Date Everything! with Ray Chase

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Well, I've been arrested.

Oh my god.

God.

Fucking shit, man.

I just got released.

I had to post so much fucking money.

Jesus, you could have called any of us.

We would have been there in this.

It's fine.

It's fine.

I spent the night in jail.

You know, you've heard that sentence: you know, life imitates art.

Yes, I've heard that sentence.

Well, we played this game this week that was, you know, the

date everything.

Date everything, right?

And I was like, wow, if you can do this in a game, you should be able to do it in real life.

So I fucked a cop car and I got in so much trouble.

Like, I got the shit beaten out of me.

Like,

so many cops got so angry and I was like, hold on, hold on.

Just let me do this.

And they were like, no, I got shot with, I got shot with a gun in the leg.

So I had first, they had to transfer me to the hospital and then they put me in jail.

Look, I was, I was going to.

Since Heather shared that, I guess I can just be candid with y'all as well.

I I had a similar incident, and actually, I also ended up in some hot water myself because we're playing this game, and we know the expression life imitates art.

Yeah, that's a sentence we all know.

Yeah, well, I was at Ikea.

I fucked a Banff bookshelf.

Just fucked the shit out of this bookshelf.

Here's the thing.

Thing just fell apart.

Oh, yeah, sure.

Of course it did.

Yeah.

IKEA furniture is notoriously fragile.

And then all of a sudden, I'm like surrounded by security guards.

You and I'm getting, I got the zip ties on me.

I'm getting tased as a fucking nightmare.

And it's like, have they not heard of the game?

It's coming out tomorrow.

Like, what is their deal?

Yeah, people are going to be fucking things.

I was blowjobbing the exhaust pipe of a cop car and they had a problem with it.

Well, since you guys shared, I have a similar thing happen to me.

What is it?

I got in so much trouble.

You know how I was in New York this weekend?

Yeah.

The Statue of Liberty ate my ass, okay?

I gotta ask, how'd you get up there?

It took a lot of climbing, and I was really scared.

I was so scared to get up there.

Wait a minute.

Are you fucking Spider-Man?

You gotta tell us if you're Spider-Man.

Man, are you Spider-Man?

Man, your ass is Spider-Man.

You gotta tell me.

I gotta go.

Thwip.

Holy shit.

There he goes.

Oh, my God.

Well, time to put this potted plant up, my asshole.

We romance trash cans and recognize voices as actor and developer Ray Chase joins and discuss his new game, Date Everything, this week on Get Played.

Welcome to Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and every game in between.

It's time to get played.

I'm your host, Heather Ann Campbell, along with my fellow host, Nick Weiger.

That's me, Tiger Weiger, along with our third host, Matt Abodaka.

Hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the premiere video game podcast, where, hey, we've got a guest today.

Surprise.

It's not just us, three assholes in your ears.

That's right.

It's a fire.

Or on your car radio.

It's a floor.

Well, hey, speaking of guests, we do have a guest engineer today,

Engineer of the Year, Producer of the Year, Sam Rogich is back.

Hi, Sam.

Hey, guys.

Hi, Sam.

Rochelle, unfortunately, has contracted the novel coronavirus.

Yeah.

That's right.

Very 2021 of her.

The government says that's done.

So I don't know how she got it.

She must be a time traveler.

The government says it's done.

Everyone's behaving as though it's done.

What the hell?

So get well soon, Rochelle.

But happy to have you, Sam.

Happy to be here.

How are things in your world?

How's your band Guck doing?

We're doing good.

Records coming out into August.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

Congrats.

Yeah.

And you have like a, you say record, you mean like a physical record.

You got 12-inch.

Wow.

How about that?

So we're excited about that.

Full sub.

Yeah.

A John Ham.

Do you know what I saw in the fucking window at Subway?

I hope it was a sandwich.

It's foot-long nachos.

Yeah, I've had the foot-long nachos.

They're made out of Doritos.

Yeah, I know.

This is Heather.

Who do you think you're talking to?

You're talking to like Michael Jordan and asking him if he's ever seen a basketball before.

Heather, did you know there's a new Gundam series out there?

Matt, did you know that the Kingdom Hearts mobile game was delayed?

Or no, canceled in debt forever?

I don't walk past Subway very often.

It's shocking to me.

To be fair, you shouldn't have to know that.

I true.

You shouldn't have to know that there's Dorito Nachos at Subway.

That was about trying to connect with my fellow hosts.

I liked it.

I like that you did that.

I like that you made the effort.

I apologize for being dismissive.

The Doritos nachos, foot-long nachos, are like all recent subway offerings, pretty underwhelming, unfortunately.

Oh, okay.

Well, do you think if Jared was still behind the helm, maybe a little bit better?

I wonder.

I honestly think he might be kind of operating as a shadow president and kind of running the show.

And maybe that's the whole reason they're in trouble.

You think he's like making phone calls from prison and being like, put all the shit on Doritos?

It's like Johnny Sack in the joint running the New York family.

I know I bring up the show, the rehearsal, pretty much every week since I saw it, but one of my favorite bits in it is that he sets the time back so that he can experience something

back to, I think, the early mid-2000s.

And on the bus stop posters are Jared from somewhere else.

We have a great guest returning to this show, a voice actor from X-Men 97, Jiu-Jitsu Kaisem, and Final Fantasy XV.

His new game, which he not only acts in, but designed, is Date Everything.

Available tomorrow, June 17th, as of this episode's release.

Ray Chase.

Hi, Ray.

Hello, guys.

Thanks for watching.

Thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for coming in.

What a treat.

Last time we had you on, we had you on via Zoom.

It's so great to meet you in person.

Yeah, it's awesome.

And even, I remember as I was leaving, I was like, can I show you guys a trailer for something that I'm working on?

You guys sat through it and promised me that I can come back, and I'm cashing it in, baby.

Here we are.

Yeah.

Thanks for having me, having me in.

And from what I've heard, you guys have played a little bit of it too.

Yeah.

Yeah, we definitely got some time with the game.

Excellent.

And we will get into it because I'm very excited to talk to you about Date Everything.

Also, can I say something really fast?

Thank you for announcing me with credits that are relevant.

Because one thing, as voice actors, that happens all the time is sometimes people just Google what we're in and they'll say like, from Naruto.

And yes, I was in Naruto for like two episodes, but they'll say, like, that's what Ray Chase is known for.

Those are actually three heavy hitters.

So thank you for that.

Yeah,

we're fans.

Who were you in, Naruto?

I uh I love Naruto so much I was basically the guy who looked exactly like Noctis and his name's like lightning in Japanese like Raijin or something like that okay okay yeah he's like way at the end he's a win guy yep yep you know okay

great

but not necessarily what I'm known for right of course but it's still I didn't know that that's awesome yeah you're working in X-Men 97 as Cyclops is fan fucking tech oh yeah that show is so fucking good you're amazing

dream

Your glasses are kind of like Scott Summers like.

They are a little bit.

I started wearing these glasses because I was working on this game date everything.

And I was like, these date veterans.

And I got to say, wearing tinted glasses, literally rose-colored glasses, the world does look different and better.

Like green pops a lot more.

Interesting.

It is pretty cool.

And then Cyclops came out first, and everyone thought I was doing it because of that.

I love it.

I love it.

A really cool glass.

Just a coincidence.

Yeah.

Interestingly.

You say Cyclops because I see Gendo from Evangelion.

Oh, that's true.

Always doing a casual cosmo of Gendo, who I did play in the Netflix uh version of it.

Oh, shit, yeah, the voice actor for Gendo as well.

Yeah, so it's a triple, it's a triple thing.

Wow, yeah, maybe this is just my thing.

I'm gonna stick with it for this.

We're not supposed to wear it to some cons.

I think it's it's perfect.

Yeah, yeah, we're not supposed to have anybody actually impressive on the show.

I'm a fourth asshole, remember?

We always got Matt here to bounce the show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I can't do fucking shit.

Ray, last time we had you on, it was during the WGA strike, just before what would be a month-long SAG After Strike.

You're here now on the other side of a second SAG After Strike for video games that just got resolved.

Like as of this record, I have in my email inbox SAG After National Board approves interactive media agreement.

A lot of this was over, you know, guardrails and gains around AI, which is a thing we've been talking about on the podcast, AI related to voice acting.

But

I don't necessarily,

I'm not even necessarily looking for

a comprehensive labor comment or anything from you.

I'm just more wondering, as a working actor, what have the last couple of years been like?

I can talk.

Man, I can talk a lot.

The question is always with this, like, how I can go comprehensive labor profile.

Hey, go for it.

Do we make the listeners fall asleep?

Is the thing.

They're ready to sleep.

Leave that to me.

Man, I got to say.

For me, the strikes are there are two in my career specifically, two video game strikes.

One was while we were working on Final Fantasy XV, and the director and casting director, Keith Farley, was also heading the strike at the same time.

Wow.

And we had a weird thing where there was the game itself, Project Black, was not struck during that strike because it would have already been in development for like a year, which I'm so thankful.

for that that rule was there because I was able to like start my career as a voice actor.

And then the second one comes in

with all these AI provisions.

And I got to say, the timing on that is really awesome.

One criticism that SAG had the first time around, or with a lot of these streaming services, is that they were late to the game.

That, like, hey, they're going to streaming services.

They're saying we're not real television.

We don't pay real residuals.

And now we live in a world where everything is streaming.

And so we don't get very much residuals.

And this time, AI is like a year or two old and is starting to be used.

Mr.

Vader, right now.

Mr.

Vader, if you're nasty.

It's coming out now and they're and they're right on it, getting these provisions in place.

And I'm so glad that it came out.

I'll have to say, one weird thing as a voice actor and striking, you are part of

when I first started out, it was AFTRA and then SAG.

Yeah, there were two separate unions that merged.

Exactly.

And then I had to, and then,

but you work on so many different things.

Right.

I work on a lot of video games.

I work work on animation.

I work on commercials.

I do promo.

I do audiobooks.

And all of those have their own separate contracts.

Yes.

So it is one thing where like it was a strike, but it's oh, and that's right.

And this strike wasn't even for all of video games.

It was just for those companies who were refusing to comply or put it into any language and who we got an agreement with.

So I have to say, I just didn't audition for those things and then continued on as normal.

So it's been okay for me just because I'm fortunate enough to have my hands in lots of different crevices of the voice actor stuff.

Yeah.

Since you mentioned it, the companies specifically were struck here, because a lot of them, especially a lot of independent video game studios, just signed side agreements and were in compliance.

But the ones that were still struck companies were Activision, Blind Light LLC, Disney Character Voices, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Formosa Interactive, Insomniac Games, Take-Two Productions, and WB games.

So these are all like big tentpole like publishers.

And

I mean we make a lot of AAA games.

But yeah, this seems like a pretty positive thing

for everyone.

I mean, I mean, Heather, this was a thing we talked about when we were talking about AI James Earl Jones.

Yeah.

And I don't, I, I,

my completely unsupported theory is that that suddenly becoming ubiquitous was almost just like a flashpoint where an agreement had to be struck.

But like I had like like someone, things, this just, this just had to be figured out.

Yeah.

From maybe even from both sides had an incentive to come to the table here.

Right.

Because like if you're,

you know, a legacy studio or an estate that has access to like a voice actor, like for example, I see no reason why Bruce Willis couldn't star in a video game in the future,

especially if his estate is cool with it.

He has been in a video game previously.

Apocalypse, was that what that was?

I think so.

I'm trying to remember.

There was a PlayStation 1 game that was a whole like boondoggle and it was like kind of like a Duke Nukem forever.

It got

delayed indefinitely, eventually came out.

Originally, Bruce Willis, this was a time when celebrities of that stature were just not in video games.

So it was like a huge thing.

Bruce Willis was a voice actor in that game originally.

And then I think he became a, or maybe he was always on camera in the game, but he shifted from being a sidekick to being the protagonist.

You just played as Bruce Willis, but it was a whole weird thing.

Yeah, but I feel like

we're at this intersection of time and technology where it's still a little weird when you see a CG actor resurrected in like Rogue One.

Like when you see young Princess Leia or young Luke Skywalker, it's a little bit unsettling.

But in games, you don't have that problem because everything already looks like a fucking alien anyway.

So it doesn't matter.

So I feel like there is this

moment that we're approaching where you can have these estates license these actors, but if these deals and the structure of the rights negotiation isn't already in place, then how are these game companies going to get access to those estates without them being exploited?

Because there's also been a lot of like pushback because Vader was racist.

Yeah, in Fortnite.

He was racist, pretty much off the drop until they patched him.

Wait, really?

Well, yeah, because you could like,

there's a lot of like TikToks and stuff of like the first week of like people being like, hey, Darth Vader, rank your favorite races.

And so you have

the authentic voice of James Earl Jones

saying defamatory, awful shit.

And it's one thing if he's like.

Italians, obviously, the bottom.

But

it's one thing

if it's like, you know, Vader was never supposed to say skibbity toilet, and he has to say it because it's a decorative item inside the game.

But it's another thing to have these, like, to have no structure about like, how do we prevent the legacy of james earl jones from being like like duplicated like this and and and made to say like racist or defamatory or homophobic statements yeah that's wild i i didn't know about that but of course it it's what happened yeah instantly yeah

first person to

it is hard you're essentially giving access to all your players to a pandora's box yeah in your game so that you have no control over what your game is doing right what if yeah you boot up mario and you can just talk to Mario and go on a date with him or like,

right.

And there's also what if I could just go on a date with Mario?

There's also ways that you can structure your queries.

Like you can have him be like, you can say, hey, can you say these phonemes and get him to say awful shit that way?

Like because there's no actual intelligence behind the AI.

So I don't know.

Like, I'm glad that the deal was struck.

I hope it's very protective to these legacy voices as well as, like, the future generations of voice actors.

Yeah, and I mean, just, I also just hope people are getting paid because

that's ultimately the main thing.

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Ray,

I have a different question, a different subject for you, which is that you've narrated all of Jason Schreier's books for the podcast, Jason Schreier.

Yes.

I'm just curious, as someone who does audiobooks, what is the audiobook recording process like?

Because that seems, I mean,

audiobooks are fucking long.

I mean, it just seems like a lot.

They are really long.

It is a lot.

It's why I don't do a lot anymore.

I just do Jason's books.

Or if something comes by, I did one about the Strong Museum of Video Games had an audiobook, and I was like, hell yeah.

Yeah, I want to learn about this.

But yeah, when I first got my start, it was a thing.

I forget if I said this on the podcast last time, but Amazon just wanted 100,000 books in their library for Audible.

It was when they were first launching.

And so they didn't really care, they cared a little bit about quality, but they just wanted to be able to say, We have 100,000.

And so I had the time and the attention span to just say, I will narrate as many as you want.

I worked for a bunch of production companies and just did as many as possible.

I did.

You did all 100,000, right?

I did all of them myself.

That's a lot of books.

And I did 200.

Very close.

All 2000.

I did do

in two years uh i did i did so many books and they were just random just whatever they just they didn't care it was a lot of like 1970s sexploitation sci-fi ones um i did a lot of just uh uh erotica for sure uh i did a king henry the eighth uh erotica where they had sex in a bathtub but it was a it was new for the technology for the time so they talked about how like they had to bring up the hot water so that they could fuck it was great you worked this yeah

I'll take a dump in this honor.

But it's really hard.

I've done 99.9% of them.

I've only worked with a director like twice.

I've done them all by, completely by myself.

Wow.

You do what's called punch and roll recording, where if you make a mistake, you just have like hotkeys in my DAW of choice, which is Reaper.

Shout out to Reaper.

And you just

go.

And as far as the process, you get like,

if you're working with a good publisher, they'll give you a pronunciation list, which is always the biggest thing.

For sure.

And so I have a lot of WhatsApp messages from Jason Schreier saying names of Blizzard people with really good annunciation.

And then you're just off to the race and you just do it and you sit there and you do it.

And it takes longer.

Wow.

Yeah.

You want to aim for like two to one recorded hours to finished hours if you're really cooking.

Yes.

It's time consuming.

Yeah.

What is your home setup?

Because I know I knew you do a lot from home.

Do you have a full booth?

I do have a full booth.

I have

a Sennheiser 416 and a USMC 1820 is my other guy.

And then some fancy headphones, but I've never been so much of a tech guy.

In fact, even during COVID, I got a really nice setup.

And the feedback from all my clients was it sounded worse.

And I didn't know how to work as well.

Yeah,

I'm no Sam Rogic.

I can't do it.

So I returned it all, and I'm just doing the regular Sennheiser 416, which is the famous, it's famously used as just the boom mic in all of

stuff, all of movies and TV and stuff.

Well, Ray, I have one more question for you and for the room.

The question is, what are you playing?

What are you playing?

Hi, is me the Resident Evil merchant, and I'm here to ask,

Ray Chase,

what he's playing.

Hi, Ray.

Hello.

It's nice to meet you.

Big fan.

Big fan, gotta say.

I'm a big fan of you.

Thank you.

I like a voice actor.

Yeah.

What kinds of things do you do?

Like anime?

Do you watch stuff?

What?

Do you watch Jiu-Jitsu Kaisen?

I'm not allowed near a television.

But when I do get to see one, like, throw a window at Best Buy, I do like what I see.

The famous TVs in the windows.

In the windows of Best Buy.

You know, they do.

I didn't realize this.

Apparently, Best Buy now gets compensation from manufacturers to display panels in store because because they know that people like Samsung or whoever knows that people will go to Best Buy to look at us at a screen in a real space and then just buy it online.

But, like, but Sam, but Samsung is like, we're still getting value out of it being in Best Buy because it will still motivate customers to purchase it, them having to seen it in person.

So they're like, that's part of their business now.

Part of how they stay afloat is they just renting out their floor space.

I wish somebody would pay me to drive a car around because you'd be like, hey, I like that car.

I want to drive it.

I'm sorry, I mean, explain what this transaction is.

Yeah, I mean, you could see any car, anytime, anywhere.

Yeah, but like, what if it was going fast and you were like, I gotta go somewhere fast?

So, I so you, if you saw me driving fast, you might be like, That's a car for me.

I guess you're right.

Or, I didn't know a Prius could hit 230 miles an hour.

Hey, at least you care about the environment.

Love the environment.

I'm playing Deltarune.

on a Switch 2, perchance?

No, just on my PC.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a great game.

I don't know if you talked about it on the show.

I don't think I've ever heard of it.

We never really dug into Deltarune.

Jeff's played Mother 3.

I feel like we're in a watershed or maybe even a Jump the Shark moment with the show where you guys actually played Mother 3.

Yeah, maybe it's never.

There's other games.

Okay, good, good, good.

But it's Toby Fox keeping that spirit alive of just

such creativity, such bonker stuff going on.

I highly recommend it.

Right now, it's basically

it's kind of a prequel to Undertale.

And you have a lot of remixed characters from it.

We're not quite sure where it is, but he's four chapters in.

He just released the first four chapters of what might be a seven-chapter series.

And every chapter, he's just getting more and more confident with his skills as an artist and a writer.

With these last two chapters, he's introducing like 3D effects and like weird stuff and just playing around with the form, and it's so good.

I highly recommend it.

Dude, this is quite an endorsement.

I mean, like, I really liked Undertale.

I've liked it more in the years since I originally played it and on this podcast, honestly.

I've never played Undertale until we covered it.

And

I really

respect Toby Fox, just as a creator and what he's built.

But Deltarune, part of why I've kept it at arm's length is the episodic nature of it.

You're waiting for them all to come.

Yeah, and I'm like, do I wait for all of them?

Is this going to be a kind of thing?

Because, like, I don't know.

I mean, part of me is like, I've dealt with Telltale series in the past where some of them, Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, are masterpieces, but other of them, I'm just like, this kind of loses steam over time.

But you feel pretty confident in this one.

Yes.

And even in its current form, it's just worth playing through chapter four.

Two things.

Yeah.

One, it's already longer than Undertale.

Wow.

And so I wonder if if you wait to the end, it might be like a 60-hour 16-bit era experience, experience, which might be too much just to look at that for that long.

And then, number two, as a man of culture yourself, there's a really sexy lady named Queen in chapter two.

She's the sexiest 16-bit character I've ever seen.

Wow.

She's got big dominant energy.

Yeah.

Play it for Queen.

Wow, okay.

She's great.

She's great.

Wow, Nick is leaving.

I'm interested in it.

Yeah, because of of

playing Undertale previously, and I want to check it out.

And it's one of the games that's on Switch 2 as a Switch 2 game.

And you mentioned Mother 3, and it's just like, that's, again, a game I just played and had known its reputation.

And like, again, just looking at Undertale again, re-evaluating Undertale after having played Mother 3, having that context, it's like, oh, okay, wow, this is a...

This is really cool.

That's, again, quite an endorsement.

I think I'll maybe dig into Deltarune as a result.

Yeah, thanks.

Yeah.

Of course.

Someone else.

You only asked me, Resident Evil.

Yeah.

I did answer your question.

I forgot the other guys' names.

Nick.

Purple.

Nick.

Nick, what are you playing?

What are you playing?

Wow, Resident Evil Merchant, thank you so much for the question.

I made a pledge to myself to play something other than Balacho this week.

I did not succeed.

In fact, in time I could have spent playing other games, I was watching Balachro University videos.

Balacho University, great streamer.

He's really good.

Although it does verge on very sleepy content.

It's hard to stay awake.

I kind of like it.

Yeah, wow.

Because, like, again, Balacho kind of puts me in a chill mood.

And I put on some Balacho University videos before I was going to go to bed and I was like, I am getting sleepy.

And he just kind of like nodded off.

He is brilliant.

He's great.

He knows all the strats.

I think a big part of my current Balacho relapse is

honestly it being on Game Pass, which I know happened a bit ago, but, you know, I think like the pull of Xbox achievements, which to me feel more tangible than Steam achievements, like I, I, I play most of my games on Steam, but I never really chase achievements because it's like a Steve Steam achievement just doesn't feel like anything to me, but the, the, the Game Pass achievements just feel more tangible.

I don't know what that is.

I have no idea.

It's a weird thing.

I'm putting them out.

No, what it is, I think what it is, it's just like Xbox.

You know, it is where like the gamer score and it's like the origin of achievements, right?

So I just get an association.

Like, Xbox achievements feel real to me.

Uh, PlayStation trophies feel real to me.

Steam achievements are just as real as either of those.

They're all nothing, they're all meaningless.

But the Steam achievements don't feel like anything to me.

If you explain it this way, I sort of do know what you mean.

And Switch is a trophy, a trophy.

It's tangible.

It feels like a real thing.

Yeah.

And then, and then the Switch, I mean, Switch just obviously doesn't have any of that.

So it's just like, why even bother?

But I

but I will say, beyond just displaying a shitload of Balacho, I did get a Nintendo Switch 2.

Yeah.

Did anyone get the Switch 2 since last time?

Anyone else?

Yes, me.

Oh, Heather got yours.

I got my Switch 2.

Should we talk about this?

Maybe we can both go in on the Switch 2 a little bit.

Sure, let's go.

I've got so much gaming stuff to talk about.

Matt, it is indeed a big boy.

It's a big boy.

It's a big boy.

It's a big boy.

Chonky boy.

The size of a boy.

Yeah.

The camera is the length of a pencil.

And that's a normal.

Everybody knows what I'm talking about when I say that.

You can visualize it, Sam.

Maybe you haven't seen the camera, but you can picture the length of a pencil.

Every

pencil.

Oh, God.

It's a new generation.

Pen guy over here.

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This is an absolutely true story.

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I eventually got off that roof when the sun rose.

I just like the feeling of setting up a new console I find very calming.

Yeah.

So I read this book,

the gentle art of Swedish death cleaning, and it's about a practice of like, I guess it's a Nordic practice of when you're going, when you're, when death is maybe not imminent, but on the horizon,

it's just like, oh, I'll get my own house in order.

I'll do the cleaning that other people will have to do after I am gone.

It's just kind of like a nice, it's both a, a, a, a, an act, like a bit of self-care, uh, but also like a gift to like your, your successors, you know, to your family that they're not going to have to get rid of a bunch of clutter.

I have the same sort of feeling when I'm like going through, I was like, okay, well, I don't need to have

whatever, you know, panty party or whatever bullshit I play for this podcast on my home screen anymore.

And so just like getting rid of all that shit was, was after the transfer was very satisfying.

Can you explain how virtual game cards work?

Because I don't understand.

Wait, wait, hold on, though.

Like, because we played that game long enough ago that it should not have been on your home screen.

Yeah, but it just shows up in your home screen sometimes.

I don't know what's going on.

Like, bring that game.

Yeah, and it's just like, it just pops right back to the top of the screen.

It wouldn't be on your menu, bro.

I don't get how these things work.

So, this is my understanding of virtual game cards.

Because

I had a concern because, you know,

we're multi-switch households.

Yes, right?

So, like, sometimes you have a digital game loaded on two switches, and all you have to do is switch between

downloading the save from the other one via the cloud or whatever.

Unless it's like Animal Crossing where you have to do a whole fucking thing.

Right.

This is basically just that, but you used to have to have one switch be a primary switch.

Yeah.

Right.

Where like

one always had to be online for you to be able to

transfer saves or or download games from or whatever and then the other one you could take and not have to be online to play any of the games.

This is basically

this virtual game cards gets rid of that, and you can now just like have the data loaded on

all of your Switches, but the license, like the game card has to be loaded onto the Switch to play it.

Okay.

So, like, it's like basically like taking out a physical card.

It's like taking it out from the library.

Yes, but the data is still loaded on your Switch.

So, when you do, you know, download it or, you know, download the virtual game card.

I feel like I'm explaining it correctly and also that it doesn't make any sense.

That was the whole thing because I was dealing with it.

It was like, I was like ejecting and then virtual game cards.

I was like, I don't really know what I'm doing here.

And it feels like just an extra step to adding or removing it from

the cloud.

But I guess the way you explain it makes sense.

What I like about it is that there's a UI element that tells families.

the game is here.

Yes.

Like that, I think, is like the description.

Like, because otherwise there's this nebulous relationship to the cloud, whereas, like, there's a nice little piece of animation where you see the virtual game card enter into your system and you're like, oh, now it's here.

Whereas before, it'd be like, I don't know, which, because it's telling me that this isn't synchronized.

Yeah.

Like, which saved is it, what one's better?

Am I going to lose it?

Like, all those things are, I believe, issues that my mom would have if she had multiple switches in her household.

But my dad will never play a video game because he thinks they're an abomination.

He only likes working with wood or boats.

That's fair.

He's right.

I do find it a nice piece of hardware.

The magnetized Joy-Cons are shockingly satisfying.

Yeah,

and a lot sturdier than I expected.

I think they've got too much

action.

Really?

I think they're a little bit too wiggly for me.

Even when they're snapped in, there's just a tiny bit of, just a tiny bit of action and travel

on the, on those, on those and also we know that I when I crack an egg this is what I was gonna say

like I explode the egg all over my

is it possible

you're choking the switch

as I said it I was like oh no I was saying I can't crack an egg

you should see me in my house

just very gingerly removing the switch two from the dock because I don't want the screen to touch the sides of it like I'm playing playing operation or something.

Yeah, whereas when I try to eat a carrot, it explodes in my hand.

My hand's carrot wet.

It's just crushes it in the dust.

Yeah, I was surprised how big it was.

I'm also excited because there's a lot of bezel on that screen.

Yes.

And when you compare the bezel on the Switch OLED to the

Switch 2, you're like, oh, wow, they're going to be able to make this screen significantly larger in the same form factor, which is really great when they upgrade it inevitably next year.

I

don't, so what I've played on it is Mario Kart World,

which is fine.

Yeah.

It's fine.

I just like, I am not someone who's enthused about Mario Kart.

I understand that this is going to be probably just the biggest game of the system.

And I know it's for some people, it's all they own a Switch for and all they're owning a switch to for.

It's it's just like I'm not super into kart racing, right?

It's it's fine.

What is has been surprisingly joyful is the switch to tour game.

Oh, yes.

I downloaded this and I haven't started it yet, which is so playful.

It's like, okay, Sony's Sony's concept of like how we like build brand relationship is Astro bot and you just travel through the machine.

With this, you're like in a museum and you're walking around on your Switch, but you also like you learn about the Switch, it demos it in these mini games.

The minigames are the same fucking thing that like Astrobots Playroom did for the PlayStation 5,

except those games are also references to older Nintendo games often.

Like the first mouse demo is very Mario Paint.

Like it's very much like, oh, this, I see this game.

It's very similar to the games of Mario Paint.

But there's also little quizzes built in, and the quizzes also have nice Nintendo references.

So for example,

when they're, they tell you how the Joy-Cons work and then you have to answer quizzes about how the Joy-Cons work in order to get coins, in order to open up new mini games.

But they also have things that are like, how does the

Switch to stand, like, how does the stand work?

And they show you like four different options.

And one of the options is the kickstand.

as is on the system.

Another is the kickstand of the Switch one.

So you're like, oh, that's not it.

Another one is just like a mystery.

And then the fourth and final one is the Wii U stand.

I kind of like that that's there.

Yeah, that fucking good.

That's good.

So it's stuff like that, where you feel like it's something that Tingle would talk about in

a Zelda game.

Like, it's just a little like Nintendo nerdsiness.

And I like it.

Is it a pack-in or do you have to pay for it?

Oh, you have to pay for it because it's fucking Nintendo.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow.

Heather, be on the Switch too.

What are you playing?

Well, I want to shout out the SoCal Gaming Expo.

This weekend in Pasadena at the Pasadena Convention Center was the SoCal Gaming Expo, which is,

I would call like a retro gaming convention.

They had an enormous amount of tangible retro games.

And I even bumped into a listener there, which was really, really nice.

But

yeah, like, you know, giant crates of like unboxed Genesis games, but then also in box, unopened, still plastic sealed Virtual Boys.

And so, like, the price, the price point varied between like, I saw a Pokemon card that was $14,000.

Jesus.

But I also saw like, you know,

I made a purchase of the Legend of Zelda Game and Watch, which you own.

Yes.

Matt owns a copy of it.

And I was like, oh, you know, I don't know that I ever would have picked this up if I hadn't physically seen it.

But it was a like a really inexpensive, it was like 30 bucks.

And I was like, oh, that's my, that's my take home from this expo.

The other thing that was really cool was they had gaming tournaments.

And so I got to watch about 30 minutes of their Tetris tournament, which was an eight-player live tournament that was also projected on these giant screens.

Each player had

a Sony PVM CRT so that the refresh rate was identical on everybody's system and an NES with the actual NES controllers so that nobody had any particular advantage over somebody else.

And one of the fascinating things about watching them play is they would sometimes also show the way they were holding the controllers, which I guess when you get like one of the guys who I was watching is like in the top 20 worldwide on Tetris, and watching him play Tetris made me feel sick

because

couldn't I couldn't even see by the time by the time

because the way the tournament was working at least when I was watching it is of the eight people each person had an individual person that they were competing against right they can only do one by one like one by one but all happening simultaneously so that the tournament didn't take forever as soon as your um opponent crashed out you were done um unless you had less points than them and in which case you had to keep playing but by the time people were crashing out, this guy, I was watching this guy, Dylan, who I guess was seated 17 in the tournament.

I couldn't see the fucking pieces.

Like, they were talking about how one guy had invented the roll.

Like, one of the guys I was watching play had invented the Tetris roll, which was a new move that revolutionized Tetris tournament play.

But it was, it was like walking in an auditorium thinking you know what basketball is.

Yeah.

And then like everybody who's playing basketball is flying.

And you're like, oh, I thought this was like a game that you played by walking on the gym floor.

It was, it was incredible and super enjoyable.

It happens every year.

It's a three-day convention.

And that's the shirt that I'm wearing is the SoCal Gaming actually.

That shirt is cool as hell.

It was a really great experience.

I love esports, the toxicity of some of it aside,

but I just love watching mastery.

I love people who are better at something than I could ever be.

It's so amazing.

You would have sat there all day.

I would have been transfixed by it.

I don't even have the vocabulary to articulate what I was seeing other than mastery.

What you were talking about with the controller, like I, from what I've seen of the competitive Tetra scene, some of the players have the controller like upside down.

It's like face down in their hands.

And it's kind of on,

I'm not sure their role is

this exact technique, but some of it does involve like kind of like

moving the d-pad in a in a way where you're almost like it you're almost like inverting how it would normal where the pressure would be.

Yeah, like there was that.

There's people who had it like sort of balanced on their leg and were typing with it.

Okay, yeah.

And then there were the like traditional players and everybody like you you go into Evo and you expect everybody who plays Street Fighter to use a joystick.

And so when you see somebody using a traditional d-pad, you're like, holy shit.

And in the same way, like there were enough, there was enough specificity to the way that each of those players played that when I did see somebody who was just holding the controller normally, I was like, are you at a disadvantage or are you God?

Like, how is that possible?

No, I believe the, I could be wrong, it could have the wrong game, but I think the Street Fighter VI grand champion at Evo used a dual shock.

And it was just like, you know, up against other players with fight sticks, but just, yeah, to be that high level.

And to me, I would think you'd be at a competitive disadvantage, but some

players are just that good.

Yep.

Did you guys hear about the new Super Mario Brothers World Record tech that came out just a few weeks ago?

No.

It is kind of crazy that the Super Mario Brothers World Record, like Tetris, one of those older games that everyone's still playing forever.

And you think that it's optimized because of tool-assisted games that are doing it.

Someone found it out accidentally by playing poorly.

There's a thing in like World 84 where if you jump into the lava deliberately and press a fireball at the right time you're able to skip a little earlier than you and it saves than you normally would it saves like two seconds and the thing that that blew everybody's mind about it is it's exactly the image on the cover of super mario brothers one

it's him inside a little block right with the lava underneath him with the the fireball it is it is pure coincidence as much as magical as it would be like the devs knew but it's one of those like crazy magical coincidences

i saw a really cool uh i think it's ocarine of time or it might have been, it might have been Skyward Sword, but I think it was Ocarina of Time.

Like that there is a

NE percent hack that was discovered in the last month where

if

Link holds up a rupee, you know, like it's like, ba-da-na-na.

His animation cycle, his breathing,

pushes him backwards by like a tenth of a pixel or something.

So if you open certain chests with your back against locked gates and then let the game run for 17 hours, he will phase through the gates without ever having to open it.

I don't understand how that works.

Yeah, well, I don't understand how it works in the context of speedrunning, but it was a brand new exploit and people were like super excited about it.

And I was like,

this is...

How does this happen?

Yeah.

How does anybody find this shit?

Yeah.

Yeah, a similar thing.

And I can't remember the details and I couldn't find it with a quick bing, but

there was a Metal Gear Solid 1

speed run

development that happened in recent years.

And I think it was a similar sort of thing.

Someone somewhere upon it by accident, but it completely upended how they looked at the box art and they just did it.

Yeah, yeah.

One of the other things that I want to just mention now that the SAG strike is over is that I'm playing Fortnite, and the new season launched this week.

It is a superhero-themed season, but one of the most exciting things for me is that it is completely playable on the Switch 2.

It is a PlayStation 4 level, like

totally passable game of Fortnite.

If you don't have the system actually tangibly plugged into your Ethernet cable, then it's still going to have that wireless lag that

you try to avoid when you're playing online competitive games.

But the flip side of,

or once that's set aside, what's interesting is that now everybody has a built-in mouse on Fortnite.

And there is a controller settings in the Switch 2 version of Fortnite where you can play with one of the Joy-Cons as a mouse and the other one as

your movement stick, your standard controller stick.

I tried doing it.

It was a fucking nightmare.

I just fell off of everything.

I couldn't tell where I was looking.

But I was like, what an interesting

step in like evening the play field because when you run into PC players, when you're playing Fortnite, you're at a disadvantage.

Well, the PC players might say that if you have a controller, you have aim assist and so you're at an advantage.

Who knows?

But it seems like if you're playing on a PC, it's a better experience.

And now there's a kind of a built-in because you can plug a mouse and a keyboard into your PlayStation.

Like anybody could technically do it.

But

because it's not the default, a lot of people just use the controller.

So I wonder if there's going to be an expansion of mouse aim in Fortnite now that you can play it on the Switch 2.

Since we haven't checked in with you in a long time because of the strike, who's your skin now?

Who do you play as?

Well, in the previous season, what was the season that just ended?

Oh, it was Star Wars season.

So I was just playing as

blank stormtrooper because I thought it was funny.

It's like, also, there were so many areas where there were just stormtroopers walking around.

So to just be plain stormtrooper with no like accents, no shots.

It's also like you're meant to be shot.

You only exist exist to be like,

also, like, when you die to stormtrooper, it's like you died to stormtrooper.

Like, it's just like nothing.

And also, uh, though I did cycle through a bunch of different skins because it was funny to hear Darth Vader, you know, say, you know, Sarah Connor, I understand that you have been hunting the Terminator and

the Rebellion.

Because also, the AI knew context of the skin that you were wearing, which was interesting.

But now that it's a superhero season,

I don't particularly.

I've heard rumor that there's going to be a one-punch man collab.

And if that's the case, then I will definitely main Saitama for the superhero season.

But right now, I'm just playing as my standard Ivor Viking because

I had to take her off for a season to play Stormtrooper.

There you go.

Nice.

Yeah.

Matt, what are you playing?

All right, I'm going to run through these just real quick.

Mario Kart World, obviously, I'm loving it.

Went to a big party, got 16 people playing Mario Kart.

Oh, shit.

It required a lot of Switch 2s because you can only do two per switch.

But it was fucking awesome.

And guys, if you haven't tried Knockout Tour yet, oh, baby, Knockout Tour fucking rocks on Mario Kart.

It's really, really fun.

It's the Battle Royale racing mode that they've added to

the franchise.

How'd you do?

I got second place on online.

Okay.

I was doing pretty good.

Nice, man.

How did you organize a party basically launch week with eight different Nintendo Switch 2s?

My buddy, look, shout out to my buddy Connor McCabe.

He's a real gatherer of people.

He's just like, he's just, he's just that kind of guy.

He knows a lot of people that are very enthusiastic.

And we knew a lot of people getting Switch 2s.

Was like, guys, I got the big TV.

Let's get everybody over here.

There was like 30 people at this thing.

It was fucking crazy.

It was awesome.

It was a really, really fun party.

That's cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's the best, and I love him very much.

And so I'm playing that.

I started a new save on Pokemon Scarlet because of the

up-resing of the visuals of the game.

And let me tell you something.

The game's good now.

Wow!

Wow!

I didn't think it was bad before.

It was obviously running very poorly on the Switch 1.

It's running like

velvet butter almost.

It's so damn smooth.

Velvet butter.

That's how smooth it is, Nick.

you look confused but it's kind of like that telling you to picture velvet butter

buttery velvet

just follow me into the bathroom

anyway it's very very smooth and also for the novelty i had to get cyberpunk 2077 yes physically on a tiny tiny little cart uh the whole thing is on the cart including the expansion which is insane um and it looks fucking incredible on a switch it does it looks fucking great wow yeah and there's a lot I've seen

rate.

Uh, it's stable and it looks like it's it looks

to me as good as playing it on any other console that I've played it on.

It's great.

Um and I've seen a lot of videos of like, you know, comparing uh you know switch 2 to the Xbox Series S version of it and things like that.

And it looks like sometimes better because I think it's just it's working with less or something.

I don't know.

I or it's running versus a Steam deck.

And figured out that like if you're playing it like at full i saw this video that was like if you're playing uh cyberpunk on a switch 2 or a steam deck at like full brightness like full like everything settings

you get two minutes less on the switch 2 than you do on the steam deck and it's about like two hours and 30 minutes of playtime because it's just a very like you know yeah sure that thing is gonna make the switch 2 hot it's gonna make the switch 2 feeling a little hot in the hand but it's a great game playing a nomad run this time, so I could see how that goes because I've done the other two so far.

And then we had a little experience the other day, Heather.

Yeah, Matt and I had an experience.

We had a little outing, a little friendship outing.

We had a friendship outing.

Wow.

We went out.

We were out in the town.

Which town?

Los Angeles.

Los Angeles.

And

we were being good.

What?

What?

I have no idea what that means.

We weren't doing anything.

It was a beautiful night in Los Angeles where nothing bad is happening.

And

we were being good.

I get it.

We went to the Death Stranding 2 on the Beach premiere here in Los Angeles, the Orpheum Theater downtown.

Yes, we did.

And we found ourselves, there was a varying circumstances, which I won't fully get into.

We found ourselves face to face with the man, the myth, the legend, Mr.

Hideo Kajima.

Yep.

And

he saw Heather, was happy to see Heather, which was that was enough.

That was honestly enough.

It was very exciting to see somebody

you look up to and respect.

Yeah.

Visually clock your friend and be excited to see them.

That was like, that was enough.

I loved that.

That was incredible to me.

I rocked you.

Heather immediately goes, this is my friend Matt.

My man puts his hand out, shakes my hand.

He's got his translator, Aki, nice to meet you.

We take a photo.

It was just the fucking best.

It was the fucking coolest.

Because then the thing, we didn't have that much.

I mean, here's the thing.

I couldn't have strung a sentence together to say to him anyway.

Yeah, sure.

It was a fucking nightmare.

It was like, it was, it was extremely, it was a huge honor, obviously.

And like, because obviously he's somebody we've talked about for so long on this show.

played a lot of his games and just like really just admire his work.

So there was not enough i could say in like the very brief interaction that we had with him but then we got to watch the it was like a live stream presentation part of summer games fest or something i think that where they were uh you know jeff keely was um you know interviewing him and then interviewed some of the cast um

and and the musician uh who did the score wood kid and then they showed uh some new clips from the game and then they showed

like the first opening five minutes of the game this is all on a video you can see this Yeah.

And

there was a moment when they started showing the beginning of the game where Heather and I thought it was real.

Like

scared us.

Real in which, like, documentary footage?

It looked like

live-action footage.

And this was a screen that is, you know, an enormous theater screen.

So to have the footage of the game internal in the in-engine gameplay

look photorealistic at that size

was staggering.

I think we turned to each other and just went, holy shit.

Yeah.

It was crazy.

And it wasn't, it was, it was showing us rocks and dirt.

Like that was like all it was.

And we were like, oh my God.

Yeah.

It was, and it was running on a PS5 Pro.

And then there was like a funny segment where somebody backstage was playing, somebody from Kojima Productions was doing the live gameplay of it, and Kojima was like roasting him.

He was like, he's been practicing all day.

He's not very good at that.

Which is very funny.

And then everything we saw was like more mind-blowing than the previous thing that we saw, which is crazy.

And then you also have no context for it.

So you're like, what the fuck is this game, actually?

It looks crazy.

Often,

because they had, you know, like Troy Baker's on stage, and he's talking about the game, and he just kept emphasizing what you've just seen, which was El Fanning's character tomorrow slipping in and out of the earth via like oil-based portals.

Yes.

While like doing an incredible action sequence.

Again, this footage is all available online, so it's no shock to anybody who's following the game.

But to have that clip end, which was staggering and wild, and then have Troy Baker be like, I'm telling you guys, this is nothing compared to how insane this game is.

Yes.

Like what, that's all I want out of Death Stranding 2 is for it to be crazy.

Yes.

I just want to be like overwhelmed.

There was a lot of action in in the preview as well, a lot of combat encounters and stuff like that.

And while that stuff looked really, really cool and obviously there's not that much of that in the first one,

Kojima did keep saying,

it is a delivery game still.

It is, you're still just delivering stuff.

But it was, and then we got to talk to him again afterward, and we were like,

hey, that stuff in the beginning looked real.

And he laughed at us like he thought we were dumb.

You know, it's a video game, right?

Yeah, that's kind of exactly what he said.

And it was just, it was just very, very surreal meeting him and just an unbelievable honor.

And I appreciate, and thank Heather for taking me.

It was super fun to go with you, Matt.

We walked around.

I got a beer.

That was cool.

I'm wearing this t-shirt that says, should we have connected?

That was from the gift bag that we got.

Oh, shit, your shirt's totally different than mine.

It seemed like they got a lot of different stuff.

We should have grabbed all of them.

Mine's like a white baseball tee with the Death Straining logo on the front, and should we have connected on the back?

That's really cool.

Wow.

That's really cool.

Wow.

So I'll disclose, and I'll be vague.

I was supposed to go

to this as well.

I was somebody's plus one,

and that person opted not to go because of

the police state situation in downtown LA.

So I would have had to get to the wait list.

So I ended up opting not to go.

Yeah.

And I'm, I'm, my ass is wrong.

I was like, whatever, I'll watch this online.

And then, of course, you both get a photo with Hineoko Gamma.

A photo that we had to scrounge for because, like, there was like, there was, I sort of knew when we took the photo, I was like, there's no way we're ever going to see this photo ever again.

And everyone's going to think, well, fucking liar.

But then we just happened to be in a video that was posted, which is very, very cool.

And it was just like, it was just, it was insane.

It was unbelievable.

The person who flagged that for me was friend of the pod, Gene park wow gene park was like hey you met the man and i was like i have no idea what you're referring to and then he was like in the game informer video incredible that's that's so awesome uh all right let's talk about date everything also wait hold on please before people in the audience think i'm like a dick i also invited you but you already had

someone who already

just like ignoring you nicks

Let's talk about Date Everything, which was developed by Sassy Chap Games and published by Team 17, releasing tomorrow, June 17th, if you're listening to this.

Ray, as we're talking about, we've got to spend some time with this game via pre-release codes.

I want to start by just asking, like, how did this, and I apologize if this is a vague, a broad question, but can you give us a

first question, yeah?

No, I mean, like,

how did this whole thing come together?

Because, like, you know, you're obviously someone with a ton of credits

in gaming,

but development is something that, like, is kind of a whole new animal.

Yeah, definitely.

I was always a big indie game fan, always following it, always going to GDC every year.

And so I had a lot of developer friends.

Hideo Kojima was not one of them, unfortunately.

And I was just always interested in it.

It was always just in the back of my mind, like, maybe one day I can be a part of making a video game.

I never thought in a million years I would direct one and do all the stuff that I ended up doing.

But it was just me and my friend Robbie Damon, who's voiceover prompto in Final Fantasy 15,

Tuxedo Mask and Goro Ketchi in Persona 5.

Wow.

Yeah.

He is a very good friend.

We were just goofing around in the studio one day saying, what if we could make a game where we could, I don't know, date everything, date the chair, date the table and stuff.

And we laugh it off.

And then the next day I go to him and I go like, I think I want to make that game.

I think that game should exist.

And I think I'm the person who should make it

because I have some free time.

I didn't know that it would take over my entire life.

Uh, and uh it was just kind of fully formed as like just that title and living up to that title.

That like, can you make a game where once people played it, they did date, they dated everything and they said, I got my money's worth.

And that kind of was the overriding like um design philosophy going through it.

Like, can we, can we reach every single tendril that we possibly can?

Right.

And you said before we got started that it took seven years.

Seven years to the day almost.

Wow.

When I finally, when I, when I first reached out, because Robbie and I had that idea, thought about it for a week, and then I sent my first email to Adriel Wallach, who ended up becoming our lead programmer on the vertical slice,

June 17th, 2018.

So coincidentally, seven years from when we first really started production.

Wow.

Yeah.

I have no experience in coding, in design, and anything like that.

Sure, I've written stuff, like all actors write stuff,

but I never done it, never done any story programming.

Through the course of this, I learned a ton of lessons, getting my teeth kicked in over and over again, and then just like finding out, like for whatever reason, I was just really good at that kind of abstract thinking that story programming needed.

There was this language called Ink, Inkle, which the sorcery game used.

And 80 Days is the other one, the other famous one.

And I just took to it.

I just really, really enjoyed it.

And I really like understood it.

And I built, what ended up happening, I built a lot of little machines inside of it to do all the little narrative things that we wanted to do.

But like just learned so many weird things that I never thought that I would.

It was a four-year journey to make the vertical slice.

That was all self-funded, trying to get it and listening to feedback.

And then we got our publisher Team17 on about three years ago.

And then it has been a rocket ship since

developing that game.

The scope expanded so much, many times over it based on feedback.

At first, we thought it was going to be like did everything we can like have, but but the only way we're going to make it is if some characters are really small and some characters are big.

And then we had these this feedback.

Arma, the smoke alarm was one of them where it was her story ended right after you talk about her trauma.

And then that was it and you got an ending.

And one innocuous comment was, oh, that was abrupt.

And I took that to mean I will now double the size of this game.

And so there are no small characters in the game at all.

Even if you think you like got a joke ending or something like that, that usually is only the beginning of what that character is.

So just talking about Inkle,

is that kind of the scripting language you used for the retail game, for like the final game, or was that more what you were using for the vertical slide?

It's the controller that Unity uses.

So it was programmed.

I didn't learn any real, real programming.

That was done by our lead programmers over the years.

But I did do all, basically you write in.

in Inkle and you can play in Inkle up to a certain point.

Then our game got too complex to be able to play in it because you have like characters like Curtin Rod were very location-based, and you can't simulate that in Inkle, so you couldn't do that.

You'd have to play it in build.

Um, and uh, and yeah, it was just uh, it was learning all that.

Uh, there's 2,000 variables in the game, 1.6 million words, which is almost as big as Baldur's Gate.

It's crazy, yeah.

I will say from playing it, it is like a staggering amount of text and all fully voiced.

It's like

it's it's like a murderer's row of voice over talent.

I just, you're just going, I like, I, I was making a list, and I was just like, I can't make this list because I don't know where to stop.

Because there's so many people that you just recognize from so many things, so many voices that are familiar.

It's a, it's, uh, I feel like, I feel like Sakurai announcing this, this, the Smash Brothers Ultimate roster.

Everyone's here.

It's true.

Yeah.

I texted my buddy and past guest, Jaquis Neal.

Yes.

When I found him in the game, because I didn't need confirmation that he was in it because I just am friends with him.

So I was like, that's Jaquis.

That's

great.

Very, very exciting.

He was like, Hell yeah.

That was, he said he had a lot of fun doing it.

Nice.

You mentioned Unity.

Like,

you know, I did, that's the engine you're using for the game.

I'm curious about

a broader design decision because there's a version of this game, and there's other dating sims that we've, that

I've played as kind of the resident dating sim fan here.

And I know you don't necessarily think of this game as much as a dating sim, which we can talk about, but like where the environments are like static backgrounds, and like there's an approach that could have been like, hey, each room is a static background,

but that would have been cheaper.

Yeah,

no, that's the thing.

Like, this is this is a full, this is a 3D engine, these are 3D environments, and I actually really like that about this.

I like that you can just explore in first person, look around.

There's, there's an element of surprise of like, oh, look at that over there.

Like,

I didn't notice that kind of tucked away.

Hey, I can interact with that.

Oh, this is a character now I can romance.

Like, it's, it's, or become friends with.

Like, I think that adds to a great sense of discovery for the game but yeah it does bloat its scope to some degree a huge amount yeah there's a Nintendo article that it did that Team 17 grabbed as a headline it's on your on our Steam page it's in big letters Ray Chase this game was very stupid to make

and it was it's it's uh normally you have like a game where it's a

a uh a loop a a game gameplay loop where you're doing this you can test it and you can have variations on the loop but this one you had to create every single asset uh be by by the nature of it, by the nature of these branching paths and stuff.

And we did go from a vertical slice, which was in the laundry room, was our first room, and

it was first person.

And we felt like this, this felt good.

And then once we got funded, we were like, actually, it might be better to make it where it's isometric.

And it looked like

the idea was the Legend of Zelda Links Awakening remake, which what it could have looked like.

But it necessitated a

player avatar, which also added to a lot of difficulties because they would block, it added a lot of things with like camera angles where if you did it isometric, you either had to rotate the house a lot or have the character

or just have walls that had nothing on them, which also felt like not a believable house.

Yeah, right.

And then because we wanted everything to animate all the objects in the game, I don't know if you played enough to unlock the magical animations,

but

everything has a regular animation for what you'd think it would do in the house, a magical animation when it loves you.

But then you also have to animate the player for every single one.

Right.

And we wanted to have multiple body types of player and all that sort of stuff.

And so that was like a, we had that for like a year.

And then we had to throw it all away and start basically from scratch again.

Yeah.

That's wild.

Yeah.

Development was tumultuous.

In a word, we failed every single milestone that we had.

And to Team 17's credit, they did not cancel us.

Somehow we kept chugging along.

I ended up putting my life savings into it.

I hope I get it back.

But yeah, we just did everything that we could to make it go.

And Team 17 still believed in us all the way through.

And I really have to commend them for that because we were

first-time developers, all learning, all just grabbing whatever we possibly could and making a game that had never existed before.

There isn't a 3D dating sim like that, a 3D visual novel.

Can I say something that just goes to the, speaks to the level of like

honesty of the game?

Yeah.

Which is that when

I opened up one of the closets in the bedroom, uh, to see what was in there to date, yeah, um, I was like, okay, here's it, I can see this stuff.

And then I closed the closet, and I was, and it's one of those double-doored closets

where, like, you know, one side is, uh, can swing in one way, and one side can swing in the other way.

And I was like, oh, of course, you can only see half of the closet because that's what I would do to save money.

But out of curiosity, clicked the closet the other way, and an entire other side of the closet opened and there was two separate closets.

Yes.

And I was like, the fuck did you do this?

Like,

I would have never, ever judged the decision to just open the closet one way.

But as soon as I could open it both ways, I was like, oh, this game is deep.

This is just going to keep going.

Thank you.

That was something I fought for.

But not in the way that you think.

There was always two closets, but those doors themselves aren't replicated because all the doors in our house are slightly askew.

And we were like, let's just replicate it and put it on there.

It wouldn't fit.

The door wouldn't slide.

It was, it was clipping through.

So we had to make extra doors for all of those things.

And each door, and I mean, like, that was a design philosophy that like, if you could, if it's there, you, it has to have all of the things that are there.

If you, if there can't be anything in the house that is not datable,

it has to be a part of a character.

Everything has to have an examine.

So if you examine every single thing in the house, it has it.

And if you have a love or a hate examine, it changes.

And then there was even stuff like you can leave the house in the game, like leave and glitch out because you can date the glitch and he tells you how to do it.

And even all of those have an examine in it like that.

It's just you have to, I'm that kind of gamer who's like, oh, maybe they forgot about this.

And I did not want that.

No, thanks.

That's what I like.

Cause like, you know, I'm not, I'm not playing this game.

I'm not trying to break this game.

I'm not trying to like, yeah, I'm, but I, but I have that natural curiosity about it.

Like, I just want to see what happens.

Or honestly, a better way to put it is, I want to see if I can do this.

You can, yeah.

and like the yes the answer is yes like it's just that all these options all these contingencies are yeah it's also what I wanted to do like as far as narratively yeah there's games where uh uh Michelle Cleo who was uh I was a narrative designer uh and I watched one of her um GDC talks was really inspired is about kindness coins in dating sims and in RPGs and stuff and like in a lot of uh

RPGs you just romance by just being kind, just being the kind option, giving the gift, all that sort of kind of stuff.

And because we had a hundred, they all had to be different in some way.

And so you had to like make it so that like you're free to experiment, that some some characters like the negging, they like the drama, they want, or they want very specific times for you to be kind when they open up.

And I wanted to have that be in the narrative too, that in the overworld, you can do whatever the hell you want, click around, you're always going to get something fun.

And then also in the narrative too, that like you're never punished for a hate ending.

You're never like friends or loves.

It's all the same.

You get the same amount of points in the end.

That was really important to me.

Just to something you said

a bit ago,

because I was all of a sudden having flashbacks to my time in development, you know,

over 10, 15 years ago.

And you mentioned milestones.

So

when I was working, we were working, the publishers were, you know, like Activision, Bethesda,

and Milestone was like a big onerous thing that was oftentimes at the end of the month,

sometimes the end of the quarter, but you basically had to present a new threshold of completeness for the game,

of completion for the game.

And we were always crunching in advance of milestones.

We were always there like past midnight when milestones needed to be delivered.

And it was just such an onerous deadline that was always putting pressure on the development team.

What is a milestone like?

Because I never worked for an indie publisher.

What is a milestone like from the indie side?

The same.

Exactly the the same.

Yeah.

Very difficult.

And for us, because of that design change that I talked about, where

three design changes that were like very massive,

that we were always running to catch up to make sure that all 102, because there's our DLC characters.

You can date the microtransaction.

I don't know if you got.

I didn't give you the DLC.

That's right.

I didn't know.

Oh, yeah.

But in the DLC, you get like two extra characters, Michael Transaction, who's

a gotcha guy who can help you with your specs points and stuff.

But

it was changing it to first person after we had already spent a year doing it in the isometric,

making them all what I would call five-star characters where they're all really deep.

And then the last one is a part of it, which I think.

The game's coming out now, and I'm okay with just saying it.

And I don't know if any of you guys got to this part, but there's a whole other layer of the game called Realization.

Did any of you guys get to there?

No,

you have to talk.

You have to awaken 50 characters to advance the plot.

I'm close.

You're close.

Yeah, I have 39.

Oh, nice.

You can bring them to life.

And they leave.

Yes.

You leave the house.

They leave the house.

You get an ending.

And then that further advances the plot the more characters that you realize.

We should, I guess we should, at this point,

if people

haven't inferred how this works yet, you are basically talking to an object.

We didn't talk about what the game was.

Yeah, we didn't really talk about it.

We still got to jump into the development side, but that's on me.

Let me begin.

Go for it.

The game begins where you've got a job in a new city and you need to work remotely.

And then you sit down on a computer and you you file some emails and let me tell you i was like oh no

i don't want to do this and you're immediately fired

you're such different kind of gamers because we're in there uh i'm doing customer service i'm like doing replying chats i'm having the title dude

do you talk to emmanuel the guy with the paper clips yes yeah yeah i play him and he's romanceable secretly you can romance oh wow the paperclip yeah yeah that's great i loved it i was totally on his side Oh, good, yeah.

So,

a mystery delivery comes to your door.

I think this is all not in spoiler country,

first moments of the game.

And it is a pair of glasses.

And when you look through those glasses, you can then

anthropomorphize anything in the house in order to date it.

You look at a toaster oven, and it will turn into a person, and then you can have a relationship with the personified version of any of the objects in the house, and you're off to the races.

Remind me the term, it's in the game, but there's a term for a,

is it Gajinka?

Oh, gajinka, yeah, and we do refer to a game.

That's correct.

Yeah, when we were coming up with like what these, what these guys look like, and one, one big design decision on day one was, do we make this an anime game?

Right.

And I, the answer was pretty much like, no, let's not lean into that.

It tends to be way too much more parody, that KFC dating simulator kind of energy.

I was like, I want this to be genuine, I want this to be its own sort of thing.

But yeah, they're all gajinkas, uh, and you directly acknowledge a thing's existence or date them.

Uh, it was another way to like sidestep, like if you just went on a hundred dates and it was always the same, we're going out to eat some pizza, that would get annoying.

So, there's some of the characters you do like traditional dating sim dates, and then a lot of them, like, I don't know if talk to the microwave, is like ready to uh fight the

swarmers in the barrels.

I met Luke Nukem.

Yes, That was very, very, very exciting.

Can you talk about the writing process of this game?

Because the first thing I did was look through the credits, but before I even played the game, just because I want to see how big the development team was.

And I just wanted to look at all the names of all the voice actors.

But I noticed there were a lot of credited writers.

Was this the sort of thing where someone would just kind of take

the narrative lead of an individual character and kind of author their voice?

Yeah, and this was part of the development process where we had this draft.

And this was where we had a bunch of writers on, like 25 writers or so that we all brought on, all from wildly different backgrounds, wildly different writing backgrounds, taught everybody how to use ink in a basic way.

And then we pitched the ideas of what these characters could be.

And that was where a lot of these characters came from.

And also where I, as the lead writer, had to go, like, we can't have too much overlap with a lot of these characters.

There's a lot of things in your house that warm things up and clean things.

Yes.

Soap things.

Yeah.

And it was like, how do we tell different stories with I'm a thing that warms something up?

And so that was, that was my responsibility to like try to make all these characters narratively distinct and visually distinct.

And

so we had that.

We put it all in.

We had those one-star through five-star characters where some of them were a little bit shorter.

And then about a year and a half in, I was like, we're going to do realization.

So all of these characters have to have a new ending.

And then

all these characters have to be brought up to five-star potential uh and we brought on a couple of new right uh other writers she's credited as the senior writer suha al-samkari uh who has a lot of dating sim experience uh and ended up writing 23 of the characters

taking the inspiration from the first drafts like these are what the characters are now now put them in and she was really good at she's she's because she has such a good experience in dating sims uh traditional dating sims, she's really good at writing sexy dialogue that's not gross.

You're not going to hear any totally dirty words that are going to put you off.

But just really like, oh, that feels good to hear.

Yeah.

Yes.

Because, I mean, I guess this game's horny.

I was like, oh, this will be kind of silly and fun.

And then, and then pretty early on, I meet Betty.

I was like, oh, this game's horny.

Betty is the bed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In the first encounter, she talks about how she touches herself at night.

Yeah, exactly.

But she was, she's canonically the only character that you sleep with.

You don't, I mean, I don't know your personal lives, but you probably don't sleep with your toaster.

I don't know.

But the bed is what we're always like, we want her to be the super sensual one.

Yes.

And put her in the tutorial.

The tutorial day, you have to talk to five very specific ones who all have like a gameplay tenant that they have to teach you.

And I'm really glad that you end with Betty to be like, hey, I know this first date was weird and very high concept, but it is a dating sim.

Feel free to be horny.

You also get steered towards, and

there's a detective character who comes from the, you know,

it's a magnifying glass that kind of is personified at the remorphis that you interact with, who gives you like a lot of, kind of, kind of steers you towards certain things.

And I do like that character.

And, but I like, one character I get steered towards was the shower.

And I'm a huge Elvis Presley fan.

And the shower, because of singing in the shower, is like a, you know, like a, like a true, an aspiring troubadour.

And it is very much just like an Elvis character.

I was like, I'm dating this guy.

I'm really glad.

He's Elvis and he's bad at singing, which I really enjoyed.

And he shows up in a lot of other databases stories, which I was, I was glad to.

That was another piece of feedback that as we were going through was like, we found that players really enjoyed when other datables entered each other's scenes.

That you weren't just looking at one thing, just focused on that, that you had multiple guys coming in and out.

And it felt like a an RPG town where like they had their own lives going on as completely aside from you.

Yeah.

On day two, what was the very first thing that you guys made made sentient?

Where was the first object that you went to?

Because I know mine was the garbage can because I was like, I got to know what the garbage can is.

Yeah, right.

I talked to the towel pretty early.

Like the towel.

But

you love getting dry.

But I think I did.

I might have gone all the way down.

I might have gone down to the washing machine.

I might have gone down to that area.

I definitely talked to the water cooler pretty early, but I honestly don't remember sequence-wise what I talked to at the top of day two.

Hard for me to remember too, uh, because I started to like uh once I figured out that you could like open things too, like that was like very exciting to me.

So met Benoit very early.

Um Benoit, who is the yeah, who's the sex toy in your nightstand, um, uh, voiced by uh Erica Ishii, which is a great performance.

Um, I remember I went, I went to the toilet pretty early, and the toilet was a French rapper,

which is very funny.

But okay, so I do want to speak to this.

The character designs are all very unique and like very on theme for what they are.

And a lot of them, I would say for the most part, look like people wearing costumes of the thing that they're wearing.

Sort of like

maybe I would go as far as to say, like, Met Gala representations of the item.

So like it'd be like a sort of like,

you you know, like a beautiful gown that is, that looks like that evokes bathtub or something, right?

Yeah.

But then you meet some other characters, and like, I can't remember the guy's name, unfortunately, but the guy whose head is a sink, Sinclair, yes,

I was like, well, this guy's different.

He's a human man's body, but the sink head.

Yes, it's very funny.

That was where, that was what I was talking about.

Like, there's a lot of characters that are water or cleanliness and stuff.

And we just had this, we had a soap character, and we had a sink character, and they were all like, I'm the OCD soap guy, and it was like fine, but it's very on the nose.

And I was like, What if you, what if one of them, when you, when you use the glasses, they all say, Hi, I'm this guy, or maybe they're in the middle of a quest or something.

But what if one of them just says, Help!

I'm not a sink, I'm a man, my name's Martin, and you have to like find out, like, who is this guy?

Like, he doesn't belong here.

So, he's part of the Maggie Mystery.

I don't know if you went down that.

It's just, I guess I'm asking you guys, like, what you did, but it's just so, it's so horizontal in terms of what you can do.

Like you can miss so much.

Here's, here's, here's what I will, what I, what I can say.

I, I, first off, think the game is very funny.

And I, I, I do like gives a credit to the writing.

Like, I'm, I'm, like, I'm, like, laughing as I'm playing this thing.

And I also think it's, like, very satisfying, just, like, as a dating sim in terms of like, oh, I get to meet a bunch of different people of,

to me, there's a big dating sim thing of like, I, you just kind of want there to be something for everyone in terms of, and, and it does definitely sort of feel like this.

There's, there's all sorts of of different you know uh

you know all genders all sorts of different body types represented um and a bunch of different kind of personality types and like so i found that that that super duper satisfying uh we were talking about the character designs i am kind of curious about the art direction of this game like uh you know

how do we how did you settle on this the art style for these characters and i i do find them like all really really appealing like so so shout out to your art department, but like,

I really like just

I,

to me, the most satisfying, one of the most satisfying parts of this game was just interacting with an object and then like, like, being surprised at what character was generated in front of me.

Yeah, it's like

opening a deck of cards, and you just

you bring up the next one.

You're like, what could be on the other side?

Yeah.

It's the credit all goes to Nijuku, Erin Wong, who is our lead artist on this.

She was, when I did Final Fantasy XV, she would do like fan art and send it to me and meet me at cons and wow she was she has a full-time job at a board game company um even throughout working on date everything she still worked there red dragon games uh and uh she uh

she does she's just a genius man uh the the fact that you are looking at and she did all the ui which also was uh uh like myself like just learning a new skill where just like we didn't really have ui that matched matched the art style niche would you do it and she just did all of it without having any UI experience at all.

And I think it just, it works because you're looking the whole game.

There is a house that you're looking at, lots of stuff, but that can get very boring after a while.

This game's like 30 to 40 hours, but you're looking at a text box, you're listening to the voiceover, and then you're just looking at the characters.

And as you're looking at them, I just, even now, I still notice like little things that I didn't notice before.

The level of detail, the sense of humor and play that she has is unmatched.

I keep telling her this, this but i'm like you have to become the next tetsuya nomura after this she's so good at this she she absolutely deserves all the credit did she do all of the character designs she did every single character design

i also found out so she didn't she designed all the poses like sketched each character has five different poses uh and then uh with each pose there's nine different expressions and they all blink um and so what uh she did was sketched out all the poses design the characters sketched out the poses and then the other artists would do the poses.

Sometimes she did like half of them, and then she did all 13,000 expressions by herself.

I did not know that until just the cast part of the other day.

She was like, I just did it.

I just did all that.

That's why I was hard to get in touch with at certain points of development because she was just doing the blink expression for every single character.

I feel like the story of this game, you spending seven years working on it, her doing all that, like all that insane amount of work.

The publishers not giving up on it because the idea is too good for it to not exist.

You know what I mean?

Like, it's like everybody's just had to give everything they fucking had to make something actually, to will something into existence, which is very, very cool.

And I hope you're like super proud of that because I am very cool.

Thank you.

Yeah,

it felt,

you know, like I'm not Nick.

I'm not in the dating sim scene.

But what I appreciate about it is that in the same way that it was.

I just is just a funny identifier.

I

so I told my wife I was like I was like I play in this game.

She's like, what are you doing?

I was like, oh, I'm playing this game date everything.

It's it's for the podcast.

She's like, okay.

And then she goes, have fun fucking everything.

Which there's an achievement for.

But what I, what I like about it, in the same way that like there are, there's a character for everyone is one of the things you said earlier.

There's also, you can conceive of what you're doing in a different way.

So, because I'm not, you know, typically warm to dating sims, I was thinking of it as a collection game.

And I was like, oh, this is like getting to see.

So, like, if I'm playing Pokemon Pocket, right?

I want to see all of the art for all of the cards.

And that is as important to me as my ability to play the game.

And in the same way, I was like, oh, I want to know what the air conditioning vent person looks like, which frustratingly, that person is behind the vent.

Yeah, for most of his story.

He's got like, he's like, hey, I'm, he's shy.

He's, he's concerned about his body image, and that's kind of his story.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

But, like, getting to go through the house and like knowing that you have a limited number of like

that day, you can only charm like several characters.

So, you're like,

what do I want to see?

Yeah.

And that was, to me, like the doorway into the rest of the gameplay, because I was like, yeah,

talking to these people is fine.

I I don't really like talking to anybody in my life.

So it's really frustrating and scary for me to even have these virtual representations of a person being like, hi, what's your name?

And I'm like, oh,

okay.

But being able to be like, oh, there's like eight boxes on the floor of this closet.

Which of the boxes do I want to see what they are?

And having each individual thing be unique was so, it was just charming and pleasant for me.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I also like there's a limited resource in terms of how many things you can date in a day because it's kind of like, oh,

what do I want to pursue?

Do I want to follow up with an existing character?

I don't know.

I know sometimes that drives people, like,

you know, people are completionists, like kind of get like, you know, analysis paralysis.

Like, what am I, what should I do right now?

How do I maximize my time?

But like, for me, I like that

you're kind of limited in your decisions and you have to prioritize who you want to pursue.

So you do have unlimited days.

Right.

Yeah.

It shouldn't feel that scary.

Yeah.

And you're like, into that point, you're in the next day immediately.

Immediately.

Yeah.

Like it's, it's, it's, that's really, really fun.

I'll say, I'll say that that design decision came towards the middle of development because we wanted to feel that time was passing.

How do you make that, how do you make it so that you just don't talk to the event over and over again?

You just keep talking to him and then just go to the next one.

I really didn't want people to just tunnel vision, just talk to the TV, romance the TV, be done, go to the next one.

I want it to feel like you're circulating around the house, you're seeing the house change because of your actions, and that's kind of where that came.

And then we got to put in traditional dating stem elements like Jeremy the Chair only performs at 6 p.m., right?

Timothy Timepiece tells you to come at a certain time.

Yeah, but his story does change if you don't come at the time.

And he gets really mad at you if you're very early.

True, I remember I started the day, and the first thing I did was I forgot that he had told me

to

go at a certain time.

The first thing I was like, let's check it on this clock real quick.

And he was like, no, no, no, no.

I have to say, I feel like I have to say this.

And you don't have to respond to this, Ray.

There was another game this year where you're walking around a house.

And I got to say, I like walking around this house more.

The movement is more pleasurable to me.

And I like the house more

because everything is where I want it to be always.

Are you talking about PT?

No, actually, that's my favorite movement in any house.

I've talked to

two friends recently

who listened to our Blue Prince episode.

One of them told me, I was furious.

And the other one told me, like, I'm so glad you also hated that game.

I'm in the, that game came out of nowhere.

And I was like, there's two games about houses in the same year.

Had to play it.

I really enjoyed it up to the point where you don't enjoy it.

And then I was able to let go and be like this is okay it's a it's an inarguably impressive design it's it's a but but yes is as far as I agree with Matt

I wanted to ask a little bit about the

the the the voice acting side yeah like

I'm just curious about like like directing some of these characters because you know it's it's it's obviously they have like real personalities that are analogous to real people but there's a layer of like this is a very abstract thing that you're you're embodying you know yeah it was uh it was run and gone uh this we started in march of last year and we uh recorded for four months straight uh we had a rotating uh uh cast of directors with robbie damon being the the lead director during that time i unfortunately wasn't able to make most of the sessions uh because i was finishing writing a lot of the characters sure i wrote 14 myself and like seven of those were all in that that last thing while editing everybody's stuff and and fixing bugs So I missed a lot of that.

But I will say, like, those sessions are run and gun because there's so many lines for each character.

And again, this game was very stupid to make.

Normally, you have a

lead characters and then you can just bring them in and they can go at their own pace and you pay for another session fee.

But for us, we had no lead characters.

So every single voice actor had to be different, had to be one session.

And if you needed them again, you had to pay for them again to be in the session.

So there was no economic

smartness to that at all, but it's cool.

And it meant that you also had to explain the entire game to every single actor who came in, which it's a bad shit crazy game.

And that took a lot of time as well.

So those we had our actors were.

The feedback that I got from a lot of them were, that was very hard.

That was the most fun I've had in years.

That's awesome.

So that was, I think, those are the two sides of that.

I'll also say about the voice actors, bringing it back to the SAG thing, too.

This game game rose out of the ashes of the first SAG strike that I was such a

big, big power of my life.

And that one was about residuals in video games, which there are still basically none.

You get a couple hundred bucks when a game comes out and that's about it,

which is great.

Not to complain about getting a couple hundred bucks, but it's not like an actual residual based on sales.

We made in our game a special contract where all of the actors get real residuals based on sales.

That's amazing.

That's so cool.

Yeah, every single person,

we have 10% of all of our profits given to all of the actors, all equal share.

And we have,

and that was, I think, another reason why we're able to get so many big talent in.

Some of them, we do have personal relationships, sure.

But we just had like a most favored nations contract.

Everyone's working for scale, but if this game makes some money, we're able to share it with our actors and like be the change that we wanted to see in the world.

I hope it's a huge hit.

Yes, I hope so too.

Yes.

I'm going to double dip on this game.

Me too.

I would not have expected, and this isn't lip service, I would not have expected the game to grab me.

And I, and usually, when you know, when we have a guest in who's involved in the game,

you're kind to it and you're like, oh, wow, this is really cool.

And what I'm glad you brought us in your favorite game or whatever it is.

So seeing that it was a dating sim, I was like, oh, I know that the boys are probably going to talk about this more than me.

I'm fucking in, man.

Like,

My thought was, oh, I want to get this on the Switch so I can play it in various locations, take it out and enjoy it when I have a moment to play, especially since I don't have a lot of Switch content

because not a lot of stuff came out.

So I was like, this is going to be my lead Switch 2 title

because it comes out as a record tomorrow.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, I'm mad, man.

You know who's going to really like it?

Mary.

She is, dude.

She's going to be random.

She's really,

she's going to think it's cute.

Yeah, she really is.

Because she played another one.

I forget what dating sim she played that she really loved.

Doki Doki Literature Club.

Yeah, it might have been Doki Doki.

Yeah.

But yeah,

I'm sold.

For me, it like

to me, just still my favorite, my favorite dating sim, and I know it's an obvious answer, but is Dream Daddy.

And I think Dream Daddy just kind of like hit the, it's, it's totally sincere, but it's also like, it, it, it's also like funny and engaging.

You know what I mean?

It's not making fun of what it's doing.

And that's the sort of thing of like, there's a version of your game that is like totally ironic and everything's at arm's length.

It's not that version of the game.

Yeah, exactly.

I really didn't want that.

Yeah, and that's where I think this really succeeds in the same way that the Dream Daddy succeeds.

And I agree, again, this is the compliment that Heather is paying you.

But yeah, I'm going to continue to play this game.

I'm really enjoying my time with it.

Awesome.

And

the thing I would say to what Heather said about

the game, we played the game before we scheduled you on the podcast.

If we didn't like the game, we just wouldn't have done this episode.

So like, I just like.

Well, I'll give you an end.

I was like, if you don't like it, we can just talk about voice acting.

I'll do a little plug.

But that's the thing I always just say, like, you know, when

we did our episode about the Fallout TV series, there are other

prestige TV series of other video game adaptations that we did not do episodes of.

And, you know, you can kind of fill in the planks there.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Well, thank you very much.

I really appreciate it.

We didn't do the Nintendo Land video TV show.

Was that cartoon?

The Nintendo cartoon?

Captain Ending Game Man?

Captain Tom Tom.

What are you, what?

Are you okay?

I need help.

You're too young for that reference.

That's a problem.

You should have tried to pull it.

Yeah, before you couldn't even say it.

You're right.

That wasn't my reference.

That wasn't my.

Your culture's not costing you more.

I'm sorry.

I do have another question for you, which is about

the writing process.

And, you know, you wrote a number of characters.

Do you have a character that you were like that in the process of writing became like your favorite?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Absolutely.

I guess more

generally.

I guess more generally, do you have like

a personal favorite character that you wrote?

And do you also have a character you have a lot of affection for that you didn't write?

I absolutely do.

Yes.

My favorite character, I've said this on interviews, is Dorian the Door

by the Inimitable Ben Starr.

Yeah.

And

he's in 17 locations around the house.

I don't know if you guys talked to any of them.

I love Dorian.

I love Back Dorian.

He's facing the wrong way.

Oh, my God.

That's so funny.

We refer to him muffling his mouth.

Like all that sort of stuff.

Each of those has three different levels of conversation through it

and tells a story around it.

And what I really like about him

was not only that he's kind of surly, he gives sense about characters.

He was fun to write, even though he's really complex, but he is the proponent of friendship.

Yes.

Yes.

In the tutorial, he's the second character you meet, and he's like, I don't want all this dating.

I don't like hate.

I don't like love.

I love friendship.

And I think that to me is like such a huge, important pillar of the game that I really wanted to do designing it.

That like, you don't have to fuck them all.

You're not, that is part of it.

Yeah.

But it is like, and you can go for a hate ending, which, which also the full hate ending, which I balanced to make like still, it still changes the critical path a lot and goes in different ways.

But all of all the different pillars that you can play through, all the different role plays that you can play through should feel really good.

I just have to say something real quick.

It's so voice actors are so amazing because why do you have a pocket ben star?

Why were you able to do this?

Listen to all his lines.

I create you, the man, you see.

One of my favorite Dorian lines, he's talking about the closet door, and he says, Do you want to know a fact about closets?

And you say, sure.

And he says, so do I.

And he leaves.

That's it.

There's nothing there.

I really like that guy.

And then who do I like who other people wrote?

Oh, my God.

I mean,

I fell in love with so many of the characters.

I have to say, I know we brought him up again, but I do like the ones who are the more wacky stuff.

My forte in writing is writing the ridiculous ones.

Dishy, the dishwasher.

I don't know if you found him, but like the ones who are more plot-heavy, very high-concept characters are the ones that I'm like.

Sue Ha, who's really good at the romance stuff, is

amazing.

And my lovely wife, Julia McElvane, also a voice actor herself, wrote a ton of the characters.

And she wrote one called Teddy the Teddy Bear.

Oh, yeah.

Tells you these wonderful stories to help you go to sleep.

If you go to the daytime, he tells you advice.

If you go to nighttime, he tells you go to sleep.

And those stories came from some of her own experiences, came from the heart.

And I love my wife very much

i've been looking at teddy and i haven't spoken i haven't spoken to him yet but i'm gonna i'm gonna beeline toward teddy of my next day we had our cast party last night uh and the voice actor charlie west who who voices teddy came uh in a oh i guess if you know his character design uh he's wearing a a wonderful uh blue uh uh brown um jacket and a bow tie and he showed up in a bow tie last night holding a teddy bear and so i was like that's amazing yeah um remind me of the name of the character of your character that writes the stories.

Lyric Literature.

Yeah.

Yes.

So Lyrics Game Mechanomic is really fun because you can sort of pick options for writing a story.

He's always wanting to write a story.

He's never written it.

He is literature.

He's read them all.

He's never written one.

So he's writing his own story.

And if you pick

the wrong ones to pair with it, there's always a little funny result with that.

But like,

did you voice that character because you wrote so many of them?

So yeah, it was a mathematical challenge to myself.

We had this character lyric literature.

He was written, and he was kind of overlapping on a couple of other characters.

And so I was like, let's start over again.

I kept the Chuck Tingle references because you've got to.

You have to.

But I was like, what if he's writing a book and you start with four options, one which is noir, adventure, comedy, and erotica.

And then from those four options, each one goes to another four options and another four and another four.

And you tell a five-beat story so that there's 1,024 different stories.

And then he gives a grade on each one of them.

And then you publish the book and you get an ending based on that.

But yeah, I wrote the character along with my writing partner, Logan, on that one.

We shared duties on that.

And we did have an actor in for it, but it was like, he has like 3,000 lines.

And it just was, I'm like, I'm free.

I will just do it.

I'm going to hear the most.

With my audiobook experience, I was able to do it really fast.

I was able to do that in like an eight-hour session and just do like 3,000 lines like that.

Yeah.

I really like talking to Lyric.

I'm glad.

And hopefully you can play it through many, many, many times really, really quickly to just hear all that ridiculous dialogue.

There's some really, really cool stuff.

The stories get crazy.

Because, yeah, because you can be on the erotica path and then go straight into adventure and then noir, and you're like, what is this story?

Is it even good?

And as we were writing, we were like, some of these are pretty good stories.

Yeah.

I appreciated the Chuck Tingle references.

It reminded me that I not only met, but basically spent a day with Chuck Tingle once, which I don't think I've ever told this story publicly.

but this was on Comedy Central.

I worked on, I was a writer for Comedy Central's At Midnight, which was a panel show with game show trappings, got semi-rebooted as After Midnight.

We were doing a live episode and we brought Chuck Tingle in to, he was going to come into the studio and live write a Chuck Tingle book, like a portion of a Chuck Tingle book that the audience would vote on the title and they would decide and he would just like come up with it on the spot, which he actually did.

Like he was, he's like that much of a pro.

He was just able to like whip up together a chapter on the fly.

But

so he, so here's the thing:

it's a level of commitment to performance art that is like, I wish there was a more contemporary reference than Andy Kaufman, but it was very Andy Kaufman-esque.

Chuck Tingle showed up with a handler, and his handler, his assistant, may very well have been Chuck Tingle himself, and the other guy was the actor.

I never knew.

Bob Zamuda, kind of.

It was a Bob Zamuda sort of thing.

He, so he had to come on to a studio a lot.

And as anyone who's gone into like a studio lot, gone through any sort of corporate security knows they were like, well, we're going to have to check your ID or whatever.

They're like, that's not going to happen.

Chuck Tingle's not going to report that.

So the whole thing where they're just like, all right, well, I guess we'll just let this guy, Chuck Tingle, come in without any sort of ID, any sort of proof of who he is.

And Chuck Tingle shows up, and he is.

He's not on camera.

He is.

Here's the thing: Chuck Tingle showed up head to toe, wrapped in gauze, like a mummy.

He had sunglasses on, and the only part of his body that was visible was his mouth.

So I'm interacting with this mummy who's talking to me and is a lovely guy and a funny guy, but like, I still don't know.

Like, I don't know who you are,

and I don't know, like, you don't even seem like a person to me.

And then I also don't know if you are the guy or if this other guy who is the guy and he's pretending like you're the guy to protect his own identity.

I don't know like, any of this, I'm not, I'm not at all.

I don't, I don't feel like I'm in on this at all.

I feel like this is happening to me, but I'm just like kind of along with the ride.

He was so nice.

Uh, he was so funny, and he was like, super, like, like, you know, seemed to like me, I guess, because I think

I was just kind of like along for the ride.

Yeah.

And then he does this whole thing, and he's great on the show.

Um, and it, and,

and, and it ends.

And he's like, Nick, and he, he's like, I got you a gift.

And he hands me a box of dry pasta and a bottle of chocolate sauce.

It just kept him on his shelf in my office until that show got canceled.

That was just so insane.

He was the best.

Was he good?

Did you eat it?

Yeah, it was great.

It is insane that there isn't a more contemporary reference than Andy Kaufman because he's like the only guy who did that in a way that anybody knows about.

So the fact that this has happened a second time is kind of crazy.

Yeah.

Forgive me.

I don't know who Chuck Tingle is.

You're about to go down a rabbit hole.

I'll send you a bunch of stuff.

I'll send you a bunch of stuff.

Well, for our listeners who might not know who Chuck Tingle is, like, who is

describing?

Chuck Tingle is a romance author, and all of his books are about.

Let's see if I can find one that is, here we go.

Here's a good Chuck Tingle title.

Space Raptor Butt Invasion.

Okay.

Bigfoot Pirates Haunt My Balls.

These are level one.

These are level one tingle titles.

Yeah.

Nick is doing a good job of like getting you started.

This is the entry ramp.

Yes.

Then they get.

Let's see.

Okay, here's one.

First buckaroo bill pounded by the handsome living White House.

So the idea is that the White House has become sentient and

had sex with this man.

Slammed in the butt by my smartphone's missing headphone jack.

This was a topical one that came out when the new iPhone removed the headphone jack.

So it's that sort of stuff.

I get it now.

He did write to us and said, thank you for the reference, Buckaroos.

Very sad that you didn't give me a character to voice in the game.

But I really want to make a character.

I want to reach out to this man.

Although, from what you say, this does sound a little terrifying, though harmless.

I loved it.

I thought it was a great experience.

Congratulations on the game.

I hope people play it.

Thank you.

And

there's a demo people can check out.

So, yes, there is a demo.

And

boy, was it accidentally well designed to be just perfect for people to get into it?

I can't believe how well it worked out for streamers and stuff.

It's the tutorial day.

You play through it once, you learn how to do it, and then you can infinitely loop the first two days.

So you can just get to know all of the characters.

Usually from what I find, like from people playing it, they'll play it like two or three times.

Some people have 50 hours into that demo.

Wow.

So please play it.

There's 50 hours of content in that demo.

The save doesn't go over to the main game, unfortunately.

But yeah, completely free.

Although it is only on PC.

All right, it's time for a segment.

Ray, you brought something in for us, so I'm just going to toss it over to you.

Thank you, Nick, for the toss.

I have been burying the lead.

Thank you for the toss.

Of course.

I've been burying the lead.

Sure.

You might know me from my voice acting roles as Noctis, Gendo Lakari,

other of them that I can't think of at this moment, because the only one I can think of is the one that you guys reference all the time on this show.

I am, in fact, one of the eight people in The Last of Us Part 2 who says, They got Jorge!

This segment is called

They Got Jorge!

Oh my god,

look, I was a fan of your work.

This is like finding out that you're the president of the United States.

Yeah.

I was a fan of your work, but I wasn't familiar with your game.

I'm so glad I was able to keep it from you guys this whole time.

Yes, I was one of them.

We worked on Blast Was Part 2.

I did almost as many sessions as Militia Mail number three

as I did Noctis.

It was around 30 sessions of voice acting.

They brought us in two at a time.

I had my partner, Davey Mitchell.

We would just say the lines.

And one weird fact: we did all the lines and they brought us back in for a wet session because the playtesters said they don't sound wet enough.

And so we did all of our lines while gargling water and spitting it out into the studio.

Oh, like during the rainy or like the like, no, like blood, like

we were just like vomiting water.

Jesus.

I see.

But that's the naughty dog way.

They do it, man.

That's wild.

Fuck, that's great.

Okay.

The job sounds hard.

That sounds good over there.

They took, I will say, like vocally stressful and stuff, like no one takes better care of their actors than Naughty Dog.

Our sessions were two hours at a maximum.

Like they were, they were amazing.

Wow.

Wait, so there's an option to be dry.

I know we can't get to the bottom of why you're wet all the time.

Science can't prove it one of these days.

But Naughty Dog might have the answer.

So, this is the game called They Got Jorge.

We, as a group, said 74 different names of people who they got.

Wow.

This game is played in two rounds, and answers must be made in the form of They Got Jorge.

So, please, for round one, this is called Open Season, and it's worth three points.

Can anyone name other names who they got in The Last of Us Part 2?

Wow.

Okay.

Do we just kind of take turns here?

You can.

I imagine you just shout it out or you can buzz in and then you must answer in the form of they got Jorge.

Okay.

So just to because everybody loves when we

litigate the rules for a really long time.

So to buzz in, do we say

they got Jorge?

Yeah.

And then we say.

Or no, I guess you say your name, yeah.

Okay.

I just wanted you guys to just scream lots of names all the time.

And I guess

maybe that's bad podcasting.

No, this is great.

I'll go first.

And I'm going to go for what?

It turns is good.

Okay.

I'll go first, and I'm just going to say, they got Matt.

That's pretty good.

That's probably possible.

Should we do Dead Letter Perfect?

They got Matthew.

Oh,

I think we give it.

Yeah, okay.

Three points for you.

Let's get one on the board.

Three points for They Got Matthew.

Well, yeah, this is open season.

This is open season.

This first round, in my opinion, is harder.

And then the other one, I'm going to give you hints.

Okay, good.

And there's 10 of those.

I'll go next.

Yes.

They got Carl.

Heather, they did not get Carl.

He lived.

Matt,

I'm going to say this one, just to get this one out there.

Yeah.

They got Samantha.

They might have got a lady.

There are many lady names.

They did not get Samantha.

Wow.

Carl and Samantha, happily ever after.

She's safe.

I think the one that I always say on the show as the example

is either they got Stephen or they got Kevin, both of which are funny names to me, so I don't think they're actually in the game.

They got Steven!

And what was the other one?

They've got Kevin!

They did get Kevin.

Wow.

A reverse home alone.

They did not get Steven, though.

He's doing something.

Stephen's too funny a name.

Steven is a reverse home alone.

They didn't get him in the home.

They got Steven.

It's too funny.

They can't do it.

Okay.

It's like, it's not quite minion rules.

Because if it was minion rules, then it would be Carl.

Like, Carl would be the name of a minion.

And, but, like, you know, you know what I mean?

So it's, it's like, what?

Are you saying that?

I'm saying that the minion names are kind of like like Kevin is a minion, right?

Carl is a minion.

Bob is a minion.

But some of these names, but I don't think they'd say they got Bob.

Like, it's not quite like, because the...

They got Roger.

Exactly.

The names, I think, have a little bit more flourish to them.

You're right.

And also.

Because, like, Matthew in and of itself, like, it just even being Matthew makes it non-miniony.

I don't know.

I don't know a lot of Mats in general.

I try to keep...

I'm like the one, right?

I don't want to be the less popular Matt in the friendly group.

I don't know any Mats that go by Matthew.

I'm sure that they do,

but I just like, I don't, I personally don't know any professionally.

Some do.

Yeah.

But as far as like, what do you call me?

I think they, yeah, I've always known Matthew.

If he died in front of you, would you be more formal?

Would you call him Matthew?

I don't know.

Yeah.

Should I start going by Matthew?

I really seem like a Matt.

We're also going

kind of like, is

like how

they got Rashid.

Like that, like, is that, like, I don't know how the tears of their sensitivities went when they were recording this fucking game.

I think that's why they got Jorge Styx out because it is a definite, it's a choice of a name for sure.

There's not a lot of those either, I would say.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna guess one, and this may be too close to one that's already been guessed, uh, but they got Sam

Sam, you're okay.

All right, okay, so Nicoly knows names of people in the same room as him.

Look, I'll just do do it.

I'll just do it.

They got Rochelle.

They did, didn't they?

Hey, they got Rachel?

Is that close enough?

I'll give a half, again, a half point.

I want it a half.

Got half a point for a different name.

Starts with an R, ends with an L.

Come on.

Okay,

I have a legitimate guess.

Yes.

They got Stacy.

Oh, that's pretty good.

Not in this universe.

They did not get Stacy.

She escaped by the skin of her teeth.

They got Roger!

Roger?

He's okay.

Roger is okay.

They got Clementine.

No fucking way.

Nick?

Wait, where'd it go?

It was there before.

Wait.

They really got her.

These are in alphabetical order.

Oh.

No.

They did not get Clementine, but it was part of one of the clues that I was going to give.

That's why it was in my head.

No, but very good guess.

Well, they got Clem.

No.

Okay.

I mean, they probably got Tyne then, right?

They did not get Tyne.

Okay.

This is just open season once, I think, once you guys have done your guesses.

Now we'll do the clues part.

Okay, good.

I think let's go into the classes.

I feel like there's going to be more biblical names on the list.

Like, Jeremiah is going to do a biblical round.

Jeremiah is too long and it sounds too

wild, but I bet there's like they just round two Bibles.

They got Jesus Christ.

Uh, they got Paul.

Oh, that's a good one.

Oh, so close.

They did not get Paul.

They got Pauline.

No,

they got Jacob.

Ooh,

no, but so close.

Wow.

This is such a funny game because we're just like excited to hear names.

We're like, oh, that's a good name.

It's a good name.

Well, it's also funny because you're thinking about the writing process.

You're thinking, like, they can't say Clementine because it's too much.

They can't say Jeremiah.

They can't say Stephen because it's too funny.

They're not going to be like Calliope.

No.

Right, right.

They got two J Bible names that are big ones.

Joseph.

No.

And

you must answer in the form of they got John.

They got John.

Yes, they got John.

They got John.

They got Joshua?

They got Joshua.

There you go.

There you go.

My next J one was going to be Jesus again.

I don't really know the Bible that much.

Sam, you got a guess?

For Bible?

Yeah.

They got Paul.

Do we?

We are are Paul.

And they didn't get him.

They got Abe.

They got what?

Abe?

Abe?

They got Abraham.

Oh.

Yeah, because you're right.

Because if you're thinking of it from a design perspective, what is going to feel silly if it's repeated?

Right.

So the names have to sound,

they have to sound familiar, but also kind of bland.

It is a tough sort of needle to thread.

Right.

Go ahead.

No, you go.

What?

I don't know.

I was going to try Stephen one more more time.

I was going to say, let's do the clues.

Okay, so here's the final round called the clue round.

Open season Bible and the clue round.

These are 10 that I don't think you guessed any of these yet.

You almost got Clementine, which is wild.

But I'm going to do, these are all, I'm going to say

the name, or I'm going to say the clue,

and then you guys can, I do think this one, you guys buzz in because these are a little bit easier.

Okay.

And then I, I guess, say your name, I'll call on you, and then we'll do the in the form of the forhey.

Oh, no!

Joel went to Midgar and sniped Cloud's fair friend.

Weiger?

Yes.

They got Sid?

No.

Sid's okay.

They got Barret.

Oh, sorry.

Heather.

They got Barret.

No, they got Cloud's fair friend.

Oh, oh, like, okay.

I thought you meant like just.

Oh, yeah.

I wrote it down capitalized.

I thought my delivery was a very capital delivery.

It can't be

Matt.

They got Aerith.

No, no.

Heather.

Yes.

They got Kate Sith.

Who are we forgetting?

Tifa.

Mad 13.

His fair friend.

Fair friend.

And fair is capitalized.

Like, oh, it's from the fair.

No.

Like, I'm from the state fair.

Not from the fair.

It's a character from Alpha Sanity.

His name is Fair.

Wait, Fair?

His name is Fair?

Yes.

They got Fair?

I see.

They got justice.

This game sucks.

This game is great.

We're just dumb.

The answer, and maybe this will help for the rest of the nine before I go home in shame.

No.

They got Zach.

Oh, they got Zach.

Of course, it's Zach.

That was the doppelganger.

Got it.

No, the

crew is perfect.

We're stupid.

Yeah, I forgot about Zach.

I haven't had, I don't know Zach like.

I did not forget about Zach, but I was thinking party members.

I was not thinking of characters that exist in the story.

And I was hung up on the concept of fairness and whether or not you met justice or goodness.

And there's also a fair in Final Fantasy VII.

Yes, I was thinking, what did I miss at the

fair?

Yeah.

Was there something the golden saucer I overlooked?

I get a point for that.

I get that grant.

Okay,

that was the practice round.

Now it's round four, the non-practice clue round.

Wake up.

Ellie is after Remedies titular spooky writer.

Oh, Matt, Alan.

Oh, fuck.

They got Alan.

Nick steals it.

I'm humiliated.

I knew one.

I fucked it up.

Okay.

Are you an Alan Wake fan?

Me?

Yeah.

I did enjoy it very, very much.

That year was hard because that was the doldrums of development where I just could not play anything.

I got UFO 50 and that was it that whole year.

Yeah, I got it.

I didn't play Wake 2 until this year.

And because that's the thing I was going to ask you about, but I imagine that you have a big backlog that you've accumulated because of development, but like stuff you're going to get around to playing.

Alan Wake 2, I finally got to this year and I absolutely loved it.

It was such a great experience.

Just a lush experience.

Just walking around.

I played like the first hour and just walking around that town was great.

Yeah.

Wake.

Wake up.

Dag Nabit.

Joel just took out this prequel pro tag, which means John Marston will be the playable character.

Oh.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Oh, Matt.

Yes.

They got Arthur.

Yes.

Arthur Morgan.

Damn.

Joel and Ellie teamed up to brutally murder Valve's VR Vixen.

She's down to half a life.

Oh, shit.

Weiger.

They got Alex.

Yes.

Oh.

Is it spelled A-L-Y-X?

Sure.

Yeah.

They got Alex spelled with the one.

They got that unique Alex.

Okay.

Joel is fucking around in Marvel Rivals now with a shiv, and he just took out the frosty Vanguard.

Now who is Cyclops gonna fuck?

Oh, Matt!

They got Emma!

Yes!

Who is Cyclops gonna fuck?

And the Frost.

It's like a real, like, oh man,

we didn't even think about the ramifications of this.

I don't want to fuck my wife Judith.

Emma knew how to treat me right.

Okay, here's a British one.

What's all this then?

Abby assassinated a British twin.

Must have been her creed to go after the lady one.

Lady twin from England?

The fuck?

And is this a royal family?

And twins?

It must have been her creed.

Yeah, this is a

go after the the

this is an assassin's creed thing but i this is a this is a series that is that is kind of a black box to me i did i did enjoy a little bit of time

in assassin's creed

is that brotherhood assassin's creed brotherhood anybody anybody no i only know the one that i played a little bit of which is the most recent one i've only played the viking one a lot it's good news because then she got away means they didn't get her oh okay oh my god

they got ev was was the answer to that one.

Evie, okay.

Which game is this from?

Assassin's Creed.

Oh, the original?

One of them.

I just know it's Jacob and Evie Fry.

I don't remember what it's from.

Okay.

Ellie and Joel have blasted off to space and took out the bald, brutal, bar-coated babe.

Guess there's no romance option for us.

Weiger, they got Jack.

Yes.

A mass effect reference.

All of these are video game references.

I forgot to say that.

Oh, wow.

I forgot to say that.

My dumbass just putting this together.

The eighth one.

Okay.

What the fuck?

Three more.

Wigger's in the lead with 13 and a half.

Holy shit.

Heather with six.

Matt with four.

What?

So

it's Wiger's game at this point.

I think I can still win, I think.

Okay, they got another one.

Oh, no, my darling Clementine.

Joel just shot your surrogate father.

You should be on the same side, Joel.

Both games have zombies.

Matt.

they got Lee.

Yes.

From The Walking Dead, Tell Dead, Telltale.

Yeah.

So Clementine was part of it.

I think I'm learning that I don't care about names.

I just want to kill people in games.

I don't know any of these people's names.

I think the name Lee, specifically Lee Everett, is like burned onto my heart.

I love Lee.

It's kind of, we've talked about it before, but it's kind of wild how similar those games are narratively and how close together they released.

Yeah.

The Walking Dead, The Telltale Walking Dead, and The Last of Us.

And they both work

in their own way.

There's so many different Walking Dead TV shows.

Yeah.

And then this game comes along.

It's not based on the shows or anything.

It's just like its own story.

I think they should adapt it into a TV show.

That would be interesting.

Walking Dead video games into a TV show.

Yeah.

That would be interesting.

Why not?

That'd be badass.

Okay, two more.

Ellie's on a goddamn rampage.

She used piano wire to slit the throat of a boy who took over the Spider-Mantle and strangled Tails from Sonic.

Yes.

They got Miles.

Yes.

Ellie's violent.

They got him.

Okay, last one.

If someone killed both Miles Morales and Tails, it'd be like history's greatest monster.

Last one.

This is for none of the points because Wagger won.

Ellie's sneaking around and found Bethesda's jacket sporting main man.

This clue just works.

What games does Bethesda make other than Fallout?

It's not Doom Guy.

It's not the

jacket wearing protagonist of a Bethesda game.

He's not a protagonist.

This clue might not work.

Oh, okay.

But yeah, I mean,

I'm just thinking Fallout and

Elder Scrolls.

And I'm trying to think of where Jacket factors in.

There's definitely something I'm overlooking that's obvious.

Oh, no, it's E3's main stage.

And they found Bethesda's jacket sporting main man on the stage.

This clue just works.

Uh, uh, Heather.

Yes.

Oh, no, they got ghoul.

I might know where you're going.

Yes.

They got Todd.

Yes, they got Todd.

You're referencing a real person.

Yeah, this.

He was a jacket.

No, I liked it.

The best part of the game was when I explained the game, and then it was downhill from there.

No, no, no,

no, no, I loved it.

It was a very thorough game.

Yeah.

Very well done.

My only note for the segment, too good.

They're newable garbage.

I loved it.

Our segments are usually mad at being like, what's a letter of the alphabet?

Yeah, nobody goes straight to Reddit to complain about it.

They don't like the game.

Thanks, guys, for letting me play with that.

I appreciate it.

Thanks for coming, guys.

Thank you.

You're the only guest we've allowed to bring in segments.

I'm glad.

That's this week's Get Played.

Our producer is Rochelle Chen.

Ranch Yard underscore underscore sard.

Special thanks to Sam Rogich for sitting in.

Sam, anything you want to plug?

Guck's records coming out in the end of August, so keep an eye out for that.

Nice.

Can people follow you on social media or anything?

Yeah, at Guck Band on Instagram.

There you go.

Our music is by Ben Prenty, BenPruntyMusic.com.

Our art is by DuckBrigade Design, DuckBrigade.com, our merchantkinshipgoods.com, and Get Animator Sister Show is over on Patreon, Matt.

What are we watching this week?

Patreon.com slash GetBlade.

We're back in the thick of it, aren't we?

We're getting down to the nitty-gritty near the very end of Gur and Lagan, and oh boy,

now that's a show.

Yeah, love it.

I just gotta say, that's a show.

It's a show

that we like.

We love it.

Ray Chase, such a delight to spend so much time talking with you.

Thank you.

I know you're doing a lot of press right now.

You're very generous to budget so much of your day to spend with us.

Thank you so much for coming into the studio.

Congratulations on the date, everything.

Genuinely enjoyed my time with it.

Going to continue to play it.

Please plug the game and tell people anything else they need to know about it.

You can get it on all consoles today or tomorrow

if this comes out on Monday.

And then Physical Edition sometime in August.

Hope you guys enjoy it and

have fun dating everything.

everything.

Wow.

And

we're very glad to have you, but unfortunately, we have to end the show by telling you you got played.

I did get my game got played.

Your game got played.

Thank you guys.

I'm going to date this house plant.

Nick, no!

That was a hit gun podcast.