The Besties - The best gaming documentary of all time [The Resties]

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

A few weeks ago, game developer Double Fine surprise-dropped a 22-hour documentary about the seven-year creation of Psychnoauts 2. At least that's the premise on paper. In reality, the stunning TV-length doc is a fearless look inside the day-to-day life of a video game studio -- warts and all. The documentarians, employed by Double Fine, have unprecedented access to practically every person and room . Frush and Plante talk about the series, called Double Fine PsychOdyssey, along with The Last of Us TV adaptation. Plus, a delightful new retro gaming book is a perfect gift for video game newcomers. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

my name is christopher thomas plan my name is russ furshtick welcome to the resties where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest this week we're talking about movies and tv shows what did i did i get the notes wrong i thought we did that the other week yeah that's right ladies and gentlemen and everybody we've got double fine psych odyssey to talk about a 22 hour and change documentary about psychonauts 2, but really about how incredibly difficult it is to make anything creative. And also The Last of Us, the TV show. And a book?

It's going to be a full episode. We're running the gamut on everything that isn't video games. But it's all tangentially related, so it's okay. Is anything else going on in life? Well, I guess I had a question for you. Are you feeling better? You were sick the last time we recorded. You know, about as good as I can feel after 10 days and change of medicine.

Yeah. Are you the sort of person that cocoons when you're sick sick or do you try to work through it, power through it? If I'm the sort of person that has a five year old in my house, what is this cocooning? I don't know what a cocoon is anymore. No, I get sick and then I get as much medicine as I can. And then and then I try to find sleep wherever it's available to me. Yeah.

It's sort of just holding off with your life. And I'm sort of gathering now that the idea of like any moment of healthiness kind of just doesn't exist for several years of a human being's life.

Right. I don't think healthiness exists for the rest of my life, right? Yeah, I think that's probably it's all done it's a sled ride to the bottom you know that's what they call everything after like 35 i guess i just didn't factor in the idea that like i'll speak for myself one person in my house for the last i don't know five months has been sick at one time like you're not saying who though well it varies oh oh i i bet you're like trying not to assert blame no no no one person my small

little child uh is is one of the culprits for being sick sure probably the reason we're all sick the vector but the but as you, I'm sure, are aware, he'll get better and then the rest of us will be lingering in his... It's like he's crop dusting the apartment with his germs and we're just walking right through it behind him. That is true. When you say it's like he's crop dusting it, you mean quite literally he's just shitting everywhere.

He's also doing that, yes. Yes. That might be what's getting us all sick. I guess I just wish I could hold it down with a little more dignity, but I don't know that there is a way to do it. No, there's no dignity. If there's one thing for... We have plenty of listeners who don't have kids,

and you're thinking about it. I don't know. Maybe it's 5, 10, 20 years away. Here's what I'm going to tell you. ahead do it nobody's stopping you but don't expect to bring your dignity with you leave it at the door burn that dignity up right where you stand exactly you're never going to need it again people are going to be like i can't believe you did that stupid thing in college and it's like, go right ahead. You know, all the dignity is going to be gone in a while anyway.

Doesn't matter. Yeah, spend it while you got it. Yeah. Anyway, do you want to go talk about video game stuff? Let's do it. Cool, I'll see you on the other side. Okay. First things first.

Double Fine Psych Odyssey. Is it the odyssey i don't know it's what it's in capped to where it's like psych and then it's one word odyssey yeah the o is capitalized which camel case oh yeah it makes oh it makes my skin crawl when i see that for that's okay it's not really the point i don't even remember that that's the title. It's effectively the, when I, it's lunchtime and I type in Double Fine YouTube channel. And then I scroll down and I see 32 or however many episodes there are installments to this enormous documentary. And then I, and I watch one during lunch. Yeah.

I've been doing that for the last month. Right. Right. So it's, yeah, it's 22 hours 30 some parts and you never know what you're gonna get sometimes a part's like you know 20 or 30 minutes long sometimes it's two hours long which i think is what happened to you when you thought hey i'm i'm right on track i'm gonna see this whole thing before we record this episode and then one of those big two hour honkers just like popped in yeah i'm about four

episodes from the finish line uh thankfully covet hasn't happened yet so maybe it won't happen maybe in their universe they didn't have covet no i'd imagine it does happen but i'm i'm very close and and uh man it's been quite the ride i I guess for you, you and I really, both of us, what do you feel like this is doing that we as people that have been covering the industry for as long as we have many years? What do you feel like you're what level of insight are you getting into the process that you hadn't had before? Like infinite. Yeah. getting into the process that you hadn't had before like infinite yeah i mean i i think this is by far not hyperbole and i know i can be hyperbolic i think it is by far the best documentation of video game development process that exists right now is it a little heartbreaking to me that it came from inside of a studio? I mean, kind of.

It's a little weird. I can't believe that a studio would voluntarily give up this much information. I'm extremely grateful that they did. It's everything, right? I mean, to me, I feel like I saw everything but what is going on inside of the HR and legal office at any given time. And even some of the interviews felt like they probably should have been in one of those offices. Yeah, I mean, they do. I think they do get pretty direct and honest, especially about like, you know, working relationships between different people and what's landing and what's not, uh, and, and how people work together and how maybe

some people aren't great at leadership roles and some people are better at leadership roles. They speak pretty directly about Tim Schafer, who's the head of the studio and where his skill sets lie and you're right it doesn't feel like they're holding back at really anything which again is shocking because i'm not entirely sure what the upside is for a studio like double fine apart from the fact that like when they kick-started so this is the second documentary, we should say, that Double Fine has really released, long-form documentary. The first one was based on Broken Age, which was their adventure game. It came out a couple years ago.

I believe it was called The Double Fine Adventure or something like that was the name of that documentary. And it was a similar idea, but this obviously is a much more enormous project with way more people, way more budget, and a longer kind of lead. So you really do see from beginning to end the pre-production process, deep in production, hitting alpha, hitting beta, and then eventually release. Yeah, and all of that stuff, as you bullet pointed it right we've seen that in documentaries about games we've made that like a polygon yeah where it's like and here's how alpha works and you know here is you know why it was hard you know they really struggled with

this part of the game and it's kind of like anecdotal or a summary of events right yeah because it has to be because we're not writing 30,000 word books about a single games development. Right, right. Or yeah, dedicating a full time video staff that is literally going into the office for seven years alongside the team. That's what's weird about this is it feels somewhere between like reality television of just like, hey, what's it like being at this office all the time? Right. Feels somewhat like kind of a standard documentary of of office gossip and office conversations and office drama um the any any office has in adapting it into a video series like it's bizarre how how much um how much i feel like i know about how people in this office feel about each other and that's the part that's like really unusual so an example i'll give is um

james marion is one of the uh design members who very, very early on in the series, basically right when Psychonauts 2 starts. And I actually know James. I taught James at NYU Game Center many, many years ago. And a very nice man, but very, very junior when he starts. He effectively doesn't have any design experience. Yeah, I think he was an associate level designer. Yeah, and we hear one of the first

things we see is a conversation between his boss and tim schafer where tim clearly is skeptical of this hire like clearly and throughout the entire thing we see his relationship with tim schafer kind of evolve and tim Tim kind of roasts him throughout, I would say the first half, two thirds of the documentary. And it's not mean, but it's certainly some tough love. And it's just unusual to see that. It's unusual to then see the interviews with James where he talks very openly about how he feels

as a member of the team how he is connecting with some people and not with other people um and then i guess like his kind of art collides with the the most shocking art to have included which is the the head of the game's design midway through i mean are we are we how are we with spoilers on this i mean i guess spoiler alert yeah i guess spoiler alert these are things that are also like they're not news secrets if you if you actually were following the development of psychonauts they were pretty direct in uh their fig backing videos and stuff like that talking about that like the project lead was no longer at double fine when the game launched and so at some point in the game's development cycle like several years in i think three years in they moved away from the original uh project lead who i believe was

zach mcclendon and that was like a major shift for them yeah and and and that, I don't know, 22 hours, I would say like a good seven of them are gradually that kind of culture clash. that they've not specific not necessarily specifically with him but their vision for like what they see as the game or that what they see as the studio doesn't necessarily match with what zach was brought in to do which was like basically design a game with level design and gameplay design first and then layer in art and music and whatever. And that is pretty contrary to Double Fine's tradition, which is usually like kind of an art first or a narrative first mentality. Yeah. And I think just seeing that sort of manifest

throughout the course of the documentary is super, super fascinating. Yeah. I think what's perhaps most interesting is and maybe the you know it's it's interesting to me just by having like covered the industry for as long as i have but maybe not interesting to people that are just like casual documentary viewers like i don't know that this lands with like a person that like just likes documentaries because it's an enormous amount of footage and there aren't necessarily like capital v villains here like they talk at one time when zach leaves or whatever

however the actual terminology was for his departure they talk uh tim is like look this is not like a riot situation where there was like a sexual harassment situation or something like that it was it was a major like culture uh incompatibility but there wasn't like that high drama that you would expect from a king of kong for example and because of that i mean it might not have the like splash of a traditional documentary, but I find it to be much more honest and much more realistic to what a lot of, you know, office politics are like, it's like, there's going to be this conflict. And the question is, is there a way to work through it? Or is it a situation where there's just like no way to solve this problem apart from like having personnel changes. Yeah. And I, I agree with you of like, there's no like clear villains and like, that's okay. Yeah. I think that there's sometimes can be a tendency,

even when you're like, when, you know, we've worked together for a very long time in work experiences, you can get really frustrated and be like, Oh, this person is like, I don't know how to get me or trying to undermine me or doing any of these things.

Most of the time, it's just a difference of opinion of how to get things done. Yeah. And being able to spend so much time, so much time with all of these people and really get to know each of their kind of viewpoints on how to be an artist and how to be a creative. each of their kind of viewpoints on how to be an artist and how to be a creative, and to watch those gradually clash and, you know, for some to win out over others, it doesn't end up feeling like, I guess, a really toxic workplace where, you know, you have sides kind of battling against each other. It feels kind of like you said that eventually Tim steps in and says,

well, no, it's not that there are are sides this is how we've always done it and maybe thinking that we should do it a different way it had really good intentions you know i'm sure that there was a desire to professionalize to avoid things like crunch to avoid things like you know design confusion but at the end of the day double finds the double fine way that that way of putting the art first putting the narrative first is so cooked into the company that you can't really disentangle it yeah i mean you meant you mentioned crunch as well which is obviously a big part of the doc as well and some of the you know most intense moments of it revolve around, like, are people, do people feel obligated to work, you know, long hours? You know, I know Tim has been very vocal about having, creating an anti-crunch atmosphere.

But there's also this element of there's a lot of creative people in the office that have an enormous amount of passion for let's say they're a you know art designer for a level and they feel like putting those extra two hours in at the end of the day is going to make the difference between them being happy when they play the level at launch versus not but then there's other people that like reasonably want to go home right on schedule and they feel like they're being undermined by people that like don't have those responsibilities so there's also that conflict which is again like really tricky how do you convince someone hey it's actually not healthy to work all night on the thing because it's detrimental not only you but the project at large yeah there's a degree to

which like people are going to kind of do what they want you can't lock someone to their desk so it's it is genuinely tricky yeah there's a really challenging moment um later on where a designer who i think she's been with like in games for 10 years but is relatively new to the studio and then still is like you know more junior than the people who've been at Double Fine for 20-some years and change and have been working in the industry since we were little kids. And this conflict of she is really worried and concerned that they are heading towards crunch and I think says something about a slippery slope. And we see tim shaper react very strongly to that like he's like offended and he's like that's bullshit you know i've seen crunch you know i think he said something like there was a slippery slope and

we had to climb all the way up it you know to get here you, we did the hard part of getting out of that. And what is so difficult about watching that is both of these people are coming from places of like extreme vulnerability. Yeah. And they're bringing so much of their past and they're so, they're so not blinded, but like, so, so they're so in in their personal experiences that they can't see the the other side of it like that the this the designer who's bringing this up is coming from a

real place of sincerity and wanting to protect themselves and the people around them from having worked at places like ea or activision and and at the same time, yeah, especially as a manager, I can relate to Tim where it's like, I worked so hard to get here. We're not even in the bad part yet. And I'm already feeling accused of doing the wrong thing. And it's like, oh, I just, that part like broke my heart

for just every person in the room. There was like no no there's no win there it just felt sad and i and i think um that designer left like that day yeah i mean i they were pretty clear about saying that like it wasn't specifically because of that meeting that they left yeah but you know that's the that's what led to that meeting right a lot of people have those breaking points in not just in game design but in general where they're like this is clearly not the place i should be and i need to move on and um and seeing a lot of that like even for people uh anachipnus was someone who was at

double fine for since its inception and leaves over the course of this uh development cycle because of those you know stressors and and conflict points i guess i was wondering for you yeah even though it is i 100 agree this is like the most thorough comprehensive portrayal of game to game development from start to finish do Do you feel like this is... I couldn't help but feel like while watching this, the way this game was made is very contrary to the way games like this are made these days. Which is to say, like, the scale of this game...

Yes. ...is like... Like, games are not designed in the way that psychonauts 2 is designed which is to say like psychonauts 2 essentially has a hub area and then has like eight or so very bizarre discrete like totally different looking and playing levels that kind of feel like their own mini game in their own. So you had these teams that were kind of focused very specifically on individual levels. They don't intentionally,

they don't make up a whole in some way because each level is so its own thing. Um, the narrative ties it all together, but as a gameplay experience, like they can feel very disparate. So the game was made with these, it's almost like you had eight little indie studios working and trying to figure out a way to unite all these things into one single game. Yeah.

I mean, I think the bigger problem is that this is a studio that shouldn't make games this big which i think actually james marion says at maybe multiple points throughout and everybody's like no no no no you're wrong like this is we're here to do this and i think i think he's making honestly a very fair point which is when was the last time double fine made something of this scale? There's nothing even close to it. Yeah, nothing close. Even the original Psychonauts was like a much smaller project than this. This was huge. Right.

And I think even Tim Schafer and the people running Double Fine understood that when they hired Zach at the beginning, right? Yeah. They were bringing in somebody who had experience on big AAA projects. They brought in some design help that also had had that experience. And at the end of the day, the culture of the studio won out over, you could say, the quality of the product. But at the end of the day, I think the quality of the product actually turned out quite well. But it had to go through a hell of a lot to get there. hell of a lot to get there and i i'm very curious now that they're under the microsoft banner and the xbox banner and they went through seven years of this right um if everyone is just happier

making smaller projects again yeah i you know they get bought by microsoft during the documentary as well and it's very clear that even though they were in pretty dire straits from a money standpoint, because Starbreeze was their initial publisher, Starbreeze imploded in the most dramatic fashion possible, and they were pretty hard up. But when you think about Double Fine

from a historical standpoint, all of their games were like a quarter the size of Psychonauts 2. And the only reason this game became so enormous was because of, you know, it was a crowdfunding element that raised a ton of money. And also they had this like pedigree of this franchise that everyone loved.

And they knew they had to at least match, if not dramatically best, what the original game brought because they had all this weight to it. I think when Microsoft came in, they were not necessarily looking at Psychonauts 2 as a representation of what they were buying. They were looking at every other project they made, which are three to four hour, small, art-driven projects that relatively can stick to a timeline because they're like scoped in the right way. And why that's great for Microsoft, Microsoft wants, let's say one game from Double Fine a year for Game Pass. I don't know what the actual cadence will be, but I'm sure every other game that they release from here until who knows will be smaller projects that

will go up on game pass. Anyone can play them that has game pass. It's kind of a perfect fit. Like of all the studios that Microsoft has acquired, it's one of the best fits because they make games that are exactly the right size for game pass and, and exactly as creative as they should be. Because a lot of these games aren't necessarily like oh that's gonna sell millions and millions of copies they could be a little niche sometimes

they made a fucking a nesting doll game like they make niche weird games that aren't gonna guarantee to sell but they uh for someone for a subscription service like that's what they want yeah and that creative freedom and personal freedom and workplace ideally will fit better under that banner with all that financial stability. I think one of the other overarching storylines or threads of this documentary is not just, hey, it's really, really hard to make an art project with this many people over this much time. But also it's really hard to run a company and balance that out with those goals. And they do a fair amount of going into the finances here and showing just how hard it is

for them to really balance from one investor one supporter one publisher to the next while they're doing all these small projects and i think the hope was for you know psychonauts 2 to be a big project that would buy them some breathing room yeah um and it certainly was not that like you know they they did get paired with umbreeze and that was a disaster. And it feels just, it's hard to imagine that they would have survived the pandemic or even this game had that acquisition not come in. That said, pretty depressing when you think about it in terms of independent studios, because here is what appeared to be one of the most successful independent studios and they lived in constant terror of their finances yeah uh so yeah it really is goes to show how tenuous this business can be and just how difficult it is to make games it's like so many different skill sets that are like the total like polar opposite of one another and everyone is like unifying those skill sets to make something that like

frequently breaks and you just sort of have to like figure out a way to fix it or hope it doesn't happen super often uh i you know by the i haven't quite finished it but as i've been watching this all it did was reaffirm my decision to never make games of this size or it's just like this does not look appealing to me at all i like working with people but the amount of control that you have to cede to the process of like demands of like fucking memory leaks and whatever else could go wrong with a, with a game of this size or even a smaller game, super stressful, uh, mad props to everyone, not only in this project in the, um, that made Psychonauts 2, which I really did enjoy, but just in general, like the game making process is so fraught and all i could hope for

you is a like creative enthusiasm for what you're making and i hope you're happy if you are making games right now and b i hope for protections long term for the game industry so that you know you hear all these people complaining about where they used to work before coming to double fine and that sucks that that's like the default experience for a lot of people in this industry. And I think really all we can hope for is people take steps to make their environments a better place. I had one more question for you. Yeah, it's kind of going back to the beginning. How do you feel about this level of access? I can't believe I'm saying that as, you know, a member of the press. Sure. Transparency is king. But this is a lot. Like,

I was kind of, again, shocked at times what people in a variety of positions were exposing themselves to, whether that is, you know, leadership saying things that will, you know, however many years later be seen by their junior employees or junior employees who don't have a lot of experience in the industry being really open. Um, and, you know, documenting that forever. Um, and I, I think it's, I think it's good. I think it's good overall. and you asked me up top you know like is how it like who does this help all right i don't i don't know how much it helps devil fine but i think it helps all of us who care about this industry and who care about video games and care about creative people and and being able to have this shared experience i i just i would

recommend to everyone who is especially coming out of college i'm about to go into a creative field watch this because i feel like you'll you'll learn so much in such a short amount of time but that said how do you feel about you know in the future if if other studios did this and they put it in their contracts that hey you need to also sign your rights to be in this sort of documentary. Yeah, it won't happen, realistically. You know, as I said, I don't see a lot of upside for Double Fine in this case. You know, some studios have tried to do the, like, radical transparency thing, not to this extent, like you know releasing like weekly

video blogs and stuff like that showing life in the studio but obviously they're pretty heavily edited in terms of what they show and don't show limiting it to the stuff that is only going to be beneficial to them um i think that'll probably continue to some extent but you're never going to necessarily see anything that's this exposed and so really the upside for for this project is an educational one because it does show you a pretty unvarnished uh portrayal of what one game is you know what it took to make this one game i don't think it's representative of everywhere obviously. But at least we have something that we can point to. You know I think this documentary I think paired with Jason Schreier friend of the show who has written two very excellent books that portray video games in like a pretty dramatic and intense light and often a negative light i think both those books

in this documentary are required reading for anyone that is like i want to make games for a living and you know unless it's like just something you're going to sit at home and it's like a passion project you're going to do it in your spare time good on you go for it but if you your dream is to like join a studio like a bungee or a double fine or a wherever you need to absorb this stuff first before paying a bunch of money to uh full sale or some other uh you know college that teaches game design because you need to know what you're getting into and you don't want to sit with a bunch of debt and then realize, oh, God, this is not at all what I was expecting. I thought I would draw a flower and then it would be in the game two days later.

We call it flower. It's flower. That's how flower was made. Yeah. My only other passing thought is what a eulogy for office culture. thought is is what a eulogy for office culture and i am not the person who's like hey we all need to go back to the office by any stretch of the imagination couldn't if i wanted to because i'm far away from new york um but there are parts of this documentary that really made me miss the early days of like our job when we worked together before polygon um and like going out

with friends from the office after work and spending like so much time in such a close proximity that it does have that kind of um college or dormitory environment i think back on um like oneup.com and the one up show. Yeah. Which I think captured a lot of this. And, and yeah, I, I, I'm not sure like how much of that exist post pandemic or endemic or how much of it will ever come back and it will be replaced or evolve into

something equally interesting and cool. I'm sure, but I can still miss something that's gone. And I think part of this documentary, again, one kind of final thread, is watching the evolution of their culture change. And it changed, quite honestly, before the pandemic even happens. But it was on its way to that. pandemic even happens um but but it was on its way to that um and you can see all especially the people who had crunched really grapple with it because there were a lot of people who you know

now are in their 40s um who really i mean these people they grew up with each other and their best friends and some of their best memories are from that time and you can tell it pains them to uh i don't know kind of like square peg round hole of hey that thing probably was really really unhealthy for me and i don't want other people to do it also that was the happiest time of my life and that's like it's just weird and interesting yeah it's it is um should we go to the other side and talk about some zombie things that aren't technically zombies let's do it cool okay the last of us tv show happened i watched none of it you didn't watch a minute i did not watch a minute of it and i did that on purpose because i wanted to be completely blank slate for you to share your feelings to me uh i appreciate that and i'll do my very best to uh impersonate uh craig Mazin as I do this. Okay, thank you.

You might recall several weeks ago, I think he was on a Besties. I watched the first episode and we talked a little bit about it. And I was very curious. So I watched the first episode and I thought it was tremendously well done and not a show that I would want to watch

from a, I i guess emotional standpoint because it didn't seem like super fun to watch something that was just like as brutal as the game was that i already played and i already knew the story and yet here i am nine episodes later and i've actually watched all of it and i think that's a testament to the performances, the writing, the production design, which is just stellar. And I guess, yeah, so I guess we're out on the other side. And thing one, I think perhaps the most shocking of all of it is just how insanely close it is to the game like i don't think there's ever been a more direct adaptation of a video game ever that like there are multiple scenes in this where the edit cadence like the shots that they're picking are directly lifted from the shots that

were used when they made the game and that is wild because it works extremely well on tv and maybe i shouldn't be surprised because in those cases they are you know cut scenes and they use filmic ideology when making cut scenes to pick angles and stuff like that but i don't know i'm just so used to i have a question about that yeah why not not not like why isn't like oh why do it if it works sure but like why do this entire thing if if you're going to basically recreate something like that well i a couple of things one it's not a hundred percent of a recreation obviously you don't shoot as many things that's for sure that's true there there is less shooting although there is a fair fair amount of shooting so it's not all one for

one shot for shot i mean you know the there was a the nick offerman uh relationship episode obviously got a lot of attention that was a probably the largest departure in the entire series from events that happened in the game uh you know you met bill but they had already him and his partner had already split by then so you didn't see this like loving relationship that they had. But apart from that, it was all very consistent. And I guess the answer to why I think there are an enormous number of people that would never have experienced this story had it not been presented to them

in the format of a TV show. Like my mom shockingly watched the last of us. Wow. I didn't think she would. She's not like a sci-fi person. She doesn't like zombies, star Wars, like all that stuff.

She rolls her eyes. But I said, Hey, in passing, I was like, Oh, by the way, there's this show on HBO.

She does watch a lot of HBO shows. You should watch it. And it's by the way, it's based on a video of HBO shows. You should watch it. And it's, by the way, it's based on a video game and she has sat and watched all of it. And that, I think it was a big reason for it because it just like seemed to be missing this huge audience. And I,

I also think it's an incredibly moving story and an interesting story that deserved like even more attention than it got when it you know was released um and even in the multiple re-releases of the game and uh so i'm i'm honestly thrilled that they took the time to make this like oh my i guess it's an homage to the original game but also you know it feels like one of the best tv shows i've seen in a very long time do you do you think it works better because there is i mean like you said i know they're still shooting and i have not watched it but you are not spending the bulk of your time walking around killing things i mean it wouldn't work as a tv show if you were like oh i know of course not but also

like emotionally right like because at the end of the day the game does that because they think the assumption if you're going to spend that much money designing a game is we need to let you kill stuff because well it's not only that you're also making an interactive experience and like they weren't going to make basically what telltale made well no but but but that's the thing right that's the rub with video games in general is that it's it's seeing that as the assumption it's well we can't see we can't see a way or we can't imagine a way or we don't want to spend really this is it we don't want to spend money developing and r and d other ways of engaging with the world yeah when shooting is right there we know it works so let's just throw it in right like yeah we can start making

the game tomorrow if you tell me your main verb of the game is shooting we can just green light but if you tell me yeah you want to walk around and like think about poems well not even think about poems like we who knows like you are you building things like there there are other ways of engage there are other verbs in the world right sure um but i'll give i think poll like it's fine you mentioned poems i think it's like words and guns are seem to be it um and i think you know film has a much wider range of verbs because that's just not how the verbs are not directly tied to how the player or the viewer experiences the object. Well, just speaking about Last of Us, for example, like obviously Last of Us made by Naughty Dog. Naughty Dog is a studio that previously was best known for Uncharted, Crash Bandicoot before that, but Uncharted was obviously the most recent.

crash bandicoot before that but uncharted was obviously the most recent and so basically they had a framework for a third person shooting game and it's clear that like there was a drive to tell a more grounded serious story using obviously some of the work that they had previously done for uncharted like some of the tech work and all that stuff could be used, but they could also, while they were doing that, tell something that had a little more depth than like the Indiana Jones stories of the Uncharted franchise.

Yeah, I mean, I guess just to show my hand here, I get the sense with the show and with, you know, creative talent from the game going on to work on the show. Neil Druckmann specifically. Neil Druckmann specifically. Yeah. Yes, it feels like the show is what Druckmann wanted to create.

Now I'm just putting words into somebody's mouth. But it feels as if like that's what you wanted to create all along, right? And that's kind of true of a lot of these cinematic games where it's like we wanted to create a movie. I mean, you could say in some ways Ho kajima is guilty of the same thing right no but i i think he is also interested in the game does i had kajima specifically i think kajima yes i i agree i'm just using that because everybody will say it if i do not mention him but in druckman's case this feels very like this thing was a game the shooting is there not because i loved creating game mechanics around shooting and you know um puzzles environmental

puzzles they're there because like that is the means of the opportunity like that's what gets us to the stuff that i actually enjoy yeah it's very clear even through the i i think to some extent for last of us the first one and then in the last of us part two it's very clear even through the, I think to some extent for Last of Us, the first one, and then in The Last of Us Part II, it's very clear that like his focus was on the narrative. And he wasn't the game director of The Last of Us Part II. He gave that title. I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the game director's name for that project. But, you know, his focus is on the narrative. But, you know, his focus is on the narrative.

And in so far as like that was his interest, like, yeah, the narrative is the closest thing to a movie that there is. And just to differentiate the two games, I think I think The Last of Us Part Two is like an astonishingly good third person shooter shooting game, like like one of the best that I've ever played. played narratively i think it kind of falls a little bit apart a little bit but i think it's the inverse for the first game i think the first game is like one of the best narrative experiences i've ever had in a game and like an okay but not great gameplay experience yeah and so it i guess is not surprising to me that he would gravitate more to the narrative it does also make me really curious about where the show is going given i think some of the critiques and i by critiques i mean not the like awful troll critiques of the part two but more of the like i cannot imagine the second game as a TV series, especially the second half of that game.

It just becomes like full-on Walking Dead-worse type of stuff. Yeah, it turns into—there's a beat in the first game and in the show where Ellie basically has this moment of abject horror where she has to murder someone. Not murder, but self-defense, but still has to murder someone not murder but like self-defense but still like has to kill someone and that effectively breaks her as a person not to mention and then the end of the game also kind of breaks her as a person and then by part two she's a basically a broken human events in part two which i won't spoil here break her even further and then she kind of just turns into a husk and how long can you follow someone that is a husk and guess what there's yet another husk waiting in the wings to also follow so i do not you're right i do don't know how it's going to

shake out yes how they're going to pace it specifically the entire southern california stuff i mean that where the where the second game goes in terms of silly zombie fiction i think there is a lot of room for someone like a craig mazen who at this point i have like an enormous amount of respect for the work he's done both with chernobyl and this oh my yeah that that is what makes me think i will go i will go and watch this is chernobyl i think is i mean i think he's very smart about what works and what doesn't from a tv perspective and so i'll be very curious to see how uh he sort of puts more of his stamp or at least works with Druckmann to find ways to make the second season more impactful than it was you know the first season ends with this big morality question would you or won't you make the decision that Joel makes and the second season really

doesn't have that decision or it doesn't have that moment yeah the second part of the game um and so yeah it's just a question of whether they can find a way to approach it maybe in a more nuanced way that is not well violence you know if everyone chooses violence then everyone just kills themselves essentially yeah yeah well uh it's also um going to be broken up into at least two seasons have they like confirmed that yeah yeah yeah well uh it's also um going to be broken up into at least two seasons have they confirmed that yeah yeah yeah they've said i think a couple times now so which i think is good uh especially because that the the back half of part two needs the most work well here's what i'm gonna say yeah season one of last of us is a perfect standalone story as is the first game of last of us

a perfect standalone story if there was no more last of us after that ending i would be totally fine with it because honestly it it stands on its own like you understand that the relationship between these two people is forever changed based on decisions that were made and you don't necessarily need to paint in the lines of like what happened next i realize people care and want to know what happens to these characters even if the show is a little bit messy from a narrative standpoint just keep in mind that like we got one damn good arguably the best video game adaptation anyone has ever done. And

I'm pretty happy with that. I can't believe you forgot the Mario movie that fast. It's not out yet. We don't know. No, we did a whole episode on. Yeah, sure. The directors for Last Fest Part 2 were Anthony Newman and Kurt Marginal.

Great. And I know Neil was paired with a writer whose name I forget, and I wanted to make sure I call her out. Haley Wegrin Gross was also the narrative lead on Last of Us Part II, so it's important people remember Haley's work as well. Nice. Cool. I'm going gonna give it a shot i i feel like i have weirdly more warmth towards last of us one um these days maybe it's just because of last of us part two um that i think here's what i'm gonna say craig mazen caught a lot of shit online for saying it's the quote best story video games has ever told

i realize people might disagree with the order but it'd be hard i'd be hard pressed to not put it in my top five i'll say that i i think it's the best story that feels like a film. You know? Like, I think that's true if what you conceptualize stories to be is, like, structurally correct in the way that film is structurally, quote, correct. Right? Yeah.

But, you know, if you start looping in, like, basically all of role-playing games do i think that there are more interesting stories out there than this 110 but are they going to be structurally correct in the way that we're supposed to talk you know three-part structure and all these things that people associate with good story i yeah i then i then i think Last of Us obviously gets in because it's so clearly going for that. I know that's getting like really semantic, but I think that's I think it's a way of looking at games as needing to meet the standards of the dominant cultural medium of the moment and i think yeah i don't i don't know i mean i it's it's very good but like i i just i think it's a very good movie that that you can play you know like that and that's how they did like that it made a tv show like sure

it but but like it's i think if i read it as a book i would be also moved is what i would say it would be some really top level scholastic book for your stuff. I, I'm thrilled. Um, I'm sorry. I'm showing too much of my opinion. Um,

anyway, speaking of a book, we normally would be doing our, um, our like other recommendations, but we both got sent a book we normally would be doing our um our like other recommendations but we both got sent a book we did i thought we could talk about for a second before you wrap up the show um we got sent it's called retro gaming a bite-sized history of video games it's by mike diver it actually came out originally in hardcover i think in 2020 uh august 2020 not a great time for just

like the world so you might have missed it uh but it's coming out in hardcover right now and i've been really enjoying it but you know who's loved it mosey oh yeah discovered it a few days ago and uh it has been deeply loved he has bent it uh in every direction because he reads it at night and he pushes it to like so it stays open on its own um he spilled a cup of water on it this morning so i can't refer to it because it's drying out it it's it's just a really solid i guess like introductory to retro gaming um i mean it doesn't feel introductory just because it's so comprehensive i was actually really impressed by how much is in there um it it just kind of runs the gamut from like the ZX Spectrum to like N64 to, you know, I don't know, more recent 3D era stuff. All the way up to like PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox.

Yeah. kind of blurbs with interesting anecdotes and stuff like that uh about these various projects and just like a ton of like really interesting factoids stuff like that yeah i really dug it earlier i i used scholastic book fair read as an unfair and untrue diss to our dear dearly departed last of us um here i mean it is like the best compliment in that if i had found this book when i was in like junior high or early high school um i guess even like late elementary school i would have been obsessed um because it is it's it's deep but not um impenetrable. It's not written like a textbook like a lot of these are. And it still has a sense of fun and whimsy that a lot of coffee table books, I guess.

Is that the right word? Yeah, coffee table books. That they often can lack. It's hard to do this well. And also you've written a book that is like the history of fun i mean we're getting another plug here but i feel like you know how hard it is to write these sorts of books that are covering so many topics in such a condensed area when i was reading it i was like

oh this is like flashing me back to me writing my book. So it is structurally almost identical to the book that I wrote. Obviously, you know, mine covers the gamut of a lot of different things, and this is just retro games. Yeah, yours is all of fun, and this is just retro gaming fun, but like who's counting?

But it is very hard to write these sorts of books just because there's no flow to it because you're constantly starting from scratch after writing three paragraphs. So it can be a lot. And this is a much larger book than what I wrote. So I am very impressed. Props. And they got some really good art from the games.

And my 20-month-old son like riveted by the book as well just because he likes looking at all the pictures and uh yeah it's been it's been really good yeah so uh if you're curious about it i i believe it's on amazon and barnes and noble i saw the hardcover version i don't know about the softcover version. Never mind. I lied. The softcover version came out a week ago. It's in paperback. And yeah, $16.95 on Amazon. That is a steal. That's a steal.

Get it. Buy it. That's our review. When we like something, buy it. What's it called again? It's called Retro Gaming, A Bite-Sized History of Video Games by Mike Diver. Good work, Mike. Good work, Mike.

Good job, Mike. Anything else on your end? I think that's it. Oh, my gosh. We did it. We talked about so much. All in all, what is this, like 32 hours of entertainment that we condensed into one hour of podcast for you. We crushed it. Wow.

What a favor we did for you, dear listener. Well, that's it. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant. His name is Russ Freshjake. This has been another episode of The Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest.

Resties!