2025.11.24: The Burden of Originality

Speaker 1 Good morning to you wherever you are because it is morning somewhere for November 24th, 2025. My name is

Speaker 1 Bernie Burns sitting right over there. She's headed for a nap.
It's actually Burns. I am.

Speaker 2 It's early in the day, and I'm already looking forward to nap time.

Speaker 1 You know, if you take a decent nap, you're going to lose all of your daylight today. We're getting down to the

Speaker 1 scarce sunlight days.

Speaker 2 I was going to say, what sunlight? Because the sun is up, and I'm still not sure I believe it.

Speaker 1 I feel you.

Speaker 2 We do get to this time of year where the days are so short that if you blink, you miss it. And you do feel like if you took a nap, that's it.
That was the whole day. But also,

Speaker 2 that's too bad. I need the nap.

Speaker 1 You know what? Take that. You know know me.
I am a proponent of sleep. Sleep when you need to do it, man.
People are, you know, there's a weird stigma on sleep, which I don't get.

Speaker 1 I was just thinking about this recently. It's like a month ago.
I was at the airport for some reason and I had about 40 minutes to kill. And I thought, you know what? I just drove all the way here.

Speaker 1 Why don't I just like in the car park, I'll lean my seat back and I'll take a nap in the car, kill 30 minutes or whatever. I should have done that Nappuccino.
That's what you should do.

Speaker 2 No, no, because today is not going to be the thing I like about the the Napaccino concept, right, is it's really meant for a 30-minute nap, right?

Speaker 2 You take it, you sleep for 30 minutes, and then you wake up and you're good to go. Today's not going to be a 30-minute nap, okay? No, I have intentions.

Speaker 1 Oh, you really do want to skip all five hours of daylight today.

Speaker 2 I mean, less, less nap, more just like daytime sleep.

Speaker 1 But this stigma on sleep, Ashley, the war on sleep, the war on sleep.

Speaker 1 I thought I'm going to lean my seat back in the car park, the parking garage, if you're in the United States, and I'm just going to take a nap in the car.

Speaker 1 But I had the feeling for sure, if I fall asleep in the car, someone will come and tell me I'm not allowed to do that.

Speaker 1 Like someone will knock on the window and go, what are you doing sleeping in public?

Speaker 2 What do you think you're doing?

Speaker 1 Like, why are we so anti-sleep? Like, if you see someone sleeping in public, you're like, you're not allowed to do that. Like, that's bad.

Speaker 2 I wonder if it's like some.

Speaker 2 If we've twisted the instinct, like sleep is for wild animals, right? Sleep is when you're most vulnerable, right?

Speaker 2 And so animals are like very careful, like when you sleep and are like, are you in the safety of your den or whatever, right?

Speaker 2 It's like the, like sleep is, is this one point at which like you are, you are helpless, right? You are dead to the world.

Speaker 2 Anything could happen. And so I wonder if like we've somehow twisted that around like as a society, Bernie, where it's like you see sleep and you're like, no, no, no, don't do that.

Speaker 1 Don't do that. You're vulnerable now.

Speaker 2 But we, but we mentally like turned it into, no, you're not supposed to do that.

Speaker 1 But we live with cats and dogs. We should learn that things are not helpless when they're sleeping.
You ever woken up a goddamn cat?

Speaker 1 In trouble when you do that, you're in big trouble.

Speaker 2 It's true. So, all we have to do is if we start waking up from naps going,

Speaker 2 then maybe we as a society can get past nap shaming.

Speaker 1 I like the idea of like working in an office where like the sunbeam like worked its way across the office and all the employees

Speaker 1 are asleep like 90% of their life. They're asleep.
True. They just sleep.
They're sleep engines. That's all they do, and they purr.

Speaker 2 And they sleep. Well, they manage to fit a lot of rage into that other 10% that they're awake, though.

Speaker 1 Think about how nice the world would be if, like, you know, you go shopping as a couple and one of you always wants to go somewhere where the other doesn't? If you could just sleep.

Speaker 1 Like, while you're in GameStop, buying your empty boxes with your game codes. What are they?

Speaker 2 Game passes? Oh, the game key cards.

Speaker 1 I still don't understand that.

Speaker 2 You know what? No, I found, I actually found a use case for them.

Speaker 2 So after I didn't understand them them last week some people mentioned that the uh the use case is specifically that you can lend them out or resell them right it's it's it's like being able to resell a digital game or a cartridge because the the access is contained in the physical card but then it's you know it's digital so someone can go download it if they've got the card they can access it that it's the well it's a key uh it's a key card uh and so from that i actually get it um it's not a scenario that i'll use because i'm like a little treasure dragon and I hoard my games.

Speaker 2 I'm never getting rid of anything. Yeah.

Speaker 2 If I've got it, as you well know, having seen my boxes of games in storage, but for those who do resell games or like who want to lend the game to a friend or something, it actually does make some sense.

Speaker 1 I want to point out that a box is itself storage, so it's storage for storage. It's just like it's all nested the whole way.

Speaker 2 It's storage all the way down, buddy.

Speaker 1 I just, I hear you explain it, and I think I understand the concept behind it.

Speaker 1 I just don't understand the execution or how it's different than just a download code, like those like 25-letter codes they have on Xbox.

Speaker 2 Because once you redeem it, you can't lend it to your buddy. Okay.

Speaker 1 Okay. But whatever.
It's, you know what, you know what it reminds me of? I've always been, I felt like we had this worked out with usernames and passwords, and we had it great.

Speaker 1 You know, I remember when we were redesigning the authentication system for the Rooster Teeth website, Ben was saying we should do a thing where we have emails and we send people like login codes.

Speaker 1 That's the modern method by which people log into sites. And I was like,

Speaker 1 okay, really? Is this how people want to do this? This is what they, and we haven't seen too many complaints about it. So that's the main method.
You can log into the Rooster Teeth site.

Speaker 2 Well, it's better than having to juggle like what your different two-factor options are, I guess. I mean, because it's like, are you going to receive something via text?

Speaker 2 Do you have to go into your authenticator app? Although I do actually, I do like authenticator apps.

Speaker 2 Or is it in a passkey? And where is that passkey?

Speaker 1 What is the deal with these goddamn passkeys, Ashley? It's like, here's my experience of using passkeys. It says, hey, you're logging into the site.
Do you want to use your passkey? And I go, sure.

Speaker 1 And it goes, yeah, that didn't work every single time.

Speaker 1 It's like, did they design a whole new system that's like where the logins are tied to a device? Because Ashley, it's 2025. Who could possibly have multiple devices in 2025 to log into a website?

Speaker 2 I think I have a couple of website logins where I was like, ooh, passkey, that sounds convenient. And I set it up.

Speaker 2 And now every time I go to that website, I have to go authenticate a different way because I don't know where the passkey is, or I don't know how I set it up, or you know, where it's so the passkey.

Speaker 1 There's six of them for one site, and some are invalid. And it's like, what is this, man?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So, no, I have this work to happen.
I have to have to change pretty much everything back. But my favorite non-email one is now the

Speaker 2 authenticator because it's like playing a game every time you log in somewhere where you've got like 30 seconds and it's like you if you got you get down to the last 10 seconds and you're like trying to type in the code and you're like, I'm gonna log in.

Speaker 2 I'm gonna make it. I mean, I feel like a world-class hacker.
I feel like you get into like every, yeah, it's it's like pushing the microwave button one second before the end, right?

Speaker 2 Like it's not, it's not doing anything, right? What would you just type in a new code, but you get to feel really cool.

Speaker 1 Waking up and seeing your alarm clock as it switches over to like

Speaker 1 you're supposed to wake up. Yeah, the other thing too is

Speaker 1 it's 2025. Can we now realize that we're actually not all spies And you don't have to hide my goddamn password when I'm typing it in.

Speaker 1 I have never needed that level of security of someone looking over my goddamn shoulder while I'm typing in my password to check Reddit comments. Like, what am I securing here?

Speaker 1 And also, I have like a password manager now where, you know, that little eyeball that you click to like look at your password for two seconds. Now I have two eyeballs that overlay each other.

Speaker 1 And it's like, I'm trying to click the correct eyeball to see which one. It's like, it's also frustrating.

Speaker 2 the the the layers of eyeballs everything that's that's designed to make your life easier they're just they're they're making it hard they're they're just making it difficult all the time

Speaker 2 I gotta manage all these passkeys like I got a goddamn keyring on my belt or something like that no but but speaking of spies you know what I feel like we could use is we could really use like a resurgence of cool spy experiences if I'm having this much fun like feeling really slick logging into websites can we just like get like a new round like of spy games and things like that so I can feel cool and not feel lame when i explain how cool i feel yeah what was that one that was the 60s theme one it was like the theme of uh man from uncle oh oh um that was no one lives forever no one lives forever that's what it was nolf

Speaker 1 nobody called it nulf actually nobody called it that i i called it nulf you know that's another thing ai is always trying to draw me pictures right and stuff like that and write poems to me That's the kind of thing I want AI to do.

Speaker 1 Everyone always uses acronyms in their posts when they're talking about something. And no one's agreed that we're at the acronym level for this thing yet, like Nolf or whatever.
Hey.

Speaker 1 Why don't sites recognize when there's an acronym? I can just mouse over the acronym and it just gives me a dropdown of like everything.

Speaker 2 It could mean this or it could mean this or it could mean this or it could mean this.

Speaker 1 Because I'm just going to look it up.

Speaker 2 There are a lot of different things that three letters can stand for.

Speaker 1 Yes, and they're used a lot for lots of different stuff.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And there's a lot of like shorthand it like within communities.
And I'm like, I don't understand anything that you guys are saying.

Speaker 1 Right. And then, or even like someone's making a post and they're like, I, you know, this thing, and it's like, this is a rare genetic condition that only people in my family have.

Speaker 1 So of course everyone's going to know the acronym for this goddamn thing and what I'm talking about. I want that.
It's like every time I do the transcription for this podcast, I'm doing the same.

Speaker 1 four mundane tasks all the time. That's what we want AI to do.
Automate that stuff. Like people who are doing an Excel.

Speaker 2 Like, oh, I see you're doing the same thing you do every day. Would you like me to just handle that for you?

Speaker 1 I realize I'm asking for clippy to make a comeback, but that, yeah, that's what I want. I want a clippy that works that says, hey, I see you've been doing this every single day between 8:45 and 9 a.m.

Speaker 1 for the last year or even like the last week. Do you want me just to do this for you? It's like, yes, thank you.

Speaker 2 Yes. Got it on it.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 I don't want to have you write me a sonnet about a dog that learned to fly a spaceship.

Speaker 1 Fuck AI is trying to do all the time.

Speaker 1 Ridiculous. You know what I was thinking about, though, is

Speaker 1 the 20th anniversary for the Xbox 360 has come up.

Speaker 2 It was this weekend. It was on Saturday.

Speaker 1 My least favorite form of authentication ever was, do you remember where they had like for controllers where you could put in a series of codes like BB, right trigger, the left.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes.

Speaker 2 That's that's still a thing you can do, by the way. And then you can have that as like security so that no one can sign into your account.
But there's.

Speaker 1 Once again, who's living in these households where people are looking over their shoulder at their passwords and trying to get to their Xbox Live account?

Speaker 2 I wonder if that's now like how parents ground their kids, right? Like, oh no, unless you can guess like the secret trigger code or whatever, you can't get into your gamer tag now.

Speaker 1 Just take the power cord.

Speaker 1 Kids can't figure that out.

Speaker 2 No, now that things are getting more universal, though, and everyone's using like the same, like, you know, the figure eight, you can just like, you know, I'm like, I'm going to steal the power cord from this place.

Speaker 2 You're not going to stop me, mom.

Speaker 1 Go to the breaker box, flip the switch. You go, yeah, that's it, kids.
The power's out in this room for some reason.

Speaker 2 We don't know what happened.

Speaker 1 Time to go outside.

Speaker 2 But yeah, it's very exciting. So it was this Saturday, the 22nd of November, was the anniversary of the Xbox 360, which means it's the great console.

Speaker 1 Arguably the greatest.

Speaker 2 So great. Face plates, but I feel like face plates should make a comment.

Speaker 1 Get out of here.

Speaker 2 No, but it was a really fun console and it did so much stuff that was like so new and so wonderful.

Speaker 2 But whenever I think of like, when I think of this as an anniversary, I think of the zero hour event, that one that was out in the desert in the hangar.

Speaker 1 We've talked about it before. We're in a hangar with all those green lights.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And so like you would, you come out to the, this nighttime desert after this event, and it's nighttime.
It's dark in a desert, right? Not a lot of color happening.

Speaker 2 And you still know that you can't see green. It was, it was a very surreal time.

Speaker 2 But I think, I think the zero hour achievement, there's the achievement that you could only get at the event by putting your memory card with your gamer tag into this like one machine at the event.

Speaker 2 That's the only way you could get this achievement. And I did it.
That's one of the things that I remain proudest of.

Speaker 1 Bernie, with your hand up. Yes, thank you.
You were at the event. I was at the event.
Once again, another place. We were in the same place at the same time.
Passing in the night.

Speaker 1 We never met each other. It's so bizarre.
We were both at this event at the Mojave Desert, and I know it's the Mojave Desert because there was two collectibles at this launch event.

Speaker 1 One was you had, I guess they handed out 360 memory cards because it was the day of the launch. So nobody would have had a 360 memory card.
The ones from the launch.

Speaker 2 Right, we must have like plugged them in and like actually had to log in.

Speaker 1 Do you remember the Xbox? The memory cards went into the controllers.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. The microphones too.

Speaker 1 Right, the microphones, right.

Speaker 2 That was how you like plugged your microphones and you plugged it to the top of the controller next to the cable.

Speaker 1 The microphones go in the controllers now and every other.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but it's it's weird. It's a weird detail, but it's like now the port is facing you, right? It's on the bottom of the controller.
So it's like at least headed in your direction.

Speaker 1 This is like you had to like wrap it around. And imagine if you had to make that choice constantly between voice chat or storage.

Speaker 1 That's not a thing anymore. But yeah, so that one collectible was this Xbox zero hour achievement.

Speaker 1 It was kind of like the faceplates where it's like, oh, we're going to do this thing that everyone's going to use.

Speaker 2 Right. So like there will be all these events and there will be this exclusive achievement that you can only get if you're at these events and you're bringing your memory card around with you.

Speaker 2 Who's not going to do that?

Speaker 1 Who's not going to do that, right? And uh, it was the only event-based achievement I ever saw in my life. The other collectible that just makes it more exclusive, right?

Speaker 1 That makes it more exclusive, right?

Speaker 1 Which makes me mad, and I'll tell you why in a second.

Speaker 1 The other collectible there was they handed out what is to me inarguably the greatest piece of promotional merchandise ever in terms of the quality of its build, I have an Xbox zero-hour launch event hoodie that still looks exactly like it did when I got it 20 years ago.

Speaker 2 I am envious of that hoodie.

Speaker 2 I'm sure that I had the opportunity to get one, but at the time they would have been probably all like the unisex, you know, extra large.

Speaker 2 And in that season of my life, I would have been like, it doesn't fit very nice. So I'm not interested.

Speaker 2 And now

Speaker 2 what I wouldn't give to have like that big, comfy, fuzzy hoodie to just snuggle up in. So what I'm saying to you is watch yourself or I'm going to have a hoodie.

Speaker 1 So here's what I think about it. Well, that's, it's yours anyway.
If you want it, you can wear it.

Speaker 1 People either got one or the other. And the only person I know who got both was Gus Sarola.
He had both the achievement and he had the hoodie. I don't think he has anymore.

Speaker 2 He got the checklist. Nice.

Speaker 1 You didn't get the hoodie. You got the achievement.
I got the hoodie. I didn't get the achievement because I didn't think that achievements were anything.

Speaker 2 Between the two of us, we had the whole experience.

Speaker 1 And Jeff Ramsey was the the same way. He looked at the hoodie and went, I'm not taking that.
And then he regretted it for years that he didn't get that hoodie.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we all do. That was a good hoodie.

Speaker 1 Yeah. So those were the two rare collectibles.
But I love the 360.

Speaker 1 What a tremendous console that was. It was just like, it's such a, and it's so weird because like, what, 80% of them failed.

Speaker 1 It was one of the worst design consumer products ever, and yet still people love it.

Speaker 2 People love it. Yeah, it was

Speaker 2 the red ring of death. I think it climbed upwards towards 100% eventually.

Speaker 1 It was over 50%. Like everyone at some point had to send in their Xbox 360.

Speaker 2 You remember they would send you the coffin? Yeah, they would send you. That's what we called it.

Speaker 2 It was, they, they, so there it was like some, it was a solder fail point or something, like where they're, um, it would get hot and the solder would break or something.

Speaker 2 And a lot of people would DIY fix it by wrapping their game console in a towel so it overheated to the point where the solder, what, like, remelted itself

Speaker 1 back together.

Speaker 2 You know, yeah, once again, going theory like

Speaker 2 blowing in a cartridge would fix everything. It's like, yeah, it might have fixed it, but what damage are you doing as a result?

Speaker 2 But you'd call or you'd you'd call in and they would send you the cardboard coffin. You would put your console inside and you would send it away and hope to God everything was going to be okay.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
You could remove your hard drive from it too because it like popped off the top.

Speaker 1 So you could, you could keep that and then they would send you a refurbed one or whatever but and of course your face page should have been something that killed that it should have been that the console should have been the death of that product but it wasn't became like this like mark of like solidarity with people errors always are yeah like like once you survive the error it becomes a badge of honor right but we were i was thinking about this uh

Speaker 1 you know this authentication method they had with the pulling the different triggers and pushing different directions and you would make your own and then immediately forget it because you have no other password that's like that right so it just became a nuisance and you'd have to disable it and go through the whole password process again.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's accurate to my experience.

Speaker 1 But I have played, this weekend I played two games.

Speaker 1 I played with Carrie and Xander. I played Helldivers this weekend.
Oh, all right. And then I played Dispatch this weekend.
That's the game I decided to play. Okay.
Deadpool VR did not make the cut.

Speaker 2 Well, let's go in order. So Helldivers.

Speaker 1 Well, both of them.

Speaker 2 Do you want to give us the official morning somewhere review of Helldivers?

Speaker 1 Here's my up-to-date review on the game Helldivers. That is a pretty good game.
Y'all should check it out.

Speaker 1 Do you think you guys are gonna like it about a year behind the curve on that one but it's got a like the the authentication on the controller both helldivers and dispatch have kind of like a mini game which is kind of like Dance Dance keyboard where it shows you a bunch of arrows and you have to hit the keyboard like the WASD in those directions and you have to get it right within a certain amount of time in order to either in dispatch it's a hacking mini game and in helldivers it's kind of like that but what you're doing is you're accessing a terminal or you're using these like special abilities you have called stratagems, right?

Speaker 1 And it's super easy to do. Like in Dispatch, I can do it no problem.
There's like even a way to practice it in Helldivers, you know, and I can do that no problem.

Speaker 1 But when I'm playing with a group of people, you they can actually watch the screen where you're doing it. Oh, they can sit there and observe you.
It's like performance anxiety.

Speaker 1 It's like, I cannot do it when someone is watching.

Speaker 2 Like, like,

Speaker 2 would you like me to offer notes?

Speaker 2 Well, the real trick then is,

Speaker 2 do they roast you for it or are they supportive?

Speaker 1 They're supportive and that's so much worse. It's so much worse.
It's so much worse.

Speaker 1 It was really hard when I started doing it too.

Speaker 2 Like, don't worry, you'll get this buddy. It's like,

Speaker 1 it's like, it happens to lots of people.

Speaker 1 So much worse.

Speaker 1 It's so much worse.

Speaker 2 Oh, don't worry. You'll, you'll get it.
Just try again.

Speaker 1 And then I try to use my passkey and my thing's like, no, that's on a different device. Don't worry about it.
It's all terrible. But Helldivers was a lot.
It was fun to play that.

Speaker 1 I also played Jump Space, formerly known as Jump Ship. That's coming along in early access.
Pretty cool. But the big one is Dispatch.
People were telling me, got to play Dispatch.

Speaker 1 Oh, while we're talking about dispatching, which is the whole theme of the game,

Speaker 1 the drop from today, we now have a voicemail box for sponsors. If you want to leave us a voicemail on whatever topic some of we talked about, we're going to try out doing voicemails on the podcast.

Speaker 2 Quick note, quick thought, quick question.

Speaker 2 The theme of all that, keep it quick. But yeah, so we now have a voicemail box if you want to send in some audio to participate.

Speaker 1 Like just to throw a topic out there, since people seem to want to talk about politics forever, who the hell could have predicted what, what the hell happened in American politics this weekend?

Speaker 2 Yeah, a fever dream, right? So

Speaker 2 Marjorie Taylor Greene

Speaker 2 surprise announced resignation from Congress.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 And then also Mom Dani, the new mayor-elect of New York, visited the Oval Office and had a meeting with Trump.

Speaker 1 And they were like, hey, everybody's all smiles and buddy-buddy.

Speaker 2 It was really like, it felt like a fever dream. Like, how am I reconciling these things happening?

Speaker 1 Like, if you could bet on politics, somebody hit an incredible parlay this weekend. Like, who could have possibly

Speaker 1 any of these things? So leave us your comments on that. And then we'll listen to your political takes and go, I'm not putting this.
I'm not putting that.

Speaker 2 But you can leave them.

Speaker 1 But Dispatch is great. And then my big takeaway from Dispatch is,

Speaker 1 first of all, I absolutely loved it. I'm only about five episodes in at this point.
So please don't spoil it for me, even though social media is doing everything in its power to spoil this game.

Speaker 2 Do you have to like scroll with your eyes crossed so you don't accidentally catch anything?

Speaker 1 It's just another reason to stay off social media in general. But now I'm getting like the recommended subreddits and everything.
I got to figure out a way to turn that off.

Speaker 2 Tricky, yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm sure there's a way to turn off those recommendation engines. But I have had a blast playing it.
This game is so well received. It's overwhelmingly positive on Steam.

Speaker 1 They announced they had 2 million players now have played the game. Something like they hit their three-year projection for sales numbers in the first month.

Speaker 2 That's incredible.

Speaker 1 We were talking about this a little bit on the QA for sponsors this weekend, but we said it might have missed the window for game of the year.

Speaker 1 It actually did get nominated for the game awards and it got nominated for such like a weird qualified award.

Speaker 2 It's yeah, it's um it's best debut indie game, best, which is a really, it's a yeah, very specific category.

Speaker 2 So, uh, it's fellow nominees, Blue Prince, Claire Obscure, Expedition 33, Despelote, and Mega Bonk.

Speaker 2 Although I think the Megabonk developer withdrew from consideration because they said that Megabonk is not a debut game.

Speaker 2 They're like, we've made games before, so we are withdrawing from consideration. Right.
But yeah, so that's the category that it is nominated for is best debut indie game.

Speaker 1 I remember in Austin, the Austin Chronicle awarded Rooster Teeth Best Game Development Studio before we had even made a game. And I had to publicly say, we don't want to play it.

Speaker 1 We don't know what that is. This is sorry, everybody.
Sorry about the award. We didn't know about that.
Sorry about that. Yeah, that was a fun moment.

Speaker 2 But yeah, so

Speaker 2 Dispatch is in a good position at the moment because of where it's released in the year cycle, right?

Speaker 2 That it's top of people's minds at the moment for that category where Blue Prince and Claire Obscure

Speaker 2 both came out much, much earlier in the year. And I don't know a lot about Des Beloce, but I think it came out earlier in the year as well.

Speaker 1 And if it had a little bit more time to build the momentum that it has, it probably would have been on that Game of the Year nominations, I think. Probably.
I think it probably would have.

Speaker 1 And ultimately,

Speaker 1 when we first started talking about this game, when we didn't know what it was about, I said, if I had described what this game is about just by what I've seen from marketing materials, it is the animated series Invincible.

Speaker 1 That's not actually that far off. And ultimately, it's up to you to decide if an eight-episode animated series with some interactive elements is worth $30 for you to pay for that.

Speaker 1 That's what I paid for it. I think it's worth it.
I think it's fantastic.

Speaker 1 You know, it had that classic Telltale moment, Ashley, because it's like a derivative of the Telltale Studios that made this thing. The studio that made it's called Ad Hoc.

Speaker 1 I'll talk about that in a second. But when I got to the end of the first episode, I was still a little skeptical.
I was like, so I'm watching an animated series that I can't rewind.

Speaker 1 Is that what this is? Because I missed something. And I was like, I want to rewind.
It's like, you can't do that because this is a game. It's not a, you know, it's not a player.
It's a game.

Speaker 1 And then I got to the credits and they did that thing of, for this choice, you made the same choice as 75% of other players. I was like, I was immediately like, oh, why is that such a dopamine hit?

Speaker 2 The one that's always interesting with that, too, is like, you and 12% of players made this choice. And you're like,

Speaker 1 oops, maybe. Maybe, or maybe I'm like, I figured something out that nobody else did.

Speaker 2 Like, how did I end up here?

Speaker 1 You and 1% of other players.

Speaker 2 Would you say that locked you in? Like, once you got that sort of like statistical

Speaker 2 look at your experience versus others?

Speaker 1 Ultimately, no, that was great. But ultimately, it's just a fantastic story, right?

Speaker 1 And that's my big takeaway from Dispatch for a lot of people, because there's a lot of creative people out there, people who listen to this podcast.

Speaker 1 That game has been in development since 2018, and I was reading the path that it took on Wikipedia. This is where all this comes from.

Speaker 1 But like in 2018, they were developing it, I think, after Telltale shut down. Then they abandoned development on it.

Speaker 1 Then the resurgence and resurrection of Telltale, they hired this company in order to help them work on Wolf Among Us Part 2. They started to work on that.
Then that relationship fell apart.

Speaker 1 Then they went back to making Dispatch. They were going to make it as live action.
Then they didn't. Then they put it back together, started making it as an animated series.

Speaker 1 Then they completely this year ran out of money. Oh, no.
And they weren't going to be able to put it out. And then Critical Role stepped in with some money,

Speaker 1 got it to the finish line. And now it's this enormous success, right?

Speaker 1 But on the calendar, along with those other things, is The Boys came out in

Speaker 1 2019. 2019, yeah, exactly.
The Amazon series came out, The Boys. So that came out when this was in development or where they had this idea.

Speaker 1 And then Invincible came out in the early 2020s, or like 2021, or something like that. So there were all these steps along the way where, like, they're working on this thing.

Speaker 1 And then this other thing comes out that they're like, oh, this idea, like this derivative of, you know, superhero culture is taking place.

Speaker 1 And ultimately, if you'd like take all the pieces of dispatch and put them together, like, this is from Suicide Squad. This is from a little bit from the boys.

Speaker 1 This looks visually like Invincible and stuff. There'd have been a lot of places along the way for them to say, like, oh, this is already old and getting tired, or this has already been done.

Speaker 2 It's already been done. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's something that I see pop up in like writing communities a lot is someone will, they'll post, they'll say, hey, I've been working on like this novel or this series for a couple of years, and this is my baby, and I'm almost done.

Speaker 2 And I just found out that there's this book out that's almost the exact same premise. What do I do? Like, do I give up on this? And the advice is almost universally, keep going.

Speaker 2 Ignore the other thing. Do your thing, because regardless of how similar the premises are, the execution is what makes things unique, right?

Speaker 2 And your execution is going to be different than someone else's execution on the same basic concept. And look at this.

Speaker 1 And they've even been, they stuck with this for almost 10 years. It's a long time.
It's a long time. And all those things come along the way.
Absolutely. Just keep doing it.

Speaker 1 Don't, don't be daunted by that. And I think that's a huge inspiration to take away from ad hoc and dispatch because look at it now.
It's an enormous success and everybody loves it.

Speaker 1 I mean, even stuff like Baldur's Gate feels like it would have been like people would have seen that and they're like, oh, we can't do this. We got to go this other way with this other thing.

Speaker 1 And no, they stuck to their guns and they made a game and they made something that they wanted to see, I assume, and they executed really well and people love it. So just don't worry about that.

Speaker 1 Don't worry about the idea that everything has to be incredibly original. It doesn't.
It just has to be executed really well.

Speaker 2 And thumbs up also for people not being able to watch your QuickTime events.

Speaker 1 And I have to say, I did turn off the QuickTime events because I just like, I felt like I didn't know that I was really changing anything about it or it would just interrupt the game

Speaker 1 But I really do actually enjoy the two little mini games not the hacking one so much, but the actual dispatch game There's really not a whole hell of a lot to it, but it's fun and I enjoy it.

Speaker 1 You know, it's enough interactivity for me to look at it like it's not just an animated series. It's not just a game.
It's a combination of both and that's worth 30 bucks to me.

Speaker 2 Well, so thumbs up to that and also thumbs up to a couple of other things. People specifically, that's Will M and Andrew Kay.

Speaker 2 Thank you both for sponsoring this episode of our show at patreon.com slash morning somewhere and roosterteeth.com.

Speaker 1 All right, well, that does it for us today, November 24th, 2025. We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.
We hope you will be here as well. Bye, everybody.