Latest / WASD and Beyond / Episode 139: FPS: First Person Shooter interview with David Craddock and Richard Moss

Transcript

Episode 139: FPS: First Person Shooter interview with David Craddock and Richard Moss · WASD and Beyond

• 1:03
  Hello everybody. Welcome back to the episode the
• 1:06
  WASD and Beyond Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Nick.
• 1:09
  Accompanying me is the freshly shaven My Heights big haired
• 1:14
  Evan. I'm taller than you.
• 1:16
  Let's get that out of the way. Yeah, because your hair, dude.
• 1:19
  Your hair is so big. That's why you're taller than
• 1:21
  me. Whatever, man.
• 1:22
  Today we are joined by two very special guests, but before we
• 1:25
  get into that, let's plug the sponsors and the community that
• 1:28
  we are a part of. WASD and beyond is proudly
• 1:31
  sponsored by Final Boss Clothing which I'm wearing the Doom shirt
• 1:34
  right now and Doc Longey, a hip hop music centric.
• 1:40
  Clothing line, it's very cool stuff.
• 1:41
  Both them do random drops every month.
• 1:44
  You should check them out, support them, support us by
• 1:46
  supporting them. We are also part of the spawn
• 1:49
  camp network and or community depending on how you're looking
• 1:52
  at it. Where you can come in game,
• 1:53
  watch movies, watch TV, play a D&D with us, do what you want,
• 1:57
  have a good time. It's free.
• 1:59
  No pay wall. Come in, join the fun.
• 2:02
  Now let's forget all that for just 90 minutes or so.
• 2:07
  And really dive into this topic I've been in loving talking
• 2:10
  about either on Twitter. I've talked to the man that you
• 2:13
  guys can see probably right above me right now, and I'm
• 2:16
  talking to another man that's a part of this project that I've
• 2:19
  been obsessed with and been obsessing with.
• 2:21
  We are talking to the writer, the producer, and the director
• 2:27
  of FPS documentary. First off, I'll introduce David
• 2:30
  Craddock, the director and the writer of it.
• 2:33
  Yeah, Co writer, along with Richard Moss and I have to say.
• 2:37
  Our obsession with this probably Trump's yours because it's kind
• 2:40
  of been our life for 2 + 2 + 2 years now.
• 2:44
  So we got David, and we also have writer, producer Richard
• 2:48
  Moss. Hello.
• 2:49
  Yes. As David said, it's it's more
• 2:54
  than two years now since we started on the project.
• 2:57
  I got brought in I think early March 2021 and then David about
• 3:04
  a month later. Joined us.
• 3:06
  So we've been on this a long time.
• 3:10
  Well, it seems like forever ago that David, you were actually on
• 3:13
  the show with myself and Brody. That's before Brody and I had
• 3:17
  ever seen the movie. That's before.
• 3:19
  I think anybody other than probably you guys have been like
• 3:22
  seeing the progress of the film and a lot of the speculation
• 3:27
  that we asked you back then. And I wonder how much of it has
• 3:32
  changed since then when it comes to what actually we saw now,
• 3:37
  because Evan and myself have seen the four hour cut.
• 3:40
  Yeah, yeah. I think it's safe to say
• 3:43
  everything changed because if memory serves, I came on last
• 3:47
  spring and that's when Richard and the rest of the team and I,
• 3:52
  we launched certainty, Go, Go and Post production had not
• 3:56
  started yet. We had.
• 3:59
  We we had finished interviews, we had that footage that we
• 4:02
  pulled from to put together the Indiegogo trailer, but we hadn't
• 4:06
  even really started scripting it.
• 4:08
  I mean, Richard and I know these stories pretty well, so we could
• 4:11
  probably see a lot of it unfolding, but it was really
• 4:14
  just in our minds at that point. So literally 100% of it has
• 4:17
  changed from the last time I was here until now.
• 4:21
  Yeah, we had a lot of big ideas and no and no actual sense of
• 4:25
  how it would fit together in reality.
• 4:29
  I mean from seeing the the cut that we've now seen, Evan
• 4:32
  myself, it seemed like it all. And I would, I remember you
• 4:35
  talking about COVID when it hit, it was like a big strain on you
• 4:39
  guys and there's just a lot of hurdles at that point.
• 4:42
  But the cut that we've now seen because we saw the the last cut
• 4:47
  and now this newer updated cut, I don't know about any hurdles.
• 4:52
  I don't see the hurdles in the movie.
• 4:55
  It looks like it came together extremely well.
• 4:59
  And the time you guys have put it is definitely worth it, man.
• 5:03
  Yeah, we appreciate that. I don't, I mean since it's been
• 5:06
  2 plus years, I don't remember a lot of the hurdles, although I
• 5:09
  have been documenting the process for a future project I
• 5:13
  wanna do. But this really started with
• 5:17
  Richard, wrote the synopsis first that was kind of our
• 5:20
  roadmap and then. Once we started reaching out to
• 5:24
  contributors for interviews, it was a process of even that was
• 5:28
  the first hurdle. I want Richard's input on this,
• 5:30
  but like, you know, the synopsis was this concept of if we could
• 5:34
  make the perfect or ideal FPS documentary.
• 5:37
  These are the games we want to cover and the people we want to
• 5:39
  talk to. But then you have to find out
• 5:41
  like Okay, who's available, who's not, who is available and
• 5:44
  when, that sort of thing, right? Right.
• 5:47
  Yeah, absolutely. Sure.
• 5:49
  Yeah. And and it was, it was very
• 5:51
  chaotic in those early days because we didn't have a
• 5:55
  properly defined leader yet. We we just put this team
• 5:58
  together and there was a sense that or maybe I'll be leading,
• 6:03
  but maybe Chris our our editor and other codirector will be
• 6:07
  leading or maybe David will be leading and no one was actually
• 6:10
  taking charge of doing anything except our executive producer,
• 6:15
  Robin. Who would occasionally from up
• 6:19
  above tell us what we need to do.
• 6:21
  But then no one was really owning any part of the film and
• 6:26
  so we didn't know what we were doing.
• 6:28
  And that resulted in, for instance, I think we had about
• 6:31
  10 in software people originally in our planned cast list of a
• 6:38
  maximum budget wise of 50. Which just did not make sense.
• 6:42
  We had to lose a few along the way or we wouldn't have been
• 6:46
  able to cover other stuff properly.
• 6:48
  And that was because we had this huge list of people we'd like to
• 6:54
  talk to. And David and the ladies who are
• 6:59
  helping with our initial PR outreach, they just went through
• 7:03
  that list and started trying to get people without really
• 7:06
  thinking much about, well, if we've got.
• 7:10
  The four key IT people, which of the other ones do we get?
• 7:15
  Do we really want? Which ones are actually going to
• 7:17
  help us? As much as Dave Taylor's going
• 7:19
  to be interesting to talk to, does he actually bring much to
• 7:24
  the film that these other guys can't?
• 7:28
  Which was actually. It's funny that you mentioned
• 7:30
  Dave because he has taken a very different course through life.
• 7:34
  When I initially reached out to him, my policy when reaching out
• 7:38
  to people. It's the same as when I outline
• 7:40
  a book. Like, I just throw everything at
• 7:41
  the wall. I'll scrape it off later in
• 7:43
  draft two or three or ten. And David Gray, but he's like,
• 7:46
  just so, you know, I hate video games now.
• 7:48
  I don't play video games. I'm living like a natural life.
• 7:51
  And I was like, all right, well, you've kind of moved to the top
• 7:53
  of the list of people who cut if and when it should come to that.
• 7:56
  And he was like, yeah, yeah, no hard feelings.
• 7:58
  That's fine. So I was like, well, that's
• 7:59
  easy. We'll cross that name off and
• 8:01
  see what else we can get. Oh.
• 8:03
  My God, that. Literally.
• 8:04
  So that just happened to me. We're we're reaching out for an
• 8:08
  interview. It was I I contacted Mark
• 8:13
  Laidlaw and I thought it was, I thought it was going to go
• 8:16
  really cool. And he's like, just so you know,
• 8:20
  I was like, oh, an e-mail from Mark Laidlaw.
• 8:21
  And I read it and I went, oh, that was not, I was like, OK and
• 8:27
  just delete that. But so there's a process.
• 8:29
  Process of elimination then is what it seems like to me because
• 8:32
  it's like you have this list of industry Titans, so to speak,
• 8:36
  which you have a lot of them here.
• 8:39
  Like, like there's a lot of big names in this movie.
• 8:44
  It's just you kind of almost like it seemed like whittling it
• 8:47
  down. And it's like, OK, you have
• 8:50
  Cliff Lesinski, you have John Romero, you have Carmack.
• 8:53
  I mean, you have G Man, You have a VGN.
• 8:56
  It's Steven from Night Dive. It's a lot of people.
• 8:59
  I would say The Who you kept was great.
• 9:03
  So was there anyone that you had to lose along the way where it's
• 9:06
  like, ah, man. God damn it, I wish we could
• 9:09
  have kept him, but. I don't think there was anyone I
• 9:15
  cut. We didn't have to cut too many
• 9:17
  people. But again, this was a long time
• 9:18
  ago. I will say there was someone I
• 9:20
  reached out to who I really hope to get and that was Ken Levine.
• 9:24
  Ken and I have emailed back and forth for years.
• 9:26
  There's a project we want to do together.
• 9:28
  But when I initially talked to him about this, he said I'm not
• 9:32
  interested right now, which could have meant I don't have
• 9:34
  time or. David, I know you're an author,
• 9:37
  but this whole movie thing, you're not really proven there.
• 9:40
  I don't know if I want to take a chance on that.
• 9:42
  And so it just didn't work out. Richard, do you have anybody
• 9:45
  like that? Yeah, there were.
• 9:47
  There were a few people that I hoped that we would have, that
• 9:52
  we ended up not being able to get.
• 9:54
  In some cases it's because they just they never responded to our
• 9:58
  outreach in the 1st place and off the top of my head, I can't.
• 10:03
  Think of a good example. But there were several of those.
• 10:07
  And then there were people who we, we we got in touch with and
• 10:12
  and they were interested, but it just fell apart.
• 10:15
  It didn't end up working out. They stopped responding to
• 10:18
  emails or or whatever. And like the guy who was the
• 10:22
  original, I guess, creator, he came up with a concept for
• 10:28
  Battlefield 1942. I thought he'd be really
• 10:30
  interesting for us to talk to. But David emailed him and and he
• 10:36
  fell off the map after an initial response of yeah sure.
• 10:41
  And we wanted to have some more music stuff in there.
• 10:45
  I don't we don't have any composers in the film.
• 10:48
  We wanted Bobby Prince and he just he he stopped being being
• 10:54
  responsive. We we would have loved to get
• 10:57
  Trent Resnow of course but he wasn't available.
• 11:01
  That would have been huge. I asked David that during
• 11:05
  another interview. I'm like, so like Trent McCord
• 11:07
  and he's like he was like, I'm not saying anything.
• 11:11
  At that part, the the cast list was still under wraps.
• 11:15
  I don't think we were talking about the games we were going to
• 11:19
  cover. We had a pretty good idea by
• 11:21
  yeah, but this time last year plus a few months, who and what
• 11:25
  we would be covering. But there again, it was like one
• 11:28
  reason we reached out to so many IT people is because they're
• 11:31
  different generations of it. Like, you know, Romero wasn't
• 11:34
  there for for Quake 2. Certain other people were and
• 11:37
  who were who could have input and but yeah, we we wanted to
• 11:41
  cast a really wide net to cover as many games as possible.
• 11:46
  Another thing Richard and I wrestled with because the
• 11:49
  scripting started with us was. How much time do we give every
• 11:54
  game? What stories do we tell from
• 11:57
  each game? Because I know that I really
• 12:00
  didn't want all the segments to feel.
• 12:04
  I didn't want any two or three segments to feel too Samy.
• 12:07
  Like I wanted to cover Doom too, Because that when people say,
• 12:11
  oh, I still play Doom today, they mean Doom too, because
• 12:13
  that's the foundation for the modding scene that's still
• 12:15
  going, you know, almost 30 years later.
• 12:18
  But like, obviously you don't spend as much time on that as
• 12:21
  Doom one, because it's not new tech, it's just the Super
• 12:23
  shotgun, some more enemies in the rogues gallery and really
• 12:26
  cool open level design. But right that I think that
• 12:31
  segment came out to like maybe half the runtime of Doom one,
• 12:34
  which is appropriate. Right, gotcha.
• 12:38
  Yeah, we we we're both new to filmmaking.
• 12:47
  So we didn't. Have a great sense of how it
• 12:50
  would come together. But we knew that we didn't want
• 12:55
  to just do it in a formulaic style.
• 12:57
  We didn't wanna go, OK, what are the What are the graphics?
• 13:02
  Things we remember What are the best weapons?
• 13:05
  What What did that sound like? Something formulaic like that
• 13:10
  just didn't make sense. We wanted to every single
• 13:13
  segment to have its own feel. What?
• 13:17
  Was special about this game. Why do people still talk about
• 13:19
  it today? And and what were the the big
• 13:24
  challenges that the developers faced when they were making it
• 13:28
  that make the most interesting stories?
• 13:30
  Because we only have a very tiny amount of time, even less time
• 13:34
  than we really realized when we when we started, we were writing
• 13:38
  at David Laos. The scripts he was writing were
• 13:42
  huge. We would have ended up with like
• 13:45
  a an 8/8 hour film or something with the early scripts but but
• 13:50
  we didn't know yet at that point how how things were going.
• 13:54
  And our naivety in this was that we didn't really block out the
• 13:58
  times in advance. We we should have gone OK, we've
• 14:02
  got 4 hours we wanna cover X Games, so that means that we.
• 14:11
  We have 4 hours divided by X as an average runtime per game.
• 14:16
  Important games are going to be longer, so let's let's push up
• 14:18
  that and that gives us a a rough estimate of how much time per
• 14:22
  segment. We didn't do any of that.
• 14:24
  We we just wrote scripts and waited for Chris to tell us how
• 14:31
  long they were and then and then eventually realized, oh shit,
• 14:37
  we've been trying, we've been trying to keep this from.
• 14:41
  From getting too long and and we've been intentionally cutting
• 14:44
  things because segments we can tell that they're going too
• 14:47
  long. But we actually did an inventory
• 14:50
  of of where are we at right now where it's 60% of the way
• 14:54
  through. I think something like that the
• 14:56
  film and and how long is it right now?
• 15:00
  Let's add it up because we're doing segments individually.
• 15:03
  So we had no idea. Let's add up numbers and let's
• 15:06
  see with what's left to do, how long are we shaping up to be.
• 15:11
  And Chris and I on the call, we're both running the numbers
• 15:14
  and came to about 5 1/2 hours. Both of us a rough estimate
• 15:21
  without without getting to without like going sleep in
• 15:24
  mathematical and actually adding them, we're about 5 1/2 hours
• 15:27
  and like shit. We we don't have 5 1/2 hours to
• 15:32
  put in this we we're supposed to be 3 plus hours or is meant to
• 15:37
  be like the upper upper limit. We've ended up over 4.
• 15:41
  But. Yeah, it was.
• 15:44
  It was even tighter than that, right, Because we couldn't go
• 15:47
  right to far. I think we could do like 3 1/2
• 15:48
  because we had to leave room for the intro and like the end
• 15:51
  credits and so and that was, that was really on me because I
• 15:56
  I, I wrote most of the scripts and like Richard said, we've
• 16:00
  written a lot of books, we've written a lot of articles, but
• 16:03
  this is our first film, so. Right.
• 16:06
  For me to kind of find my way through this, I started with the
• 16:09
  same process I would use for writing a book.
• 16:11
  When I write first drafts, I don't think about word limits.
• 16:14
  I just write knowing I'll cut later.
• 16:17
  And even with the scripts, like, they were really long.
• 16:19
  But even then I was pretty conservative with what I want to
• 16:25
  tell. I thought I'd picked up the best
• 16:26
  bits and still left plenty behind.
• 16:29
  But when Chris and Richard were like, oh shit, I was kind of
• 16:31
  like. I mean, you will cut, right?
• 16:35
  But like we needed to start. We needed to start that later
• 16:38
  because if it were a book, I'd be the one doing the cutting.
• 16:40
  But Chris has to do the cutting and that's a lot of work for one
• 16:45
  video editor to do. Right.
• 16:47
  Yeah. And we'd already cut a bit in
• 16:50
  the scripting stage. Like whenever David would write
• 16:53
  a script, especially early on, I'd come in and say, OK, this
• 16:58
  chunk here is redundant. That's already talked about
• 17:01
  somewhere. Or this other chunk that there
• 17:05
  we we can shrink it down to that one sentence that's all that
• 17:09
  actually is important in this bit and and so we probably
• 17:14
  shaved off minutes of every script in the early days doing
• 17:18
  that but it was still too long and poor Chris the the the thing
• 17:23
  that that we had to that at least I understood because I've
• 17:28
  done audio editing but. Hadn't really properly cemented
• 17:32
  for me and I and I don't know if David knew at all, was that
• 17:37
  video editing takes a long time to do and and Paul, Chris, he's
• 17:42
  having to do these rough cuts that are 10 minutes long.
• 17:46
  When we end up having the segment that's 5 minutes, that's
• 17:49
  he's a huge amount of his time wasted because we've over
• 17:54
  scripted. That was hard.
• 17:58
  Yeah, that was hard. And a lot of that was was Chris
• 18:01
  and I especially would go back and forth on each segment.
• 18:05
  So we would do several passes that the way the way we the
• 18:08
  milestones we had was every like six weeks or so the team would
• 18:13
  review a chapter. That's how we blocked it out.
• 18:15
  You can actually still see that format in the film.
• 18:17
  There's certain headers we have that's basically delineating the
• 18:21
  start of a new chapter, a new error and.
• 18:26
  I think each segment had at least three cuts, but the ones
• 18:31
  that changed the most were probably the ones that we put
• 18:36
  together earlier or like really early in the project, because
• 18:39
  Richard and I were getting our filmmaking feet wet.
• 18:43
  Chris and I were learning how to work together.
• 18:46
  Chris and Richard and I were learning how to work together,
• 18:49
  so and that. That is often how at least
• 18:52
  speaking for me, that's how my books goes.
• 18:54
  Well, the second-half of the first draft is usually much
• 18:57
  stronger because I found the voice the first half needs.
• 19:00
  I mean the whole thing needs work, but the first half needs a
• 19:02
  lot more work. So like, I think even maze roar,
• 19:05
  which is really fascinating game because most people will not
• 19:09
  have played that. I think the first cut was around
• 19:12
  like 15 minutes and now it's around 5.
• 19:15
  Like that's a really good example.
• 19:17
  And you might think like, oh wow, you've lost. 66%, Well,
• 19:21
  yes, but the the the five minute runtime that it is now is
• 19:26
  really, really tight. It is entertaining and
• 19:28
  informative, which is a really hard balance to strike I think.
• 19:33
  It was very we. We all knew that segment in
• 19:37
  particular because it's not an exciting game now looking,
• 19:42
  looking in our 2023 eyes. It's it's kind of dull.
• 19:46
  It's just some lines that you're walking through right and and so
• 19:54
  and there's there's not really even any sound either so it was
• 19:57
  boring. The segment was boring.
• 20:00
  It it it makes a very interesting written article and
• 20:03
  I I literally wrote the article about this game some years ago
• 20:07
  but when we put it into the film it was this is not how we can
• 20:13
  start start the movie. People were gonna go to sleep.
• 20:16
  We have to cut this down. But we'll deal with this later.
• 20:20
  Let's make the rest of the film and come back.
• 20:24
  Gotcha. Yeah, that's actually something.
• 20:27
  The beginning, I think is a really fun combination of
• 20:31
  surprising and subversive, because so we recently just did
• 20:37
  the intro and I captured all the game plays in the intro.
• 20:41
  I think you guys have seen that it's in the latest cut.
• 20:43
  To like 95% complete version where we showed big games, we
• 20:49
  showed Wolfenstein, we showed Doom, we showed Duke, we show
• 20:53
  Gold Knight and and Halo. And the thinking that Chris and
• 20:57
  I had there was we're going to open with these games because
• 21:00
  that's kind of where most people would expect the story to start,
• 21:03
  right? You think, oh, it's going to
• 21:04
  start with it and Wolfenstein or Doom because that was the first
• 21:08
  FPSI think most people who grew up in the 90s played, but then
• 21:11
  when you go from that. To Maze War and your first
• 21:14
  thought is, oh, what is this? I think that's what most people
• 21:16
  don't think. And then it goes from there to
• 21:18
  Battle Zone. It's like, well, Battle Zone's
• 21:20
  not a first person shooter, that's an action game from
• 21:23
  Atari. But it's like, well, what are
• 21:26
  you doing on that game? You are looking through a
• 21:27
  Periscope and and. Shooting.
• 21:30
  In first person, so and then it goes to the colony, right like
• 21:34
  that was. Some of those were some of my
• 21:35
  favorite stories. And Richard knew Richard knew
• 21:37
  Maze War, The colony. Those are two games I had to
• 21:39
  learn about. Like from scratch in this
• 21:42
  project. But I really love that we
• 21:44
  started there because again, like most people aren't going to
• 21:47
  expect FPS games to have been born in like 1973, a good 20
• 21:52
  years before most people had even.
• 21:54
  I mean, the FPS terminology wasn't introduced until like the
• 21:57
  late 90s anyway, but starting with those games was, I think, a
• 22:00
  really cool move that are going to it's going to surprise me.
• 22:04
  Well, I think it's. Got me, Yeah, I'll say.
• 22:07
  I'll say that. It got me.
• 22:08
  Because I mean. Like, like we said before we
• 22:11
  started, I had, you know, only heard of things like, you know,
• 22:13
  Doom and Quake never actually played him.
• 22:15
  And then I I thought that was pretty cool about how it went to
• 22:17
  Maze War. And yeah, hearing a bit more
• 22:19
  history about it, I mean, it just made me more excited for
• 22:22
  everything that came after, like Doom, Quake, Unreal, Duke Nukem,
• 22:25
  all that stuff. It just made me more intrigued
• 22:28
  to learn about it, knowing that 20 years prior is when it had
• 22:30
  really, I guess, like the seed was planted, if you will, in a
• 22:34
  sense. And like it's most archaic form
• 22:36
  to. Just yeah, just lines.
• 22:39
  You're like. How the hell did you guys manage
• 22:41
  that? That's some sort of imagination.
• 22:43
  And yet it's so appropriate. Like maze were is kind of a good
• 22:46
  descriptor for what death match in FPS is like.
• 22:49
  Navigate the maze war against other humans and you rack up the
• 22:53
  most frags. And it was so cool to see how
• 22:55
  much Greg Thompson and Dave Lebling and those guys had had
• 23:00
  in place. Like a lot of the, you know,
• 23:04
  ticks that you would tick off on the list.
• 23:07
  Were there even as far as like a spectator mode like that was
• 23:10
  that only has really recently become standardized in FPS in
• 23:14
  the year 2023. So that's pretty surprising.
• 23:17
  That was pretty surprising to see.
• 23:19
  Well, whose idea was it to do that?
• 23:21
  Like, almost subliminal thinking then?
• 23:23
  Because you just brought that up with going into the intro of the
• 23:26
  film and then into me's work. You you do show off big titles,
• 23:30
  Wolfenstein, Doom, Halo and these epic battles.
• 23:34
  And then the kind it's like a it's like a fast zoom and then
• 23:37
  it slows you back in right in the maze.
• 23:40
  You know what I'm saying? That that was a very good
• 23:42
  tactic. The the intro was something
• 23:45
  Chris and I put together, but Richard and I knew we were going
• 23:49
  to start with Maze War because we were, at least at first, we
• 23:53
  were pretty closely following the format of other creator VC
• 23:58
  documentaries, most notably In Search of Darkness, which is
• 24:01
  still the company's tentpole documentary work.
• 24:04
  They go in chronological order and and what I think we all
• 24:07
  liked, well, I'll speak for myself, what I liked about that
• 24:09
  was that you could really see how filmmakers evolved in that
• 24:15
  genre from way back when until the end of the movie.
• 24:18
  And our film jumps around a little bit because we we didn't
• 24:21
  want to just kind of go along the track, we wanted to tell
• 24:23
  some stories and establish some themes.
• 24:26
  But we we did know that no matter what the intro was.
• 24:30
  We would be going back to 1973. And in fact, Richard's totally
• 24:34
  right. Like the the early cuts of Maze
• 24:37
  War was so boring that at one point we were kind of panicking,
• 24:39
  like, well, maybe we there's a sound bite.
• 24:43
  Tom Hall gave us a really good sound bite where he said, you
• 24:45
  know, most people think that Doom was the first FPS,
• 24:48
  something along those lines. We were in thinking like, OK,
• 24:51
  maybe we'll have the movie start there and then, you know,
• 24:55
  subvert expectations and like go back to Maze War or start with
• 24:58
  Doom and then have Tom. Come in and say that and then we
• 25:01
  go back just because the segment was so slow at first, we were
• 25:05
  like we've got to start with a big game that people know and
• 25:07
  that it's really exciting. But I think the way we ended up
• 25:11
  editing those first few segments, really cutting all the
• 25:14
  fat, we we were able to to tell a linear story, but more
• 25:20
  importantly able to again subvert expectations and start
• 25:24
  with a game that would kind of blow most people's minds, I
• 25:27
  would say. Yeah, I was like definitely, you
• 25:29
  got me. So I had like known a bit about
• 25:34
  it from my uncle was, you know, been gaming since he basically
• 25:37
  he went the womb. So he'd taught me like this was
• 25:39
  this, this was that, this was this.
• 25:41
  But then to see it in your movie, I was like, that's what
• 25:44
  that old man was talking about. That's pretty neat.
• 25:48
  Now this goes to both of you since you wrote the writers,
• 25:51
  right. So like, how important.
• 25:53
  In this film, was it to educate an audience that may not have
• 25:57
  known a lot of this, though, Because I found this movie to
• 26:00
  not only just be a badass flick about documentaries, it
• 26:02
  certainly is. But there was a lot in here.
• 26:04
  Even though I was sitting there going, I had no idea.
• 26:07
  I had no idea of these stories. I had no idea about that.
• 26:10
  Oh my God, there's that. And to me, that was one of the
• 26:13
  biggest values of the movie, was learning the humble beginnings
• 26:18
  and to how we got here and to how we got there.
• 26:20
  And This is why that exists. So as writers, how important was
• 26:24
  that to you? I would.
• 26:26
  Say it was pretty important like Richard again, wrote the
• 26:29
  synopsis. So you wanna kick this off?
• 26:31
  Yeah, I think it's for me. It is the goal of a good
• 26:37
  documentary to be informative entertainment.
• 26:41
  You don't want to. Just inform people and make them
• 26:44
  bored. You want it to be entertaining,
• 26:46
  especially when it's something like video games which are meant
• 26:48
  to be fun and and there's something you do for leisure.
• 26:51
  So the documentary should reflect that.
• 26:54
  But we also don't want to just go surface level all.
• 27:00
  Wasn't it great when this happened?
• 27:02
  We wanted to right from the beginning.
• 27:05
  We wanted to have stories of how games are made in there and and
• 27:09
  David and I, we know we've we've been.
• 27:11
  Writing about this industry for a long time, games are really,
• 27:15
  really hard to make. Everything goes wrong when
• 27:19
  you're working on the game. At some point everything's gonna
• 27:22
  break. Stuff that that you think is
• 27:27
  gonna is gonna define the future goes nowhere.
• 27:32
  Something that you you put in just on a whim as a that'll be
• 27:36
  fun ends up changing the world that.
• 27:42
  The history of video games is really messy and complicated and
• 27:46
  we wanted to to get stories in there that reflect that messy
• 27:51
  nature, the chaotic nature of of making games and and actually
• 27:56
  tell you the stories that go behind these things and like
• 28:02
  like the BFG and then something that's really fun, we want you
• 28:05
  to know, oh, that's where it came from.
• 28:08
  And yeah, Don Romero thinks it's funny too.
• 28:12
  It's cool. Yeah, it was really cool how we
• 28:15
  have, like, you know, James Rolf going, what does that stand for,
• 28:18
  John. Big fucking God.
• 28:20
  And then James's reaction, and that was something we did so
• 28:24
  that we felt like the audience would probably have that same
• 28:27
  reaction. And then you see it play out on
• 28:28
  screen and you're kind of laughing along with everyone and
• 28:32
  you feel like you're just at the pub.
• 28:34
  Chris would say, you know, having a having a pint and and
• 28:38
  hearing these stories. It was also really fun to,
• 28:41
  especially for the first couple of chapters, to experiment with
• 28:46
  storytelling. Doom is my favorite FPS.
• 28:49
  I've made no secret of this. I can't tell you the number of
• 28:52
  times Richard had to remind me. David, this is not a Doom
• 28:54
  documentary. And I was like, isn't it though?
• 28:57
  But one thing I did was, you know, there was this in software
• 29:02
  at the beginning, but Tom Hall was leading the design of the
• 29:05
  game and a lot of his rooms. Really kind of felt derivative
• 29:08
  of Wolfenstein, you know, baked in lighting, all ceilings of the
• 29:13
  same height, orthogonal corridors.
• 29:15
  And John Romero sat down and was like, you know, if if a room
• 29:19
  exists in doom that could have existed in Wolfenstein, we
• 29:22
  failed. And so he, he walked me through
• 29:24
  and I'd heard this story before, but he walked me through it
• 29:26
  again. He's like, I want, I want tall
• 29:28
  ceilings, I want lighting, I want lifts, I want stairs, All
• 29:32
  the stuff that didn't exist, that couldn't exist in
• 29:34
  Wolfenstein. And so I was talking to Chris.
• 29:37
  I'm like, wouldn't it be cool if we could show that?
• 29:39
  And he's like, what do you mean? And I was like, well, in most
• 29:41
  modern ports of doom, I can punch in codes.
• 29:45
  Like, for example, if you type in no target, the monsters won't
• 29:48
  acknowledge you unless you shoot them.
• 29:49
  And there's been since 1993, there's another code that
• 29:53
  enables all the lighting, just as if you were to wear the
• 29:55
  amplification goggles. And I said, I'm going to capture
• 29:58
  footage of this room fully lit. And with the with the with no
• 30:04
  monsters and then with with monsters, but the targeting
• 30:07
  turned off. If I do that, could you shrink
• 30:11
  the ceiling size that it looks uniform to Wolfenstein and then
• 30:14
  stretch it back up? He was like, yeah, I could do
• 30:17
  that. And so we did that.
• 30:18
  And then they captured separate footage of the lights going off
• 30:21
  and flashing and the monster suddenly waking up.
• 30:23
  So we were able to actually, as John Romar was talking.
• 30:28
  Show you more or less the evolution that Room took.
• 30:32
  And then we also captured footage of Doom's Alpha.
• 30:36
  So there are a couple points in there where you can see, hey,
• 30:39
  this is what the level looked like very early on.
• 30:41
  And here's how it ended up with the lighting and the variable
• 30:44
  heights. And that's not something we
• 30:46
  could do with every segment. But that was OK because Richard
• 30:49
  and Chris and I didn't want to just do the same thing with
• 30:51
  every segment. And even though like Maze were
• 30:54
  technically the first FPS. Wolfenstein and Doom.
• 30:58
  They were not the first, but they did canonize and codify so
• 31:03
  much of it. So we thought it really
• 31:04
  important there to slow down a little bit and show the
• 31:09
  breakthrough moments that kind of laid the groundwork for
• 31:12
  virtually everything, right. Yeah, that's truly incredible.
• 31:18
  It's blowing my mind right now. I like that you went and got all
• 31:22
  that extra footage and actually showed the process as well.
• 31:25
  I like that. But that's something I wouldn't
• 31:27
  have thought of early in the process, because I didn't know
• 31:29
  anything about filmmaking other than how to spell it like we
• 31:32
  were. We were all starting from square
• 31:35
  one. I wouldn't have thought of that.
• 31:37
  Yeah, but there's the mantra in storytelling that has become a
• 31:43
  cliche in film, which is you show, don't tell often, often in
• 31:48
  TV and movies things. Actually get cut from a script
• 31:52
  because it's well, we don't need to tell people this.
• 31:55
  We can just show it on the screen and they'll they'll put
• 31:57
  it all together. And the nice thing about doing a
• 32:03
  documentary on first person shooters is they nearly all have
• 32:06
  modding tools and and and special modes where you can go
• 32:12
  in and and do like God Mode and things and and mess around with
• 32:17
  stuff so we could. When developers are talking
• 32:20
  about how they're making things we could very often actually
• 32:24
  recreate that footage. I I did something similar with
• 32:29
  the the modding script. I I got a story of Richard Gray
• 32:35
  telling the first time that he found out about how you could
• 32:40
  mod doom and and he he's just. Amazed that this is a legit
• 32:46
  thing that you that that ID software actually put in the
• 32:49
  game not it's it's not some fan created thing ID software
• 32:52
  actually wants you to mod this game and and some fan has has
• 32:58
  released the doom editing utility and he gets it on a disk
• 33:01
  from from a a colleague of his and he's what is this thing and
• 33:05
  he plugs it in and he starts playing around with it and he
• 33:09
  had always wondered when he he was playing E1M1.
• 33:14
  He he box into the level, he turns left, he goes up the
• 33:18
  stairs, he sees those windows. What?
• 33:20
  Why can't I go down through those windows into the area
• 33:23
  below? And so he instantly thinks so
• 33:27
  with this DEU, maybe I can change that.
• 33:30
  And so he goes in and he he messes around with it, changes
• 33:34
  the heights of the windows and and so I.
• 33:37
  Learned how to use the DEU, which was difficult because it's
• 33:43
  a DOS application very early in Doom's life when they weren't
• 33:47
  thinking much about the usability and and the UX and UI
• 33:52
  design. But I I figured out enough that
• 33:55
  I could actually go in and do that.
• 33:57
  I changed the heights of the things I recorded myself doing
• 34:00
  this and then went in and and I ran around in there and it was
• 34:03
  wow, this is so cool. Probably millions of people have
• 34:07
  done that at this point, but I got to recreate that feeling for
• 34:11
  you of what Richard Gray had when he was maybe the first
• 34:14
  person ever to to knock the window height down and walk
• 34:18
  through. That's insane, dude.
• 34:23
  So, like, with all that game footage, that that's all you
• 34:26
  guys done, huh? Or like, not only you guys, but
• 34:29
  was it a lot of trying to get your hands on these games?
• 34:34
  Richard and I had a lot of these games like for example he knew
• 34:37
  Maze were and the colony so but I actually I literally like the
• 34:41
  little touches you did Richard of like actually opening the The
• 34:44
  Colony on the Mac desktop like that was a really cool.
• 34:47
  Like and then the maze were as well.
• 34:50
  I I was typing in the command line while I'm recording it and
• 34:53
  you even get my keystroke errors.
• 34:55
  Chris kept all that in there. I'm typing things wrong.
• 35:01
  And and I thought that that really adds to to that
• 35:03
  immersiveness for you you where you we're we're typing in the
• 35:08
  the command some weird obtuse commands to to open maze and it
• 35:13
  says you are the first rat in the maze and and then it loads
• 35:17
  up the the graphics that that was really cool.
• 35:20
  It took me many hours to figure out how to get that game to run.
• 35:24
  I had to have someone help me. Because it's a 1973 mainframe
• 35:29
  game, and it's not just run on the mainframe, it's actually
• 35:34
  you're running on a PDP10. I think that's right, a mini
• 35:40
  computer and it connects to a mainframe system and so I had to
• 35:47
  download an emulator, get it built.
• 35:50
  In in Ubuntu Linux and and with some troubleshooting, learn how
• 35:56
  to to boot this thing up and and then figure out for myself how
• 36:01
  to how to operate it. So Colony was probably a
• 36:05
  cakewalk compared to that, right?
• 36:06
  Like at least you knew the Mac UI.
• 36:09
  Yeah, The Colony and I I've played that many times through.
• 36:14
  I drew up using a Mac, so that was very straightforward and I
• 36:18
  knew. Slow down the emulator.
• 36:20
  Don't don't run it at the default full speed or this is
• 36:23
  just gonna look so weird and hyper and wow, they made
• 36:26
  something that's faster than doom.
• 36:28
  No, no, no, no. Yeah, that's so that's another
• 36:34
  thing. So to answer your original
• 36:36
  question, Richard and I would capture footage for the for A,
• 36:40
  the games we knew really well and B, the games we knew most
• 36:44
  people wouldn't have access to, but.
• 36:47
  For our Kickstarter and Indiegogo backers who pledged at
• 36:50
  or above a certain level, one of the perks was you can record
• 36:54
  footage and submit it to us. And Richard actually handled
• 36:57
  that. He would say, hey, here's what
• 36:59
  we're looking for, here are the specific moments and here's kind
• 37:02
  of how to play cuz that's something Richard mentioned
• 37:05
  this, but we had to learn or kind of relearn how to play
• 37:08
  games. Like I remember a lot of the
• 37:10
  early footage I captured of the IT games.
• 37:13
  I played. I went on autopilot and played
• 37:15
  how I'd normally play. I'm circle strafing.
• 37:17
  I'm, I'm Bunny hopping. I'm rocket jumping.
• 37:19
  And that looks cool. And there are moments in the
• 37:21
  movie where you see that because that's what's being talked
• 37:24
  about, right? But otherwise we, we both Rich
• 37:27
  and I, learned these these filmmaking lessons from Chris.
• 37:31
  Like one thing he told us way back during the Kickstarter was
• 37:35
  should always be moving forward, because that adds that a sense
• 37:39
  of momentum when you're watching.
• 37:41
  Right. It just kind of you can't really
• 37:43
  put your finger on it. It's not something most people
• 37:45
  don't articulate, but it it feels more exciting what you're
• 37:48
  watching if you're just moving forward the 2nd.
• 37:50
  Is and try and be smooth as well because if you like.
• 37:54
  Typical FPS player or I don't wanna get shot, I don't wanna
• 37:56
  get shot, I don't wanna get shot.
• 37:57
  Twitchy. It's just so it's so
• 38:02
  disorienting if you're watching the movie to have that happen.
• 38:05
  Exactly. So.
• 38:06
  Like you turn on God Mode so that if you do get shot, it's no
• 38:09
  big deal. But you also disable the HUD.
• 38:11
  Because a lot of times those HUD elements are distracting, like
• 38:15
  they're iconic and nostalgic and we show them at certain points.
• 38:18
  But when we show game footage, we try to fill your screen with
• 38:22
  as much of the game space as possible.
• 38:25
  But yeah, like, yeah, I mean a lot of our backers, it was
• 38:29
  really cool. I believe Richard can expend on
• 38:31
  this, but we had one person who I think his name was Sean.
• 38:36
  He captured a lot of footage for us and in particular he actually
• 38:40
  rounded up some friends and captured 4 player Goldeneye,
• 38:43
  which was really cool to see because that's really hard to
• 38:46
  repay on an emulator unless you have four people in the same.
• 38:49
  Right. Yeah.
• 38:49
  Yeah, Sean. Sean was was great.
• 38:52
  There were a few other people who also became like my go to
• 38:55
  people as at the beginning I had surveyed everyone in our our
• 39:00
  Quake guy list to to ask well, what games could you capture for
• 39:04
  us. And when I was doing outreach to
• 39:09
  to actually get the footage, some people they they would
• 39:11
  flake out. They wouldn't provide anything.
• 39:14
  Other people they would. Really enthusiastically capture
• 39:19
  some incredibly high quality footage.
• 39:21
  That's exactly the kind of stuff that we want.
• 39:24
  It's the style. There's it.
• 39:26
  It's not too much footage that they're sending, like they're
• 39:29
  not sending 20 minute videos that we have to cut through.
• 39:32
  They've actually listened to my instructions and sent short
• 39:35
  clips so that we can quickly find what we need.
• 39:39
  And and Sean was one of them and he happened to have a capture
• 39:43
  card, a Nintendo 64, a copy of Goldeneye.
• 39:47
  And a group of friends who he could get to come over and it
• 39:52
  took him a few weeks to to find a time that they could all get
• 39:55
  together. But at my behest he he did this
• 40:01
  and and he played they played a bunch of different modes and
• 40:05
  made sure they did a slappers only game for us.
• 40:07
  The golden gun game for us yeah and and it was so cool and.
• 40:13
  So it it's sort of grainy and low quality because it's
• 40:16
  captured from a real Nintendo 64, but it's it's truly
• 40:21
  authentic. We didn't have to fake that
• 40:23
  footage. Some of the four player footage
• 40:24
  in the game is faked. It's actually 4 individual one
• 40:28
  player games that Chris has put together on the screen.
• 40:32
  Don't look at it. That one's legit.
• 40:36
  That that one's real and and it's great and you even see them
• 40:40
  just going like that. Just like you really would when
• 40:43
  you're playing slippers only. Every two seconds you just see
• 40:46
  everyone who's going down the hallways.
• 40:47
  It's like, like, what the hell, dude?
• 40:50
  Yeah, I remember doing. Slappers only.
• 40:52
  During the Goldeneye section, that was what stuck out to me.
• 40:54
  I mean, the whole section, actually, of Goldeneye I loved a
• 40:56
  lot. So that's actually really cool
• 40:58
  to know that there was actual footage captured like that.
• 41:01
  That's sweet. So that was a script I I went
• 41:05
  off script to write. You know, we were supposed to be
• 41:07
  writing chapters in order, but. I learned that Goldeneye was one
• 41:13
  of Chris's favorite FPS games. And so I was like, I'm going to
• 41:15
  write this Goldeneye script and just blow his mind.
• 41:17
  And he had a ton of fun with that.
• 41:20
  But it also kind of backfired on me because he sent me like a six
• 41:23
  page list of like particular shots and assets.
• 41:26
  And I was like, oh, this isn't fun anymore, okay, start
• 41:30
  capturing all this stuff. But I do think that one turned
• 41:33
  out really well, Like and a lot of a lot of these ideas, like
• 41:38
  the nice thing about this is, you know.
• 41:40
  Richard and I, coming from from books and articles, are used to
• 41:44
  kind of having to think of everything.
• 41:46
  But there are certain things that Chris, who has, you know,
• 41:50
  worked in the visual medium for years, can go, oh, I can move
• 41:54
  these parts of the script around because it actually, it may read
• 41:57
  well, but in the audio file it doesn't sound quite right.
• 42:01
  So he can move some of that stuff around while preserving
• 42:03
  context and also find really fun ways to, to show what we're
• 42:08
  talking about, right, like. When Brett Jones says I would
• 42:11
  literally whack him on the shoulder and sometimes he might
• 42:14
  fall down and pull the whole, like, mocap unit off the wall.
• 42:18
  And so that's the part where you see Chris, like, slap someone.
• 42:21
  The guard fell over and then it went.
• 42:23
  He kind of recreated that, Yeah, just for kind of a laugh.
• 42:26
  But also again, going for that immersiveness to pull you into
• 42:29
  the storytelling and make you feel part of what's going on as
• 42:33
  if you were there, yeah. There's definitely a lot of that
• 42:36
  going on in this film, like. Certain examples that you've
• 42:39
  brought up, just they'll be talking your interviewee, you'll
• 42:42
  be talking, and then just like gameplay and then exactly just
• 42:45
  that action happens. You're like, oh, he's literally
• 42:47
  describing that and they just recreated that.
• 42:49
  That's really neat how you did that.
• 42:51
  Speaking of things like that though, the transitions in this
• 42:54
  film were really stand out to me.
• 42:58
  Those transitions of the big box to the game, to the next big box
• 43:02
  to the game, What landed you guys on that transition?
• 43:06
  Style exactly because that was really, really something else.
• 43:11
  So I don't know if Richard's thinking the same thing I am,
• 43:15
  but there was a meeting where we were reminded like hey guys, you
• 43:21
  need the box. While transition of that was
• 43:23
  that was a honestly a fun and fruitful discussion ultimately.
• 43:27
  Yeah, Chris was having a pretty big argument with Robin about
• 43:31
  about that. Because you you and you and he
• 43:35
  wanted to to break away a bit from the the format from the
• 43:41
  formula of of the In search of films.
• 43:43
  But we also had to keep in mind that this is a really long film
• 43:49
  and a lot of people were not going to be able to watch 4 1/2
• 43:53
  hours in one go. And that's that's just insane
• 43:56
  that. That you can realistically
• 43:58
  expect people to sit there for 4 1/2 hours without moving.
• 44:02
  So they're probably going to be pausing it and coming back the
• 44:06
  next day. And so you want it to be
• 44:09
  something that they can jump into very quickly.
• 44:11
  And you want people to be able to six months later, they they
• 44:17
  just want to watch this one game segment and just they just go to
• 44:20
  that. And so in the in the Bluray
• 44:23
  menu, they choose that game. And it will automatically go to
• 44:27
  it and you get the nice that nice wall zoom in effect that
• 44:34
  Robin was was adamant that we have to do it like that.
• 44:37
  That's the format. That's what we agreed to and
• 44:41
  Chris was was pushing up. But that's not very interesting.
• 44:46
  I want to I want to be able to do storytelling in a more
• 44:50
  dynamic organic way and. It was over one particular
• 44:56
  segment where two games had been merged together that that the
• 45:00
  argument was centering and then Dom our associate producer and I
• 45:07
  both just said well can't you just do this and and it was ohh
• 45:13
  yeah OK and the the the whole argument just fell apart and and
• 45:18
  we had a compromise that was that was the effect that we
• 45:21
  have. So yeah, this is actually a
• 45:24
  really good story because it was it was pretty contentious, but
• 45:30
  it wasn't anything out of the ordinary on almost any creative
• 45:34
  project I've been a part of, everyone involved in building
• 45:37
  something is very passionate about it.
• 45:40
  Everyone has a certain vision and it's it.
• 45:42
  This wasn't the case. We had a couple arguments.
• 45:44
  We'll talk about Double O Cat later maybe, but please do.
• 45:50
  But but. You know it's in.
• 45:54
  This is a scenario as Richard said, where no one was really
• 45:56
  wrong. We just needed to to reach a
• 45:58
  compromise. So the segment in question was,
• 46:02
  so Chris and I had really all but forgotten about the the wall
• 46:05
  of box art because we didn't find it interesting and Chris
• 46:08
  was was was the one kind of speaking for both of us because
• 46:12
  I was the one who did a lot of the arguing for Double O Cat
• 46:16
  some months earlier, but. We we had a lot of other
• 46:21
  transitions planned we wanted to be really creative with them and
• 46:24
  and and Robin said and and Richard and Dominic were right
• 46:28
  that the the the wall of of big boxes would be you know really
• 46:34
  good palate cleanser you know very clear chapter break.
• 46:37
  I think Richard when you and I talked about it you mentioned
• 46:40
  that in books like you know text and A at the end of a chapter
• 46:43
  won't necessarily end at the bottom of the page you have that
• 46:45
  white space. They kind of go, oh.
• 46:47
  Yeah, I I gave you that metaphor.
• 46:49
  It's it's like the end of a chapter.
• 46:52
  You you come to the end of the thing and maybe you've actually
• 46:54
  set up a transition and it's going directly flow into the
• 46:58
  next chapter. But you've got that pause.
• 47:00
  They're just a tiny little pause.
• 47:02
  There's some white text. You turn the page.
• 47:05
  Oh, it's a new chapter. Yes.
• 47:08
  And that was that was what we needed to do.
• 47:10
  Yeah, and that that was a perfect metaphor.
• 47:12
  That helped me really see it, because of course a book
• 47:15
  metaphor would finally get. Through, but the the segment in
• 47:19
  question was the transition from Trespasser to halfway.
• 47:22
  We saw an opportunity to you know for the first like almost
• 47:28
  half of the film you're really talking about games that
• 47:31
  amounted to to shooting galleries, not to tell them, not
• 47:34
  to sell them short, but that's really what they were and that
• 47:37
  was of a time and place. They were great, they were fun.
• 47:42
  But then there were people like the the folks who made sin, the,
• 47:45
  you know, Seamus Blackley and the the team who made
• 47:48
  trespasser. And then, you know, leading into
• 47:51
  Valve and Halflife where they were thinking like, let's do
• 47:53
  more than just shoot all the things, let's tell a story.
• 47:56
  And we wanted to do that. We had this.
• 47:59
  And Richard can attest this. Seamus Blackley is just a quote
• 48:02
  machine, like almost everything he says is just so it comes
• 48:06
  across so well. It can be used in some different
• 48:08
  ways. But he had this.
• 48:10
  You know, I wasn't the first to think of it, but I saw what
• 48:12
  could happen and then Chris added this echo effect.
• 48:14
  So and then we we we fade to black and then you hear the
• 48:18
  welcome to the Black Mesa and right there if you know these
• 48:23
  games, you get the chills. And so this is what you know
• 48:27
  where Richard and Dominic pointed out like, you know, we
• 48:29
  could just do the wall box art there, still have the audio
• 48:32
  playing, you know have to have that moment of the black screen
• 48:35
  hearing the Black Mesa, you know, PA system.
• 48:39
  And it still worked. So this is, this is a, this is
• 48:43
  an example. Reason I'm sharing this, we're
• 48:44
  sharing the story is because this was an argument that needed
• 48:48
  to happen, because we all came out of it feeling much happier
• 48:53
  with the production. We got to tell our story, we got
• 48:57
  to establish some themes. We got our transition, which we
• 49:00
  maintain was very important, but we did it in a way that made
• 49:03
  everyone happy and that served the larger purpose of.
• 49:07
  Those chapter breaks and helping people have, you know, the clean
• 49:10
  break from 1 segment to the next.
• 49:12
  And also yeah, going to that menu, if you want to jump right
• 49:15
  to halflife, you won't have needed to hear the trespasser
• 49:18
  story. You can enjoy the halflife
• 49:20
  segment. So, but if you are watching
• 49:22
  everything in order and let's face it, that's how most movies
• 49:24
  are meant to be watched. You do that first and then
• 49:26
  you're seen jumping, right, right.
• 49:28
  You'll be able to enjoy the the bigger picture there.
• 49:31
  So that was a really, really fruitful discussion I think.
• 49:35
  So that's how the menu's gonna work though, huh?
• 49:36
  To be able to just click on the big box, that is.
• 49:40
  I don't know what it'll look like, if it'll be thumbnails or
• 49:44
  if it'll be the boxes themselves.
• 49:46
  I don't know that that's anything.
• 49:48
  I guess we could weigh in on it, but like, in my mind, that's
• 49:51
  like, that's fulfillment. I don't even know what you do.
• 49:54
  You know who's making the menus like?
• 49:57
  I don't know. That that's.
• 49:58
  That's. That's like that's Robin's work.
• 50:01
  He, he he's in charge of fulfillment stuff.
• 50:04
  We just, yeah, we do what he asked.
• 50:06
  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.
• 50:10
  I could see Nick's mind exploding when you were talking
• 50:12
  about how the Blu-ray menu would work.
• 50:14
  He was. I didn't know how much he loves
• 50:16
  big boxes. So that was really.
• 50:18
  I'm sure you're excited for that.
• 50:20
  Yeah, See. Look at Richard's background
• 50:21
  there. I know every meeting we have
• 50:23
  stuff I like. Is that?
• 50:24
  Yeah. I.
• 50:27
  Is that marathon back there? No, no, unfortunately I don't.
• 50:31
  I don't have a copy of Marathon. I I'd love to, but I.
• 50:35
  Can't see it. Yeah, I I never had the big box
• 50:39
  of it back in the day and it's the collector's item now and I
• 50:43
  just there's. No point to try to get it.
• 50:45
  Yeah, I will not spend hundreds of dollars plural, on buying a
• 50:50
  cardboard box, as cool as it is. I don't want to talk about it, I
• 50:56
  feel. Tired.
• 50:57
  I didn't buy, I didn't buy Marathon.
• 50:59
  I got Marathon Tube that was a gift from my uncle.
• 51:01
  I'm happy with it. It's there.
• 51:04
  But to talk about big boxes, I feel like this is important to
• 51:07
  kind of maybe step away from the actual movie and talk about the
• 51:10
  Kickstarter and the community that you guys have built.
• 51:14
  Richard, it seems that maybe you're the driving force behind
• 51:17
  the Discord, the the and the community itself and directly
• 51:22
  talking to the backers. For FPS documentary, how
• 51:26
  important was that to you and your entire team to really make
• 51:30
  this move? Because to me, every e-mail I
• 51:32
  get, I feel a part of the team, you know what I mean?
• 51:35
  Like, I've like. And that was even after I talked
• 51:37
  to David and I was like, wow, I really feel like they're talking
• 51:41
  to me, not at me when asking me questions.
• 51:45
  Does that, does that make sense? Yeah, I feel like I'm being
• 51:47
  heard and that that was awesome. Now how how important to you was
• 51:51
  that, though? Oh it it's absolutely critical.
• 51:54
  It it's part of I guess what I would say like part of the DNA
• 51:59
  of the company. It's a it's fan driven
• 52:02
  entertainment. But we've we've gone further on
• 52:07
  this project than in the others in being personable and that's
• 52:12
  very much intentional and that that's actually been a point of
• 52:14
  contention sometimes where he's felt that I'm too familiar.
• 52:19
  Sometimes in my style I I'm telling you guys too much and he
• 52:23
  tells me you have to cut that we're not we're not sharing that
• 52:26
  detail and and that's unfortunate and and I'm like and
• 52:30
  I complained to my wife that that that Robin made me cut this
• 52:34
  thing and and and because I know that gamers love authenticity
• 52:42
  you you don't want. When you guys back a a project
• 52:47
  on Kick Start or Indiegogo or even just you buy a game, you
• 52:51
  want to know it's made by humans, other humans.
• 52:54
  That that that is part of the culture of games where we're
• 52:58
  much more laid back than in other other industries.
• 53:02
  And I think personally when you're doing a crowdfunding
• 53:07
  project, the people who are your backers.
• 53:12
  Our partners in the whole process and so they deserve to
• 53:18
  get Full disclosure of of what's going on, right.
• 53:22
  I I don't like having to hold some little bits of information
• 53:25
  back from you. I I want to tell you everything
• 53:28
  and share the whole process because I think that's very
• 53:31
  interesting and that's part of why you are supporting us.
• 53:35
  You believe in the creative process, you don't.
• 53:39
  You aren't just doing a preorder you want the whole thing.
• 53:42
  That whole experience, the the rise of Kickstarter is a way to
• 53:47
  to publish games that was in large part down to Double Fine
• 53:54
  going well we're going to bring you into the whole process and
• 53:57
  they made that how many parts documentary, massive documentary
• 54:02
  that was that was about the entire process of making Broken
• 54:06
  Age from the the very beginning to to the to the end and.
• 54:12
  I think that that is the ideal way to communicate with the
• 54:18
  audience. It's it's to bring you into the
• 54:20
  process and and not just tell you what's going on, but also
• 54:25
  ask for your input as often as possible.
• 54:27
  Because we're making this for you.
• 54:30
  Like specifically each of you 2 and and everyone listening who
• 54:34
  has supported the project. We have made this for you and we
• 54:39
  hope that people outside of you. Outside of this audience of
• 54:43
  backers will love it because we we want to make more money and
• 54:47
  we want to make more films. But you are our core audience
• 54:52
  because you're the ones who supported us and your voices are
• 54:56
  are key to what we've done. And it's actually shaped a lot
• 55:00
  of the way the film has been made.
• 55:02
  Some of the games that we selected are because we did a
• 55:05
  survey back after the Kickstarter asking what do you
• 55:09
  want in the film? And and I ran the numbers on
• 55:14
  that and I looked, OK, well, what are the things that the
• 55:16
  most people were talking about? And it was like 90s shooters and
• 55:22
  where the genre came from. What are the roots of FPS games?
• 55:26
  And so it's like great David and I are most interested in that
• 55:30
  stuff too. That is perfect.
• 55:32
  We are going to concentrate this film on that era and we're going
• 55:37
  to. Worry a bit less about the
• 55:40
  modern games and we're still going to try to give you that
• 55:44
  through line all the way to the modern day.
• 55:46
  But we're going to focus on the retro shooters and the so-called
• 55:51
  boomer shooters because that's what people care about the most
• 55:56
  in our audience and there's some stuff that we had to cut.
• 56:00
  Unfortunately due to time constraints like a lot of people
• 56:04
  wanted to know more about how. How Games are made in a
• 56:08
  technical standpoint and and maybe if we get to do another
• 56:12
  project one day we'll we'll explore that more, but we didn't
• 56:15
  get to cover it much in this film.
• 56:18
  But to cut the Long story short, your voices are very important
• 56:22
  and it was entirely intentional to to be talking to you like
• 56:28
  you're part of the team. I definitely found that to be.
• 56:35
  A sigh of relief because you sign up for a Kickstarter and
• 56:38
  you're really excited for the project and then it's like
• 56:40
  you'll go months, months, months, months, months not hear
• 56:43
  anything about the project. Then you'll get your update and
• 56:46
  you're like, OK, cool, I I wonder how long it's going to
• 56:48
  take. Now to hear something else.
• 56:50
  Now with with this team, it was boom, boom, boom, this what
• 56:54
  we're doing, this what's happening, this what we're doing
• 56:56
  this what's happening. And I found I was really
• 56:58
  impressed by that because again, I felt like I was being talked.
• 57:04
  To not at. And that was a nice feeling,
• 57:08
  especially with this, a project that Evan and myself have
• 57:11
  supported. Right, Evan?
• 57:12
  You know what I mean. Yeah, well, I was gonna say like
• 57:14
  you put it very well there, Nick, about like you're being
• 57:17
  talked to not at where a lot of game updates that you read,
• 57:20
  whether they're already out and there's another update coming or
• 57:23
  if it is a Kickstarter project or something like that, you
• 57:25
  might feel like you're being talked at of like.
• 57:29
  You know, here's the, here's the patch notes, here's the list of
• 57:31
  things or whatever, and then that's it.
• 57:32
  And there's a lot left in the dark, a lot left of speculation.
• 57:35
  And I think that there's a benefit there of talking to
• 57:38
  people and saying, hey, this is what's going on.
• 57:40
  And you're not leaving anything to speculation, which I think
• 57:43
  cultivates a better community because there's not a whole lot
• 57:46
  of questions here and there. It's like, OK, they're talking.
• 57:48
  They're going to focus mainly on the the origins of the genre,
• 57:51
  the 90 shooters or boomer shooters, if you want to call
• 57:54
  them that. And that's where it is.
• 57:55
  And there's no question about it, you know, after which I
• 57:58
  think. Personally, for me, that make me
• 58:00
  feel a lot more comfortable knowing, oh, that's what they're
• 58:02
  doing and there's no, I hope they do this.
• 58:05
  It's like there is no hoping you know what they're doing.
• 58:09
  Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it's phenomenal then.
• 58:12
  I think that really came together, Richard.
• 58:14
  I'm glad you mentioned the survey.
• 58:15
  That was kind of a guiding light for us because we did want to
• 58:22
  delve deeper into military shooters, but.
• 58:25
  We were okay with not doing that because we could look at the
• 58:29
  results of that survey and go well.
• 58:31
  We are giving backers what they asked for, you know what the
• 58:34
  majority asked for and we did. I think it was back in April.
• 58:39
  What is time? It was back in April or May.
• 58:42
  We we did and you guys were part of this.
• 58:44
  We selected some backers to give us feedback on an early cut and
• 58:49
  you know we got out, we came out of that with around 80 some.
• 58:53
  Reviews and I think a 90% aggregate and people by and
• 58:57
  large said covered what I wanted to see and that's we were pretty
• 59:02
  happy to see that. Yeah, I would say so, man.
• 59:06
  I mean. I'd be happy.
• 59:08
  Myself, I I saw pretty much everything I wanted to see
• 59:13
  besides doom Three, I think because, and that was probably
• 59:17
  something I had to either get cut or maybe has enough time for
• 59:20
  that that was cut because. Again, it's not a Doom
• 59:24
  documentary apparently. No, no.
• 59:27
  You know, we we had, we had a lot of material on Doom one,
• 59:33
  Doom 2, Doom 3, Doom 64. There's actually a Doom 64
• 59:37
  segment that we shared during the Indiegogo that we actually
• 59:40
  dropped because we wanted to cover other console games.
• 59:44
  And that actually that was, I believe that was my call.
• 59:47
  So I can be objective that comes to Doom because I, you know, I
• 59:50
  knew we need to cover other stuff here.
• 59:53
  And, you know, maybe it'll show up in another project one day.
• 59:56
  But I actually really love Doom Three.
• 1:00:00
  I will beat that drum all day. But it was just like, okay, you
• 1:00:04
  know, we don't really have time for it here.
• 1:00:05
  There's so many other games to cover.
• 1:00:07
  So we set it aside. Right.
• 1:00:10
  I get it, man. You can't have it all.
• 1:00:13
  Was there anything for you, Richard?
• 1:00:16
  That maybe you were super stoked for and had it had to get cut or
• 1:00:20
  it was like just right there you had to, you know, just had to
• 1:00:24
  get rid of some stuff that you were excited about this film.
• 1:00:27
  Yeah, the biggest disappointment for me was losing some of the
• 1:00:33
  feature content. We called them Breakouts.
• 1:00:37
  That was the name I came up with.
• 1:00:39
  Like The Rise of Military Shooters was one of them.
• 1:00:43
  The bit on Aliens, DC and modding.
• 1:00:46
  The rise of modding the E sports things.
• 1:00:48
  To legend. Yeah, so I I was writing these
• 1:00:51
  and these were were my idea from the very beginning, back when I
• 1:00:55
  did the first synopsis. And this was something that I
• 1:00:59
  thought was important to have in the film.
• 1:01:01
  They they'd done a bit of this stuff in the In Search Of
• 1:01:05
  series. But I thought, this is the ripe
• 1:01:09
  space for us to really explore the big ideas driving the genre.
• 1:01:14
  Across many games, and I absolutely hated losing the
• 1:01:22
  chance to talk about the engine wars of the 90s between the
• 1:01:28
  build engine and in tech and the rise of 3D graphics cards.
• 1:01:33
  That was part of that. And what was the other one that
• 1:01:39
  I was really bummed to lose? Control schemes.
• 1:01:44
  Yeah, yeah, we we got Thresh to talk about.
• 1:01:49
  Thank you, David, to talk about control schemes and how he
• 1:01:53
  accidentally popularized it was the controls.
• 1:01:57
  And we got this guy Nomad is a pro gamer, but he's also
• 1:02:01
  quadriplegic and he plays with his chin and he has a custom
• 1:02:07
  layout that got put. In Call of Duty for Modern
• 1:02:10
  Warfare and all but one Call of Duty game since then called the
• 1:02:15
  Nomad layout. And so we we got these stories
• 1:02:18
  from them and I wanted to tell the stories behind these things
• 1:02:21
  and how how shooters became like how the controls for for first
• 1:02:27
  person shooters are what they are today and how people used to
• 1:02:31
  play just with cursor keys and. And a couple of other keys on
• 1:02:35
  the keyboard and they wouldn't even touch the mouse.
• 1:02:37
  The mouse was forgotten about and until until you had people
• 1:02:41
  like Thresh come along and show that oh actually it is
• 1:02:45
  incredibly fast and precise and and I wanted to tell these
• 1:02:49
  stories but we we were so pressed for time that even the
• 1:02:53
  the the breakout segments that we did get to do had to had to
• 1:02:58
  be compressed more than I would have ideally liked them to be.
• 1:03:03
  Gotcha. Yeah, I was just the chime in on
• 1:03:06
  that. I was really disappointed to
• 1:03:08
  lose those two. I think what it came down to,
• 1:03:10
  not only for time, but because we were exploring, you know,
• 1:03:16
  we're kind of waiting around in the primordial ooze of FPS.
• 1:03:21
  We felt that we could explore a lot of big ideas through the
• 1:03:24
  games themselves, because for a long time there every game.
• 1:03:28
  Was sort of a manifestation of a lot of big ideas, but I I really
• 1:03:31
  wish we could have gotten more into that as well, particularly
• 1:03:34
  the control schemes. I find that stuff interesting.
• 1:03:37
  I think the engine wars, Richard, correct me if I'm
• 1:03:40
  wrong, I know we got a lot of material on that, but it's too
• 1:03:44
  bad that we were missing some interviews, that Tim Sweeney
• 1:03:47
  hasn't done interviews for a long time for various reasons,
• 1:03:50
  like he's in, you know, epics embroiled in some lawsuits with
• 1:03:53
  Apple and stuff. But I would have loved to get
• 1:03:55
  his input because I feel like we could have had some really good
• 1:03:59
  back and forth with Tim Sweeney and John Carmack.
• 1:04:02
  And you know, we got Ken Silverman first time appearing
• 1:04:04
  on film. We could have done a lot like
• 1:04:07
  that segment could have been really cool.
• 1:04:10
  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was Ken.
• 1:04:13
  Ken Silverman was a massive get and he he's obviously so nervous
• 1:04:18
  on camera. I don't know if you guys picked
• 1:04:19
  that up, but. He's he's really uncomfortable
• 1:04:22
  and he told us beforehand that he was really uncomfortable with
• 1:04:25
  the idea. It was going to be his first
• 1:04:28
  ever time being interviewed on camera.
• 1:04:29
  But he also had barely done any actual real time interviews in
• 1:04:35
  the 1st place back back in the 90s.
• 1:04:38
  He he only did a few phone interviews and and one or two in
• 1:04:41
  person interviews he he is not comfortable with talking about
• 1:04:46
  his work but. I think if if we could have had
• 1:04:51
  that segment in there, he would have had a bit more breathing
• 1:04:54
  room and he wouldn't have have come across quite.
• 1:04:56
  So I'm frozen up and I'm not sure what I'm saying.
• 1:05:00
  Very, yeah. He would have had some time.
• 1:05:05
  Yeah, very much a programmer's programmer.
• 1:05:07
  Which is totally fine, just because he wasn't really in the
• 1:05:10
  position to have done a lot of press and didn't really need to,
• 1:05:14
  whereas someone like Carmack. He has, he has his own way of
• 1:05:18
  speaking to people, but he had a lot more experience.
• 1:05:21
  I mean, I don't know if you ever attended A Quakecon while John
• 1:05:24
  Carmichael was at the company, but for me it was a highlight.
• 1:05:28
  He would talk, just talk for three, 3 1/2 hours and I sat
• 1:05:34
  there. I I went to Quakecon at least
• 1:05:36
  twice while he was around. I just sat there and listened.
• 1:05:39
  And he, he likes to talk about this.
• 1:05:40
  It's basically. An oral session of his dot plan
• 1:05:44
  files that he used to write back in back in the day right.
• 1:05:47
  And like that's just something he liked to do.
• 1:05:49
  He wasn't really camera shy but you know there's the the the the
• 1:05:54
  benefit to anything we had to cut was that it's there and kind
• 1:05:58
  of ready should we want to do anything within the future.
• 1:06:00
  As another example we had a we had a segment on Blake Stone
• 1:06:04
  which is when we Blake Stone had a really cool mini map which is
• 1:06:07
  something I was unaware of because.
• 1:06:10
  As Scott Miller told us, maybe he talked to you guys about this
• 1:06:14
  as well. Blake Stone.
• 1:06:15
  One of the reasons it never really picked up traction was
• 1:06:17
  because it came out around the same time as.
• 1:06:21
  One week, One week before I think it was.
• 1:06:24
  Yeah. One week before Doom.
• 1:06:28
  Yeah, which shame about the timing there.
• 1:06:32
  But like the mini map was pretty cool and that was where we
• 1:06:35
  talked about one of those big ideas where of mini maps
• 1:06:37
  becoming. More important to FPS games, but
• 1:06:41
  that is something you tried to show in segments.
• 1:06:43
  Like I specifically when I captured Duke 3D, I played with
• 1:06:46
  the mini map on with just the lines and then I hit tab again
• 1:06:50
  to show the like the overhead perspective of the map.
• 1:06:53
  Just to kind of show that because there are a lot of
• 1:06:55
  things like we we didn't talk specifically about the Super
• 1:06:58
  shotgun in Doom 2, but most of the footage I used it because
• 1:07:02
  that's what you want to see when you think of Doom 2.
• 1:07:05
  So it's just another way to get something in there even though
• 1:07:08
  we couldn't. Explicitly discuss.
• 1:07:10
  It visually show the audience because most of us who've played
• 1:07:13
  these games know this and we know the feeling.
• 1:07:16
  That's really actually quite brilliant.
• 1:07:19
  The lot you guys did hear that, just insane to me.
• 1:07:22
  Now that I'm hearing it come out of your mouth, so I'm like, oh,
• 1:07:25
  that totally makes sense as to why it was done this way.
• 1:07:27
  It's insane. It actually is really good that
• 1:07:32
  we can talk about this because the past two years have been.
• 1:07:37
  Kind of heads down working on this that you can start to
• 1:07:39
  forget a lot of which would be ironic because we bugged people
• 1:07:43
  to tell us how they made their games.
• 1:07:46
  You know, we expected them to remember those details.
• 1:07:49
  So you know, right. Really fair to share some fun.
• 1:07:53
  Why did you Why did you make this light red in your game 33
• 1:07:58
  years ago? Something something a name like
• 1:08:01
  that. Some of the old questions I.
• 1:08:04
  We we haven't talked about this, some of David's questions.
• 1:08:07
  So when it came time to do interviews, what would happen is
• 1:08:11
  that he'd write a question sheet and then I'd come in and add
• 1:08:15
  questions. And if it's someone I was an
• 1:08:17
  expert on, then I'd be adding a lot of questions.
• 1:08:20
  Or if it was someone that he was an expert on, I'd have barely
• 1:08:24
  anything to add. And the questions he'd written
• 1:08:27
  for the ID software people in particular, were so incredibly.
• 1:08:32
  Finitely detailed. He he really knows Doom inside
• 1:08:36
  out, and these poor guys are having to to so super specific
• 1:08:43
  questions about how Doom was made.
• 1:08:46
  Yeah, those. I actually derived a lot of the
• 1:08:49
  in software questions from interviews I have done with
• 1:08:52
  them. For like my book, Rocket Jump.
• 1:08:55
  So I knew that like they wouldn't be caught off guard,
• 1:08:57
  like wait, what? Red light where, you know, like
• 1:09:01
  I knew that they would be able to talk to it, but it was really
• 1:09:03
  cool. Like Richard and I would kind of
• 1:09:08
  we both do a lot of interviews, so we would kind of help each
• 1:09:10
  other get the right prompt to set up a really good answer.
• 1:09:15
  And so that was actually, I had a lot of fun with that process,
• 1:09:18
  the interviews I did, most or all of them.
• 1:09:23
  But it was, it was great to have help with the questions because
• 1:09:27
  we had a lot of interviews to prepare for.
• 1:09:29
  And there'd be days where, you know, depending on where we were
• 1:09:32
  going, like there, I think there were five or six people in
• 1:09:37
  Seattle and in the San Francisco Bay Area.
• 1:09:40
  That was a really long day. So having really, really good
• 1:09:44
  questions set up ahead of time took a lot of the pressure off.
• 1:09:49
  You know, you you you want to extemporize as you talk, but.
• 1:09:52
  The more prepared you are, the more you can be assured that
• 1:09:55
  you're going to ask everything. Right, absolutely.
• 1:10:02
  And I think your mic is muted, buddy.
• 1:10:05
  No, it's not. It looked like your mouth was
• 1:10:08
  his. Your mouth just moved.
• 1:10:10
  Did it not? I don't know what.
• 1:10:12
  You're talking about, I don't know, I'm going.
• 1:10:14
  I'm going. I'm going crazy.
• 1:10:14
  He. Knows I'm nothing, He'll admit
• 1:10:17
  nothing. Did you ever go to segue from
• 1:10:20
  that awkward moment? Did you ever go to the arcade
• 1:10:22
  with Mr. Carmack you were talking about?
• 1:10:24
  You were supposed to go. So yeah, after he and I were
• 1:10:28
  done, he told me in an e-mail, like I had to e-mail him a
• 1:10:32
  couple times to about this project.
• 1:10:34
  He was like, you are the only one who can Get Me Out of my
• 1:10:37
  programmers cave these days, which is a really nice
• 1:10:40
  compliment. And so after the interview, he's
• 1:10:41
  like, oh, I thought you'd be here.
• 1:10:43
  I was going to take you to the free to play arcade.
• 1:10:45
  I'm like, well, this is terrible.
• 1:10:46
  I hate everything. But I may have an opportunity to
• 1:10:51
  do that in a couple of months for a project I can't really
• 1:10:55
  thought. Maybe you will hear about it
• 1:10:59
  first one day here folks. Who?
• 1:11:01
  Know. Evan, is there anything you
• 1:11:05
  would like to ask Richard or David?
• 1:11:08
  I can't really like think of any questions I've I've like I said
• 1:11:12
  earlier, before we started, I was watching it while I was at
• 1:11:14
  work. I watched it over the weekend
• 1:11:16
  and. To hear you guys talk about
• 1:11:18
  everything that came into like the decisions like especially
• 1:11:21
  the big box stuff, I loved some certain segments like the the
• 1:11:25
  Golden Eye segments. So to hear more on that
• 1:11:26
  especially how it was actual like footage captured like
• 1:11:29
  recently instead of you know, just found here or there or
• 1:11:32
  something like that was really interesting.
• 1:11:34
  So I mean I I I can't think of any questions.
• 1:11:36
  I can only just think of high praise to both of you and to
• 1:11:39
  everybody on the team for this. Like I loved it not knowing
• 1:11:43
  anything about it other than hearing.
• 1:11:45
  I mean, I haven't really heard anybody talk about it other than
• 1:11:46
  my dad and that wasn't passing, you know, here and there.
• 1:11:49
  You know, he'd mentioned Doom or Quake or something like that.
• 1:11:51
  I've really only understood or heard more about these games
• 1:11:54
  because of Nick, and he loves to talk about them and all that
• 1:11:58
  kind of stuff. I mean, obviously he's a huge.
• 1:12:00
  Half life nerd and everything like that.
• 1:12:01
  So to hear the other previous stuff is is interesting as well.
• 1:12:05
  So to come back and like see Maze War and OK that was the
• 1:12:08
  first one. OK that's really interesting.
• 1:12:10
  It's just a bunch of lines. All right.
• 1:12:12
  What's the next thing? And then yeah, then you got, you
• 1:12:15
  know you go from there. Right.
• 1:12:17
  So I I I can't think of anything other than to just say
• 1:12:21
  congratulations to both of you and everybody on the team for
• 1:12:23
  this. I can't wait to watch it more
• 1:12:25
  more. I'm going to show it to my dad.
• 1:12:26
  He's going to love it. Seeing the first cut now, now
• 1:12:34
  diving back in because it is a four hour.
• 1:12:36
  It is 4 hours four. And 1/2.
• 1:12:39
  It doesn't feel like. It 4 1/2 hours almost 5.
• 1:12:41
  But it doesn't. I'll say that the the thing.
• 1:12:43
  It's pacing so well. You are correct.
• 1:12:45
  Does not feel like it, but it is that long.
• 1:12:49
  So there I'll have to I'll stand up after like a long time like.
• 1:12:53
  Oh man, my back and I smell bad now.
• 1:12:56
  Somehow I I grew to my chair. What the fuck?
• 1:12:59
  But it's a wonderful experience because of the pacing of it and
• 1:13:04
  going back into it, because I I started it again.
• 1:13:06
  I was actually at my job today and when I got home preparing
• 1:13:09
  for the interview and I was like, wow, God damn, I love this
• 1:13:13
  all over again. But I because.
• 1:13:15
  But I also know where I can skip if I had to.
• 1:13:17
  So I was like, OK, I know this. I'm going to.
• 1:13:20
  I think I need to be refreshed over here.
• 1:13:23
  And that's now that you're bringing up the big box menu and
• 1:13:25
  all that that makes. Man, I just had a Jimmy Neutron
• 1:13:28
  brain blast and I'm so stoked for this movie to grip you're.
• 1:13:31
  Happy about those transitions, no?
• 1:13:33
  Yeah. Yeah dude, I couldn't.
• 1:13:36
  Okay. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:39
  Yeah. Who?
• 1:13:40
  Us. You know, it's one of those
• 1:13:43
  moments. Is there any?
• 1:13:45
  No, I was just saying I love the transitions.
• 1:13:47
  I think I didn't think about it at the time or like realized
• 1:13:49
  that was the whole point of it being like a palate cleanser.
• 1:13:51
  But looking at it now, after you've explained that, it's
• 1:13:53
  like, Oh yeah, that works incredibly well to not only find
• 1:13:57
  your place but also go like, OK, kind of in a way, sort of a
• 1:14:01
  mental reset right onto the next one.
• 1:14:03
  And I kind of I I liked that. It felt like, at least in the
• 1:14:06
  earlier part of the documentary where it's like if there is a
• 1:14:10
  transition here. But I felt like I kept taking
• 1:14:12
  the lessons from the previous games that I had watched.
• 1:14:15
  Going into the next one, going into the one after that.
• 1:14:18
  And I thought that was really cool to have.
• 1:14:19
  Like I'm remembering the tidbits here and there, especially if
• 1:14:21
  they're brought up again into the next game.
• 1:14:23
  But I was kind of holding on to the the bigger ones and
• 1:14:27
  especially all the little tidbits and stuff like that.
• 1:14:29
  I love love the technical stuff as well.
• 1:14:32
  But then the things that stick with you are those human moments
• 1:14:36
  that you know, I I saw this in a movie.
• 1:14:38
  I wanted to put it in the game. And that's why this is iconic
• 1:14:41
  and and whatnot. So yeah, it was really
• 1:14:44
  incredible in that regard as well.
• 1:14:45
  Sorry Nick didn't cut you off. No, absolutely not.
• 1:14:48
  We're we're closing in on the time where you know where we end
• 1:14:52
  that. So I guess my biggest question
• 1:14:54
  for you guys to our audiences is there any updates on the film
• 1:14:58
  you wanted to let them know about anything important about
• 1:15:01
  the film they should know about maybe any more funding or
• 1:15:06
  anything that. You just want our audience to
• 1:15:08
  know about FPS documentary? Well, when you're listening to
• 1:15:13
  this, probably in early July, we will be running what we're
• 1:15:17
  calling the final sale, which isn't really the final sale.
• 1:15:20
  It is your last opportunity to get your name in the credits
• 1:15:23
  though. So if you want to do that, go to
• 1:15:25
  fps.fpsdoc.com and you can still pledge.
• 1:15:31
  Now we've got digital editions, various physical editions
• 1:15:34
  including a big box collectors item.
• 1:15:37
  So you know, definitely go to the website, check that out and
• 1:15:41
  be a part of gaming history. That's exactly what I said and I
• 1:15:47
  was really happy about that. There you go.
• 1:15:48
  There you go. Richard, is there anything you
• 1:15:51
  would like anyone to know? No, I think David covered that
• 1:15:56
  pretty well. I guess just a reminder that.
• 1:16:02
  Our our business model is sort of like how limited run games
• 1:16:06
  works. So if you if you're going if if
• 1:16:10
  you wanna watch the film then you should support this.
• 1:16:14
  You should you should buy it at this point get your name in the
• 1:16:17
  credits. It'll be nice.
• 1:16:18
  If you've got enough money you can get yourself a beautiful big
• 1:16:21
  box. I I don't I don't know if we're
• 1:16:24
  doing this big box again after this there will be eventually
• 1:16:28
  another chance to buy a physical edition but.
• 1:16:32
  Then that's like, that's it. We're not, this is not going to
• 1:16:36
  be perpetually available. You won't be able to buy this in
• 1:16:39
  the store. We are doing limited time
• 1:16:42
  releases, so don't wait too long if you want it.
• 1:16:49
  You guys heard it here first, man.
• 1:16:51
  You better get in on it now. Get your copies in.
• 1:16:54
  Absolutely. And I guess my final question
• 1:16:57
  is. FPS Wow, that's cool.
• 1:17:01
  Us very. Good.
• 1:17:02
  The next evolution of the FPS. I screwed the cats out of the
• 1:17:06
  bag. Now Nick, way to go way.
• 1:17:10
  To go to win, there's so much. History FPS two hell on earth.
• 1:17:16
  I don't. I don't.
• 1:17:17
  I don't know. I don't think we have any
• 1:17:19
  concrete plans right now. Yeah, we've talked about maybe
• 1:17:25
  it would be great to do it, but. Let's let's finish this, let's
• 1:17:28
  get this out, let let people enjoy it.
• 1:17:31
  And then we're going to to all get together and talk about what
• 1:17:36
  are we gonna do next. We've got a bunch of different
• 1:17:38
  ideas. That's one of them.
• 1:17:41
  And and I don't know maybe we'll find the the the bandwidth to do
• 1:17:47
  2 projects simultaneously. Maybe we'll only be able to do
• 1:17:49
  one, I don't know. But unless this flops, we're
• 1:17:53
  going to do something else. Together after this, So go out
• 1:17:58
  and buy it and make sure that this is a success so that we can
• 1:18:02
  make another film we want to make more.
• 1:18:05
  Yes, we do. Maybe we'll open this one up to
• 1:18:08
  modding. That seems to be the next step,
• 1:18:10
  so. People will be watching just me
• 1:18:13
  and Evan look like 2 Muppet dudes.
• 1:18:16
  My God, what's their names? I like the. 2.
• 1:18:20
  Yeah, yeah. Just tell their problems.
• 1:18:22
  Hey, Boo, Yeah. I know David wrote that.
• 1:18:26
  Boo David. That's definitely Richard's
• 1:18:29
  spot. The movie's phenomenal.
• 1:18:34
  WAC loved it immensely. Absolutely.
• 1:18:37
  Please, please support this film.
• 1:18:40
  We will link your guys' discord in the notes of the show.
• 1:18:43
  Join the discord. Join in on the discussion.
• 1:18:46
  It's it's a wonderful project. I've been following for the for
• 1:18:49
  a long time and I'm very fortunate to be now talking to
• 1:18:51
  Richard and David. Additionally, please go buy
• 1:18:56
  David and Richard's books. They're both authors of dope ass
• 1:19:00
  books. You got Share Where your heroes
• 1:19:02
  and Long live Mortal Kombats. Go go buy those books.
• 1:19:05
  Check them out. Just support the creators.
• 1:19:08
  Don't support us. We don't need it.
• 1:19:10
  We suck. They need it.
• 1:19:12
  Support them. Did I do a good job Shilling.
• 1:19:15
  Is that how you do it? I?
• 1:19:17
  Did. That's great.
• 1:19:18
  So flood is strong, so flood is strong, man.
• 1:19:21
  God woo. All right guys, Thank you kid
• 1:19:25
  for coming to another Absolutely WASD and Beyond podcast.
• 1:19:28
  Please check out FPS Documentary once it's available.
• 1:19:31
  Support it when you can or miss out forever.
• 1:19:35
  Till next time, take it easy, guys.
• 1:19:38
  See this is the WASD. And Beyond Podcast.
• 1:20:15
  Enemy Spawn.