Hello, and welcome to episode number one hundred and thirty five of the Cheese
Stakes to Get Charis podcast presided by fox PHL The Gambler, one of two
point five FM fourteen eighty AM iHeartRadio where wherever you get your podcasts, you
can download this show and listen to it. My name is Jason Finnelli and
I am the Esports and Game Againstider four fox PHL The Gambler, And after
our special episode earlier this week with Megacat Studios and those fine folks talking about
Russell Quest, we have yet another fun interview segment for you. This episode
one major talk with one developer from a game or sorry, the representative from
another studio doing a really really cool project that I am very excited to present
to you right now, so today on She Steaks and Controller's episode number one
hundred and thirty five. Very excited for multiple reasons. If you remember,
is past November, I had the honor of reviewing Atari fifty for the switch
I played it for for Game Informer Online, not their magazine online. That
was made by Digital Eclipse, who has taken it upon themselves to turn their
products into digital museums, which I really appreciate they started with Atari, but
now they're getting a little a little more focused, a little more. They're
gonna spotlight one game as opposed to an entire company, that game being Karatica,
which or Kara Taka. However, we've tried talking about pronouncing it,
and I still got it wrong. But either way, I had the editorial
director of Digital Eclipse here, Chris Kohler. We're going to talk about this
project, and I am very excited to do so. Chris, how are
you today? Very good? Thank you for having me. Thank you for
that review of Atari fifty. We really appreciated that. UM. Thank you
for checking on the pronunciation of of Kronica and everything. It's you know,
as you know, we we address it in the product. There is a
video actually in the interactive documentary The Making of Karnica U, in which you
know I pronounced I mean I speak Japanese. You know, a Japanese would
be like Catica. Uh Um, I say Karatica in English, you know,
giving a little bit more rum, just because that's sort of what's natural
in English. Um. Jordan Mechner, who created a game in the ninteen
eighties, didn't know Japanese and you know, it's not like it's just nineteen
eighty four. He get just put on put on YouTube to find out how
to pronounce it. He always said karataka. Um, some people say karatcha,
and really it's just like just just pronounce it how you want. At
this point, it's like it's it's you know, it's just gonna be impossible
to get everybody to agree and the and it's like ultimately we're all varying degrees
of off of what the original Japanese pronunciation is going to be because that sound
that stop just doesn't exist in English. So just just forget it. It's
fine now. And it's amazing what one two letters in one syllable will do.
If you just take away the car and it's karate or karate, people
have way less trouble with it. But I imagine that was already copyrighted back
in the age exactly exactly, yeah and right, And I tend to say
like more like, you know, I grew up you know, calling you
know karate, you know, and it's there's it's not there's no raw and
there's no tea in there either. It's caught up, you know, the
empty hand right, So it's like, I don't know, it's just at
this point it's been forty years and you know, we're no closer to a
cure. Yeah, I understand. The Japanese language is a very complicated thing.
I'm actually teaching myself right now thanks to that green owl on Duo Lingo,
slowly getting through it, and it is quite a challenge, but a
good one. I do appreciate it. So my first question about insert pronunciation
of game here. What so you went from Atari fifty and that entire history
of a major company, fifty years of research and prototypes and design docs and
all this to one single game two years worth of whatever Jordan had worked with
at the time. So my first question is a simple one. Why this
game? Why Kara? What was the reason for this to be the first
time you try the single game documentary as opposed to the company wide doc.
Well, the funny thing is, and you would have no way of knowing
this, of course, but I will tell you, is that really we
went from Karatica to Atari fifty in that when I started working at Digital Eclipse
in twenty twenty, the first thing that I was put on was this project
that was that had been going for a little while called the Making of Karnica,
and I kind of came in. The people who've been doing creative on
it were both gone at that point, and so nobody was you know,
nobody was in had the reins creatively, and I looked at where that project
was and I was like, you know, I kind of I took a
step back and I started doing I kind of started doing the research from zero
again because I was like, I don't want to base my decisions here on
what's already in this this sort of like early early version of the product.
I want to go do the research again. So it's like, Jordan,
the thing that makes Chronica so perfect. There's a lot of things that make
Charnica perfect, and I will get to this to answer your question. One
of the things that makes it perfect is that Jordan Mechner was a total like
documentarian himself and a pack rat who saved absolutely everything. So as he was
going along in college, like freshman year of college, he was making this
game as a freshman at Yale University. That's when he started. In nineteen
eighty three is when he started on this. Okay, he was writing a
journal, a daily journal, that he kept up that he's actually kept up
through his whole life. And he started writing a journal around that time and
daily documented the process, everything that he was doing in at college, but
also everything he worked on on that game. And so we had something that
very few people have if you're trying to look at the history of how a
game was developed, a daily log of everything that he was doing. Not
only that, but you know what he was feeling he was doing it,
you know, So all of his teenage angst is right there on the page.
And Jordan has published those journals and you can you can buy those and
read them right now. And then additionally, he did all of his designing
like on paper, and he saved all the paper, and so all the
paper, all of the design documents for Krotica, just just stacks and stacks
of stuff is all in the care of the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester,
New York, who we kind of basically partnered with to put this out.
They gave us access to all the Jordan's materials and were extremely helpful.
So basically at that point I go back and I'm like, okay, I'm
gonna read Jordan's journals. Of course from start to finish, I'm going to
um go to the strong and you know, redo the research and say,
what do you guys have. I want to make absolutely sure that we have
everything pertaining to Karnica. Found a bunch more stuff, found a lot of
Chronica stuff in the Prince of Persia folders where it had been you know,
sort of accidentally missorted, and start to realize that there is a way to
tell this story, Like there's so much information journals and design documents, and
then then we start looking at the contents of Jordan's floppy discs because those had
been preserved about ten years ago and by Jason Scott and the Internet archive folks,
and they had like gotten all of Jordan's floppies and you know, done
like very expert level stuff to try to get as much data as they could
off of the shoebox full of floppy discs. And so there were like graphics,
cut content and things like that or like in development versions of Kerotica,
so we had as much It's like no other game from nineteen eighty four is
this well documented, unless I mean there's probably like there's probably something similar for
like Super Mario Brothers, but it's in a vault Nintendo and we'll never see
it, you know what I mean. But Miamoto wasn't writing a diary,
nope. So by taking all these parts, this was the This was the
fun as a former journalist, you know what I mean, Like, this
was the fun part. Because now I've got a diary in which he explains
what he was doing that day. I've got images off with floppy disk,
and I've got scans of paper documents and he can start connecting the dots and
matching that stuff up. So now, as opposed to a typical collection where
it's sort of like, here's a design document, I can say, here's
the design document, here's what Jordan said when he was writing this, here's
what came out of it as an original, you know, or as a
sprite on his floppy disc, and show all of those things together and lay
it out all chronologically. So from a content perspective, Keronica has enough supporting
content to let us do and Atari fifty size is essentially it's the same thing
as Atari fifty where we've got five you know, chapters essentially that you can
go through. It just gives us the ability to do that as as and
then as far as the game itself, one of the things that we want
to do with the gold Master series, which is this line of independently produced,
self published, interactive documentary style games, is um, you know,
we want to tell some of these stories of video game history that aren't being
told. And one of the stories that's always told about video game history,
and I'm guilty of this myself, is this idea of like there was Atari
and then Atari die and the video game industry crashed and there was this black
hole, and then Nintendo came riding in on a white horse and saved video
games, you know, and that's like, there is something to be said
for that in terms of the game console business in America, right, But
that's but that's it right on. First of all, for the rest of
the world, that's not the case, and certainly on personal computers, you
know, that's where gaming kind of shifted to and we just don't hear about
these stories. And Jordan Meckner's Coronica was a profoundly influential game when it came
out in nineteen eighty four, in the middle of what some people just sort
of consider the nothing time. It came out in eighty four, it sold
a ton of copies, and importantly, it made so many innovations in terms
of the way that video games had presented cinematic scenes or cut scenes animation.
Jordan used rhodoscoping okay to achieve lifelike animation inside of this game. In terms
of soundtrack, Jordan's dad, Francis Mechner, who is sort of one of
the heroes of our story, was a classical pianist as a hobby, and
he composed the soundtrack in an era where games certainly on the Apple too and
on most other platforms, really didn't have music scoring them. And but he
did in a really smart way because he used this life motif approach for every
character, every emotion, every setting had its own little stinger of music.
So that lifted the emotional kind of, you know, m weight of the
story as well. And so Keronica makes all these cool innovations and it feels
like a little movie. Basically. That's how players perceive it is the first
time they're playing a game on their computer that really felt like they're like the
hero of an action movie. And that was so profound and it inspired a
generation of game designers we have. We went out to people like Tom Hall,
the co founder of ID Software. Uh. John Tobias, the co
creator of Mortal Kombat, is in this um and they're in this discussing like
how profound an impact you know, Coronica had on them, And we can
in that way connect the dots and show um why this game, which was,
by the way, you know, as I've kind of alluded to,
is the debut the directorial debut title of Jordan mcner, who would go on
to create Prince of Persia series. Prince of Persia stands the time Prince of
Persia, the Hollywood film you know, Um, Coronica was like this um
little um, like little egg, you know, this little sort of like
the tiny seed from which Prince of Persia would grow. Um. And so
it's important to look at it that way as well. And so as far
as it's importance to the industry, as far as it being a story that
has not really been told, as far as it being an amazing story,
it's a there's a wonderful father son story at the core of this whole thing,
because you know, Francis Machner not only did he dad, he's the
dad of the year, Like not did he compose the soundtrack to his son's
game, you know, support his his teenage son in any way that he
could to make this game amazing. When Jordan wanted to rhodoscope somebody, his
father put on his wife's karate outfit and went out into the woods behind their
house in upstate New York and ran around in this karate outfit while Jordan filmed
him with a Super eight camera and captured his dad's running and jumping and climbing
motions and then rotascoped them into Karatica. And so when you see the Karatica
running around, he wrote a scope two people. His his mom's karate teacher
for all the karate moves, and then his dad for all of the ancillary
stuff like running and climbing and things like that, the non martial arts moves.
And that makes the two of them tied for being essentially the first like
mocap actors ever in a video game. And again it's his untold story that,
like, you know, Francis mcner is this like unsung hero of video
games. For all the work that he did on this, you don't really
hear about him. And so we want to make we want to get that
story out there. So it's a story that we're passionate about telling. It's
a really important game. It's a story where we have all the ability to
do it, and so um we had to. I was working on this
and we had to shelve it for a while because so many other big projects
coming in that needed all hands on deck. I was working on this before
we signed Blizzard Arcade Collection. So it was this, It was this lightning
rapid like you know, Blizzard Arcade Collection comes in, needs you on that
teenage Mutan Nincha Turtles, the Calbunga Collection, We need you on that.
We actually, after Kalbunga Collection, we'd like had a kickoff meeting for Corotica
to get it going again. And while that was happening, like, we
signed Atari fifty and Atari fifty was just this great opportunity though, because Atari
needed something different and we're like, you know what, We've we've got this
interactive documentary approach that we've been workshopping internally that we've been designing Corotica to that,
and so we were able to put the brakes on everything else get Atar
fifty out the door in like record time because we had to do it for
the Atari fifty ten overs re year um. And then once that was done,
finally had the time and the bandwidth to go back. Uh. And
and not only the Karatica, but other stuff that's coming up later in the
gold Master series that we're working on now. UM so yes, um yeah,
it's a series. We've announced it a series, um and so and
so that's happening. So I hope that gives you a little bit of insight
into why it's that game. Now. This is not to say, like
other stuff in the gold Master series might be um, a bunch of games.
It might be one developer, it might be one company, you know,
going on. It's not necessarily this could be one game. But in
this case, you know, it's it's like it's um, it's it's really
all. And the thing is, there's actually fourteen games in the making of
Chronica, because there's Karatica for the Apple two, which was what Jordan created.
There's the ports to the Commodore sixty four and the Atari eight hundred.
Um. We even speak with in the video in the video sections of the
cook who actually did the conversion programming for the Atari and the Commodore versions.
So we get into the details of like what was that, like, you
know, what's it like to support something from He's one very very different platform
to another. Right, you have Jordan's original game shooter that he made called
Death Bounce, which is what he was trying to pitch before Karnica that got
canceled, but it's in four different prototypes of that are in the game,
several prototypes of Karnica, and even Asteroid Blaster, which was basically like Jordan
cloning asteroids, that's in it too. So across all of these things,
we've got fourteen different playable games in various stages of production. And again,
like Autari fifty, as you go through the timelines, when those versions come
up, you have the chance to play them, and you have the chance
to check them out and then go back to the timeline and resume your sort
of historical journey through the documentary. So that actually answers a question that I
had on the pace. So with Atari fifty, you're going through the history
of the company and you just put in the full games that they you're talking
about in that particular, you know, year here with one game, are
you breaking up the game into sections and they play those sections or do they
play the whole thing and then get the history. But if it's now like
fourteen different prototypes and the full games and stuff like that, it kind of
makes more sense in my head as to house. Yeah, I mean,
I think it's just important to note here that like you as the player,
have the option to dive into one of these deeper sort of segments that you
know, just as if you were at a museum, you know, and
you're going through the museum. You could either start at the beginning of the
museum exhibit and just walk really fast through everything and just look at things that
interest you and then be done. Or you can spend all day in there
and just start at the beginning to exhibit and then just go from you know,
station to station, and if there's an interactive part of that, you
can stay there and interact with it and exhaust all of the utility out of
that before you move on to the next part of the museum. Depends on
how you're feeling that day and just how deeply interested you are. So if
you just want to kind of quickly go through the story, you can do
that. But if you want to stop and play a game for a while,
you know, you can do that. As well, and you just
nothing is a lott you know what I mean. You just have the freedom
to just go where you want to go. We'll try to guide you to
what's next chronologically, but you have this choice, like do you want to
play Jordan's Asteroids clone? Um, we even have watch mode for all of
the games, so it's like, if you just want to watch a little
playthrough of somebody playing Asteroids, you know, do that we don't and that
gets even that's that's even more important. You're talking about the game like Kronica,
which is actually kind of difficult, So it's like, if you just
want to watch somebody play You even have chapter select in the watch mode,
so if you want to just jump to a certain part of the game and
check that out, you know, you have the option to do that as
well. Um And for the Apple two version of Kronica, we have director's
commentary on the watch mode, so you can watch somebody play through Jordan's original
version um while you listen to Jordan Nor and Francis mcner um talk about extemporaneously
to sort of talk about the various things that you're seeing and the little bit
of the behind the scenes of how that was put together. That's awesome.
Um, I'm wondering, is he like reading through his journals and remembering his
angsty moments as he's going through these or is he just kind of talking about
what he was doing at the time he is reacting to what's going on on
the screen. Basically what we you know, we we had once we got
the playthrough and we knew that that was going to be that, you know,
we had to do it in order, right. It's like, the
playthrough is not just a video, it's it's actually like an It's uses emulator
save states because you can you can jump into the playthrough at anytime and start
playing. That's why the chapter select allows you to say, I want to
practice that fight against the bird, just jump right to it and then jump
in and start playing. So it's cool chapter select. Um. So we
had to make sure that that was one hundred percent done before we went to
Jordan and Francis and actually visited them in New York City in April. Um,
so it wasn't that long ago and just uh sat them down with the
demo, played the watch mode set up like my phone and just recorded them.
Um. It was a very ad hoc thing because we weren't really sure
if we were going to be able to get them, you know, because
it was so late in the process. But it was like, we have
you here, let's do this, um and so, and it one up
being very insightful. It was just it was one take, totally just you
know, off the cuff. But it's but it's really brilliant. It's really
fun to listen to. That's cool. And we mentioned we talked to a
little bit earlier about Prince of Persia and how this game kind of set the
table for that. Uh is that reference In the latter half of the timeline
documentary portion, do you get into like what parts of Karatica became part of
Prince of Persia formula and how that's how that flow works. Yeah. So
after Karatica, you know, it was a big success, and you know,
Jordan and his publisher were both like, we got to do Karatica two.
So Jordan starts messing with new designs and things like that, and he
was inspired, as you'll see because there's an entire chapter that's just called Karatica
two U. He was fired by games like there's a broader run game called
the Castles of Doctor Creep, which was like a more like um it had
more like traps and platform kind of stuff, and he was thinking, gee,
I'd like to do something like that. So we actually have a lot
of screenshots of in you know, sort of in progress stuff where he was
working on a more platform type Karatica game. He was using the Karatica characters.
He was thinking maybe Princess Mariko would be playable this time, and story
treatments and stuff like that. Um, but the game you kind of see
it like once you get to the final like you know, mock up of
Karataka two, it starts to look a lot like Prince of Persia, not
in terms of the character designs, but in terms of you know, the
traps and doors and things like that. And that's kind of where we stop,
and we're like, you know, at past this point, it became
a new project, you know, which was originally called Bagdad and that became
so we stopped there, and uh, you know that, you know,
I don't want to say too we continued because we don't have the rights to
do diversion, but it's like, but the story goes on from there,
yeah, right, and then people can do their own research and filling exactly
from there. Yeah, so you talked about also the black hole in the
gaming industry that was filled by Apple two, which is what this was developed
on. Do you take some time to go through that platform as a development
platform? To you to repeat myself, do you go into like the technology
of the Apple two and what was used to make this game as you did
with the Atari consoles in fifty, not super deeply, we do, you
know, in these interactive documentaries, as we do with with Atari fifty.
You know, we want to make sure that we're not just sort of taking
the game ram and just sort of plunking it down their right context. So
we do want to make sure that, yes, people understand like what's the
difference between these platforms. So yeah, as you're going through the timeline,
so as we get to the introduction of like the Apple two or the Commodo
sixty before the Atari, you know, we talked a little bit about well,
when was that released, what were its strengths? You know, so
we talk a bit about that. You will glean some of that, especially
from a lot of Jordan's commentary about the Apple two and what it was capable
of, what the Commodore and the Atari were capable of versus that when we
start talking about ports, there is, but ultimately it's kind of out of
scope to really start getting into, like, you know, the nitty gritty
of the how the Apple two works, even though it is very interesting and
to understand that platform does help you understand like why does Chronica look like that?
Why does it use those colors? Well, the Apple two could only
generate, like you know this, this small handful of colors, so every
game has that orange blue kind of aesthetic interest. And the interesting thing about
that that I found out as I was doing this is that, um,
the Apple two doesn't have color hardware. Steve wazni Acc basically figured out a
way to use it. The Apple two. Technically the hardware could only do
like, um, you know, luminants basically like black and white, right,
but he figured out ways to send signals along that black and white pathway
basically to juice you know, your your monitor. You'd have to have color
monitor obviously, but he would get the monitor to be able to display those
colors um and and like if you it could only kind of display them in
certain areas. So if you shift a pixel over that was blue, it
becomes orange, you know what I mean. It's one of those things where
it's like that's what Apple two programmers had to figure out. It's like color
was not just put this color there, it was And that's why when you
look at Chronica and other Apple two games, you see like, um uh,
what seems to be like sloppiness of the colors. You know, you'll
see like something that's orange and it'll have like a blue pixel in there somewhere.
And that's literally just because the Apple two is doing color in a very
strange way without color hardware. Um. So that's something that would be like
a little too much to include. Um, although it is a really interesting
story that is. Um maybe if there's ever a gold Gold Master Series on
the Apple too itself, it would be a good place to put that.
And you know, I think and that's a really good observation because it's like
with the Gold Master Series, like it doesn't necessarily have to be about like
a game or even games, you know what I mean, there could be
It's like it's it's and that's what's important to get across here is like we're
not like selling you Kerotica, No, like I don't want to sell you
like this just this game. Ram. This is about selling you the story,
the documentary, even if you don't, if you aren't really interested in
the game, that the pitch here is like the story is so interesting.
Yeah, that it's it's it's the meat. It actually is the core user
experience. So if someone were to come to you for a potential pitch in
this gold Master series, if you even accept them, what would be your
vironments would you? What would you and Digital Eclips want or need even in
order to even consider doing something like this for another project, whether it be
a single game or an old developer or even the platform. As we've talked
about, what sort of information and how much of it would you need in
order to have that jumping off point. I think ultimately we would just want
to make sure that it's something where there could be just a variety of different
things. I mean, maybe the game itself is so well known that people
are already so passionate about it that we'll just figure out what the story is
and tell that story. But if you were to come to us and say,
well, I've got this game and nobody's really heard of it, but
the story behind it is so fascinating. You know, I think we would
we would take that as a really interesting challenge of can we take something that's
got no fan base whatsoever, but the story is so good that we think
that if we get it out to people and put that context around it,
we will actually create fans of this game. Um, I think we would
like that challenge as well. So it's really just like I feel like everything
has a potential argument for it, you know, whether it was you know,
you know, like whether whether it's it's already got fans, whether it
doesn't have fans. But if there's a good story there, if there's a
story that we can tell, it's something I could think of at least two
or three different projects off the top of my head that I would love to
see get this treatment. But we can, uh, we can bypass that.
I don't want to. I don't want to start saying you should do
this, because that's I'm sure you get enough of that on social media and
stuff like that. It's not you know, ultimately, well, I mean,
we we do, and we like cards on the table. It's like
I like to hear like you should do this, especially when it's something that's
like on social media, and it's kind of quantifiable because ultimately, it's not
like we're sitting around with a big list of games and we're going, let's
do yeah, yeah, yeah, No, it's really trying to convince rights
holders to go in with us, you know, and take a chance on
us and do it this one. Um. And so if we have more
of a sense of what do people want, you know, that gives us
a little bit of ammo. That's like, oh, you know, we
have all you know, fans are asking for this, like this is what
we hear about a lot. So it's it's it's good to hear. But
also it's like, don't don't you know, mistake the process of um,
you know, we're we're just picking whatever we want. I wish maybe in
twenty years if we really establish ourselves people falling all over ourselves to you know,
get digital clips, to uh, you know, to include something in
the Gold Master series. But yeah, that would be yeah, that would
be awesome. Um. So I want to ask also, I know we
kind of touched on this a little bit, but did you find focusing on
the one story and the one game, even with the wealth of information that
you ended up finding from the museum up in Rochester. Did you find this
to be a little more challenging to build enough of a story to get through
those five chapters as opposed to the first time you did this, where you
had fifty years of information to dig through. This one a little bit more
focused. I'm just I'm just wondering how challenging it was for the team to
get that story. Did it become apparent like right from the jump? Um?
Yeah, I mean within like the first once I really started reading the
journals and once I really started looking at and asking because it really you my
first week or two with it at the company back in twenty twenty, because
literally this was what I was put on and I was just like, okay,
you know, let me get the information. Once you start looking at
it and realizing there's just so much there. But I think that you know,
I also had a twenty five year career in journalism prior to that,
and I mean, so much of that is um, you know, there's
all this information out there. How do you perceive what's important? How do
you start to see a story take shape in this sort of mass of of
seemingly unrelated events and so writing big magazine features, big five thousand word features.
You started to develop a little bit of a sense of oh, that
can go in, that can go in. That's important once you start connecting
the dots. I mean, I think that's that's that's kind of the big
thing. So maybe it's something that somebody without that experience might not have perceived.
But you know, in from my sense, it was like, yeah,
yeah, this this, I mean, there's a huge story to be
told here, and we just gotta you know, we just gotta put it
all together. Now. In retrospect, you mentioned that, UH, Karatica
was actually supposed to be first, and then a Tori fifty kind of took
over in this documentary style format. Do you actually think that going through a
Tori first ultimately benefited Karatica as opposed to if you had launched them the other
way around? You do you feel that having going basically doing the trial run
with fifty years of Atari made this one even better in uh? In retrospect,
yes, absolutely, yeah, one hundred percent, because there's there's so
much that, like you know again, like you know, Coronica was in
the works, but Atari, it's like we had a deadline and we had
to finish it. And finishing something is very important, you know, because
you do ninety percent of the work and then after that you do the other
ninety percent of the work at the end. You know, it's like just
just getting something completely totally finished out the door. You know. It allowed
us to really just like bang on a lot of our you know, initial
ideas and like preconceived notions and and really you know, test it out in
a product, and then of course it's very fortunate, you know, we
released Atari fifty. Reviews were very good, and importantly there was a lot
and there were a lot of people who thought what we were doing because as
the first sort of test flight, it's like what if people don't understand this?
What if people hit start on Atari fifty and they're like, where are
my video games? What is all this stuff? You know? I mean
that could have happened and what is yeah, yeah, like where's asteroids?
I can't find asteroids? You know, um, And we did a lot
to make sure that both of those types of players. You know, if
you just wanted a list of games, we gave you a great games carousel
that you know, sorted and you know, had you know a lot of
information about each of those games to help you make that decision of what to
play. But if you wanted to go through the timelines, that's your primary
kind of you know, user experience. You wanted to make sure that had
access to all of the games that way as well. Um, and the
fact that people picked up on it. Uh. And and you know what's
interesting with Atari fifty is that, um, when Atar fifty was announced,
I think a lot of people paid it no attention and we're just like,
oh, it's another collection of Atari games. Okay, I don't and I
made that I will admit I made that assumption as well. Well. The
Game Informer review came a week or two later, I think, after the
lease, and you typically don't say that happened with IGN as well, and
that happened with there wasn't a review, but that happened with Kotaku's coverage as
well. And I think that that's actually that's actually great because what it means
is it came out and there was this sense of oh, oops, like
we should have you know, we should have covered this. This is something
different, this is something unique. We actually need to go back. And
you know it's not often that after that initial review cycle somebody's gonna go back,
you know, uh and and cover him. So it's it's wonderful that
that happened because it really it made it very clear that people were picking up
on it. Oh, this actually is something different. And the benefit then
to the Gold Master Series is now we're like, here's our next interactive documentary.
We've got tons of people already who are just like, oh, like
Autari fifty, this is gonna be good. You know. So it really
that's that's that's very helpful. UM. You know, for for us,
we're launching the UM launching the indie thing. That's more of a risk,
where the risk is all on us, where it's where it's being announced,
you know. Very fortunately we're really lucky, UM, very grateful to have
it announced on the ID Xbox showcase. That was definitely awesome, UM and
uh. But but still ultimately there's no big publisher here, like with a
big marketing machine. It's just falls to us UM. And so you know,
it's so it's so it's scary, UM, and it's risky, but
it is what we believe we need to do UM to treat you know this
these classic games which we believe are they're not just like old you know,
products that you sell in the bargain bin, Like, this is the foundational
art on which the video game media is based, and we believe we need
to treat them with more respect um and so this is a way that we're
trying to do that. Now you're you touched on something that I wanted to
make sure I asked you about. One of the last things we talked about,
because I imagine it's going to be a heavy topic here, and that
is preservation. Last last week, that report or two weeks ago, the
report came out that eighty seven percent of games ever released are no longer available
in any platform. Blew my mind just because I assume that you could still
get some of the weird games that I played as a kid, because I
still have them, so people probably still have them. But no, a
lot of those games aren't available anymore. Did you see that and start to
think, Okay, maybe we're onto something with this Golden Master series. Maybe
we can bring that number down by getting some of these titles back out into
the forefront or the spotlight, even if it's a little spotlight like like Keronica.
As as great and foundational as it is, it like only for old
folks like me and you older folks, not old folks who have been playing
games for a long time. We know about it, but but the youth
now won't until this. So do have you guys kind of like taken up
that mantle a little bit? Like all right, if there's a preservation issue
and they're not going to do anything about it, if they'll partner with us,
we'll do it. Yeah. So, I mean we believe there's a
role for everybody in all kinds of different organizations as far as game preservation.
You know, the Video Game History Foundation wants to make this extremely salient point
because they're arguing for um, you know, alterations to copyright laws essentially that
allow UM libraries and institutions to provide for video games remote access because ultimately it's
like eighty seven percent of games, um, you know, according to the
study, the only way that you can access them is either um A you
know, piracy or B you just can't. And so if if library it's
just simply can't do it. I mean there's there's games. Look, if
you want to go pirate a laser active game, you can't do that,
Like you have to have a laser active, you know, set up.
But if libraries and institutions were able to set up and provide remote access for
these things, then that would give researchers UM or quite frankly, not just
researchers, but just you know, everybody, the opportunity to play these things
within a legal framework where they do not have to I mean it when we're
talking about UM. One of the other things that we want to do with
the Gold Master series is bring back computer games because a lot of times what
you see our collections of console games, but when you start looking at the
libraries of of computer games, you don't actually see personal computer games being brought
back as much, and you you don't see them on game consoles. Because
it's one thing to re release a computer game for a computer because Karnica,
you know, used keyboard controls, right, and you needed keyboard controls to
get through this. So what we're doing, and we have engineers essentially working
on this for Karnica and for other stuff in the Gold Master series, it's
a big task, a big expensive engineering task. Have a highly paid engineer
sit down and spend days and weeks essentially taking computer games and bringing them up
so that you can use a console controller to interact with them. Uh,
and so with Keronica, it's like even if you wanted to just you know,
pirate it, you know, you're still dealing with all of the intricacies
of like like it's it's like I I use emulators all but time and just
getting a computer game running and be like, okay, we get this Apple
two emulator. Okay, well how do I mount a disk image? You
know? Once I do that, what do I have to type anything?
I mean, god, you know I'm abusing like a you know, a
Commodo or sixty four emulator. It's like for for people who grew up with
Commodoor sixty four, they're like, oh yeah, type load Comma you know
as ampersand you know, so like you know all the stuff and you run
the and you and you then you run it. But it's like I don't
remember this. I have to go look it up, and I have to
go look this information up, and this information is on some forum posts like
there there there were times when I'm trying to emulate something and the answer is
buried in some forum post from two thousand and eight, and it's like this
is not sustainable, No, can't keep doing this like. This is why
when the Video Game History Foundation points out these games are like critically endangered,
it is because all of the rigamar role that you have to go through and
this sort of fragile ecosystem of like homebrew hackers and pirates that are propping it
all up is it's it's it's it's not sustainable and it's disrespectful, and it's
something that you know, we should be working a lot harder to now from
the Digital Eclipse perspective, we can't save every game by putting out products like
this, you know, especially because look, we're making the making of Chronica,
but it's like when does our game become incompatible? You know, it's
like what happens twenty years from now, through no fault of our own,
where if we can't go in because you know, what if the development in
froment for the making of Keronica gets deprecated decades down the line and we can't
even update it anymore. What if the storefronts that it's available on all shut
down. You know, then either the way that somebody would access my creative
work would be through what would hope remote access via a library. I don't
want this to go away, But I understand that it will unless there's institutions
that are able to provide it to people, or they'll just pirate it,
you know. And so but from our perspective, you know, we all
we can do is like the work of like we're what is it. It's
like, you know, it's just it's a massive forests and we can save
like one tree, you know what I mean, like by through doing this,
but I mean I think it's very what we're what we're doing ads to
preservation absolutely, especially you know, even with like Ninja Turtles, the Cowbunga
collection, thank you very much. And there's thousands of pages of design documents
from Konami's internal archives that now exist in extremely high quality you know, I
think four K on some consoles, you know, digital form. Whereas in
the past, before we embarked on that project, they existed as a piece
of paper in a building in one of the countries that is beset by the
most natural disasters of any place on Earth. If if an earthquake didn't get
them, a typhoon was gonna get them, you know what I mean.
So it's like by doing the project and by having it because if somebody other
than Digital Eclipse had done a Turtle's you know collection for Konami, they might
not have said, yeah, we want every document, you know, and
people are just like, why is this collection? However many gigabytes it is,
it's just x number of ROMs, and it's like, no, because
we successfully argued that it needs to be this, and so from a preservation
standpoint, we actually did do great work on that. And so that's the
same thing with you know, with you know, making a chronica and things
far in the future is just getting those those physical documents, turning them into
digital documents that are now everywhere, you know, everybody has them, and
it helps preserve that information in a in a really substantial way. And so
we feel that pressure too. But then also we know that that bonus you
know, that what was considered, you know, you speak through the bonus
content. Really, for some people is the whole show right now? Do
you think, I mean, obviously game companies can be doing more to preserve
their own games. I don't. I don't think that's that's our opinion.
That's it's total, it's absolute fact. Would Digital Eclipse ever consider partnering with
a big publisher if for no other reason than to just show them how you
do it. It's if you're not going to use us, at least let
us show you what we're doing so that you can maybe do it yourself.
We'd love to do it for you, but I see, yeah, I
mean, like you know, it's sort of a consulting sort of way.
Yeah, you know, hit us up like we're we're down for We're down
for whatever, you know what I mean, Like we this is we're we're
not like we're not like desperately, like we're not going to go out there
and be like you you may not, you know, do something this way.
If everybody, if everybody starts doing if everybody adopts our approach to uh
classic game or archival game releases, will feel very proud that we were able
to, you know, essentially flip the script and change the way to say
this is like it's a you know, it's it's our business, but it's
really it really, really is a cause that we all believe in, Like
we want to preserve video game history, want to do our part, and
we want to treat these things with the respect that they deserve. And if
that gets other people doing that, great, If that gets other people saying,
oh geez, like Digital Clips is a really good job on these.
We gotta hire them to do our next thing also wonderful, you know.
So yeah, now I'm wondering is there any and if you if you don't
want to answer this question for fear that people might think that you're working on
it, that's fine, But is there any older game that you would love,
like from your youth? But you're like, man, I haven't played
this in a really long time. I wonder if this is one. Like
if you were the Twitter feed right right right, yeah, if you were
the guy on Twitter saying, hey, Digital Eclipse do this, Yeah,
what would that be? Does? Okay? So does Shagara Miamoto listen to
your podcast? I had, I had, I had Reggie Feesam episode one
hundred. So maybe okay, okay, so maybe he does. Yeah,
so Miamoto just call me. You know, you have my number. Um
No, I mean seriously, Like it sounds crazy, but like I will
say this all the time, like absolutely, Nintendo get in touch. You
know, like I think that what we do could actually compliment um, you
know what they have as far as the the online subscription service. You know,
the context is not there. And the thing is, the pitch to
publishers is really list Like, if you're just taking the games and putting the
games out, the audience that you have is gonna be people who are already
kind of like excited about those particular games. But it's like, we can
help create new fans. So if there's something that is dormant, you know,
by putting these things in their proper context, you know, by doing
it, whether it's the interactive documentary format or whether it's something like cow bunga
collection, you know, but by putting this stuff in context and introducing it
to new audiences. And like, one of the things we found with Atari
fifty is that there were a lot of people who, just anecdotally on social
media or interviews would say things like, I don't really like Atari that much.
I've never been an Atari fan. I did not grow up with Atari.
I've never been interested in it. But in going through the documentary and
learning about these games and learning about where they came from and why they were
important and who worked hard on them, and learning what to look for when
I play these games, then after that, when I play the games,
I become more interested in them, and like that is that is the magic
of doing it this way, which is getting somebody who did not have any
interest and getting them to the point where where they do play that game.
Suddenly now they're a fan of food Fight for the Atari XL or whatever it
is, you know, and so like that's what's so important about this and
so that's really my that's really my pitch to to, you know, to
publishers and like why you want to let us do it and why we want
to do it this way? Yeah, And which makes a lot of sense
because, like as you mentioned Nintendo, I could think of a ton of
games in their portfolio that I haven't seen the light of day in years that
could really benefit from this sort of complimentary service. Like you're saying, Star
Tropics is one that comes to mind immediately, right because nobody knows what that
is outside of like us and Eric Bailey on Twitter, who I talked to
every once in a while, he's always mentioning Star Tropics. That would be
a perfect idea. Every company has games like that that are deep buried in
their archives and haven't come out and forever even if at all, And I
just think there's a lot of merit to that not just in the preservation of
what did come out, but also in the history of these companies that we
may not know about. I feel like you might even have a possibility of
and maybe you might not agree with this of a series where it's just all
unreleased games or all prototypes from a company that never saw the light of day
until now. And here's why here, you know, stuff like that.
Would that be something that you guys would be interested into? Yeah, I
mean, I think again, like Coronica, is this really really great test
bed for so many things that we want to do because we haven't really even
gotten into a lot of this stuff about like you know, I mean,
one of the other things that we do in making of Kronica is so we
knew that Jordan used rotoscoping. The Strong Museum had preserved and digitized that super
eighth film of his dad running around. We had all the steps in the
process because what he did was he he filmed his dad, He took the
film with a movie editing device and then traced the frame onto a tracing paper,
and then he took a device called a versa writer, which was this
very very early like device with like a stylist for the Apple two, where
you had your stilus and the silus was attached to a mechanical arm basically like
on a tablet, and you moved the mechanical arm around you're drawing, and
it would start recreating that on the screen in front of you based on the
movements of the arm. And then he that's how he digitized all the frames.
It's an incredibly laborious like like process that took months. And then once
he had the digitized you know, versions of the tracing paper, was able
to animate that and that's how he got like human animation. We have an
interactive thing called Rotoscope Theater in which I went back and took that video,
found the exact frames from the video that he traced with tracing paper that he
digitized. That became Chronica Man on screen and you can compare real life footage
of Francis Mechner with final in game sprite as if you're in like photoshop,
lay them on top of each other and see how the real life maps to
give and you do it in an interactive way, and so that's kind of
like that's something else that we can do. So Chronica is like a test
bed for a variety of different things. We have a fifteen minute audio only
podcast in the middle of making of Coronica in which Kirk Hamilton's Yes m former
co worker does the Strong Songs podcast. He basically does a little mini Strong
Songs for the Chronica soundtrack and he and he just breaks it down as far
as like this is why this music is so good, and so we're just
like we're putting everything in the kitchen sync into making a Chronica in terms of
weird while wacky ideas, you know, the director's commentary and all that kind
of stuff to show like here's just here are just some ways you know that
we can do this interactive documentary format. We can tell the story of this
game in a variety of different ways. And so going on in the process
in the future, it's like there's we'll come up with even more stuff than
we can do and it'll all depend on The first step in this process is
well, what's out there? You know, like, what does the company
have internally? What can we go research and find on our own, And
then the shape of it sort of follows from the information that we have.
That's awesome. Do you hear? These are the lengths that these folks are
going to make sure that the history of video games is told in a way
that is scinct and informative and most of all, entertaining. And I have
a feeling that the history of Karatica or Carroteca or whoever it's pronounced will be
one that is told very effectively, just as Atari fifty was last year.
Chris Kohler, thank you so much for your time and your information, and
the interview was great. I look forward to seeing the history of Carrotcha went
making Karatica Whoa when it comes back, and I look forward to speaking to
you again soon when we're talking about the next great gold Master series from Digital
Eclipse. Chris, thank you for your time, Thank you so much for
having me. And with that, we are at the end of episode number
one hundred and thirty five of the Chief Stakes End Controllers podcast, as always
presented by Fox PHL The Gambler one or two point five FM fourteen eighty AM
and iHeartRadio. If you're listening to these words, you've gotten to the end
of the episode, and I very much appreciate your time, and I hope
you were entertained and informed, and I will be back again next week with
the greatest and latest in video game. So I hope you have a fantastic
weekend or if you have a better week right behind it. And like I
said, we'll be back again next week with more cheese steaks and control. Baba h