One of the things that I really wanted to do was let people dress up their vendors, which doesn't seem like a big system anymore, but the people loved it because they loved customizing the things.

And so a lot of the guilds, they started to like build uniforms for their vendors so people could see, you know, uniforms and it, and it outgrew even what I had expected, which is one of my very favorite parts of development.

It's when the players outsmart you as a developer.

That's really the kind of the magic where they do something in a way you didn't expect.

And, and I think that's probably the coolest things about our job.

That was Paul Sage, the founder of Ruckus Games, newish studio, working on their debut title, and Paul's got a pretty storied past, back to That sounds weird, doesn't it?

He's, he's very experienced.

Let's say that, going back to Ultima Elder Scrolls, borderlands, some amazing games talking about a merchant play and just the, the, how satisfying it is as a game maker to build it.

Feature or system tool, something that your players go and do something you weren't expecting?

It reminds me of the warthog jump videos.

I remember we were at Microsoft after Halo came out and it must have been like early YouTube days or whatever.

Somebody posted this video of these physics jumps they were doing.

I like the grenades stuff With the grenades.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I remember that.

There were some good ones.

The one I remember the most, there was one where someone took a grenade, a sticky, they they did a lot of stuff with stickies.

Yeah.

And then they would use the physics to get the thing to somewhere else and then that would do like something else.

Or rocket jumping.

Yeah,

rocket jumping.

Yeah.

You know, that also reminds me of the COD videos.

Have you ever seen the ones where they would, players when they start the match, they would like just throw the knife?

Have you seen this

like super grief?

Well, no, you, because you could throw the knife like up in the air and it would go across the entire level or something, and then it would like headshot.

Someone like this.

Ridiculous.

Like amazing.

Yeah.

Speaking of witch, I love that stuff.

What is that called back by the way?

Whenever the, the journalism.

You remember that there was like a, I dunno if that's happening anymore, but there was like almost, it almost picked up where people were doing like the in-game journalism or in-game photography?

Oh yeah.

There's, I, was hanging out with, so I was gonna say I just got back from.

Gamescom.

Mm-hmm.

being in, in Germany for a week, still recovering a little bit from jet lag, and I know you lived there for, some time.

Did you like living in Germany at times?

There's pluses and minuses, let's just say that.

I could, I could see, I could see.

I enjoyed, I enjoyed, you know, I've only been to Germany once or twice before, trip.

It's a beautiful country trip.

Beautiful country.

I got to do a, a nice long run along the Orion River and I did notice that.

and you know, cologne is not the biggest city, but it's, it's not a tiny city.

You know how you say Cologne in German?

Koln?

Yeah.

Isn't that crazy?

Amazing cathedral in the middle of town.

Yeah, those are great.

Apparently the only building that didn't get destroyed in, world War ii.

Yeah.

'cause it was a church.

Yeah.

They weren't shooting churches.

They were respectful.

Wow.

Did you, did you see Masters of the Year?

I don't know how good their aim really was.

You know,

but when you're dropping like bombs and stuff,

just a couple minutes outside of town, I hit the campgrounds.

I, my guess is

what does that mean?

in, in Germany, folks really to go, hold on mean the campgrounds?

Camping.

Camping.

Like people were camping in RVs for RVs

for Gamescom?

No, I think just for fun.

Not, not like game devs, but like, you know, just people, Germans, you know.

Off on a weekend with their dog.

They all have dogs.

Right.

That this is where it's like I wanted to talk to you about, 'cause you've brought up camping before, like that's just sleeping outside.

That would be like you, and I'm sure you've done this with your kids, where you just set up a tent in the backyard and then they sleep outside overnight.

Yeah, I've, I've done that except for the part where they actually sleep outside overnight.

Oh.

They handle hours because usually a few hours in they're like, "Hey, the, the, the, my, my wifi signal's not so good out here.

I'm going inside." Yeah.

And there's coyotes where you live in raccoon, but dude, seriously, that's not camping.

Like in, like you have to drive, I would say, and I'm just speculating, like someone can bring up Google Maps right now.

You have to drive a thousand kilometers from cologne in any direction before you get to a place.

Is it camping?

If you just park a, like you're sleeping outside at that point.

Oh, whatever.

I'm not trying to shoot it down.

I'm just anti camping.

You are, you're like in a negative mood today.

I don't know what-

I don't, I don't, don't, I don't like camping and school.

Really?

Those two things.

I can't

Camping and school, huh?

Yeah.

'Cause think about it, camping.

Like you, what is the point of air conditioning at that point?

Nature, is,

you know what I mean?

Like, it's like we've gone so far and you're like, you know what, okay, I wanna rough it.

Don't wear clothes for a day, do that.

That's like real go sleep up weird.

You know what I'm saying?

That's a leap.

That's a different-

that's a leap.

I'm sorry.

Okay.

So you saw the camping, you went jogging out there.

I'm sure.

It was very nice.

The air is very good there.

We've really have gone far, far afield here.

Games- It was my first time going to Gamescom, which, having been in this industry for so long, surprised even me that I realized I had never been.

What surprised you?

Hold on.

What surprised you?

The camp?

Like the

no, that I, that I have never been to Gamescom.

Okay.

You would've thought.

Yeah.

Have you been to the Ja Japanese one?

No.

You haven't been to the Japanese ones either, right?

I've been to teach, I've been to Tokyo Game Show a long time ago.

Tokyo Game Show.

Yeah.

Was it Halo related?

I think before that, we were working on, on the Marathon games.

Yeah.

Wow.

Okay.

I mean, that was an amazing trip.

We had a great distributor over there.

Okay.

Well, thank you for hanging out with us again this week.

I hope if you went to Gamescom and you have a story to share, about something you saw, come on over to Discord and share it with everybody.

That'd be fantastic.

And, excited to be able to share a conversation with Paul Sage.

Hope you enjoy it.

I will just say real briefly, Paul does tell a, very personal story about, that sort of, I guess suicide is mentioned.

Just wanted to call that out in case anybody wants to be aware, that that's mentioned in this episode.

Hope you enjoy it and we shall see you on the other side.

Welcome to this week's edition of the Fourth Curtain, friends.

Today we are so lucky to be joined by journeymen game maker and entrepreneur, Paul Sage, the founder and CEO of Ruckus Games.

That's gonna be my first question for you, Paul, is how you came up with the name there.

Don't answer it yet though, 'cause I still have more Intro to go.

If you aren't familiar with Ruckus, that's A-OK because you're probably familiar with Paul's work.

He's old school and I spelled that with a K 'cause he gotta start back at Origin Systems.

Working on things like Ultima Online and has worked on things like Elder Scrolls online, Borderlands 3, both in creative director roles.

So we're gonna get into that a little bit 'cause Borderlands is one of my favorites, that series.

Yeah, just a few small games right there.

His current studio Ruckus has raised, I did the simple addition, I think it's about 25 million bucks from Venture and also from Krafton, the Pub G guys for their inaugural game, which is quite a feat in this day and age, so great to see you Paul.

Welcome to the podcast.

How are you?

I'm good, I'm good.

Thanks for having me.

And just, it was 24.5 round up, you know, 500,000 there.

500,000 here.

That's five up at some point.

Yeah, exactly.

Good.

good on, if you had the extra 500k, what would you spend it on?

Oh my gosh.

Are you an investor now, or

next question?

He wants line items.

Yeah, let's, oh my gosh.

Yeah.

Let's see.

Snacks is a great one.

Yeah, there you go.

I wouldn't spend it, I'd save it for a rainy day.

true.

But yeah.

I did wanna ask you, we've hung out a little bit, and I've been on your site and I've seen some of the stuff you're working on and I keep wanting to ask you where the name Ruckus Games came from.

I'm feel fascinated at how people come up with naming.

For me, it's always about what URLI can get, but I'm just curious, how'd you come up with the name for the studio?

What we did is we had a whole bunch of names that we kind of like, it's not putting it in a hat.

And then we did, what we called the final four for, for the basketball, you know, Uhhuh kind of drawing uhhuh and, we all voted on it.

And, and Ruckus.

I, I wanna say that one of our founders, Kevin Penrod, he's actually just awesome, like 3D modeler an artist, it was his name.

And I think everybody was just really drawn to it.

And, you know, I, I don't think it was really that close to anything else.

kind of the way we're, we're doing our own, a name for the game, which I can't talk about yet, but,

Hmm.

And that was it.

It was, it was like, we really liked it.

You don't wanna share the name of the game?

Yeah.

You could make it here exclusive.

Not yet.

Yeah, not yet.

Yeah.

What was the, pardon the, it's not a pun, I guess, but the origin story of Ruckus.

I, I, I wish I had a, a seventies sitcom theme song for this, because it would just be so much better, like the Brady Bunch or something.

but what it really was, was, you know, that we, we had all, well, not all of us, but, but six of us had worked on Borderlands 3 together.

And you're, you're gonna hear this, it's gonna sound almost like I'm talking about what, what's going on in the industry right now.

But you've gotta remember this is 2021, that we got together.

And there were, there were a lot of things that were.

You know, I, I wouldn't say like.

I, I loved working in gearbox.

I think it's a great studio, but the things we saw, we were just unable to believe that we could sustain the way we were making games at the AAA level.

I'd worked on Borderlands 3, I'd worked on Elder Scrolls Online and we just saw so many, like ideas get crushed and killed for various reasons, right?

As, as you know, you, you have to respect the IP in the, in that.

But we also saw a lot of other things, like how much spending happened, how much you know, of, of people who were all part of a decision making process where you literally, if, if the sandwich was developers, then you were like the lowest part of that sandwich, right?

You have this piece of bread here where, where like everybody else was kind of at this upper level and it just doesn't seem sustainable to us, right?

And so we're calling this out like, this is just not going to be something that's sustainable.

And also, as you know, if you're working with creative people, they wanna be creative.

And so if you've got them kind of hemmed into an IP, you've got them realizing that even if they're wildly successful with that game, that that game may not actually make them money.

Then there's a problem.

Hmm.

There's a huge problem.

And we saw that on a number of games, not just the ones we were working on, but a number of games where the studio would sell.

I don't know.

You know, pick out a number that you think is a successful number of units that a game should sell.

5 million copies.

5 million copies.

That's a huge hit.

It's a huge hit, right?

We'd all like to believe that, but most AAA games, if they sell 5 million units are, are done for, you know, underwater.

yeah.

And, and that's what we saw.

And it was getting really scary, right?

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

And so we all talked about it and we said, what if instead we made a smaller game?

Like we see indie studios, they're, they're, they're coming out with more creative.

You know, ideas and what they have to do and probably because of some of the constraints that are on them and we think they're making like better games.

Mm-hmm.

And so it wasn't, you know, that we were in such a bad situation.

It's that we think or we thought at the time this is not gonna be sustainable.

And we want to enjoy some of that success that we think should come along with games and not just have everybody else who's taking pieces of the pie peck away at it to where even 5 million units isn't successful.

And there's a whole bunch of reasons, right.

Why, why 5 million-

Yeah.

And this was 2021?

Yeah, it was 2021.

I think you were probably a little bit ahead of the curve.

'cause you know, in that time, like 2020, you know, during the pandemic there was just a huge influx of investment.

A lot of excitement about video games, people like- play time was going up and up and up'cause people were at home.

They had nothing to do.

They were playing games.

But then I'm kind of curious, I, I totally agree with you.

I'm just, I'm kind of curious what you think was the difference between sort of the period of time we're in right now, like 2021 to now versus like, I don't know, the late teens where it seemed like everything was just up and to the right.

You know, 'cause there's always gonna be Call of Duty, you know, there's always gonna be the big thing.

But the idea that there's this whole segment of AAA games that are investible.

Like, I, I agree with you.

I think that equation has changed and the new stuff is gonna come from other pla.

Like, what do you think happened?

Like, what changed?

A lot of things happened, right?

but even, even back long before this, if you think just about how long it takes to make a video game.

And you, you put that on paper, right?

A lot of people are gonna tell you it takes three years to make a video game, right?

And, and they, and they think they're, they're like, I got this.

It's gonna take three years.

And that's a long time.

But we know the answer isn't that at all.

A lot of the successful gains are, are like taking up to six years or, or even longer than that to make.

Why is it six now?

Is it because it just, it it's takes longer.

It's six for a lot of reasons, but, but let me try to break it down at least how I see it, which is if you tell somebody you have to sell 15 million units to be successful.

Am I having a panic attack?

Yeah, yeah, exactly right.

We should all have panic attacks'cause of how difficult that is.

Then they're going to keep spending chasing that dragon, right?

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

And they're gonna keep investing the time and knowing that that's what it is.

And so it takes longer and longer to do cinematic to, to get, you know, all of these features in that you want in.

And it's, it's no longer okay to say, I wanna make a game that's 12 hours right now.

You have to say, I wanna make games as a service, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so all these people are trying to like re tinker and how they think about these things.

And so it takes them a long time to get this right, because one investment you have to get, right.

Yeah.

That's making me think about Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem forever.

Yeah.

And I, I remember that game was in development for years and I'm fa I'm fascinated by that story at some point, right?

We, we got a, we have to do an episode about that game, but I remember after that game was in development for years, they switched game engines.

Yeah.

And it, and it was in that time where everybody's kinda like one up.

Yeah.

It's exactly what you're saying.

It's like, Hey, we have to be the best.

We got, you know, we have to have the latest, we're gonna switch engines in the middle of development.

I was like, right.

Actually, one of our founders worked on Duke Nukem, that's Keith Schuler.

So he was, he was on that project.

I wanna say he was on it for 12 years.

Wait, the first one or the second one?

The first part of it, or the second part when they rereleased?

Yes.

I, I think the answer to that question is yes.

I think he was on

12 years, he was on everything.

Yeah.

I think he was on both iterations of it.

and so yeah, I, I think that, that's exactly right because everybody knows they have to have a hit.

Right.

And that's one of the sicknesses is that we all look at it for a hit.

Yeah.

That's a thing that is exciting.

But else punishing about this industry is that like, if, if you don't make a hit, it's almost like it doesn't even matter, right?

Yeah.

But if your challenge instead is we have to break even at 500,000.

That's a completely different challenge.

Yes.

Right?

Yeah.

And that, that's, that's set by leadership.

And if you set that up as, versus we have to make the hit versus we have to be profitable beyond 500,000 units, then we have a completely different state of the industry.

Right?

Yeah.

You know, my, my belief is that the heyday of the industry was really the, the late nineties.

you saw a ton of innovation during that time.

You saw a ton of new types of games come out.

studios were very healthy.

You had more independently owned studios at that time.

So it was, it was really good.

Yeah.

Not, not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a healthy industry.

I, I kind of think based on what you're saying, and I agree with it, that we're gonna see a new renaissance, you know, because a lot of the investment that's coming in is coming in to projects kinda like yours, where, hey, we realize it's not really investible to take one shot at 50 to a hundred million dollars.

We have to take smaller shots that are, have an angle, a hook, something, they're doing something new.

And when you're sort of like, if you have an investment thesis that's around providing something new, then that seems exciting to me.

We're gonna see new stuff.

I assume that's what you're working on is not a clone of in a game that's been in market for a while, but something new and different.

That's right.

That's what we're hoping for.

That's exactly right.

Yeah.

You know, and I, I know this is, you know, I don't, I didn't just come on to, to, you know, promote Ruckus, although it certainly is nice.

But that was, that was definitely it.

We, we we're gonna get into the time machine.

Don't worry about it.

It's just this is, this is a, it's fascinating to me, and I'm, I'm always curious about how things kind of get started, you know, so like, yeah, the, the seven of you and six of you are on Borderlands, and you had this realization that.

You were working on a project that it doesn't fit a future facing sort of format or mold or, or setup and you want to have more skin in the game.

Like from that, were you guys like going out to lunch together?

You don't have to give out any clandestine secrets, but were you like, Hey, we gotta get out and start our own thing?

Or, you know, like, were you, were you like grabbing boxes of diskettes out of the supply closet to-

That's what Alex does!

-Set up the new company.

What, what was happening?

Yeah, so the, the, the interesting thing about this is I think we hit a number of people who were going to just leave.

Hmm.

That, that, you know, and again, that sounds like I'm saying something so bad about, you know, the previous company.

And I'm not at all like, in no way.

I think they're a great studio.

I really love those people there.

but it was, we've kind of had, you know, we want something different.

And when all of us got connected, you know, we, we talked a little bit.

We realized, oh wait, you're thinking about leaving and you're thinking about leaving and you're thinking about leaving.

Right.

Can I, can I ask you a question about that?

Sure.

Actually, to interrupt you, sorry to interrupt you, but Yeah, this is 2021.

So were y'all, y'all, I, I've been to your that studio before at Gearbox.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And it's a very comfortable place.

Was there like a, everybody's working from home era and now you're at home, and then did that have any influence with the next,

I don't know.

You know, they call it the great exodus around that time of technology exodus where a lot of people left their companies.

I don't know.

I don't know that that was the big influencer, but maybe it was, maybe there's some, something to the pandemic of scaring everybody enough about like, go do the things that are valuable in life.

You know, that, that we all, all thought that.

I don't know that that was really the catalyst, but I do know that it was more or less a group of guys who wanted to go do something different and creative, and they wanted to be rewarded for doing that.

You know, Alex, you introduced me.

I've been in the industry since 95.

I'm not rich.

I didn't, I didn't get rich off, you know, these, these mega hit games that we worked on.

That's just not what happens to developers, right?

They, they're not the ones that, that get that way.

And I really like to see developers go back to being, superstars not the right word.

It's, it's more or less, but stakeholders.

Stakeholders, yeah.

Stakeholders, getting the credit for what they're doing.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, I think that's really important.

Yeah.

I'm here talking to you.

I'm not the most brilliant person on my team.

Right.

Like, I'm not, I'm not the genius,

but you are the ceo.

How did you, how did you get, how did you, did you draw the short straw or were you like-

I did.

Who's the oldest guy in the room?

What was it?

What was it?

Yeah, I, I think it was that everybody believed.

That I'd had enough experience kind of dealing with, you know, upper management, you know, the business people and things like that, that I was the natural person to go talk to.

And I also think my resume, when you say, oh, well he was the creative director on this hit and this hit, showed, showed that.

And so it gave a little bit more gravitas to it.

Mm-hmm.

I think.

Mm-hmm.

that's, you know, the, my team's smart.

They, they kind of know and, and it really was the, Hey, you know, why don't you go do this?

And, and you've said it correctly.

It's the short straw.

Right.

It's the, it's the thing that takes me away from the thing I love doing, which is creating games.

But at the same time, I really do believe that, that every person on my team, they need to be, you know, they need success.

They need to get, get that taste of like, Hey, your efforts mattered and, and you're awesome.

Right.

And that's, that's what I really want to, have everybody who works on my team feel very much though.

Right.

Yeah.

So you're in Texas, right?

Yeah!!

Got Team Texas over here.

It's a great country.

Did you grow up in Texas?

Believe it or not, I did.

I I grew up in Dallas.

I was, my mom and my dad got divorced as, as kids, you know, parents in the seventies where we're just starting to have that happen a lot more.

So it's not an unusual tale by any stretch of the imagination.

I am a product of the Dallas Independent School District.

Right.

I went to kind of, you know, it was, it was a great school.

Like it was, it was fine, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't the rich kid school by any stretch of the imagination, right.

So Dallas Independent School District, is that just what they call the public school system in, in Dallas?

That's exactly the public school system in Dallas.

All yeah.

Public schools for the win.

Me too.

Absolutely.

you know, I wasn't the, I wasn't the most brilliant student or anything.

I ended up going to UT.

But yeah, I, I spent a lot of time-

UT's a fantastic school!

UT in where?

Which one?

Austin.

So Austin, the real one.

Right.

It turns out, even if my grades weren't spectacular, I was pretty good at the SAT.

Right.

Like I, I did well on the testing side of this.

Okay.

It, and so what was like home life?

So your parents got divorced, how old were you?

Oh, I would've been six, right around six years old.

Six?

Yeah.

Okay.

Pretty, pretty young.

And so did you grow up like between two households?

Absolutely.

I'm kind of mostly curious, like what was that journey like, you know, through high school.

Did you, was technology there?

Were you like, I'm, and this was probably, I'm guessing eighties for you high school.

Yeah, it was, it was definitely the eighties in high school.

I mean, I got, You know, speaking of technology, like I always wanted the beeps and boops, you know, of any toy that, that you could get.

Right.

I had a Merlin, do you remember Merlin's?

The old Uhr mer.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

That sounds so familiar.

What was the Merlin

familiar with?

This little handheld, and they had like little games, like they had tic-tac toe, which wasn't important, and then they had memory things.

It was just, it was just like, I had one of those, those

alpha numeric displays where, where it was like, it could do like letters and numbers on each square or nose.

No, you're way too fancy.

It was little LED buttons.

Okay.

It would just line up the little LEDs

red.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

It's like, hey, when LEDs came out.

Right.

All right.

And so that was, you know, but I was jealous when my friends would have the little metel, you know, football games that, that were, again, were LEDs and stuff like that, but then I got an Atari 2600.

Oh, okay, man.

It was, it was everything I wanted.

you know, it, it just, you know, you're chasing ducks around with arrows, you know, for those who don't know, that's adventure, right?

and, and I just, I was absorbed, but I didn't know what I wanted to do.

Really, because every kid played video games.

Every kid loved video games.

And I wasn't the best kid at video games.

My friends would come over and kick my butt at combat and things like that.

But I got a Commodore Vic 20.

Okay.

And then I started writing my own games, right?

Like I used, I used basic, ooh, and this is gonna sound horrible, but I, I had to go to an electronic store to get a 16k expansion because I kept filling the memory.

Any other engineer would tell you that The reason I was filling the memory is 'cause I wasn't doing it right.

I was using basic,

And how old are you at this time?

With the basic?

I'm probably 12, maybe 13.

Okay.

Or at this time,

Hey, do you remember we had, I'm trying to remember who it was, who was telling the story about he would go to Radio Shack and write code.

That was, was that Brian Reynolds?

Yeah.

He would go over to Radio Shack and, and write a game on the computer there.

'cause he didn't have one at home.

Yeah.

And then he'd leave.

Yeah, you, he'd come back and the code would still be there somewhere.

That's brilliant.

So you, so you go, well you're, you're out at Radio Shack buying a, a memory expansion for your V 20 'cause your basic coding skills were basic.

Is that basically what're saying?

I I wish it had been Radio Shack.

It was, it was literally of some like tiny electronic store that nobody had ever heard of.

Right.

Okay.

And you had to flick like little dongle switches to get the right amount of memory on your, commodore rate.

20.

And then my mom, she was always invested in, in this kind of stuff for me.

And so she got me a Commodore 64.

Okay, that's cool.

Big time.

And dude, that was the, the coolest thing ever.

And wow, this will date me at that same Christmas.

I got a color tv.

For my room.

Whoa.

At the Commodore 64.

Could be not.

Okay, so you, you're doing, I mean, public school, but you're doing, doing pretty good in Dallas.

Here you got a 2600, then a Vic 20, then a C64 plus a color TV in your room.

Did you have a trampoline too?

No.

No.

So, so with a funny thing that I'm telling you, and the reason why this should be impressive is because we didn't have a lot of money.

Like all of this was, that's the sacrifice.

My mom worked at Die Marcus.

I mean, my dad, he had a, he had a construction company that he owned as well.

But you know, he's, he split on everything.

And so it wasn't the, the highfalutin, it was just that they were so invested in me at the time and I was one of.

Four kids at the time.

Okay.

Three siblings.

And where were you in the order?

Youngest by far.

Youngest, okay.

Yeah, until I got, stepsisters, which was later on at the picture break.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

And so, and so that was, it was just learning everything that I could learn about how to program.

I got compute magazines out, you know, and doing what I could because it was great.

But the day I saw Ultima three was the day I was sold.

And I think I was like, that would've been my 16th birthday.

Maybe, maybe my 15th birthday.

I can't remember exactly.

Okay.

I, I can't even begin to tell you.

Alima Ultima three.

Yeah.

Yeah.

On the Commodore 64 or?

On the Commodore 64.

Okay.

So they used to have this, this computer store called, it was before it was Babbage's.

It had a different name and I can't remember, but certainly let's use Babbage's as the name.

Okay.

I remember Babbage's, I remember that.

Is it Funko Land?

I would know.

I wish it would've been as fancy as Funko land.

I would, I would walk into Babbage's and I would just sit there and watch.

They had a video tape.

They just played over and over of certain games.

And then Ultima three would come on, and you may not remember this, but the Commodore 64 had this thing called a Sid Chip, which was music.

So you not only got the beeps and boots, you actually got real music in the game, you know, for the price of your Commodore 64.

And I'm just like, my, my face is just, and I'm drooling'cause it's got, you know, this and this stuff going on.

And I'm just, I'm like, I want this game.

And I mean, it's one of those things where like, you know, you want something really badly and it turns out it's just as awesome as you'd hoped it would be when you play it.

and I was sold at that point, like even writing on everything else didn't send me over the edge like ultimate three did.

So when you say you were sold and you're still in high school.

Yeah.

You were sold like, oh, I love this.

Like when I went to go see Star Wars kind of thing, or like, I know what I wanna do when I grow up.

No, it's, I better get my butt in gear.

Get better at my classwork.

Start like taking math classes and things, start taking math seriously, which I did not, you know, and doing whatever I could to learn how to program.

There's, there was no computer game school.

Right.

Okay.

That didn't exist.

So you saw that and you were like, oh, this is state of the art.

Right.

I can't be writing crappy basic code anymore.

I gotta get good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sorry, I didn't mean, I didn't mean to, to

make fun of your basic code.

It's cool though.

It's fine.

But it's cool that you recognize it at that time.

Like a lot of people, like they're much older.

Yeah,

right.

You know,

and so I went to college for that exact reason.

It's, I was a computer science major.

Hmm.

And, and up until that point, I'd actually been a better English student than a math student by far.

And got into computer science classes.

Proceeded to really find out something important about myself, which is I'm a terrible student.

I like really, really bad.

I'm going to computer science class.

I'm like, yeah, I don't want to do this right now.

I was, was too into like everything else that was associated with college because one, my mom was awesome at setting me up and all this stuff.

She's incredibly strict.

Right?

Like my bedtime was nine o'clock until I was a sophomore in high school, and then she got lenient and I got 10 o'clock until I was a senior.

Nice.

Yeah,

I mean, that's my bedtime now it's 10 o'clock.

Yeah.

Right, right.

Works.

That's voluntary.

Resting comes on at 10 o'clock in the night, at nine actually.

Sounds pretty good.

yeah.

But, okay.

You're in Austin, so you're living on campus, you know, a few hours away from home.

Yeah.

And and why do you think you had challenge as a student?

Were you antsy, bored, or were you like questioning whether do I really wanna do this?

Like, what was it?

Yeah, it was, it was all of those things and, and rolled into one.

It was, again, I'm not blaming my mother, but there was a strict upbringing and when you get into a place where those rules no longer apply mm-hmm.

And you realize you can go out and do almost anything you want to do, it, it, it's, it's, it's a whole different world at that point.

And, you know, I was, I was a student where like I again was, didn't mean I was great, but I was in choir, you know, I was in all the musicals and I was in football.

Right.

Like, I was at school, like high school from

00 AM to like eight with extracurricular activities, doing everything right.

Kind of nerdy for sure.

Not, not exactly.

And, and you know, also doing the computer game stuff.

So.

But when I got to college and it's just like this, this whole world opens up, you know?

And, and nothing really too elicit.

you know, may Yes.

Drinking, of course, yes, going to parties, but really just, oh, I can sit here and play video games, you know, all day long or, you know, I can

Cause you had that color tv.

And were you still had your Commodore 64 then?

Or did you like get an Apple two?

What'd you have

The first year, I had the Commodore 64.

The second year I had a, a 2000, or, sorry, what was it?

A, I'm trying to remember.

'cause it was based off megahertz.

It was a, a 16, I remember it was a 16 sx, like it was, what was the Intel chips called at that one of an

early pc?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was before

that, before 386, like a 286 or three six.

It was a 286 16.

286.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think, I think that was it.

Okay.

So that was like, could run Doom on there.

Yeah, eventually you could eventually, but I was playing games like Crescent Hawks Revenge and that kind of thing on, on that system, so

Is that mud, you were saying Muds earlier?

Muds were, when you're supposed to have your time on, you know, the different spark stations or the sun stations at school, do you know, like development?

You, and then Yeah.

You took that time and then you're playing a mud instead of actually working on lisc.

Right.

So, okay.

So, like a Spark station or a Sun station, these are like$25,000 workstation computers that the university would put there for students to learn how to do like hardcore programming.

Yeah.

And, and they're networked together.

Okay.

There you go.

All right.

On this thing called the internet, right?

Yeah.

Which early days.

Early, early times, right?

Okay.

So ut did you graduate with a degree in computer science?

No, I did not.

Did you graduate?

Not at all.

No.

Okay.

No, no.

I, what, what happened?

What happened was shortly, I, I can't, I can't even remember what year it was, but I basically, I was just outta money.

I, I mean, there's poor and then there's what I was, which is negative, right?

Like I was, I'd owed people money.

You wanna say people like, you know, you owe that.

I got a job as an apartment manager to, to actually pay for my ability to live there.

So I never had to pay rent.

But that was about all that covered.

And then I had to find odd jobs to, survive.

you know, and I couldn't afford school at all.

And so I had to drop out of school completely.

I had to.

Basically just find a way to survive, which I, I ended up at the apartment manager job.

I did well enough to become, you know, a higher level apartment manager at a bigger complex where now it wasn't just my rent, but it was rent plus some money.

And I, you know, I thought I was gonna end up having to go into real estate and Wow.

There.

Yeah, there was a girl that I had met at a bar, and this is a funny story, and I failed spectacularly.

We went out on one date and failed spectacularly to impress her, right?

And then saw her at a bar again four years later.

So imagine this is me at 20 or 19 when I met her and then met her like three years later, something like that.

Maybe a little later than that, actually come to think of it.

And I asked her what she was doing and she said, oh, I actually work at this company, just this.

Little, little, you know, this company, they make video games and, you know, my jaw drops.

I'm like, that's all I've ever wanted to do.

And she's like, oh, yeah, yeah.

It's, it's pretty great.

I'm an artist there.

And you know, and I knew that she'd been in art classes and things and and.

I'm like, is there any way you can get me in the door?

Like I would've said anything at this point.

Right?

Like, you know, real estate's outta my mind, you know, the dream's back in front of me.

And she's like, well, they have this thing and it's called an application and you should go fill it out.

So that's what I did.

And this is now 1995 and we're up to, you know, windows 95 is, is the, is the platform that's, it's just taken over and nobody knows how to get their games, their DOS games running at Windows 95.

So they have to hire up all these technical support people.

And I, you know, I think I mentioned to you earlier, you know, I know you've talked to Harvey, so you know that he went through this same thing of getting in, getting into QA much the same way I did.

But, but luckily,

Although I, I think he just squatted on the softball team until somebody invited him in the building.

He was hanging out.

That's right.

That was what I heard.

Yeah.

Mine was me.

But you filled out an application.

That's impressive.

I did.

I did.

And luckily Jenny had said, Hey, you know, I worked there so you take pity on you.

And she put in a good word for me.

So it was still who you knew, she put in a good word for me.

But you know, people that had worked in that same technical support department that, whose names you might know, I don't know if you know a guy named Monty Kerr.

Monty Kerr does a lot in the mobile gaming industry.

You know, Harvey, I think even Star got his his start there, but also J.

Allen Brack

Starr Long,

Starr Long, okay.

Oh wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

J.

Allen Brack.

What a killer QA crew.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, it was, it was, honestly, it was one of the best times ever.

Like that was, that was such a fun, place to work.

But it was also the place where like what we experience now, there were a lot of layoffs.

We used to joke that there was this tree that would bloom in May in our parking lot.

Whenever the end of the fiscal was this, this tree would bloom.

And it was like, oh look, the blooms were on the layoff tree because we all knew the were coming.

I knew exactly.

That was, that was the running joke.

That was how bad it was.

yeah.

Yeah.

We've got, we've gotten too close to the EA layoff tree, right?

Yeah.

Wait, this was, so this was in 95, they set it on fire.

Yeah.

Origin was already part of Electronic Arts.

Is that right?

That's right.

Yeah.

I think, I wanna tell you, I'm probably wrong, but I wanna say they got bought by EA in, in 94.

Okay.

So, so it was, it was just right after they got bought.

I, I could be wrong.

Okay.

It might not be exactly right.

You know, I really thought you were gonna say that You met this girl at the bar four years later, and now she's your wife.

Did you guys get married?

Yeah.

No.

That's what I thought too, I'm so you said that.

No, but, but, but also good story, you know, that you got the application.

so, so you end up at Origin, you're in the QA department.

And.

Did you, what happened?

Did you get laid off or was that just a joke?

You know, that it, it just cycled a lot.

So it, it turns out, while I'm not great in academic environments, once you have no money or negative money and you're struggling to survive, it kicks a gear in you, you don't know you have.

And I hustled, but, in QA and, and just worked myself to the bone.

I didn't care how many hours I had to work.

It didn't matter to me that that was, was irrelevant.

What was relevant was I, I was getting closer to doing the thing I wanted to do.

And the only way that I knew you could do that, and, and this is funny, one of my managers at the time, his name is Richard Zinser, and he said something that I'll never forget.

He said nobody ever got promoted doing poorly at their current job.

Now we all know that's not exactly the tautology.

We would hope it would be, but it was actually true with Richard and I just, you know, I would put in hundreds of hours, like when we were testing Ultima online and they pitched Ultima online to us as a game called Multima.

Right.

And none of us really knew.

At the time how big this thing should have been.

But we were excited to work on it, you know, for me, Ultima, right?

And Oh wow.

Ultima Online now it's like those muds that I played, was perfect.

And you know, you get to know the dev team a little bit when you're working at QA with that and it's a brilliant project and you get, get really excited about that.

But it was hard because you did have to put in hours and, and they never knew when a build would come through.

And we talk about builds and we're like, this build is taking a long time and it's, you know, it's 15 minutes to 20 minutes a build.

There was, it could be eight hours right?

For them to get a build and put it on the servers.

Did like to, to press the button.

Okay, we're ready to make a build, blink, and then take eight hours to actually compile everything together into something playable?

Yeah.

And, and, and put it on the dis so we'd all have the client on our discs to install.

Oh, okay.

You know, so you have the server and you've got the client and they've gotta get those out to you.

So we'd have burners, you know, in the QA room,

CDs, burning CDs, right.

Yeah.

That's cool.

Kids, back in the nineties, you have to put things on CDs.

You can't even buy a computer with a CD drive anymore.

You cannot.

And it's just, or, or almost any kind of media that outside of a thumb drive.

Right.

We'll be right back if you like what you're hearing, like, and follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

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And now back to the show.

How big was Origin then?

So like Ultima Online doing testing on it, like how many, how big was the studio?

I, I would say it was probably around four to 500 people.

Origin handled multiple teams better than I've ever seen any other company handle multiple teams.

And the way they did it was, you know, for different projects, each team was their own team.

Period.

End of story.

There was no sharing of resources, there was no anything else.

They were run independently by different people.

It's brilliant.

It's the way it should always be done because that way the people on the team have investment in the project they're working on.

Sorry, little bit of a rant there because I, I still think it's one of the best ways I've ever seen it done.

So that is how big Origin was at the time.

So Richard's still there at the studio.

Is like Warren there, Chris Roberts?

Was that sort of like the, the crew?

Warren had gone.

Okay.

Yeah.

Chris, I, I, I probably got to spend about two years of overlapping maybe because they were Maverick Studios, before he went and started Digital Animal.

That's right.

That's right.

Yeah.

Who did Free Space.

That was, that was a fascinating, studio.

And he was, he was known as the really meticulous guy.

And then yeah, Richard was definitely there.

Warren had left pretty shortly after I started.

Hmm.

Okay.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

So listeners, you're probably familiar with Warren, he's been on the show on Chris Roberts said the Wing Commander Games.

Right?

That's right.

Which were part of Origin.

Okay.

So, so, yeah.

And so like, what was next for you, like Ultima Online, but did you go to Tabula Rasa after that or was there Yeah.

So, you know, just how did that happen?

Just just to give you the little bridge there.

I actually went from QA to working as a Game master on, Ultima Online.

And they had told us that's the way you're gonna get in development, right?

I was like, oh, 'cause you're actually gonna be able to run Quest, which was nothing like the truth.

And we, we were just handling customer service, you know, complaints about the game the whole time.

And, you know, finally there was one day that, that a kid called in and, you know, basically had said, Hey, you know, I, I've taken a whole bunch of pills and, and had told people this online.

And then we ended up looking up his name right.

And, and trying to call, his parents.

you know, didn't know what else to do at the time.

And then his mom is like, well, yeah, his dad's like, really bottle.

And she tells me this whole story.

And I'm just sitting there, I'm like, I'm not qualified for this in any way whatsoever.

And at that point I, I'm just kind of like, I'm not doing something I like at all.

And it really hit me that I just, I wasn't qualified or it did, it had just taken such a dark turn and I'm like, I'm, I'm in customer service.

I'm not, gaming is a completely different beast now.

Mm-hmm.

And so I, I'd, Ended up telling, I guess he was the vice president at the time of the studio, I'm like, I'm out.

I, I, I have to leave now.

It's like, well, do you have another job lined up?

I'm like, Nope.

I just, I can't do this anymore.

And he said, well, what do you wanna do?

I said, well, I wanted to be a developer.

I said, so go be a developer.

And I said, well, that's easy for you to say.

And he's like, it is easy for me to say, you're gonna be a developer.

And, he, he stuck with me.

That was Gordon Walton and, it's great, right,

Gordon.

And, and he, so he got me.

That's cool.

An appointment with two teams to see which team I wanted to go to.

and it ended up being not the fancy new Ultima Online two team, which I had an offer from, thanks to Starr.

But it was ultimate online.

And because I, I really still love the game.

I am still a big fan of that game, and I knew it.

And, and so I just, I wanted to get on there.

And I also got a designer there also meant to part-coder, which as you know, probably appealed to me.

and so I was able to get on that game, in that capacity.

Lots of stories with that game, but that, that's kind of was the bridge to me getting in development.

And then actually a lot of the people who went over there, Carly, Stalin, Starr Long and some other people went over and I didn't know Richard as well at that point, and they brought me over to work at NCsoft and they said, Hey, we think, you know, this guy is worthy of at least getting a, an interview.

And they brought me over to NCsoft, because I was the lead designer on Ultima Online at that point, and then went over to NCsoft to work, work there.

How long was that period of time from like, okay, basically I gotta leave.

And you get a, a role on the UO team.

How long was it from that to you're now lead designer on your like, favorite game of all time?

About two years.

Two years.

Wow.

About two years.

Yeah.

And that's, that sounds like I'm a really accomplished person, but let's hotshot Yeah.

Let's be real of, of what actually happened.

We had a lot of the developers of Ultima Online at that time, left to go work on Star Wars galaxies.

Oh yeah.

I remember that game.

Okay.

They, they took a lot of the team with them.

and I kind of became the lead designer by default.

You know, I'd love to tell you it was, I was, you know, hustling and everything else, but that wasn't really true.

And then we had to hire a whole new group of, people to be on that development team at that point.

But it, it, it really was like, you learn very quickly, what is it?

Baptism by fire of, you know, you're, you're, you're really in the trenches, at that point.

Sorry to go back here, Paul, but you mentioned the kid on the phone that took the pills.

What happened to that?

Like what, what was the?

So as far as we know, that was resolved, right?

We, we, we suggest to his mom, 'cause his mom was asking us questions like, what, what can I do?

And I'm like, well the first thing you should do is go check on your kid and the second thing you should do is get help.

Right.

Like get, get real professional counseling.

That's what we told them.

as far as we know that kid is okay, like, you know, or was at the time.

And, but that was, he could, and we know that only because he was back online, you know?

Okay.

A few days later.

And it's not, you know, we followed up that much.

We didn't follow up much more.

It wasn't really our, our business or our place to follow.

Yeah, yeah.

But I, I wish that were an only story, but it's surprising how many people use that medium to reach out for help.

Yeah.

I've heard about that too.

That's, that's very interesting.

Yeah.

Sorry I had to go back'cause you mentioned it.

I'm like, well what happened to the guy?

Yeah.

Sorry.

Good point.

Yeah.

It's the important part.

That's a really interesting story, Paul, and it's a, it's a good observation, Aaron, that our medium video games are, they're social and they're interactive.

There's, you know, people relate to each other inside of the entertainment.

They relate to the creators or communicate with the creators inside of the entertainment.

It's, I think, pretty unique that way.

Mm-hmm.

So I sounds like that was a pretty challenging experience for a young game developer that you Paul, to be in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can't even imagine, like, what

It's just, it wasn't something I was qualified to do, you know?

And the only thing that I think I was qualified to do is, no, I wasn't.

Right.

Yeah.

So being a designer on Ultima Online, and it's been in service for a few years at this point, like what was the day-to-day like then?

Like what, what were you doing?

It was pretty great.

The, the nice thing was one of the first, very first things I've worked on, there were two things they gave me.

They said, here's a system for, you know, you tell us what you want to do, which was awesome.

There's a guy named Anthony Castori.

He said, you tell me what you want to do and how, what you wanna do to the game to make this better.

And then the second thing is, we want you to do patches.

So, so it was, you know, again, it was kind of that small team mentality a little bit.

but the first thing I wanted to do is do something that I had nicknamed vendor Barbie, which a lot of the people in the games had vendors that they had associated with their houses and to learn.

How the systems worked and things like that.

One of the things that I really wanted to do was let people dress up their vendors.

Right.

Which doesn't seem like a big system anymore, but at the time was pretty unheard of.

And, and, and the attempts were a little clumsy, but the people loved it because they loved customizing the things.

And so a lot of the guilds, they started to like build uniforms for the vendors so people could see, you know, the uniforms.

And it, and it outgrew even what I had expected, which is one of my very favorite parts of development.

It's when the players outsmart you as a developer.

Right?

That's, yeah.

That's, that's the, that's really the kind of the magic where they do something in a way you didn't expect.

And, and I think that's probably the coolest things about our job.

And, and that was again, the, the, the reaffirmation that this was something that really went over well.

And in fact, it was such a small system, but it had gone over so well.

It was like, oh, I'm not out of touch with them.

I'm one of them, you know, one of us, one of us, one of us, as a developer.

And so.

That was, that was fun.

And it was great to get to work on that.

So you, if you think about that, imagine somebody said to you, Aaron or Alex today, you just tell me what you wanna work on and then you go make that happen.

That, that's so rare in, in games.

Right.

But, but it was an established thing.

Yeah.

At the same token, you can also screw up really badly live, but you, you have that, the beautiful thing about live games is you have that quick turnaround of your communication with the players to know whether what you did was right or wrong in their eyes.

Okay.

So then what happened?

You got recruited over to Ncsoft and you start working on Tabula Rasa.

Right.

And, and Tabula Rasa is, it's, it's a seven year stint of my career, that I think amounted to 25,000 or 30,000 sold units.

So for those of you who aren't aware, that's not great.

But I really did love the people I worked with at, at, at studio.

They were, they're great.

It's just that.

I, I think that's one of those things where you're, you're, you are in the feast portion of development instead of the famine portion.

And so you have all of this time, you have all of these resources because it's being backed by Ncsoft who's, you know, still living large based off of Lineage at the time.

Right.

And they've invested in the studio.

We had people from Korea come over and work with us.

It's, it's a beautiful time to understand how every bit of our thinking was pretty flawed in a lot of ways, right?

We, we tried to make a game that would appeal to both the western market and the eastern market.

Hmm.

Appeals to no one.

We all got a little high on like some of our designs.

Maybe it was high on other things, but it was definitely our designs where, you know, the going in directives for the project were things like Chinese Ghost Story and Terry Mugler outfits and things of that nature.

And it's not that anybody was doing anything wrong, there's some brilliant kind of thinking behind that stuff, but it didn't translate to a fun game.

And a lot of times we ended up talking about things that this is what the game's not, versus here's what the game is and, and was there really central vision?

And I think at that point is, is when I had a real epiphany to like, you know, games have to be directed and they have to be directed really well.

You know, people have to understand what they're making.

And now I have to be very careful with that statement because there will be times where people say like, I'm still not sure what we're making.

You know, like.

Every day today.

But it's like, okay, well let me help you understand that.

But sometimes people are like, they use that as, as kind of an out for like, I wanna do this other thing and I don't understand what we're making.

Right?

Like, so, so you have to be very careful and understand what that's about.

But everybody who works in a video game works in a video game to, to have their own idea be a part of it.

And so that's, that's really a strong thing about direction is you have to learn to like, listen to what people are really telling you they want, and see how you can fit that in the game.

And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

How do you do that?

Like when you're running a project or you directing game, whatever and, and somebody brings an idea that you don't like.

Yeah.

What do you do with that?

Talk to 'em about what they wanted to do.

Like what, what was the goal of this?

Like what, what did you hope the goal was?

Like, you know, how did you see that fitting into the thing?

It's generally asking them questions about what it is versus telling them no outright.

I mean, sometimes you have to say no outright, just 'cause you're, you're out of time.

Mm-hmm.

But it really is just trying to get to the heart of what they're trying to do and saying, let me ask you a question.

If we did what you were trying to do this way, would this still fulfill what you're trying to do?

And most people, when they hear that you're willing to make that effort will then say, yes.

Like this would work.

And if, if you can say this thing that they want, it's not gonna break our game, it's not going to hurt it.

It's, it's going to be what they want and we can get it fit in, then you're probably doing an okay job.

Mm.

You kind of root out like intention and then try to match intention to vision

Yeah.

And sometimes you pitch their own idea back to them.

If you, if you're getting, if you're getting the, the, the little essence of what they're trying to pitch to you, then a lot of times they'll be like, okay, okay.

I think you got it.

I think you understood what I want.

And sometimes, unfortunately, the way this comes across is me asking questions very matter of factly.

Right?

Because here we're just talking, but I will ask questions sometimes, like, and it might sound hostile and it's in no way hostile.

It's, I am not understanding, I need to understand.

So I will just sit there just, just for rattle off question after question.

And, and as long as people can understand that my intent is never to be negative, it's always the, I really need to understand this better.

I really need to understand this better.

Yeah.

Were you there from the beginning of the game to the end of the game?

Like from the whole

For Tabula?

Yeah.

Yes.

Were there other games?

Like what was like, I'm trying to understand the 'cause I remember that that time.

Austin was like the MMO town in the US right?

It was, it was, and, and, and largely because of UO.

Right.

And, and, and, and I'll always lament that because I wish EA had understood what they had, in UO, and they never did.

But the thing about it was, is there were so many things that we were trying to do versus just say, this is the game we wanna make.

Which I said before, but let me give you an idea of what this is like.

We were kind of off the reservation with this Chinese ghost story stuff, and, and in, I'm gonna get this date wrong, but I, I wanna tell you, it was 2004.

We went to E3 and we previewed the game to people and, and, and lead balloon doesn't even cover how, how poorly I guess this went over.

And we had, people who were, you know, working on marketing with us and things like that, that said, we can't sell this game.

We don't know what this game is.

Because it was based off of, you know, things like mythos where you had unicorns where had, and, and this might sound cool or horrible depending on your, the way you looked at it.

We had a whole character designs that were based around, like, well, some of them used knowledge to attack and then they would open books and use knowledge as their attacks and they would, you know, war hammer.

Yeah.

They, they would play musical instruments as part of their attacks.

Right.

That's cool.

Like, and, and things like that.

Or they dance and it just never went over well.

And so marketing partners said, we can't sell this.

And so we completely flipped that game into, it's just fun to have a gun in your end and let's make a, a sci-fi shooter, MMO.

And that's what it, it eventually became, but that meeting after that E3 is, is one of three of the most uncomfortable meetings I've ever sat in.

And it was, it was really hard and I thought I was going to be fired, but that was tough.

Yeah.

So that period of time and that project, like, what was your big learning from again?

It was, it was, you have to direct you, you can't leave people wondering what they're working on, wondering what's going on.

And, and so you even after that project, I was a little burnt out 'cause I, I was eventually the lead designer on that project, but not until we had to turn.

And once we had to turn, I became the lead designer on that project.

And, and I still think to this day that it could have been a, a cool game, Planet Side being my, my primary example of like, see they did it and they did it.

Well that's a cool game because they wanted, an an RPG still of, of like a number base shooter where like your numbers matter.

But we were like, if your cross hairs are over something and you shoot and you miss, people are going to bem.

Right.

It just felt awful.

And we, we went down that path for so long and eventually we said, well, you can't ever miss right on Tabula Rasa.

That's, that's quite a ride.

Yeah.

So yeah.

The game comes out 25,000 copies.

I know that's not the result anybody wants.

Yeah.

Was that sort of the end of the road for the project and your role on it?

Is that when you moved over to Bethesda?

Yeah, that was, it's really close.

What actually happened, is, is a little bit more, you know, and, and it gives me some sympathy as well, for people.

So I had, I had said, well, I, I kind of wanna distance myself from this, right?

Like, I was probably feeling a little hurt, right?

And we started up like, Hey, let's pitch new projects for NCsoft because they, they were, you know, they hadn't pulled out.

NCsoft was still very successful, right?

It was like our studio was the one that was having the trouble.

And there were some reasons that, that we were pitching new games.

And so they said, yeah, we definitely want you guys to pitch new games.

And so we did.

But once we started pitching the new games, we, we were on a different team.

There was a game I pitched, it was called Dream Catcher.

Like I still love the idea.

And it actually went nowhere.

And they laid us off.

Right, because we weren't, we weren't even on, on that team.

So, got laid off.

it was one of the first times I'd ever been laid off.

It doesn't matter if they tell you you're fired or if you're laid off, you still hurt when other people are left behind.

And, and you were one of the first people that was laid off.

Right.

And then I luckily was laid off under very good circumstances.

They treated us well.

And then I spent some time and moved to, Bethesda.

Actually, I, I had two choices.

One was Harmonix.

I'm a huge nerd for, music games.

I, I love them, but I really love, let's be honest, I love frequency and amplitude and the music that they had in those games.

Even more so than Guitar Hero, but loved Harmonix, but ended up going with Zenimax 'cause they were making Elder Scrolls Online.

And I love Elder Scrolls.

So it was, it was where my expertise was.

I got hired as a content designer there and eventually became the creative director, on that game.

Right on.

Cool game.

And was that happening in Austin as well or did you end up relocating?

No, we moved to just outside of Baltimore, which if you've lived in Texas your whole life, that's a bit of a culture shock.

Yeah.

What was, so what was that like for you?

Baltimore seems very different from Dallas and Austin.

It, it was, and we moved actually to Pennsylvania 'cause the taxes were better there.

And it was only like, you know, 27 minutes to get into work and it's, it was very different.

I still, I still love Bethesda, like honestly.

Bethesda and Robert in that group, and Robert, unfortunately, he's no longer with us, he was the head of Bethesda at the time, were amazing and I think they gave me the most confidence and the ability to do what I'm doing now, which is starting Ruckus games.

I learned so much from being at the top level meetings there, going to those meetings, seeing how things were run.

It was, it was beautiful.

They, because unlike the other studios I've worked at, they were extremely professional, right?

It wasn't like a garage band that had made it and, and it just kept growing.

It was more like they were a professional organization, you know?

They, they had hours that people were supposed to be there.

And I just, I just found out I, I, I kind of flourished in that environment.

it was, it was exactly the environment I loved.

They, they had a little bit more structure.

It was more clear what expectations were of everybody.

It wasn't just, Hey, just put in 110 hours and everything will be good.

It was, things were a little bit more set up with intention.

Yeah.

Would you say?

Yeah.

I, yes.

Especially the structure, the corporate structure of Bethesda was definitely that way.

Zenimax Online was a great studio.

I loved it, but they struggled for, for quite a while to find what Elder Scrolls Online would be.

And it, it, it sounds easy, but we, we'd started out with it, it being very much a World of Warcraft clone, right?

And, you know, know, chasing that dragon is, is dangerous.

And, and so part of the reason I think I was able to become creative director was I said, we need to stop chasing that.

And we need to start embracing what's beautiful about Elder Scrolls.

And since I was a fan, that was really easy for me to wanna do and, and really talk about that.

And there were some things that really hard about that.

Like, k stories gotta come.

It's really gotta be a priority for us.

Missions, exploring the world has to be a priority for us.

It has to be, find all these things in all these places.

But I loved it because we had an art director who came in and turned around a lot of the studio's art at the time.

his name was Jared Carr.

He was a huge, huge win for that studio as far as getting somebody with, with an extreme amount of talent.

And then, you know, I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but at the time I did feel like I knew exactly what I wanted to do with this game.

And then once I was promoted to creative director, I think that we, we actually were able to do that.

But that was only 18 months before we shipped.

Oh, wow.

So a game like that, Elder Scrolls Online, like what's the whole development timeline?

Was that a six year project?

Oh, I wish, I, I wanna say that I started in, in 2009 and I think we shipped in 2014 originally on the pc, and then I think we shipped console in 2015.

Big project seven years.

Okay, so you were like on some pretty big time investment projects.

Yeah.

And then, and was Borderlands 3 shorter?

I'm guessing?

Yes, it was, it was shorter.

it's, it's actually one of the things, you can start to see some of the patterns here, right?

Like, because I love MMOs, but they're such a time investment.

But I'm also a big Twitch shooter fan.

Like, you Halo.

So, you know, as honestly, the first time I played a shooter on consoles was that, and I loved it.

Goldeneye, but you know, you know what I'm getting at?

was there.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Goldeneye was good.

Yeah, it was, so it really was, once we switched over to.

Really thinking about like the length of time I was spending or once I switched over to that thinking, I wanted to work on something that, that where they ship games and, and gearbox actually was a really good studio for shipping a game quicker, right?

And again, it was a little bit more garage band get successful, but that hunger in them to wanna ship a game faster was, was still there at the time.

And that was it.

But, you know, we shipped, I want to tell you that Borderlands was probably the number three game in the world, Maybe, you know, certainly in the top five.

It's hard to know.

And we sold over 15 million units, you know, huge, huge numbers, huge success.

I love that.

I love Borderlands when I started there.

But at the same time, that's when we really noticed that that wasn't considered.

A tremendous success by everybody, then there's something fundamentally wrong.

There's something wrong.

Yeah.

And broken in the industry.

I, I can totally see.

So that whole journey that you've been on with Borderlands 3 at one end of the bookshelf and Tabula Rasa, which was many, many years of your life with a lot of challenge at the other end of the bookshelf, having a pretty big impact on what you're doing right now.

So it makes a lot of sense.

I think a, a lot of folks in the industry have probably come to similar conclusions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think, I think so.

I think it's hard, right?

Like we're, we're experiencing that change right now in the future seems uncertain.

But, but, you know, it's, it's always uncertain and we, we will get there.

I'm optimistic.

I, I feel like there's always opportunity, you know?

Yeah.

Wait, can, can you realize it?

Hmm.

You know, maybe there's always opportunity.

You know, I, I love the game I'm working on now.

Like, I can tell you also that I'm having more fun than I've had in, in years.

Like, I'm having the kind of fun I had on old my online.

Anytime I'm working on a game, I'm doing that.

That's a great sign.

Yeah.

The CEO stuff, you know, that's, that's, that's neither here nor there.

I mean, I do love leading a studio.

I think what we're the reasons we're doing it are good reasons.

but it's when I'm actually in the game making things directing, that's, that's really the passion.

Are you, do you get to spend time, like, are you guys using Unreal do to get, to spend time in the engine, like building stuff or are you kind of like, you know, in, in spreadsheets and on the phone all day?

Yes.

Yes.

Yes, indeed.

So you're in there though.

You're messing around with the game.

That's cool, man.

Man,

I, there's, there's, my engineers will disagree with you, but I, I, I have done code for the game.

you know, and, definitely design work, you know, I'm on spreadsheets and, you know, for design, systematic design is, is that's, that's what I love doing, making guns.

So, been doing a lot of that.

it's super fun, man.

It's, it's also fun that we're making the kind of game that we all kind of enjoy playing right now.

And again, I'm gonna tell you 2022, so when I say this, it wasn't like we were looking at what was going on.

It's the kind of games we wanted to make, but it was cooperative.

We were like, Hey, there's a lot of people making competition games.

I love competition, but I, I really also like playing together and playing with four people, having a shooter, having crazy dumb guns and things like that all throughout.

Awesome.

Is, is, is that when you started in 2022?

So we started in 2021.

And when I say we started, and you heard me say, by no means are we like wealthy, we all took a year off of income to do this.

Like we, we had jobs but we didn't have income.

So we all took a year.

Mm.

you know, to invest bootstrapping.

Yeah, that's right, that's right.

To make a, to make a demo.

2021.

That's when you started.

2021 to 2022.

And we got seed in 2022.

Okay.

And it's 2025.

Yep.

So that's three years.

Yep.

When are you shipping?

Pretty, pretty soon.

So see, when are you announcing in this?

I love that you asked me that.

So cleverly like, Hey, are you gonna commit to this?

But, but remember there's a difference between,

but you're, 'cause you're not in it for six years, right?

This is, we're going quicker, right?

Or is it just smaller team?

Well, we're also building a company at the same time, so, yeah.

Okay.

That's fair.

That's fair.

And, and so yes, it's a smaller team.

But yeah, we're not ready to it now is when we're shipping it, but it was good.

It was good.

You almost got me there.

Yeah.

You know, the most important thing is when we start play testing, you know, I don't wanna, you know, put our name in any kind of, knitted or bright and luminous sites here, but, you know, we start play testing here.

I think within a couple months.

And we've got signups on our website right now ruckus-games.com.

Oh, right on.

So listeners could just go to the site right now and sign up to play test.

Yeah.

As long as your listeners don't work in the industry for a competitor, then yeah, don't.

Yes, that's me.

Very much can get in.

I was gonna join the play test.

Are we comp We're not competitors.

We can play test, right?

Absolutely.

I promise you we can get you in.

It's on the main page.

Yeah.

He's a cool looking guy with a big brain one eye.

Awesome.

All right, Paul, we kept you way over.

Thanks for joining us this afternoon.

Absolutely.

You've had some really fantastic arcs in your career.

Some of them glorious and some of them, Other, you know, and that's, I think is you need the, you need the ups and downs, right?

You do, you know, to get perspective.

And I think what you're doing right now is super smart.

Yeah.

And you've been pretty successful at, at getting partners for bringing this game out in a time when that's really hard.

So I'm sure you on something really great.

Can't wait to check it out.

Yeah.

I, I, I think the game is, is, is super fun.

We're back to a fun part.

You know, you, you always go through ups and downs in any development cycle.

We're back to a fun part.

And I'll say this, you know, again, and I hope everybody, whoever hears anything like this is just always hears this.

But I am here as a result of so many other people being awesome, that it's hard to say that I, I, I, I never love being the face of anything, right?

I don't have the face for it, number one.

But number two, it's, it's not like I was trained in brilliance, but these people that I've had the pleasure of working with, and the team I have now are awesome.

And I hope everybody, when they play a game, know how great most developers are.

I, I, I certainly can't say enough good things about most of the people in our industry.

Right on.

Right on.

Cool.

Thanks again, Paul.

Nice meeting you, Paul.

Good to meet you.

Did you play any, like, did you play any of the Ultima games and all that stuff?

That was a very interesting era.

Yes.

Ultima 2 maybe?

Yeah, that was a weird era.

It's been a long time.

Did you consider that when y'all were making games, like before, halo, before Marathon, before Pathways in the Darkness, we did a game called Minotaur.

You said that's your favorite game that you worked on.

Yeah, maybe.

I mean, it's just such a, a blast to play.

It was before its time, you know, it was like over a modem.

but we did, I was working on a, a game, I think it was called Archipelago, but it was.

It was sort of like that in that vein, in that ultimate vein, like tile based, top down explorer.

And y'all considered it?

Yeah, we considered it.

Because that was a really weird era and it kind of came and went, you know.

Weird?

Awesome.

It was weird if you couldn't play the game.

I think it seems like it came and went for us because it was a little bit before our time, you know?

It's like, it seemed like we maybe came in at the end of it, so it seemed like it was ending real quick.

Mm, I see.

For me, it was a very, it was a very hard, you had to have the stuff, you know what I mean?

Like you had to have the gear to play a lot of these games, like your computer had to be able to run, you had to have a modem.

There was a, there was a, there was quite a few like points of entry, like, what is it?

Points of entry?

Barriers.

Yeah, barriers.

Barriers to entry.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Barriers to entry and.

I didn't have all of them, so I was watching from the, from the-

Yeah, but you had like four or five jobs when you were a kid.

I think you could have afforded a Commodore 64.

I played Doom, yeah.

I had some online stuff, but I couldn't get, Ultima was, so there's something about it they felt, you know, hard to get, get, and then they kept releasing them.

Should bring those games back.

They do.

There's a big quest thing going on right now, which is kind of in the same spirit, right?

Yeah.

But I, I actually mean like Ultima, they should revive the brand, you know?

Oh yeah.

Reboot.

Dude.

It would be great for the phone.

I'd play Ultima on the phone.

Oh yeah.

You know, if anybody, if, if, if only, if only we knew somebody who might listen to this podcast who was related to Ultima in some way, I'd really love to talk to you.

Yeah.

And on the phone.

Yes.

You know, you could fit one of those.

How big was that game?

You know, I think about, think it was probably like 200K.

No, probably not even.

No, it wasn't joining.

It was at least a CD.

Right.

Or a DVD.

So I rem, this is one of the things I remember the most.

Those games came with stuff, and I miss that.

They should bring that back, if anything.

Maps and the books

and cloth maps

and the bag, like, a little bag of Of miniatures or dice or something.

Something, yeah.

Something like cool stuff.

Okay.

I missed that.

Let's do that.

AIG Big rule book.

Mm-hmm.

Where they cared about the rule book.

There was a little bit of lore in there, you know.

Okay.

Merch.

Not merch.

It's not merch.

It's, it's, where I should, they were like game pieces.

Yeah.

Let's do that.

It's good stuff.

Yeah.

I really miss that.

Yeah.

About our industry.

It's gotten so impersonal, you know, like.

Yeah.

It's just a download.

We're all, we're all just a quid, you know.

It's a download and then if it goes offline, screw you.

Who cares.

Yeah.

You know, at the, I, so I'm with you on that.

'cause I was, so coming back on the plane, so I wasn't on my regular airline and the internet, you know, you could buy internet, it's like 30 euros.

It's expensive.

Yeah.

But it's like a dude that's the cost of, that's like 45 bucks.

Yeah.

But it was a 12 hour flight.

So I'm like, man, fuck it.

I'm gonna spend the money 'cause I want to get some stuff done.

And then the internet crapped out.

It worked for like literally 22 minutes and then it was done and then I kept pulled my phone out.

And you can't play a single game on your phone.

No.

Unless you have internet

Apple Arcade though, you can, if you have Apple Arcade, you can play a lot of those offline.

Okay.

That's the beauty of Apple Arcade is we are not sponsored by Apple Arcade.

But if you're listening to Apple Arcade, you're sure Apple Arcade, you could play almost all those games offline.

You know, like Balatro.

I love that.

I love that.

I, I should have thought of that.

I didn't think of it.

Okay.

Thanks for listening, everybody.

We'll see you next time.

See you next week everybody.

Thank you for listening to the Fourth Curtain Podcast.

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The Fourth Curtain Podcast as a production of Fourth Curtain Media, lovingly edited by Bryen Hensley of Noise Floor Sound Solutions.

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Production support by Kimya Taheri with Community Management by Doug Zartman, and Art Production by Paul Russel.

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