Job Stability, Quality Of Life, Windjammers With Dave Lang - GDC Podcast

this is your host Chris graphs with a quick note for our listeners this podcast was recorded about a week prior to GDC 2020s post moment thanks so much for your support and stay safe and healthy out there on GDC podcast episode 7 we've got Dave Lang a tall guy with cool baseball hats who is chief product officer at iron galaxy Studios he's gonna talk about game development in the 2000s the Chicago game dev seen the video game porting business and much much more we'll be back in a sec [Music] [Music] and we're back and it seems that we have found Elissa masculine after after her being missing in action for an entire

month I was gonna try to figure out what the in canon reason for me not being around last week was but I haven't listened to the episode yet uh-oh I mean yeah it is canon that i mean it's the truth the truth is canon you are having your apartment building recited and would say you did that you were the one who actually made the order Florida yep and I've been out there with the ladder and just yelling at myself yeah faster yeah and it turns out it's really hard to podcast when you're in a construction zone and especially when you're a construction worker yeah they're still not done with it so I was like as we were approaching the time I was like staring out the window being ly gonna come hammer on the wall next to my office again you're gonna do it and they're staying away they're very kind apparently GDC podcast fans yeah that's what I find missing among you know contractors these days is the respect for the podcast good game development techniques yeah

yeah well they sound like a good crew I say well it's nice to have you back we got rid of that Alex guy whose last name we never did reveal he might be back if the the sighting continues that Alex Alex someone's Alex yeah so let's do let's do some morning announcements here right gia what's what's going on what's going on GDC I want like the Ferris Bueller with a dong done done before they do the morning announcements at the high school oh yeah yeah let me find my links here um for the Pioneer Award at GDC 2020 they've announced that Roberto Wilma Williams is receiving that award yeah at the GDC A's dream did you say Roberto Roberto I'm Roberta I'm bad I'm so bad with financing names I don't know why this is my chopper who's Roberto Williams known for Kang's

quest so you can handle that one because I can't talk no no you're you're fine I can't either I can't believe words are able to spill out of my mouth right right obviously yeah but uh Roberta Williams pioneer pioneer award because she did amazing stuff throughout her career with all the adventure games did you ever play any of mine oh shoot yes I have I didn't I'm very bad at connecting named dots uh Sierra I might like to find my childhood with weird adventure games that I didn't quite understand how weird they were at the time mmm what's it mixed-up fairy tales I never played King's Quest but there was a seer on line one about fairy tales that was really like dark actually that was great and gave me nightmares um another one Pepper's adventures in time I think was a Sierra online game where you time-traveled back and hung out with a STONER Ben Franklin um that one was also super dark and gave me nightmares so wait are you sure that

this was a game well you went back in time and you met Ben Franklin it could have maybe I'm just like getting all my time-travel memories and compartmentalizing them so they made sense to my child brain as I was a video game yeah yeah well that happens to me something about a better dog so let's let's start getting our next guest in he's just kind of hanging hanging back here it was tough to sit back with Roberto Bolle small-government I have some Roberto Williams opinions best game Bar None in my humble opinion is Gabriel Knight that's the best Roberto Williams good there is also I remember wait let me dammit let me introduce you okay sorry this you're completely breaking protocol that's our job I could get a stab at it and just put the accent on the wrong Val okay yeah let's try it okay now our next guest he

cut his teeth as a game programmer in the 90s if I get any of this stuff wrong gonna have to edit Wikipedia with Studio Tech director at Midway where he oversaw games including stranglehold and then he went on to found Chicago based iron Galaxy Studios known for games like killer instinct and their amazing ports of video games it is Dave lanch pulse very close it's da flames okay thank you almost nailed it yeah yeah thank you for joining us today pleasures all mine I love your work Christ know it no now before we get late let's let's talk about Rupert Roberta now I'm gonna say Roberto Roberta Williams stuff like it what was your strong opinion there again Dave Gabriel Knight series is without a

doubt her best work I believe yeah I'm almost certain she worked on those games I'm almost certain I wasn't I was gonna google it when you were talking to make sure I don't sound like an idiot but I didn't want to hear a clackety-clack of a background I want respect podcasts advocate so the risk if the risk of being wrong in a podcast I'm gonna stir it strongly say those are her best games if the apartment building reciters can just back off for a minute you can refrain from tapping on your keyboard maybe they can shout in their favorite game to just kind of yeah I was working at Gamestop when phantasmagoria came out and that was like a big deal because there were some adult scenes and it was FMV and stuff I definitely that one that's what I skipped I didn't play it but I did see the box on the shelf while working at game stuff I'm gonna minorly derail the conversation to embarrass myself on the podcast quickly you're gonna derail the derailment derail the derailment on the topic of mispronouncing names just to get the ground nice and even here with my own name which is Alyssa I got my

hair done over the weekend and when I introduced myself to the woman dyeing my hair for four hours didn't say my name but she knew me from the invite and she's like oh good to see you Allison yeah in that moment I did not correct her and then for the next four hours it was like too late i sat in the chair being called the wrong name because this is the hole I dug for myself there's a certain like how long do you think you're allowed to let like but what is the window for correcting someone on your name because I have my full name is is Christian with a K yeah so when people see it like on my credit card they're like here we go Kristen and like you know that's fine it's just a Christian it happens yeah but if you don't say anything in like those three seconds anything longer than that it's weird anything like longer than that you think the window it's like it feels like what do you Dave what do you think so I definitely shouldn't correct my title at this point right no okay now chief product officer we nailed

it crushed it oh yeah we got we weight your product project no III love tells us founder okay just found her just found her so it's not product no no it's not chief it's not product at a site office not for a while I was calling myself c-3po for a while make that joke until I looked on your LinkedIn you knew I'd already made the joke yeah cuz I was I was CEO and then we brought Adam in to be CEO I'm like well I need a title now and I don't care about titles at all but people I talk to do and it should have a/c in front of it I guess and so I was calling myself c-3po and it just confused the out of everyone so subsequently reverted the founder now when you say Adam you're talking about Adam boys yes Adam T boys Esquire boys Esquire actually no idea what his middle name is that was he looks like a TiVo yeah probably Todd yeah Terry Terry Adam Terry boys that's a horrible name that's right yeah I had to head to

Google CPO like and I got all kinds of results for it so we're we're that probably came from is when we did the flip so I was the CEO and Chelsea was our director of product development now you found it iron galaxy in 2008 2008 right yeah and then Chelsea joined me in 2010 I believe in December 2010 something like that and she's been along for the ride almost the whole time she's like employee number 13 and then when we brought Adam on board to be CEO one big Chelsea the c-suite to at that point and so at that point she became CP o which is our chief product officer and then after about a year that she's like it doesn't really encapsulate what I actually do I'm just gonna be CLO everyone knows what that is no one asked me any questions about Co o and then UB founder and that will call it a day and that's what we settled on so there's a lot of confusion around the c-suite of iron galaxy are you are you still considered as c-suite executive even

though there's no see I believe technically I'm above the c-suite in most men's minds yeah I believe founder you know there's two kinds of founders there's the founders who are still there and the quote/unquote power behind the throne and the people that actually gets done and then there's the founders who are had to get out of the company because they said something racist on Twitter and I'm definitely not the latter yes you though yeah yes yeah dodged another bullet every day you know but I'm still the first one I hope anyway yeah I mean so basically I'm not sure what you do you're the you're the very upper tier of your company but you still got stuck doing the podcast yeah so you know what I'm a podcasting person I love podcasts I have my own podcast in fact oh yeah what did a mouth it's guy it's not it's it's kind of like the Seinfeld the podcast it's not really about anything I just made my friends talk you actually you know what recently so a recent launch season 3 and season 3 were doing game development origin stories so I

tracked down game developers and I talked about how they got into the business and he talked to anyone about or just like have you heard an interesting one yet the best one I so I've gone with people I know just to see if the concept works and it definitely works the best one I've had in the podcast so far that I already knew is Jonathan yaki yes he's the best by far he basically pre-internet stalked mark Turmel and got a job just by Stockton Archer Mallos amazing so that's great and also these these names you've been around the block yeah yeah yeah yeast you know when did you start a game development so I started professionally in my first job was January 96 at sculpture software sculptured software was a very prolific 16-bit developer like David the genesis version of MORTAL KOMBAT right that everyone loves and it's like the yeah amazing they they were a port house did a lot of stuff and then they got bought

by acclaim like we're actually right before I got there and about after my I worked on Space Jam first for the Saturn and then I worked on a game called NHL breakaway for the n64 and as breakaway was happening all of the leadership team got fired by acclaim and they went off to start a new studio so called Kodiak interactive so I finished the host hockey game there and then quit and went and worked on WCW mayhem and then WCW WCW backstage assault at Kodiak and then those games didn't really turn out the way anyone wanted and so that studio started to close kind of dramatically at the time I was working on a baseball game for Kodiak but the Microsoft contract Kodiak to do it and when Kodiak folded kind of overnight I ended up at the Microsoft Salt Lake studio to finish that game out and I hated that job that job was horrible yeah yes I mad about it it was just not a good fit for me like gosh I don't want to like anymore I

can't imagine anything not anything something night not fitting year it's weird right yeah it's really weird like like that place was like um so I was like it was a really well-established and fabled like games like dated Tex Murphy right they did they did the lynx games it's like they were a great developer they made a bunch of great games but I guess like there's no really kind of clean way to say this but just yeah I just that wasn't a fit I guess that's the best way to say it and I was there for about two years and finished the baseball game and then they're kind of like hey there's probably not another game for you to work on here wink wink and so and so at the time my wife is like hey let's have a let's have a family let's go back home and so originally from Chicago and so went back and I interviewed with new effects who became EA Chicago and I interviewed at Midway and I didn't really want to work at either place because like this was like the fat babies era right then like Midway sounded like the worst job in the

world right and I just swore I said I wasn't gonna swear they just opened and just rip the band-aid right off yeah but I ended up going to Midway and ended up being like the best decision I've made so I appoint my career for sure and I made a ton of talented people and worked on tons of cool things and I just learned a lot about gate involvement there yeah I'd like to talk about the Midway days because I was I started reporting on the industry in late 2005 and then a few years later like you know started really hitting the fan yeah at Midway can you talk about you know like any interesting stories they're like that was this seems like a tumultuous time there's like a revolving door CEOs yeah I mean there's literally like no what would variety of story would you like I mean there's like what kind of category because what about like a mafia involved story okay so I've got one of those so there was always rumors

that Midway was like the the CEO at the time was guy named Neil Nicastro right and there was always rumors that he was hit mafia ties or was in the Mafia or whatever and I didn't believe any of them or whatever I would just like oh that's stupid like there's no way like doesn't make any sense and then you know my first week at Midway and Midway was a weird place it was like if you weren't at Midway like 30 years like you just they treat you like you just got there you never had job before and so the first week like no one talked to me and I went to lunch by myself and I found this little kind of sandwich shop like right around the corner from there and I go in there I order sandwich the guy's like hey you look like you probably work at Midway no yeah I just started he goes real family business they got going over there huh and I my pants on the spot what have they done like is this for real yeah and then the whole time I was there I'd never heard another mafia reference Aalto knows yeah but the first week I was I'm scared I'm scared that's great

though I mean it's like blood in blood out right yeah I was like absolutely this point I'm expecting like I'm gonna be like you know digging shell graves for people in the middle Wrigley Field and Mary people the pitcher's mound like I've having visions of what's going down for me my future and none of it ended up happening so the sandwich the sandwich person I caught in your story said you look like someone hoarse it Midway yes well did you look like because so Midway at the time was in a let's just say it was it was in a very diverse neighborhood it was a lot of Hispanic influences a lot of Asian influences and there weren't a lot of people that look like me aka huge white guy that's not my place right to kind of live that are like endemic to that region right and so if one walks in and you know it's probably the Midway person and sure enough they guessed it correctly ya know like there was also the whole sorry and I slightly nerd out

about some of this stuff but like you were there as studio tech director and I remember something going on trying to like a big deal near the end making the switch to Unreal Engine 3 yeah so when I started I started as that I was the lead on slugfest loaded that was my first thing there and then I was the lead on blitz the league and then I spent like six months as tech director for all sports games and then I got promoted to studio tech director and about the time I was sports game tech director Midway was under underwear at the time pretty much everyone was on underwear of some former function and the Midway kind of made a strategic decision to switch to Unreal 3 yeah and thinking it's like okay so here's the way it's gonna work is like we'll be able to share engines for the first time and share our experiences and like if a game team a write something cool game team B C D and E will benefit from it and all these synergies that seemed theoretical if you've never made a game before I'm sterically possible and yeah and so

it basically everyone like you know stranglehold was oh gosh what was the name of that game it was the Braves like telekinesis game science laughs so sick psyops they had to ditch their engine to go m'kay ditch their engine to go unreal how much everyone that had like a stand was franchises projects and right seriesin yeah and then they came to the sports teams to do it and the sports teams are like well no our budget for the game it's like like the whole budget for blitz the league one was eight million dollars like if we wanted to like rebuild a game and that's because it that only works because we had like years and years of blitz already there right and we had they're like what's new for this year or whatever if we like I'm telling if we have to switch the Unreal three it's a twenty million dollar game and like it doesn't make sense I'm like exactly right like let's just leave it it's runned away or so aside from the sports games everything was a ue3 by the time the doors closed at Midway hmm yeah yeah it's one of those things that you know

it makes sense on paper to an executive right yeah it's a funny though without them doing that experience like iron galaxy doesn't exist today because like one of my duties estudio tech director so there was the core technology group which was in the austin studio but every studio had an advanced technology group and it was a room full of Engineers basically and we're kind of tasked with like the lofty goals I talked about earlier like hey if a wheel man team builds a crowd system now every team can use it and the ATG teams job is to like distribute that or work on the tool and make the tool chain better make the particle effects editor better make the UI system better or whatever then everyone benefits but really what we ended up doing was just fixing bugs improving performance working on you know RAM considerations or whatever for the next game out the door and so it was a roomful of 25 really good engineers and all we were doing was firefighting for the next Midway game coming out the door and as things started to disintegrate there and it was clear like

you know I don't know what's gonna happen but it's gonna be dramatic I kind of realized like we have a roomful 25 people here just doing this for midway like we could do this freelance like that and make some coin doing it in run a business and shortly after that realization I kind of punched out of there and started exactly that business that's cool yeah that kind of brings us to iron gag iron galaxy which is you know it's immersed itself in porting and work-for-hire stuff and tech consulting but you know you also do publishing and you work on franchises like killer instinct I know that you know original IP is in probably you know in the cards on the cards for you but can you tell me about you know the affinity for the tech side is it just because of your background or is it like a job stability thing you know yeah yeah requires it's a how long do you want me to talk about this for I'm going to talk for about three minutes okay not as long as you want yeah I got multiple verses

of the story I have a three minute version you're in luck okay I'm starting now okay so basically the reason I our galaxy exists is you know I had the opportunity that I saw with the things happening but like that's not the reason we did it like the reason we did it is I've been at so many companies that have kind of closed overnight on me like you know sculpture kicked out the management it wasn't the company loved anymore Kodiak literally closed overnight on me Microsoft right company were like 10 billion in the bank told me I'm not welcome there anymore essentially I need to find a new job Midway disintegrated around me like you know it's like no place is safe and I just want to build a game developer where I could work with my friends until I was done making games right I want to build a place that we can retire from if we want to retire from and so stability is the thing we care about most in the world and as such we tend to work on a bunch of projects at once and a bunch of varieties of projects at once and so you know we started off doing kind of just tech consulting like kind of like firefighting stuff then we branched into doing ports and then we branched into an

original development and kind of our our portfolio now ideally we've got like one really big kind of creative project in the works right whether it's killer instinct or extinction or whatever's next for us which we can't talk about quite yet we're doing some ports you know like we've worked on we helped Blizzard do overwatch Diablo 3 we've helped Skyrim switch port with Bethesda and we're still doing a lot of code of elements and like we have people embedded on teams at Bethesda and Blizzard and other places I can't mention yet and so we kind of do all this different work and we do like 10 to 12 different things at once and we don't do it because it's easy we do it because like if one of them goes away no one has to lose their job right there's like plenty of work to go around for everyone else and so we want to be doing like it's like people started IG what I tell them is like okay if you're coming here and you have a game in your head that needs to get out this is probably not the best place for you to be right because like I'm not saying we're not gonna make it

I'm not saying it's impossible I'm saying it's not a priority like what's important here is making sure that this company is built to last and we're gonna make robust decisions around like you know ensuring that other people's bad decisions or games bad performances don't affect us in any way shape or form mm-hmm it's it's interesting because when you describe the business tack of iron galaxy it's like well yeah that makes sense and then the next question is well why aren't more companies more game companies doing what iron galaxy does and I assume the answer is probably because it's really hard well it's weird so there's it's it's a really complicated question so there there are people doing what we do it's I think it's just more rare that you know who we are then more so that people don't do what we do right like there's a bunch of companies out there who I think kind of followed in our footsteps and realized like oh yeah we can because like when we started this company it was pretty

common to people for people to think you can't outsource engineering you know like they had just barely gotten you styled sourcing art you know and like oh no engineering is too iterative and it's too collaborative and it'll never work and then we kind of showed yes it can work and so there's companies that do it like we do it now and there's companies that doing ports longer than we've been doing them it's just for a variety of reasons we've kind of emerged from that group as you know one of the developers people know about more than others right so there are a bunch of people behind the scenes kind of doing this kind of work it's just maybe they're not as recognized as we are yeah so I think when I was reading doing my obligatory research into all of this yeah so yeah I was reading about how that's kind of the the gist of your studio what you do was a lot of like support for other projects and stuff like that and that reminded me of psionics rocket League developers did like I watched I think it was an O clip documentary about them

and they were talking about how they did a similar kind of thing where they did but their's was more they did a bunch of like helped other people with their projects to keep themselves afloat while they chase their dream projects but that's kind of like a same starting point but different goal from what you guys are doing right yeah it's a subtle like I know the scientist guys fairly well Dave and the crew over there well that's probably overstating it but I know I'm we talking we've talked about events and we've talked about this stuff from time to time before Dave became a billionaire and does talk to anyone anymore but the is like yeah it's like you know they I think one of the differences between us and other people that do this work right and one of the reasons I think we have kind of risen to the surface is I think a lot of companies do the work we do to pay for the game they want to make yeah right and as a result that shows in the work they do right maybe they don't have an even distribution of talent across all the projects maybe people that are on you know the support jobs or the port jobs are bitter they're not on the

creative thing and they're kind of pissed off about that and they're not doing their best work or whatever it is and that's just not what we do like here everyone understands that every project is important everyone's work is important for ensuring the goal of you know we're gonna be here to fight another day no matter what right and so I think that's one of the differences between us and almost everybody else you know because they were looking to get that breakout hit and become financially independent and like you know that would be great if it happened but it's not a goal like like the reason we do creative things at all is like one it's like yeah it would be nice in like the 5% chance we have something that hits like a now money's not really as much of a concern as it normally is but really what it is is we want you know diversity and partners and diversity and projects you know and platforms like you never know like I'm not an analyst right I don't know which way the industry is gonna go but I do know if we have experience doing something it's easier to get those kind of jobs in the future right and let's say like co-development dries up

overnight and then we need to become a studio that pitches more creative IP well we've got experience doing that right or whatever it is so it's more like a strategic thing than like a oh I've got to make this game holy is this my ambition in life is to make this yeah yeah and you're you it seems that you have an opinion about like quality of life job stability things like that and that wasn't informed by your past experiences so I'm wondering from your perspective do you think that quality of life in the game industry has gotten better or worse of stayed about the same over the past 15 years oh it's definitely better it's like they couldn't pay you couldn't be any worse than it was when I started and I do want to clarify something I do tend to talk about this a lot or get asked about this a lot and I think one thing I kind of universally do a bad job at explaining like I never Galaxy has not always been this like oasis where we don't crunch right like in the beginning I'd say the

first three or four years or whatever we've all worked our asses off right and then at some point I just kind of decided like you know what like if this is the way it has to be then it's kind of not worth doing and it wasn't overnight we slowly kind of built a crunch a culture of like no crunching and zero tolerance of that sort of thing you know some people still work hard and some people still put in extra hours cuz they're passionate about stuff but like it's something we try to monitor and the company will never ever ask anyone to work more than 40 a day like the conversation I had with everybody in the studio it's like listen I I don't need you to work 41 hours I just need your best 40 as long as you're giving me your best 40 like that's all I care about right and so it's yeah it's something I feel pretty strongly about now and I think we've proven you can do it the hard part with creative projects and no crunch policy is as someone you know I

talk a lot about like doing creative projects it's like a strategic thing for us but that doesn't mean we don't have people here that like incredibly passionate about like making killer instinct as good as it can be or whatever right yeah and a game can always be better right it's it's it can always always be better there's always something that can be better and developers know what could be better you know we're not blind like we play the game we see these problems and so having the discipline - kind of like walk that line and take care of yourself while feel like you're doing your best work is very challenging I've created projects and I think I think the industry still sucks at it but it's like through the lens of like wow that's a really hard problem like I'm not sure exactly what the solution there long-term is yeah yeah well there you go folks there's no doesn't have solution for crunch yeah yeah our solution is we just don't do it and we if a game is needs more time

our solution isn't like make people work 80 hours a week our solution is go to a partner and get more time from them you know but that's an imperfect solution too right that's like comes with its own perils so yeah how's that conversation tend to go when you reach out to this video you're working with you're like hey we need we need more time to do this we can't do this in the amount of time and interest of keeping my my staff happy and healthy yeah I mean generally speaking it's gotten easier over the years as our partners have kind of gotten used to us and know the work we do and the quality we do it's kind of like when we were just getting going it would've been impossible right and with some of the partners I'm not gonna name names it would like literally if we told them up front like hey we're not gonna crunch in this project we wouldn't get the gig right it's just like flat out we just wouldn't get it but now 11 years into this thing everyone knows who we are everyone knows what we stand for you know the track record of our work with this policy kind of stands on its own merits and either you care about that

you care about like making a good game it or like you know or you care about other things and if you care about other things they just don't call us you know we have kind of like self-selected a client list of people that care first and foremost about game quality and because of that those conversations are not nearly as hard as they would be otherwise what port is is they're like a port that you're particularly proud of yeah yeah I mean it's still Street Fighter 3 thirst strike online edition um without a doubt like the that day it was our first kind of like big quote big break and you know there was a bunch of hand-wringing about some of the details about the game like really really nitpicky stuff but I just couldn't be prouder of the game we put out it's kind of like our first effort and the response it received and it's still kind of seen as like the gold standard of Capcom fighting game ports and yeah that's that's without a doubt

one I'm still proud of stuff yes my partner I mentioned that we were doing this interview with you and he's like ah holy immediately without missing a beat so yeah yeah definitely still got that I played a crapload of that on PlayStation 3 and still break it out every now and then if I want to get my ass handed to me yeah it's so weird like like you know the version we did isn't in the Capcom or Street Fighter a 30 year edition or whatever it was it's like a different version and piece it's like I like I know why Capcom did that like but it's like just so weird that there's people out there playing a version of third-strike that's not the one we did it's bad it's really weird why did my didn't they include your version I assume it's financially and there's financial reasons tied to it is what I'm assuming they never even called us and asked us about it so yeah I would I like I would assume it's some kind of financially didn't want to engage with us because of cost reasons is my assumption again I didn't talk to anyone

Capcom about it but yeah I did find it pretty weird so yeah so iron galaxy is in Chicago I actually also live with two students with Chicago in Orlando oh yeah that's right how you know where are you calling from are you in Chicago right now yeah Chicago right now yeah so I used to live in Fort Wayne Indiana thanks man he's to jump over there for for bears and Cubs games okay what and I and I love Chicago like I just the vibe there is like so good and my kind of vibe what's the game to have seen like there it's pretty not great I would say okay I think that's I think among Chicago people that might be a contentious opinion but like you've got NetherRealm who's still here and making kick-ass games like m'kay and all the games injustice those games just keep getting better and better and better and they're like the top of the craft and that stuff shoutouts there's us there's people have

been around here forever like high voltage you know then there's a kind of Indies that are kind of up and coming right like you got young horses here and you did octave dad and you know they're probably gonna start talking about their next game here really soon mm-hmm you've got some got a lot a lot of indie people kind of getting things going but it doesn't feel like it just doesn't feel like a game development hub to me you know if people don't come here for game development right people don't think about Chicago like if you go to the random person and say hey give me your top 10 game development cities like I don't think most people name Chicago right and so I I think it's not great and I get it like we recently opened their Orlando studio is because it's not great here and recruiting is very hard like you know when we're recruiting people with experience you know they're usually coming from like a warmer climate or at least a coast or something right yeah and they have one of two

reactions they either think they're gonna freeze to death or get shot the minute they get off the plane so recruiting is really hard and the city you know there's not a lot of economic support from the city and so if this is something like all those problems you know the weather obviously you can talk to the crime you can talk to you the crime is largely a myth but really if you want people to start growing businesses here and like not move you know half the development studio to Orlando then we need support from the local government that we're not getting yeah so how big are your studios in each city so we are about 140 people across both of them and it's about like 55 45 Orlando right now yeah that's that's reasonably medium yeah it's kind of its again it's like one of those things to where that's weird like you know like we started in 2008 like a month before like the global recession essentially and while it made it impossible to get a loan for anything it ended up like it's

the reason we're probably still standing is because of that thing and it's like like it like you talk about like cognitive biases right like it'd be really easy in our position to have like survivor's bias right they're like oh yeah we must be must be great because we're still here but like if you look at us it's like one of the real reasons we're still here and I believe it's all my hearts and this is like no like when that recession hit a lot of people started making fewer and fewer games every year right and budgets got budgets kind of bifurcated budgets they went smaller and bigger in the middle was it was already started drying up but it just kind of disappeared all the game yeah it's not totally the the bottom fell out of the middle so then you just have like really big or small right and so there were a bunch of developers at the time that are our size now that like had to scramble they had to go to Facebook games or mobile games or go out of business altogether right yeah and so then when the economy kind of stabilized there's this void of developers this size that do this kind of work and it

allowed us to kind of grow into that space much easier than we would have otherwise right because we didn't have to displace these 20 other veterans Studios that have been doing it better or longer than we've been doing it right and so it's really weird to think about like yeah that was a really good thing for us but I have no doubt it was at this point well there's like the talent like Windows like medium sized studios medium sized publishers close down then you kind of have all of the talent you yet you have a recruitment right essentially yeah yeah and so so so there you have it you benefited from the the recession yes yes yeah that's so interesting so when you're when you're talking about successes and failures that iron galaxy you know what what have you learned about what what players want and finding an audience and I know that you do some you know a lot of your work has to do was you know Studios themselves but I know that you know you do killer killer instinct and you've

commented I watched you part of your GDC talk and I'm just wondering if I can speak to what you've learned about in the audience yeah it's it's interesting like the I still feel like we've got a lot to learn there frankly like I don't think like listening to the audience and being aware of their concerns is like a skill we've fully developed at this point and I think it's something we need to be better at but like generically you know it's like the it's really easy to engage with people that are saying things you agree with you know and if there's people who are saying things like maybe they're maybe they're not even trolling or whatever they're just saying of you you disagree with it's really hard to have the institutional discipline to interrogate that feedback you know like a dispassionate way and say okay is there value here or not right yeah because it's so easy to dismiss Twitter feedback

it's so easy to dismiss forum feedback because so much of it is just horrible right yeah and I think that is something we need to be better at and we need to figure out like how do we actually interrogate some of these notions in a dispassionate way because I think our knee-jerk response is oh just just ignore it all right yeah it's really really difficult problem because you should ignore most of it because most of it sucks but like that doesn't mean there's nothing out there that's valuable or good and you know for when we were a certain size like I remembered strike you know we I'd get a handful of emails a week from people who were passion about third strike and that and a lot of them were nasty but then nine times out of 10 I'd engage with the person and be like hey listen if you're gonna talk to me like that I'm not gonna continue this conversation but if you want to have a like a discourse about like how do we make this game better okay let's do that nine times out of ten those people respond with I'm sorry I didn't think I think and will even read

this thing like but here's the problems I see them and they were really good right and now the proud the problem is like we're to the size and scale like a killer instinct we just couldn't do that right there's like too many people and I feel like that's a valuable job though yes Twitter is more prolific too I mean you can't yeah have that conversation like pivot that nowadays to say like look you're being a jerk and then they'll just come right back and say well you know you put you on blast yeah yeah people used to be I remember that because like if people would say like mail me something like nasty and then I mail them back it's like surprise this is a person and then they're like they would back off immediately but I don't think it's like that anymore it's actually I think one of the best things about my Twitter persona is like I've cultivated like a view of myself from people that is impervious to trolling like like who is gonna send

something nasty to me like I said I put so many stupider things out than you could ever tweeted me every day like there's nothing you can do to get to me it's like impossible and what I've been telling myself this whole time it turns out I'm dumber than you are as it turns out ha ha ha joke's on you yeah yeah yeah you just self-deprecating into like invincibility yeah it's worked out very well yeah like like many things in my life I know we're probably getting close to a wrap-up time but we need a hit we need to hit a couple things here I think like I'm not really caught up with there's a thing with you and Windjammers and Adam boys I think or what what is what's the story there so Windjammers I this is not my finest moment it was like I want to say like maybe 6 gbc's ago I was daydreaming and then I

remembered I was supposed to be on the Giant Bomb stream that night and I got on the stream and I was blasted I was out of my frickin mind gone I should not have been on I know this is a no-judgment zone we've been friends friends should have stopped me from going on but so Vinnie Aki knew we had killer instincts signed but we were announcing it like the Tuesday we had a big like exclusive in polygon that was dropping Tuesday after GDC and so he's he's a really he's a he's a good friend quote-unquote he was trying to get me to like ruin all that and spill the beans on the giant bomb thing he goes he goes Dave I hear you've got a big announcement to make and luckily if by the way this should cement all look as embarrassing as that show was for me like if you have a doubt I can keep a secret look at that string like I just without a beat I like I look at the camera yes I have an announcement to make you'll never have another Windjammers

[Laughter] bow this have been playing a lot of Windjammers it was something that was staple on there like per Friday's show they'd play alive and I don't hate Windjammers I've never even played Windjammers I don't care I thought was a funny thing to say and then from that moment on I was the guy who hates Windjammers it's a very random game to choose yeah it's so very good well is that like kind of like as I mentioned I was hammered and so yeah it's so late for that point out I became a like Dave lying professional Windjammer later yeah I know I was reading rumors like you owned the the Windjammers property yeah I was keeping it under wraps so no one else could ever enjoy it again yeah there's another Windjammers coming out did you like will that into existence somehow by just being like know so much that Windjammers to just it's pretty funny how that with jammer stuff goes cuz like every time there's a Windjammers trailer for two or an announcement for two or whatever like people tweet at me like i haha you are wrong I'm like hey it's not it's not out yet also it's not out yet so I think also we have to have you and Alyssa talk

on on-air about about hitman so in the floor for any hitman map conversation or there was the moment when we were doing our stalking I had a podcast there again where I've already established I have a bad time linking names and like what people have done it takes me a second to like connect those dots and I was just literally like sitting of that holy he's the guy who made the hit man list because I had discussed that in select recently so because for giantbomb your end of the year list this last year you ranked on the Hitman maps in 2016 - yeah I've been doing that giant bomb list for almost a decade now and as I've kind of listed companies gotten bigger and bigger I have fewer and fewer time to play games and so like I die like I literally didn't play ten games I liked last year right and so I can't do like a top ten list and so I just come up with like hopefully creative original things to do every year and people seem to like that list it seemed to go over pretty well so yeah like I was gonna

disagree with it that I get to the bottom and you're like oh there's no such thing as a bad hitman map and I'm like I yeah there's there's only some that are better than others yeah Colorado was Colorado is one of the okay not to get to hit like fan about hitman talking here but like Colorado for the longest time was like my least favorite hit man now and then that was going through it the first time when I'm still like learning the magic of the game and kind of those all those systems you memorize all the steps you memorize and the weird little ways that you can interact with NPCs that you figured out to kind of like game the system and then going back like Colorado is an entirely different experience once you have that little bit of knowledge under you're about under your belt my personal Colorado story is filled with tragedy and heartbreak so the the way Colorado goes is there's three targets right and then there is a secret door with like a facial scanner in the basement of one of the houses and you need to build like a 3d print a mask to get into that door right and so but the you through the mask is of someone you

killed and I didn't know about the mask a bit and so I killed the guy on the other side of the map and ice carried him stealth mode although I was gonna like hold his face up to the door and so I played that map for two freaking hours and I hollowed from the cornfields all the way into the house without being seen Herculean task and I get to the door and there's no freaking prompt and I was so mad I was just getting angry just thinking about it I'm like how if this is the way you do it how is this not like scripted this is the worst game of all time and I put hit me and down for a little bit and I came back in like yeah Colorado it was at that point it was the worst map by far but is so brilliant that worked yeah I feel like I might be wrong but I thought I read that at work so I don't know if they patched that in eventually or I could be just making something up right maybe they maybe a io interactive heard Dave story I've talked about the places okay I mean if they they kept the suitcase or

the briefcase with the yeah they're the homing briefcase where if you throw it it'll it's not quite as fast or it's a little bit faster than the run speed of the npc's they'll start sprinting away from it and it'll track them and follow them and fly through the air and they like instead of patching that out as a bug they like double down on it which is iOS grave yeah the best about one of the best gifts in hitman in recent times is the guy throwing the briefcase of the guy in the jet ski yeah yeah the briefcase just like Troy holding missile like the guy that jet ski amazing yeah yep I think I forget who the level designer was but she gave a talk at GDC last year and talked about kind of like the different kinds of like level of spaces they designed in a hitman level and like color-coded everything I'm broke broke it down it's a really great talk not sure if it's on the YouTube vault but it's out there and you should really watch it or read my life tweets or my article about it but um also a great noclip documentary on hitman yes yes watch all this material about hitman

but she was talking about Colorado and what made it different and why people didn't like it so much is because in hitman games you typically have your two spaces in level design or on the broader category where they're these social stealth places where you can walk around normally and as long as you don't do anything inherently illegal no one's gonna get pissed at you and these more secure spaces where it's like this is a trespassing zone there's armed guards and like once you're in this spot you have to be stealthy or you have to blend in and Colorado is all that second space which made it so difficult because there's no like safe place getting started if you gotta get there first outfit yeah it's so difficult in such a different kind of like level design but like even that when you play enough of the game and you go back to it really shines as a I don't know level design okay man so good I could talk about it yeah they're geniuses like I have obviously things I like or don't like about the map like my personal take on moat why most of the three target maps aren't as good as the other maps is because like they have the same amount

of like set pieces as the the two or one target maps but they're spread across three targets and so killing everyone is just kind of inherently there's less interesting and less variety ways to do it and so it's just kind of just not as good and it's like you know I would love love love to go to IO one day and just kind of sit with people and just talk about and chop it up just as a fan because that would be super fun oh but they like it's another interesting thing is like on the the basic level because the multi-target ones can feel like three different games to like a lower level person but then you watch like someone who's speedruns the game play it and they'll set this up while running and like with one hand tied behind their back and like hit a button at the eggs at all three died at the same time they leave and like I know it's just about designing a game that can take that level of variance it's just very interesting and we should talk about other things that are analyzed I'm just gonna let it go and keep going yeah well this is a good way to good place to stop and a good way to stop I think this was lovely thank you so much Dave really

appreciate you taking time I know you're a busy man it takes revenue it was fun [Music] [Music] and as we are back how about that dog launch Dave link yeah I tried to deliberately mispronounce it my mouth is like no yeah yeah the brain Mouse connection is is melting with Alyssa yeah that's really gonna confuse me like oh you can't even like get the name of like the you know the woman on your staff right this is all I was just like it's not quite gas lighting but I'm just setting you up for failure it's the long

time that's right I like a challenge so so the day of conversation that was that was good that was one of the like one of the most fun podcasts that we've done yet I think all our podcasts have been equally fun they've been some of them have been let's be honest some of them have been better than others last months when I wasn't here no I haven't listened to it I'm sure it was great oh yeah that one was great yeah that was good no all of our guests we they are equally loved by us we play no favorites [Laughter] [Music] yeah I like just starting out just like you know just talking about random stuff like Gabriel Knight and Roberto Williams sorry no that's not right if she listens to this over I am so sorry yeah she's not have anything to worry about there yeah it's it's cool talking to someone

who's been in the game industry for a long time and like you know a lot this is a young industry so it's kind of but I don't know I'm trying to I'm trying not sound ageist here Dave's older than the youngins that we've had on before and I'm somewhere right in the middle between Dave and and in the younger people who have accomplished more than I ever like a career representation throughout our trajectory so far so that's great yeah but no it's always really wonderful to hear those conversations about like the old days of the industry and like how things were way back then with certain companies that maybe don't exist anymore or maybe have like gone on to a completely different image or something like that it's funny because it's not even like it's the you say the old days but it does I mean it was like 2003 yeah and but it does feel like that because things move so quickly in the industry I feel like and it's you know yeah and I

love how it's kind of like I I did report pretty extensively like earlier on in my career on Midway so to have somebody that was there you know during that time in the 2000s just like okay what kind of interesting story do you want to hear about Midway and then I'm like mm mafia and there's just like okay well did you know going into that that there was a mafia story I mean I knew that like there was had this rumored like background but that's just hilarious this and would you like slack jawed the whole tiny way what's going on I like the sandwich guy this is good it's a real nice family business they got going on over there huh I could picture that in my mind yeah young impressionable Dave going in to get his meatball sub it's also nice to hear the

the issues a studio still face in the industry against like how it was 28 15 20 years ago yeah it's like and those are still issues if they're more of an issue less of an issue with like crunch doesn't like how he said it's gotten like that kind of awareness has gotten better about the same yeah yeah it's cool our ago I don't remember what he said that no Dave said that the work-life balance and quality of life in the game industry as has gotten you know undeniably better yeah which is a nice perspective to kind of like reflect on cuz it's easy to get caught in like the moment-to-moment issues which are still important it should be focused on but like the larger scheme of things it's also good to have that yeah sure yeah and I'm glad that at least one person benefited from everyone's lost during the recession so but but it's true though that's like that's interesting like what are you is saying because there was there was speculation at that time because you had like THQ going out of business Midway was one of

them and really just the middle falling out of the industry and that like impacted so many things like even games media it impacted that you know these are publishers that would pay for advertisements and so that recession had this ripple effect but there is also talk about you know will now there's all this talent that's out there so then you see people either leave the industry or they found you know iron galaxy you know yeah and and then the people people who still want to work in the industry you know there's a talent pool now you know and they go and either found their own stuff or or go to work on on startups mmm-hmm like making the best of a bad situation but in like a really unique way but I don't know the entire like studious structure of iron galaxy is just really interesting because like yeah you hear about like studios that do you make their make their bank doing like support work for other games and they're not the ones that you hear they're not like the blank game by

playing studio that's not the headline yeah but the work they do is really important and he employs 140 people about that company which is like way larger than I thought that was before reading about any of that at two locations yeah and just like highlighting the importance of like that kind of work and the value of that work and like the place that that has yes conversation yeah they are the unsung heroes of game development and it you know and we can we can kind of end on this but the the job stability making that the goal is super interesting to me you know and that's not as glamorous you know as saying I have this idea you know and then and then you execute and then it becomes a hit you know a tiny fraction you have like that success happens to people yeah you have more like more Studios kind of like going for the same kind of thing like in these well like a lot of coops lately it's been talked about like more and more where like the team owns the studio and kind

of getting job security and putting employees first that way yeah and then iron galaxy's like a different it's the same idea but a completely different path for that and just like seeing how those both work yeah so there we go you don't always have to be the next John blow I want to be the next day of lying honestly yeah I don't know I have to get a little you program where I'll have to get a little taller and a little more Caucasian dream big all right that's it so check us out on iTunes Google Play Spotify and someday we'll we'll upload some more of these to YouTube but we've got a couple of them up there right now just don't read the comments but if you like what you heard you know like and subscribe we would love to have you and that's all for this month thanks Alysa thank you bye [Music]

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