Think Differently. Solve the Impossible.

 

 

Show Notes

Website: ElectricEggplant.com (Company)

Connect with David Fox: LinkedIn

Email: david@electriceggplant.com

 

Transcript

I wasn't actively looking for a job at Lucasfilm because I didn't think there was anything I could do there that I had skill set for.

I wasn't a special effects person, but then following my dream into doing the game stuff gave me the entry into being there at the right time from when that happened.

I mean, when I look back at the choices I made that landed me at that dream job at Lucasfilm, and then other projects I worked on over the years after that, the commonality was this little voice that I would hear in my head, the intuitive feeling of which direction I should go next.

For someone just starting out, you need to have the experience to get the job.

It's kind of like a chicken and egg thing.

So looking at projects they might have done in college or high school, ideally with other people so that we can see how they work with other people on a team.

My guest today is David Fox.

David was one of the founding members, first game designer and project leader at Lucas Film Games, LucasArts in 1982, where he worked in designing and scripting many of the graphic adventures of the 1980s.

From 2007 to 2011, he worked with Disney as an interactive consultant.

He's presently the lead programmer for the game Return To Monkey Island.

He's also adapting Rube Works, the Official Rube Goldberg Invention Game to XR.

For those of you like me who are not programmers or don't play a lot of games, XR stands for Extended Reality, a technology that's a combination of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, AR and Mixed Reality, MR David's specialty is a producer and game designer, iOS and Android app development with Utility 3D and Corona, iBook creation, location based entertainment design, and virtual reality and location based VR.

He says the overall theme in everything he does is finding ways to use technology to enrich people's lives, and using humor and entertainment to empower change.

His website is electriceggplant.com.

When I reached out to David to ask him if he'd be a guest on the show, I explained I'd like to encourage and inspire people to do the thing they want to do.

And I know a few students in college who are dreaming of getting a job either as a designer or a programmer in the gaming industry when they graduate.

So I was excited when David said yes.

And I'm hoping this conversation inspires those considering a career in the gaming industry.

And for those of you not sure if you want to focus and you're in school on either designing games or programming them, hoping this conversation leads you to expect what you might find day to day in either role as you embark on a career in the gaming industry.

welcome to my show, David.

Thank you.

Thank you for inviting me.

So your resume is impressive.

It's stunning how many different projects you've worked on over the years and you're still going.

Tell me how you got started.

What inspired you to pursue a game, a career in the video game industry?

Sure.

Well, back in the 1970s, it's right after I graduated from college.

I was actually focused on my major at college was humanistic psychology and I thought I was going to be working with people and counseling and that would be what I do for the rest of my life.

And I did it for a few years in the mid 70s, and then something about it felt like I just wasn't going to have a big enough impact in terms of the number of people I could help or work with.

And the idea that I wonder whether there is some way to use the emerging computer technology to actually create games or experiences that might reach a much broader audience.

And it may be not as intensive as counseling with someone one to one, but where it might help someone learn something more about themselves or experience new situations that they could learn from and launched us in that direction.

This is back in the 80s?

Seventies.

Okay.

And most people today, youth, they don't realize we didn't have video games until Atari.

Again, what was that, the 70s, early 80s, the first video, home video games?

The Atari 2600, I think was 1976, maybe, 75, 76.

That was a little cartridge when there were some arcade games, but not a whole lot.

So you're on the touch of that.

You're getting into it right when the very, very first.

Yeah.

So my wife and I decided to open a non-profit computer center where we'd invite the public in to play games or learn about computers.

We started with 10 microcomputers and eventually ended up with 40 through grants and kids would come in, they'd rent time for like $1.50 an hour.

We'd have birthday parties there.

They'd be playing games that we were able to put on the computers we had, microcomputers.

So you were programming the games already then?

Well, we weren't.

I wasn't programming.

We thought these were games we either enter in basic, typing the commands into the computer and saving them.

We would get from a computer games book or there were a few early game companies like Adventure International, and I think Sierra was one of the early ones, and a few other, Broderbund.

For those who have no idea how software works, today, there's 50 developers working on different parts of the program.

Nobody works on the whole thing.

It's compiled, it's debugged, it's tested.

What David did back then was literally, it's like you got a cookbook, typed into the computer, you typed in the recipe, hit return, and then you could play the game, right?

Yeah.

Save the game off, so put it onto an audio cassette tape, and then load it back in when we had someone who came and wanted to play it.

Awesome.

We did that for a few years, and that was how I learned programming, was by looking at other people's code, maybe modifying some of the games we typed in.

I eventually started doing ports of the Adventure International text adventure games from the RadioShack version of Basic, which is the language that they were written in.

I think most computers at the time came with a version of Basic.

Yeah, come to think of it, I actually wrote a, my older brother had a TRS-80 when they came out, RadioShack computer, and actually taught myself how to program Basic and wrote a little video game on it in Basic.

It was really slow.

Well, it wasn't really slow, it was just, it couldn't stack up to what you'd go to the arcade, the store for and play that.

Yeah, you have to use your imagination.

In fact, most of the computers we started with didn't have audio and they were in black and white.

So for audio, you put a little AM radio next to them, and the people who created the games would do things in their loops to make static buzz being picked up by the AM radio for these sound effects.

So not full stereo sound, just like staticky beats.

Sound effects, like an explosion.

You blew up a spaceship or whatever it was.

We eventually got some Apple IIs and Atari computers, and 400s and 800s.

So we were doing these ports for Adventure International from the TRS-80 to Apple II.

So I got to be in the code looking at what we needed to do to increase the number of commands AppleSoft basic had, because it wasn't as powerful as RadioShack version, and it had a product called Apple Spice, which Adventure International sold, which was like an add-on to Apple Basic, gave these extra basic commands.

Now for those listeners who probably weren't born yet, we're talking the Apple Computer, the huge Apple today that you know and love.

This is the very first, right David, the first Apple released, like the first Apple Computer.

Well, it was actually the second.

The first one was the Apple 1, which was essentially a kit that you throw into your own suitcase.

Apple 2 was much more refined, it came complete, you didn't have to assemble anything.

Actually, when we were looking at which computers we would buy, I went down to Coutinho, I was saying somewhere in the South Bay, Silicon Valley area, and then with these two guys who had this new company, and they both were pretty heavily bearded, both of their names were Steve, and they were showing me these, I saw it in a small office space, they had stacks of these new Apple 2s, and they're giving me a demo saying, well, this is what we think you should buy.

Obviously, it was Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

They don't have too much trouble doing that these days, here's what you should buy, here's the latest iPhone, there's a line out the door to buy one.

Yeah.

We ended up not choosing the Apple 2 because it couldn't do lower case, it was all upper case initially.

I thought that a big function of our computer center would be people wanting to come in and do word processing, and they would need upper and lower case.

But it turned out that by far the biggest interest was learning the program and games, and if we had used theirs, we would have had color, we would have had sound, probably would have been a better choice, but we didn't know at the time.

So you went with a PC, basically an IBM?

It was called the Processor Technology Sol 20.

This is before PCs were invented.

Okay.

PCs didn't really come out till early 80s, I think, so like five years later.

And then Atari.

I ended up writing a couple of beginning programming books with my friend Mitchell Waite.

And one of them was on computer animation.

And on the Atari 800.

And when I finished, or during the process of writing the book, I wanted to look at both what was happening in high-end state-of-the-art computer animation.

The book was called Computer Animation Primer.

And also the second half of the book was How Do You Do Computer Animation on Your Atari 800?

And so during the research part, I checked out Lucasfilm Computer Division, which happened to be conveniently located in the same county where we were based.

And they were just really happy to talk to me and show me around, show me the things they were working on.

So Lucasfilm, that's the big Star Wars thing, right, Lucas?

Did they already made Star Wars?

Yeah.

So Star Wars came out in 1977, which is the same year that the Computer Center opened.

And then 1980 was Empire Strikes Back.

And then this is 1981.

When I visited them, they already started this new computer division, because George figured that at some point, computers would get powerful enough where they'd be indispensable in film and gaming, really.

Yeah, that sounds right.

Yeah.

And they were starting to do some experiments of like, could we do computer animation for different shots?

I think the first one that, I mean, there's a computer animation sequence in the original Star Wars, which is like the wireframe graphics of going down the trench, or the image of the Death Star that was like the wireframe schematic of the Death Star.

Those were done on, I think, photograph off of like Evidence in Sutherland vector style computer.

But the first one they did where there was a lot of really rendered imagery would be from Star Trek to The Wrath of Khan, where there's this thing called the Genesis.

It's an awesome movie.

I love that movie and I'm not even a big Trekkie like.

I loved it too.

It's a good movie.

I thought it was a lot better than the first one that came out.

There's this thing where they are terraforming this planet, and there's animation sequence of planet covered in fire, then mountains start rising up and lakes start filling up.

All that was done in the new computer division.

I remember that scene.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Lucasfilm did that.

Yeah.

I think I have footage of it.

I maybe have a frame of that in my book.

What is your book real quick?

What's the name of your book real quick?

Computer Animation Primer.

It's actually online.

Someone scanned the entire book and you just search for it.

Okay.

I'll find it, put in the show notes.

Okay.

One of our members at the Computer Center, who worked at Industrial Light and Magic, which is the special effects division of Lucasfilm, came into our center and said, Hey, David, did you hear that Lucasfilm was starting up a new games group?

And I said, No, wow.

So I, and it's within the computer division, which I already had the connection with.

So I called up Ed Catmull, who I'd met a year earlier when I was doing the research for the book.

And he said, Yeah, we are, we just hired the new general manager, Peter Langston, he'll start in three weeks.

I'll let him know to give you a call when he starts.

So I got called in for an interview.

I showed him my manuscript, which I just finished for the book.

And since it's a nice little coincidence, Atari had given Lucas some million dollars to help start their games group.

And with the idea that Atari would get the first games that we did if they liked them.

It sounds like such a small amount of money these days.

Back then, probably a huge risk.

What's the million dollars in 1982?

At least maybe five, it's a lot more.

Yeah, it's a lot more.

But it was a big risk, right?

Because at that time, they didn't really mean they anticipated what we have today.

But it was cutting edge development.

Yeah.

I think George thought, let's learn about games, let's see what we can do.

Because Atari was the company and my book was based on the Atari computer, I was local.

Peter was actually looking for people who were not from the computer games industry.

He didn't want to hire people who came from Atari.

Because he wanted to reinvent how games are made.

He didn't want old thinking involved.

So that was also what I thought would be a minus, was actually a plus in my case.

So I got hired.

It took a couple of months.

I was ended up being the third person after Peter and after another guy, Rob Hoor, who was working already in the computer division, doing working on the laser film printer.

What you mentioned about being outside the box.

That's one of my key things that I talk about when I speak of innovation to a company because they're always trying to put little micro groups together for brainstorming that know the same thing, have the same expertise and get the marketing guy involved with the engineering, so he doesn't know what a transistor is.

Good.

He's got to sell them.

Plus, maybe he might think of an application you guys can't.

So that was visionary really in terms of leadership, should get leadership.

Yeah.

Well, I think we were looking more for innovation and creativity and less for deep experience in the industry.

And so that's why I got hired.

I started working September 1st, 1982.

And first thing I did was they put me in the office, our space wasn't set up yet for the new games group.

So they put me in the office with Lauren Carpenter, who was one of the members of the computer division, who ended up, who was the one who's like, you all about facto graphics animation, facto mountain creation.

So in the Genesis effect, we see these mountains rising up.

That was his code.

Mathematics.

Sounds like heavy mathematics.

Yeah, really.

Absolutely.

And I wanted to know whether it would be possible to do something with facto animation, facto mountain generation on an Atari computer, as opposed to where they're using much larger computers and taking hours to render each frame.

I wanted something that you could do like four to eight frames per second on a little 8-bit Atari computer.

So at first he didn't think it would be possible, but he thought about it and actually said, well, I might have an idea.

So he borrowed one of our Atari 800s and took it home and learned 6502 assembly language, coding close to the core of the computer.

It's hard for, I don't know very many programmers who are programmers that can really do assembly language.

Why would they need to these days, right?

You don't need to know.

Yeah.

And so he learned it.

He learned about the Atari hardware and literally like in three days, he came back with a demo of flying through a fractal landscape, you know, line drawing.

That became the basis of the game, my first game, which is called Rescue On Fractalis.

The key thing here I want to interject because you're on the same page with me in terms of innovation.

Albert Einstein, I think it was the theory of relativity.

He had the idea but he couldn't do the math.

So it sounds like David had the creative idea, but he needed some help with something, you know, it wasn't his skill set.

And the magic happened when he went out and found someone who did, someone who's really good at it and that was their thing.

And in this case, I guess I asked a question that no one would have dared to ask because it was coming from naivety.

I had no idea how hard it would be to do it.

And so I asked him and he took it as a challenge and he came up with a solution that worked.

And we ended up with, you know, after a lot of a lot more work on the game, we ended up with around maybe six to eight frames per second, which compared to say the, by then, the early flight simulators that were coming out, were running at two or three frames per second.

And ours was algorithmically generated.

So you'd have random, as you got closer to the mountains, because the way factors work, more and more detail would emerge and become more and more refined and fly through them.

So, I remember one of the first conversations, okay, I gotta back up a second.

When I was first thinking about how could you use computers to help people, really the original idea was kind of an idea for like this public, no, for this interact with Disneyland.

Really a massive theme park where everything would be interactive as opposed to like static attractions.

If you went on to The Pirates of Caribbean, they interact with you directly and you'd have different things happen for each group and you know.

Kind of like AI, like it would be.

Yeah, well, AI for using today's terms, it would have been combination of AI, virtual reality, this term, location based entertainment, but basically the algorithm would try to understand how you're interacting and then the and then the computer would think, okay, they're doing this, let me do this back.

Right.

The intent would be to give you a experience.

Experience, yeah.

But it would also change your point of view on things.

Maybe alter your perception of a problem, make you more aware of yourself, the way you think.

That was kind of like, that was kind of the initial motivation to do the Computer Center.

It was like, okay, well, I don't know anything about computers.

What's the first step?

So when I went to work at Lucas, Lucas Home Games, I told Peter, so this is kind of my vision, my dream.

And he said, well, that's cool, but we're going to do home games right now.

So it's not going to happen yet.

Oh, I was wondering, like, is this, I'm like, fantastic, like, what happened?

Because no pirate of the Caribbean's I've ever gone to in Disneyland has that.

So I was wondering what happened.

So that's what happened.

It didn't happen.

It didn't happen.

Not quite, but in some ways it did.

So when our next manager came on, Steve Arnold, he actually had a huge interest in location-based entertainment.

So I told him that far out vision for the future, he said, I'd love to do something like that, maybe we can do that.

So after doing games from 82 to around 1990, and I was in different roles.

Sometimes I was the project lead.

When I was project lead, I was also one of the programmers and the designer.

Other games, I would come in and work with a different person who is the project lead, and maybe just be the programmer, or maybe contribute some design elements.

That would be the case for Maniac Mansion.

In the case of Indiana Jones and Alaska Crusade Graphic Venture, there were actually three of us who were co-project leaders, and there was a short deadline.

We had to get the game done around the time the movie came out.

Three of us, me, Ron Gilbert, Noah Falstein, we're all experienced project leaders, and designers, and programmers.

We all worked on that project together, split it up, and made it work.

But it varies from project to project.

I want to come back to your timeline here with your story, but real quick.

Today, you were able to jump around because you had the skill sets for one.

You knew all these three different paths.

But even if you know those three today, is it still possible to do that in a job today at a company?

Would you have to start your own if you want to do that?

If you went to a big company, they want you to specialize?

I think it depends.

The other part of that, too, is like, if I was a project leader and I had a really big ego, would I be willing to not be the project leader and just work with another project leader designer on a game and not feel like I have to push my viewpoint?

So I think part of that skill set was willingness to say, okay, this is your vision.

I'm here to make the game successful and do whatever it is I can to have it happen.

I'll push back on some ideas that I think I'm a new one.

But when you say, no, I want to do it this way, then be willing to let it go and not feel like, resentment that your point of view, your ideas aren't being taken.

And that's not a skill that you probably learn in computer school.

And that's just communication and personal development kind of.

Yeah.

You have to be willing to trust the other person, but also know that your job is not to stand out as the creator.

Your job is to support the vision of the person who's leading the project.

What I was wondering is, do you have to focus on just programming as a career or just design, or do you have some opportunity today and in today's economy to bounce back and forth depending on the project?

I, well, for sure, if it's your own project, you for sure have that.

If it's a small group, then the smaller the group, the more hats that each person ends up wearing.

Obviously, switching between all those, and I did pixel art, I did play testing, I did game design.

Back in the old days, you had maybe six or seven, five to seven people on a project, and everyone had to pretty much jump in and do a lot of different things and just make it happen.

When you have the last game I worked on, which was Return To Monkey Island, I was not one of the designers, I was the lead game programmer.

So my job was to obviously get feedback.

As I had some thoughts about maybe one of the puzzles they're doing, but it was really to make sure that the game was implemented and highlighted the vision of the designers, which were Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman.

Go ahead and finish or go back to, I'm sorry I interrupted your timeline.

I did a major jump since that game came out a year and a half ago.

So the Ron who hired me for that, to work with him on this, knew that I could do that.

I could serve his vision essentially in terms of what his and Dave's vision in terms of what the design was and add my touches to it, but not try to take it off in a different direction.

So, that team was, I'd say, around 24 core team members plus another maybe 20 people who came in at different stages to help things.

And for that, it was pretty, you had your role, you knew what you're supposed to do.

I mean, anyone could contribute design ideas, and there are actually opportunities where they say, here's the next room.

What is everyone's idea for little animations that could happen, or for little gags or other things that could happen?

And so, everyone on the team would fill out these, say, Google Docs or something like that, where you list different things that could happen, and they would go through and say, we like these, here's the ones we want to use, and those would get implemented.

So, everyone had a way to input, but you knew that your idea may or may not get implemented.

But, as far as roles, the roles were pretty much very defined, and you really, within a project, we didn't have the opportunity to jump from one aspect of it to another because we were hired for a specific role.

In a company, and this terrible toy box who developed the game, is really a virtual company.

They don't have a staff.

It's like they'll gear up and bring people on for each project that they do.

And then everyone goes off in a separate ways.

Well, I've heard of that.

And then is it technically like you get unemployment?

No, because we're not even employees.

We're contractors.

Independent contractors.

Yeah, we're getting paid an hourly wage.

And no benefits, right?

No benefits.

So when it's over, it's over.

And that's for a lot of, I mean, that's kind of the model that the film industry would use also.

So like, you know, you gear up for film, they bring in a bunch of people to work on a specific film and then they work out.

That's true.

That's a good, good analogy.

That's you're building something once it's built.

It kind of reminds me, I've heard rumor that Ian Musk recently laid off a bunch of software programmers at Twitter because our access calls it.

He's like, how many programmers do we need to write one app that's already written?

In the case of the film industry, I think if the director says, okay, we're going to do another one, he's obviously the people he's going to bring back on, are the people that he's worked with before, he or she's worked with before and felt comfortable with and knows.

They already have an established common language, shortcut ways of communicating, they know the rhythms, they know everything.

So if that person works as a team member, they'll bring him back.

That's probably why I got asked to work with Ron on two recent games, Monkey Island and Thimblewee Park, because he knew me from helping work with me on projects 30 years ago.

Okay, David could do this, so let me ask him if he's interested.

Knowing that even that might be a temporary project, knowing that if it's a good experience for all around, you're going to likely get brought in from someone.

So this is a question I was going to ask you a little later, after you told me the rest of them, the cool history behind the Apple and the Atari.

How if someone in school today, what could they do?

You hear the word OOP and internship.

What could they do today before they graduate?

So when they're out, they have some connection like you just mentioned, like so-and-so knows me.

Would that be an internship or just networking, building a portfolio of your own, of games you designed?

Yeah, all of that.

Exactly.

I mean, if we hired someone, say Lucas, for a period I was responsible for a lot of the hiring, there was a period Lucas some games that was around that point became LucasArts.

I was the Director of Operations for a year, and we had grown rapidly from three people to 15 people to 30.

Now we're up to like 60 or 70 or 80 people, and we had never really put a hierarchy in place.

Everyone reported to Steve Arnold, the manager.

He wanted me to set up some more mid-level people to report to, so it was manageable.

I hired a bunch of people, and what we were looking for was, well, interestingly, we wanted people who could help us with graphic adventure games, and to actually be programmers slash writers, because often the way we do the games, it'd be a lot of texts and a lot of writing, and they were always going to be funny.

And so I realized that I had to find people who already had a great sense of humor, because that wasn't something we were going to be able to teach.

We could teach them how to code.

We want them to have some aptitude to show they could do it.

But using our in-house language was definitely teachable, and our standards was teachable, but how to be funny in the same mode that we wanted them to be was not going to be teachable.

So I was really looking for people who had that spark of creativity in their resumes or in the interviews we had, and it was pretty much a group process.

I was the initial filter, but then I bring people in and we often have someone talk.

What were you looking for on the resumes?

What else besides trying to suss out those little humors here and they're not so serious?

Yeah.

Well, I'm thinking, so this was around 1989, 1990.

You can pick anybody you want probably.

But I wanted the specific role we were looking at, we're like junior programmers.

So I didn't want someone who had done a whole publishing a major game for this.

That was a different thing.

That would be more a project leader role.

I wanted someone who could join a project and understand the style of humor, understand the tone, and be able to meld their writing style to the style of the design lead for that.

In this case, it would be Ron Gilbert.

Two of the people we hired were Dave Grossman and Tim Schaeffer.

That was their entry into computer games, really.

Both were, I think, pretty fresh out of college.

They were both pretty young.

Tim, in particular, sent in a resume that was essentially a graphic novel page.

Of him walking into Lucasfilm and getting interviewed.

I just said, well, this is hilarious.

It's amazingly creative and funny.

It's creative, something outside the box.

Creative.

Hired to be a designer, make it.

It was a huge risk for him to do that since it was so not the way you usually would do a resume.

It's okay.

It definitely made it pop.

That may have only been Dubo that one time.

I don't know if we got a bunch more of them.

Everybody else was like, hey, you want to job with David?

Do this.

Yeah, right.

You must have talked to Tim.

It makes me think too.

I'm guilty at it once in a while for something on AIChat, GBT, how to phrase something different, but I'm really careful about it because I like to have my own voice sound like I wrote it and write it.

I'm going to bet there's some people out there that use chat TBT to help write their resume.

Yeah.

That would be detrimental, correct?

I think so, if I noticed back then.

That wasn't an issue back then.

What I mean is it would take the humor out of it.

It would take the humor out of it.

It would have taken their personality out of it.

Yeah.

Well, I was looking for personality.

I wanted to get a sense of the person's wackiness.

We wanted people who were eccentric and who thought differently than the average.

After the resume, the resume looked like it was strong enough.

There would be these first phone interviews, and then if they passed out, they come in for group interviews.

And watching how they are, obviously, you couldn't use ChatGPT in a group interview.

You'd have to see what the person's like, how they fit in, how they would meld with the other people on the team.

And that stuff you probably couldn't tell directly from the resume.

And then in references, talk to other people who work with them and what's their experience.

For someone just starting out, though, you need to have the experience to get the job.

It's kind of like a chicken and egg thing.

So looking at projects they might have done in college or high school, ideally with other people so that we can see how they work with other people on a team where each person might have their own skill sets.

I was the animator on this project or I was the coder or whatever it was.

So for someone who desperately wants to get in the games industry, having, like you said, a portfolio essentially and history of things they've done before to show that they were able to actually tackle the project and finish it, which is huge.

I mean, how many times have we started something and then just got distracted and couldn't finish it?

Well, that wouldn't work if you're working for a company trying to finish a game.

You've got to be able to follow through because that triggered another thought.

Question to ask you, startups.

Is it I mean, there's pros and cons.

You work for a startup in any business, you have more opportunities, more input, but higher risk in that you might make less money because they don't have money and you might they just might go under.

But it's a good way to get your foot in the door.

Versus a big company where you got more resources, money.

What are your thoughts on one versus the other and are they both equally good to look for a job in or should there's benefits to one versus the other?

That's interesting.

I'm thinking about the actual jobs I've had and they were all pretty much startups.

Before there was that word, probably, huh?

Yeah.

Well, Lucasfilm Games was on the edge.

The games group was a startup for sure.

But we have the unusual benefit of having this larger company that was still raking in lots of money from the Star Wars movies supporting it.

So we didn't have pressure initially to produce smash hit games in order to survive.

We were given multiple years, like five, eight years to find our voice and know that we were able to experiment and do things that maybe you wouldn't do if it was run by a marketing department, saying, oh, that's not going to sell.

We didn't have that.

We didn't have any marketing filter for any of the games we did during the 80s, and I was there.

And we also knew that we weren't going to, that the company wasn't going to go under because they still had a major revenue stream.

So we weren't, I think the initial edict was, stay small, don't lose money, and do some great stuff.

And we, as opposed to with other companies, we hit a smash hit right out from the start.

So we can pay our bills.

We didn't have to worry about that.

I think they understood, they understood coming from a creative company that creativity, you can't just spit out with a program.

You have to have, it's like writing a song or you have a band and they have good albums and bad albums.

You have to invest some time.

You can't just hire one-hit wonders.

There'll be one-hit wonders.

The management, the bigger company understood what they were really investing in is the future, not six months or a year.

Exactly.

It was like planting seeds.

It was, good analogy would be when George Lucas built Skywalker Ranch.

He wanted, he ended up by bringing in thousands of small trees that he planted around the property to create a forest.

And the, you know, he was willing for to wait for that to happen.

I mean, it was okay to...

He waited to use the forest?

He planted it long before?

I don't think he, I don't think he, I mean, it was just, it was part of the atmosphere that he wanted for the ranch, in terms of how the ranch would look.

We actually, there was a point after, I think it was 1985, we ended up moving to the ranch for four years, the games group, and one time I remember they sent out a message to everyone in the company and said, hey, we have some extra trees that we didn't need for our forest.

You could have them for $4 each.

I ended up buying, I think it was six fir trees and six bay trees, and brought them home.

Now, we have a forest in our backyards.

We've been living in this house for 41 years.

We've got some of the original Lucas trees too.

That's kind of cool.

So it's a Skywalker Ranch Transclan Forest.

But the point there is that that was the unicorn type of a job where you end up in this very creative company to do something you love to do, but given a lot of time to figure it out and not worry yet about having to hit everything out of the park and be successful, that changed during the time I was there, that's what it was.

But when we got into the 90s and I was pretty much gone, everything shifted.

For the time I was there in 80s, we were not allowed to do Star Wars games because the license had already been sold to other companies early on.

But in the early 90s, I think that that must have expired.

Star Wars, the last movie had been, was Return of the Jedi was 1983.

Probably those license agreements had all expired and they started to do Star Wars games.

Then not soon after that, pretty much all the games they did were Star Wars games.

Then I think George started paying more attention and trying to add his creative input in a way which maybe wasn't as helpful as it could have been.

As the owner of the family, I don't know if he understood the process of making games.

It ended up, and this is from stories I've read afterwards, where he might come in and change the whole plot of the story after they'd already done months of pre-production or early production work on it.

At first, I was really upset that I couldn't do a Star Wars game because my first game was supposed to be a Star Wars game with my mind.

Soon after, in retrospect, I realized that was a blessing that we had the freedom to find our own voice.

We didn't have to get stuck doing multiple Star Wars games, and we could have much more freedom to experiment and do what we want to do.

To answer your question about startup versus big companies.

The other companies I worked for were generally seem to be relatively small.

And like you said, there's a big risk that the thing wouldn't last, that it would grow in a direction you don't like, that the culture there might end up being toxic.

I'm thinking of one company in particular that I worked at.

And where if you go to a company that's already established and larger, you probably get a better sense of what it's going to be like to work there from talking to other people.

What's the culture?

What's it like to be there?

But it sounds like in terms of your career, you could go back and forth between different companies anyhow.

So it's not like there's an advantage in the long term for your career, your training, your experience.

Well, after having the 10 years at Lucas, that showed that I knew what I was doing.

I had a track record, so I could get other gigs.

But it turned out that I ended up doing a lot more stuff for myself, because I think I'm not a big company kind of a person.

I don't think I like being part of a large organization.

So then you started doing more on your own.

Yeah.

I'm either consulting or doing my own projects.

I'm lucky to have a long-term partner and my wife.

We're celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary in August.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

We often will trade off on supporting each other on a project.

I'd say I need a year to learn this new thing, to experiment with that while she's working on something and trade it like right now, she's writing novels and I'm helping her with the backend part of that, formatting the books and proofreading, giving your feedback, brainstorming.

Having a partner like that can really make a difference in terms of what you end up doing with your life and not having to make choices to do projects that are distasteful, really.

I think we were somewhere in the 90s, 2000.

What did you do?

The one thing I want to mention was the last two years at Lucasfilm, after I did the Director of Operations, the deal was if I did Director of Operations for a year, that Steve Arnold would then try to find a location-based entertainment project I could work on.

He kept his promise and for two years I worked on this skunkworks project within Lucasfilm to create a simulation-type immersive game in a pod.

And that's the, what do you call it, virtual reality or the XR?

Yeah, it was really more of a pod-type simulator.

And we partnered with Hughes Simulations, Hughes Aircraft, that was making these professional flight simulators for the Air Force and for airlines.

So you'd actually get these massively expensive pods that would be on motion bases and you'd help.

Yeah, my friend, I've seen him.

My buddy was a big captain for a big jet, yeah.

So the idea was that could we take that technology and cost it down enough so that a theme part could afford to buy, say, eight of them for an interactive experience where you're sitting in the pod and you're flying and whatever you're doing.

So the first game we got to do, I actually got to design a Star Wars based game.

In this pod, there are two people sitting in the pod.

There is a heads down display screen which was using an Amiga computer.

That was where the joystick input was coming from.

But we had this out the window.

We had three projectors projecting on a collimating mirror.

So it's a mirror that was curved like concave mirror, so that when you're looking out the window, instead of something feeling like it was five feet away, it felt like it was like 100 feet away.

So you're looking out into vast distances.

So we didn't have motion, but you didn't really need it to get that sense of movement.

It was a really cool project.

There's videos online.

I have a couple that I posted.

Unfortunately, when we had something that was showable, Lucasfilm decided that by then Steve Arnold had left the company and there was no one left in the company who cared about this technology.

So they just said, okay, we're going to back away from it.

We're going to close down the group.

We'll give the tech to Hughes to let them try to market it to theme parks.

It's crazy how, if you haven't worked for a big company, I have, it's crazy how you can have something so big and beautiful and almost perfect, and just one CEO, he doesn't know anything about this, and he's got his priorities, just goes, nope, we'll close it down.

And you can't just beat on their door and go and grab them by the car and go, look, man, you've got to experience it.

So you probably did, but they're still not like a force.

You can't lead it.

You can lead them to water and not make them drink, right?

Yeah.

I'm not sure.

I don't know all the different decisions that went into that, but looking back, I can assume that revenue is drying up from server stuff.

Yeah, but that's still David gets us me back to, so I worked at Motorola for 11 years.

And you know, Motorola was gold back in the day.

You probably program something on their processors.

What I witnessed is, yeah, the money thing, but again, it's the bean counters and they're good.

You go to the bean counters, tell me how much money I have, but then the leader still has to decide, hey, I'm going to take the risk because I've seen it, I've done it.

And if you don't have that kind of leader, then your company doesn't do so well or you lose your project as an engineer anyhow and go find another job, I guess.

Yeah, so it's like the transformation from the creative leads to, say, the bean counters.

I know LucasArts also transformed after Steve left.

They had a series of managers or heads of the, I guess, general managers who ran LucasArts.

And often they start going to marketing people and lawyers and people who weren't really game designers or game people.

And I wasn't there at the time, so I've just heard stories that, you know, how much it had changed from how it was early on.

I'm kind of glad I wasn't there because I think I would have been really upset.

Yeah, you're more the creative type than the bureaucratic type, probably.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

So unfortunately, the project got killed.

It was too expensive at the time for theme parks to pick it up.

The tech, they were still using a super expensive, at the time, million-dollar image generator.

And eight years later, you could probably do the same thing with a graphics card and a PC.

And it would look almost as good.

So it was a little too early.

One of those things that was just too early for it to be successful, for it to be practical.

And there wasn't anyone with the deep pockets who believed in it enough to do it.

Except maybe Disney.

It was around the mid-90s, Disney had created something called DisneyQuest, which initially was like a five-story building in Florida, next to the Disney parks, where you could go in and they had a bunch of VR experiences, early VR experiences and pod type experiences, and they were doing all sorts of really creative things there.

But also even then, that was early.

The tech was still expensive and not as kind of clunky and hard to do.

And I think they ended up closing down after a while.

But the idea to do interactive was definitely something that was going to stick.

And the closest, I haven't seen it yet, unfortunately, because of COVID, I didn't go back down to Disneyland again.

But the new Star Wars area, well, relatively new Star Wars area in Disneyland with the Millennium Falcon smugglers run, I think it's called, is interactive, at least to some degree.

It's still on a track.

You have some, it's interactive with some limitations.

But that's, I'm hoping that's the direction that, that kind of entertainment is going to go, where you find ways to get people through the experience fast enough for it to be profitable for them.

I think I'd almost get a little frustrated as a creative type.

You're trying to just build it in your garage with what you have.

You have the vision, you put in the time, and then once it's out, simply because a computer becomes faster in the next couple of years, someone sees what you do, they can do it faster, better, and actually make money out of it.

Now, you're like, man, you know how much money and time I put into this?

Is there anything about intellectual property?

You probably have a lot to say about that, but protecting patents and whatnot, or is that another department in your company you work for to try to lock that down?

So you put all this time and money into something creative, and someone just doesn't, when there's a cheaper way to do it, take over and make the money you should have made.

That comes into the patents, that if you can get them and know what they are, know that you have a patent, something patentable.

Yeah, and that's expensive too, because you end up having to hire a patent lawyer, and you have to do the research and all that.

Defend it, and yeah, that's true.

Okay.

Maybe this is why Steve Jobs, when he was still around, I think I heard some place Apple, he would hire people, even today, I think, they can't tell you Apple programmers what they worked on, like Xcode, the software development for the apps, Xcode, you're an iOS programmer.

You know what I'm talking about?

Xcode is the Apple's language for those listeners who don't do it to program an app or an app on an Apple computer, and they revamped it.

Xcode came out, correct me if I'm wrong, David.

Less than 10 years ago, they wrote their own application for writing programs, and I heard the people in that transition to write that code, that program, there's no door on the office you go in.

It's all secretive.

No one even knows what your position is and what you're working on, right?

Because then you can't lose your intellectual property because no one knows what you're working on.

And you have all kinds of non-disclosure agreements where you can't tell anybody, almost like the military, keeping a private secret.

Yeah, that's tough.

If you're in a company with a lot of secrecy like that, you have to be able to keep your mouth closed.

I mean, probably the most recent experience was working on the Monkey Island game because we had to be super secretive what the game was we were working on.

Which game is this?

Return to Monkey Island.

Okay.

Return to Monkey Island.

Don't play video games next time.

I'm with someone who does.

I'm asking about that game.

Yeah.

It's an adventure game.

So it's a point and click adventure game and it's a puzzle-based game.

And I love working on that project.

It was secretive, you're saying?

Secretive.

It was secret.

We had to keep it secret until the public announcement.

And I think it worked.

People were shocked when we actually announced it because no one thought we would be working on new one.

Nice.

I was going to say something.

I can't remember what it was now.

So, oh yeah.

So, also back in the early 90s, I was looking at virtual reality that just started being, a few small companies were experimenting with it and trying to do things with it.

But again, it was just too early.

The tech was too slow.

You'd get motion sick as you turn your head, and then the image would pop into place after you moved.

So, just the lag was not great.

It just took a while for it to get good.

But when I went to Facebook or Oculus, had their annual Connect Conference in 2019, I went to that and saw how good the original Quest was compared to the other headsets I'd used and price-wise.

It's okay, this is my next thing.

I'm going to do something in VR.

I can actually do it now.

An idea was to take the Rube Goldberg game that I re-published in 2013, which was done in Unity and now we had 3D characters in spaces to see if we could adapt that as a VR project.

Is this your own company?

Yeah.

It was something that I initiated.

We got funding from Unity, Unity 3D, the company that makes a development environment that a lot of people use for creating games.

By funding, you mean like capital, what's the word for seed money, investors?

It wasn't really investors.

They actually agreed to provide funding for the game.

So it wasn't for the company as much as like a here's, here's a couple hundred thousand dollars for you to do the game and you have a year and you have to bring on your, hire your team and, and then we will be able to publish it.

So is this like, you have a company and someone comes to you and they want to build something and they're not literally giving you money to use in your company, they're, this is for this project.

I want you to.

Right.

That's cool.

Yeah.

So that's more like what a publisher might do.

Then my publisher might say, okay, I'm giving you an advance for your book, for example.

Okay.

Great.

Yeah.

Okay.

Or I'm giving you an advance against royalties for to develop the game.

Well, that's exciting.

You're getting paid to do what you love to do by someone who has money.

Yeah.

I can do that for you.

And the hope is that you can actually do it within the budget that you've done.

So we were actually looking for like three times the amount.

So we had to dramatically find ways to reduce the complexity and reduce the size of the game in order to do it within that budget.

But we did it and it came out and it was well received.

But then Unity Games, which was really a division, a new division within Unity, decided that they didn't want to be in a publishing business anymore.

They only lasted about nine months.

By publishing business, the book and the rec, I know books, I know the music industry.

Tell me how by publishing this game, you mean distribute it, so everyone knows about it?

Yeah, so it would be like in the app store, you'd see this game is published by this company, and it's the company, usually the company that develops it or it might be the case of Return To Monkey Island, the publisher is Devolver, which is a large game company.

They're the ones that provided the funding.

So why wouldn't a company that gave you money want to publish it?

Because it's not good enough and then they got to keep a marketing team on, or what would be the reason for not?

Yeah, well, in this case, it wasn't that they did publish it.

But since Unity, my understanding is Unity, their primary business is providing software development environments for developers to create games.

That was their big business.

That's where all their money comes from.

They had the idea like, hey, let's try publishing some of our own games from some of these people.

We'll pick out someone.

We'll put our weight behind it.

I guess what happened was they saw that they were competing against their primary customers.

The primary customers were other developers.

Let's have it.

That's like if you're on a music label, why they only want one reggae band, because if they're great, how can you have a second reggae band and have them both on the same label and give them both the same amount of marketing resources and money to make albums?

And it doesn't make sense, right?

Yeah.

Or think of it like this.

Let's say you're a company that makes guitars, and you want all the musicians around the world to buy your guitars and then you decide that you're going to start publishing music from some of these guitar players, and you're giving preferential treatment to certain songs.

All the other guitar purchasers are going to get pissed that you're giving preferential treatment to these people.

So I think that's kind of what happened, and they decided to close down the publishing arm, the small group.

But for us, that was a good thing, because it gave the rights back to us for the game, and we could continue publishing ourselves.

Was that something you negotiated?

It was in the contract to begin with?

I don't think we ever thought that would happen, so I don't think it was in the contract.

So they realized that when they couldn't support it anymore, that was the nice way of shaking hands and saying...

They didn't want to bury the game.

They just said they could have it back if you want.

Of course.

That's nice.

They want to see it.

Yeah.

So we did some experimenting.

I invested in hiring a programmer to start adapting the game for VR, and we got a really good working prototype.

At some point, I realized that based on the feedback, we did a great proof of concept, but it was going to be way more expensive to finish it than I had first thought in terms of bringing it up to current standards.

I mean, this is art and graphics that were 10 years old already.

By expense, is it most of the expense and you need staff like another programmer to help you?

It's paying a programmer what they're worth, the rate and treating them well, and then realizing there might be a lot more involved in getting it to the finish line.

So what I've been doing now...

Yeah, go ahead.

What you've been doing now?

So when I went to the last computer game developers conference or GDC in March, I realized that I needed to pivot.

I started looking for outside developers who could help me with this and I also started looking for publishers.

I can't announce anything yet, but I definitely been talking to a publisher and with the idea that they would pick it up, they would do the rest of the development in house, and they have way, way more experience than I do in terms of VR.

So I guess it will still be attached to the project as the designer, but working with them to do it.

So hopefully, they would have more staff, like programmers to help you.

Yeah, they have their in-house staff do the work.

So what about back to a startup?

And I hear these ideas like, oh, you could work in a startup and get equity.

Meaning, if you're a programmer, maybe out of college, and hopefully, you don't have a big student loan, don't need a lot of money, that you could work for a small startup, and basically, it means you're not going to get paid as much, but you get stock in the company.

Is that a realistic scenario?

Is that happening in your gaming industry as much as maybe some of the other software development that's going on?

Yeah.

I've been in three different companies where stock equity was offered.

Two of the three closed down before stock ever became a possibility.

The third one actually went public.

The stock actually did pretty well for the first few months, which is before we could sell it.

Then 2000 hit and there is a.com crash where all the.com stocks went like this.

So what I put into it, I actually did get stocked.

I haven't sold it yet, but what it's worth now is about what I paid for it.

So you're 0 for 3, or that's the 0 for 3 record.

Yeah.

My son worked for a startup and actually was able to cash out.

So he got some.

So it happens.

I think it's pretty rare that you could actually, the company actually goes all the way, either get bought or go public.

Is it worth taking it for the experience just so you can get a job easier?

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, obviously, you want to make sure you're getting enough money.

To live.

To live off of.

You have to assume that you'll never see the back end.

They're offering it.

Say you're living with your parents though, and they want you out of the house, but it's already been five years.

What's another year?

Mom, dad, can I live here for a year?

I'm working for a startup.

After that, I'll have all this experience.

It's a small company and I'll be able to design a little program, everything, project management, and then I promise I'm moving out, even if I don't have a job.

If your parents are willing to do it, and you can survive without going nuts, living with your parents as an adult, then yeah.

But the downside would be if it's such a small startup, because I also see these online, and I do my research, and because I develop, I've written an app for myself on the iPhone with iOS and Xcode.

So I mean, it's curious.

I was curious about the industry and exploring, that you'll see people, they don't really have that much money, and they're searching for free work, free programmers to do a startup, and they're never going to make it.

It's one person and they don't have any money behind them.

You're not going to get good experience out of that.

You'd put it on your resume, but probably, right David, is not going to look that great.

But it would give you some experience.

So I wouldn't say don't do it, but don't do it with expectation that it's going to turn into anything other than some experience.

Another thing to put on your resume.

Something to put on your resume.

I would rather hire someone who's worked on several games or several projects, someone who's fresh out of school, has never done anything.

Oh, you would rather hire somebody straight from scratch like clean slate or not?

I would rather not.

I would rather have some experience.

Unless I have such a great feeling about them that I think it's worth the risk.

But more often than not, as someone hiring someone, do you want to take the risk?

The person who looks good on paper actually, it turns out they can't focus or they spend too much time playing other people's games instead of doing what you're supposed to be doing.

Or they should have been in marketing because they wrote a great resume.

It's spectacular looking.

It's just paper.

Yeah.

That's why you might have to take some of these jobs that are not really give you what you're worth in order to get the real experience that you could put on a resume for stepping up.

You might get lucky.

I mean, going to some place like the Peter Game Developers Conference, Game Developers Conference, as a student, there's a really great-

Where is that at?

Game Developers Conference?

It's usually every March in San Francisco.

March in San Francisco.

It's massive conference.

There's maybe 25,000 people.

They have a whole program set up for students.

They can come for free in exchange for volunteering to help monitor, help run the project, help run the experience.

But you also get time off where you can sit in on a bunch of the talks, go to some of the events, and also talk to a bunch of other people who are in the industry, and maybe get your resume out there.

That's a great intro opportunity.

I mean, the sooner the better.

But what year do you really need to buy your junior year, your sophomore year, or right away start doing stuff like that?

So you know that you're interested in games.

You start to.

Okay.

I know people who, I mean, the original, I think, pathway might be, you start as a play tester, get to do some play test gigs, and then you show that you're really good as a play tester, meaning you can write bug reports that are clear, and the programmer can look at your bug report and understand exactly what they did to trigger the bug.

And then you maybe work from there to a management position in doing bug testing or play testing, and work from there maybe to start doing some design.

This is after you graduate?

After you graduate or while you're in school?

If you, it might be both.

You might be able to get a side play testing.

I mean, there are definitely indie projects that are looking for free play testing.

They're not paying, they just want people to get feedback, but some of those gives you experience in reporting bugs and also seeing, and it's a great way to, if there's a certain kind of program you like, seeing the process of it moving from out beta.

So you get to actually see the code as a bugger, a debugger?

You don't get to see the code, but you get to see the game in its rough form and then polish it, how the different feedback.

That's kind of like, say, okay, it's like looking at a masterpiece when it was in rough form, and seeing the process of how it got from that to the polished version.

I think it's really educational.

Most people, when you buy a game, it's already finished or it should be finished.

If that's something someone's interested in, learning what the process was to take a game from step 1 to step 5, and how it got refined, how it got better, and then where you actually can give your feedback as the testers, like, well, this doesn't make sense to me.

I tried doing this and kept on.

Communication skills.

That happened instead.

You learn how to communicate with the development team.

Understand what they're looking for and following instructions, and then see how much work probably went into the game itself.

Where it doesn't just come out fully form, it goes through a lot of painful steps to get there.

You get to see what a day in the life of the industry really looks like, which is sometimes not fun and creative.

There's work involved.

There's a whole thing on Steam, which is where a lot of people can buy their games, call it early access, where you might be able to get a version of a game either for free or, I think it's usually for free or for reduced price.

Early access.

Early access, yeah.

And then, then you get to, and you, you know, give, it's all volunteer.

You volunteer by reports and, and, and.

Can you, and that's something you can put on your resume?

Um, I think you, maybe.

Not really impressive, not really impressive.

I mean, I, it might show that you say I, I've been on the beta team and 15 games or 10 games in early access and getting great feedback.

And the person who is a project lead on that game said, you're the best bug, you know, bug rider that if anyone we were to work with, without that can go on the resume.

But just having, having done it might show interest that you've done this before.

Show your dedication to, to learning the industry.

I think would be a plus.

A recommendation, a feedback recommendation is always better than what you actually did.

Anything that's good.

But if you're, I mean, showing that you're a consumer of games, okay, so often in the old days, for sure, someone would say, what do you do?

And I'd say, well, I'm a game developer, a game designer.

So, wow, that sounds like a really fun job.

And what they're thinking in their mind is, you're sitting at the computer playing games all the time.

And that's not what the job is.

It's often very, very difficult because you're problem-solving, you're managing people, you're trying to figure out how to make this work based on feedback that you kind of knew in the back of your head that something wasn't quite right.

And some tester comes out and says, says exactly what you were hoping no one would notice.

You realize, yep, that's actually true.

I have to change the whole game because that person actually noticed what I was hoping no one would notice.

Or five people came up with the same thing.

And you realize that, you know, it's, it's.

It's like the journey, not the destination.

You enjoy the process.

And it's a, and it's a very challenging process.

And, but for me, I don't play a lot of games because it's much more fun for me to, to make the games and know enough about what's out there to, you know, to appreciate what someone else has done.

But when you say you don't play the games, David, I know what you mean.

But for those who aren't programmers, imagine you work on cars and you're working on fixing the car.

That's what you love.

You drive the car.

You have to drive the car to test it.

But you're not driving cars all day like racing them.

You're in the garage building the car that someone else is going to race.

Yeah.

And you probably enjoy fixing, working on the cars as the fun part more than the driving part maybe.

Yeah.

So as we wrap up, is there anything else we haven't covered that you might think might be important for people getting in the gaming industry to know about?

Well, I think this is general for any industry, really, which is really, I mean, when I look back at the choices I made, that landed me at that dream job at Lucasfilm, and then other projects I've worked on over the years after that, the commonality was this little voice that I would hear in my head, the intuitive feeling of which direction I should go next.

Finding your way to crossroads, should I live in this county or should I live somewhere else?

Making that choice to live in Marin, where Lucasfilm turned out to end up being base, changed everything.

Wow.

There was actually a point where we were living in San Francisco, and I said, I think we should live in Marin.

There was a point a few years later where we were thinking about moving up to Oregon because housing was cheaper and I started, I noticed I was feeling this really sad, emotional, depressed feeling, and I said, oh, it's realizing that if I moved up to Eugene, Oregon, I would never be able to work for Lucasfilm, which was this little hidden dream I had.

It's like, okay, listen to that.

Okay, we're not going to move, we're going to stay in Marin.

I wasn't actively looking for a job at Lucasfilm because I didn't think there was anything I could do there that I had skill set for.

I wasn't a special effects person.

But then following my dream into doing the game stuff, gave me the entry in writing that book, gave me the entry into being there at the right time for when that happened, when they started the group.

Sounds like sometimes you don't know why you feel a certain way, but you have to trust your gut.

Even if it has nothing to do with your career or what you think, what you're worried about.

Yeah, you have to listen to those feelings, the impulses you get.

And I don't know, I mean, is it luck?

I don't know.

It might be partly being in the right place.

It might also be having these feelings about, you know, which way should I go in order to get to that point?

There was, I went to a workshop once where they had this kind of game that we all played where everyone put something into this big cookie jar.

The gift might have been a piece of jewelry, it might have been a promise of a massage, it might have been, you know, whatever.

It's like a gift you were giving.

And then everyone had the chance of choosing, like, do you want to do, take door A or door B, do this or that, and then all these different possible things.

And I ended up, I might remember how I ended up, I ended up being the person who got to be the one choosing and I just ended up making all the right choices.

No, I'm not going to do that, I'm going to do that.

And then I ended up with this cookie jar filled with all these fun things.

And during that process, there was this feeling of feeling like I was being steered in the right direction.

I've also had that feeling sometimes going to a conference of like say, why am I here?

Why did I choose to come here?

And then just kind of like settling into, okay, I'm here and then just deciding where to go, or where to sit down, and it's sitting down to someone who ends up becoming a good friend later on, or go over here to this workshop and here's some piece of information that opens another door, and just using like serendipity and synchronicity and whatever to go with whatever the flow is.

And it sounds very woo-woo, and I don't know how many people have this.

I think for a lot of people, people get these senses and they disregard them, or they throw them away, or they choose to ignore them because it's scary.

Your logical mind takes over, really.

It's like, well, it'd be cheaper to live here, more there, or this, that, that.

And your logical mind takes over, which is a good way to check things.

Then you just, or a lot of people, I mean, I'm, I do it myself and kick myself for it sometimes.

You should have listened to that gut feel, even though you didn't know why.

In your logical mind.

Yeah.

And, or would I regret not doing that if I had that opportunity?

That's a good one.

Yeah, that's excellent.

How would I picture myself in five years looking back?

And here's this choice point that I could have gone this way or that way.

I could have taken that job or not taken it, not knowing whether it was good.

How would I feel if I chose not to do it and whatever happened?

It's like an extreme, like, if I never got to do this, but I always forever could do that, how would that work?

Versus if I could never get to do that, but always just went that way, but never ever the other path, the two extremes sometimes helps the rational mind.

Yeah.

And something else that I did, which was really helpful when we were, when I was at that turning point, trying to think about doing counseling or doing something totally different, is I got together with several friends and my wife, and we started brainstorming and picturing what life was like for me 10 years in the future.

So I said, okay, it's now 10 years in the future.

It's now 1986.

I'm looking back over the last 10 years and what have I done?

What's changed?

What's my path to get here?

And kind of forcing yourself to take a viewpoint outside of your current circumstances, and imagine a path of how you would move through life and get to where you want to go.

And what I was imagining did not come to pass, but it freed up the brainstorming process of imagining things that I never would have imagined before, and kind of got me moving in the right direction.

So it's more of a directional compass pointing thing, as opposed to this is where I have to be.

Maybe it helps because you're the creative type too, so you have some imagination.

Well, I hope that everyone has some core of creativity that they've had at one point that they could rekindle, and use that to drive choices like this, because I think that's really important in life.

It's important.

It will make you happier or less happier.

So what's next for you?

What's next for you?

If the Rube Works VR project goes forward, then I'll be working on that to some degree for the next year or so.

I'm also helping my wife Annie with, I'm essentially her publisher, since we self-publish, so learning about the marketing end of it, and working with the marketing team, and getting her books off from her keyboard into the world.

Really, her next one is going to come out in February, so she's in the writing stage right now.

What's the title?

Well, the next one, I should really promote the one that she already did, which came out last February, which is called Little Things That Kill a Team Friendship Afterlife Apology Tour.

And it's young adult fiction about a teen who finds herself dead in an afterlife area, having to figure out how she died.

And turns out the place where she's put is for people who committed suicide.

And she doesn't believe that's what happened, so she has to find out what actually happened, and go back to earth and start putting the puzzle together, learning, you know, talking to her, watching your friends, talking to a friend who's kind of very witchy.

And it's a really fun book.

Yeah, it sounds cool.

Yeah.

You can go to anniefox.com for more information.

That's her website.

And all your information I'll have in the show notes, too, in terms of your website for your gaming and your programs and everything.

Yeah.

So that's probably what I don't know that.

I mean, if Ron Gilbert were to come back and say, hey, you want to work on the game with me?

I say, sure.

But so far, I'm not working on another project yet right now.

So, you know, there's a possibly of another game.

Who knows?

There might be some other game that pops up I know nothing about yet.

It's what you do, right?

So, when it happens, you'll use your intuition and how it feels, whether you should take it or not.

Exactly.

That's what keeps you going and successful in doing what you want to do.

Awesome.

Thanks for being on my show, David.

Yeah, thank you for inviting me.

Whenever I play video games, which is, I'm not very good.

I'm horrible.

I used to be able to play Pac-Man, the little Ataris, but the two-handed stuff.

Well, I think there's a, for the Return To Monkey Island, I think there's a, definitely it's on pretty much every platform.

I believe on mobile, maybe iOS, there's a version which is like a demo version.

We can play it and not have to pay for it.

Okay.

And get to a certain point where you have to choose to buy.

But it's not a video game in the way you're thinking, because it's not a skill-based game.

It's purely story-based and problem-solving.

Okay.

And so you don't need hand-eye coordination.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

It's not like I can't move fast enough or shoot something.

It's not a shooting game.

Well, it sounds interesting.

Return To Monkey Island.

Yeah.

Go to the website, returntomonkeyisland.com and you can see some trailer stuff there.

Best to you, David.

Okay.

Thanks for being on my show and I'll be keeping an eye on you for whatever's down the road, another fantastic game or big or small.

Great.

Thanks for being on my show.

Thank you.