The Real OG Jane Whittaker Unfiltered: 44 years in gaming, Alien vs Predator & Why fun still wins

By the way, if you're at this point, like this always kind of bangs my head.

How was it during the 1983-85 video game crash?

Like, if if I guess you're the only person I know,

yeah, you can ask.

I was there.

I mean, we went from millions of sales.

I mean,

we'd release on cassette in those days.

We'd release the cassette, and you go and do a million units without thinking about it.

I mean, people love that these days.

I mean, it's just

everything sold.

And I still we haven't built those numbers up now because there's so many.

I'll explain why later.

But

yeah, it's all all of a sudden we release something, it's like what is happening here?

It's not actually doing the numbers anymore.

And,

you know, the situation in the global economy, we've been through some of that recently, just changed everything.

I say the web studio loosely, it was just a small conglomeration of guys.

I mean, someone said to me, in all sense, sorry, I'm just to myself a couple of weeks ago, that when I was doing the original 8-bit games,

you could put all the 8-bit developers who had made a chart game on a bus together and go on a trip.

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Okay.

Yeah, we can we can definitely start.

Okay, hello everybody.

This is Matteja Antaric.

And this is Jacob Remier.

And we are your hosts and we have very, very, very special guests.

Guests, not guests, but guests with lots of experience.

I'm looking around for the others guys.

Yeah, yeah, it's got a guest.

But it's multiple guests in one guest.

It's multiple guests in one guest because you have so many years of experience.

Jane, welcome to two and a half gamers.

For people who don't know, which I'm not sure if there is any, can you introduce yourself and talk about

whatever you've done before in so many games?

Yeah, well, yeah, firstly, it's such a pleasure to be here with you guys, and thank you for the invite.

It means a lot.

So, I thank you to everybody who's watching.

44 years in games, I

first

game was in the early 1980s for the Sinclair ZX81

in 1981.

Yeah, I know, you're going to laugh because I'm so darned old.

We were not here.

Well, we were here.

Yeah, we were already here.

1981.

No, we were not here.

Not 81.

No, no, no.

There we go.

I knew it.

I knew it.

Don't get me laughing.

We're being professional now.

I was.

Yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, 1981, the Sinclair CX81 onto the Sinclair Spectrum.

And I went through the whole thing, the Commodore 64, the Atari ST, the Amiga PCs.

And I've worked on, I believe, pretty much every gaming system

that's been released that's that's done well in the mass market.

Apart from Sega, I've never done Sega game, but I've done the PlayStations, Nintendos, PCs, all of it.

First job was at 14.

I was doing some side work on the franchise with

Sid Meier and his first company.

Okay.

So Sid had a

company called MicroPros, and that was sort of my first work

in my teens.

So, you know, done done for the bedroom.

It was all indie then, guys.

I mean, we talk about indie developers now, it's all we had.

Yeah, like it's a different world, yeah.

Yeah, for those who don't know, like Sid is the guy who did civilization, yeah, exactly right, exactly right, and a very nice man, too.

Yeah, I mean, we spoke about games publishing in those days.

What they meant was that was your kitchen, you know.

So, so the indie developer was the bedroom,

the kitchen was the publishing room.

Um, yeah, so I worked with Sid and I got to to work through my areas with people such as Mike Singleton.

Now, a lot of younger people won't know Mike, but Mike was credited as the father of Open World Gaming.

We sadly lost him, he passed away from cancer.

But

he did a multitude of open world titles, including the Midwinter franchise.

And I was very lucky to work with him on that.

So my background in Open World, etc., that comes all the way back to me being relatively young and working with Mike.

So if you don't know Mike Singleton, Google him.

He was regarded as the father of home computing.

And he did millions upon millions of units in the 1980s, and he was my mentor.

So, between him and working with Sid and Wild Bill Steely,

the other co-founder was with Sid Meyer, I had a really good start.

And then, so I'm yapping away already.

This is supposed to be the quick introduction.

Look at this.

Yeah, I mean, like,

usually, I finally talking open world games, the games I play.

It's the games I play too, it's the games, the games I make, and the games I play.

And then

I moved on to various companies, including Atari, probably best known for early investors, predator Atari,

and which was the best-selling console game for the Atari Jaguar, and launched PC games and all sorts of things based on that work.

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Bye-bye.

By the way, if you're at this point, like this always kind of bangs my head.

Like, how was it during the 1983-85 video game crash?

Like, if if I guess you're the only person I know,

we can ask.

I was there.

I mean, we went from millions of sales.

I mean, we would we'd release on cassette in those days,

we'd release the cassette, and you can't do a million units without thinking about it.

I mean, people do love that these days.

I mean, it's just

everything sold.

And I still, we haven't built those numbers up now because there's so many.

I'll explain why later.

But

yeah, it's

all of a sudden we release something, it's like what's happening here, it's not actually doing the numbers anymore.

And you know, the situation, the global economy, we've been through some of that recently, just changed everything.

So for me, I was lucky.

I was able to continue on.

The sales were down, but kept plugging away.

But many small developers, unfortunately, fell by the wayside and and never came back.

It sort of rationalised the industry.

It wasn't just the sales, it's about who's still going to be around, which studio is still going to be around.

I mean, we I say the word studio loosely, it was just a small conglomeration of guys.

Yeah.

But someone said to me, and it in all situations, sorry, I'm adjusting myself here a couple of weeks ago,

that when I was doing the original 8-bit games, that you could put all the 8-bit developers who had made a chart game on a bus together and go on a trip,

so that was that was the size of the industry, so it was a big hit for us, but then there's probably some truth in that.

There were probably maybe 50, 60 of us who were actually, I mean, there are lots of people doing it as a hobby, but those of us are actually selling

worldwide.

It was very, very small.

I mean, you see more than that on a single game now.

So, we're really pioneers, I think, and it taught me a lot.

Yeah, and then I went to Atari, as I mentioned, and Investor Predator.

teams got a bit bigger then

would you believe there were two of us programming alien vested predator i mean really yeah i want to say like for what three maybe but yeah two

those are if i understand those are still the times where there was like programmer was the only guy doing the game meaning like the game design as well right the game design the programming the art which was mostly like programmer generated if i get

yeah absolutely right and the music

well i i i i did uh an 8-bit game i went on an 8-bit game called flying shark for for firebed and rainbed which was it's another one of Sid's companies, Firebird and Rainbird, was

Sid bought that.

And I did an arcade conversion, a Tato arcade coin-up that I worked with along with others on the Flying Shark.

And I was asked to do the music for the music drivers.

I didn't actually compose the music, but I had to do writing the music driver code for the Amstrad version of the Amstrad computer.

And my gosh, was I lost?

I had no idea.

I don't know anything about musical and musical notes.

I got it out.

You can go and play the game now.

It's got my sound drivers that were actually driving the music, but I'd never done sound before or since because we just had to do everything then.

You're quite right, it was everything.

I still design now as well as write code and everything because

I still something of an all-rounder.

That's because I had to be when I started the business.

There's no other way.

That's exactly right, Matt.

There is no other way.

But with the early Investor Presentative, it came, I guess, my signature game, everyone talks to me about it.

But the coding was myself and Mike Beaton, the primary coding.

We had a really great guy called Mike Pooler who did the compression system called JagPeg, which is like a JPEG for the Atari Jagara.

And but the act, but the actual JagPeg, what a great name.

So it sounds sounds like somebody put your washing on on a line.

I've got my jack peg.

Yeah.

But yeah, so Mike Beaton and myself, Mike, Mike did the 3D engine.

It's a fantastic programme.

It came from Argonaut.

That's going back to the eighties as well.

Argonaut did things like Starglide and all these big games.

And he Mike built the 3D engine.

And then, my job was anything that happens in the world was me.

Player interaction, AI, gameplay,

anything else.

So, Mike, Mike built the environment, and anything that moves in it was me, is what we always say.

And that was it in programmes.

We had some good artists, really good artists, and some great musicians, too.

And the best producer in the world, a guy called Purple Hampton, Atari, became a very famous Atari producer.

But in terms of the actual day-to-day code, me and Mike, you know, that and that and that actually is still Atari's biggest console game.

What's the name of the game?

Alien Investors Predator.

Oh, hello.

Hello there.

I didn't see you.

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Now let's get back to it.

Thank you.

Well, Elliot, this is Elliot.

Yeah, we were talking about Eliver.

Maybe

already.

So, but it was just the two of us.

Yeah, do you think it would be a different game if you had the tools that are here?

Well, they're here now, but if you had the tools back then, would it be different?

It'd be massively massively different, I think.

I mean, I'm actually working on my personal

survival game now.

I've just got it's been mentioned on over a thousand websites in the last week talking about the.

I wanted to go back and do a modern survival game based on what I learned.

So, something we can talk about later, guys.

And

I'll put two or three shameless plugs in along the way.

No worries.

You put it here, of course.

Come on,

it's super interesting.

But yeah,

but yeah, I mean, the biggest issue we had was cartridge space.

We there was so much we wanted to put into MVP and we we we used the cartridge, there wasn't a bite of memory left on the on the cartridge.

So people saying, you know, why didn't you do this and why didn't you do that?

And you could have you could have had cl aliens climbing walls and all of these things.

Well actually no, there wasn't even there wasn't even space for another line of code on that cartridge.

We literally maxed the cartridge out.

That to that

that's why that's why Mike Pooler had to do a compression system.

because we had to decompress real time even to get the game we had to fit on the cartridge.

So we we were totally maxed out.

So that so the biggest tool I would have liked was a bigger cartridge.

It's

within a couple of weeks of shipping, they doubled the cartridge size for everybody because they just found out to make bigger cartridges

just after we shipped, of course.

But yeah, I mean, but these days, of course, you're writing C,

those days, it was all in pure assembler.

Everything was written in binary assembly.

I had a programmer on my team in my first project that was talking to me about assembler.

That that I remember, but that's all of it.

So it was a sixty eight sixty eight thousand assembler.

And there were there were two custom microprocessors in there that John Matheson uh designed for the for the console.

Um and they were called Tom and Jerry, which I've always loved.

So I would like to mention them.

So we had a sixty eight thousand processor and Tom and Jerry.

And we and we we we had to code those direct to the metal as they say actually in in binary assembler.

No no C or no no Visual Studio development environment or anything.

We just sat there with binary files and had to link them together to make that game.

It's a different world than what it is now, I can tell.

Well, only from the outside, obviously.

Yeah, well it's changed massively in our industry.

And then

from there, I went

to Metro Gold Remayer, MGM.

And because I'd done well on the movie-based game, I got asked if I wanted to go to MGM.

And I became development director at MGM and a senior participant there.

So

I looked after the James Bond franchise and the James Bond games for MGM, including GoldenEye N64, which people always talk to me about too.

I didn't write the code for GoldenEye.

I'm not taking the credit for the code for Golden Eye, but I was all at MGM who thought it was a really great idea that we do this with Nintendo and find a good team.

So we signed up Rare, a team called Rare, who were my favourite team at the time.

Nintendo and MGM got together and we hired Rare to do GoldenEye N64.

And that's so I sort of went from ABP straight to GoldenEye as I sort of left Atari and went to MGM.

So I got a couple of lucky breaks there.

As I said, people say, people keep saying to me, I don't think you coded

GoldenEye N64.

No, I didn't.

Just be absolutely clear.

No, I didn't.

I was on the management team at MGM that

made the decisions and the game design decisions with Nintendo.

Because I got promoted.

But there's so much more.

So much more.

Yeah, there's lots.

And then from there, many years at Electronic Arts.

yeah, and then from there, a barking

this is the look at that.

Where did you find that?

Yeah,

I saw him, he's he's typing and just looking elsewhere, like, okay, he's just gonna bring this up for sure.

Yeah, yeah, because

people definitely need to see this, like, because I don't think so they'll grasp like what we're talking about.

Yeah, no, no, no, talking about this game.

It looks very crude now, but it was groundbreaking at the time.

Of course,

100%, yeah.

Yeah, but we're talking 32 years old,

yeah.

So, I love it.

And

the game I'm working on now, uh, which we're calling Zeno,

um, there you go, look at that shotgun collector.

I used to love wandering around like that.

This is pre-Wolfenstein, isn't it?

Yeah, it's around the same time.

I don't sure, I don't know if it's pre-or after, but around around the same time.

And what we did, uh, and I say we, this is all Mike's work and not mine, is you'll find there's floors and ceilings.

We're all the first to do floors and ceilings in an FPS.

But see if you go back to Wolfenstein etc.

There's no floor, no ceiling in the reindeering engine.

That's true, yeah, that's true.

So we

this is this is this is a mistake I made when I killed the aliens

when you kill an alien you get the acid damage

and after I shipped I suddenly realized I'd not remove the aliens so they they don't time out so there's the acid damage is always there.

And actually, it means as you see it hasn't it hasn't disappeared so you're going to still take the damage.

But what it what it did mean is people now actually think, where should I kill this?

So it's not just shooting something as it arrives like that.

It's where should I kill this so I can get through the doors and avoid the problems.

Okay, it's actually a fortuitous error, really.

So I have it.

So this is released 1994.

1994.

Sorry, regular Atari links.

And Doom is 1993.

Yeah, but he said he's a Wolfenstein.

So

but the we we started the coding of this in 92, it was a two-year project.

So

I don't know when John and

started doing

that same

ballpark, aren't we?

This time 1992.

There we go.

And then

that's amazing.

That's amazing.

I'm not going to upset Mr.

Carmack and Mr.

Romero.

I get on well with both.

I was recently on a BAFTA judging panel, John Romero and I sat together and judged BAFTA games, so I'm not going to offend him

no worries no worries

but it this launched the the whole idea of AVP franchise the dark horse comics and and everything it's

I'm a massive fan of the franchise like uh that that's like I think well so somebody somebody came to us at Atari and said

Fox I believe and said you know we would you can do can you do an alien game we said yeah can you do a predator game like yeah great but not both not both at the same time because we need the people so we said okay we'll put them together, Alien versus Predator.

It's actually having like a pretty big resurgence these days, if I understand, like, with all the new Alien movie and like the second one being ordered and the series and something.

So, yeah, definitely live and kicking.

And I was, I was, I mean,

I was getting mesmerized watching that.

I've not seen that in all.

Yeah, so I recently got called the father of the survival game because of this, because it's not an FPS, it's more about survival and strategy and stealth.

So

I was told about one of the big gaming sites that was the father of the survival game.

So, the new game now,

Xenomorph, is not the alien license.

But I'm going back to the things I've learned about survival and stealth and crafting and all these things and bringing that into the modern world.

For 30 years, people have asked me to go back and do another creature game.

So, that's what I've doing now.

We've got investment, we've got funding, we've got a publisher, and away we go.

So, it's good that you found that, Jacob, because that's exactly what I'm doing now, is my Persmore personal sequel.

We just made the announcement recently.

That's great.

Oh, yes, yes.

Where did we stop?

I think I cut your timeline there.

Yeah, with EA, I think, but I did see.

Yeah, so

I had some years here, and I was very lucky.

I came into EA just after Peter Molyneux left.

Yeah, so I picked up on some of Peter's titles, etc., and led those.

So I was the fancy title of executive in charge of production.

Again, one of these questions is burning me.

What happened with the Dungeon Keeper franchise?

Why it's they're doing nothing.

Yeah.

There were internal changes at EA.

Bullfrog's no more.

I agree with you.

I loved Dungeon Keeper.

I didn't work on Dungeon Keeper.

Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2 is my best games ever made.

Like, seriously, I could play that million times.

Well,

I was at Bullfrog in production for Dungeon Keeper 2, or was it three

keeper games i was at in the i i joined bullfrog in 97 so you guys work out which dungeon keeper it was and we we had we had theme park world and lots of things going on

and i i also led a project called indestructibles

when peter left

um he left a portfolio of game ideas uh and my job was to pick up on some of those game ideas and bring them to life so it was really interesting to say you know thanks peter he's here's what you've left me uh and one of those was was Indestructibles, which was a superhero game.

It had been tried on console by a guy called Sean Cooper, a bullfrog before.

But in 1997, I was asked to do a PC version, which was really interesting.

I got to work with who I consider to be the best programmer in the world, the engine programmer, Jan Svarovsky.

And you can Google him.

You're not developers, but developers use the books called Graphics Gems and all this sort of thing.

Big developer guides.

And Jan's like the regular contributor,

Mr.

3D.

So I was really lucky to work with him.

And so we worked on a superhero game that never shipped.

Ironically, the one that got away at Bullfrog because

Marvel didn't like it and they didn't want to license it.

So it's like, you're stealing all our characters.

I'm like, no, we'll license.

You know, we're happy to set the Marvel license, but it all went horribly wrong.

So we built a game between Marvel and DC complaining about who has what rights to what, it got shelled, but it was a really fun game to work on.

Do I get the try that before it was the norm that you would build a game and then ask for the license?

Absolutely right.

Nowadays, but it's not the case the other way around now.

Yeah, for obvious reasons.

So these problems don't occur.

And it was like accepted normal.

Because if I understand, this is how also StarCraft came to life, whereas guys built it for Warhammer and then didn't get the license and then went their own way.

That wouldn't surprise me.

That would not surprise me.

I mean, I actually got involved in World of Warcraft too.

So I told you I've been involved in so many games.

Yeah I mean it's just great age great age guys I keep telling you and there was a there's a uh a chap called Peter Rezon

a lovely man who was also passed now

he he looked after uh the the UK side of Blizzard uh and they they needed some help out in the States on three D engine design and landscape design and I I went out and helped and advised on this project and it had multiple names doing development and Peter sent me across to Los Angeles it was all really really nice and

you know, a few months later, someone said to me, We're calling it World of Warcraft.

And that, and I so that I, it wasn't when I was working on it, but yeah, so I helped architect the landscape and things.

I just brought in because of my 3D knowledge.

That was what, like, 2001, 2002?

Yeah, if not a bit, if not a bit before.

World of Warcraft was like, what, 2004, 6th is a release?

Yeah, I mean, we probably started a bit before that.

Yeah.

But yeah, early 2000s.

2004 released.

But that was a guy called Peter Rezon who who looked after Blizzard and Vivendi.

He was Blizzard Vivendi Universal and Universal Studios owned it all.

Yeah, so I was Peter was a dear friend.

He said, do you want to go and help fix?

And I got flown out to LA and got a star treatment.

It's really nice.

I'd only just returned from living in the US and I was like, oh, okay, I'll go back out to LA again.

But they they gave me a great time.

I don't know if I'm credited or not.

I don't really care.

I'm not I'm not a credit person, but I was just it's just nice.

It was really nice just to be on that gigtail, get that thing going, you know.

But they say it didn't become World Warcraft until after I'd left.

So, so continuing open open world, lots of stuff at the air and then Microsoft, I became famous for the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise.

Again, because I'm an open world person, yeah,

makes sense.

You don't get a bigger world than the whole world.

But the big, the big thing with Microsoft Flight Simulator is we have to create every inch of the world

because you could take off and fly from anywhere to anywhere.

So, you are building the ultimate technically, it's the most difficult open world you're going to make

because it's going to be on the ground down in the air as well.

Yeah.

So I worked on that and I did the official expansion packs for Steam, the Steam version of Flight Simulator 10 or Flight Simulator X, as people call it.

So all the official expansion packs for Steam was me on my own.

I just sat and solo wrote those, even though I was working as an executive and a board level VP at the time.

On my evenings, I was doing the official expansion packs for Flight Simulator.

I've worked with Train Simulator 2, because of course that's a big open world thing.

Only in April I shipped an expansion pack for Train Sim World

with Dovetail Games with my team.

A fantastic guy.

I'm going to give him a plug, Mike Meaden on my team,

and my programmer Aaron.

We created some expansion pack content for that.

So I've been around lots and lots of games, but the general theme is explorable worlds,

health

and survival.

So usually one or more of those elements are sort of defined every game I've done in my career so that's that's sort of the specialization of what we do have you ever get in any relationship with Ultima online at some point

um yes

when I was at

when I was yeah because I say this because Richard Garrett and I get on really well so Richard

Rich has made some lovely testimonials on my behalf recently.

I can share them with you guys if you want to put them on screen.

But he says, but what he was talking about, um, him and I being the sage gurus of the games industry, which was from Richard Garrett, which was a lovely thing for him to say.

So, yeah, for those who don't know, Richard Garrett is a very, very important game industry person who's credited with Ultima Online, basically.

Yeah, and which became all you know, which was all part of EA Origin.

So, we still have the origin story here now, and of course, that was Richard's business.

I mean,

yeah,

we can see it quite clearly here.

Oh,

It's on your page.

Is that a quote, is it?

I need my glasses on.

Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, that's the quote from Richard, which I'm very proud of, really.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, not only Richard, but also some other guys from the other side.

Well, there's Sam

from Sam Tramil, Mr.

Atari.

Yeah.

Above that, we have Starlibras, which is a whole lot of games.

Mr.

Nolla, yeah.

Yeah, no,

pretty, pretty interesting.

Yeah, but but for those who don't know, Ultima Online is, in my opinion, the open world MMORPG game released in 1990.

It is the Ultimate Online Jacob.

I played it for like three to four years, I think, constantly when I was younger on like a Czech Shards open server when we were literally like, you know, there were all these things around us, like World of Warcraft, lineages, and all these like new games, but we were still playing this Ultimate Online game.

It's just so good.

Richard nailed it.

And there was no leveling system, by the way.

For those who don't know, like in Ultima line there's no leveling system you literally learn by doing like the moment you do something you improve your skill in it and that's it like that was it like you start chopping wood your lumberjacking skill increases

yeah that's that's that's what I'm doing in the new game by the way the same thing because

I found some of these leveling systems to be artificial and then and then you end up in a situation where you I don't know, you're level fifty in the level one zone and you're just swatting everything.

Or likewise they're too strong for you, either too strong for you or too weak for you.

And so on the new game, we've been working on ideas of avoiding these sort of leveling traps and making it more organic where you learn as you grow and as you go.

For that very reason, I mean, people do the level scaling and all the rest of it, it's still not a great answer.

Oh, well, the best answer is to avoid that sort of leveling.

Yeah, yeah, we played Diablo 4 together, it was fucking terrible.

Yeah, you've got to go round and round the same thing.

Yeah, it's like, come on, like the monsters get level up faster than you, and therefore you never progress pretty much.

Yeah,

it was so oh my god, yeah, like yeah, they don't make games these days this way, basically, like Ultima Online did.

Like, even like the specialization, because I remember that there was literally like me going every day to the craftsman guild trying to like buy materials or stuff, or literally order some armors or whatever from people that were like specializing in craftsmanships, were like completely unusable in battle, but they were still like the richest people on the server because they were selling all this shit.

Yeah, exactly.

And then we wrote it on world within the world, didn't it?

Yeah, exactly.

And then we were the ones that were actually fighting and using it or, you know, to battle player killers or go to dungeons and stuff like that.

And we were equally wealthy, basically, because we were putting in the time in the dungeons, but they were putting the time in the forge.

Yeah.

And you couldn't do it without them.

Yeah, you couldn't do it without them, of course.

I can give you a little Richard Garriott

anecdote because

he did the trip.

He went up into space and then he wanted to go as deep as he could.

So he went to the Mariana Trench.

And I think Richard and I must have got some sort of record because we were emailing each other while he was in the trench.

So we sent it, I think we sent

the only email that was from

that low in the world in the Mariana Trench because he set up an internet connection on his trip.

And we were emailing him backwards and forwards while he was going down there, going down into the trench.

So I suppose that's a nice little anecdote there.

Probably

the deepest email ever sent.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

How can you translate all the learnings from AVP to Xeno, the new game?

Like, you said you're trying to avoid the leveling Xeno.

What else?

Tell us a little bit more.

I want lots of stealth,

lots of smart crafting.

It's a survival game.

It's not a shooter.

If you want to run around and shoot anything, well, you're quite welcome.

But if you find some weapons, but it's not

the point is, it's how do I survive in this environment?

Not, and this doesn't mean going scrabbling around for four pieces of food or something.

This is the actual actual environment's out for you, and the creatures in the environment are out for you.

So, it's about how do I act smartly to live in this environment?

How do I learn the behaviours of the people who live there and the creatures that live there?

How do I adapt to this world?

So, it means survival in the actual sense of I have to think about what I'm doing in this universe, not just collect 10 pieces of magnesium and 10 into something else.

Because that's not my idea of crafting and survival.

That drives me crazy.

But then there's like the fear and tension, like everything around the surface.

Which is exactly

what I got famous for was the fear and tension in AVP and other titles I did too.

I mean, I don't think I scared anyone in flight simulator, but I certainly did in.

I certainly did in AVP and that, and that fear and the tension, you're quite right.

That's the driving force of this game.

Once you've got mechanics of that survival, I want you to be going around every corner and not knowing what on earth's around that corner.

Don't go rushing around the corner because you don't know who's going to be sat waiting for you.

And I want that sense all the time.

Dark brooding places, forests, caves.

Just this complete tension and fear.

And going back to AVP, when we're building AVP,

we used to work right through late into night at the Atari offices and we'd turn the lights off and we actually got got scared play testing our own game.

I can imagine.

And then we didn't even want to walk home or whatever in the middle of the night from the Atari office.

And then that was when we were coding the thing.

And I wanted to bring that back, to bring that entire sense back.

So you're quite right.

That's the driving force behind that.

To look at survival, to look at strategy, to create a crafting system.

Mike Meaden and Sean Delaney are working with me on that right now.

Create a crafting system where it isn't to collect 10 of these and 15 of those.

It's much more organic, where you actually bring things together and find parts and improvise.

Improvisation is a big thing.

Yeah, absolutely right.

And but over the top of all that, I want this whole thing of tension, of fear.

You know, we didn't put music in AVPs you're playing.

And people said, why didn't you?

Because we wanted to hear the heartbeats, wanted to hear the predator laughing at you.

And all these things.

I learned such a great deal about building tension in games.

And that's why this is what I'm shipping across.

So, we're not, as I say, we're not using the alien license because I want to create creatures that aren't limited by somebody else's IP.

We want to do some new things, but certainly the tension, because I mean, there's loads of alien games now.

So, I don't want to do it.

You don't need to have a license to be successful.

You can just look at Helldivers, you know, like they don't have the license.

It wasn't even that.

I mean, we could have got the license.

I have a good relationship with Disney.

It's Disney's now, but I genuinely wanted wanted to be able to do things that couldn't fit within the license.

But taking those core ideas of it's limiting, it's limiting, of course, yeah, it's limiting.

That's exactly, yeah.

But these games are like quite popular these days, if you understand.

Like, something like I don't know, Sons of the Forest or these other like horror-based survival games.

Sons of the Forest is very good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

For those who don't know, there's uh

again, I can do a little bit of a screen.

Yeah, you can,

yeah, 225k reviews here on Steam, and this is basically

kind of similar to what Jane is saying: that like survival stuff in this kind of a horror-based.

I don't know if these are cannibals against you or zombies or something like that.

And this, this, yeah, this really blew up last year.

Yeah, but from what I think, what I understood from Jane, like, it's not going to be more about like shooting these, like, but more like crafting and trying to survive in the

you're going to have to make a weapon in the first place.

You're going to have to, you're going to have to actually, do I hit them with a piece of wood?

Do I do I go and find something?

It's a lot of salvage and improvisation.

But yeah, so you can, if you want to go out and fight, great.

But you might be smarter actually avoiding some enemies.

So Sons of the Forest became very combat focused.

This game can be.

It's up to you.

It depends how you want to play it.

But me personally, I want it to be focused in.

combat when you need to combat and be smart when you can.

So, you know, setting traps away from your base and base building.

And, you know, maybe a quarter of a mile away, you know, a couple of kilometers away, having having some traps set in the forest, and you know, you hear a little ding, and this one's going to caught in the net,

all this sort of business.

Not, not, not just that visceral combat, which everyone's doing now.

So, I'm not going to say it's not combat, but it's like

mix the combat with being clever about how you do it, don't just go rushing into situations.

Yeah,

try and create other opportunities for

bringing the enemy down.

Or if you even need to, even try and avoid the enemy even knowing you're there for as long as you can.

If you're first building up your base, you know, don't make a lot of noise.

Be very, very quiet.

Perhaps you want to put your base underground or something.

So, literally, try and avoid the enemy until you're smart to go out and face them.

Do you also have some kind of maintenance mechanics like Don't Starve or something similar where you have like watch your health or I don't mean health like food food gauge or something like that?

And we're working on that on the UI, but yeah, yes, I mean, yes, there's food and everything, but it's

it's it's not in, you know, if I if I don't eat within 40 seconds, I'm gonna get a

screen's gonna go red.

That's just annoying, but it's

fully agree.

But it is, there is requirement that you eat and drink to survive, but not in such a way where it's just where it just becomes an obstacle where you try to do something else.

I think that's been done a bit too far.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, so it's you know, you're halfway on a radio mission.

It's like, oh my gosh, if I don't eat this sausage now, and that I'm done for.

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I fully agree with this.

Like, I can't play these games very, like, I want to take care of myself first, and then I need to take also care of the character in the video game and feed him and drink and stuff like that, which is like annoying.

Yeah, because then

the game is all about just eating and trying to hunt for food, and then you don't explore anything else because you don't have time to, you just try to,

yeah.

So, so, so, yes, there is a survival element, but not

where it becomes super intrusive.

It's about surviving, it's

not surviving against your own body.

It's about surviving against the environment and what's out there.

That's that's that's a personal thing.

I'm glad you guys are validating it as gamers, so thank you.

Well, it's gonna be PC, Steam, or are you thinking about PC and consoles?

P C

yeah, P C and consoles.

No mobile.

I mean, of course I mean, we have a P C segment now, so we keep uh reviewing P C games uh from time to time more and more these days because because of the forces that are pretty much pushing a lot of the PC successful games into mobile if they want or not.

Basically, yeah,

I've never done a mobile game, I have to say.

So there you go, you found my career gap.

I've never done, I've only ever done PCs and consoles.

Only, yeah, you have only 40 years of experience.

Oh my god, I haven't seen it.

No, it's not good enough, is it?

I should be shipping mobile games.

Yeah, thank you very much for listening, guys.

So we end here.

Yeah, sorry, you're done.

No, but are you thinking about mobile or not really?

It's just, I mean, not for this game.

It's not going to fit.

I have some ideas about companion apps on mobile.

I mean, things that fit into the IP that we're creating.

So this, I'm not saying there won't be things on mobile, but we're not going to be able to fit this onto any sort of meaningful way.

Okay.

How close are you with the release?

We're about two years.

To give a take.

We're putting the game playing now.

We've got some engine stuff done and the design team are working now.

We have this lovely lady called Blair who's a concept artist.

was actually won the Blizzard Scholarship Awards.

And she's,

as I'm talking to you, I've got her on Discord showing me monsters.

So it's good to see.

Perfect.

Yeah, it's good.

I thought she was doing portraits of me, but apparently, not as monsters for the game.

So we're okay.

Yeah, so there's a lot going on.

So we're just starting to put pieces together and we've sorted a publisher.

We've got some funding to push it to the finish line, which is super exciting.

Yeah, how is it that if you when you don't really need to do it all alone?

Yeah, it's what's changed.

The biggest thing for me is trying not to interfere in other people and be a control freak.

And I don't mean that in some egotistical way.

The team will tell you that I'm only an egotist on Thursdays, you know.

But

it's like, I can do that, I can do that, I can do that.

And then

the guys keep saying, yeah, but there's only one of you now.

And these games are big.

You can't clone yourself, unfortunately.

Exactly.

And that's exactly what they're saying.

Do you want to do the business?

Do you want to do the game design?

I can't do the art, so the artists are safe.

I can't draw stickman.

My art is terrible, but you know,

code and things that I still interfere with.

And I have actually architected the AI system.

But being serious, you're saying the AI is a big part of my thing, as you saw from AVP and all the other projects along the way.

So I've created

a complex, what I hope is a leading-edge AI system for the programmes to use.

So again, it's not this creature patrols, left and right, goes and has a break and does it again.

Probably does file.

Go ahead.

Yeah, exactly.

We have a learning system where the creatures learn by what they see.

So if they see you do something, they will learn.

Each creature actually has its own brain and learns.

And then the intelligent creatures, when they meet other intelligent creatures, will pass on what they've found out.

So you might have some guy who understands what trick you did to catch the other guy because he's been told.

So the creatures who will meet each other will pass on knowledge of what they've learnt about you.

If they don't, if you meet a creature who doesn't know anything about you, then they'll fall into the trap that the first creature did.

If the first creature got to him before you did, he's told them.

That's very interesting mechanic.

Yeah.

The smart thing is, is don't let anyone tell tales.

So you should not left any survivors, basically.

Yeah.

Yeah,

certainly so on the bad guys.

Or the nice thing is, so it's really complicated AI because that's what I do.

You could get them all thinking you're doing one thing, they all tell each other that you're doing one thing, and you keep doing it over and over.

So they think this is your pattern, and then you go and do something else completely to confuse them.

So

you can use it

to lie to them about your techniques, different tricks.

I think that's new.

I say so myself.

I don't know how

to do that.

Definitely.

By the way, if you are at this topic, do you use any AI actively doing development?

Or what's the current take regarding production that you have there?

Absolutely no AI whatsoever.

No AI whatsoever.

Apart from my handwritten AI code and you haven't written anything.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but

no AI generation of art or anything else.

And I know some people do, and it saves them time and money, but

well, the whole team are like myself, are absolute perfectionists and just wants to make everything handcrafted.

So I'm not going to do a big procedural world either.

The world's handcrafted.

Yes, it costs more time and money, but I think the results will be worth it off the back end.

I think people are going to enjoy the game more.

So, I

like the idea that if you go around every corner, there might be something there that's been crafted.

Every bit of terrain has a reason.

You can create enormous worlds with procedural, but it becomes competitive very quickly.

Yeah, so

we are looking at ways of creating big worlds handcrafted.

We have some landscape creation tools, but it's handcrafting.

The tools will speed up the hand crafting rather rather than proceduralize yeah but the thing is like in this case you actually want to explore the world if it's just randomly generated by AI yeah you don't you don't you don't

is the differentiation yeah yeah exactly why would your body just stay at home in your little base and say if I don't need to go out there because I've seen it already so so here you could you could walk a quarter of a kilometre in one direction and just see various things and then you suddenly walk in another direction and the landscape might change absolutely completely and like oh god But even the transitions between landscape types, everything has a plausible reason.

To support my work in open wells, I went away and

I did a bachelor's degree in natural sciences just so I could study geology and physics and all these things at degree level.

So my open wells actually can be believable.

Yeah.

So you know what you're doing.

So it's a five-year natural sciences degree alongside the day job.

So when we create wells, it's plausible.

I mean, I'm pretty sure, like, if you say this is someone who's like nowadays in gaming industry, it's like, no, no, no,

I don't need this, I don't need this, it's too much work.

That's that's such a big difference between then and now.

And we have this discussion with Yako, like the games that are made now, it's they're nowhere near the quality they were back in like a couple of years ago.

Not quality, like the effort, that's the thing, effort, effort, yes.

Effort's the thing, quality, like you know, technology gets better, like rendering and all these things gets better, and so on and so forth.

But the effort that you had to put in before in order to achieve that 3D engine where you actually could go through the 3D environment because you had to do it yourself, like, wasn't really on the table before.

There's no Unity Unreal to do that.

I agree with you.

I don't blame the devs for that.

There's a lot of commercial pressure on them to get things out quickly.

But I'm very lucky that we've been funded and

I've had a background where I have been a perfectionist and the team perfectionist.

So hopefully, that'll show through in the problem.

I'm not saying we're perfect, it's not a sales pitch, but I've always genuinely been a perfectionist because I've had to be because there weren't any tools.

And

that comes through into what we're doing as a team, that level of perfectionism.

And again, I'm not saying that as some sort of BS sales pitch.

It's just,

I'll do the sales pitch later.

You know, you always leave them with the sales pitch.

It's just a different way of thinking where we're not under that pressure.

So I don't blame any of the devs whatsoever.

It's just the situation they're in.

Get this thing out, get it shipped.

One of the things I used to say to teams when I was looking after production of electronic arts, they used to come to me and say, We've got this great new engine, or we've got this great new lighting system, we've got this, this, and this.

I'm like, Yeah, but does it make the game more fun?

Are these technical things helping the game, or are they hindering the game?

So, there is a bit of a problem of a ponderance now to create really smart tech, but then you look at the game under it and it's really shallow.

And I'm like, build a smart game, then put the tech in there to support that game, not the other way around.

We're not building tech demos, we just do tech demos on the Amiga, you know, Amiga scrolling, bright screening around the screen and things.

We don't want to get back to that.

So I'm at this stage now of my life.

I say to everyone, build the game, gameplay first, gameplay first, make it beautiful, yes.

but to support the game, not the other way around.

Don't build a game around a tech demo.

Yeah, that's I think even the current market force that's driving like all these successes where you have like I don't know Helldiverse, Baldur's Gate, or these other games where or PAL world where they are driven by kind of double A or small team kind of setup where again, as you said, they go gameplay first, don't have the budget of the big corpse, but they can still beat them.

Absolutely right, absolutely right.

And look and look at Baldur's Gate 3.

I mean, Larian did fantastic things.

I keep evangelizing them on LinkedIn because I know quite a lot of the guys, I'm friends with quite a lot of them, and I absolutely class that as my favorite game of all time because it's smart, it's clever, there's so many ways of doing things.

You don't need big budgets for a clever game design, you need clever designers, and that's and that's exactly what they've got in spades.

And that perfectionism comes through in what they do.

And I honestly think it's the best game ever made for me personally.

I think if you have a big budget, it always kind of limits your way of like how we think about stuff and

the way of creating and ideating because then you're like, oh, we have so much money, I don't care.

But if you have very low amount of money, like you are on a small budget,

yes, everything comes.

You need to be very efficient.

You need to be smart about things.

And then that's when like the magic.

That's a good idea.

Yeah.

So yeah, it's like a small budget always.

It's like pushes you to

think

differently.

I agree.

I agree.

And that's something where...

Well, I mean, I keep myself very, very current.

Despite 44 years, I still keep myself technically current, as you're hearing.

But I also bring some of that history with me because we had to do these games in six weeks by ourselves, you know, with a with a very low budget.

I mean, I was

yeah, it's exactly right, but we had to do the what were the games of the day, yeah.

We had, we had, we had six weeks start to finish, we didn't get paid until the royalties came out.

You know, I'd I'd be living on toast or something for the six weeks, you know, hoping until hell the game would come out and I'd get paid.

So we didn't, we didn't have the big budgets, and that's and those disciplines is something I've brought forward throughout my career of

discipline.

Yeah,

yeah, I still eat toast every day.

Yeah, there you go, yeah.

Um, but yeah, but it was exactly that.

We we just didn't have massive funds, but we made games that were fun, and I think that's the key.

No matter how much money you've got, being serious, that's what this what is this industry about?

It's fun.

It's not, it's not about showing people pretty graphics, it's about are those things fun.

And we, we, my first ever game didn't have any graphics at all.

The the first game i shipped was for the zx81 it didn't have graphics it just had text

so we we were we you know you'd be having letter a would be your spaceship and the the letter x would be the bombs but it was fun to play

there's the thing like it doesn't really matter if if it like it looks great if it's really like you having fun by playing the gambling that's that's i mean that's why it's called a game it's exactly right fun game entertainment so i i i think use your budget to to to polish up and make the graphics and everything nice if you can.

For heaven's sake, the core of your game is the gameplay.

That's why we call it game play.

It's what we want people to do.

And

that should always be the central focus of any product.

So I think those of us have been around for a long time see that.

And I think sometimes what it shows.

Like the guys who run the Larrying team have been around for a very long time.

It shows that I think that experience starts to show through.

At least I hope it does.

Maybe I'm just older to see now, but I hope so.

But

where do you get the inspiration from?

I mean, the new game clearly takes inspiration from everything that you learned right in the last years.

But what else?

I mean, of course, do you have anything?

I get ideas in my head.

I will go around

and I used to take a notebook out with me, and I still do sometimes.

just to the supermarket and things and I'll see something in the supermarket and I'll suddenly start getting tracked onto a game.

I'll be rushing around and giving notes.

They just they just come rushing at me sometimes.

Quite honestly, it drives my wife crazy.

She's she's looking for the milk and beans and I'm worrying about monsters.

But but yeah, so it's it does.

I mean, I even wake up with game ideas and all sorts of things.

But but it is usually built around my my core interests of the AI and stealth and the strategy and open world.

So you you can you can see from this where where my areas are from this call.

And so my brain's usually always permeating with ideas around.

I can understand that.

Like, I have some similar things with RPGs, basically.

That's also always on my brain.

But then, then I'm doing gachas for

what was your favorite RPG then, John?

Favorite RPG.

I still haven't finished Bowders Gate because I have a second kid now.

No, that's time consuming.

Yeah, I'm at the end of the second act, but hopefully, by the end of this year, I'll finish it.

For now, it would be, I would say, We Trade Rends Down, like that.

But it's a fantastic product.

Absolutely agree.

Again,

i read the books before the the games so i i know you know franchise very well was a big fan and like i remember the whole like cd project rec going from nobody to this like random victor game and then to this multi-billion company it's a lot of hard work that they're putting into it and still i still prefer victory one before victory which one which one's having a remastered this year by the way awesome oh is it really that i think yeah i i have a very good friend uh working in warsaw that's like leading the tech technology.

Well yeah, they're they're really doubling down on it.

And I think I remember when this I I think that was the same time when Witcher 3 came out and Fallout 4 actually came out.

Yeah, nobody was talking about 4 out 4 because Witcher 3

totally overshadowed them.

And that's why we're talking about where big budget doesn't always help.

Look at Fallout 76.

I mean,

it it just died despite the budget, you know.

Whereas the CD Project Red came out of nowhere with Witcher 3, really.

Witcher 1 and 2.

The difference in quality between Witcher 2 and Witcher 3 was just phenomenal.

The other thing that I really think was kind of a little bit beyond what I would experience before when I was like, I think like two years ago, I literally modded my Skyrim with like 200 gigs of additional mods.

Oh my gosh.

It's a completely different game.

It's a completely different game.

And like, why do people keep making these super expensive games that are, you know, like, like you said, Flow

66, when when there's like so many good stuff.

Like, there's literally like a mod that would add 2,000 lines fully voiceover for a character for one of the expansions on Skyrim, the girl, the vampire girl, basically.

And she would have commentary on everything.

Like, she would literally be like AI, like,

this or that.

And she would, like, have it in her catalogue and like tell you something about it.

Have some like relation trees that would unlock and stuff.

Like, like, it was a completely different game suddenly.

You know, now after this call, I'm going to be asking if all these mods are because I love Skyrim.

Get there.

And like, I've seen Skyrims being fine-tuned to, like, you know, with like 8K textures and all these other things.

That's great.

Like, you can up the graphics a lot.

That's one thing.

But there's a lot of content that people created.

All these being able to have multiple followers, multiple quest lines, multiple different things that are enriching the game so much.

So that's the other way for me.

That, like, sometimes you don't really need to go, like, I guess, to look for the new one, just like refine the old one and i refine like it's always the mods like i don't think so people or like companies have that exponential manpower to do this what modders do if they really fall in love with the project you're quite right and that's that's why with the the game we're designing now we're we're already talking about mike meaden uh my my business partner on this uh mike's mike's already talking about how do we how do we support modders and because it it becomes your game it's not just our game then it's the game people want it to be so i think modding is really really important now: Steam Workshop support, etc.

And, you know, look, look what it's done for Baldur's Gate 3.

It's given that, you know, a lot more noise recently.

So, yeah, I agree with you.

I'm I pulled down mods for all sorts of things.

So,

100% with you.

And

do you know, you mentioned, I'm just thinking about RPGs.

I haven't mentioned one of my

major projects game, Mr.

Open World, was a game called Power Crystal, which was a big open world RPG.

It never shipped, but it got done, and the industry saw it.

Some of the Bethesda people very kindly kindly said it was part of their

inspiration for Morrowind and Skyrim, etc.

Morrowind.

So, but we I got asked by Trip Hawkins, and then for the audience here, we should name his name, that was the founder of Electronic Arts.

He had a separate spin-off 3DO, probably remember the 3DO console.

3DO Heroes of Magic.

Exactly it.

And he had

one of the best games ever.

Exactly right.

And

he launched the 3DO M2 console.

And I was asked to be the launch title for that.

So we put the team together, we did a huge sprawling RPG power crystal, and then we were so pleased about it.

Then we got a message, the console's been stopped.

Like, okay.

So

the first time in my career I've actually built a game, then the machine no longer exists to put it on, which was a bit gutting, I have to say.

It still hurts, but it's just how it was.

And I went to the mainstream EA after that, anyways.

There's no bad blood between trip and that, it's just the way it worked out with

console.

But yeah, so that was that was a big goal from World RPG, and I'm really proud that a lot of the RPG people now got to see it.

They're saying it's inspired them.

You'll probably find that online somewhere, Jacob, too, with some scary pictures.

Oh, really?

Yeah,

Power Crystal M2.

For the M2 console is

so it's 3DO M1, it was machine one, the original 3DO console, but the sequels must be 3DOM2, 3DO Machine 2.

I think I heard it.

Yeah, of course you have have that.

Yeah, of course.

It's faster.

This man's faster as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Take them a prototype, prototype cancel.

This one.

That's a boring picture.

There's one of the characters.

Yeah, yeah, but these are from it.

That's one of my favourites when we did the snow scenes.

I mean, again, it doesn't look anything now, but this was mid-90s, you know?

Like, it was

like breaking the sky remote.

There you go.

That's that's one nice town shot.

what's the what's the date we're talking here?

Mid 90s.

Mid 90s.

Okay.

That's very very advanced.

Yeah.

If you go back one roll back one, that's that's what it actually looked like going down the streets.

That one didn't have the ground texture in it.

We could see the sort of buildings we're doing, which wasn't wasn't bad for the day.

Because

these are all production images.

None of these are finished game images.

The ones you found here are all the the production diary photos.

But yeah.

That was really nice.

This was great, even for the moment.

Yeah, it's very good.

Yeah, yeah.

It's very good.

That was it.

That was a guy called Andrew Noble and Dave Tolley with the artists who did that.

I think they did a fabulous job.

So those are test characters.

That's why they're very polygony.

They're not the real characters.

They're still good.

Yeah, this looks pretty good.

Yeah, I don't want to.

The copy will be at the bottom with my big hat, I think.

Okay, Jay, give us the like, where's the sales speech you were talking about?

What's the sales speech for you?

I was kidding, but yeah, but I just, I just, I just hope that we just build some interest and get some excitement going for the Xenomorph games.

It's, as you can see, 44 years, I've not lost a passion.

And we've brought, I think, some of the best developers in the world together to create this thing.

So I just want to bang the drum and say, we're doing this, we're listening.

We're gamers too.

We're taking what we've learned about stealth, what we've learned about open world, and we're putting it into Xenomorph.

I mean, my partner, Mike Meaden, Meadan, big open world guy, very big technical open world guy from the technical side.

Um, he's just come off Forza Horizon to do this with me.

He was a producer of Forza Horizon, so we know

the team have such a pedigree in this.

So, we just we want to make the game that you guys, you guys, the viewers, not just you two guys, I mean, you two guys as well, um, want to play.

So, you know, give us feedback, talk to us.

We're going to start getting more active in the community, and we're going to make Xenomorph something that we all want to play because we wouldn't, you know, I'm not doing this for the cash.

I'm only 60 years old.

I'm doing this for the cash room.

Yeah,

so

the big pictures we really are genuinely trying to make something different.

We've brought in some absolutely incredible people.

Mike was producer on Star Citizen as well before he went to Forza.

Star Citizen, that's a story we're following pretty closely.

Yeah,

there's a huge story there.

You need to talk to Mike one day.

Bring Mike on here.

He'll talk to you for hours.

When they release?

Yeah.

just as long as he doesn't break his NDAs, he'll be talking for days.

But yeah, but we've brought people, we've brought people in from the open world genre, and it's not just me, it's not just my game.

I came up with a concept, but we've put one incredible team around it.

We've got rather than being publisher-funded, we've been investor-funded

and investors that have given us a really, really good deal because the investors who all come in were passionate for the game.

So it's even the commercial side, people like, you know, we want you to do this, and I really hope it's going to create something special.

I want to create, you know, as I'm getting older, I want to create that follow-up to the success I've had over the years on multiple projects.

So, really,

it's taking pieces from all the different projects I've done and what I did right and what I did wrong.

Because, gosh, I made some mistakes and games we all do.

And I want to actually bring that together into a whole new survival world.

Can people learn somewhere about the project, either a website or Discord or something?

about to be.

Awesome.

You can Google the press, at least in some of the interviews we've done online now.

You'll see

just Google my name and send them off.

There's a lot of content.

But we are waiting until we're happy with things to show, which isn't too far away.

And then you'll see a bit some content.

Jane, thanks very much for coming.

I hope you can come on again and we continue talking because you mentioned how many hours we have.

This can be a series of multiple hours of discussions.

Oh, my God.

Very, very lovely and very wholesome.

Really, thank you for making the time here.

Yeah.

Honestly, I appreciate you two guys wanting to talk to me and share with your audience.

I think it comes across, I genuinely still have the passion, so I love talking to everyone.

Yeah, that's what you definitely need to talk about a little bit in current times.

Yeah, exactly.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Dear listeners, thank you very much for coming.

I joined the Slack channel.

I will put all the links in the show notes so you can check out how the chain is doing and then see you next time.

Cheers.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.