July 21, 2023 • 52 mins
This week, Jason is joined by Digital Eclipse editorial director Chris Kohler to talk about The Making of Karateka, the upcoming interactive documentary which chronicles the development of a classic game from the mid-80s. Kohler speaks about the story behind the project, reveals a few interesting tidbits, and speaks about the importance of game preservation in today's industry.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:26):
Hello, and welcome to episode numberone hundred and thirty five of the Cheese
Stakes to Get Charis podcast presided byfox PHL The Gambler, one of two
point five FM fourteen eighty AM iHeartRadiowhere wherever you get your podcasts, you
can download this show and listen toit. My name is Jason Finnelli and
I am the Esports and Game Againstiderfour fox PHL The Gambler, And after
(00:47):
our special episode earlier this week withMegacat Studios and those fine folks talking about
Russell Quest, we have yet anotherfun interview segment for you. This episode
one major talk with one developer froma game or sorry, the representative from
another studio doing a really really coolproject that I am very excited to present
to you right now, so todayon She Steaks and Controller's episode number one
(01:12):
hundred and thirty five. Very excitedfor multiple reasons. If you remember,
is past November, I had thehonor of reviewing Atari fifty for the switch
I played it for for Game InformerOnline, not their magazine online. That
was made by Digital Eclipse, whohas taken it upon themselves to turn their
(01:32):
products into digital museums, which Ireally appreciate they started with Atari, but
now they're getting a little a littlemore focused, a little more. They're
gonna spotlight one game as opposed toan entire company, that game being Karatica,
which or Kara Taka. However,we've tried talking about pronouncing it,
(01:52):
and I still got it wrong.But either way, I had the editorial
director of Digital Eclipse here, ChrisKohler. We're going to talk about this
project, and I am very excitedto do so. Chris, how are
you today? Very good? Thankyou for having me. Thank you for
that review of Atari fifty. Wereally appreciated that. UM. Thank you
for checking on the pronunciation of ofKronica and everything. It's you know,
(02:14):
as you know, we we addressit in the product. There is a
video actually in the interactive documentary TheMaking of Karnica U, in which you
know I pronounced I mean I speakJapanese. 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
(02:36):
eighties, didn't know Japanese and youknow, it's not like it's just nineteen
eighty four. He get just puton put on YouTube to find out how
to pronounce it. He always saidkarataka. Um, some people say karatcha,
and really it's just like just justpronounce it how you want. At
this point, it's like it's it'syou know, it's just gonna be impossible
to get everybody to agree and theand it's like ultimately we're all varying degrees
(02:59):
of off of what the original Japanesepronunciation 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 whatone two letters in one syllable will do.
If you just take away the carand it's karate or karate, people
have way less trouble with it.But I imagine that was already copyrighted back
(03:20):
in the age exactly exactly, yeahand right, And I tend to say
like more like, you know,I grew up you know, calling you
know karate, you know, andit'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 andyou know, we're no closer to a
(03:42):
cure. Yeah, I understand.The Japanese language is a very complicated thing.
I'm actually teaching myself right now thanksto that green owl on Duo Lingo,
slowly getting through it, and itis quite a challenge, but a
good one. I do appreciate it. So my first question about insert pronunciation
of game here. What so youwent from Atari fifty and that entire history
(04:03):
of a major company, fifty yearsof research and prototypes and design docs and
all this to one single game twoyears worth of whatever Jordan had worked with
at the time. So my firstquestion is a simple one. Why this
game? Why Kara? What wasthe reason for this to be the first
(04:24):
time you try the single game documentaryas opposed to the company wide doc.
Well, the funny thing is,and you would have no way of knowing
this, of course, but Iwill tell you, is that really we
went from Karatica to Atari fifty inthat when I started working at Digital Eclipse
in twenty twenty, the first thingthat I was put on was this project
that was that had been going fora little while called the Making of Karnica,
(04:46):
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, youknow, I kind of I took a
step back and I started doing Ikind of started doing the research from zero
again because I was like, Idon't want to base my decisions here on
(05:10):
what's already in this this sort oflike early early version of the product.
I want to go do the researchagain. 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 getto this to answer your question. One
of the things that makes it perfectis that Jordan Mechner was a total like
documentarian himself and a pack rat whosaved absolutely everything. So as he was
(05:36):
going along in college, like freshmanyear 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 onthis. Okay, he was writing a
journal, a daily journal, thathe kept up that he's actually kept up
through his whole life. And hestarted writing a journal around that time and
(05:57):
daily documented the process, everything thathe was doing in at college, but
also everything he worked on on thatgame. And so we had something that
very few people have if you're tryingto look at the history of how a
game was developed, a daily logof everything that he was doing. Not
only that, but you know whathe was feeling he was doing it,
(06:23):
you know, So all of histeenage angst is right there on the page.
And Jordan has published those journals andyou can you can buy those and
read them right now. And thenadditionally, he did all of his designing
like on paper, and he savedall the paper, and so all the
paper, all of the design documentsfor Krotica, just just stacks and stacks
(06:43):
of stuff is all in the careof the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester,
New York, who we kind ofbasically partnered with to put this out.
They gave us access to all theJordan's materials and were extremely helpful.
So basically at that point I goback and I'm like, okay, I'm
gonna read Jordan's journals. Of coursefrom start to finish, I'm going to
um go to the strong and youknow, redo the research and say,
(07:09):
what do you guys have. Iwant to make absolutely sure that we have
everything pertaining to Karnica. Found abunch more stuff, found a lot of
Chronica stuff in the Prince of Persiafolders where it had been you know,
sort of accidentally missorted, and startto realize that there is a way to
tell this story, Like there's somuch information journals and design documents, and
(07:32):
then then we start looking at thecontents of Jordan's floppy discs because those had
been preserved about ten years ago andby Jason Scott and the Internet archive folks,
and they had like gotten all ofJordan's floppies and you know, done
like very expert level stuff to tryto get as much data as they could
(07:53):
off of the shoebox full of floppydiscs. And so there were like graphics,
cut content and things like that orlike in development versions of Kerotica,
so we had as much It's likeno other game from nineteen eighty four is
this well documented, unless I meanthere's probably like there's probably something similar for
(08:16):
like Super Mario Brothers, but it'sin 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 theseparts, this was the This was the
fun as a former journalist, youknow what I mean, Like, this
was the fun part. Because nowI've got a diary in which he explains
(08:37):
what he was doing that day.I've got images off with floppy disk,
and I've got scans of paper documentsand 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 adesign document, I can say, here's
the design document, here's what Jordansaid when he was writing this, here's
(09:00):
what came out of it as anoriginal, you know, or as a
sprite on his floppy disc, andshow all of those things together and lay
it out all chronologically. So froma content perspective, Keronica has enough supporting
content to let us do and Atarififty size is essentially it's the same thing
(09:22):
as Atari fifty where we've got fiveyou know, chapters essentially that you can
go through. It just gives usthe 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,
(09:46):
we want to tell some of thesestories of video game history that aren't being
told. And one of the storiesthat'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 videogame industry crashed and there was this black
hole, and then Nintendo came ridingin on a white horse and saved video
(10:07):
games, you know, and that'slike, there is something to be said
for that in terms of the gameconsole 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
(10:28):
know, that's where gaming kind ofshifted to and we just don't hear about
these stories. And Jordan Meckner's Coronicawas a profoundly influential game when it came
out in nineteen eighty four, inthe middle of what some people just sort
of consider the nothing time. Itcame out in eighty four, it sold
a ton of copies, and importantly, it made so many innovations in terms
(10:50):
of the way that video games hadpresented cinematic scenes or cut scenes animation.
Jordan used rhodoscoping okay to achieve lifelikeanimation inside of this game. In terms
of soundtrack, Jordan's dad, FrancisMechner, who is sort of one of
the heroes of our story, wasa classical pianist as a hobby, and
(11:11):
he composed the soundtrack in an erawhere games certainly on the Apple too and
on most other platforms, really didn'thave music scoring them. And but he
did in a really smart way becausehe used this life motif approach for every
character, every emotion, every settinghad its own little stinger of music.
(11:33):
So that lifted the emotional kind of, you know, m weight of the
story as well. And so Keronicamakes 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 theircomputer that really felt like they're like the
hero of an action movie. Andthat was so profound and it inspired a
(11:56):
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 inthis 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 andshow um why this game, which was,
(12:20):
by the way, you know,as I've kind of alluded to,
is the debut the directorial debut titleof 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 ofPersia would grow. Um. And so
(12:41):
it's important to look at it thatway 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, asfar as it being an amazing story,
it's a there's a wonderful father sonstory at the core of this whole thing,
because you know, Francis Machner notonly did he dad, he's the
dad of the year, Like notdid he compose the soundtrack to his son's
game, you know, support hishis teenage son in any way that he
(13:03):
could to make this game amazing.When Jordan wanted to rhodoscope somebody, his
father put on his wife's karate outfitand went out into the woods behind their
house in upstate New York and ranaround in this karate outfit while Jordan filmed
him with a Super eight camera andcaptured his dad's running and jumping and climbing
(13:24):
motions and then rotascoped them into Karatica. And so when you see the Karatica
running around, he wrote a scopetwo people. His his mom's karate teacher
for all the karate moves, andthen his dad for all of the ancillary
stuff like running and climbing and thingslike that, the non martial arts moves.
And that makes the two of themtied for being essentially the first like
(13:46):
mocap actors ever in a video game. And again it's his untold story that,
like, you know, Francis mcneris this like unsung hero of video
games. For all the work thathe did on this, you don't really
hear about him. And so wewant to make we want to get that
story out there. So it's astory that we're passionate about telling. It's
a really important game. It's astory where we have all the ability to
(14:07):
do it, and so um wehad to. I was working on this
and we had to shelve it fora while because so many other big projects
coming in that needed all hands ondeck. I was working on this before
we signed Blizzard Arcade Collection. Soit was this, It was this lightning
rapid like you know, Blizzard ArcadeCollection comes in, needs you on that
teenage Mutan Nincha Turtles, the CalbungaCollection, We need you on that.
(14:28):
We actually, after Kalbunga Collection,we'd like had a kickoff meeting for Corotica
to get it going again. Andwhile that was happening, like, we
signed Atari fifty and Atari fifty wasjust this great opportunity though, because Atari
needed something different and we're like,you know what, We've we've got this
(14:48):
interactive documentary approach that we've been workshoppinginternally that we've been designing Corotica to that,
and so we were able to putthe brakes on everything else get Atar
fifty out the door in like recordtime because we had to do it for
the Atari fifty ten overs re yearum. And then once that was done,
finally had the time and the bandwidthto go back. Uh. And
(15:11):
and not only the Karatica, butother stuff that's coming up later in the
gold Master series that we're working onnow. UM so yes, um yeah,
it's a series. We've announced ita series, um and so and
so that's happening. So I hopethat 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 seriesmight be um, a bunch of games.
It might be one developer, itmight be one company, you know,
(15:35):
going on. It's not necessarily thiscould be one game. But in
this case, you know, it'sit'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 theApple two, which was what Jordan created.
There's the ports to the Commodore sixtyfour and the Atari eight hundred.
Um. We even speak with inthe video in the video sections of the
(16:00):
cook who actually did the conversion programmingfor the Atari and the Commodore versions.
So we get into the details oflike what was that, like, you
know, what's it like to supportsomething from He's one very very different platform
to another. Right, you haveJordan's original game shooter that he made called
Death Bounce, which is what hewas trying to pitch before Karnica that got
(16:22):
canceled, but it's in four differentprototypes of that are in the game,
several prototypes of Karnica, and evenAsteroid 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 invarious stages of production. And again,
like Autari fifty, as you gothrough the timelines, when those versions come
(16:48):
up, you have the chance toplay them, and you have the chance
to check them out and then goback 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 withAtari fifty, you're going through the history
of the company and you just putin the full games that they you're talking
about in that particular, you know, year here with one game, are
(17:11):
you breaking up the game into sectionsand they play those sections or do they
play the whole thing and then getthe history. But if it's now like
fourteen different prototypes and the full gamesand stuff like that, it kind of
makes more sense in my head asto house. Yeah, I mean,
I think it's just important to notehere that like you as the player,
have the option to dive into oneof these deeper sort of segments that you
(17:34):
know, just as if you wereat a museum, you know, and
you're going through the museum. Youcould either start at the beginning of the
museum exhibit and just walk really fastthrough 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 toexhibit and then just go from you know,
station to station, and if there'san interactive part of that, you
(17:55):
can stay there and interact with itand exhaust all of the utility out of
that before you move on to thenext part of the museum. Depends on
how you're feeling that day and justhow deeply interested you are. So if
you just want to kind of quicklygo through the story, you can do
that. But if you want tostop and play a game for a while,
you know, you can do that. As well, and you just
nothing is a lott you know whatI mean. You just have the freedom
(18:17):
to just go where you want togo. We'll try to guide you to
what's next chronologically, but you havethis 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, youknow, 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
(18:38):
want to watch somebody play You evenhave chapter select in the watch mode,
so if you want to just jumpto 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 Appletwo version of Kronica, we have director's
commentary on the watch mode, soyou can watch somebody play through Jordan's original
version um while you listen to JordanNor and Francis mcner um talk about extemporaneously
(19:03):
to sort of talk about the variousthings that you're seeing and the little bit
of the behind the scenes of howthat was put together. That's awesome.
Um, I'm wondering, is helike reading through his journals and remembering his
angsty moments as he's going through theseor is he just kind of talking about
what he was doing at the timehe is reacting to what's going on on
the screen. Basically what we youknow, we we had once we got
(19:25):
the playthrough and we knew that thatwas 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 canjump into the playthrough at anytime and start
playing. That's why the chapter selectallows you to say, I want to
practice that fight against the bird,just jump right to it and then jump
(19:45):
in and start playing. So it'scool chapter select. Um. So we
had to make sure that that wasone hundred percent done before we went to
Jordan and Francis and actually visited themin New York City in April. Um,
so it wasn't that long ago andjust uh sat them down with the
demo, played the watch mode setup like my phone and just recorded them.
(20:06):
Um. It was a very adhoc thing because we weren't really sure
if we were going to be ableto 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 justit was one take, totally just you
know, off the cuff. Butit's but it's really brilliant. It's really
fun to listen to. That's cool. And we mentioned we talked to a
(20:26):
little bit earlier about Prince of Persiaand how this game kind of set the
table for that. Uh is thatreference In the latter half of the timeline
documentary portion, do you get intolike what parts of Karatica became part of
Prince of Persia formula and how that'show that flow works. Yeah. So
after Karatica, you know, itwas a big success, and you know,
Jordan and his publisher were both like, we got to do Karatica two.
(20:48):
So Jordan starts messing with new designsand things like that, and he
was inspired, as you'll see becausethere's an entire chapter that's just called Karatica
two U. He was fired bygames like there's a broader run game called
the Castles of Doctor Creep, whichwas like a more like um it had
more like traps and platform kind ofstuff, and he was thinking, gee,
(21:08):
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 Karaticagame. He was using the Karatica characters.
He was thinking maybe Princess Mariko wouldbe playable this time, and story
treatments and stuff like that. Um, but the game you kind of see
(21:30):
it like once you get to thefinal like you know, mock up of
Karataka two, it starts to looka 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
(21:51):
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 wecontinued 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 peoplecan do their own research and filling exactly
from there. Yeah, so youtalked about also the black hole in the
(22:15):
gaming industry that was filled by Appletwo, which is what this was developed
on. Do you take some timeto 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 wasused to make this game as you did
with the Atari consoles in fifty,not super deeply, we do, you
(22:37):
know, in these interactive documentaries,as we do with with Atari fifty.
You know, we want to makesure that we're not just sort of taking
the game ram and just sort ofplunking 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 introductionof like the Apple two or the Commodo
sixty before the Atari, you know, we talked a little bit about well,
(23:00):
when was that released, what wereits strengths? You know, so
we talk a bit about that.You will glean some of that, especially
from a lot of Jordan's commentary aboutthe Apple two and what it was capable
of, what the Commodore and theAtari 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
(23:23):
of the how the Apple two works, even though it is very interesting and
to understand that platform does help youunderstand 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 ofaesthetic interest. And the interesting thing about
(23:44):
that that I found out as Iwas 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 Appletwo. Technically the hardware could only do
like, um, you know,luminants basically like black and white, right,
but he figured out ways to sendsignals along that black and white pathway
(24:11):
basically to juice you know, youryour monitor. You'd have to have color
monitor obviously, but he would getthe monitor to be able to display those
colors um and and like if youit could only kind of display them in
certain areas. So if you shifta pixel over that was blue, it
becomes orange, you know what Imean. It's one of those things where
it's like that's what Apple two programmershad to figure out. It's like color
(24:34):
was not just put this color there, it was And that's why when you
look at Chronica and other Apple twogames, you see like, um uh,
what seems to be like sloppiness ofthe colors. You know, you'll
see like something that's orange and it'llhave like a blue pixel in there somewhere.
And that's literally just because the Appletwo is doing color in a very
(24:56):
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 ifthere's ever a gold Gold Master Series on
the Apple too itself, it wouldbe a good place to put that.
And you know, I think andthat's a really good observation because it's like
(25:17):
with the Gold Master Series, likeit doesn't necessarily have to be about like
a game or even games, youknow what I mean, there could be
It's like it's it's and that's what'simportant 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
(25:40):
the game, that the pitch hereis like the story is so interesting.
Yeah, that it's it's it's themeat. It actually is the core user
experience. So if someone were tocome to you for a potential pitch in
this gold Master series, if youeven accept them, what would be your
vironments would you? What would youand Digital Eclips want or need even in
(26:04):
order to even consider doing something likethis for another project, whether it be
a single game or an old developeror even the platform. As we've talked
about, what sort of information andhow 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 wherethere could be just a variety of different
(26:29):
things. I mean, maybe thegame itself is so well known that people
are already so passionate about it thatwe'll just figure out what the story is
and tell that story. But ifyou were to come to us and say,
well, I've got this game andnobody'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 reallyinteresting challenge of can we take something that's
(26:51):
got no fan base whatsoever, butthe story is so good that we think
that if we get it out topeople and put that context around it,
we will actually create fans of thisgame. Um, I think we would
like that challenge as well. Soit's really just like I feel like everything
has a potential argument for it,you know, whether it was you know,
(27:12):
you know, like whether whether it'sit's already got fans, whether it
doesn't have fans. But if there'sa good story there, if there's a
story that we can tell, it'ssomething I could think of at least two
or three different projects off the topof my head that I would love to
see get this treatment. But wecan, uh, we can bypass that.
I don't want to. I don'twant to start saying you should do
(27:33):
this, because that's I'm sure youget enough of that on social media and
stuff like that. It's not youknow, ultimately, well, I mean,
we we do, and we likecards on the table. It's like
I like to hear like you shoulddo this, especially when it's something that's
like on social media, and it'skind of quantifiable because ultimately, it's not
like we're sitting around with a biglist of games and we're going, let's
(27:56):
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 peoplewant, you know, that gives us
a little bit of ammo. That'slike, oh, you know, we
have all you know, fans areasking for this, like this is what
we hear about a lot. Soit's it's it's good to hear. But
(28:19):
also it's like, don't don't youknow, mistake the process of um,
you know, we're we're just pickingwhatever we want. I wish maybe in
twenty years if we really establish ourselvespeople 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 Iwant to ask also, I know we
(28:41):
kind of touched on this a littlebit, 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 museumup in Rochester. Did you find this
to be a little more challenging tobuild enough of a story to get through
those five chapters as opposed to thefirst time you did this, where you
(29:03):
had fifty years of information to digthrough. This one a little bit more
focused. I'm just I'm just wonderinghow challenging it was for the team to
get that story. Did it becomeapparent like right from the jump? Um?
Yeah, I mean within like thefirst once I really started reading the
(29:23):
journals and once I really started lookingat and asking because it really you my
first week or two with it atthe company back in twenty twenty, because
literally this was what I was puton and I was just like, okay,
you know, let me get theinformation. Once you start looking at
it and realizing there's just so muchthere. But I think that you know,
I also had a twenty five yearcareer in journalism prior to that,
(29:44):
and I mean, so much ofthat is um, you know, there's
all this information out there. Howdo you perceive what's important? How do
you start to see a story takeshape in this sort of mass of of
seemingly unrelated events and so writing bigmagazine features, big five thousand word features.
(30:06):
You started to develop a little bitof a sense of oh, that
can go in, that can goin. That's important once you start connecting
the dots. I mean, Ithink that's that's that's kind of the big
thing. So maybe it's something thatsomebody without that experience might not have perceived.
But you know, in from mysense, it was like, yeah,
yeah, this this, I mean, there's a huge story to be
(30:27):
told here, and we just gottayou 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 opposedto if you had launched them the other
(30:48):
way around? You do you feelthat having going basically doing the trial run
with fifty years of Atari made thisone even better in uh? In retrospect,
yes, absolutely, yeah, onehundred percent, because there's there's so
much that, like you know again, like you know, Coronica was in
the works, but Atari, it'slike we had a deadline and we had
to finish it. And finishing somethingis very important, you know, because
(31:10):
you do ninety percent of the workand then after that you do the other
ninety percent of the work at theend. You know, it's like just
just getting something completely totally finished outthe door. You know. It allowed
us to really just like bang ona lot of our you know, initial
ideas and like preconceived notions and andreally you know, test it out in
(31:33):
a product, and then of courseit's very fortunate, you know, we
released Atari fifty. Reviews were verygood, and importantly there was a lot
and there were a lot of peoplewho 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 Atarififty and they're like, where are
(31:55):
my video games? What is allthis stuff? You know? I mean
that could have happened and what isyeah, yeah, like where's asteroids?
I can't find asteroids? You know, um, And we did a lot
to make sure that both of thosetypes of players. You know, if
you just wanted a list of games, we gave you a great games carousel
that you know, sorted and youknow, had you know a lot of
(32:16):
information about each of those games tohelp you make that decision of what to
play. But if you wanted togo 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 thatway 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,
(32:39):
I think a lot of people paidit no attention and we're just like,
oh, it's another collection of Atarigames. Okay, I don't and I
made that I will admit I madethat assumption as well. Well. The
Game Informer review came a week ortwo later, I think, after the
lease, and you typically don't saythat happened with IGN as well, and
that happened with there wasn't a review, but that happened with Kotaku's coverage as
(33:00):
well. And I think that that'sactually that's actually great because what it means
is it came out and there wasthis sense of oh, oops, like
we should have you know, weshould 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 afterthat initial review cycle somebody's gonna go back,
(33:22):
you know, uh and and coverhim. So it's it's wonderful that
that happened because it really it madeit very clear that people were picking up
on it. Oh, this actuallyis something different. And the benefit then
to the Gold Master Series is nowwe're like, here's our next interactive documentary.
We've got tons of people already whoare just like, oh, like
Autari fifty, this is gonna begood. You know. So it really
(33:45):
that's that's that's very helpful. UM. You know, for for us,
we're launching the UM launching the indiething. 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 reallylucky, UM, very grateful to have
it announced on the ID Xbox showcase. That was definitely awesome, UM and
uh. But but still ultimately there'sno big publisher here, like with a
(34:09):
big marketing machine. It's just fallsto 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 needto do UM to treat you know this
these classic games which we believe arethey're not just like old you know,
(34:29):
products that you sell in the bargainbin, Like, this is the foundational
art on which the video game mediais based, and we believe we need
to treat them with more respect umand so this is a way that we're
trying to do that. Now you'reyou 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 bea heavy topic here, and that
(34:50):
is preservation. Last last week,that report or two weeks ago, the
report came out that eighty seven percentof games ever released are no longer available
in any platform. Blew my mindjust because I assume that you could still
get some of the weird games thatI played as a kid, because I
still have them, so people probablystill have them. But no, a
lot of those games aren't available anymore. Did you see that and start to
(35:14):
think, Okay, maybe we're ontosomething with this Golden Master series. Maybe
we can bring that number down bygetting some of these titles back out into
the forefront or the spotlight, evenif it's a little spotlight like like Keronica.
As as great and foundational as itis, it like only for old
folks like me and you older folks, not old folks who have been playing
(35:36):
games for a long time. Weknow about it, but but the youth
now won't until this. So dohave you guys kind of like taken up
that mantle a little bit? Likeall right, if there's a preservation issue
and they're not going to do anythingabout 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 ofdifferent organizations as far as game preservation.
(35:57):
You know, the Video Game HistoryFoundation wants to make this extremely salient point
because they're arguing for um, youknow, alterations to copyright laws essentially that
allow UM libraries and institutions to providefor 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 youcan access them is either um A you
(36:22):
know, piracy or B you justcan't. And so if if library it's
just simply can't do it. Imean there's there's games. Look, if
you want to go pirate a laseractive game, you can't do that,
Like you have to have a laseractive, you know, set up.
But if libraries and institutions were ableto set up and provide remote access for
(36:43):
these things, then that would giveresearchers UM or quite frankly, not just
researchers, but just you know,everybody, the opportunity to play these things
within a legal framework where they donot have to I mean it when we're
talking about UM. One of theother things that we want to do with
(37:04):
the Gold Master series is bring backcomputer 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, youdon't actually see personal computer games being brought
back as much, and you youdon't see them on game consoles. Because
it's one thing to re release acomputer game for a computer because Karnica,
(37:29):
you know, used keyboard controls,right, and you needed keyboard controls to
get through this. So what we'redoing, and we have engineers essentially working
on this for Karnica and for otherstuff in the Gold Master series, it's
a big task, a big expensiveengineering task. Have a highly paid engineer
sit down and spend days and weeksessentially taking computer games and bringing them up
(37:57):
so that you can use a consolecontroller to interact with them. Uh,
and so with Keronica, it's likeeven if you wanted to just you know,
pirate it, you know, you'restill dealing with all of the intricacies
of like like it's it's like II use emulators all but time and just
getting a computer game running and belike, okay, we get this Apple
(38:20):
two emulator. Okay, well howdo I mount a disk image? You
know? Once I do that,what do I have to type anything?
I mean, god, you knowI'm abusing like a you know, a
Commodo or sixty four emulator. It'slike 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 likeyou know all the stuff and you run
the and you and you then yourun it. But it's like I don't
(38:43):
remember this. I have to golook it up, and I have to
go look this information up, andthis information is on some forum posts like
there there there were times when I'mtrying to emulate something and the answer is
buried in some forum post from twothousand and eight, and it's like this
is not sustainable, No, can'tkeep doing this like. This is why
(39:06):
when the Video Game History Foundation pointsout these games are like critically endangered,
it is because all of the rigamarrole that you have to go through and
this sort of fragile ecosystem of likehomebrew hackers and pirates that are propping it
all up is it's it's it's it'snot sustainable and it's disrespectful, and it's
(39:30):
something that you know, we shouldbe working a lot harder to now from
the Digital Eclipse perspective, we can'tsave every game by putting out products like
this, you know, especially becauselook, we're making the making of Chronica,
but it's like when does our gamebecome incompatible? You know, it's
(39:50):
like what happens twenty years from now, through no fault of our own,
where if we can't go in becauseyou know, what if the development in
froment for the making of Keronica getsdeprecated decades down the line and we can't
even update it anymore. What ifthe storefronts that it's available on all shut
down. You know, then eitherthe way that somebody would access my creative
(40:15):
work would be through what would hoperemote access via a library. I don't
want this to go away, ButI understand that it will unless there's institutions
that are able to provide it topeople, or they'll just pirate it,
you know. And so but fromour perspective, you know, we all
we can do is like the workof like we're what is it. It's
(40:38):
like, you know, it's justit's a massive forests and we can save
like one tree, you know whatI mean, like by through doing this,
but I mean I think it's verywhat 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
(41:06):
from Konami's internal archives that now existin extremely high quality you know, I
think four K on some consoles,you know, digital form. Whereas in
the past, before we embarked onthat project, they existed as a piece
of paper in a building in oneof the countries that is beset by the
(41:29):
most natural disasters of any place onEarth. If if an earthquake didn't get
them, a typhoon was gonna getthem, you know what I mean.
So it's like by doing the projectand by having it because if somebody other
than Digital Eclipse had done a Turtle'syou know collection for Konami, they might
(41:50):
not have said, yeah, wewant every document, you know, and
people are just like, why isthis 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 tobe this, and so from a preservation
standpoint, we actually did do greatwork on that. And so that's the
same thing with you know, withyou know, making a chronica and things
(42:12):
far in the future is just gettingthose those physical documents, turning them into
digital documents that are now everywhere,you know, everybody has them, and
it helps preserve that information in ain a really substantial way. And so
we feel that pressure too. Butthen also we know that that bonus you
know, that what was considered,you know, you speak through the bonus
content. Really, for some peopleis the whole show right now? Do
(42:36):
you think, I mean, obviouslygame 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 otherreason than to just show them how you
do it. It's if you're notgoing to use us, at least let
us show you what we're doing sothat you can maybe do it yourself.
(42:57):
We'd love to do it for you, but I see, yeah, I
mean, like you know, it'ssort of a consulting sort of way.
Yeah, you know, hit usup like we're we're down for We're down
for whatever, you know what Imean, 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 doingif everybody adopts our approach to uh
(43:22):
classic game or archival game releases,will feel very proud that we were able
to, you know, essentially flipthe 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 acause that we all believe in, Like
(43:42):
we want to preserve video game history, want to do our part, and
we want to treat these things withthe respect that they deserve. And if
that gets other people doing that,great, If that gets other people saying,
oh geez, like Digital Clips isa really good job on these.
We gotta hire them to do ournext thing also wonderful, you know.
So yeah, now I'm wondering isthere any and if you if you don't
(44:07):
want to answer this question for fearthat people might think that you're working on
it, that's fine, But isthere any older game that you would love,
like from your youth? But you'relike, man, I haven't played
this in a really long time.I wonder if this is one. Like
if you were the Twitter feed rightright 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
(44:30):
your podcast? I had, Ihad, I had Reggie Feesam episode one
hundred. So maybe okay, okay, so maybe he does. Yeah,
so Miamoto just call me. Youknow, you have my number. Um
No, I mean seriously, Likeit sounds crazy, but like I will
say this all the time, likeabsolutely, Nintendo get in touch. You
know, like I think that whatwe do could actually compliment um, you
(44:55):
know what they have as far asthe the online subscription service. You know,
the context is not there. Andthe thing is, the pitch to
publishers is really list Like, ifyou're just taking the games and putting the
games out, the audience that youhave is gonna be people who are already
kind of like excited about those particulargames. But it's like, we can
(45:17):
help create new fans. So ifthere's something that is dormant, you know,
by putting these things in their propercontext, you know, by doing
it, whether it's the interactive documentaryformat or whether it's something like cow bunga
collection, you know, but byputting this stuff in context and introducing it
to new audiences. And like,one of the things we found with Atari
(45:37):
fifty is that there were a lotof 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 aboutwhere they came from and why they were
(45:58):
important and who worked hard on them, and learning what to look for when
I play these games, then afterthat, when I play the games,
I become more interested in them,and like that is that is the magic
of doing it this way, whichis getting somebody who did not have any
(46:20):
interest and getting them to the pointwhere where they do play that game.
Suddenly now they're a fan of foodFight for the Atari XL or whatever it
is, you know, and solike that's what's so important about this and
so that's really my that's really mypitch to to, you know, to
publishers and like why you want tolet us do it and why we want
to do it this way? Yeah, And which makes a lot of sense
(46:43):
because, like as you mentioned Nintendo, I could think of a ton of
games in their portfolio that I haven'tseen the light of day in years that
could really benefit from this sort ofcomplimentary service. Like you're saying, Star
Tropics is one that comes to mindimmediately, right because nobody knows what that
is outside of like us and EricBailey on Twitter, who I talked to
(47:04):
every once in a while, he'salways mentioning Star Tropics. That would be
a perfect idea. Every company hasgames like that that are deep buried in
their archives and haven't come out andforever even if at all, And I
just think there's a lot of meritto that not just in the preservation of
what did come out, but alsoin the history of these companies that we
may not know about. I feellike you might even have a possibility of
(47:27):
and maybe you might not agree withthis of a series where it's just all
unreleased games or all prototypes from acompany 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 guyswould be interested into? Yeah, I
mean, I think again, likeCoronica, is this really really great test
bed for so many things that wewant to do because we haven't really even
(47:51):
gotten into a lot of this stuffabout like you know, I mean,
one of the other things that wedo in making of Kronica is so we
knew that Jordan used rotoscoping. TheStrong 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 hehe filmed his dad, He took the
(48:14):
film with a movie editing device andthen traced the frame onto a tracing paper,
and then he took a device calleda versa writer, which was this
very very early like device with likea stylist for the Apple two, where
you had your stilus and the siluswas attached to a mechanical arm basically like
on a tablet, and you movedthe mechanical arm around you're drawing, and
(48:36):
it would start recreating that on thescreen in front of you based on the
movements of the arm. And thenhe that's how he digitized all the frames.
It's an incredibly laborious like like processthat 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 hegot like human animation. We have an
(49:00):
interactive thing called Rotoscope Theater in whichI went back and took that video,
found the exact frames from the videothat he traced with tracing paper that he
digitized. That became Chronica Man onscreen and you can compare real life footage
(49:20):
of Francis Mechner with final in gamesprite as if you're in like photoshop,
lay them on top of each otherand see how the real life maps to
give and you do it in aninteractive way, and so that's kind of
like that's something else that we cando. 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 ofCoronica in which Kirk Hamilton's Yes m former
(49:45):
co worker does the Strong Songs podcast. He basically does a little mini Strong
Songs for the Chronica soundtrack and heand he just breaks it down as far
as like this is why this musicis so good, and so we're just
like we're putting everything in the kitchensync into making a Chronica in terms of
weird while wacky ideas, you know, the director's commentary and all that kind
(50:07):
of stuff to show like here's justhere 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'swe'll come up with even more stuff than
(50:27):
we can do and it'll all dependon The first step in this process is
well, what's out there? Youknow, like, what does the company
have internally? What can we goresearch and find on our own, And
then the shape of it sort offollows from the information that we have.
That's awesome. Do you hear?These are the lengths that these folks are
(50:50):
going to make sure that the historyof video games is told in a way
that is scinct and informative and mostof all, entertaining. And I have
a feeling that the history of Karaticaor 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 muchfor your time and your information, and
(51:13):
the interview was great. I lookforward 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 aboutthe next great gold Master series from Digital
Eclipse. Chris, thank you foryour 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 theChief Stakes End Controllers podcast, as always
(51:37):
presented by Fox PHL The Gambler oneor two point five FM fourteen eighty AM
and iHeartRadio. If you're listening tothese words, you've gotten to the end
of the episode, and I verymuch appreciate your time, and I hope
you were entertained and informed, andI 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 betterweek right behind it. And like I
(51:58):
said, we'll be back again nextweek with more cheese steaks and control. Baba h
Hello, and welcome to episode numberone hundred and thirty five of the Cheese
Stakes to Get Charis podcast presided byfox PHL The Gambler, one of two
point five FM fourteen eighty AM iHeartRadiowhere wherever you get your podcasts, you
can download this show and listen toit. My name is Jason Finnelli and
I am the Esports and Game Againstiderfour fox PHL The Gambler, And after
(00:47):
our special episode earlier this week withMegacat Studios and those fine folks talking about
Russell Quest, we have yet anotherfun interview segment for you. This episode
one major talk with one developer froma game or sorry, the representative from
another studio doing a really really coolproject that I am very excited to present
to you right now, so todayon She Steaks and Controller's episode number one
(01:12):
hundred and thirty five. Very excitedfor multiple reasons. If you remember,
is past November, I had thehonor of reviewing Atari fifty for the switch
I played it for for Game InformerOnline, not their magazine online. That
was made by Digital Eclipse, whohas taken it upon themselves to turn their
(01:32):
products into digital museums, which Ireally appreciate they started with Atari, but
now they're getting a little a littlemore focused, a little more. They're
gonna spotlight one game as opposed toan entire company, that game being Karatica,
which or Kara Taka. However,we've tried talking about pronouncing it,
(01:52):
and I still got it wrong.But either way, I had the editorial
director of Digital Eclipse here, ChrisKohler. We're going to talk about this
project, and I am very excitedto do so. Chris, how are
you today? Very good? Thankyou for having me. Thank you for
that review of Atari fifty. Wereally appreciated that. UM. Thank you
for checking on the pronunciation of ofKronica and everything. It's you know,
(02:14):
as you know, we we addressit in the product. There is a
video actually in the interactive documentary TheMaking of Karnica U, in which you
know I pronounced I mean I speakJapanese. 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
(02:36):
eighties, didn't know Japanese and youknow, it's not like it's just nineteen
eighty four. He get just puton put on YouTube to find out how
to pronounce it. He always saidkarataka. Um, some people say karatcha,
and really it's just like just justpronounce it how you want. At
this point, it's like it's it'syou know, it's just gonna be impossible
to get everybody to agree and theand it's like ultimately we're all varying degrees
(02:59):
of off of what the original Japanesepronunciation 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 whatone two letters in one syllable will do.
If you just take away the carand it's karate or karate, people
have way less trouble with it.But I imagine that was already copyrighted back
(03:20):
in the age exactly exactly, yeahand right, And I tend to say
like more like, you know,I grew up you know, calling you
know karate, you know, andit'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 andyou know, we're no closer to a
(03:42):
cure. Yeah, I understand.The Japanese language is a very complicated thing.
I'm actually teaching myself right now thanksto that green owl on Duo Lingo,
slowly getting through it, and itis quite a challenge, but a
good one. I do appreciate it. So my first question about insert pronunciation
of game here. What so youwent from Atari fifty and that entire history
(04:03):
of a major company, fifty yearsof research and prototypes and design docs and
all this to one single game twoyears worth of whatever Jordan had worked with
at the time. So my firstquestion is a simple one. Why this
game? Why Kara? What wasthe reason for this to be the first
(04:24):
time you try the single game documentaryas opposed to the company wide doc.
Well, the funny thing is,and you would have no way of knowing
this, of course, but Iwill tell you, is that really we
went from Karatica to Atari fifty inthat when I started working at Digital Eclipse
in twenty twenty, the first thingthat I was put on was this project
that was that had been going fora little while called the Making of Karnica,
(04:46):
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, youknow, I kind of I took a
step back and I started doing Ikind of started doing the research from zero
again because I was like, Idon't want to base my decisions here on
(05:10):
what's already in this this sort oflike early early version of the product.
I want to go do the researchagain. 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 getto this to answer your question. One
of the things that makes it perfectis that Jordan Mechner was a total like
documentarian himself and a pack rat whosaved absolutely everything. So as he was
(05:36):
going along in college, like freshmanyear 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 onthis. Okay, he was writing a
journal, a daily journal, thathe kept up that he's actually kept up
through his whole life. And hestarted writing a journal around that time and
(05:57):
daily documented the process, everything thathe was doing in at college, but
also everything he worked on on thatgame. And so we had something that
very few people have if you're tryingto look at the history of how a
game was developed, a daily logof everything that he was doing. Not
only that, but you know whathe was feeling he was doing it,
(06:23):
you know, So all of histeenage angst is right there on the page.
And Jordan has published those journals andyou can you can buy those and
read them right now. And thenadditionally, he did all of his designing
like on paper, and he savedall the paper, and so all the
paper, all of the design documentsfor Krotica, just just stacks and stacks
(06:43):
of stuff is all in the careof the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester,
New York, who we kind ofbasically partnered with to put this out.
They gave us access to all theJordan's materials and were extremely helpful.
So basically at that point I goback and I'm like, okay, I'm
gonna read Jordan's journals. Of coursefrom start to finish, I'm going to
um go to the strong and youknow, redo the research and say,
(07:09):
what do you guys have. Iwant to make absolutely sure that we have
everything pertaining to Karnica. Found abunch more stuff, found a lot of
Chronica stuff in the Prince of Persiafolders where it had been you know,
sort of accidentally missorted, and startto realize that there is a way to
tell this story, Like there's somuch information journals and design documents, and
(07:32):
then then we start looking at thecontents of Jordan's floppy discs because those had
been preserved about ten years ago andby Jason Scott and the Internet archive folks,
and they had like gotten all ofJordan's floppies and you know, done
like very expert level stuff to tryto get as much data as they could
(07:53):
off of the shoebox full of floppydiscs. And so there were like graphics,
cut content and things like that orlike in development versions of Kerotica,
so we had as much It's likeno other game from nineteen eighty four is
this well documented, unless I meanthere's probably like there's probably something similar for
(08:16):
like Super Mario Brothers, but it'sin 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 theseparts, this was the This was the
fun as a former journalist, youknow what I mean, Like, this
was the fun part. Because nowI've got a diary in which he explains
(08:37):
what he was doing that day.I've got images off with floppy disk,
and I've got scans of paper documentsand 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 adesign document, I can say, here's
the design document, here's what Jordansaid when he was writing this, here's
(09:00):
what came out of it as anoriginal, you know, or as a
sprite on his floppy disc, andshow all of those things together and lay
it out all chronologically. So froma content perspective, Keronica has enough supporting
content to let us do and Atarififty size is essentially it's the same thing
(09:22):
as Atari fifty where we've got fiveyou know, chapters essentially that you can
go through. It just gives usthe 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,
(09:46):
we want to tell some of thesestories of video game history that aren't being
told. And one of the storiesthat'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 videogame industry crashed and there was this black
hole, and then Nintendo came ridingin on a white horse and saved video
(10:07):
games, you know, and that'slike, there is something to be said
for that in terms of the gameconsole 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
(10:28):
know, that's where gaming kind ofshifted to and we just don't hear about
these stories. And Jordan Meckner's Coronicawas a profoundly influential game when it came
out in nineteen eighty four, inthe middle of what some people just sort
of consider the nothing time. Itcame out in eighty four, it sold
a ton of copies, and importantly, it made so many innovations in terms
(10:50):
of the way that video games hadpresented cinematic scenes or cut scenes animation.
Jordan used rhodoscoping okay to achieve lifelikeanimation inside of this game. In terms
of soundtrack, Jordan's dad, FrancisMechner, who is sort of one of
the heroes of our story, wasa classical pianist as a hobby, and
(11:11):
he composed the soundtrack in an erawhere games certainly on the Apple too and
on most other platforms, really didn'thave music scoring them. And but he
did in a really smart way becausehe used this life motif approach for every
character, every emotion, every settinghad its own little stinger of music.
(11:33):
So that lifted the emotional kind of, you know, m weight of the
story as well. And so Keronicamakes 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 theircomputer that really felt like they're like the
hero of an action movie. Andthat was so profound and it inspired a
(11:56):
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 inthis 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 andshow um why this game, which was,
(12:20):
by the way, you know,as I've kind of alluded to,
is the debut the directorial debut titleof 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 ofPersia would grow. Um. And so
(12:41):
it's important to look at it thatway 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, asfar as it being an amazing story,
it's a there's a wonderful father sonstory at the core of this whole thing,
because you know, Francis Machner notonly did he dad, he's the
dad of the year, Like notdid he compose the soundtrack to his son's
game, you know, support hishis teenage son in any way that he
(13:03):
could to make this game amazing.When Jordan wanted to rhodoscope somebody, his
father put on his wife's karate outfitand went out into the woods behind their
house in upstate New York and ranaround in this karate outfit while Jordan filmed
him with a Super eight camera andcaptured his dad's running and jumping and climbing
(13:24):
motions and then rotascoped them into Karatica. And so when you see the Karatica
running around, he wrote a scopetwo people. His his mom's karate teacher
for all the karate moves, andthen his dad for all of the ancillary
stuff like running and climbing and thingslike that, the non martial arts moves.
And that makes the two of themtied for being essentially the first like
(13:46):
mocap actors ever in a video game. And again it's his untold story that,
like, you know, Francis mcneris this like unsung hero of video
games. For all the work thathe did on this, you don't really
hear about him. And so wewant to make we want to get that
story out there. So it's astory that we're passionate about telling. It's
a really important game. It's astory where we have all the ability to
(14:07):
do it, and so um wehad to. I was working on this
and we had to shelve it fora while because so many other big projects
coming in that needed all hands ondeck. I was working on this before
we signed Blizzard Arcade Collection. Soit was this, It was this lightning
rapid like you know, Blizzard ArcadeCollection comes in, needs you on that
teenage Mutan Nincha Turtles, the CalbungaCollection, We need you on that.
(14:28):
We actually, after Kalbunga Collection,we'd like had a kickoff meeting for Corotica
to get it going again. Andwhile that was happening, like, we
signed Atari fifty and Atari fifty wasjust this great opportunity though, because Atari
needed something different and we're like,you know what, We've we've got this
(14:48):
interactive documentary approach that we've been workshoppinginternally that we've been designing Corotica to that,
and so we were able to putthe brakes on everything else get Atar
fifty out the door in like recordtime because we had to do it for
the Atari fifty ten overs re yearum. And then once that was done,
finally had the time and the bandwidthto go back. Uh. And
(15:11):
and not only the Karatica, butother stuff that's coming up later in the
gold Master series that we're working onnow. UM so yes, um yeah,
it's a series. We've announced ita series, um and so and
so that's happening. So I hopethat 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 seriesmight be um, a bunch of games.
It might be one developer, itmight be one company, you know,
(15:35):
going on. It's not necessarily thiscould be one game. But in
this case, you know, it'sit'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 theApple two, which was what Jordan created.
There's the ports to the Commodore sixtyfour and the Atari eight hundred.
Um. We even speak with inthe video in the video sections of the
(16:00):
cook who actually did the conversion programmingfor the Atari and the Commodore versions.
So we get into the details oflike what was that, like, you
know, what's it like to supportsomething from He's one very very different platform
to another. Right, you haveJordan's original game shooter that he made called
Death Bounce, which is what hewas trying to pitch before Karnica that got
(16:22):
canceled, but it's in four differentprototypes of that are in the game,
several prototypes of Karnica, and evenAsteroid 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 invarious stages of production. And again,
like Autari fifty, as you gothrough the timelines, when those versions come
(16:48):
up, you have the chance toplay them, and you have the chance
to check them out and then goback 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 withAtari fifty, you're going through the history
of the company and you just putin the full games that they you're talking
about in that particular, you know, year here with one game, are
(17:11):
you breaking up the game into sectionsand they play those sections or do they
play the whole thing and then getthe history. But if it's now like
fourteen different prototypes and the full gamesand stuff like that, it kind of
makes more sense in my head asto house. Yeah, I mean,
I think it's just important to notehere that like you as the player,
have the option to dive into oneof these deeper sort of segments that you
(17:34):
know, just as if you wereat a museum, you know, and
you're going through the museum. Youcould either start at the beginning of the
museum exhibit and just walk really fastthrough 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 toexhibit and then just go from you know,
station to station, and if there'san interactive part of that, you
(17:55):
can stay there and interact with itand exhaust all of the utility out of
that before you move on to thenext part of the museum. Depends on
how you're feeling that day and justhow deeply interested you are. So if
you just want to kind of quicklygo through the story, you can do
that. But if you want tostop and play a game for a while,
you know, you can do that. As well, and you just
nothing is a lott you know whatI mean. You just have the freedom
(18:17):
to just go where you want togo. We'll try to guide you to
what's next chronologically, but you havethis 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, youknow, 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
(18:38):
want to watch somebody play You evenhave chapter select in the watch mode,
so if you want to just jumpto 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 Appletwo version of Kronica, we have director's
commentary on the watch mode, soyou can watch somebody play through Jordan's original
version um while you listen to JordanNor and Francis mcner um talk about extemporaneously
(19:03):
to sort of talk about the variousthings that you're seeing and the little bit
of the behind the scenes of howthat was put together. That's awesome.
Um, I'm wondering, is helike reading through his journals and remembering his
angsty moments as he's going through theseor is he just kind of talking about
what he was doing at the timehe is reacting to what's going on on
the screen. Basically what we youknow, we we had once we got
(19:25):
the playthrough and we knew that thatwas 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 canjump into the playthrough at anytime and start
playing. That's why the chapter selectallows you to say, I want to
practice that fight against the bird,just jump right to it and then jump
(19:45):
in and start playing. So it'scool chapter select. Um. So we
had to make sure that that wasone hundred percent done before we went to
Jordan and Francis and actually visited themin New York City in April. Um,
so it wasn't that long ago andjust uh sat them down with the
demo, played the watch mode setup like my phone and just recorded them.
(20:06):
Um. It was a very adhoc thing because we weren't really sure
if we were going to be ableto 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 justit was one take, totally just you
know, off the cuff. Butit's but it's really brilliant. It's really
fun to listen to. That's cool. And we mentioned we talked to a
(20:26):
little bit earlier about Prince of Persiaand how this game kind of set the
table for that. Uh is thatreference In the latter half of the timeline
documentary portion, do you get intolike what parts of Karatica became part of
Prince of Persia formula and how that'show that flow works. Yeah. So
after Karatica, you know, itwas a big success, and you know,
Jordan and his publisher were both like, we got to do Karatica two.
(20:48):
So Jordan starts messing with new designsand things like that, and he
was inspired, as you'll see becausethere's an entire chapter that's just called Karatica
two U. He was fired bygames like there's a broader run game called
the Castles of Doctor Creep, whichwas like a more like um it had
more like traps and platform kind ofstuff, and he was thinking, gee,
(21:08):
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 Karaticagame. He was using the Karatica characters.
He was thinking maybe Princess Mariko wouldbe playable this time, and story
treatments and stuff like that. Um, but the game you kind of see
(21:30):
it like once you get to thefinal like you know, mock up of
Karataka two, it starts to looka 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
(21:51):
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 wecontinued 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 peoplecan do their own research and filling exactly
from there. Yeah, so youtalked about also the black hole in the
(22:15):
gaming industry that was filled by Appletwo, which is what this was developed
on. Do you take some timeto 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 wasused to make this game as you did
with the Atari consoles in fifty,not super deeply, we do, you
(22:37):
know, in these interactive documentaries,as we do with with Atari fifty.
You know, we want to makesure that we're not just sort of taking
the game ram and just sort ofplunking 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 introductionof like the Apple two or the Commodo
sixty before the Atari, you know, we talked a little bit about well,
(23:00):
when was that released, what wereits strengths? You know, so
we talk a bit about that.You will glean some of that, especially
from a lot of Jordan's commentary aboutthe Apple two and what it was capable
of, what the Commodore and theAtari 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
(23:23):
of the how the Apple two works, even though it is very interesting and
to understand that platform does help youunderstand 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 ofaesthetic interest. And the interesting thing about
(23:44):
that that I found out as Iwas 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 Appletwo. Technically the hardware could only do
like, um, you know,luminants basically like black and white, right,
but he figured out ways to sendsignals along that black and white pathway
(24:11):
basically to juice you know, youryour monitor. You'd have to have color
monitor obviously, but he would getthe monitor to be able to display those
colors um and and like if youit could only kind of display them in
certain areas. So if you shifta pixel over that was blue, it
becomes orange, you know what Imean. It's one of those things where
it's like that's what Apple two programmershad to figure out. It's like color
(24:34):
was not just put this color there, it was And that's why when you
look at Chronica and other Apple twogames, you see like, um uh,
what seems to be like sloppiness ofthe colors. You know, you'll
see like something that's orange and it'llhave like a blue pixel in there somewhere.
And that's literally just because the Appletwo is doing color in a very
(24:56):
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 ifthere's ever a gold Gold Master Series on
the Apple too itself, it wouldbe a good place to put that.
And you know, I think andthat's a really good observation because it's like
(25:17):
with the Gold Master Series, likeit doesn't necessarily have to be about like
a game or even games, youknow what I mean, there could be
It's like it's it's and that's what'simportant 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
(25:40):
the game, that the pitch hereis like the story is so interesting.
Yeah, that it's it's it's themeat. It actually is the core user
experience. So if someone were tocome to you for a potential pitch in
this gold Master series, if youeven accept them, what would be your
vironments would you? What would youand Digital Eclips want or need even in
(26:04):
order to even consider doing something likethis for another project, whether it be
a single game or an old developeror even the platform. As we've talked
about, what sort of information andhow 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 wherethere could be just a variety of different
(26:29):
things. I mean, maybe thegame itself is so well known that people
are already so passionate about it thatwe'll just figure out what the story is
and tell that story. But ifyou were to come to us and say,
well, I've got this game andnobody'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 reallyinteresting challenge of can we take something that's
(26:51):
got no fan base whatsoever, butthe story is so good that we think
that if we get it out topeople and put that context around it,
we will actually create fans of thisgame. Um, I think we would
like that challenge as well. Soit's really just like I feel like everything
has a potential argument for it,you know, whether it was you know,
(27:12):
you know, like whether whether it'sit's already got fans, whether it
doesn't have fans. But if there'sa good story there, if there's a
story that we can tell, it'ssomething I could think of at least two
or three different projects off the topof my head that I would love to
see get this treatment. But wecan, uh, we can bypass that.
I don't want to. I don'twant to start saying you should do
(27:33):
this, because that's I'm sure youget enough of that on social media and
stuff like that. It's not youknow, ultimately, well, I mean,
we we do, and we likecards on the table. It's like
I like to hear like you shoulddo this, especially when it's something that's
like on social media, and it'skind of quantifiable because ultimately, it's not
like we're sitting around with a biglist of games and we're going, let's
(27:56):
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 peoplewant, you know, that gives us
a little bit of ammo. That'slike, oh, you know, we
have all you know, fans areasking for this, like this is what
we hear about a lot. Soit's it's it's good to hear. But
(28:19):
also it's like, don't don't youknow, mistake the process of um,
you know, we're we're just pickingwhatever we want. I wish maybe in
twenty years if we really establish ourselvespeople 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 Iwant to ask also, I know we
(28:41):
kind of touched on this a littlebit, 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 museumup in Rochester. Did you find this
to be a little more challenging tobuild enough of a story to get through
those five chapters as opposed to thefirst time you did this, where you
(29:03):
had fifty years of information to digthrough. This one a little bit more
focused. I'm just I'm just wonderinghow challenging it was for the team to
get that story. Did it becomeapparent like right from the jump? Um?
Yeah, I mean within like thefirst once I really started reading the
(29:23):
journals and once I really started lookingat and asking because it really you my
first week or two with it atthe company back in twenty twenty, because
literally this was what I was puton and I was just like, okay,
you know, let me get theinformation. Once you start looking at
it and realizing there's just so muchthere. But I think that you know,
I also had a twenty five yearcareer in journalism prior to that,
(29:44):
and I mean, so much ofthat is um, you know, there's
all this information out there. Howdo you perceive what's important? How do
you start to see a story takeshape in this sort of mass of of
seemingly unrelated events and so writing bigmagazine features, big five thousand word features.
(30:06):
You started to develop a little bitof a sense of oh, that
can go in, that can goin. That's important once you start connecting
the dots. I mean, Ithink that's that's that's kind of the big
thing. So maybe it's something thatsomebody without that experience might not have perceived.
But you know, in from mysense, it was like, yeah,
yeah, this this, I mean, there's a huge story to be
(30:27):
told here, and we just gottayou 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 opposedto if you had launched them the other
(30:48):
way around? You do you feelthat having going basically doing the trial run
with fifty years of Atari made thisone even better in uh? In retrospect,
yes, absolutely, yeah, onehundred percent, because there's there's so
much that, like you know again, like you know, Coronica was in
the works, but Atari, it'slike we had a deadline and we had
to finish it. And finishing somethingis very important, you know, because
(31:10):
you do ninety percent of the workand then after that you do the other
ninety percent of the work at theend. You know, it's like just
just getting something completely totally finished outthe door. You know. It allowed
us to really just like bang ona lot of our you know, initial
ideas and like preconceived notions and andreally you know, test it out in
(31:33):
a product, and then of courseit's very fortunate, you know, we
released Atari fifty. Reviews were verygood, and importantly there was a lot
and there were a lot of peoplewho 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 Atarififty and they're like, where are
(31:55):
my video games? What is allthis stuff? You know? I mean
that could have happened and what isyeah, yeah, like where's asteroids?
I can't find asteroids? You know, um, And we did a lot
to make sure that both of thosetypes of players. You know, if
you just wanted a list of games, we gave you a great games carousel
that you know, sorted and youknow, had you know a lot of
(32:16):
information about each of those games tohelp you make that decision of what to
play. But if you wanted togo 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 thatway 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,
(32:39):
I think a lot of people paidit no attention and we're just like,
oh, it's another collection of Atarigames. Okay, I don't and I
made that I will admit I madethat assumption as well. Well. The
Game Informer review came a week ortwo later, I think, after the
lease, and you typically don't saythat happened with IGN as well, and
that happened with there wasn't a review, but that happened with Kotaku's coverage as
(33:00):
well. And I think that that'sactually that's actually great because what it means
is it came out and there wasthis sense of oh, oops, like
we should have you know, weshould 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 afterthat initial review cycle somebody's gonna go back,
(33:22):
you know, uh and and coverhim. So it's it's wonderful that
that happened because it really it madeit very clear that people were picking up
on it. Oh, this actuallyis something different. And the benefit then
to the Gold Master Series is nowwe're like, here's our next interactive documentary.
We've got tons of people already whoare just like, oh, like
Autari fifty, this is gonna begood. You know. So it really
(33:45):
that's that's that's very helpful. UM. You know, for for us,
we're launching the UM launching the indiething. 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 reallylucky, UM, very grateful to have
it announced on the ID Xbox showcase. That was definitely awesome, UM and
uh. But but still ultimately there'sno big publisher here, like with a
(34:09):
big marketing machine. It's just fallsto 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 needto do UM to treat you know this
these classic games which we believe arethey're not just like old you know,
(34:29):
products that you sell in the bargainbin, Like, this is the foundational
art on which the video game mediais based, and we believe we need
to treat them with more respect umand so this is a way that we're
trying to do that. Now you'reyou 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 bea heavy topic here, and that
(34:50):
is preservation. Last last week,that report or two weeks ago, the
report came out that eighty seven percentof games ever released are no longer available
in any platform. Blew my mindjust because I assume that you could still
get some of the weird games thatI played as a kid, because I
still have them, so people probablystill have them. But no, a
lot of those games aren't available anymore. Did you see that and start to
(35:14):
think, Okay, maybe we're ontosomething with this Golden Master series. Maybe
we can bring that number down bygetting some of these titles back out into
the forefront or the spotlight, evenif it's a little spotlight like like Keronica.
As as great and foundational as itis, it like only for old
folks like me and you older folks, not old folks who have been playing
(35:36):
games for a long time. Weknow about it, but but the youth
now won't until this. So dohave you guys kind of like taken up
that mantle a little bit? Likeall right, if there's a preservation issue
and they're not going to do anythingabout 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 ofdifferent organizations as far as game preservation.
(35:57):
You know, the Video Game HistoryFoundation wants to make this extremely salient point
because they're arguing for um, youknow, alterations to copyright laws essentially that
allow UM libraries and institutions to providefor 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 youcan access them is either um A you
(36:22):
know, piracy or B you justcan't. And so if if library it's
just simply can't do it. Imean there's there's games. Look, if
you want to go pirate a laseractive game, you can't do that,
Like you have to have a laseractive, you know, set up.
But if libraries and institutions were ableto set up and provide remote access for
(36:43):
these things, then that would giveresearchers UM or quite frankly, not just
researchers, but just you know,everybody, the opportunity to play these things
within a legal framework where they donot have to I mean it when we're
talking about UM. One of theother things that we want to do with
(37:04):
the Gold Master series is bring backcomputer 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, youdon't actually see personal computer games being brought
back as much, and you youdon't see them on game consoles. Because
it's one thing to re release acomputer game for a computer because Karnica,
(37:29):
you know, used keyboard controls,right, and you needed keyboard controls to
get through this. So what we'redoing, and we have engineers essentially working
on this for Karnica and for otherstuff in the Gold Master series, it's
a big task, a big expensiveengineering task. Have a highly paid engineer
sit down and spend days and weeksessentially taking computer games and bringing them up
(37:57):
so that you can use a consolecontroller to interact with them. Uh,
and so with Keronica, it's likeeven if you wanted to just you know,
pirate it, you know, you'restill dealing with all of the intricacies
of like like it's it's like II use emulators all but time and just
getting a computer game running and belike, okay, we get this Apple
(38:20):
two emulator. Okay, well howdo I mount a disk image? You
know? Once I do that,what do I have to type anything?
I mean, god, you knowI'm abusing like a you know, a
Commodo or sixty four emulator. It'slike 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 likeyou know all the stuff and you run
the and you and you then yourun it. But it's like I don't
(38:43):
remember this. I have to golook it up, and I have to
go look this information up, andthis information is on some forum posts like
there there there were times when I'mtrying to emulate something and the answer is
buried in some forum post from twothousand and eight, and it's like this
is not sustainable, No, can'tkeep doing this like. This is why
(39:06):
when the Video Game History Foundation pointsout these games are like critically endangered,
it is because all of the rigamarrole that you have to go through and
this sort of fragile ecosystem of likehomebrew hackers and pirates that are propping it
all up is it's it's it's it'snot sustainable and it's disrespectful, and it's
(39:30):
something that you know, we shouldbe working a lot harder to now from
the Digital Eclipse perspective, we can'tsave every game by putting out products like
this, you know, especially becauselook, we're making the making of Chronica,
but it's like when does our gamebecome incompatible? You know, it's
(39:50):
like what happens twenty years from now, through no fault of our own,
where if we can't go in becauseyou know, what if the development in
froment for the making of Keronica getsdeprecated decades down the line and we can't
even update it anymore. What ifthe storefronts that it's available on all shut
down. You know, then eitherthe way that somebody would access my creative
(40:15):
work would be through what would hoperemote access via a library. I don't
want this to go away, ButI understand that it will unless there's institutions
that are able to provide it topeople, or they'll just pirate it,
you know. And so but fromour perspective, you know, we all
we can do is like the workof like we're what is it. It's
(40:38):
like, you know, it's justit's a massive forests and we can save
like one tree, you know whatI mean, like by through doing this,
but I mean I think it's verywhat 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
(41:06):
from Konami's internal archives that now existin extremely high quality you know, I
think four K on some consoles,you know, digital form. Whereas in
the past, before we embarked onthat project, they existed as a piece
of paper in a building in oneof the countries that is beset by the
(41:29):
most natural disasters of any place onEarth. If if an earthquake didn't get
them, a typhoon was gonna getthem, you know what I mean.
So it's like by doing the projectand by having it because if somebody other
than Digital Eclipse had done a Turtle'syou know collection for Konami, they might
(41:50):
not have said, yeah, wewant every document, you know, and
people are just like, why isthis 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 tobe this, and so from a preservation
standpoint, we actually did do greatwork on that. And so that's the
same thing with you know, withyou know, making a chronica and things
(42:12):
far in the future is just gettingthose those physical documents, turning them into
digital documents that are now everywhere,you know, everybody has them, and
it helps preserve that information in ain a really substantial way. And so
we feel that pressure too. Butthen also we know that that bonus you
know, that what was considered,you know, you speak through the bonus
content. Really, for some peopleis the whole show right now? Do
(42:36):
you think, I mean, obviouslygame 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 otherreason than to just show them how you
do it. It's if you're notgoing to use us, at least let
us show you what we're doing sothat you can maybe do it yourself.
(42:57):
We'd love to do it for you, but I see, yeah, I
mean, like you know, it'ssort of a consulting sort of way.
Yeah, you know, hit usup like we're we're down for We're down
for whatever, you know what Imean, 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 doingif everybody adopts our approach to uh
(43:22):
classic game or archival game releases,will feel very proud that we were able
to, you know, essentially flipthe 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 acause that we all believe in, Like
(43:42):
we want to preserve video game history, want to do our part, and
we want to treat these things withthe respect that they deserve. And if
that gets other people doing that,great, If that gets other people saying,
oh geez, like Digital Clips isa really good job on these.
We gotta hire them to do ournext thing also wonderful, you know.
So yeah, now I'm wondering isthere any and if you if you don't
(44:07):
want to answer this question for fearthat people might think that you're working on
it, that's fine, But isthere any older game that you would love,
like from your youth? But you'relike, man, I haven't played
this in a really long time.I wonder if this is one. Like
if you were the Twitter feed rightright 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
(44:30):
your podcast? I had, Ihad, I had Reggie Feesam episode one
hundred. So maybe okay, okay, so maybe he does. Yeah,
so Miamoto just call me. Youknow, you have my number. Um
No, I mean seriously, Likeit sounds crazy, but like I will
say this all the time, likeabsolutely, Nintendo get in touch. You
know, like I think that whatwe do could actually compliment um, you
(44:55):
know what they have as far asthe the online subscription service. You know,
the context is not there. Andthe thing is, the pitch to
publishers is really list Like, ifyou're just taking the games and putting the
games out, the audience that youhave is gonna be people who are already
kind of like excited about those particulargames. But it's like, we can
(45:17):
help create new fans. So ifthere's something that is dormant, you know,
by putting these things in their propercontext, you know, by doing
it, whether it's the interactive documentaryformat or whether it's something like cow bunga
collection, you know, but byputting this stuff in context and introducing it
to new audiences. And like,one of the things we found with Atari
(45:37):
fifty is that there were a lotof 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 aboutwhere they came from and why they were
(45:58):
important and who worked hard on them, and learning what to look for when
I play these games, then afterthat, when I play the games,
I become more interested in them,and like that is that is the magic
of doing it this way, whichis getting somebody who did not have any
(46:20):
interest and getting them to the pointwhere where they do play that game.
Suddenly now they're a fan of foodFight for the Atari XL or whatever it
is, you know, and solike that's what's so important about this and
so that's really my that's really mypitch to to, you know, to
publishers and like why you want tolet us do it and why we want
to do it this way? Yeah, And which makes a lot of sense
(46:43):
because, like as you mentioned Nintendo, I could think of a ton of
games in their portfolio that I haven'tseen the light of day in years that
could really benefit from this sort ofcomplimentary service. Like you're saying, Star
Tropics is one that comes to mindimmediately, right because nobody knows what that
is outside of like us and EricBailey on Twitter, who I talked to
(47:04):
every once in a while, he'salways mentioning Star Tropics. That would be
a perfect idea. Every company hasgames like that that are deep buried in
their archives and haven't come out andforever even if at all, And I
just think there's a lot of meritto that not just in the preservation of
what did come out, but alsoin the history of these companies that we
may not know about. I feellike you might even have a possibility of
(47:27):
and maybe you might not agree withthis of a series where it's just all
unreleased games or all prototypes from acompany 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 guyswould be interested into? Yeah, I
mean, I think again, likeCoronica, is this really really great test
bed for so many things that wewant to do because we haven't really even
(47:51):
gotten into a lot of this stuffabout like you know, I mean,
one of the other things that wedo in making of Kronica is so we
knew that Jordan used rotoscoping. TheStrong 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 hehe filmed his dad, He took the
(48:14):
film with a movie editing device andthen traced the frame onto a tracing paper,
and then he took a device calleda versa writer, which was this
very very early like device with likea stylist for the Apple two, where
you had your stilus and the siluswas attached to a mechanical arm basically like
on a tablet, and you movedthe mechanical arm around you're drawing, and
(48:36):
it would start recreating that on thescreen in front of you based on the
movements of the arm. And thenhe that's how he digitized all the frames.
It's an incredibly laborious like like processthat 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 hegot like human animation. We have an
(49:00):
interactive thing called Rotoscope Theater in whichI went back and took that video,
found the exact frames from the videothat he traced with tracing paper that he
digitized. That became Chronica Man onscreen and you can compare real life footage
(49:20):
of Francis Mechner with final in gamesprite as if you're in like photoshop,
lay them on top of each otherand see how the real life maps to
give and you do it in aninteractive way, and so that's kind of
like that's something else that we cando. 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 ofCoronica in which Kirk Hamilton's Yes m former
(49:45):
co worker does the Strong Songs podcast. He basically does a little mini Strong
Songs for the Chronica soundtrack and heand he just breaks it down as far
as like this is why this musicis so good, and so we're just
like we're putting everything in the kitchensync into making a Chronica in terms of
weird while wacky ideas, you know, the director's commentary and all that kind
(50:07):
of stuff to show like here's justhere 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'swe'll come up with even more stuff than
(50:27):
we can do and it'll all dependon The first step in this process is
well, what's out there? Youknow, like, what does the company
have internally? What can we goresearch and find on our own, And
then the shape of it sort offollows from the information that we have.
That's awesome. Do you hear?These are the lengths that these folks are
(50:50):
going to make sure that the historyof video games is told in a way
that is scinct and informative and mostof all, entertaining. And I have
a feeling that the history of Karaticaor 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 muchfor your time and your information, and
(51:13):
the interview was great. I lookforward 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 aboutthe next great gold Master series from Digital
Eclipse. Chris, thank you foryour 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 theChief Stakes End Controllers podcast, as always
(51:37):
presented by Fox PHL The Gambler oneor two point five FM fourteen eighty AM
and iHeartRadio. If you're listening tothese words, you've gotten to the end
of the episode, and I verymuch appreciate your time, and I hope
you were entertained and informed, andI 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 betterweek right behind it. And like I
(51:58):
said, we'll be back again nextweek with more cheese steaks and control. Baba h
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com