previously worked on Final Fantasy XV.

Beyond that, a a lot of Nintendo veterans, it seems like, on the team.

When I get into talking about Fantastic Four games, I might talk about the challenge of making a character feel powerful.

It's specifically like physically powerful and how much of that needs to be accomplished with like, you know, hit frames and,

you know, screen shake and sound design, all of these, these aesthetic considerations that kind of force feedback that really like hammer home how potent a character is, how a character has real weight to their movement and their attacks.

Donkey Kong Bonanza absolutely accomplishes that.

It is there so forefronted, it's so effective, you feel like Juggernaut.

It invited comparisons to, you know, Hulk Ultimate Destruction, a game I have a lot of affection and nostalgia for.

And yeah, it very much kind of like feels like that in a modern sense.

The train deformation is really something to marvel at, just how much you can completely just fuck up an environment.

I remember when Duke Nukem Nukem 3D had like one set piece where you could destroy a building, and that feeling mind-blowing.

And then later on, you have games like Red Faction, I feel like, was the first big one I remember where destroying terrain was a big part of it.

Obviously, we live in a post-Minecraft world, the

most influential game of the century, and maybe

one of the biggest movies, I guess, biggest franchises in existence.

And yeah, this definitely goes all, you know, basically almost all the way to the Minecraft extreme of just being able to do whatever you want in terms of altering the play space.

The other thing I really respond to is just a sense of forward momentum.

And again, that goes back to the juggernaut comparison, but it's just like, just really feels like you're, like you're going for it.

And I think the design decision to make dedicated buttons for punch forward, punch up, and punch down is one of those things where it's like, that's not an

obvious choice.

That's a thing I feel like they go through with play testing and prototyping and just having the time to figure out how do we want to make Donkey Kong feel like Donkey Kong.

And it works so well.

So used to altering the directionality of an attack via, you know, like a like stick movement or D-pad movement.

And to have it just like mapped to a dedicated button is so satisfying.

And again, makes the action so frenetic and so kinetic.

I

jump map to the A button is maybe a little bit awkward.

It's a little bit of a reach, but also like

you're just kind of doing less of that due to the nature of traversal here.

I love the Pauline reveal.

I wish Matt was here because I would tell Matt

the way Pauline emerges, I was shocked.

And I think she's a really fun character and she's a great sidekick.

Also,

you get different wardrobe here.

I love changing my clothes in a game.

And I love that they're just not purely cosmetic.

Some of them give little advantages, you know?

It's really fun.

It's really rewarding.

The Minecraft comparisons are obvious, but like,

there's also like a Wario land feel to it of just collecting so much loot, collecting so much treasure.

I love

how many collectibles there are.

I love how large your pool of

whatever the currency is exactly.

I don't know.

I just feel like I'm picking up a lot of like gold shit.

Obviously, you got the big bananas you're busting up.

And then you're an ooh, banana

doesn't get old to me.

I'll take that on a loop.

I just love collecting a lot of shit.

You're just running around, you're fucking shit up, you're picking stuff up, you're making a mess, and you're reaping the rewards.

It's so gratifying.

I've been kind of like thinking about development a lot naturally in preparation for this episode.

And like a developer told me was talking about the magic of Diablo 2 back when I worked in the industry.

And they were basically just saying,

it's pretty simple, constant rewards.

And that's what this game feels like, just constant rewards.

Vampire Survivors, a game that owes its existence in some level, several steps removed, to like a Diablo 2 and other dungeon crawlers,

is a constant rewards game.

And that's what this feels like.

I love how different terrains interact with each other.

Again, just such a really thoughtful design choice.

that gives it another layer.

I mean, it's being a layer is because you are descending through layers as you're progressing from biome to biome, but just giving a

that certain certain ones are more powerful, certain ones interact differently with different enemies.

It's it's it's very fun and just adds depth to what could be a fairly simple destruction mechanic.

Picking up big chunks of terrain is so satisfying, just ripping shit out of the earth can just makes you feel powerful, makes you feel potent.

Also, there's a thing that I think is just a convention of 3D platformers now.

And honestly, maybe just owes it all to Mario Sunshine.

Is that the first time we saw, hey, there's these little sublevels, these little obstacle courses that you will enter in every, you know, major, like a main level?

I mean, there's a, there's a similar thing in an Astro bot, which this has naturally been compared to.

It's those levels here, those sublevels within the main levels where you're just grabbing more bananas and hearing, oh, banana.

Not even the last time I say it this episode.

Those are super fun.

I like, I've enjoyed just stumbling upon them just to see what's inside of it.

The use of music, both

in the scoring, but also mechanically, that it has an element in here.

And then the tuning fork checkpoints, that's what those are, right?

Really fun, just in terms of making the world feel more alive and thematically coherent.

Sound design is really great.

Again, just another element of making the character feel powerful.

And from the beginning, too, it's just, it's kind of just this power fantasy from the get-go, just from that initial mind tutorial space, just being able to wreck house right away.

And then, of course, the bonanza mode, which again, first time I encountered that, I was shocked.

The only thing I would say that are a little bit of a hiccup for me, and these have been commented on by others, the frame drops are pretty noticeable and kind of a bummer for what hope, you know, you'd think is like, hey, this is the big new step up in hardware.

And, you know, that's what you're encountering some when the screen's getting particularly messy.

Not a deal breaker, certainly, but a little bit of a bummer.

Also, the camera and man, camera design in a 3D game is so difficult.

I can't imagine how much many more levels of difficulty it adds to,

again, have this fully deformable terrain.

But there were some times I feel like when I was playing, even early on, where I felt like the camera was getting lost and I couldn't quite tell what I was looking at.

Again, not a huge deal, but just minor detractions that I feel obligated to add if I'm giving my take.

I've been getting a lot of use out of the Switch 2 Pro controllers.

I've put a few hours into this game, and it's my first time really playing it for using it for extending stretches to play a game.

I really like it.

I was not expecting it to be such a step up from the Switch Pro controller on the Switch 1.

Vanilla Switch, I guess you could call it, but vanilla is a flavor.

It doesn't mean plain.

It's an exotic bean.

I really,

you know, I like the under buttons, the paddles.

I think it's really comfortable to hand.

The force feedback again was very effective.

And I just kind of like it aesthetically.

Like, I like it.

It's got kind of a, it's not a purely black colorway of the OG Switch 1

Pro controller.

It's got a kind of like, you know, it's got some black and white sort of coexisting.

Pleasing to look at.

Yeah, but I kind of feel like that's the way to play this one.

I haven't really tried it in handheld mode, honestly.

Anyway, a friend asked me, should I get a Switch 2 for Donkey Kong Bonanza?

I think my answer for that is an annoying maybe.

If you're planning on getting a Switch 2 anyway, at some point, and you're not particularly cash constrained where you want to wait for a price drop, and who knows when that will come from Nintendo, then yeah, I think it's a good enough game to get a Switch to.

Certainly, if you're someone who has a passion for the Donkey Kong franchise or just loves 3D platformers, then I would say, yeah, get a Switch 2.

Beyond that, I'm still not sure if it's quite a system seller for gamers in general.

I think it's the pretty particular case of

I either love, love these type of games, in which case you probably already have one.

You probably already have Donkey Kong Bonanza and have played more of it than I have.

I'm telling you what a fucking idiot I am for my dumbass takes.

But

like, or, you know, or if you're someone who's like, I just, I'm just going to get a Switch to

eventually anyway, then yeah, I think this is a good enough reason to jump.

But beyond that, yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I just, I don't know if there's enough of a library to justify it beyond that.

I also have not investigated how long this game is.

It feels like it's going to be fairly beefy, but you know, I haven't looked at how long to beat.

I guess I could do that real quick.

Hold on.

How long to beat?

Is there anyone on

Donkey Kong Bonanza yet?

Okay, preliminary looks like, wow, main plus extra close to 40 hours.

So this is a big boy.

Main story, 18 and a half hours.

Again, how many people have actually reported?

Only seven people have reported.

So, you know, it's maybe a little

pretty small sample size.

It'll be interesting to see how this holds up versus Mario Odyssey.

I've had some friends already like give like some like, this might be like a Mario Odyssey for the Switch, which, if that's the case,

I mean, you know, we're talking about one of the very best Switch games, or if it's an Astrobot, which I, you know, it's the defining 3D platformer of this generation, pretty much.

Such a marvelous game.

I feel like I'll just say this: I'm having the same amount of fun I was having with Astrobot.

I'm not quite as charmed yet,

but part of that is because I was bringing a lot more

pre-existing expectations into a Donkey Kong game than it was into an Astrobot game, having basically just played Astro's Playroom previously.

And so it's kind of an

unpair.

Fuck.

Rochelle, you got to help me out here.

Change the P into an F.

I was going to say unfair.

Let's work your magic.

Kind of an unfair comparison.

I had unfair and comparison.

That's worthy.

The fair

in unfair and the pair in comparison.

I conflated them

and made the word unpair.

Had an apple earlier.

That was kind of an unpair.

Michelle, help me out here.

Fucking dying.

Juice this with some audience applause or something.

Make me look good.

It's kind of an unfair comparison with Astrobot.

I do love Astrobot so much.

I mean, I would love for this game to be as good as Astrobot.

And maybe we'll get there.

But man, I was just saying, I picked this thing up.

I was like, I'll mess around with it a little bit on launch night.

Could not stop playing the fucking thing.

I'm like up past my bedtime.

Like bleary-eyed in the morning.

Cause I was playing Donkey Kong Bonanza.

The big smile on my face like a fucking dipshit.

Wrinkles in my brain just smoothing out.

Having the time of my fucking life.

It rocks.

What are the best Donkey Kong games?

I do have a lot of fondness just for straight up Donkey Kong.

I played the shit out of Donkey Kong.

I love that game.

It's very much of its time.

There's a lot of that design that feels a little bit clunky, but it is a really, really compelling arcade game.

Donkey Kong Country is great,

obviously.

I think a lot of, you know, a lot of people came at me, or came at us, I would guess say more generally, when we were doing our rare tier list and we're kind of down a little bit on Donkey Kong Country 3,

which I know the least of the Donkey Kong, remember the least of the Donkey Kong Country games.

In fact, I don't think, I don't know if I've ever finished Donkey Kong Country 3, but I'm being completely honest.

I probably should.

But some people are coming at us and saying, hey, actually, y'all were

wrong.

Donkey Kong Country 3 is maybe the strongest or is the strongest of the Donkey Kong Country franchise.

I believe you.

I believe Donkey Kong Enthusiasts when you're telling me that.

That's just not my memory of it.

But then again, you also look at the timing of it.

In North America, the Donkey Kong Country 3 for Super Nintendo came out after the release of the Nintendo 64.

So, like, it just felt so dated and like such a retread at the time that it was kind of hard to evaluate it with clear eyes.

I think if I played it now, I might be open to its uh magic a little bit more.

But I really love Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze.

That game is awesome.

I think Retro did an amazing job with that.

And then I, yeah,

I don't know how much we open it up to spin-offs, but I have so much fondness for Donkey Konga.

What a cool design.

Anyway, Donkey Kong Bonanza.

What can I say besides?

oh, banana?

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All right, let's get into some devtales of my time working on Fantastic Four and Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer.

As you may know, if you've listened to previous episodes of Get Played, or honestly, episodes Doughboys, kind of can't fucking shut up about it.

I worked in game development in my 20s.

It was my first career, the first thing I wanted to do, or rather thought I wanted to do.

And so I did that for about a decade.

Then I thought I wanted to do writing.

So I transitioned to that and was a TV writer for a decade.

And then I realized what I really wanted to do was nothing.

So I'm a podcaster.

But it was

my video game career as it was really came from a passion for gaming.

And it was like my favorite hobby.

It was the thing I loved the most.

It was that, and I guess music, just by virtue of me playing in orchestras and bands as a kid so much.

But, but gaming was number one.

And just the idea that I could actually get a job working in the industry, that that was not a thing that was actually, that was purely aspirational, but was in fact tangible for me at a relatively young age, I was just so excited to pursue it and

so quickly became jaded and disillusioned.

Probably like, you know, being a jingoistic, anti-communist American going into the, you know, not being drafted, but volunteering for combat duty in Vietnam.

And yes, I am comparing myself to a combat veteran for working in video games.

In fact, I'd appreciate a thank you for your service every now and then.

It's kind of like that.

You know, you're like, oh, hey, yeah, let's go to war.

I love America.

And then you get into shit and you're just immediately like, this is fucking war as hell.

What the fuck am I doing here?

What the fuck are we doing here?

It's sadly kind of how I felt.

And part of that was because of the games that I was tasked with working on.

And before I really dig in, I am going to tell some stories that involve some people that I worked with.

And I'm going to just try to avoid saying names in this for the most part.

I weighed how I wanted to handle this.

And I just kind of realized I'm in an asymmetrical position to have this platform and be able to just sort of bloviate about my side of all these stories where even if I feel like I'm not being unfair to somebody or if I'm making somebody look good, I don't know if they want to be shouted out here.

So I'm just going to, I'm just going to err on the side of I'm just not going to say names.

Except for one guy, Doug.

You know who you are.

I don't think I actually worked with a Doug.

Fuck, did I?

As I was preparing this episode and doing the chronology, I realized, and this is just one of those insane things about aging, this was fully 20 years ago.

I was generally kind of say like, oh, yeah, I work in game design.

I worked at what, like 10, 15 years ago.

No, I started in 2004.

Holy fucking shit.

From my game design career until now is an infant who can order a beer at a bar.

Anyway, Fantastic Four, the Tim Story movie that these games were based off of, released in 2005.

So again, 20 years ago, basically 20 years removed from the Fantastic Four First Steps.

So how I got started in video game design?

I got a job.

I just kind of applied for it.

Didn't really have an in in my memory.

It's possible I did, but I don't think I did.

I think I just kind of cold applied for it, a QA customer support job at Activision.

And I worked there for about a year.

This was after I dropped out of school.

I worked an IT job for a time.

Then I got this job that was more related to video gaming, even though it was not as well paying.

In fact, it was pretty terribly paying.

But I was working in the video game industry.

And

yeah, I think I've talked about working in QA and customer support before.

The QA at Activision at the time was in a basement that was just absolutely clogged with consoles and computers and monitors and just shoulder to shoulder with the sweatiest, stinkiest fellow gamers.

It was an absolute sort of nightmare environment.

It felt like a sweatshop.

And

so you were working down there and I was working the graveyard shift and that was another thing that came to me and it's like, oh man, why was I doing that?

In fact, one of my credits, and I didn't realize this,

one of my credits in

game development.

was on a real-time strategy game as a third shift tester.

For some reason, they credited those of us who were working in the graveyard shift separately for the rest of QA.

But that was the sort of thing because it was basically 24-hour crunching.

They just had bodies working on these builds around the clock.

And I was one of them for a time.

I didn't last very long in Graveyard Shift.

I actually kind of thrived in customer support, which was answering phones and emails,

largely from dismayed parents, but sometimes from frustrated gamers.

And it was almost always someone who a game wouldn't run on their PC because they just didn't have a powerful enough video card.

That was like 90% of it.

But my technique was basically just being more mad at their problem than they were.

And it was amazing how much that would calm people down where they'd be, this fucking, this is fucking bullshit.

I can't believe this fucking game.

I paid 50 bucks for this.

And I'm just like, I know.

What the?

That's insane.

And you bought it for your son's birthday?

That's so unfair.

And then all of a sudden they're just like, oh, yeah, you know, it's, you know, it's all right.

We'll figure it out.

You know what I mean?

Like, it's, for whatever reason, that would kind of simmer them down, de-escalate everything.

I think I've told some of these stories before, but I, uh,

we had a regular caller who'd call in the customer support,

and he'd always ask us to, if he could, if we could physically mail him updates for games.

And we had to be like, no, yeah, you can, you can go here, you can download the patch, you can download the latest update, you know, but we can't like send you a CD with a new build.

It just doesn't kind of work that way.

And I'd be a nice, nice, nice fella.

But he'd be like, oh, man, okay, well,

I don't have an internet connection because I have a porn addiction.

And I can't, you know, there's just too much temptation.

So

I guess I just can't play the new version.

Felt bad for the guy, but, you know, I wonder what, what became of that?

Because how do you avoid having an internet connection now?

You can't, right?

Can you do anything without an internet connection in 2025?

It was something of an option back in the early aughts, but now there's no way to opt out.

I mean, how do you do banking even?

How do you do anything?

How can you get on a plane?

Is this guy just, you know,

basically a shut-in with no contact with the outside world?

Did he become like a shed manifesto person?

Or is he on broadband again?

Is he wired in?

Fucking cranking it all day long.

I love this.

Why did I ever enter recovery?

This is the thing I like the most.

Sick fuck.

You know, he's into some nasty shit, too.

Sitting there pulling his pud.

In a fucking library?

There are kids there, man.

You're looking at four?

Pulling yourself off in a public library?

Anyway, I also had

a time where...

At the end of each day,

we would have a meeting, and the leads on the team would go around and talk to everyone who worked in the call center about all of the things that we'd happened that day, if there were any trends, if anyone was calling about the same problems, the same games, if there were any particular notable incidents.

So, the way that would go, they just go sort of go around and be like,

Hey, Mike, anything happen?

All right,

Juan, anything happened over there?

You know, like, how was your day?

Just that sort of thing.

So, we're going around, you're going around the circle.

It goes to everybody

that this is my team, this is the team lead.

This is my supervisor.

He points to me.

He says, All right, how about you, cocksucker?

This is my boss saying this to me.

And I'm just like, ah, yeah,

yeah, I don't know what the fuck, I don't know what the fuck to say.

Another guy on the team raises his hand and says, no, that was me.

I turned out an angry dad had called the guy a cocksucker on the phone,

but he thought

the lead thought it was me.

But I'm just sitting there being called a cocksucker in a conference room by next up in the chain of command contemplating an hr complaint

we had fun it all worked out fine there was also just a thing that happened on that side of the job where constantly um uh the the guy who worked above him like the the lead of the department would go around and just have like a big stack of like

you know X-Men Origins, Wolverine.

I think that was the game.

I think that's what it was called.

I think it was the same title as the movie.

And he's like, hey, anyone want this game?

And we'd be like, yeah, all right.

I'll take a free game.

You know, I'm making $9 an hour in customer support.

Why not?

I think eventually got it bumped up to like $11.82.

And so, like, I, you know, I got, I just got stacks of free games.

And I remember when there was this guy who used to give me rides.

And I would, uh,

when I was in school, and I just had all these free games from working at Activision.

And so, like, I just, one day he was like, hey, man, thanks so much for, for, you know, giving me a lift.

Here you go.

And I just handed him like a stack of four games.

He was like, oh, holy shit.

Like, he's like, you know, because it was like, I handed him, I handed a college student $200, basically.

But for me, I was just like getting them all the time.

Anyway, years later, I meet up with another guy who worked in customer support at Activision.

And we're just talking about people on it.

It was like, hey, whatever happened to, you know, our boss?

What happened?

He's like, oh, you didn't hear?

Yeah, he got fired.

He was stealing all those games.

This guy was just, I mean, it's kind of an awesome thing to do.

Very Robin Hood.

Just be like lifting inventory from Activision Corporate and just handing it out to your staff.

Anyway, after working in Activision,

I went back to school briefly.

This is at UCLA.

Then in 2004, my college roommate who had already graduated and was working in game development at this company, Seven Studios, told me there was a design opening and I should submit for it.

So I submitted and I interviewed and passed a design test and I was hired.

I was a math major in college, so I had, you know, computer programming knowledge.

Plus, I had some short films I've written, which I could use as samples, and I had some writing samples.

So I kind of had like my kind of both buckets of like

I could handle the technical side and I could handle the creative side.

And that's, you know, ideally what you're looking for.

And really, I guess in any part of gaming, I mean, it's all it's all a creative field, but like particularly in design.

I was a junior designer.

I believe my starting salary was $35,000 a year, which even in 2004 money was not very much.

And the hours were pretty punishing, which we'll get into.

And I was hired mid-development cycle for the game that would become 2005's Fantastic Four with a number four.

Now, I looked up

this game on Moby Games.

Yeah, I hadn't read anything about it in many years.

Here's the verbatim description taken for Moby Games.

This game is a licensee of the 2005 movie Fantastic Four.

Unlike Unlike many licensed titles, this third-person action game in the vein of the Onomusha or Devil May Cry series only takes the base of its plot from the actual movie, then liberally changes it to

make for better gameplay.

Very flattering comparisons to Onomusha and Devil May Cry.

I'm a defender of the work we were able to do on that game, but I do not think it's in that territory.

But that's certainly what it was aspiring to be.

Generally, the game brings in more content for the comic books than the movie, particularly considering the villains that appear.

While the movie pretty much only concerned itself with Victor Von Doom, aka Dr.

Doom, as its supervillain of choice, I believe in the movie it was Victor Van Dam.

And I believe that was the case in the game as well.

They did some retconning because Fox was, I guess, concerned that Victor Von Doom sounded too stupid, but Victor

Van Dam was okay for some reason, but he could still be Doctor Doom.

It's the same reason Galactus became a gas.

It was sort of these arbitrary changes to IB, taking away what was interesting about it

to, I guess, make it less weird for mainstream audiences, but

in so doing, you just make it like boring and alienate everybody.

As

Victor Von Doom, aka Dr.

Doom is its supervillain of choice.

The game brings in various characters from the comic books as well.

The Mole Man, the Puppet Master, or Diablo, to name a few.

The gameplay usually consists of walking the heroic title characters around a level and beating up various enemies that cross their path.

They're mission objectives, but usually the only way to achieve them leads through the enemies, and as usual, the only way to to fail them is to be overwhelmed by the bad guys.

People yields points, which can be used to upgrade characters with new special moves or unlock various bonus materials.

And there's also co-op mode, which it talks about.

I ultimately have level design, sound design, and additional dialogue credits

on this game.

So, but like I said, it's mid-development when I join, and I'm very much just thrown right into it, like right into the fire.

And I quickly learn

the development lead has a quick fire trigger.

I won't say who specifically, I certainly not gonna say a name, but

my second week, Friday of my second week, a guy got pulled into their office and that designer from my team, from my immediate team, same game, same department, was fired.

Now, in the run-up to that,

this guy had been, this lead had been asking the other designers, just been kind of checking in with them, I later learned, and being like, hey, how's Walker doing?

Do you think he can handle it?

And I never got clarity on this.

But

it was strongly implied that I was hired as this guy's replacement while he still had a job there.

And so I basically had a two-week audition.

to see whether or not I could handle it.

And if so, you know, I could keep the job.

Otherwise, I guess I would have been fired.

Maybe that guy stays.

It was just like fucking grim and ruthless.

The studio later did the same thing where they hired four designers for two slots.

And thankfully, they had the good sense because all of them were good to be like, you know what?

We're just going to create room in the budget to keep all four of these guys.

That was on a different game.

But it's just like, that's a fucking insane way of doing business.

And this is my introduction to it.

This is my introduction to the industry.

So

there was also another guy I learned about because a lot of people got fired there.

There was a guy who got fired years before I joined, but it was kind of an infamous story at the studio.

I guess he got fired for cause,

and then IT was going through his hard drive for his work computer.

And he had just like, you know, gigs of porno.

But it was all specifically like

guys, dicks, and balls

with like ice cream on it.

Like he had a specific like melting ice cream over a nutsack fetish.

I had relayed that to a British guy later.

And he said, sounds like he really got sacked.

I was like, that's very clever.

So the studio is located in Brentwood, California, which is a very fancy pants neighborhood in L.A.

It was not a fancy pants company.

In fact, they had a tiny headquarters.

They were crammed in this too small office space.

I remember they had programmers working in a converted closet.

That's how like just cramped it was.

Eventually, mid-development, in fact,

the whole company moves to a larger space in West L.A.

which was much more of a nutritional office space.

But for the first few months, we were really, really crammed in there.

In this era of development, off-the-shelf solutions for game engines weren't as common.

And you also were a lot less likely to encounter robust middleware, like, you know, say the Havoc Physics engine or Speed Tree or whatever the fuck, you know, you just didn't have as many of those tools and you didn't have these commonalities where you could kind of go in and immediately get on the saddle because, like, you know, in the same way that if you know Microsoft Excel or Photoshop, you can go to a job where knowledge of those programs is part of the expectation and you know what to do.

Here, the studio had a bespoke engine, as most studios did for their projects.

Part of the frustration of working in that era of development is that

skill transference was not as direct.

So, like these days, I'm not saying these days as modern developers have it easy at all.

It's still

an extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming job.

But

just the idea of having, you know, if you know Unreal Engine or you know Unity, it feels like you can kind of have a lot of job opportunities.

And in fact, you're likely to be working at a studio that is maybe, you know, using one of those or some other major engine where the skills are transferable.

But if you're going someplace, and in my case, working for years at the same studio that has its own internal technology, and then all of a sudden you get an opportunity for

a job somewhere else, as I did at a couple of studios, Pandemic was one place where I was looking for work, a RIP studio that had some great games and was shut down, I believe, by EA, maybe Activision.

Well, let's do fucking publishers who all they do is buy studios and then shut them down.

And

Infinity Ward was another one, which is responsible for birthing the Call of Duty franchise.

And both of those just required design tests that were like, yeah, hey, learn our

internal tool and apply it just as a condition for employment.

And it's just like, you know, you're working a full-time job.

You're talking about something that's going to be a week's

worth of work on top of the more than a week's worth of work you're doing in full-time development.

Anyway, so the studio had this internal engine, internally developed engine that was used for its first two games, Legion, the Legend of Excalibur, which was an action RTS hybrid, and Defender, which was a remake of the classic game.

And Defender was their 3D Defender was pretty good and may have just been 7 Studios' strongest game overall.

I didn't work on either of those games.

Those had been published previously.

As such, however, though, it was developed for, again, an RTS game.

And Defender is a, you know, a vehicle combat game.

It's a shooter.

Basically, you're flying over terrain.

So it had a lot of limitations that were not necessarily...

an issue with Fantastic Four's original design, but with the design it turned into,

it became a little bit of a stumbling block, and it certainly was an issue for me as a level designer.

More on that in a second.

And by in a second, I mean right now.

The Fantastic Four game had been in development for a few years previously.

Shortly before I am hired, in fact, I think part of the reason I'm hired and part of the reason they're staffing up

pretty rapidly

is because they had the comic license.

Seven Studios had the comic license for an F4 game that Activision was going to publish.

Then the Fox movie gets greenlit.

And now all of a sudden, this Fantastic Four comics game, which, as is my understanding in the original design and some of the original concepts I've seen, was supposed to be a traditional, more side-scrolling beat-em-up, was turned into more of a 3D character action game.

And

it created just like a lot of weirdness because you had a lot of assets, a lot of story that was created.

Some of what I was saying in the Moby Games summary earlier, where it's talking about like, there's things from the character, from the comics, but there's also things from the movie.

Yeah, that's because all the comic stuff was generated for that original concept, and then the movie stuff was grafted on top of it and sort of, you know, kludged in there to try to make it work as a tie-in game.

Nowadays, I don't think they'd overthink it to that degree.

I think there's this a little bit more of a sophistication in terms of IP and a little bit more respect for the audience.

And, you know, after the,

you know, the Rock City Batman games and the Sony Spider-Man games, where it's like,

well, it doesn't have to be a direct tie-in to the movie.

Like, I feel like if they came up with just a random Fantastic Four game now, maybe they are, that had no real connection, did not have the likenesses to the actors in the movies, in the movie, the new movie, the MCU, MCU movie, and no one would give a fuck.

They'd just be like, excited to play a Fantastic Four game.

But back then, they were like, we're trying to make it pretty one-to-one.

And I talked about the engine.

It made more sense for the original design, but not for the redesign because it was pretty limited in terms of what it could do for verticality.

And, you know, again, just trying to make a modern feeling, modern, meaning the odd sense, 3D game without much vertical movement or with just having to fake that,

it felt pretty unnatural.

And

it just all had a little bit of a jank to it.

So we had to work around that.

It was also integrating the movie lore and the story was a little bit clunky.

They retconned the Ultimate Fantastic Four comics lore to correspond to the Fox movie with Victor Van Damme and Gas Lactis.

And they rebuilt the character models, as I mentioned, to be likenesses for the actors in the movies.

There was a lot of,

I mean, it's just like tough for the art department to try to rejigger all that on the fly, make the existing animations work with different character proportions.

There were just challenges there.

So, for this internal engine, this bespoke engine that we use for this game, we had an internally developed tool called UberTool,

which

I guess describing the workplace, if anyone's ever worked with CAD or if anyone's ever worked with like 3D Studio Max or Maya, it's kind of that sort of UX, you know?

You've got like an environment where you can do level layout, and then you've separately got,

you know, Windows where you can do scripting, and that's how you can handle flow of control, how you can handle like the

events that are happening

throughout the course of the game, when cutscenes are triggered,

where enemies spawn and so forth.

Because it's an

internally developed tool

with the GUI and it's kind of crude because

the programmers are making it, but they're just trying to make it to be kind of bare-bones functional.

They're not trying to give it all the bells and whistles of something that's like, again, a dedicated product like Unreal Engine.

It just was a

very functional tool, but just had a very high learning curve and no real manual, certainly,

you know, no YouTube tutorials to draw upon.

It was just kind of like learning, again,

trying to learn Photoshop or 3D Studio Max

and just by messing around, just by trial and error, just by and just by asking the guy next to you, hey, how do you do this?

And so, you know,

that was part of that two-week period, trial period, was just seeing like if I could get up to speed and learn how to use this thing.

Thankfully, I was able to figure it out and, you know, become quite fluent with it.

But again, it was a thing that was really a skill that was really only useful in that particular job.

As a video editor later in my career and was working at Funnier Die,

you know, like I knew like, I knew like Final Cut.

And then at a certain point, they switched internally to Adobe Premiere.

And so like, you know, that was kind of a lateral thing.

And I, because I knew Final Cut and I also knew Adobe After effects i was able to transfer some of those skills so i guess there is like uh just just in terms of like making 3d levels and and you know knowing how to script and lure python or whatever the fuck like there there was stuff that was indirectly transferable but it was certainly would there would never be not be any other development environment where you'd ever use uber tool which is what we used every day i did enjoy the parts of the job that were working with environment artists because again as a level designer that was my primary role that's mostly what i was doing figuring out how the level was laid out and figuring out what happened within it.

And a lot of that was working with an environment artist.

A lot of then the guys there were all so, so talented.

The people there were all super, super talented.

And it was really cool the way how you would, you would kind of just build a box and then just see them figure out the art that would layer on top of that and it would make it feel,

you know,

lived in and

just just aesthetically pleasing.

Combat was less my focus in my role, but I would like set up combat encounters.

I mean, that's just part of designing a level.

Like, you go into this space, and again, these are the waves that happen.

The character movesets I thought were pretty good from a combat standpoint.

Again, this is not stuff that I was really responsible for, but it was stuff that I thought worked well in the game.

The way I think Raid Richards, Mr.

Fantastic, played in particular, he had this kind of like dulsome stretching mechanic, but it also had like a little bit more of a floatiness to it, just using the flexibility of him.

And I thought the moves, I thought the way he played was very visually satisfying.

And he also had like a hacking mini game, which I had some,

you know,

I put some work into helping to design and implement.

And that was basically just like Pipe Dream.

But that was kind of fun.

I don't know.

I mean, it's just like kind of one of those things you just put it in because

I guess this should have a hacking mini game.

I don't know.

That's part of how you use like the.

uh the the smartest man in the world is that you just give him something that i guess i guess lets you you play that side of it, even though

some of his shit's just in a game just to give you something to do, you know?

And that's kind of what that felt like, but I did think it worked in context.

Ben Grimm, the thing I thought also played pretty fun.

He did feel powerful and he was really, you know, could really wreck house.

I really liked

from a design standpoint, combat design standpoint, that you could grab enemies and throw them off of ledges.

I always felt that was very satisfying as a way to

kill them.

Johnny Storm and Sue Storm, I think we were a little bit less successful with.

Johnny Storm, again, part of the limitation of the engine, we didn't really have a way for him to fly.

He was just basically hovering.

And so it was just a little bit less satisfying.

You know, you kind of want the sense of flight.

You want to be able to have

3D movement, but the engine wasn't really capable of that.

And or even if we could find a way to fake it,

it just would have felt, it just would have broken a lot of the way the levels were designed.

And, you know, you know, just like

it's, again, it's less of an issue if it's a side-scrolling beat-em-up because you don't feel that as much.

But if you're, if you're dealing with a 3D, fully 3D environment, it was, it was part of the

issue with rebuilding the plane in flight.

And Sue Storm, it was just like the game just didn't really have a stealth

system at all.

And so you couldn't really, you got to use kind of more of her force powers, her telekinesis and what have you, but you didn't really, we didn't really have a satisfying invisibility mechanic.

You could go invisible, but it's never,

it never really felt like the power fantasy of being that character.

I did really like about the job mentioning collaborating with artists

and programmers.

It was just always cool to just be like, if you could ask something, you could ask a programmer something.

And just for them, they're like, oh, yeah, I could do that.

You know, because

for our camera system, specifically for cinematics, we were kind of restricted in terms of what you could do with camera movement.

And so I was just like, hey, can we make it so you could, you know, you could do like a dolly, you know, you could move the camera forward.

You could, uh, you could roll the camera so you could do like a Dutch angle, you know, like just like simple things like that, like within the context of a cutscene.

And they're just like, yeah, I could do that.

Like, like, implemented in a day.

And all of a sudden, we had these new cinematic tools that we could use

for cutscenes.

So it was always, it was always satisfying when you had that sort of process of just like talking, like, like checking in with somebody.

And they're like, oh, yeah, fuck.

Yeah, why not?

And

conversely, like, also, sometimes you'd run into things you wouldn't know were going to be impossible.

So like we had one of the boss fights I worked on had Puppet Master in it, but Puppet Master was not a character who could animate.

It was just a static model.

And so basically he was just present there, kind of standing in the background saying quips.

And I was kind of like, I don't know, it might be cool if he could like run around like and, you know, like, like find, he, like, you're battling this main boss, right?

And it's like Puppet Master is puppeting him.

So, like, but, but, like, you're, you're fighting that main boss, but he's also a distraction.

He could, like, run over here and taunt you and, like, throw something at you and then run over here, like do something like that.

And I, like, I, I pitched this to the artist.

They were, the, to the, to, you know, the lead character artist.

And he was just like, basically at a meltdown of just like,

it'd take a week just to like rig this guy, like, just to, just to make it so he could animate like it's just like this would be so much work that it's like all right well that kind of got smothered in the crib my frustration with the job beyond

the

you know the way the game was going

um in terms of its design kind of getting unmoored from its original approach

and the horrible hours, which I'll talk about more in a little bit and were not unique to my experience in gaming, was I, I don't know, know, I think I am a good writer and I didn't get much opportunity to write anything.

The actual writing process, so much of that involved

screenwriters that Fox and Activision had vetted.

And

they did a good job, but

they really were not people who were internal, who were having a lot of contact with the team and could iterate as rapidly as we were progressing as we were developing.

So, you know, you might change something in a level and like all of a sudden we need new dialogue here.

And it's not a kind of thing of like,

if you have a narrative designer in-house or you have a writer in house, it's someone who can on the fly be making these adjustments or someone, again, you can be directly collaborating with.

It was just not really a possibility.

It was like

emails sent into the void and then weeks later getting a new draft of a script.

I did end up with an additional design credit or additional design, additional writing credit, as I mentioned above, because I did get some dialogue in there

by hook or by crook, as did a lot of the other designers.

But yeah, that was a little bit of an annoyance.

I also have a sound design credit, which I don't know if I really even deserved, but happy to take it.

But a lot of what I was just doing was just implementing sound effects.

I didn't generate the sound effects.

These were being pulled from a library, and then I was just timing them with the animation.

And so

it was more just implementing things.

It really didn't have much to do with like defining the

sonic character of the the game.

Phew.

Sonic character of the game.

Now we're talking.

Get Big the Cat in there.

It was a multi-platform game

and developing for GameCube specifically was a challenge because it had so much less disk space.

So we had PlayStation 2, Xbox, Windows, and GameCube were our SKUs.

And yeah, the GameCube, I mean, just again, from an audio standpoint, part of my job there was to compress audio, sometimes compress the shit out of it, just so we could fit more assets onto the GameCube disc.

I talked about camera earlier with Donkey Kong.

The designing, camera is just like such a nightmare.

Not something, again, I had much influence from from a design standpoint.

And a lot of that was like

on the programming side, but it was a thing you always had to be conscious of.

And it's sometimes why, and I feel like this is specifically the case with a lot of games from that era where some of the 3D spaces, some of the levels feel unnatural.

Like they just like something, some spaces are too wide,

you know, out of proportion.

You know, why is this door frame like 15 feet tall?

You know what I mean?

It's like all shit, it's just everything feels a little bit skewed.

And a lot of that was just to

our efforts to just accommodate the camera.

And again, I don't think that was something that was unique to what we were doing at 7 Studios.

I mentioned the cutscenes and the way we did them, kind of an internal self-own, and this was partly in response to Activision wanting the game to feel, again, more movie-like.

The engineering team developed a vignette system,

which allowed for more, you know, ornate animations,

animated sequences to be streamed from the disc.

So you could all of a sudden have not just like what I was describing earlier, where it's just like...

you know, a handful of camera moves and some,

you know, you've just got guys standing there in idle animations while voiceover is playing and we're not seeing that their lips aren't moving, but just actually have like a little bit more of like a dynamic sequence where, you know, for instance, one of them was the thing, Ben Grimm waking up in the hospital bed and realizing he's the thing for the first time.

And it's like a whole, like, you know, like he's having some real reactions and it was well animated.

But it's the kind of thing where it's like just doing that, creating that, that 30-second animation, which looks really cool, but any gamer is going to want to watch once and then skip on all subsequent

playthroughs.

That in and of itself consumed like a week of an animator's time.

And we only had so many animators, and that whole time they were spent making vignettes took away making

in essence like bespoke fully contained movies within the game engine, took away from time spent on other tasks,

like refining character movement and combat and so forth.

And

giving enemies cool shit to do.

But that's also the kind of thing where like, you're working with a publisher, and in that era, a lot of the executives at the publisher don't really understand gaming, but they know what a movie is.

So they're seeing a cool-looking cutscene, and they're like, nah, we want more of those.

And so all of a sudden,

again, while part of why I called it a cell phone is because it was this technology that was created and it made us make, let it let us create things that looked really cool in 2004, 2005 gaming terms and cinematic, but it just created a ton more work that took away from the overall quality of the game.

As for some of the levels I worked on, you know, I mentioned things like hallway width and door size.

A lot of those things came from guidelines within the GDD or general design document, which is just kind of like a Bible, if you will, of how the game is supposed to work.

I'm not sure if all developers use them, but certainly when I was working in development, that was kind of a standard expectation.

I know some other developers I've heard like to work more in shorthand and a little bit less formally.

But this was all a comprehensive layer what was going to happen in the game and all the guidelines were sort of pretty explicitly laid out.

So I worked on some levels, but anyway,

that was all just said to sort of say there were some general guidelines, but beyond that, we were kind of just given some freedom in terms of, hey, here's what happens in this level story-wise, but you kind of figure it out.

And so for some of these levels, there were a few I crafted from scratch.

There were others that I took over that had been worked on to various degrees and I took ownership of as kind of overseeing.

In fact, just in general, the way it worked is that all the level designers kind of like took different pieces of the game.

And one thing I did really like about the way it was structured internally is that it wasn't like we were assigned a separate biome.

It's like, hey, you take care of this, like all these levels that take place in, you know, Takal and you take care of all these levels that take place in space.

It was like everyone had a piece of each individual thing.

So we were all kind of invested in it holistically and made it feel a little bit more cohesive.

So that was fun.

But yeah, I worked on a couple of hospital levels from the early game.

I worked in the very first level of the game, which was kind of a non-combat thing, a more cinematic approach that people really liked.

And as such, they had me do another level like that that I just knew was not fucking working.

But it was just like, well,

they liked this one level where it was just like you were,

it was Ben Grimm pre-transformation in space where he's going to to be exposed to cosmic rays.

And it was just like him in a spacesuit and kind of this sort of claustrophobic sort of a

space horror feel to it.

Uh, and I guess it was effective, and it was also kind of a tutorial level.

But then, when you revisited a non-combat thing in a game that was, again, again, owes its origins to being a beat-em-up later on into the game, which was a sequence which was pulled from the movie where they rescue some civilians from a crashed fire truck or something like that.

I had to oversee this level and like, I never felt like it was fucking working.

I never thought like it was a good idea.

I certainly don't think I did a good idea trying to make it playable, but you do, you're just trying to make the best out of it.

But yeah, it was, it was very much like, you know, I mean, like, I was trying to think of a thing other than to say than polishing a turd.

But there you go.

Hey, we want this level to be a turd.

All right.

Well, I mean, it's going to, it's going to probably be bad.

It's probably like smell bad.

And like, you know, I'm going to look at it.

And it's going to, you know, be like, why, why is this here?

Why am I looking at this thing?

I don't like it.

I'll guess I'll make it shiny.

Maybe that'll help.

Put like coat of varnish on it.

I did get to work on some boss fights I liked.

I had the puppet master boss fight I mentioned, which in its original design was supposed to be

like a golem that could roll into a ball.

That was what I wanted to do.

And then eventually, you know, the animators were like, I don't think that's really possible.

So we rejiggered into something else, but it was still, you know, like a monster.

It became, I believe, a monster that's subdivided into smaller monsters.

And that's like a kind of a boss

fight convention I always enjoyed.

So that was fun to oversee that.

And then I worked on the Mole Man slash Moloid King boss fight, which was this, I don't think there is Moloid King.

I think that's something we invented.

In fact, it's maybe something I fucking named.

I don't know.

Maybe Moloid King is canon in the comics and I'm Mandela affecting it.

But he was a big, he was just like, he's like the mole kid, the mole man who lives underground in the final part of that, uh the the final uh of his four levels his chunk of the game you battle him again like like the puppet master a static character uh who can't animate but could just say quips who was up there and he wasn't who you were actually fighting who you were fighting uh was this gigantic monster who emerged from the street um and uh you know i i think this was it was more a little bit more style over substance but it was i think pretty cool feeling it was definitely akin to not as good as obviously but like kind of like more of a God of War boss fight where it's a little bit more, you can't battle them in a conventional way.

You're not using conventional combat techniques.

You're more just trying to

dodge a series of attacks and then end up with a context-sensitive action.

In this case, it was using Sue Storms, Force Bubble Power.

I'm sure the Fantastic Four Nerds are so mad that I don't know the actual names of these things.

I'm sorry.

I should.

Worked on these games for years.

Like the Moley King would throw his hand down.

Oh, I did get in trouble for killing a cop in this box fight.

I had a cutscene where the, or the fucking,

the Moloid king knocked, knocked on a building, like knocked some rubble from a building, and it fell on a cop and crushed him.

Because there was already an existing animation of

like a civilian cowering.

And so I just put it onto the cop and it looked like he fucking was killed by like falling rubble.

I got a talking to

about killing police officers

in a game for children.

Anyway,

I thought it was earned by the narrative.

But anyway, yeah, like the boy king would throw his hand into the street, and while it was stuck there, you could run over his Seus Storm and use your Force Ball powers to anchor it in place.

Then he would have one hand locked down, he'd get the other hand down, you'd lock that one into place, and then you could access his face and fucking beat him up a little bit.

So, you know, it's pretty basic, but it was pretty satisfying.

And that boss fight got to be on the cover of Game Fan Magazine, which was still like, eh, that's kind of a cool thing.

That's a level I worked on.

Wasn't the only one who worked on it, but you know, I took some ownership of it.

There was also a level with the human torch, who, again, like,

the way he played was just a little bit awkward, but I thought his combat was pretty fun.

He felt pretty,

you know, fast and kinetic.

And his, his,

he could light things on fire.

That was satisfying.

There was a level where he would go through and there were a bunch of Doombots, which are like, you know, Dr.

Doom's replicas that were all powered down.

And so you're going through, I think it was a museum, maybe it was the space station.

Anyway, you reach a certain point where you have to pull an alarm to open an, or you have to turn on the power.

I think it's turning on the power.

Fuck, man.

Why am I telling this anecdote I am profoundly unclear on?

The point is, you had to flip a switch, and the switch opened a door you needed to get through, but as a result, powered up all the powered-off Doombots.

And there was a cinematic in there, and I took over the level.

There was like a cutscene of like, oh, watching all the Doombots power up, because I thought it was more satisfying to just have that happen

in gameplay, where you'd flip the switch, you'd turn around, you'd head back, and realize, holy shit, all these Doombots that were powered off are now powered on, and I'm fighting them.

They're spawning one by one.

I thought that was just more interesting for that to be emergent.

But I was told that they know they wanted the cinematics and to put them back in.

So,

you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you win some, you lose some.

But I always like the approach just in terms of game design of like having things happen in gameplay and not interrupting gameplay with movies, which again goes back to what I was talking about with the cinematics and the vignette system.

And a lot of that, again, came from Activision, who was the publisher.

Part of

when you're working with, I guess, a publisher of any size is you have milestones.

Basically, every month you have a deliverable, and every quarter you have like a major one of those where they want to see a chunk of the game at a certain stage of development.

And that's how they decide if you're going to get paid for the next month or the next quarter.

And so that basically you could always count on horrific crunch at the end of each month, just trying to achieve this

overly ambitious deliverable.

One thing that came from Activision on top of just the relentless, you know, a barrage of milestones that you had to hit was

you got a lot of creative involvement from people who, or creative notes from people who maybe were less familiar with gaming or just had like a different idea of how things should work.

And again, weren't in the trenches with the development.

So I don't know if everyone knows the door problem of game design.

This is a famous blog on game developer from Liz England.

I've got a little bit of this here.

I like to describe my job in terms, I'm just reading from it here.

I like to describe my job in terms of the door problem.

Premise, you are making a game.

Are there doors in the game?

Can the player open them?

Can the player open every door in the game?

Or some doors for decoration?

How does the player know the difference?

Are doors you can open green and ones you can't red?

Is there trash piled up in front of doors you can't use?

Did you just remove all the doorknobs and call it a day?

Can doors be locked and unlocked?

What tells a player a door is locked and will open as opposed to a door they will never open?

Etc., etc.

And it keeps going.

It's basically like anytime you bring up a new idea, it just presents so many possibilities that you have to work through.

and so many contingencies that you have to account for.

So I'll give one example.

An Activision executive really liked the idea of the thing, the big rock monster,

grabbing a parking meter and swinging it as a baseball bat.

Now, I agree.

In theory, that sounds fun.

That sounds like cool power fantasy.

That sounds like you're being, you know, this big, buff, burly superhero.

But again, just work through the door problem

with that concept.

Is every parking meter a baseball bat?

If so, like, you know, you think of a a street

and

you never see one parking meter, right?

You'll see a line of them.

So, like, now you just have a bunch of baseball bats that are available in the environment.

Now the user is incentivized to, instead of using the thing's moveset, to just grab as many parking meters as possible, is use them as baseball bats.

Or...

You know, one thing you could do is say like, hey, these baseball bats are not particularly powerful.

These parking meter baseball bats are not particularly particularly powerful.

But then that stops feeling like you're using a parking meter

as a weapon.

And again, that kind of undermines the power fantasy of it.

It just feels less fun.

So then you have like, well, maybe some parking meters you can use as baseball bats, but others you can't to make sure they're not overpowered or too available in the environment.

But then that becomes a thing of how do we distinguish it?

Do we make, you know, green parking meters are ones you can swing and gray parking meters are ones you can't?

Ultimately, what they landed on was,

you know, not,

I think it was the best of the options, which was just you could break a parking meter and there was a percentage chance that it would spawn a swingable parking meter baseball bat.

Because, you know, again, if you make them too weak or too,

you know, breakable, then

it stops being fun.

So you want them to have some heft.

You want them to have some potency.

But if you can't have too many of them, because then they become OP.

So that became that, but like, I, to me, that also just kind of felt unsatisfying because it's like, wait, why?

Now, what is the justification why some of them spawn swingable baseball bats and other ones don't?

You know what I mean?

It's like, but that's these are the sort of things that happen when you just like, when someone just has like an idea.

And

again, that's just kind of the frustration of working with a publisher who has a heavy hand in what you're doing.

In mid-2004, the Incredibles releases, which

we're all just like, we are fucked.

There's no way the Fantastic Four movie is going to be as good as the Incredibles.

I remember seeing that with the development team in the theater.

I was just like, oh, man, I mean, that was great, but I read the script for the movie that's coming out with the Fantastic Four for the game we're working on.

They're fighting a fucking gas.

There's like a space nebula that's the big bad guy.

As we got towards the finish line, because we had to deliver this game, this is the era where physical release is

basically the only game in town.

So you have to lock the game.

It has to go gold quite a bit earlier to allow for production time.

So we're really ramping up towards the back end of 2004 and into early 2005.

I think we had to lock in May and the game ships in June.

Crunch just became unrelenting.

I mean, just like

the one example I will tell people sometimes, just to give you a taste of how it was, I worked 18 straight days, 19 straight days.

I locked a day off.

One of those days was Easter Sunday.

Just, I mean, Monday through Sunday, just going in relentlessly.

I'd say most weeks I worked six day weeks.

And I would say 60 hours was kind of the floor of where we were.

In fact,

I remember being told in a team meeting, team-wide meeting, all departments, that we were going to 60-hour weeks and us feeling like they were reducing our hours.

In my memory,

people applauded because it was just like, oh man, you're giving us a break.

Also,

I mean, this is just, again, just like it kind of like was a crazy environment to be tossed into.

Pretty early on, we were working pretty heavy hours.

And one of the leads was talking about just pacing yourselves and just being like, you know, like, if you feel like you can get your work done, you can go home.

But it was, it wasn't like, it was not like a, hey, crunch is mandatory, but kind of like tacitly implied that like it'd be hey it'd be great if you could crunch, but you know, you take time for yourself if you want, but don't you fuck me.

Don't you fuck me

damn, dude.

It's a lot for a 23-year-old guy straight out of school to hear at his first real job.

I don't know if people remember EA's spouse at this era, but this was a famous blogger who just talked about being the partner of someone who worked in development, in this case at EA, and just how

rarely they got to spend time with their partner and how stressful it was.

And

just like how onerous working in game development was.

I actually met EA spouse working that job.

One of the developers I shared an office with,

one day, like a couple of developer, a couple of friends came to visit.

It was a guy who worked at EA and his wife.

And afterwards, he was like, That was EA spouse.

I was like, That's fucking crazy.

But yeah, that was just sort of the thing of just like, I remember reading that blog and being like, Yeah, that's kind of what it feels like.

As we got towards the finish line, I will say, having worked in QA, seeing QA from the other side as a developer, and this happened on subsequent games I worked on as well.

QA is so absolutely essential and undervalued.

It's just like,

there's no way you could possibly make a game at all

without the heroic work of testers playing the shit out of your game and finding things that you couldn't have found from a bug standpoint, from a balance standpoint.

It's just so absolutely essential.

And, you know, it's,

gained gained new res.

I mean, I already had more respect for QA after working that job and seeing how taxing it was, but then just see how tangibly they were improving the game, how much extraordinarily useful

bug chasing.

Bug chasing?

Should I say bug chasing?

Yeah, bug chasing.

And playtesting they were doing.

Just so much respect for them.

Also, towards the end, as we're getting towards shipping, Stan Lee came to visit our studio.

And it was a whole photo op thing where Stan Lee was there.

And we're all kind of like, oh, this is cool.

And Stan Lee came in and played the Fantastic Four with one of my fellow designers.

They played co-op mode together.

Honestly, what I remember is I found Stan Lee profoundly annoying.

He just came in and just talked an unbroken monologue until he left.

Like,

ah, the Fantastic Four game.

Here we are.

We invented the Fantastic Four back in 1963.

I was

at the Sue Storm with a visible woman.

Just like that, just like just word salad talking about Marvel properties non-stop, like not even like leaving any space for anyone to say anything.

And also,

in the process of playing the game, he somehow took the thing out of collision and just ended up

in a gray, a gray void.

So he somehow broke the fucking game.

I mean, not his fault, obviously, but Also,

when the game shipped,

I had an uncle who, not for his, it couldn't have been his kid, my cousin, because he's too old, but I think for maybe for like a friend's kid, he was like, hey, can I get a copy of the game just as a gift?

I was like, yeah, sure.

And so I like, I got a copy.

We got free copies of the game.

We got a bunch of free copies of the game when it shipped.

And so

I just left one out there at the front desk with a Sharpie and I had the whole team sign it.

And I sent to my uncle, hey, here you go.

I got everyone to sign or whatever.

My uncle's like,

I I can't give this to him.

He fucking sold it on eBay.

Now, I don't know how much over MSRP it's getting for the John Hancocks of a bunch of random developers for a licensed game.

I don't know who wants that, but he thought it was a hot property and made some coin off of it.

The game released on June 28th, 2005, I think to middling to semi-positive reviews.

I thought it was okay.

And it sold pretty well for my understanding.

The movie did okay.

And as a shipping bonus, everyone on the team got a $50 best buy gift card.

Makes it all worth it.

I bought a vacuum.

I will say, whatever the quality of the game itself,

there were so many incredibly talented people who worked on it.

absolutely phenomenal artists, programmers, and designers.

And this is where I wish I could shout out names, but I'm just abiding by my own rule.

But, you know,

I share, I like the guy I shared in office with, worked on Command and Conquer and Red Alert.

A lot of the team did.

I was like,

there's fucking huge games.

Vampire the Masquerade.

A lot of the development team worked on that.

I saw someone who worked not on this game, but worked on another game.

And I peripherally interacted with them, don't really know them, but I saw them

in recent years accept an award at the game awards because they worked on a huge game.

It's like, it's, it's,

what I've kind of learned from working on bad video games and on a number of bad TV shows is there is talent absolutely everywhere.

It is sometimes just not allowed to flourish for systemic reasons.

I genuinely think if that team had been given a lot more creative leeway

and a little bit more,

a little bit of a less restrictive schedule in terms of this has to ship by the time the movie comes out.

We could have made an awesome Fantastic Four game.

But unfortunately, that was just not the circumstance of that game's development.

I also worked on Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Server, which I have less to say about.

I mean, a lot of that would be rehashing what I talked about with F4.

In between those two games, I worked on Pirates of the Caribbean, The Legend of Jack Sparrow, where it's credited as a lead level designer.

I won't talk about that game.

Dev Men Tell No Tales?

Is that anything?

Fucking trying here.

But that is the game where I went to the neighboring Albertsons,

got fried chicken as a snack, that fuck that I am, as an afternoon snack.

I got a four-piece fried chicken,

came back to the office.

The lead, the game, the design lead had called everyone into the conference room.

Like, I'm basically getting in the elevator and I'm being ushered into a conference room.

And

so naturally, I sit down there.

I start taking out fried chicken.

I start eating it.

And in a very grim voice, the design lead is is telling us that he had to fire somebody and, you know, like he was a valuable member of the team, but he just like, you know, was no longer fitting in or whatever, saying that sort of stuff.

Meanwhile, I'm just taking big bites like a drumstick.

And one of the other designers goes, there goes Weiger chomping on chicken.

Dude's got to have his chicken.

Me hearing about some guy having his life completely upended and the team grappling with morale because we've lost one of our own.

There I am stuffing my fat fucking face.

Fantasy 4 Rise of the Silver Surfer, published by 2K, much less ambitious, isometric beat-em-up focused design.

I thought smartly it just had, you know, like lower aspirations, but ultimately it was unfortunately a little bit of a less successful game.

It invited comparisons to Marvel Ultimate Alliance, which was not as robust as, and not as, again, not as ambitious as.

But as such, just by being so similar, I think everyone was just like, well, that one's, this is like a pale imitation of that, which again wasn't the intention, but that's what the reception was.

It was a smaller development team.

It was a shorter development cycle.

It was also the last-gen version of the game for PS2 and Wii.

A separate developer built the Xbox 360 slash PS3 versions because this was an era where the horsepower was so vastly different between generations.

I just have less to say about this game.

I think because it was at this point, like the third or fourth game I've worked on, it just is a little bit less forward in my memory.

And also just by nature of it being a pretty straightforward design and having, again, more of a plan from the get-go that was just kind of stuck all the way through.

It was kind of smooth sailing.

The design lead on that team, again, where I wish I was going to shout out some names, was absolutely great and just really good at respecting everyone's work-life balance.

So it was a much more manageable project.

But as such, just kind of a smaller slider game.

Contemporaneous with all this, I am taking classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, Comedy Theater here in LA.

And while I'm working on the video game Fantastic Four, I audition for and then placed on one of the house improv teams at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, a team that would become known as Last Day of School.

Also on that team, someone you may know named Heatherann Campbell.

I was also in a sketch group around this era, A Kiss from Daddy, which was the Upright Citizens Brigade.

And I made this video.

This is while I was working

towards the back end of my time in development, I was able to finagle.

And thanks partly to the incredible support from the people I worked with, from my employers.

Again, there was crunching was a reality of gaming, but I think most of the people I worked with were great.

And, you know, most of the leads I worked with, most of the producers I worked with were so

kind.

And when I, when I made it clear that I wanted to pursue something else, as I was still working in games and still need the income room, it's so accommodating to allowing me to take time off.

Eventually was able to go halftime, which again is like basically

where else in development would you be allowed to do that?

So I was in a sketch group with Kiss from Daddy, and we had this video that I wrote called Mobster Long Piss.

And basically what it was was that a couple of gangsters, mobsters, whack a guy, and then one of them goes to piss on the corpse.

But then it's one of those pisses where he can't stop pissing.

And then just like, you know, stars wheel overhead and he just keeps pissing forever.

And there's eventually like a fucking like Tales from the Crip ending.

You get it.

You get it.

But I had this video.

I was like, well, if someone's going to get pissed on, it will be me.

I'm not going to

write this video, make this video, and have someone else have to be pissed on.

I'll be the guy who gets pissed on.

So I get shot.

And so my role in this video is just to basically get shot in the back of the head.

My buddies Mike Cassidy and Paul Rust, who y'all may know, may be familiar with.

I mean, you definitely know who these guys are.

And

they're in that video with me.

And so Paul Rust is the guy pissing.

And the best fake piss we got was apple juice.

I looked best on camera.

So he's just squeezing apple juice out of a water bottle like onto me for like, you know, whatever, 12 takes.

And the whole thing is like he can't stop pissing.

So it just keeps like I'm just getting absolutely drenched in piss slash apple juice.

This is on a day where I'm supposed to go into the office.

So we're shooting this in the morning.

Probably should have shot it at night, honestly.

It's a guy being whack, but just like, whatever.

That was when we could, we were available to shoot.

We shot it.

We shot it in the morning.

I'm getting pissed on.

As originally scheduled, I would have had time to shower.

It ends up wrapping late.

I have to go straight to work.

So I'm just at work.

I change my clothes, but I just am soaked, like just still sticky all over.

And I just smell like fucking apple juice.

And I just have to be like, yeah, I don't know.

We did a video where I got pissed on.

What do you want from me?

The rest of my time in development was, you know, as I mentioned, I was kind of pivoting away from it, kind of half in, half out.

My mental state was declining.

I worked on, I mentioned before, Soprano's Rotten Spec, but that was very briefly.

And I just have an additional design credit on that.

Also, a lot of the games, all the games after Fantastic Four, Rise of the Silver Surfer, my credits were just additional design.

Because again, I was kind of like half half in, half out.

Wasn't fully committed.

I worked on a Six Flags Fun Park, which was just kind of like a wee sort of, I think they did a good job with it, but it was kind of a wee shovelware minigame sort of collection.

Space Camp was a similar sort of thing.

At a certain point, the studio ran out of money and we had no parking.

So as part of that, they were like, the building like shut, like took away everyone's parking privileges, no AC and no paychecks.

So this was several projects later, but we were working for months for like basically unpaid.

I mean, we should have just walked away, but I think you're working in the video game industry.

You're so fucking beaten down that you're just like, yeah, whatever.

Yeah, this is just one more indignity.

Who gives a shit?

With no parking, no AC, no paychecks for months on end.

Part of that was because of a lawsuit involving an internally developed game, which I believe was called Scratch,

which Activision believed infringed on another game that they were developing.

These were both like

games where you played as a DJ that involved a peripheral, like Guitar Hero.

The outcome of that was that Activision ended up just acquiring 7 Studios to squash this sort of legal action from whatever side it was coming from on April 6th, 2009, and turned that game or merge that with

Activision's other concept they were working on into DJ Hero.

And I never checked what actually got into the game, but I did come up with some of the achievements for DJ Hero.

That was like the very last thing I basically did in game development.

Not long after this acquisition, I was told very nicely, again, by people who were very supportive, that I'd need to come in.

I'd need to just be a full-time worker again if I wanted to continue to work for this studio.

And I just kind of at this point was like, you know what?

I think this probably mutually, it's best for

me to pursue something else.

And I had a very nice departure from my time in 7 Studios and my time in game development and transitioned to comedy writing, first for the internet at The Onion and Funnier Die, and then later for TV.

Later that year in 2009, again, this is after I left, and this may have been partly why I

I was given this talking to, Activision laid off half the company.

So again, I think if I hadn't voluntarily walked away, I probably would have gotten the knife at any point in 2009.

And then they closed the studio for good in 2011 because that's what publishers do.

They buy studios and they fucking close them.

I get melancholy when I think about my timing in game development, partly because I never worked on any game I would have wanted to play.

And like I mentioned, I don't feel like I ever put my full ass into it.

But I also feel like

there were things I could have done.

Like, I read about how Shovel Knight came together.

And my understanding of it from largely from reading Jason Schreier's book is that there were a lot of people who were working on games they hated.

I don't know if they're exactly analogous to the games I was working on, where you're trying to make the best of it, but it's that, you know, you're not, you're not, you didn't get into this industry to make games based off of IP, to make licensed tie-ins

that are, that are glorified toys that are going to coast off of the success of a movie or TV show or a brand.

But those are a lot of the game jobs that exist.

But then the Shovel Knight team was just like, fuck it, we're going to make our own thing.

And they went fully indie and they made a indie game passion project and went into business for themselves.

And,

you know, God bless.

I find that that shit so cool and so inspiring.

And it's the kind of thing, like, if I...

look back at my life and what I would have done differently if I really wanted to pursue game design, I do kind of wish I'd figured out like, hey, how to get my own vision made, whether that was within a studio, the studio system or whether that was independently.

However, as I mentioned, I met and worked with a lot of extremely talented and kind people.

And as I mentioned, some of whom have gone on to amazing success.

A lot of whom have gone on to amazing success.

Also, you know, again, I'm at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater.

I had a one-man show.

I fucking know.

I know.

You've been listening to this.

You're still clicked on on this.

Imagine me doing this on stage.

I had a one-man show, but like so like so many of the people from the development team came out and supported me.

And I'll always be so grateful for that.

Some of them came and saw it multiple times.

So again, just working with incredibly kind people.

It was also just really cool to work with a bunch of fucking gamers, you know, as someone who like loved games and found a few people in high school and college I could connect with, but never like a community this big.

And it's just like everyone there.

Like I remember working in game development games like God of War and World of Warcraft, Mario Kart DS, Half-Life 2 came out.

It's just, it was just so cool to be in that environment to be able to talk with people who like like really had strong opinions and also really knew what the fuck they were talking about and sometimes could put things in, you know, in better, smarter language than I use on this podcast when talking about game design or art or the tech side of it.

And I do miss that about the industry.

I'd like to say it all worked out for the best, you know?

I'm not sure.

That's like the easy thing to say, but it's kind of the only rational thing to do.

You just got to kind of accept the way things played out because that's how life works.

I will say I got some nice perspective from a programmer who is, you know, 20 years older than me, maybe retired now,

who before working in game development worked on bank software for many years.

And he was basically like, you know, look, I was well paid, but you never felt like you made anything, you know?

And there's something really satisfying.

It doesn't even matter if it's good or bad about just.

ending up with a tangible product at the end of something.

Like I worked on this thing and it's done and it's out there and I made it.

You know what I mean?

I collaborated with this team to come together and build this work of creativity.

I imagine it's like if you're a, you work construction, you know, maybe it's maybe, may not be your dream to be hanging drywall at a Taco Bell franchise, but you know, you build this new Taco Bell and you're like, hey, I built that Taco Bell.

And I guess that's kind of how I feel about working on the Fantastic Four games.

It also taught me to be less precious about creative things you can't control.

Because again, I can do my job up to a point, then it's out of my hands.

Can polish the hell out of this turd, but fundamentally, you know, there's your log of shit on a plate.

Incidentally, I actually am working a writing job right now, which I'll be annoyingly cagey about, but I wasn't planning on getting back into TV writing, but it was an opportunity I kind of, it couldn't pass up.

And thinking back on Crunch, you know, because I have Doughboys get played and get animated,

now my days are...

Again, like they were in the first half decade of Doughboys and the first couple years I played, whereas in a writer's room all day and then went straight to record podcasts at night.

And I'll basically be out of the house for 12 hours most days.

I'm actually recording this in my home office at 9 p.m.

on a Friday.

And I'm just kind of numb to that because it still feels like nothing compared to crunching and game development.

And I feel like if I had any failing in this episode beyond it sucking, I feel like I just really didn't hammer home what it was like to just never get a break, to just constantly be working.

How fucking bad crunching was and how much it sucked and how much it made me hate something I was passionate for.

I remember this moment where a guy,

a developer on a different team who I kind of knew, but was good friends with someone I shared an office with came in one day and was just kind of like,

oh, that's it.

I'm getting out of games.

And we're like, oh, Kyle Wise.

Like, yeah, I'm just going to go and go work for my dad's real estate firm.

And he's a talented guy, young guy, but just got burned out so fucking quick, just couldn't handle the hours.

And I think the industry's gotten better in that regard, but it just fucking churned people into nubs.

I certainly probably would have spent more time in it if I could have handled the time I was forced to spend in it, but I burned out.

And here I am, podcasting.

The gravest insult.

Special shout out to my old roommate/slash co-worker.

I don't think they want to be doxxed.

I'm not sure.

But, you know, again, they're kind of my way into game development and a really talented developer and a great friend.

What a ride.

By the way, speaking of which, one more crunch story, me and this roommate had worked a very long day, 12-hour day on the Fantastic Four game.

It was a Friday, and we're like, fuck it.

Let's just fucking go to Houston's.

And so we went straight from work to Houston's.

At our studio in the parking garage, There was a very nice parking garage attendant who you'd see and you'd say hi to.

We get to Houston's.

The guy valeting our car is that parking garage attendant.

He went to his second job.

So we worked 12 hours.

He was in the middle of his second shift.

And it was just one of those things where, you know, again, as bad as it was for me as an office worker in game development, you know, people in the true working class,

it's even tougher.

And again, I just, I don't even know why I added that, but it just like it was another thing that sort of lended perspective to what this world is.

As my, as for my thoughts on the Tim Story movie, Fantastic Four, which the game was based off of,

I never saw it

for our segment this episode.

Earlier this week, I sat down with my Doughboys co-host, Mike Mitchell, of Twisted Metal Season 2.

We recorded it right after recording back-to-back Doughboys episodes, so we're a little punchy, but it was a fun chat.

So take a listen.

All right, Mitch, Twisted Metal Season 2.

That's right, we're going to be.

Coming July 31st, 2 Peacock.

I know you would be circuitous about what's happening in the show, but your character, Stew, has a big presence in Season 2.

Stu is there in Season Stew, some call it.

People are saying Season Stew?

People are saying Season Stew.

That's wild.

Why, because the power dynamic has shifted.

I'm your guest now.

You're my friend.

Well, yes, but in the podcast world, I am your guest.

But you've guessed it on Get Played before.

You know the drill.

I certainly do.

Yeah, yeah.

We always kind of go into

a co-host dynamic, I think, naturally, if we're on any pod, or if we're

both guesting on a different pod, it's always good to have your powers when I'm on another pod.

It's have my powers, yeah.

When our powers combine, we're a bigger force.

Wow, it's true.

I uh, I'm always physically

600 pounds and three inches.

Is that the combined?

Uh,

You got a big hog, usually is what I joke about.

We've got a.

So it didn't make sense, but it was fun to pretend you got a small one for a second.

For our,

that can be canon for get played.

Yeah, yeah.

The get played canon is that.

So we have a.

Can I tell you my favorite episode of Get Played?

So we have a.

We have a Twisted Metal.

The new season of Twisted Metal is coming out.

New Season of Twisted Metal is out, Wags, on Peacock, July 31st.

That's right, yeah.

Streaming, if you got Peacock, download Peacock.

And if you're in another country, which I know that you have international listeners,

you might have to do some digging to figure out where it is because sometimes it's on another streaming service.

I know we have a lot of listeners to the podcast who are, you know, like we have a lot of avid gamers, and so they're familiar with the Twisted Metal franchise.

They may play the PlayStation 1 originals.

They may play Twisted Metal Black on PS2.

Twisted Metal 3 and 4 you can get right now on the PlayStation store.

That's just available on the PlayStation Store if you want to mess around with that.

I think you have to be a PlayStation Plus subscriber, I believe.

Sure.

I think that's what it is if you want to download on it.

But

I know from talking to some of the people behind the scenes that this show, although a lot of the canon is invented, although a lot of the lore comes from

the writers and creators,

it does all have a basis in the original game.

And it also comes from a deep love and appreciation for the original franchises.

For sure, yes.

I think that there are a lot of people who can be a little bit specific about the games and they sure don't want to see too many changes.

And I understand that.

And I think the showrunner, Michael Jonathan Smith, and all the writers

did like a great job of keeping a lot of the same character elements and a lot of the story elements, but then also adding things to make it a TV show, which I think is like the, that's the hard thing to balance.

And a big part of like the show, the actual production of it is like vehicle action, car combat.

100%.

This is like basically the franchise

that birthed that genre of gaming,

or at least made it mainstream.

The Mario Kart and this.

I mean,

the Mount Race, the Mount Battlemore, I guess you could put them on.

Mount Battle Kartmore.

Mount Battle.

Yeah, I think Mount Battle Kart more is correct.

Mount Battle Kart more.

I think it's up there.

Driving Battle.

The Driving Battle Games.

Who is on the Mount Rushmore?

Mario Kart is one.

Yeah, sure.

Twisted Metal's got to be up there.

Yeah.

Do you put Diddy Kong racing?

What else do you put up there?

I mean, I think probably some people would go back to an earlier era and I'm trying to like put like a battle zone on there, you know, but I but also like I

do think like a big part of Twisted Metal is like the aesthetic and the tone, right?

Like because even though Super Mario Kart, yeah, the battle mode there like had some of those elements that are that are heightened and expanded upon the Twisted Metal franchise, it was the sort of thing that is like, okay, this is a little bit more of a grown-up slash, you know, edgy slash, you know, funny sort of treatment of it.

That's right, yes.

David Jaffe, I believe, who created the game.

Yeah.

And also, I mean, he created.

He goes on to create the God of War franchise.

The God of War franchise.

He's a heavy hitter as far as video game franchises.

And I know that

you are yourself are a big-time gamer.

You play a lot of games.

I know you're trying to

play less these days because you just have other things going on and you get very compulsive towards 100% in games.

I just know that's your tendency.

But there is, and we talked about it earlier on this very episode.

We're recording this on the eve of the Donkey Kong Bonanza release.

That's right.

You're pretty pumped for that.

I think that one's going to pull you back in.

I haven't played.

I try to get into Kart.

It was speaking of

Battle Games.

Yes.

Of Battle Kart more.

The Switch to Mario Kart.

The Switch to Mario Kart.

And

it didn't pull me in 100%.

I played every level and I liked it.

But

I don't know, the mechanics of it,

how did you feel about it?

I wasn't crazy about it.

I just have felt the same way about Mario Kart for probably 20 years now, which is just, I think I'm just past the point in my life where I'm playing Mario Kart, you know, like I have an appreciation for them.

I know for some people, it's like this is a system seller for them, but I'm just less into it.

I'm way more excited for a game like Donkey Kong Bonanza because just like a straight-ahead platformer, that's that's what platformers are my favorite to me.

That's my favorite type of game, anyways.

I like platformers more than anything else.

I, and I'm very excited.

I am gonna play in probably 100% Donkey Kong Bonanza, yeah, is my guess.

I

Mario Kart, this is, I wonder how you'll feel about this, but the more like video games advance, like the less I kind of like.

I think Mario Kart 8 was great, and I think that was like the last gasp for me of Mario Kart was Mario Kart 8.

And I liked the idea of the open world thing, but it didn't do it enough for me.

Mario Kart 64 was the last one because it still felt like

you're making your own shortcuts by turning left on a bridge or something.

You know what I mean?

And I'm like,

after that, I just don't care anymore.

Platformers is it for me.

Also corresponds with the end of childhood for you.

That's also true.

I mean,

that might just be what it is to get behind childhood.

I liked Mario Kart 8, and I would love a Twisted Metal update.

I never played that.

That's what I, I mean, I know you don't have any insight into that, but it is a sort of thing.

Wow, breaking chews.

Do I?

I don't know.

I guess I should say breaking news here because it's not dope voice.

Breaking breaking gaming chews.

I'm trying to breaking cues.

That's me at church.

Get news.

That was good.

I never, did you play Twisted Metal Black?

Oh, I'm spinning out you do.

Yeah, I did play Twisted Metal Black, yeah.

A little Dilophosaur action for me.

I did not play Twisted Metal Black, and I would, and I know that that's like a fan, that's like a huge fan favorite one.

I think people consider that like the apex of the franchise, yeah.

It's a darker, it's a dark, it's a darker entry in the Twisted Metal series.

I think that people wanted a lot of that.

The show can be very dark, by the way.

And this season is, I'm going to say it, this season's gory as hell.

It's fucking bloody and gory, and there's dark stuff in it, but um maybe turn up the brightness on your TV.

Well, not that, not that sort of dark wages, though there is some stuff like that, too.

There's night scenes.

Okay, so so you know, there is darkness that's involved.

Maybe you have your your phone's flashlight feature handy so you can see what's going on.

I mean, no, it's the perfect dark wages.

Hmm, perfect dark.

Now we're talking, now we're talking.

Did you play Dark Man?

I liked Dark Man a lot.

Did they play Dark Man?

Yeah,

oh, no, Dark.

I'm so sorry.

Shadow Man is what I'm saying.

Shadow Man, yes.

I did not play Shadow Man, but I remember Shadow Man.

Dark Man, the Sam Raimi film with staring Liam Neeson.

A big blind spot for me.

Liam Neeson, a man with a huge hog.

That's right.

Yes.

An Evian bottle-sized hog.

Yeah.

Was it Janice Dickinson who believe so?

Yes.

Yeah.

The supermodel.

Like a dead German hanging out of a window, right?

Is that what she said?

I heard someone else say that.

A dead German hanging out a window?

This is like the twisted metal black of your

get played.

We're getting dark here.

It's a,

but anyway, yes, the twisted metal black was, it definitely had a lot of people.

I think a lot of people wanted, but the show has some of that.

I mean, I think that I think so.

No, I will say to someone, I have not seen season two as of this,

as of us recording this interview.

I watched all of season one.

It definitely has moments of like, you know, like sadness and humanity.

It definitely has some really bleak stuff.

And we're living in a post-apocalyptic society where most of the Earth's population has been, they got got, you know, so that's, that's pretty inherently dark from a premise standpoint.

And I, and I do think that they have fun with the show.

And I, look, I, I probably wouldn't, if it was like a true dark drama, I don't know if I would be on the show.

So and I could pull that off.

I could, I mean, I think I could, look, I do think I could pull it off, but I do think that

the fact that it's a comedy show and it's having fun,

that's what I like about the show.

Because there's a lot of video game shows that take themselves very seriously.

I won't point any fingers at any shows that take themselves very seriously

and maybe have some bloaters involved or something, but it's a very serious show.

Maybe you have a sort of maison-y haze to them.

We're not naming any specific shows.

I'm trying to be specific.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But they, yes, they're like, there's sort of like this, this, this, this, uh, like high art seriousness,

this prestige TV series.

People that they're like the last of the, of the people.

Right, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And, and, and there's like

this, this show isn't going for, like, it's not trying to have that sort of sheen about about it.

It's like just it's a show that's fun and revels in being funny.

It's giving a different perspective than that sort of show.

And I think I think it's a lot of fun.

And I do think that this year there's like the like all the stunt driving, which I've, which I told you about, pod drivers, which you liked.

We were very fascinated.

We should talk about this a little bit.

So I think for, you know,

people who are just like curious how TV is made, the process of how stunt driving works,

which there's a lot of people who are.

If you saw you on the street driving on the street, they'd say that they would describe you as a pod driver, I'm sure, right?

Because of my resemblance to Anakin Skywalker.

Because you're a podcaster and a driver.

Oh, I got it, got it.

Not like, hey, it's Ben Quadroneros.

I don't know if you would be insulted by being called Ben Quadroneros.

That guy's a real fuck-up.

Yeah.

Well, doesn't get past the starting line.

Didn't Sabalba fuck with his.

I thought Sabalba did fuck with his.

Yeah, well, that's the whole thing.

Sebulba doesn't play by the rules.

We're talking Star Wars and

a producer has fallen asleep.

Hey, episode, the pod racer, there's another.

Yeah, we revisited that on Get Played, and it actually holds up pretty decently.

I mean, it's got some jank to the UX,

but it's a pretty Star Wars episode one racer

was a pretty fun pod racing sim.

But wait, let's...

I was talking about actual pod drivers.

Yes, pod drivers.

So this is a...

I mean, just describe what a pod driver is.

A pod driver is a person that is stationed on top of your car and kind of like almost what looks like a roll cage on top of your car.

And

he or she has controls of

your car.

And they basically...

They have basically like a wheel and pedals up there and a gear shift.

They can control everything that's going.

It's kind of like a go-kart.

It's basically they are plugged into the engine and they can control everything that's going on in the car.

Your your brake and gas and your wheel are not doing anything.

You can still step on them and do everything, but it's it's actually I think you can maybe still step on the brake, possibly to like break it.

But no, actually, I don't even think that

it's a professional driver.

My guy was an actual like NASCAR driver.

Yeah, so these are these are pro-stunt drivers who work on all sorts of

high-end productions.

And so

you got the best of the best up there as your crew.

And so you're down there as an actor, you know, you're pretending to drive, you're miming, driving while someone else has the controls.

And then in post-production, you know, we're, you know, as shooting it, and while shooting it, we're framing that out.

And in post-production, we're, they're painting it out visually so that it, you know, it looks like you're in control of the vehicle.

But there are like some like really, you know, death-defying stunts where you're basically just a passenger for this thing.

100%.

Do you want me to tell you the real thing is

they will do the exterior shots and have stunt drivers in our cars.

Got it.

And then, so the exterior ones, they get to show them being crazy without the pod drivers on top of it.

And then with the pod drivers on top of the car, they can do all the closer.

They're putting cameras on us and you're like seeing the window, like you're seeing stuff zoom by us and stuff like that.

And why?

Because it's terrifying.

It was a very, it was like, the way I described it was like, it was like scarier than the scariest roller coaster I've ever been on.

It was like we were going 60 miles per hour.

We were like driving through like basically courses or something.

Yes.

And we were driving by stuff very fast.

Hazardous exteriors and interiors.

Yes, going

60, right?

60 plus miles per hour or something.

You know what I mean?

And you have to stage it where it looks perilous, but by doing that, it actually is perilous to be driving through.

They really were trying to do what to get the vibe of the game this season.

Right.

Which it's still a show, and you're still going to see people outside of cars because

that's a TV show.

I'm out.

God damn it.

You know, you're getting

lot of car action.

You're getting so much car action.

I think from what I've heard, from what I've inferred from hearing about the second season,

more car action than the first season?

100%.

Wow, that's awesome.

There's so much more car action.

It's crazy.

I mean, like, there's multiple episodes with a lot of car action.

Yeah.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

Do you have a,

like as an actor,

go on?

As an as an actor, as a thespian,

as someone who treads the boards,

do you ever have like a scene that's really going to stress you out in advance of, whether it's some stunt driving sequences, whether it's like some sort of hand-to-hand combat, whether it's just something where you have to get particularly emotionally vulnerable and raw, when you have something

in advance that you're maybe dreading, like, how do you prepare for that?

Wise, that is a great question.

Yeah.

And I'll tell you, as you know, I've dealt with long COVID stuff.

There was one scene where I had to go to one emotional place that was very hard for me.

Yeah.

And won't, I can't say any specifics about it.

Yeah.

And I think I got, I think I got it out, but then there was, there's another scene later in the show where like I had to get

very emotional at one point.

And

so that was like, that was, you know, like you are thinking, you want to get into a good headspace.

And you're, you're an actor.

You sell yourself short.

I mean, I'm not really an actor.

I've acted in some stuff, but I'm not someone who's like, that's a thing I pursue or a thing I, it's, it's, it's stuff I stumble into.

Did you ever do a scene where you had to cry before or no?

No.

Or like get upset or anything like that?

No.

Not really even in my life.

Hopefully you practice enough so the day when I die, you can at least pretend to be upset.

Oh, the Patreon.

I also just like picture you like at my wake, like slamming on the coffin, being really big, and be like, I can't believe he's gone.

Take me instead.

That's a good move.

I love that guy.

Yeah, I mean, some of that stuff is, and you get like, I get when, when some actors are like annoying about stuff like that, because like when you're trying to have like being

in a space of like, not even onto a submittal, but if you're like, I need to be like really emotionally vulnerable or be sad or something.

And then you're sitting and talking with people or someone that's talking to you.

And like, and I'm not, I'm never a person who's like, don't talk to me.

I'll never do that ever.

But like, you're trying to get worked up to be upset and you're and you're either thinking of things that would make you upset or like just trying to really like that it that is always difficult to do i feel like but i am always i'm i'm always a person who will just talk to people and this is probably why i shouldn't do this i should be like in but being in the zone i think is like is helpful if i'm gonna go out there and like ball my eyes out or something and and but like uh but

For me, more so what you were saying of like the stunt driving, I just didn't want to fuck up because I didn't want to fuck up for those guys because they were, they, it's like, oh, they like all of these people that are working on this show and like they're doing this extraordinary stunt driving.

And you're like, I don't want to fuck up this take because they are, they're risking their lives to do this, as I guess you are too, in a way, but like, you're like, they're very good at what they're doing and they're keeping me safe.

And I don't want to be like, what was my line?

And like, forget it or whatever.

So I think it was uh-oh.

That's that that is that that to me is like, don't fuck up.

So, like, in those scenes, I like specifically didn't.

And I think that you like when you're driving, and like you're kind of naturally nervous, anyways, because you're, you know, if you're in a conversation or whatever, so that's helpful to use that or whatever.

But do you have a like?

Because I know as part of the process, there are some times when an actor will be physically driving themselves.

Did you do any actual driving?

Or was it?

Yeah, there was time.

There were times where I did.

I did drive some stuff on my own.

And there's some, I know there's some, I mean, there's some, some action in season one.

I imagine there's more like action in season two, like in terms of like, you know, hand-to-hand, in terms of, of, of gunplay.

Was there anything you have to do where it's like, oh, that was pretty cool?

There was some hand-to-hog, too.

There was a lot of stuff I got to do that was, that, there was, there was a lot of cool stuff.

Did you, do you, did you learn how to do something?

You're like, I can do that now.

No.

Oh, actually, actually, no, no, you know what?

Yeah,

I'll say this.

I can say this.

Yeah, because I know you would be vague about spoilers of shows, no doubt.

There was like a day where I did stunts.

There was like stunt stuff, so I had to work with, and the stunt team is so good.

And I hope, I hope the stunt people win at an Emmy because they're so good on this.

It's crazy.

They're so fucking good on the entire show.

But I had to learn.

There's like a couple things where I am, I am like hand-to-hand stuff that I had to, and I, and, and like, we did stunt stuff and, like, we went and worked like a whole day to like do stuff like that.

It was great.

It was cool.

Can you show me?

And this is audio only.

So, like, you don't, you can just

forgot this fucking audio.

We're done.

Yeah, just show me what you did.

There was a little like a,

like,

ah, you know what I'm saying?

Fuck, that was cool as hell.

Holy shit.

Fuck.

Oh, how'd you do that?

And then there was a little this.

Holy shit, that's amazing.

I couldn't believe they, I can't believe they showed you how to do that.

What the wow?

Mitch, this is so cool.

People's minds are going to be blown.

Okay, now people are maybe figuring out what you're doing.

It's a,

it's, it's such a great show.

Thank you, Wax.

And thank you for promoting on your guy's show.

I mean, this genuinely.

Like, we all enjoyed the show.

We said the same thing when we talked about the TV show Fallout.

If we don't like a video game adaptation, we're not necessarily going going to shit on it on the show because

we may know people who

we have worked with or want to work with at some point, but we just maybe won't cover it.

We maybe won't dedicate

any space to it.

Sounds like someone's angling to work with Maison at some point.

But I can honestly say

that like I watched Twisted Metal to support you, to support my friend.

Thank you.

You're such a great actor, and I'm always excited when you get opportunities because you deserve them.

You should be in more stuff.

Thank you.

But yeah, to watch the show,

I was so delighted that it was actually good.

It was actually something I enjoyed.

And I do think the season one genuinely made me laugh, has some really cool action.

I'm really excited to see what y'all can achieve with a bigger scale and a bigger budget and a lot more stew.

A lot more stew.

I mean, also, I'm glad that you didn't hate it and had to lie to me for like two years, like maybe even longer.

Who knows how long it will go?

But you also know me, I wouldn't lie to you.

I know.

That's the other side.

That's the worst part of it.

I think you would be like, it wasn't for me, but I think you did great.

You would say something nice, of course.

No, I think that you will like season two more than you like season one.

And I thought season one, they did a great job in like, you know, it's not as, you know, it doesn't have as big of a budget as a lot of other shows do.

But I think that everything this season, everything is bigger.

They did everything bigger this year.

And like you said, we like, I'm a fan of Fallout.

I think they did a great job with Fallout.

And I think they did a great job with this show.

And I hope we get to make a third one.

And I think people are really going to like it.

So please watch it.

I don't want to spoil something from the show, but

everything is bigger.

Everything is bigger.

And then you have the scene, of course, where you go full frontal and go, not everything is bigger.

Yeah, it's the only time in the show where I break the fourth wall.

And we do a Flintstones joke.

It's a living.

Your hog is a pterodactyl.

Look, I'm not trying to spoil too much, but

you do see a lot of the spoon man on the okay, all right.

Just look forward to the stew man.

You see a lot of the stew man and get that pause button ready.

Twisted Metal Season 2 is on Peacock.

People should check it out.

If you're in the States, it's on Peacock.

Check where you are globally,

where you can find Twisted Metal Season 2 streaming.

July 31st, three episodes are out, and then

two new episodes every Thursday.

Yes, so three episodes.

So we're going to get the first Thursday on July 31st.

So the first three episodes will be out on July 31st.

And those first three episodes, especially episode three,

you're going to like it.

Episode three, I'm just hearing a lot of great stuff about.

And the first two episodes, also fantastic.

And then it goes two,

two,

two, three.

Wow.

So

the final episode towards the end of August is three episodes.

So basically, July 31st through all of August, you'll be able to watch the season in its entirety.

Check it out on Peacock.

Congratulations, man.

Thank you, Wax.

Thank you for being here.

You're a good friend, and you're a good writer, and a good actor.

Wow, I want to thank this.

We don't talk about that too often.

We should shout out our comic book real quick as well.

Our podcast, Doughboy.

That's right.

We have a comic book with it that's really great and they think you can enjoy even if you're not a Dough Boys listener.

Check that out at brkids.com.

Hey, maybe we'll make a live-action version of the comic book.

Something's going to happen.

Oh, whatever.

We'll see ya.

Bye.

Wow.

Thanks to Mitch.

Seriously, everyone, check out Twisted Metal.

If you're in the U.S., it's on Peacock.

Season two premieres July 31st.

It's a great show.

I just think it's so fun, and the action is so awesome.

By the way, I did get Mitch's impressions on Donkey Kong Bonanza after he played it.

We talked about it briefly during the interview.

I'm quoting here.

It's awesome.

I love it, honestly.

It fucking rules.

Well said, Spoonman.

And thanks to all of you for listening to An Old Man Grapple with a Slow Decay of Time.

That's this week's Get Played.

Our producer is Rochelle Chen, Ranch, Yard underscore, underscore sard.

Our music comes by Ben Prunty, BenPruntyMusic.com.

Our artist by Duck Brigade, design duckbrigade.com.

Get Played merch is available at kinshipgoods.com.

Link in the show description.

Also, check out Get Animate or Sister Show on Patreon, where we're watching Birdie Wing Golf Girl Story.

A lot of fun and a little horny.

Patreon.com/slash get played.

As for what got played this week,

my fucking 20s.

What an L for old wigs.

Bye.

That was a hit gum podcast.