There is no after GFW Radio Reunion, The one and only!
Hello, and Welcome to GFW Radio! This book is an analyse of the extra special episode of the Comedy Button, a podcast about games and more. In this episode the crew of the beloved GFW Radio podcast reunites for a mini reunion. After 5 years they are back with lots of story’s and memory’s. The People talking and there designated colour are:
Jeff Green: azure Robert Ashley: Stone Lavender Shawn Elliott: Velvet
Anthony Gallegos: peach Sean Molloy: orange
Ryan Scott.: sky Bleu
00:04:00
Hello and welcome to GFW Radio! This is the podcast for March 8th... It's the 8th right? It's actually March 30th but... March 30th That's OK. March 30th 2012, This is Jeff Green and I'm here with... The usual gang of idiots and idiots please introduce yourselfs... Shawn Elliott. Rayn Scott. Anthony Gallegos. Robert Ashley. Sean Molloy.
Sean what ehm?
Yea I don't know who that was before me.
What's up with Anthony, were just sitting here and he's just hungry as hell for more kickstarter dollars... He was gonna eat some fucking burritos – but the crazy thing is that when I was watching him do it a minute ago in the studio he didn’t even, like, his teeth didn't even move he sucked the rice and beans like through the gaps in his teeth apparently and then immediately after that he held the wrapper up to his face in the way that I guess a dog would treat like a woman's underwear or something, and began to suck the cheese off of the thing untill he sucked so hard that it ripped a whole through the wrapper. And then after that he probed his tongue through the hole and licked the grease of the other side of the wrapper. I gotta keep up my bean meter man. It's a something that happens to anyone that's partially Mexican. You have a bean meter, it gets low, you refill it. How much you think you're gonna pull off that... Like how much money. 00:05:00
What do I get for 100$?
man... Well, so here we are. Here we are. Once again. Here we are, how've you guys been? I'm good. I got a bunch of kickstarter money. How much did you get? Me personally? Yea. Zero. Hahaha. How did you... How do you deal with that actually? We... It's in a bank account...That Scott and I jointly own. Scott Bromley, my Comedy Button co-host. And uh... I mean we use it to buy equipment. do you guys all have like... Access to this account? Like could you just go withdraw some money and... Wait wait wait, so... ... Buy games for...
Hold on I'm confused, how come you're wearing this like... Valure suit and this crazy pimp hat, you have like a... spicane that you're walking on today is like, it looks it has diamonds on it and shit.
00:06:00
Robert you're supposed to dress for the job you want, not the job you have.
I'm saying this tho, Ryan... Ryan last night was talking about a chinese replica sword that he owns... And, I'm saying that kickstarter money paid for that thing.
No! Look... So who on this podcast does not have kickstarter money? I don't have kickstarter money. I don't have any.
I mean I got some kickstarter money but I don't have that kind of like good old... podcast kickstarter money. I got like a little... The whole point and click adventure... kickstarter money. Jeff, why are we talking about kickstarter money man? That's so bad its like the new fucking panhandeling man! panhandeling... for fucking like... “... Hey man do you like podcasts?” “I'm gonna make a podcast for you...” So what was happening with Ryan's replica sword? How are you getting distracted by a sword? Alright look, we were getting ready to play Soul Calibur the other night, me and Shawn and our friend Rory and ehm... They were like “face me on the field of justice, what're you doing?” And I was like... Field of history, get it right man.
Sorry, field of history and I was like... Cleaning this sword that I have. 'Cause its been under my bed for like seven years and I never cleaned it and its kind of rusty so I'm... I'm like polishing my... My “shword”. And now Shawn's making fun of me.
Why were you polishing it? Are you gonna put it back under your bed and forget it for another seven years? Because I wanted to... I didn't want it to get all rusty and I wanted to get the rust off of it. I'm just saying, Ryan... You not only have a fucking sword...
Why do you have a sword under your bed? ...But its under your bed, so its not even... There's one level of goonery at that point its like hanging on your wall over your fucking couch. But then its under your bed so like... you have to be entertaining some fantasies of someone breaking in and you doing some like Soul Calibur shit with this fucking chinese sword dude!
Yea is it under the bed like like a baseball bat, is that why its under there?
No its under the bed 'cause my wife told me “That ... goes under the bed. I don't want that on display.” Ah man...
00:07:00
Oh I was thinking there was another reasong she wanted it under the bed. Which is?
Well you know its just a handy tool to have around the bedroom... ....I suppose?
For roleplay and stuff... Hahaha... I'll be “Hang Ghua�! So is your sword polished now?
I'm trying to picture you wielding a sword.
00:08:00
...My sword is polished Jeff. Thank you. His sword aint shaped compared to the unit my character had... When I was beating you. Yea Shawn you can... These custom characters...
I already pimped the shit out of it, it's kind of stupid and old but like, I found a great way cause... They allow you in the character creation for Soul Calibur V to take like these additional items and like move them and place them on the character. So by combining a... It was like actually a 3 dimentional heart with a gord... And changing the colours I was able to get a nice sized hardon and taking a raccoon tail, tilting it and embedding the majority of it into the body of the character and having just like the tip of it come out I got like... I got nice big well groomed up pubic hair mount over the top of the gord dick. That's good... That's great Shawn.
I just can't help, I keep on thinking like, I can't believe people are willing to pay money on kickstarter for this kinda thing. I mean basically... Well not for THIS kinda thing...
It's amazing. Not what we're doing.
What we're doing right now is... Terrible, but... That's what I'm saying.
Yea OK maybe... Maybe I don't know what the high quality product is. We don't either. They're just paying cause they want to have something to listen to at their miserable jobs.
Ah man... Their jobs can't be that miserable if they're throwing the fucking money away on kickstarters. AG: That's a good point. I guess I don't have a right answer. Now I feel like a panhandler. Goddamnit.
Yea we've all been shamed.
It probably just flips tho you know... I mean you have to know when you're doing kickstarters there's like a group of people who's just like sitting there like a combination of like... Just disbelief at the amount of money that you're like able to like pull in and then also to (...?) on to like the dignity thing. But I think the moment it comes - the moment I'm like not doing game design or something, I'm sure as shit I'm gonna start a kickstarter and I'd better bare my fucking change of attitude in advance. Hahaha ohhwn. Why were you guys playing Soul Calibur anyway? How did that happen? Cause its new, It's Soul Calibur V Jeff. Oh there's a new one? Yea. I'm out of that loop. I play Facebook games.
I used to love those, haven't played them in a while tho.
Soul Calibur, Shawn Elliott, You can see, you can like set people as your rivals... And you can always see what your rivals have been doing in the game... And Shawn's clocked like twelve hours in the training mode. Just against the training dummy. ... That doesn't even attack back?
00:09:00
Well I mean you can program it to do whatever... But Shawn is like honing his skills against the computer. I'm learning combos.
What he's really honing his skills at is the bong, they just don't show that... Or dude like I just get the right moves and like fucking Ivy or something does a certain move in the right way it looks nice... And then we get on and we're playing and him and Rory are sitting there being like “oh well, I'm gonna just do my 3 B+B+K” against you and its like “oh no, I got the 1 A+A ...3 K combo”. And they're like talking in like... code. 20 hours in the training mode Shawn is well on his way to becoming a future 'Ulilia'(?) with what he's logging in there. It's the usual thing with me...
We need to start Shawn's kickstarter which will be Shawn doing youtube videos of like speedruns of videogames and just talk for like 20 hours just talking and talking and playing games. Like I wanna pay Shawn to do that. I'd put in a couple of dollars for that. For Shawn to speedrun... What? JG: Speedrun... Whatever. I think that training mode stuff is exactly why I don't play fighting games very much anymore? I just like... It's intimidating. Like I feel like I do have to sit there in the training room beating on the dummy to have any chance against people.
00:10:00
Yea man I already have a hard time going to the real gym I don't really want a videogame to be like... The virtual gym.
Well it's a competitive game so you put in some work in order to be competitive but... I think the majority of the training time like occurred when I first got the game... There's this cycle that you go through every time a fighting game's released where... You get it and... Your first few games you actually just do fine, because you don't know anything, so you end up doing the same three moves and if you just are doing three moves it's counter intuatively like easier to fight someone because you know like when to do each of those three moves. And then as you practise you're attempting to commit all this stuff to memory but you haven't really mastered it you know? It's not become sort of like part of your repetoire, so you play like shit for a long time because as you're playing you're very concious of it trying to think about it. It isnt like a golf swing or something like where you're going through the steps of “OK I need to like... Hold my posture like this and I need to do this and then that” and then you like actually become good at golf when you stop thinking of all that and internalised it and then like... I think we're at the part where at least with some characters we've internalised it and then Ryan just jumped in and – fuck you, with the training mode thing, you're the one that had a creep sheet.
You had a piece of paper that you had written the ten most fucking useful moves on and furthermore, you had done all sorts of prep work looking on forums to see who was like rated as the top rank characters and altho you did deny it those are precisely the ones you picked when we beat the shit out of you when you joined our game. There was only one character that I was using with any consistency tho. The other ones were just... You're just the cheapest... Dirtiest, rottern piece of shit...
Either way Ryan can't talk about this shit because he regularly... Well I dont know bout regularly anymore, but he used to write League of Legends guides that were multiple thousand words long. Well yea I wrote a giant like 3000 words Leage of Legends Champions guide a few months ago... For who?
For just a Leage of Legends... Guide site? No but he's saying what character... Oh... You play Leage of Legends? Uhu!
Oh... I wrote one for Janna.
Oh OK... I don't like Janna... I probably did not read your guide. Back in collage my house used to be filled with... .Matrix printouts of fighting game moves just like... Hundreds and hundreds of pages just laying all over the place because we needed a copy for like all six people who were like trading off the controllers. Like we were all studying in between. It was pretty aweful... 00:11:00
When I was a little kid I used to transcribe fighting game moves from Gamepro and then take some with me to the arcade to try and get better... In the hopes that I could make some kid... I'd be like... The cool kid at the arcade. I used to bring the actual fucking Like were you ever?
00:12:00
... I was never the cool kid at the arcade.
I was the age when I actually thought it was someone's job to like... Sit in front of a game and just try every possible button combination to see if it did something. Like “Up Up Down do anything? Nope.”
magazine or like the you know the published fighting strategy guide or whatever to the arcade. I mean I can remember being like thirteen or fourteen years old and leaving my house to get on my bike to ride to the mall and play Mortal Kombat. And the girl next door who I had a crush on would be like hanging out in her yard being like “Hey you wanna hang out?” And I was like “No I just - I gotta like go play some Mortal Kombat!”
Because that stuff wasn't... Asside from like... On the front of the cabinet they'd have like a brief moves list that offered no more then like two or three moves per character and it really was up to sort of word-of-mouth... And like you said like people printing shit out you know and... Mortal Kombat, especially when 2 first came out, it has fatalities and babalities and animalities and all that other stuff and inputs were like arcane, you know, and internet wasn't, you know... It existed but it wasn't as widely used as it was now so... Someone who could do that to you, there's a huge chance that they would surprise you, you wouldn't even know that it existed untill they'd done it. So, I mean yea that's... I think that stuff is cool.
Those were the days man... When playing a video game was like being a telegraph operator.
In Mortal Kombat the developers used that to troll people... Like they had things in like their oudit menus that eluded to things that didn't exist in the game just so people would talk about them and try to figure out these things that ultimately weren't in the game... So... ... I have nothing to contribute to this 'cause I never played fighting games. ... Didn't... Yea you were like see... That's the agegap, you weren't like... Hanging around 7/11 like... Thank god you weren't hahaha...
Yea, NOW I am at fifty, now that's what I do... Yea... I got into my first fist fight in a pizzaria... Like over a videogame...
What game? ... It was cool. And the dirty old pizza guy came and broke us up.
You were fighting over a game? ... That was like when playchoise 10 was the shit hahaha. And they got like... Kung Fu, you know that old game were like – I actually had a frame... a screenshot of that, eh, in the office...
It got passed on to... Me I believe. I took that screenshot for you when I was an intern, I remember this.
Yea I specially requested from you, I was like “Hey, you know Kung Fu? How you can get like a gangbang 5 man beat all fucking going at it? I want that.”
00:13:00
Hahaha... I got into a fight over Double Dragon. Like at the end when you have to beat the shit out eachother? I had no idea that was coming and like... My friend beat me and... ...And then you fought in real life?
No I... The only fight I ever got in was a fistfight, with my older brother who punched me in the mouth at his barmitsva...Yea, cause I was making fun of him 'cause of his suit.
... I was soooo pissed off.
And so he...
Like you instigated it?
What was it, blue?
Eh, yea I did.
... It was probably like, you know like... Beige. Like a leisure suit.
Wow...
It was a Comedy Button suit, Comedy Button guys inherited it?
One of the rare times I freaked out and... Actually hit someone.
Nyea...
Wow... You're so peaceful it's... Completely impossible to imagine.
It thought me many things I've changed because of it... While your frontal lobes develop kids get into fights for some awesome stuff...
00:14:00
Well yea but everyone here its about videogames...
Ehm... So should be explain what's going on here? NO! No? No - Next topic! No, lets not do that... OK... We don't... No, we can do that... Shall we do that? We'll do that.
So... There's no doubt a percentage of people who are incredibly confused about what they're listening to right now... Which is an extra special April fools day episode of the comedy button. Where we've gotten together the cast of the beloved GFW Radio podcast, Extra special... March for a little mini reunion. 30th So... Yea, so extra
April fools cause its the day before... Or whatever
Actually its like four weeks before I already blew that one...
This morning when I knew we were gonna do this tonight I was thinking about us doing this, and I was thinking that we're like... The superold like forgotten guys at comic book conventions who are like waiting to get their autographs... You know...
You can thank that holiday for this fucked up pathetic vestige of a podcast... Where now... Half of the crew aren't able to... Talk shit on videogames and games journalism...
Yea you know... ... Usually our bread and butter...
You know like Timmy from Lassy...
00:15:00
Right and nobody's waiting... Nobody's actually lining up to get our autographs 'cause nobody remembers who we are anymore... Like Mickey Rourcke in The Wrestler...
To boost everyone's egos tho, I can tell you that I ran into people today... That specifically lament... Talked about lamenting the end of GFW. While at game developers conference, so... Well we do, yea I mean, We heard a lot, I mean each of us individually hear it on Twitter and stuff like that just... It's nice to hear. Yea... Someone suggested a kickstarter for it... On Twitter.
Someone did... Oh dear...
Well, they better like... Buy us houses and... I think this recording is gonna prove why we shouldn't do a kickstarter...
Yea, hahaha... Any chance we had of earning money... Do your job as the fucking host, get us on to a topic that's somewhat interesting!
I, no, I'm retired... We'll start a kickstarter for the “Games For Whoever� podcast...
Start a kickstarter for my retirement! I mean obviously a lot has changed since we all used to record right, so... The biggest one being that the only people that are left that are... Critically writing about games at this point are... Me and Ryan regularly, Robert... I don't know if you are still doing anything, mostly you avoid that world it seems like and enjoy your life... Yea do you actually have a job Robert? Roberts just eating thousand dinners and...
00:16:00
No I don't have a job I'm a musician and by definition that means I don't have a job... How are you earning money? Ehm well I'm... Sort of getting by on selling music and being married... OK that was really vague. And starting kickstarter projects... ?
OK if you want me to be specific I... I suck a lot of dick.
Thank you! That's what we were... No no I mean I just, you know... We make some money which mainly, you know... Goes to paying the rent and studio... And I'm married, so... I can sort of... Leech of her? ...Get by like this until... until I can't. Do you miss writing about games? I do, I miss writing in general you know, I miss erm... There's something about like when your job is to write, it organises your life in a cool way and makes you think... And I miss that. But I don't miss playing games all the time I still play games but I don't miss like... Reviewing them, being forced to play them when I don't wanna play them. I'm OK with that part. But I miss the podcast, you know? That's what I miss the most...
You miss the podcast?
But ehm, obviously the big, where I was going with that was that... You know, the biggest changes that have happenend in the coming years since the end of the podcast originally is that.. Three people have moved over to the other side and now work for development studios.
We sold out Yeap
*hums the Star Wars empire theme*
00:17:00
But the interesting thing about that is a lot of people used to listen to us when we would occasionally talk about games and our thoughts on the way they were made but now it's like you guys obviously probably have a way different perspective...
Now we know that we were all full of shit back then! We didn't know what the hell we were talking about. I mean I don't know if that's something you guys would be interested in speaking about cause... I mean here we are still on the other side but I don't have any idea about the way that a studio actually really operates... It's actually kind of nice that the three of us, the two Shawns Well Sean's case too especially I mean, and and me, are at companies that all of our cases I mean, in like... we did like back when we were The Peggle love, the love for Bioshock, the on the press side. It'd be kind of depressing if like one of us was like love for World of Warcraft and every other sitting here working for someone one of Blizzard's games... It' was clear that really awful like... Ehhhh if, you know, in 2008 you asked anyone of ...Let's just leave it at that! us to imagine you know if a few years in the ...So someone really awful.
00:18:00
future, you'd be working for these companies we would've been just completely ecstatic about it I mean... Like I, there are times you know, Jeff I heard you recently in a podcast interview with just talking and it was... It was kind of sad 'cause you were talking about working at 1up and how awesome it was - and it absolutely was I mean you know it was just a phenomenal period of my career, but at the same time I feel like... I mean I wouldn't trade where I'm at now for anything. There was a time right when I was in production, when I began, that was how I first transitioned... Because it was like “Hey, what's your skill set?�... I can angle you know like I can try to leverage the light management stuff that I had under my belt... Erm and do that, but I knew it wasn't fulfilling and that... I mean from the getgo I knew that the only way I was gonna be happy moving forward into development was if I become a designer, so... I set about doing that and it's like... So, when I was in production... Honestly the whole time, I can say it now, and I wouldn't have said it at the time is that... There were some dark days you know?
...You go from being the centre of attention with podcasts and everything to essentially being someone who's taking notes and rounding people up you're like you know what... I write cover stories, I don't... Dictate what I'm hearing in a conference... And then moving back into the creative side which has always being like... my strongest suit, or just where I'm happiest... That's been... Fucking great for me like I... Absolutely love game design.
Yea I mean I think my road was... Rockier you know to get the transition from CGW to where I am now at Popcap which is great but you know my ehm... The time that I spent on The Sims at EA was really though for me and I've written about it a little I wrote a column for... Who, EGM? I forget now... But talking about my experience, trying to produce one of the Sims games... And you know the though thing there was that... Erm - I'm trying to be careful with my wording ...Now that I'm owned by EA yet again. Well, It's just that I'd gone from being editor and chief of this magazine where I had my own office, in the Sims group, I was sharing a cube with three other guys and... I was doing work that I didn't understand. Like I didn't know how to do it and you know, as Shawn you know on a design team, no one has time to really help anybody else. There's just too much to do. And so it was really like a sink or swim thing for me...
You were in production as well?
Yes I was producer on My Sims Agents™ and... I will say bad production is like... It's definitely not easy, you know? Which is what I felt I was 'cause when you're like in one of the departments that's outside of production and content creation It's like... A producer is great in so far as they help you get your job done you know, the phenomenal ones are like... You have a ton of bugs and they basically, instead of coming through with some completely outdated sheet about what you ought to be doing they're there to see what you're really doing and see what they can do to like make it better. And you don't know that when you first start in production, you're just like feeling your way around and everyone's looking at you like “What is this fucking person doing?”.
Right...
Or, right, that's how I felt... That's how I felt as I'm sitting in this cube you know like at the time I'm like you know... Mid/late forties... I don't have any skills or talent in this thing my entire career has been in journalism I was like, pretty good at that... But now I'm sitting there with all these people who have been to... That have the training, they're engineers that actually know what they're doing, they're in the career they belong in and they're like “Who the fuck is this like... Old guy sitting here?” Like “Why is he here?” You know. 'Cause there were people on the team who didn't know me and that was fine it's just that... It then made no sense why I was there. Like the people who knew me it's like “Well it's Jeff Green he was like in journalism and he talked about The Sims a lot so now he's working on The Sims.”... But the people who didn't know me were just like “Why is this old fucking guy who has no experience sitting here? Like is this some sort of welfare program?” ... And that's how it felt to me you know. And people were like “Why is he here?” So... I'm painting a grimm picture but in retrospect, now... Now that I'm in a much better place, I wouldn't change it and I don't regret that time at all because even as hard as it was, I learned so much about how games are made like... It completely changed everything that I thought I knew. ...Just about the minutia of what's involved in the littlest thing in game design.
00:19:00
So now when people like me are like “How hard could it have been for them to have just done it this way?” You can be like “No... Idiot.” Right. And especially... One of the things that you realise is that everything... Like if the press is saying “Well why didn't they do that?” There actually is an answer. That everything that you could possibly think of, the design team thought of it. And it didn't work for some reason or another or they decided not to do it because they decided to implement this other feature instead so they didn't have enough time to do the thing you wanted. Or the costs are just so extraordinary so far as just like... Labour investment, money and stuff... I mean a lot of time people will say like “Oh why isn't there...” - They'll play a single player game and say “Oh why isn't there co-op?” You know. And like a lot of times they're looking at a project that has like... A year schedule on it, you know. Unlike us right now, we've been in development for quite a long time... And it's just not possible, right. Even with 400 people on your team. It's not just a matter of making it so that like hey, you can have a client play and a host play... The entire game needs to be re-designed. All the systems need to be re-designed.
Even when I was in the press it always felt like some sort of hubris to just assume... Like when you say “Why don't they just do this?”... And you say it out loud you kind of have this pang of guilt where you're just sitting there going “Well ofcourse, I thought about this for maybe thirty seconds... And a hundred people or whatever maybe fifty people thought about it for years... Ofcourse they thought about it, why did I just say that out loud?” I always had that sort of like... I cut myself off...And its kind of shorthand for like “I wish they hadn't done that.”
But it doesn't excuse I think the problems when the game does come out and like... I know like some of the stuff I saw in the Sims... Where I was sitting there going like “Eh, I don't know ya know... Seems like we ought to do this.” And then the review would call it on it and then it was like... The correct call. So the fact that a game design team chooses not to do something for budgetary reasons or whatever is ultimately not a good excuse if it sucks in the end.
00:20:00
And in the end it's just the player experience that's gonna matter, so...
Right...
I can imagine you being like just in general in so far as when you first make that transition the thing that all of us faced was going from being relatively high up the ladder or being relatively big fish in a small pond to being like absolutely insignificant fish in a much larger pond. Yea absolutely. And... It's like you don't feel any entitlement, you don't feel any empowerment and that's the challenge you have to get through... And you have to be hungry for it and what happens is you end up you know... You get over that hump and then it just gets amazing like... For me the hunger was design. I knew it from the moment I saw it in action I was like “I have to do this, I have to teach myself this�. And sure enough as soon as that happened I was at home you know... And I knew that ahead, even when I was at Ziff eh... Shawn you can attest to this being a managing editor like... I'm a shit manager that just not where my interest is you know. I'd much rather be creating something then enviously watching someone else do something. And it's just a matter of knowing like you can't have that right away because you don't have the skill set and using it as an opportunity to develop the skill set. Yea the best time that I actually had on the Sims team in the brief time that I was there was when they asked me to write some dialogue for My Sims Agents. I had such a great time because I was just kind of like cutting lose, I had this like ongoing Taxi Driver reference and you know this was a kids game for the Wii. And I was having so much fun but being older, when you figured out how to insert and it was pretty funny and other text in that word bubble didn't you like a certain people on the team like it and sense of accomplishment? of course it all ended up getting cut. But the problem was... And Shawn Elliott maybe you know this too... The tools that a lot of these companies use are these like super arcane proprietary incredibly complex tools so like... I mean head I thought I was gonna be writing like a Microsoft Word document. In fact inserting text into a bubble above a character's head in the Wii is like insanely complex. And so I would just sit there all day trying to do like one word balloon. And so ultimately I think if my experience had been more... I coulda been a game writer just like writing... I probably would have...
00:21:00
I think I feel the sort of sense of accomplishment that like my dad would in figuring out how to turn on the Ipad.
How to turn on the computer or something... I'm trying to think of like the script I used to write or something years ago and how rudimentary it was en yet how fulfilling it was because it was like I understood very much that I was building up a very basic vocabulary with which I could later assemble complex paragraphs with and beyond that like entire stories... And so at the time it was just a matter of “I got an AI to do this, I got an AI to do that”... I mean, from the very beginning when I was still in production I was just fucking around in the editor in the off hours like... I'd “Turn the lights Off and On”... and I know that's just the stupidest thing ever. But those become the alphabet that you use later on and so, just as long as I kept it in perspective, it was really exciting.
00:22:00
You make the door open and close and then you realise “oh shit the path data hasn't changed any and the AI's don't know that's it open or closed” and then you get to that step you know and there's always like... Every time you get one step further there's something else behind it.
I totally get that it's creating anything like... I don't do design but I've messed around with... I have a book that I'm using to learn Unreal (engine). The first time I created a door that could like open and close it was like hot shit. I wanted to show someone even tho they wouldn’t care.
Well this is probably part of the appeal of Minecraft, right? Is that it's giving that kind of feeling of creation to folks who are playing the game without even really having to use any kind of fancy editing tools.
Yea I'm just laughing 'cause I feel like I must be the only guy on this show who's like... I have absolutely no interest in ever writing a line of code in my entire life. And I played Minecraft, I basically played it like a rogue... Like I would just immediately dig into the ground and try to find like... Anything... And to fight anything, or run away from... I'd play it that way for like eight hours and then just get really bored. I have like no want to “make” that stuff, I want to experience that stuff. Yea actually I don't either, I mean I just wanted to write. So once I was faced with actual disign tools I had to get the hell out of there.
You're not thinking about creating an experience for someone else, or for countless people who play and who could possibly play it in countless different ways and break it in as many ways, you're just like “what can I do in this circumstance... Can I break it” you know? You should see Anthony's crazy Minecraft city...
Yea, we've recreated to scale adapts and a mural to Mega Man made purely out of different depths of water to make the different shades of blue and eh... Yea it's pretty crazy. Also anybody that wants to try learning basic Javascript programming there's this really cool game made in unity called “Code Hero” that is like the code version of Guitar Hero that teaches you how to do light programming. And it's currently like in Beta and you can buy it right now and play it. I was playing it and I learned how to change the size of blocks in a 3D world. Robert, maybe you can do that so you could stop freeloading off your wife... I gotta step in like for Robert 'cause I know you imagine like coding is just this entirely mathematical thing, which it absolutely is for programmers, you have to have just like first rate math skills but for designers thanks to visual scripting languages we're able to... It's much more like logic you know if you have fun doing venn diagrams and troop trees (?) and stuff you assemble something basically with boxes that have different inputs and outputs... But as soon as you play you see the result of it. So there's a level of abstraction but as soon as you play you're like “OK I see exactly what I've done and what I've produced” you know?
Yea...
And I think that makes it a lot less you know... If you're not super mathematically enclined it it still makes it entirely accessable...
Yea I'm just flashing back to memories of when I was a kid. My dad's a big computer nerd, my dad really tried to get me into computer programming and he made me learn Turbo Pascal and Basic and stuff like that. And I would just be going through these books and it was just... Ugh.
I was totally into it when I was a kid I would like subscribe to kid's programming magazines and do all of the little code entry to make a supid Commodore64 balloon float across the screen. I would buy like every game making construction kit they had for the Commodore... I just made hypercard stacks... That's what I did, with the Mac. I made like a flipbook of a french guy, That's what I did. Nice. 00:23:00
But it's just language acquisition you know. I mean you get to the point when like you're learning to speak French of something and everytime you're trying to say a single sentence you're basically translating it every word and every step along the way and then suddenly you get to this point when you start to say something and you're like “Wow I didn't even premeditate that! I just uttered a senstence in French without thinking about it.” And then soon you're just happily conversation with native French speakers and it just feels wonderful. That's basically the best parallel I can think of.
And then you have that magical moment when you're sitting there and you're like “Killer George Washington Robot.”
That's what I do with marketing speak now...
I was gonna say when you listen to Shawn a second ago and he was like “Yea you know you have fun making venn diagrams” and I was thinking yea that sounds really fun... Right there's two levels I mean on the one hand you're thinking with your imagination you're like “Hey I want a 'Killer George Washington Robot' who needs to do this and this” and then you go into the Venn diagrams and then you get your robot you know. It always proceeds you know... The creativity proceeds the diving into this other language and then coming out the other end with the expression that you imagine and that's like the crazy thing that's like... Alchemy or something, you know? What's that Playstation game... Where you program robots... Oh my god I have to look this up now...
Nah I've never heard of it... I was totally into that game. Carry on.
Shawn Molloy, why did you not persue that thing if you were that into it when you were a kid? Well I did go to school for engineering and learned many many programming languages and worked as a software engineer for an automotive company before I started... Writing about videogames...
Wow! I had no idea about this whole secret past of yours... Really?
00:24:00
Shawn is like the most mysterious guy... Like, especially right now since we're on Skype... His icon is like the Skype like... It's not a picture of him it's just a question mark thing... Right, Robert Ashley, we have a still face of yours... Shawn Elliott we have a plane, some sort of plane...
But I feel like Shawn Molloy is a super mysterious guy to me. I mean I've hung out in a room with him plenty of times he's a funny, you know, nice smart guy but like... Totally mysterious.
He's like a superhero! ...He might work for the CIA or something. There's a lot about my past you don't know and you'll never...
So wait, so what was the transition from doing all this engineering to just deciding you were gonna write about games? How'd that happen? Well I hated my engineering job... It was one of those things where I went to school thinking I really liked math and programming and all that because I liked those game construction kits and the programming books that I had as a kid. And then my programming class in highschool started getting into what it really was, for an actual career and like two years in it was like “Uh-oh.” So...
But what if at that time you could've made games? They had like a virgining game design program sort of? The school that I went to actually has one of like “the top ten in the country” now – the Rochester Institute of Technology. But at the time while I was there... If I was able to make games? I don't really know, that didn't even really cross my mind as a actual career to persue. I think I was thinking to practically. So what I ended up doing was...
Writing about games... Yea, what I really liked doing... Is writing. So I was writing a novel on the side or whatever you do in college. And I contemplated switching majors to take like creative writing or... Theater or film, they had a really good filmschool too. But I decided to stick through it since to me, at the end of the day, if I had an engineering degree that would actually help me get a job, whereas a film degree probably would not.
Yeap. So I ended up with an engineering degree but tried to get out of it as quickly as possible... I was just doing a movie review site on the side with some friends and then someone at Gamepro back when it was the “.com days”...
Back when Gamepro existed... Back when Gamepro existed...
Rest in peace. Back when they had a website, back when they were throwing money at the website and had like a... Movie Review section and like a DVD and Anime rewiew section... And like they hired me to do that. So I was doing that for two years before games.
00:25:00
AAAANIMEEEEE... MANGAAAAA... I'd watch the free anime DVD's we'd get and talk about em... That was my job.
The funny thing is since the end of the podcast you know people still kind of I think feel like they have a connection with the people that were on it because of things like Twitter and stuff but... Like the rest of us tend to talk about our daily lives and stuff sometimes on Twitter and the mundane shit that maybe people would do or don't wanna know about... Yup.
But I regularly go to Shawn Elliott's because when I'm sitting down with my friends sometimes hanging out we use Shawn's as the best way to find out the worst shit on the internet. Right that's why I just don't... I follow Shawn but I never click anything... Yea I don't click for like a month and then I go through it all for like one depressing evening.
...At home all the time but not at work.
This goes back to like back when he would send us emails at work and there came a point where you were like “I know not to click on any links in Shawn's email.”
00:26:00
Right the thing was he would always like just grief us, it would be on instant message too, he would just “fake you out.” Like “Hey Jeff you should see this thing on Neogaf” or whatever... And then I'd click it and it's like... Goat porn or, you know.
But one of the stories that Shawn has been like using his journalistic skills to track down over the years is the story of Chris... Christopher Chan...
Christopher Weston Chandler. THEY'RE BLAMIN ON MEE Yea I don't know this guy...
00:27:00
This guy woulda been like absolutely like prime time for GFW Radio and I'm amazed we didn't talk about him. I still think to this day that he's like one of the most amazing stories to come out of social media, ever. And every time like you have news segments on “how the internet can go wrong”, you'd have a bullied teen or something basically losing it, they're always just like skirting around the periphery of the story of “Chrischan”. And its like... Imagine... I'm trying to think about how I can summarize this very briefly... Before we dive into the particulars of his case... Imagine you have a guy who's entire reality is being constructed by other people on the internet, so... The people who he interacts with, his “girlfriends” - I put that in scare quotes, all of these are essentially people fucking with him. And he's completely oblivious to it. So the thing to know about him is he's self described as a “high-functioning autistic” and there's no reason at all to doubt that. I mean he exibits every sign of it that you'd imagine, namely just an absolute inability to mind read. Mind read in the psychological sense were it's just like anticipating what other people's intentions are. Are they trying to manipulate you? What are their intentions? You know in the way that you're interacting with them. Just completely oblivious to it. And because of that blind spot in his mind you could come at him with more or less anything and he's going to believe it, and he's not going to doubt it.
00:28:00
So, all you need to do for example, to seduce him is make a fake account with like a photograph of an attractive woman and say you're this woman and you're absolutely ready to date him and have sex with him, he's a thirty year old virgin, he just turned thirty years old, and he's completely interested in sex, and say “hey I'm ready to suck your dick and fuck you Chris, but what you need to do is take your sex doll into the McDonalds parking lot and fuck the shit out of it and make out with it on video and then post that video to the internet ”. So... These sorts of things happen over and over again... And for about like five years now there's just this incredible body of... Work, I guess you can call it, of him doing obscene things. And the thing that makes it unique to me is that there's an entire community devoted to maintaining his fiction. So they have what's called the “CWCki” and it's the Christian Weston Chandler Wikipedia basically... And it documents this entire history of scams pulled on this guy. And every one of the foibles, so...
Wait so how does he not know this? Well he does, he...
Because he's a high-functioning autistic and... For whatever reason he can never make sense of it.
This is probably something that in like 20 years or 30 years people in school will show this as like a textbook case of a kind of like incredibly despicable crime. Well I know like I shouldn't... You know like, I was thinking recently there was this flap where a commentator for a fighting game community... Was essentially sexually harassed by someone who was playing games with him...
I wouldn't say “essentially” I would say he was.
Yea and it was completely dispicable and I thought about it and was like “Man, why do I watch this Christian Weston Chandler shit?” when it's every bit as bad... And perhaps even worse because he doesn't even realise what's happening. And everytime he realises what's happening it's like you can just completely reset it the next minute by making a new account and starting all over... I mean the thing is that he does realise... And... Sorry, go ahead.
00:29:00
00:30:00
I was just saying like.. It's so hard I mean there's just so much there, a book really does need to be written about it because it's so phenomenal, there's so many insane twists and turns where they've created these like “nemesis” for him, or people who are like trolling him and stuff, but they're fabricated as well. There's this guy called “SurfshackTito” and they based him on some character from like some Spongebob cartoon or something? And he thinks he's real, and then they eventually had a crossover with... There's this notion of like a Youtube superstar or something, we call them “Tubetards”... Where they're basically people on Youtube who are just making a public wreck of their lives. And there's this guy called “Fatman” who publicly like overeats for... Kickstarter money essentially, like he'll host a livefeed and you donate money for him to buy as much food as he can possibly eat. So he's this entirely unrelated “Tubetard” and they made a fake account for him, for Fatman. And they basically approached Chrischan and said “Hey, these guys have been tormenting you and tricking you all this time, we for their identities and were going to give you them.” And one of them was Fatman who ofcourse didn't even know that Chris-chan existed, Chrischan didn't know who Fatman was. And so Chris-chan is making videos calling out Fatman and making fun of him... And Fatman's responding like, screaming at Chris-chan for whatever and it's like... The entire time this is being written like a novel by these people who are, like I said, tracking every fucking event...
I'm gonna find it so fucking gratifying when we learn that this whole thing is a hoax perpetrated on Shawn Elliott... That would be... It's actually Andy Kaufman who has returned to exclusively create this environment for you... The best part is that even when Christan Weston Chandler... Hey I'd be happy if it's a joke perpetrated on me that would be better then the guilt at laughing a lot with it... It would be better for humanity.
It's so crazy just the shit that's on camera now... I can't even fathom it, it's like... The English fucking “Sorrow� or something, I just can't believe how much fucking terrible shit you can watch from people's lives on the internet.
And the worst part about it is even tho Christian Weston Chandler does catch on and eventually takes down these videos by then someone has always recorded them off Youtube and perserved them for the sake of history. And reposting them constantly. Where's this guy's parents? Is there like anybody looking after this guy? I think that's part of the problem...
That's part of the problem... There's the longest time where his dad and mom would sometimes appear in videos and they would actually fuck with them as well. Oh god... So for example they would convince Chris to get into a cyber-sex session and to get him like beating off furiously Wait, his parents would do this?? Nono, the internet.
Oh, the internet...
00:31:00
00:32:00
And then they'd call his parents phonenumber and This is the saddest story I've ever heard. This is horrible! say “Hey! You gotta get in It is sad, I think it's among the biggest mordern the room! Chris is on the day tragedies that's just waiting to be discovered... internet saying he's gonna This civilization desurves kill himself! Bust in the everything it's got coming... door and stop him!” And This is all some story you're making up! then so, he's on webcam Nonono jacking off for what he thinks Yea I'm looking at the Wiki right now... Oh that makes me believe it... is a woman, and they're I believe everything capturing footage of it so I read on the Wiki. that they can repost it on At one point they had Chris-chan the videochannel, and then give a video tour of his home, which they also captured and kept his dad comes in “Chris, on Youtube, and it turned out his family is hoarders.They're totally they're sayin you gonna kill hoarders. And his parents were like “We're gonna lose our home yourself on the internet! 'cause you put this video up on the internet! Take it down!” But it What're you doin?” And didn't matter because the goons he's like “Leave me alone had it. Yea, speaking of bad videos... dad! I'm jacking off!” And They got to edit it and they did with that then they post that video on what is make a remix – you know that Ke$ha song? the internet. And then very Ke$ha with a dollar or tragically... I'm gonna seem something, they made a remix entirely out of Chrischan and his dad agruing completely insincere after to like whatever her hit I just did that is, is that his song was... And he also... One of the dad recently passed away. things, one of his constant obsessions is this character he's And they just completely... made, that his Wiki is named called “Sonichu”, which Made a completely mess of after is a recolored, yellow Sonic the Hedgehog... that... Well its a combination of Sonic and Pikachu... Right and... Various people at various times have trolled him into believing that they were actually Shigeru Miyamoto contacting him to make his character into a video game.
There's an element of American Movie, one of my all-time favorite documentaries... I love that movie...
What was it? It was “Cöven”, right? Cöven...
Coven... or Cöven or whatever... Yea he pronounced it “Cöven”
The guy from American Movie strikes me as someone who had a certain kind of talent, I mean he had like a visual talent in some interesting way I mean the movie looked really cool and interesting... And he was like... That's the weed talking man, that's the weed talkin!
Yea....... “Yea! Yea!”
I mean he was also like a really... I dunno, he was able to like grab people and make them do things... And you think of like all the people that he sort of manipulated or whatever to get his way, I dunno. I just think that guy's a real artist to me and it's almost like this... I would say the same thing about Ed Wood 'cause he seemed to have that ability...
00:33:00
That documentary is just so phenomenal 'cause it just brutally shows you someone, and all of us have this, everyone has this aspiration to create things, And this guy's completely got it but it's like what happens when that desire is in someone with no talent or ability whatsoever... So with Chrischan they take it a step further and basically make him think like... It would be like the guy in American Movie getting trolled into thinking that Spielberg and fuckin Scorsceze are contacting him saying they wanna produce his next film and market it.
Right...
He convinced one of his friends to get his head put through a fucking kitchen cuboard door! And it was obviously painful... WHAT?!
What about that scene with his friend Mike who's the guy that was like LCD damaged Right...
He tried to create it so that when he pushed his head through the fucking cabinet door it would break away but it didn't break at all and he just kept slamming his head through it...The guy like persevered and did the shot so yea...
Mike Shank.
And he was like so sweet, such a nice amazing guy... But he won the lottery, he won the lottery and was like “I can't tell him cause he'll ask for the money” but he walked in and he had this huge smile on his face... And the guy, the film maker is like “Oh, why are you so happy? You got some money didn't you!” And he like... Can't lie. It's impossible, so... Yea that's a great movie. Sorry for the tantrum. CGW Radio recommends you watch American Movie. Yea I've never seen that... Hey, I called us “CGW Radio”... Have you ever listened to the commentary track on the DVD? It's them talking about themselves in the movie it's like the most amazing thing ever.
Wow.
Oh my god I'm getting the Netflix like this weekend I didn't know that existed. Yea... Our lives are so exciting. Yea, things have gotten really great.
00:34:00
“I'm gonna Netflix a 10 year old movie!”
So other horrors that you were linking us to Shawn were these forum posts of goons and they're eh... “dungeons”. I don't know what to say about this other than we'll have to provide the link for people but like the fact that like on a forum dedicated – I mean there's a forum for everything right? But a forum dedicated to taking psilocybin, there just so happened to be a guy who posted pictures of his house. And it's the most vile, reprehensible...
It's “ashroomery.org”
Well the tread is like “post a picture of your bedroom!” And the pictures this guy posted, I can't tell if he's serious or not but just, he post pictures of this trash heap... Yea with like bottles of urine... It looks pretty legit. I don't know where you'd get all this trash.
00:35:00
I'm just trying to figure this out about myself, The first time I opened this up I was fucking dying and I think it was vicariously like... It probably wasn't funny to me, but what was funny was knowing I was going to like... Bomb other people with it? And now that I'm looking at it after the bombing's already occurred, it's just nothing but remorse, you know? It's like... There's nothing funny about this, it's this dude in this pitiful trashthrewn, piece of shit bedroom And he's on a psilocybin forum and the moment he posts this, the immediate response is “Take that down! No good can come of this!” Because of course, he's not only documenting the fact that he's got a piss-jugg that's just fucking enormous like a whole month's worth of piss is... And it's sitting on top of his microwave but he bothers to tell you the type of bottle it's contained in, and then he says “I pushed the microwave away from the bed...”, And the bed is of course this shitty inflatable mattress with cum stains allover it and dirty ass fucking blanket, that he pushed the microwave away from the bed 'cause he heard it can cause cancer. And yet he preps his food on the top of the microwave and there's a fucking like... 64 gallons of the dirtiest yellow piss sitting on top of that and then right immediately beside it are three fleshlights. Which he also bothers to say that he's got one that's an anus, a pussy and a mouth... So that he can satisfy all of his sexual needs you know, as a thirty year old virgin and...
Yea the crasiest thing is like... The rest of the forum, if you scroll up, it has nothing to do with this. Like he volunteered this, they weren't talking about “show your disgusting hoarder place”. It's like “show your room” and then he did and everyone's going “Dude! What the hell!!” That's a really nice rice cooker he's got there...
Yea there's a rice cooker which he also uses to sterilise his fucking mushrooms... and then also cook rice. And then he has a fucking - what is this thing? An Ariser Extreme Q 4.0 vaporizer which he uses only for aroma therapy.
Well maybe this is a troll too... Imagine like self medicating aroma therapy in this fucking sty...
Couldn't this be a troll tho? 'Cause, Shawn, this seems like something you would do... “Stick your nice in the fleshlight, you're good!”
I could see this whole thing being a hoax. I don't know...
You know the reason people do these things on forums you know, you go to any forum no matter what the topic and for some reason after a while someone starts a thread like “show us your room, show us your house” or whatever. 'Cause people wanna know “who else is like me? What are the other people who are into this like?”And when you're on the thread for like psychedelic mushrooms and that happens... And those pictures popup, that might be an important warning sign for you that maybe you ought to be posting on other threads... Dude you guys need to fucking dail this back tho, I fucking have strong reason to believe that he's one of like the thousand dollar kickstarter donors for both of your kickstarters...
...Sorry. Signed poster!
That could be I mean now we're gonna have to hang out with him...
Have him on our show... That's fucking, that's like real talk right there, if you're gonna do a kickstarter you're gotta volunteer to spend like a week in this dude's house.
Was there an epilogue to this story? I mean did he clean up his room or anything?
Yea 'cause it's very much like a Hollywood movie, Jeff... He's living in fucking squalor to this very minute. He's fucking one of the flesh lights, he's ready to piss in the jugg when he's done and microwave of that green giant broccoli. 00:36:00
Now there's a happy ending...
That's the whole problem with Hoarders, which I've only watched a couple of times because it's so disgusting I can't take it. At first I thought it was sort of amusing, but it's so gross. But the thing I've always wondered was like what happens after, like they don't come back, ya know...
There is no “after”.
I wanna believe they've cleaned all of the dog shit out of their bedroom, ya know. “I need it here 'cause I miss Sparky!!”
I'm looking at the pictures and I forgot like, right behind the computer he's got tons of plastic bags, I'm just gonna read his discription : “Those plastic bags between the laptop and the pee bottle is what I use to jack off with and when I'm done I wrap it so the cum don't drip and I leave it there. And when there are enough I toss them away.” And enough is like... Highly subjective 'cause were looking at like... A year's worth of grocery trips of plasic bags sitting behind his laptop... But Shawn don't you think... I feel like this is all something that you could do, Shawn Elliot. And like be laughing your head off at it. That's why I think this... I wanna believe this is a prank. That I would set this up? I'd throw a bunch of like jurgins and plastic bags and stuff around... Yea, because what better way would there be to just completely freak out people on a psilocybin forum. I mean cause the chance is they're probably on shrooms while they're reading it. “How do I mess with their heads?” Let me create the like grossest room ever and say “This is what I live in.”
I think the more amazing troll in that cause would've been he posted these pictures, and it was you know like... A picture of a filthy wastebasket full of feces or something and he was like “Here is my rosegarden!” Yea this is kind of tame compared to what could have been.
What could have been? I don't think we talked about this stuff in our old podcasting days, did we?
What the disgusting room? It didn't get quite this nasty, did it? Or am I... Yes it did.
It did?
Jeff is like “Oh my, we weren't this disgusting were we?” 00:37:00
I'm a polyatheist after working at PopCap
It was, Jeff, in case you're wondering, it was filthy. Really? It really was. Yea it was.
We did talk about games every once in a while. We did. Yea, sometimes.
I had one of those moments like recording one of our Irrational Behavior with the studio where I put something in and I had to like remind myself, well actually, I didn't remind myself shit, I was in the bathroom and I was standing in a urinal and Ken Levine comes up to the next urinal and he's pissing and all of a sudden... Meanwhile I hear people with crazy gastro-intestinal problems... So, it's important that I set the scene right? Then Ken says “Hey man, I love hearing about your jacking off!” And I'm like “Wait, what dude?” And then it dawned on me that in the podcast we'd just gotten approved I was talking about how playing horror games co-operatively is like watching pornos with friends in college where you have to laugh and make fun of it the whole time 'cause in the same way that you don't wanna reveal your arousal to your friends, you don't wanna reveal that you're afraid to your friends. So then you clown on it and yea, it was just one of those moments where I realised... Sometimes, I forget where I'm at.
It's in your blood man. But did it go out like that? It got published?
00:38:00
It ought to, yea. I think he ended up approving it and it was funny because I remember we had this big approval process and one of the people who handles our PR internally asked me “Are you really... Are you sure? You don't wanna edit out that part where you're talking about watching porno movies with your friends?” ...And laugh at it with your friends and then suddenly when everyone's going home saying “I'll borrow this, I'll borrow this.” But no man! Sure as shit when I was 17 years old and there was a good porno, I'd take that home. I'll borrow that.
They're just building your character up so you can say something really embarrasing and disgusting the moment that they reveal that Sarah Palin is the final boss of your game. We've even run into a similar situation to which Shawn is describing, even more recently... You did?
Yea. So at the IGN office there was a porn star who used to come in and do like a “dating advice” podcast sometimes. No shit, really?
Yea. And at one point... Which porn star man? Give me names!
Her name is Ryan Keighly. I'm gonna look that shit up right now.
So at one point she was sponsored by FleshLight. So she sent us a box of flesh lights. And you could tell when the box arrived, it was exactly what you said... Everyone was clowning on it, talking a bunch of shit about how dumb they were but you could tell everyone was like “I Want...” And then did they all dissapear by the end of the day? They were gone by the end of the day?
By the time they got finally thrown out they went from being twelve of them to two of them. And some of them were like absurd ones like... They were moddeled after Avatar, giant blue vaginas, with two clits. And all kinds of stuff like that Oh my god...
And some of em were vampire teeth, vampire mouths hid inside what's supposed to be a bear can to disguise on your shelf. And eh... I think this would be a good time for me to plug Bejeweled Blitz.
We're getting video feed of you guys, so I get to see Jeff looking really uncomfortable... He's just like “Oh man, this is getting...” I'm googling Ryan Keighly right now, so... That shit is nice!
...There's some innapropriate things on my screen. 00:39:00
I'm gonna - I'll be right back guys!
Nah Shawn you're supposed to say “This is really stupid!”
I dunno about getting advice from her. Well, she used to just come and give dating advice for nerds and she also...
“Make sure you put adequite lube in the flesh light before you use it! - OK OK OK” Yea yea yea... That's like Ryan writing down his top ten Nightmare moves for Soul Calibur. “Get lube, lube flesh light, double clit.”
they also sent us “flesh light rejuvenating powder.” And it turns out all it is is corn starch in a can. Flash light branded.
00:40:00
Wait, rejuvenating? Like you just like rock the shit out of the blue pussy and then you need to like... It basically needs reconstructive surgery 'cause you fucked it so hard? Hahaha Yea like to give it back it's fleshy feel and softness. 'Cause the reality of it is that when they first come, we all like, ofcourse, what does everyone do when they get them, everyone's like “I wanna touch it and see what it feels like.” What they feel like is they kind of feel like the shitty sticky hands you used to get ouf of a quarter machine that you could throw against the wall... That's what they feel like. So to give them like a fleshy feeling you're supposed to coat them in corn starch so that they...
I'd think they'd be all dried...
I was thinking when you were saying it was for “rejuvenating” I thought it was for, you know, the human part. And I was thinking about how when I was really fat and I was in middleschool I used to have a real chafing problem.
It's called “fat man thigh syndrome.” Yea I still get that. Exactly. Hahaha. Yea.
The thing is... Robert I gotta say tho dude someone hit you up on Twitter man... Like you were solliciting your new album, which I wanna give a shoutout to, that's awesome...
Oh yea yea... Yea...
Someone was like “Is that your tit when you were fat, on the album cover?” Oh my god!
Like “Yea, it's good to have @ShawnElliott followers on Twitter.”
Hahaha well I can just tell those guys – What Shawn's saying the album cover of this record is this collage that our friend Jeniffer made of this like... She has this huge 70's porn collection and she's been making this series of collages from like cut-outs from these old 70's porno mags. And this picture is this weird... I dunno, ripped apart collage. And there's a boob on it and... At some point today somebody tweeted me on Twitter and was like “Hey, is that your fat boob on the cover?” And I just tweeted back I was like “Oh man I can tell the Shawn Elliott fans from a mile away” And he was immediatly like apologetic and didn't dispute me he was like “Yea...” People's shit on Twitter, you can't be defensive you just gotta embrace it, you know.
You gotta be like “No dude that's good I wish I had thought of that.”
I didn't mean to be defensive. But yea, I agree... No not at all, it was awesome.
He was fishing for a re-tweet.
I wanna go back to this whole “flesh light” thing – is that what they're called, flesh lights? Don't pretend you don't know...
“What're those things called?”
So they also came with an instruction booklet and the most dounting thing why I don't understand why anyone would ever have them, even tho DemoniousX – you know, “famous internet user” said it was like the best thing ever... “Famous internet user”?
00:41:00
He's putting that on his business card... The closest thing to real sex you'll ever have. That's another “tubetard”... And that's what he said, closest thing you can have to having real sex. But the things is that the instruction booklet tells you that you're supposed to heat it up in hot water for 15 minutes prior to use. Who ever was like “I wanna masturbate... in 15 minutes.” No one ever does that!
But that's what I don't understand about even without the heating of the thing, having to use a prop or whatever I mean... In my day we had a sock. Like why do you have to... Or a fucking year's worth of dirty grocery bags...
I dunno it seems like a lot of effort to have a “device” to do... That. I dunno, it seems like too much work.
I can sort of understand if the idea is that you're supposed to take it into the shower with you. I would imagine that that is the case...
00:42:00
The stereotype for women masturbating is that there's like all this prep work and lighting candles and it's all like honorable and intimate, you know? And guys just on a whim decide they're gonna jerk their pud... So it's like yea, the notion that you're gonna take like prep work, you're gonna pre-meditate like “Alright man... Gonna do some good wanking tonight. I'm gonna heat the hotwater bottle up then I'm gonna pour some starch in this thing and I'm gonna be good.”
Pour myself a glass of wine... See this is exactly why after I saw that I thought... you know if... So we went to the Flesh Light website 'cause it comes with all these adds, or there was a ton of flyers in the box and... They sell these mounts for like 400$ for them, that are basically mounts curved so that you can... I guess, you know, fuck it basically, instead of having to hold it in your hands. And to me I was like “Man... I have a genious invention which is like... All these nerds probably have like really awesome pc's that put out a ton of fucking heat. You just need an insert on your fucking rig, you shove it in there, your rig heats it up and then... You can “love your machine.”I dunno...
I'm thinking you oughta DIY this yourself man. Yea I mean as far as the prep work thing goes it seems like this whole thing is about like, you know, guys masturbate... This is for guys who wanna take it past that. This is like... You're not gonna have sex, obviously... This is like “Carreer masturbation.”
...But you can go out of your way to have some sort of weird simulation of it. “Professional masturbation.” Yea, exactly. That's like people who buy expensive razors or something. Hahaha yea, that's pretty much exactly what its like! Like a beard trimmer or something, you know. Like “I don't just masturbate, I have a fleshlight.”
There's the next kickstarter Anthony... “When I masturbate, I use a Fleshlight!” Yea, that's gonna be my next kickstarter. When I finally lose this job... GFW formers do you wanna go strait from flesh light into some petty talk? Wanna talk about a book? So like I've been recommending this book to you guys for a while now, it's called “The Most Human Human” and it's by a guy who... He's actually a pretty young writer. And there's an anual competition in England it's called the “Touring Competition” where they basically get people to create chatbots that will attempt to convince judges that they are legitimate humans. And then they have legitimate humans... Buugghg, you’re all still thinking about flesh lights...
I was listening keep going! OK, so the competition is basically real people versus chatbots and the people have to convice the judges that they're legitimate people and the chatbots need to convice the judges the exact same thing. And interestingly enough there have been people who have been passed off as bots, even tho they're real.
That's be me.
Chris-chan or Ryan, talking about his Chinese sword. So the guy wrote this whole book ostensibly about the experience of being one of the humans in this competition and he uses it as like this point of departure of all these sort of intellectual excursions that are really interesting. And the only thing, the thing that I want to talk about, that I found to be a really good thinking tool is his notion of like, taking like... Compression, like digital compression would be a good example, where you know – like Robert you gotta be familiar with this – you take a file and you compress it down to something that can be transferred easily. And what is lost in that compression. So... Let me think of an example... So like if you were to take and open a Word document and you just mash a bunch of keys a whole bunch and then copy and paste that a thousand times and ultimately create as many, you know, character as there are in a Tolstoy novel. And then you were to compress that and you were also to compress the Tolstoy novel, you'd be able to... It's called like “low entropy” if you can compress the shit out of something and lose almost nothing from it. So like the random characters that you put in and then just copy and paste it would be very low entropy because the copy and pasting a good compression program would realise that there's just a bunch of redundant information and would find a way around that where as like a Tolstoy novel ends up being a much much larger file because there it's high entropy, you know? There it's like the more that you cut out the more you lose of the actual meaning. And so the writer takes this notion and starts applying it to everything you can imagine in life from interviews to writing to poetry. And I found it interesting because when you think about games, a lot of video games are very very low entropy, right? Like you can take the experience of playing a no name MMO and compress the shit out of it and essentially you're doing the same thing, over and over and over again. And in shooters as well right? I mean you have a very fundamental verb set that you just engage in ad nauseum to a point you know.
00:43:00
Yea I mean I get what you're saying and I feel like that's the reason that I spend most of my game time just playing cheap dollar games on my phone. Because so many phone games just have an interesting game experience that I'll get elsewhere just dragged out and regurgitated fifteen thousand ways with a terrible story tacked on.
“How awesome is your game?” That kinda thing, right? Exactly, yea yea! You ask them “How awesome is your game?” and then you don't even need to hear the answer.
Right. It's just a complete waste of time. And then the things that we made fun of when we mocked game reviews is the same thing. Like you don't even need to review it 'cause you can write it in your head before you review it and you just change certain words in it, you know? So it'd be a very very low entropy game review. And it's one of those things were sometimes people can go wrong when they start applying like whatever the de jour analogy of the day... Like for neugoscience for example. Right now everyone just tries to think of the brain in terms of like computation. And this arguably is another example of that. But I find that it's useful because it's just like so like... You can apply it to most anything, you can apply it to like a game review. A game review is essentially an attempt to compress an experience, you know? You take the experience of the game and you try to compress it in a few words and if you find this very very easy, you can review this game in like twenty words, you probably...
Right. Do you even need to play the game, you know? Like if someone can summarize a movie in two lines, or if the preview does it, do you even need to see the movie? So it's like works of art are competing against the reviewers in a way because it's like they're trying to be high entropy against, you know, an attempt to compress them.
00:44:00
You know that's why I always liked reviews... Like my favorite movie reviewers would be ones that – and that's something I always waished would happen in the gaming press and it never did, and I didn't do it either – was... I'm just thinking of certain movie critics who would not feel the need to summarize the movie or basically, what you're saying like, compress the movie into a thousand words. They would just take a particular angle maybe of one particular scene or shot and say like “This is representable of why this movie is so awesome.” Right.
Right, exactly exactly. So, it got me thinking about the games I like most and they're very high entropy right? Like where it's just like constantly... Like one of my favorite games of all time is Half-Life2: Episode2 and the entire time I'm playing it I feel as though – even tho the verb set is uniform throughout the game – the way that it's asking you to express it is constantly changing, the entire time. So you never feel as though basically you're jumping through the same hoop twice. And just like yea I mean, I'll give you a moment to think about it, but like if you imagine an interview for example, a shitty interview would be low entropy in so far as the question you ask in the interview essentially contains the answer in it. Or if you were to have like a really bad interview... You know we work in the games press a lot, some of the worst interview you could possible have are entirely predictable. Before you even ask the question you can imagine the responce you're going to get because it's very, you know, on point. It's trying to deliver a very specific message or something.
Like they didn't feel the need to give a third grade book report summary. And so that thousand word piece itself becomes a think piece that's independant of what the movie experience is offering. It's its own... I won't say work of art, but it's its own individual piece. No reviewer ever wants to get to the point where you say “You have to play it.” Or “You have to see it.” Or “You have to read it to understand it.” And yet from the point of view of the person responsible for creating that work of art, that's absolutely what you want. It's almost the definition of sublime, right? When someone cannot compress it, they say “You have to experience this first-hand.” Ofcourse as the reviewer you never want to find yourself in that position because you seem like a complete idiot.
Or you're being lazy.
Being lazy, yea. “I don't know what to think, you play it!” But now that I'm on the other side it's like I want to make a game that just completely fucking stifles you. That is just like really hard to say something about and you feel that you cannot really summarize this entire experience.
I gotta say there's a fucking down-side to that. Spending the last year and a half of my life working on a serial concept album that is impossible to write about and... So nobody does.
They give up.
00:45:00
I mean it's like you can make something so hard to describe, so absolutely like... An experience, that people won't take the time to do it. I mean no one's going to do that to something like Bioshock 'cause everyone already knows that's awesome. But if there was some like game on Steam that was five dollars that people were like “You gotta play this! -What is it like? - I dunno it's like... You gotta play it!” You're not gonna play it. Or you create something that everyone wants to say something about, but it just so happens that they're all saying different things. And they're all right in their own respect, you know? Like the greatest album you can read two entirely different reviews from different approaches and they say absolutely different things, but they're both awesome. So it's the same thing with a game, you want everyone... They go to the water cooler and instead of like them basically nodding their head like in agreement the entire time they find that their experiences and their appreciation of it is entirely different from one another. And I think the same for your album, you know, you agruably want to have people saying like “No, its fucking great for this reason!” “No it's great for this reason!” “Oh I didn't even know that I didnt' even catch that.”
Yea yea, I just mean for like... Getting someone to... Check anything out at all. Like if someone was like “There's this game on Steam, you absolutely have to play it.” You know... I guess they could say there's this one thing about it... So, yea.
I think the reviews for like Journey came out, like maybe a week ago, in our “current timeline.” And I started reading a couple of them and it like seemed like they just did not want to talk about Journey except to say that “It is awesome, trust me, but I can't tell you why.”
Right. Yea I was gonna bring that one up too.
I actually generally don't read reviews ahead of time but I was interested in that one so I started to but... I do like to go back to them after I've experienced something and just kind of either compare notes, to validate my opinion or just to see if they have some sort of insight into it that I didn't.
Yea, right. Do you think they wouldn't say, in this case Shaun, they weren't willing to dive into details because of fear of spoiling certain things that everyone would experience in the same way or because some other reason?
Maybe it was a combination of fear of spoilers or like... They all just kept saying like “I can't tell you because telling you would ruin it. So therefore, you just have to trust me.” It was just this endless cycle of... I actually played and finished Journey.
00:46:00
Did you review it?
There will be a review in a magazine that I wrote, yes. Wait a minute, there are magazines? I know! They still make those. It's crazy. Where, what magazine? “@Gamer.”Which is Bestbuy's version of GameInformer... OK.
...Basically. But it is a weird game... It's kind of hard to talk about because like... I dunno... But should we just play it?
Well it's the kind of game where like you're a character that is on a “journey” and you go somewhere and you get there. And it doesn't tell you, really, it doesn't explicitly tell you like “Here is what this is about and here is where you are going!” You're kind of left to draw your own conclusions... Right and I guess that's part of the game is going in blindly. So I kind of stopped reading because I actually realised I didn't wanna know about it. But then I'm not going to be able to go back and look at those reviews and do the thing I said which is to compare notes with someone who has played it, as I have played it, maybe they experienced something totally different I think we're gonna lose that feedback loop. I mean they'll exist in forums and such...
When the next issue of @Gamer arrives in your mailbox, because I know you have a subscription, you should read my review because I think I have something to say about it that you might find value in... I'm gon peep that shit! I'm gon peep that shit!
... Journey.
00:47:00
Yea I dunno, sometimes you know you say that maybe you wouldn't wanna see something - you wouldnt, Robert - wanna go check something out if someone came at you and was just like “I don't even know how to explain it to you you just have to see it.” But for me like... That's exactly what I want people to tell me when I hear about a game 'cause... Like last year when I was at E3 all the games I was seeing they all just seemed like I was seeing like the same like three ideas tossed around. And then when I finally saw one that I felt like was unique it was like... I couldn't wait to tell people about it, and they were like “Well what is it?” And I'm like “You just have to go see it.” Like that's the best thing that I think someone can say about a game is that you have to see it.
What game was that? Was that the new Call of Duty? No, it's this game called “Papo Y Yo”. And it's made by an indie team in Montreal. It's a PSN game that's coming out, and it's this guy that used to work for EA that started the studio in Montreal and it's basically a game about... It is a game that tells an analogy of... This little boy that runs around with this monster and this monster is addicted to frogs but when the monster eats frogs he goes crazy and will hurt the little boy and screw up his relationships with the people that he loves. And its basically this dude dealing with the fact that he grew up with a alcoholic father, who beat the shit out of him, when he was a kid. And so it's this game that explores that. And this kid lives in this really terrible favela... And so the only way that he has fun with this monster, this character that he lives with, is that they play imaginary games but it's like... very surreal almost like a... I think think of that movie about like... Waking dreams, cause... Spirited Away? Well it's like there's a part where he moves boxes... Nightmare on Elm Street? There's a part where he moves boxes and as he moves boxes around, as he's like making a little toy city, the actual favela in the background like building are ripping out of the ground and slamming back into place, as if he's like actually changing the layout of the city and it's all in his imagination... Inception? So, but the whole point of the game is that he is on a journey...
00:48:00
This is the problem tho, as Ryan, as everyone is just trying to grasp some analogy... ...That's the essense of it right? When you create something where “it's like this meets this” is not going to get you anywhere, you've created a work of art.You know it's the problem with genre fiction, right? It's very very low entropy it's because so much of it you expect, its just completely formulaic, it's wrote, you're absolutely... The only interesting aspect of it is “How is it going to take this formula and twist it in some way?” And what you're talking about is something that defies analogy. Where people can just sit there and continually attempt to say “Was it like this? Is it like this?” and you're like “No, it's not, it's not like that at all.”You know? That's I think it when you get something that's really interesting, you know?
That's why I think that games like Pacman like totally define that, right? It's like at its most pure abstract level... Yea absolutely, especially when it came out, right?
Right. What are people gonna compare Pacman to like when... Whenever in 82 or 81 when it came out?
I just remember having all these weird conversation where you tried to like... Tell someone about a video game. Especially like someone who didn't play them like an adult. When I was a kid I spent a lot of time going like “They had this game and you're this guy and you like walk down the street and you just kick like a million people...”. “You gotta save your sister and like you climb up this building and there's this evelator that goes up...” You know it's just like “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Right, you couldnt. If on that day when Yea. And for me it's like, I also... it came out and you The other half of the equation is just... I love the experience of you don't played it and you know when some awesome game is went home and like going to happen, you know? So like That's Streets of Rage. one day you're just looking around tried to tell your and you read about “Oh there's this It's a lot of things, you know. cool game that just came out yea I'll friend about it... And It could be anything! check it out”. You download it and tried to compare it to Robert, I liked your earlier point it becomes an obsession for like a about, I mean, it's along the week. And you freak out about it. something else that entropy line here, of what you Yea. said about playing dollar games existed like... What I love the surprise... on the Iphone because it does would those things be? kind of distill that experience It's a little more wild west again, I while getting rid of the extranious mean, it's an interesting thing that You couldn't do it... happened between the time we stuff. I found myself doing that a You could describe the experience but you wouldn't be describing it via comparison.
Right.
last podcasted together as GFW and now, is that between the indie games on Steam and elsewhere and the IOS and other small platforms you suddenly have all these amazing games. And even XBLA like with Braid. It seems like it's almost like it used to be before the triple A publishers took it all over. I mean obviously they're still there and they're still doing the 30 million dollar games and whatever but there's so much more oppertunity now than there was when we were last podcasting, for one or two people to make an amazing experience that we can all access.
00:49:00
lot too and I wonder how much the hardcore gaming audience in general also is experiencing that now. I've definitely found a couple Iphone games that sort of scratch a certain itch I have for like a strategy game that in the old days would have just required a lot more work to get to... Including turning on my computer and getting through the lame story and the horrible dialogue and everything else like... There's a couple of great turn-based strategy games that give that to me now, whenever I want it, in my pocket that have no cost of entry. Like almost literally, or a dollar.
That's 100% true. Even when I was walking around at Game Developers Conference there were guys there that just bought a pass to get in and then were handing out download codes or thumbdrives with their game on it. And they would just like play it.
And that is like, you know, a complete fullcircle from the first GDC's from a long time ago when people were handing out casettes or floppy discs to eachother and saying “Play my game.� You know, in a plasic bag. Why do you think that that's not the case in mainstream games? I mean in so far as like people want... I do believe that people all enjoy and appreciate a novel experience. It's just that they have to be nudged into experiencing it, right? And it's clear from the sales of games that people tend to want to go for what's familiar. Even... I don't know about us, I mean were a pretty eclectic group, but I mean a lot of people I work with even – when you look at what they're reading, it's all genre fiction, it's all basically itterations of the same story they've been reading their entire life.
Sure. So...
And I do that too, I mean, I alternate between non-fiction and more serious books, and I'll read just like kind of semilame spy novels 'cause I actually like that genre and I like just sort of going through the familiar. It's like having a grilled cheese sandwhich and tomatos... Do you think then that it's really that people will embrace some of these like small games that you're talking about when they find true novelty they're ready to embrace it but it's almost like they have to be introduced to it inspite themselves? Yea. I would say pretty much... I don't even know how much people are after novely when they get like a 0,99 cent game, you know? Like I mean, sometimes you get that, you know. But a lot of times all I want... It's funny the older I get the more I realise that my favorite games are just arcade games. I just wanna play like an arcade game. And it's such like a... It's not smart, it's not arty, it's just like some pleasure that I really enjoy and when a game comes out and I love the experience of it and I have like a real novel, crazy kind of experience with it, I love that too but that happens so rarely, you know? It's like a couple of times a year some game comes out that I freak out about and I have to spend 60 dollars on it and run out and play it in three days and think about it a lot, but it's so rare, you know. Most of the time it's just something normal, you know. Like a shooter... There's a risk factor that you're getting at too, right? When you say 60 dollars I mean, if you pay 0,99 cents for a game that's like whatever the fuck it is let's find out, if it's horrible...
00:50:00
It doesn't matter. If it's something I'm not familiar with then it's 0,99 cents. If it's 60 dollars I just invested in this and it turns out to be novelty that's entirely like... Uninteresting to me. That's a real loss, you know.
I've probably bought a hundred 0,99 cent games that I played once and deleted emmediately. Right.
I feel no compunction about just trying something out and getting rid of it. To me it's just like going to the arcade and popping a quarter in or whatever. But there's still something satisfying about buying it. Listening to a song instead of buying an album.
There's still something satisfying about that because its kind of stoking the like... One of the parts of games I enjoy the most is kind of the discovery fase when you don't really know what the game's systems can do or what the boundries of the systems are, what types of things you're going to encounter and I always enjoy that, even in bad games. And then it just... The time from when you started to where you realise you've discovered everything is kind of when you realise how good something is but up to that point it seems like it's all potential energy.
Yea for me it's all about that sweet spot between like when you pick something up and learn it and like when you get to the point where can't get any better at it. And that's when I... Like I love a lot of games that I grind on untill the point where I'm like “fucking hell I'm never gonna get any better at this game and it's driving me insane!” And I just stop, I just have to stop, you know? With games tho I think the budget does matter. There are certain types of experiences that you can only deliver...
Oh absolutely!
With a certain kind of budget. Like you know recently like... Peter Molyneux just announced that he's going independent...
Right.
And you think it's like... He wouldn't... I'm sure creating the dog from Fable cost more alone, just creating the dog to function the way it did in Fable would be more than his entire project, you know?
Right.
I think like where I'm at the best case scenario is... You prove something, you get people's interest and you promise them enough familiarity to get them in, and then you use that oppertunity and the money, you know, to really create a high end thing that's going to, you know, that optimaly will...
Right... But where you guys are at is like... I mean there might be like three or four other games in the pipe right now that are something like what you guys are working on. I mean there's just not that much like high risk super novel, big budget gaming out there. I mean it's out there but it's... Irrational's in a really great position of having the kind of clout that you guys can make the game you wanna make. And that there's a lot of trust.
00:51:00
No start-up studio could propose basically to a publisher the game that we're making right now and say they'd be like “Oh sure, here's the money! Go make it! We have every fate that you will deliver something that will sell well.” You know?
Right, exactly. You know at GDC, Tim Cane, the developer of the original Fallout, was talking about how like impossible it was basically for them to pitch that game to Interplay at the time. And when they were telling them what it was gonna be the publishers were coming back with “Well why don't you make a fantasy game?” And, you know, that kind of thing that ehh... I don't know what my point is. I'll stop talking! I will say that even now they're still dealing with that. I've been on – actually I've like befriended Brian Fargo one of the original creators. And he is going to start a kickstarter to make “Wasteland”, a sequel. Yea I mean 'cause, again, that is a game that even with the fact that you know, people are very vocal on the internet about it and stuff like no publisher would ever touch that... Well ofcourse the classic, obvious one is what Tim Shafer just went through, right? Like we know every publisher in town would turn down a point-andclick adventure and yet look what he was able to raise. It's insane! Well they've told him, yea, he's tried to pitch a point-and-click adventure for a while, him and eh... Ron Gilbert. Yea Ron Gilbert, have both been turned down, so. And now he's doing it on his own, so... But Shawn... For anyone planning a kickstarter I
have to say in instances like that it is interesting because it's like enough people, you know, even if it's like 5000 people are basically saying “We're willing to put our money to back this to convince everyone else that this is entirely worthwhile.”
Right. That was just a great story.
There's no other way that this could be created.
00:52:00
It puts nerds in almost a political position, I kind of love it. I love like... I mean nerds in like, there's nerds in all sorts of cultural walks of life, there are people who are so into things they just wanna like evangelize them to the world. And I'm really interested to see these people like put their money where their mouth is, you know? And I think that's such a bizarre thing. It's never happened before. So, it's interesting... It's an interesting way to look at it too 'cause it's not so much just about personal wish fulfillment like “I really want to hear this podcast.” But rather “I think that everyone else would enjoy this if only they had the opertunity to experience it.” You know? If it could exist, then they would... 'Cause you know I imagine all the people that donated to Double Fine, it's not just that they really really wanna play another adventure game but that they're convinced that there's an entire like world of people out there who could see what it is that they appreciate about that genre.
Well and it's these particular guys, right?
And I think they're investing in the idea that “If I help fund this one and it does really well maybe I'll get more.” Like “I can help revive something that I love.” Right. But like two random dudes that decided they wanted to do a kickstarter for a point-and-click adventure would make like twelve dollars and fifty cents. Right.
But this was Ron Gilbert and Tim Shafer, who made some of the greatest adventure games ever. So, you know, to me, the kickstarter was about like trust in these guys... Yea...
And just wanting to see them do it again. And I think one of the more sobering things about it was they were asking for like 400k initially?
Yea. And once they hit around two million that's when Tim Shafer was saying like that's actually about now the budget of...
Full Throttle. Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. They did not ask for the amount of money that they would need to make a Grim Fandango or like that level, which is kind of interesting.
I just feel like that kickstarter is just providing them with the material for that game? Like don't you know that that game is gonna be so full of references to like where they spent the money, you know? It's gonna be like the whole big joke in that game will just be like “Boy that looks like really expensive door! I should click on that!” That's true. Yea, right. Yea... They got almost 2,5 million with four days to go. And their kickstarter, as a result of them, has also helped out a lot of other ones too like that Code Hero game that I was talking about. That was a kickstarter as well. They needed a hundred thousand and they made like twohundred thousand. I wonder how long that could last...
What's up with that? What's up with the trend where people go like far in excess of like the amount specified that is necessary for something to actually happen?
Didn't that was happened with you guys? Our goal was 6000 and we hit that inside of three hours. Or one hour... So why do you think people pay like money above and beyond that?
00:53:00
I think what it comes down to is, at least in the case of kickstarter, is that... It's not just good will. It's also, in the case of kickstarter, everyone that donates to Double Fine is getting the game, and if they donate more they get the poster or, in our case, they got T-shirts, posters, shit like that, pictures. So, you know, they are donating to get exclusive crap. That's really what they're donating for.
I also think that in the day in age of social networking that donating to a kickstarter becomes like wearing a band T-shirt or putting a bumpersticker on your car or something... That's what I'm thinking.
You're like expressing yourself, you know?
Correct. And especially when you get a T-shirt out of it that you are only going to get...
Band T-shirts remember too like, fuckin even in the 80's were like 30 bucks which sounds about right for a T-shirt now but shit, at the time, T-shirts were like 2 bucks, you know?
Yea.
You got like a white, you know...
That was like really expensive. That was really expensive! I know man! I had a Cure T-shirt...
I remember when I got my MC Hammer tour T-shirt when I was like, you know, ten years old man. And I was super psyched about that T-shirt. Yea I'm gonna share a moment of shame with you guys. What was it, yesterday, I stood in line... Minor Threat T-shirt, here it comes from Jeff... No I stood in line, this was at GDC...
Oh no...
I stood in line for my free GDC T-shirt.
What?!
What?! For like multiple minutes. While people were walking out of the room...
You stood in line for a T-shirt that's like “GDC 2012”? I did. Like “I was there!”
Don't you get enough of those free dumb T-shirts from EA or...?
No! That's the problem, I don't anymore. I don't get the free T-shirts. 'Cause I'm not in the press anymore! Your T-shirt supply has dried up...
The T-shirt supply has dried up. You stood in line for a T-shirt... Yea, a GDC T-shirt. For how long? A shame tarp mind you. Shame tarp, yea. How long were you in line? It was probably ehh... 10 minutes. Are you wearing it right now? I’m not.
00:54:00
OK.
But under this shirt I have a Beatles Rock Band shirt on. It’s still true tho, when I was at GDC today... But see that’s the reason I needed a GDC shirt ‘cause how old is Beatles Rock Band, I mean this shirt stinks. I need new shirts! Yea but now you can say you were there. But today when I was at GDC I saw all kinds of stuff like that too. Nvidia was handing out all these green, you know, “We’re Nr.1” fingers and... Oh god. people were pratically climbing over eachother to get those or even like buttons for like ehh... Bink Video Player. People were just...
Well that used to be like when we were... There was an E3 we attended where they gave out, like at the microsoft press conference, they were like fucking ass pads for you to sit on... Right and people were grabbing the left overs, right?
And people emmidiatly like were hoarding, you know when the conference like ended... People in the media! Media people. People were just scooping these things up and sure enough they were allover Ebay. “Games journalist ass sat on this ass pad! Buy it now! 100$!!”
...Wonder if those sold. Well we, you know, 1Up, we used to sometimes do giveaways of all our crap that nobody wanted. And readers and, you know, our audience members would just eat it up. You know we got one of those finger things that’s like Wolverine or whatever like somebody will... Somebody will take that... I dunno who but somebody will take it. I mean I understand it to a degree there’s certain games that when it comes out the dumb chotskies are actually stuff that I get behind the... When we did a charity event at IGN at one point and a bunch of developers sent us stuff, like it was crazy how much that stuff would auction off for. Like absurd prices, like a Brutal Legend... Who was auctioning it? Makin them sideline bucks... Makin... Bucks...
It was for charity. And so... Charity my ass dude! Makin that fuckin side money!
This was for charity! But even like a Brutal Legend statue, the type of thing that all of us were like “Ohh... Alright” and we just like kind of passed off, it was like... 500$. To the average person, you know. I actually bid 400$ and I now have a HalfLife2 electric guitar, from Valve. So...
You know how many flesh lights that is?! But I mean that’s like fan stuff. There’s always the appeal of “the free thing.” Like people love “the free thing.” And at this point in time it’s amazing to see like, with so much digital entertainment, that people are basically allowing marketers to determine what they do for entertainment based on whatever’s cheap or free. I mean there are people out there who only play free games or who only play 0,99 cent games. Oh absolutely. Or games on sale or whatever. They never go out of their way to play exactly what they want, they’ll just play whatever is shoved at them at a cheap price, you know? Right, that actually is a shift that’s happening at PopCap where with the IOS specific things where they’re, you know, to use the lame terms in the industry “from premium to freemium.” They’re realising like “Let’s not sell it for a dollar or two dollars, let’s actually give it away. And then charge them for other stuff.” And they did that recently with Bejeweled Blitz and the number was like astronomically higher then when the game was a dollar of the downloads because it was free, but then those people monetized. So... they paid, sorry. That’s marketing speak... And when it’s free they evangelized to their friends.
“Monotized”... Kill me. For using that word. You’ve gone to the other side. Hey while you’re talking about your work, give us an answer on this, when’s the next Peggle game? Like seriously how many years does it take to make a Peggle game... 00:55:00
Yea, I know.
I think it’s more about oversaturation...
Who cares about Peggle, when’s Plants vs Zombies... I care. I still play it on XBLA and everytime I play it I’m like “Really, how long does it take to make one of these?”
And its unbelievable how slow PopCap is.
Well I mean the thing is that like two years ago Gabe Newel called PopCap on the phone and he was like “We can’t finish HalfLife 3 without the Peggle team!!” And then they camoed up... And they parachuted down... And like they’ve been stuck on HalfLife 3 for the last like two years. Yea when did Peggle? - I should know this like off the top of my head when Peggle came out. Well, because... Well weren’t we all still working together? I guess in 2007?
Yea.
I’m thinking that... Are we gonna ship Bioshock Infinite before Peggle 2 comes out?
Actually the truth is that of all the franchises at PopCap Peggle has the most like hardcore gamer fans.
The race is on! I can tell you tho, there are issues...
Really?
We got out shipdate announced man, you guys don’t have anything...
And the problem at PopCap now is that because so many years have gone by it’s like now it has to be so awesome otherwise it’s like “What the hell have we been doing all these years?” No it doesn’t! Bejeweled 2 to 3 I don’t think was that big of a leap... But if Peggle isn’t fundamentaly different I think everyone’s gonna go like “Well this is just like...”
Do you still shoot peggs at other peggs? Is that your audience tho, Jeff? Really? Are they like “Well this is a dissapointing sequel!” Really? Your audience is like my fiancee she just wants to play more she doesn’t care...
00:56:00
Your audience is like “It’s a crab that talks! Haha!”
Hardcore gamers like Peggle more than any other PopCap franchise. Really? Yea.
I will say that even like in our office a Peggle mention is always at least once a month. Anytime it comes to a matter of like positive reinforcement, making people feel as tho they’ve achieved something, Peggle is like seriously the gold standard. Yea. I mean between the fucking Odede Joy and just like the audio visual feedback for success is...
Right.
It’s magic.
Peggle is actually a source of one of my only serious injuries due to video gaming. Because I was playing the original on my computer which was sitting under a metal spiral staircase in Burkeley. And I destroyed some level and Ode de Joy came on and I got the mega bonus and all that shit, and I literally jumped out of my chair... And smashed my hand on the metal staircase... Wow. And it bled allover the place. I’ll send you some free PopCap schwag for that... Jeff? Just because you were so blown away that you got some points?
What? When...
I mean it was amazing! And it all started with a single fucking button press too, let me remind you of that dude!
I know! You moved the stick a little bit to the left or to the right, you pressed one button. And you were going bonkers!
When are we getting Bejeweled 3 on droid? Bejeweled 3 on droid? Like what’s taking so long?
The droid platform is what takes so long with droid. Why? It’s like the old pc days with all the freaking graphics cards. Can’t you just copy and paste it from the Iphone? No, that’s the problem! The Iphone is a closed system and on the droid it’s like “Oh great, so now it works on these three phones but it broke on these two phones.” Like fuck Android. Oh... You know, that... Just suck up to Apple, Ryan.
Right.
Jesus Christ! Is that PopCap’s official stance?
Yea that is PopCap’s - No that is not PopCap’s official stance! Oh my God. We love the Android. But there’s a weird like... I’ve been at PopCap for over a year and a half now and there is this kind of weird, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m down here in the Bay area now and I’m three weeks away from being up there...There’s like some kind of fog or like miasma of entropy over the PopCap office. And like nothing actually does shit. Like that’s a good question, where is Peggle 2? But like, it also applies to me, when I first got there my first goal was like: I needed to start a podcast. Well, it started one year later. Like, what happened? I dunno... 00:57:00
Does the fog that you’re mentioning like originate in a bong?
While we’re speaking about bongs, can we just point out the fact that, if you all look at your Skype screens, that everyone else either has a fake name, or their real name. Robert’s is his real name. Except he’s spelled his last name wrong.
Yea, Robert’s spelled his own last name wrong. Bububububub, don’t say my Skype name, but we can say that my Skype account is my name but with it... misspelled. Yea, what’s the story behind that? I’m just thinking right now that...
Well, the story behind it... Is that I started a Skype account one day... And as I was signing up I didn’t realise that I misspelled my name. And then a year later, when I was trying to connect with Shawn or something online, I was looking at my name and trying to figure out why he couldn’t find me in the list and I was like “Oh... It’s because I misspelled my own name.” It’s pretty bad. That’s all I got...So Jeff, basically the Peggle guys they created
that game, and they got so high of their own like... Ode de Joy and like the tones of their crazy combos that they felt that they had like reached the apex of all work, and they never needed to do anything again?
Yea I...
I think of that now I’m like... When you... I mean, not to knock on the game because I absolutely love it, without any reservations it’s great. But for some reason right now I’ve got a visual image of someone going through a drive-through in a fast food place in like a power chair, like a hover round... Who’s morbidly obese, and they have like a little speaker playing Ode de Joy and Peggle sounds every time they go through the drivethrough ordering a fucking fourth meal... Hahaha!
00:58:00
I think that the truth is with that game that there really was this desire to not have it feel like Peggle Nights, you know. Peggle Nights was the first sequel to Peggle and it basically got knocked by... Everybody, the press, we probably knocked it as being like more of the same. And so it’s like...
You kidding? You being in your office being like “Peggle! Oh boy!” I don’t know like if you changed Peggle that much like... That might be bad too.
Yea...
Right! See, that’s the delimma so... How do you improve it? I can see changing it if they just take the same idea and apply some other feeling to it... Like how amazing would it be if they made Peggle like super metal. Well, right...
And like whenever you do something badass it’s just like DJUDJUDJUDJU like the feedback is just incredibly... Fucking metal. Well all these kinds of discussions have happened. We’ve talked about like different kinds of pegs, you know, that kind of stuff...
Well people like to win. Like just through observation and playing myself, people love to have the - and like when Robert fucked himself up – people love to have the phenomenal Peggle round. So if you up the stakes with like, you could easily create a number of maps where it’s just like the average score instead of 100,000 is now like 600,000. But it’s just constant sensory feedback for it. And the highscore becomes a million... That alone would be cool.
Well in-house they do credit a lot of Peggle’s like... The longevity of the popularity on, the replay feature. The bragging rights of the utterly amazing shot that you had – that ofcourse was, you know, mostly luck but... The other hard thing I’m thinking about, you know when I think about it as a designer is that making it so that their Peggle characters – ‘cause I play cometitively, you know – I play versus a lot...
Sure. So that the characters are not strickly superior to one another? Which I honestly do think they are, right? I mean when you’re competing with someone, based on the puzzle you choose...
Shawn, you... Who’s going through tier lists now, Shawn?! I have other Peggle tier lists dude! There’s times were just like it would be assanine to say pick the guy with the flippers like... Right. The Peggle designers...
The unicorn man! When you could get triple score of the rabbit hat... Exactly. The rabbit hat is always the best.
Right. Well see, you could get in a serious debate with the Peggle designers on who’s the best or not. They’ll go on and on just like you guys with the fighting games. They totally feel like certain levels you’re gonna beat with certain characters. Yea... Shawn...
Yea. And that’s the issue right? They’re level specific.
Yes.
Depending on the level you pick there’s a character that’s strictly superior to another one. On another note tho, and it’s less critical, when I’m thinking now of like the Peggle masters, as soon as I think of one I think of the sound of them like hitting the green pegg? Like TIDEDIDELEEE!!! The pyramid homey! The sound of like when you have the owl and you get the fuckin zen-ball...
Bongggg!!
00:59:00
I like it... I like that shit. It really is 2007 again...
Yea let’s go back to 2007. That was good. It was a good era, yea. Now it sucks, everything’s horrible. It does. Oh wow.
Actually actually, I had a quick story... Somewhat related to the past. As you guys know I moved to Georgia, Athens Georgia, with my bandmates. And we’ve been mixing this album that we just finished for a long time and we were going crazy... And we decided we wanted to do something and get out of time ‘cause Athens is this crazy little small town and we decided we were gonna drive to Atlanta. And we had no fucking clue what to do there, so we looked up like tourist attractions and shit. And we got advice on Twitter and everyone was like “You should go to Cylcorama! Go to the Cyclorama!” And we’re like “What is the Cyclorama? We gotta go to this place!” It turns out it’s a civil war museum that was contructed in like the 70’s and has not been updated since then. I would not have guessed that.
00:60:00
It better be mini golf... A civil war confederate themed mini golf course dude...
What it actually is, is this giant painting that was made in like the eithteenhundreds, depicting a civil war battle. But they stretch it all across this wall and they put you in this fucking rotating platform of seats, that was made in the 70’s with this cheesy like audio tape commentary that’s so old that it’s skipping and warbeling, they’re like “When the soUuth wOn the cival wAarrr sfbsqhdd...” It’s like completely fucked up. And it was just like... It was completely dated and the worst thing about it was, you know, I’m there with this other guy, it’s in the middle of the day on a weekday and... Who goes to this civil war thing on like a monday at 2 o’ clock in the afternoon but... A giant fucking class of middleschool kids? And when a giant class of middleschool kids sees only two grown-up guys and they’re by themselves together, what do they think? They think that you’re gay... And they were making fun of us like the entire time as we’re travelling around the Cyclorama at like 0,5 miles an hour, like cracking jokes at us, and I felt like I was back in highschool or something being made fun of. It was really terrible.
You should have just started making out with him. Dude you gotta, you’re in the heart of that shit, you gotta go to like one those like creation science museums or something, like the theme park where like fucking man’s like milking, making dinosaur cheese or something... Whahahaahaa?
That’s where it all goes down! Yea there were dinosaurs 4000 years ago.
I’m so in the heart of it that stuff is like here I mean, in the middle of the town that I live in, at city hall there’s this double-barreled cannon. That was created by a bunch of irregular, you know... Old man confederate soldiers who couldn’t fight in the war, who decided they wanted to make a badass cannon! That you could fire two cannon balls at the same time with a chain attached, and it would decapitate people as it flew through the crowd! Except they didn’t figure out how to make the cannon shoot both at the same time. So it never fucking worked. And they’ve been trying this non-working decapitating double cannonball thing in the town square in Athens Georgia... It was the spirit tho dude!
Yes, the spirit of decapitation... They planned on fucking up some of those damned abolitionists... That was the original fatality.
The original fatality... This this old world history sign like out in front of the university here calls the civil war “the war of northern aggression.” You moved from Berkeley to popo town.
Except Athens is like totally Berkeley allover again. I mean, this is the... Yea that was my question, is it still like a... Music mekka? Or is that kind of...
Oh yea, it totally is. And it’s like the place where every kind of left leaning like arty-farty southern Georgia dude goes and so... Do people wear those gross shoes with the toes? Must be Austin Texas in Georgia...
Exactly, except like a lot smaller and there’s no like indrustry here, you know? The industry here is like “bartending.” Robert do people in Athens wear like those gross shoes with the toes that look like gorilla feet? I have those. You have those? That’s why I made that face, Jeff. I run in them. Does everyone have a story about the B-52’s and/or REM?
I saw the B-52’s walking down the street when they played a show here a couple of weeks ago and... They must be old.
I run into Michael Stipe at the bar like all-the fucking-time. Like I cannot escape Michael Stipe. He appears everywhere I go. 00:61:00
Really?
Does he do kind of like a “Do you know who I am?” or “Do you remember who I am?”
Be the dude from Treme who just keeps harassing Elvis Costello.
Fucking kickstarters?!
For who?
No he doesn’t, I mean, I’ve never talked to him... kickstarter for REM! Let’s get it going!
There’s a rule in Athens that you’re not allowed to talk to “the Michael.” So like everywhere you go – you might be in a little tiny bar – and Michael Stipe is right next to you having a really pretentious conversation about Shably But you’re not allowed to aknowledge that he’s there, or talk to him. The me from 10 years ago would have like just... Died. Died of shock. Really?
What if you do? Like, somebody shoots you, what?
I don’t... If you do... Hahaha you shoot the fucking cannonball attached to a chain fired from a racist old ass coot’s fucking barn?
What? What did you say?
He’s talking about the double cannon... Jeff’s like “What happens when you talk to fucking Michael Stipe?” You know, the first rule of Athens is you don’t talk to Michael Stipe, so what if you shoot the fucking cannonball... Fucking old racist bullshit...
Jeez. Nah I mean I think it’s just a rule of the town here “try to keep it cool.” We’re all cool, we all know Michael. He’s still here we need to keep him here! Don’t bug him!
00:62:00
Exactly. I mean just the other day I was at a show with the singing soul player from the band Neutral Milk Hotel, and I was standing right next to him as a complete and utter Neutral Milk Hotel ripoff band was playing. And it was so akward it’s like I’m standing right next to this guy and I’m watching him watch this band that rips his famous band off... And it was just so fucking weird.
Great show. You see that? I think it was in a second or third episode of Treme but ehh – who did “The Wire” - there was just this like local guy and he’s like... Elvis Costello happens to be performing in the bar, and its just like so... He’s almost the equivalent of the character Ziggy from The Wire, anytime he’s on screen, you just feel so fucking nervous cause he just creates such an immense shame...
Yea what was that actors name who plays that character on Treme? ‘Cause he does such a great job in that scene. ‘Cause Elvis Costello is actually in the audience watching another musician play, and the character from Treme just like... Sidles up next to Elvis Costello and like, you know, keeps glancing at him like “Yea. Yea we’re both grooving on this together, right Elvis?” And this is just horribly painful, you know? “Yea we’re buddies.” It’s one of those rare occasions I think where a guy gets to understand what it’s like to be a woman, you know? There’s just this fucking complete goober who just will not fucking leave me alone and will not stop staring at me and he can get it out of his head that I have fucking no interest whatsoever in hearing a word out of his mouth.
This just makes me feel really... This makes me feel really akward because there was actually a time when I came into the city to tape a GFW Radio show. And I was coming out of the fucking Bart station with my headphones on. And looking up above me I see people passing by and, right then, this dude in a trenchcoat looks down, and I see it’s Elvis Costello. And I get this look on my face, like “I know.” You know it’s just suddenly like “Wow!”, “It’s Elvis Costello!” And he looks at me in utter fucking terror. And I emmediatly like...Come up and give him like a cd from my bad and I’m like “Oh my god it’s Elvis Costello!”
Wait, did you really?! I totally like fanned on him... Wait, you actually did that? Yea I did that OK that’s worse than standing in line for the... You’re the fucking guy from Treme dude!!
That’s worse than standing in line for the GDC shirt... You are that experience for that fucking scene! Oh my god!
“Remember that time that you were so terrified?”
I recently had a moment of horrible fan shame too. Anthony Daniels actually came to the IGN office because he donates to the... AKA C-3PO.
Yea he donates to like the Carnegie Mellon School, and we had some of their people that were making an indie game in our office, and so he came to like talk to them and see what his investment was doing. And he came over to my desk while I was in the bathroom, because people were like “Oh you gotta meet this kid!” ‘Cause my desk was covered in a bunch of Star Wars toys. And then he’s like going through all my stuff when I come back and I’m just like “What?” And then he sees me... And I’m like so... I’m like taken aback ‘cause it’s C-3PO, and I’m nerding out, and then I take off my hoodie ‘cause I’m getting really warm... And he sees my tattoos and he just like... Immediatly gets terrified. Like a genuine look of terror in his eyes. ‘Cause I have Star Wars tattoos. And you could tell he Immediatly did not want to talk to me. It was like a immediate shift, he was not joking around, he was just like “Why would you do that to yourself?” And then he signed my C-3PO and moved on with his life.
You shoulda just been like “I have no need for a protocol droid.” 00:63:00
Oh goddamnit! Hahaha.
It’s fucking hard to live like that tho like, this last summer for my birthday we flew to Nantucket on a small Cessna and on the way back, the only other passenger was John Carey. And like I didn’t even, as soon as like I realised that he was gonna be the only other passenger on this like fucking five-seater plane I was like... I’m gonna basically pretend that I don’t even recognise this guy... And just listen I guess, you know, to him on his cellphone and shit? And I mean it was hard it was just kind of like... ‘Cause your instinct is like “Oh wait, shit, I’ve seen you before! Oh yea I voted for your dumb ass...” Right, and the difference is...
I would see that as totally an opportunity, I would be like “Oh my god, this is like the two hours on a plane with John Carey that I always needed after that election.”, “I’m gonna have a real like serious discussion with this guy for the next couple of hours.”
In my defense he was specifically brought over to me so that I could nerd out on him. I wasn’t like... I wasn’t approaching him “in the wild” and being like... So they warned him, they were like “Dude...” He got time to think about it.
Yea he saw my desk and have like a one foot tall C-3PO pez dispenser still in the box, like, he knew when he walked over to my desk what he was getting into. So he was probably already scared before he even got there... Yea, I mean he had a handler and stuff there to protect him I’m sure. Right. But he handled it... He handled it very well. So, other than the fact that he was... It was a little... And you were a story for his family later that night. Yea I mean it was a little disheartening to know that he was genuinely frightened of me. Like I was that guy for him. Yea. He went home to what... Like “I met the biggest creepy weirdo today at this office.” Like how fucking old is this guy now? What’d you say? Imagine that guy’s gotta be like older than Cervantes. Yea, he’s pretty old but he looks great for his age. I dunno. He looks like he’s barely fifty, so. You heard a little bit of C-3PO in his voice? Oh ofcourse, I mean, he was... Did you ask him to do it for you? No, I didn’t get that bad, so. But he...
You picked up the bronze fleshlight, didn’t you? Definitely... So I guess we should probably ehh Yea, so what time is it where you are?
1AM.
00:64:00
Fucking one, I gotta get up for another twelve hour day tomorrow, you fucking assholes.
We’ve been recording for two hours here. Damn.
Well, you know, it’s been a few years since we’ve all been talking together, so. Yea. We had a lot to cover between the flesh lights and the...
Hey, could I before we go, I didn’t actually ever get to plug my real quick... Of course. I just wanted to say that yea... That my band, “I Come to Shanghai” has a new record coming out and you can find it on Bandcamp. ‘Cause at this point our kickstarter is over. But you should check it oout. It’s the only way to get a picture of Robert Ashley’s tit. It’s true. Does anyone wanna plug anything else before we go? I mean ehh... Shawn Molloy should we buy Blizzard games? Yes.
Oh I saw that!
Just saying. I am trying to find someone to give me a scroll of ressurection so I can get back in because now I want in.
I will say that I don’t know They’re like offering to pay for your divorce and everything. if it will still be going on Hahaha! when this podcast is out Basically. but, Blizzard has a fucking Fishing for a referral. ridiculous promotion going Ryan, you got like a pimp a chinese replica on to get people back into Or sword outlet that’s gonna hook you up with World of Warcraft... another one if you sent enough people their way? I dunno. That sounds good. Ehh... But yea... Aren’t you starting a tenth podcast soon?
Well I’ve got four, so. Yea you kind of have an empire now.
I’m trying... But actually you should listen to my other podcasts at Geekbox.net. And Anthony does Rebel FM at eat/sleep/game.com. So we have a bunch of shows for you to listen to. And ehh...
00:65:00
It’s fucking NPR word from our sponsors time dude! Hahaha We do this every time... For everybody who’s confused about... I dunno what this is, I dunno... Too bad. For any new listeners we have that are just like “Oh, GFW!” You should keep listening to this podcast every week. It’s pretty cool. It’s called The Comedy Button. So... Yea... And then, if you wanna hear more about jacking off ... Or not jacking off but watching pornos with friends at college, check out Irrational Behavior. It’s a podcast. Oh and send me free T-shirts. OK well, you can find the address in Geekbox that you can send T-shirts but say “Care of Jeff Green.” We’ll make sure that they get to the right people.
00:66:00
Alright. So yea... Send us off Jeff. Ehh... And we out, we out PFFFRRRT! That was good. I... Yea, we’re done. Can’t top that. See you in another 5 years!
Kask 2012 Bachelorproef Derde Bachelor Grafische Vormgeving Sofie Van Assche Printing PrintenCopy Aalst Gentse Steenweg 390, 9300 Aalst Tel. 053 76 73 21 White Paper 120 grams Cover, White Paper 220 grams Fonts used Cronos Pro Display Eurostile Lt Std Demi Trade Gothic LT Std Condensed No. 18 Cronos Pro Display ITC Highlander Std Book Italic Kabel Lt Std Book Eurostile Lt Std Medium My special thanks goes to Ravi Matthieu, for helping me with writhing all of this gibberish down!!! Thank you very, very much! All rights to text belong to the Comedy Button, They said all the words I merely wrote them down!