Interview: Lucasfilm Games-Legend David B. Fox

Folge 35 der wöchentlichen Nerd-Predigt am Mount Geek und... Tom ist krank! Ein perfekter Anlass, endlich das Interview von Dan mit David B. Fox, dem Gründungsvater der Lucasfilm Games Division, dem Designer von Meilensteinen der Computer-Spiele-Geschichte wie  "Zak McKracken",  "Rescue on Fractulous!" und Programmierer vom Kultspiel "Maniac Mansion" rauszuhauen.

Dan & David sprechen über die gute alte Adventure-Zeit, neue Trends und die Entwicklung von Social Media Plattformen wie X, Mastodon und Blue Sky.

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David B. Fox Biografie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Fox_(game_designer) 
https://www.mobygames.com/person/2220/david-b-fox/

Transcript

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Welcome to a special episode of Two Geeks, one featuring the man who has influenced so many childhoods back in the 80s. Founding member of the Lucasfilm Games division. The lead programmer and designer of epic milestones like Rescue of Fratellis, labyrinth, Zack McCracken, Indiana Jones, The Last Crusade, and and and... Ladies and geeks, it's David Bowie. Fox. I'm out of an intro. I tried to make this the most epic intro ever I hope, I hope, I hope it worked. Yeah. They succeeded. Such an honor to talk to you. Before we hit the record button on this podcast special episode. I told you I spent so many hours with your games, and I'm not lying. You probably, probably. Zach McCracken mentioned being the first at least adventure games I've ever played them back then on the C64 Commodore. So it's really an honor to have you on the on this special episode. Thank you. I guess I start feeling my age when I hear of like, you know, someone was five years old or something when they started. They learned English from my one of my games or something. Yeah, I was like, probably I'm born in 78, so I was most likely like six or 6 or 7 when I first played, Zack McCracken back then. Great. I think the Zach McCracken actually was the first one, and then, McMansion followed and then all the rest of Lucasfilm, of course. And you've been, involved in Tumbleweed Park lately. All right. And like, five years ago. So lately. Right. The most recent ones I worked on, I think Louis Park as a, as a scripter, kind of the equivalent of scam script, except we weren't using scum for those who know that. And also, most recently, I returned to Monkey Island. Oh, yeah. Right. That was last year, right? Yeah. I didn't even realize this was kind of the official, you know, sequel of Monkey Island because there has been like a fan version of fan sequel of the game, and I noticed the name. I think I saw it on steam or somewhere, but I didn't realize it's running. You being involved. Yeah. And Dave Grossman. Oh yeah. Right. Although the the old gang if you want. So. Right. Yeah. Who had the idea to continue the game I mean like how many years this Monkey Island has been like like 15 years maybe, or longer. Oh, like. I lost track. Since the last time. Well, the first one I think came out in 1990, maybe 91. I didn't actually work on that one. Or any of this is the first one I actually. Yeah. I was, I was at Lucasfilm Games at that time for the first one. And then by the time the second one was being worked on, I was still at Lucasfilm, but in a, more of a location based entertainment group, sites up doing games for home at that point. I see, and, I mean, who had the idea to to continue the game like so many years afterwards and was it was Ron Gilbert or. Yeah. Well, Ron was the was the lead. Okay. I you can you could check his, his, you know, his interviews and stuff. I know he was approached, by Devolver and they were able to work it out. Devolver is the publisher on this? Yeah, yeah, I was asking myself about the license. Right, because I thought Monkey Island would be a license of of Lucasfilm or Lucas Arts. No. It's true, whatever they call themselves. No. I recall them so well, you know, Disney actually. Oh a Disney. Yeah. So they worked out the license and where, where like purchased the rights to, to produce a sequel. Right. That's probably how it worked. Yeah. Let's go back in history like a couple of years. Okay. I promise to make this part the shortest of the interview, because I just realized you had so many interviews in the years. The most recent one I found was, like just a couple of months ago. And probably everybody keeps asking you about the your old games and your early days at the most epic company called Lucasfilm Games and stuff. I'm really sorry to be just another one asking you the same questions. Okay, but how did you end up and one of the most iconic gaming studios in the at the early days of of home computers? I think it was 80% serendipity and luck and, and being in the right place at the right time and 20% saying the right thing or just having done the right things to get there. I already lived in Marin County, which is where Lucasfilm is based, so that, you know, check that one off. And I was a huge fan of Star Wars and had. After I saw the first movie, I just said, I want to get into that universe somehow. And I realized it wasn't like that to actually get to fight a Tie fighter or X-Wing. So the next best thing was like figuring out figuring out a way to actually work at the company. And, you know, that kind of became a background hidden goal. In the meantime, the same year that the movie came out, my wife and I started a public access microcomputer center in Maryland called the Marine Computer Center. And, it was a nonprofit. We had started with ten computers and ended up with like 40 after a while. But they're the first microcomputers that came out. And, you know, kids would come in and we'd have members, we would, you know, start doing some of our own games, but also review a lot of games that existed to kind of, you understand the whole thing. I pretty much taught myself programing at that same time. And then we taught my wife and she taught most of the classes we were giving and programing in Basic, and then, wrote a couple of books. And when it was on computer animation for for beginners, focus on the Atari computer. And around the time I finished that, as part of the research for the book, I went to the to the Lucasfilm computer division and interviewed them and got some video clips. I was able to put in my book as a flipbook and stills and, got, you know, some people there. So that was nice. And then, after a year after that, when I finished, I had just finished the manuscript, one of our computer center members, guy named Gary Leo, who worked in Industrial Light and Magic, told me that they were starting a new games group. And I heard about that and I said no. So I contacted the head of the division, who I met at Catmull, and got an early interview with the person they just hired to be the manager of Peter Langston. And, you know, my manuscript, which focus on the Atari, the fact that Atari had given Lucasfilm like $1 million to start this group had first right of refusal for games that we would be doing on the Atari. It's like everything had just lined up perfectly. And, the other that one thing which could have been a deal killer was my level of experience in games. Peter was actually looking for people who had not worked in large game companies before because he wanted he didn't want people to have preset notions on how to do game development, game design. So check that one off also. So everything just worked. And I ended up being, I guess, employee number three. Wow. So really one of the founding members, right. Yeah. So I never I never consider myself founding member until people started saying that. I guess it meant I guess I was early. I mean, being among the first of three people. I'd say. I guess that counts. Yeah, right. I guess because it wasn't my idea. I didn't want to take credit for that. But I happened to be there, and I'm sure that I contributed a lot to the culture and how things ended up being afterwards, which was great. So, yeah. Did you did you ever bump into George Lucas? Although, yeah. But I didn't actually literally bump into him. But I did meet him. It would have been very embarrassing, you know. Oh, sorry. He followed each other in the hallway. I'm mostly on the first game that I worked on, which is rescue and fractals. And, since that was the first two that went in Ball Blazer were the first two games we did, you know, and George was interested in seeing what we were doing with this new group and came into my office for like a 20 minute demo, and he actually played the game and gave some really critical feedback that was that made a huge difference in how the game turned out. And, you know, the couple other times, you know, we passed each other someplace in kind of do a nod wave kind of thing. But the only other time was when we were in preparation to do Indiana Insurance on The Last Crusade, and we had a short meeting with him and Steven Spielberg. And it was me know, if was staying in Ron Gilbert and then George and Steve, to talk about what we could and could not do on that game in terms of, you know, matching the movie, going off, out of balance or killing off Indy during the game or whatever else. And pretty much anything we wanted to do was, was okay. I assume I think the unsaid thing was as long as, you know, it felt like Indy, which we we honored him, of course, but George wasn't especially I don't think he was a game a gamer. At least he wasn't to the point where he'd be hanging around and checking what we were doing. I think other. I think he was really interested in tech all the time. So he was pretty much a geek in some terms. Yeah, working at a company like Lucas Arts, Lucasfilm Games, they changed names later. People probably imagine that, like working at Apple, which is to Apple fanboys like the Big Dream. But actually working at Apple is probably a lot of stress because, you know, you're forced to to work a lot. I was working at Lucasfilm wasn't really that much fun. Like, it sounds to me like, you know, all the people in the room, everybody has a beard and geek glasses, toying around doing jokes and stuff. Or were you sometimes under pressure? Even. But both. It was fun, and I think we all wanted to make sure that happened. I mean, early on we had this large room in our first, the first building we were in where we had several arcade games, from Atari, because one of our functions in that group was to essentially approve any Star Wars licenses that, see, Atari had the Star Wars license for Arcade and Parker Brothers. Slash. Kenner had it for home home use so we would get games as they were being created. And we get to playtest them and actually just play them and, and and get feedback like, you know, hey, this doesn't quite feel Star Wars like and, I don't remember that ever happening with Atari. I think they must have had other people who were in the loop. So we just got the benefit of having those games, and then also a few others that we had nothing to do with that with us that we got. And I can't remember if it was they were, purchased or what, but I think Peter Langston made sure that there was a fun element to balance out the intensity. And then, of course, I think for the first couple of years, it felt more like a research group than a production game production company. And the first two games we did were were billed as kind of throw away games, experimenting, seeing what we could come up with. If they were good, we could go with them. If not, we would just chuck it up to experience. And turned out having that mindset helped a lot because I think we all, in the beginning were thinking, okay, we have to do something in the games industry comparable to what Star Wars was to the film industry in terms of, you know, making Mark and quality and, you know, billions of dollars or whatever that, and thinking them as throwaway games kind of took a lot of that pressure off. You know, let us go ahead and let them essentially bake, you know, work on them, polished them without a really hard production deadline. And then once we say, okay, these are going to be games, then, you know, things got more intense. So we didn't start having deadlines we had to deal with. So, you know, for other games, I think I remember, you know, pretty much all the games we did, quality was extremely important. And I think maybe because we were a part of a company that had this other income flow, we weren't we didn't have as much pressure initially to get things done on time, or under under whatever budget and that, you know, shifted as the years went on. And I think around the time I left was when it started getting much more intense in that area. I see, but how how does development of a game like Zach McCracken work? I mean, I once read an interview with Ron Gilbert who said pretty much, he usually develops the story of a game while it's being coded. Is it really like that? So everybody's sitting in the room and someone comes up with the joke and let's put this isn't, oh, how do I have to imagine you guys starting to code the game? Like, yeah, like Zach McCracken. Well, so in the case case of Zack, that was my idea. And probably of all the games I worked on there that were adventure games, that was probably the only one that was originally my idea, because either the the other ones were either something I worked on based on a movie like Labyrinth and Indiana Jones, or Ryan's Idea, which was Maniac Man Running, Gary Winnick, Maniac Mansion. And so you were the guy who came up with the idea to put an arc in the microwave to distract the stewardess. That was the idea, right? Like the puzzle of the game. Yeah. So. So I started off by, you know, I got to brainstorm with this guy named David Spangler, who who was a friend of our current general manager, Steve Arnold, about, who's essentially an author and a spiritualist and knew a lot about, you know, all the different ancient alien stuff and, and, yeah. How are. Bots on Earth. And you know, the Face on Mars was something he brought to it. So we brainstormed for a couple of days up at his home up near Seattle, which is how Mount Rainier came into it. And I then took all those extensive notes and kind of raw ideas and took a couple of months and tried to weave them into an overarching story. And then they then, you know, wrote some concept documents and then a more, more of a design doc that might have been like 10 or 20 pages, which I wish I had, but I can't find it. That should be framed on a wall. And it was somewhere. Somewhere. Yeah. And then with that, the pastor ran into our group. So all the other designers. Yeah. And the games group had a chance to review it and get feedback. And Ryan in particular felt that, I was missing the mark in terms of humor, that it wasn't wacky enough. And we ended up with a brainstorming session with the designers and Steve Arnold, and and he twisted it like 90 degrees. So the story didn't change, but the name of the character changed from Jason to to Zach McCracken, who is something we, you know, we picked up out of a phonebook from a local phonebook and the name of the game and, the I think the other key one was the idea that he worked at a tabloid instead of a mainstream newspaper, which meant that all of a sudden we could now, you know, you know, the he'd been making up stories all along, and now he could actually find a real story that he's in the middle of that was that could report on and that just that was the the glue that made everything kind of come alive. And gave us a much better framework to make it funny. Yeah. That's right. How many times have you played, Zach McCracken all the way to the end? Well, not for years. Oh, you haven't recently even. No, I mean, okay, after you probably. Think I would be in my mind would be painful, because I'd be. I'd be looking at all these things. I wish I could have changed. It aged pretty well. Well, thank you, I must I can say I can tell you I played these games, like, maybe once a year. Not. Not all the time to the end, actually. I managed to to lock myself out of the game and Zach McCracken, like a couple of months ago when I played it for the last time or the last time because I ran out of money and I, I've some I know maybe I, I missed something, but I, I sold the fork and I did all the tricks you can do, you know to to get some cash. But some of my characters got stuck someplace because they ran out of money, and then I would have had to travel to them to give them the money. I think that would have been possible. Yeah, you could have if you had the money. Yeah. But you if he back then. We were when we were trying to get this balance. I mean, we, we felt that our chief competitor was Sierra Online. Corsair, also doing graphic adventures. Yeah. But they were selling, like, you know, ten times more of them than we were, at least in the United States. And so we were. We were really proud that we didn't have these all these random deaths, but we hadn't yet started looking at how do you set up a game so that you can't hit a dead end or die or whatever? I mean, this is what Lucasfilm games are famous for, right? You can't die and you usually cannot get stuck at some place, right? Well, that's I. Mean, you could actually kill Guybrush underwater, but you really would have to mean it. Right? So back then, we didn't quite. We were partway there. You know, we didn't have random deaths where. Yeah. You know, like like you pick up a piece of glass and cut yourself and. You're dead safe early. Save often. Right? Yeah, yeah. But you, you know, if you jump out of an airplane without a parachute, then. Yeah, you probably die. And you better save the game before you do that, because, you know, it's there more, I think, announced that people would know that this is something that would be dangerous. Maniac mansion, don't push this button. And you push the button and. Oh yeah, that one with the sign on top. Right. Dumb person. Right. If you really want to, it's a meltdown. So if you save the game first. Yeah. So, back then you were trying to get roughly 30 hours of gameplay time. And the whole idea of of getting partway through a game, learning a bunch of stuff and realizing that you were stuck and you had to start over was not a bad thing because it just added to the gameplay, time that you had for the game. Now it now it would be much more frustrating. And other people now would not probably put up with that as much, at least with an adventure game. So yeah, there were a bunch of dead answers. Most of them I think I knew about, but there probably some of those people came up with that. We didn't. And obviously you had to kind of work out the order of countries you go to to make sure that the money you had would last until until you had these magic abilities to get endless funds, which opened up later in the game. I mean, it was it was forgiving to some degree if you travel back and forth and because you forgot something, then you travel again to, I don't know, Egypt or someplace, but at some point you really you really running out of money if you, if you had to and concentrated when traveling or to, you know, not caring much about the money. Yeah. That's right. So you kind of had it set up a, a map like, you know, I guess, I guess how Amazon drivers do it to make sure the most. Yeah. Right. To be the most effective. I like in tracking. I like how how the characters, you know, start to meet each other during the game development. You know, it's not like meeting mention where you have a bunch of friends trying to rescue Sandy. I think the name was Sandy, right. But it's like McCracken's like it's not physic. And and then you meet, I think then you some at some point meet the twins. Right. Because they have this TV spot about, searching for rare stones or something. Right. And then you introduce the the girls on the Mars, so you get to learn all the characters of work together over time. And this is what I really liked about the game. It's pretty unique too. Yeah. I liked the idea of switching characters that we became for Maniac Mansion, but I didn't like how complex it got because you could choose any two two extra characters from a from a list which just, geometrically made the game more complex and difficult to debug. And I did not want that headaches. I wanted the the characters to be set, but, give you time to get used to doing it on your own before you could switch. And that worked really well. I think that I'm happy with that mechanic. Would you be able to solve all the puzzles today, or do you think you might have forgotten them? I think I would have a hard time getting through the first time, because I probably don't remember. All would actually be a fun, fun video. You should record yourselves playing correctly after so many years and then you get stuck. I need to Google for like, you know, how do you get to how do you get the I don't know, I. Know I call up the designer for a hint. Yeah, well, the hotline. All right. I think the, the one thing that people mentioned that I probably besides the, the dead ends or unexpected dead ends would probably be the number of mazes. That's you know, some people love the mazes, and some people felt that their way, just way too many of them. And that was also, I think in retrospect, it was more than I would have done now for sure. But it was, one of the new technologies we added to that to upgrade the, the scam engine, script creation utility for Maniac Mansion is the the scripting engine that we used was to have what we called pseudo rooms, which acted like a real room, separate location, but reused art from the same set of art. And that gave us the ability to. With, you know, hundreds of rooms if we wanted to without, adding a huge amount of graphics overload because, you know, these two had a ship on a couple of floppy disks for company 64. Right. Yeah. So, things like the airports were all really one set of art, but different logical rooms, I guess. And we just would say when you enter this room, the Miami airport, then in the enter code, probably turn, turn on this side, turn on that side, turn on this background object. And, but, you know, the doors are always in the same place. I think one was closed for renovation, right? I never I never got why? But. Oh, yeah. I wonder why that was always closed. Yeah. You can go into Miami, the airport. Oh, yeah. Miami was under construction or something, right? Yeah. Miami itself. Right. Must have been a hurricane or something. Yeah, but you could go to you could go outside the airports and all the other places, but not that one in the same thing for mazes. Mazes where, you know, as each maze was set of unique art, but then you could make as many rooms as he wanted to that reused different elements and turn on and off objects and, and and so you can make it much bigger than it was and probably that definitely extended play time. And but I think there may be 1 or 2 more than we would have used nowadays. Maybe 1 or 2 would have been enough. So sorry for you people who hate mazes. That's breaking news. David B Fox, says sorry 25 years. Oh, no. Almost 40 years after he introduced the mazes to me. Correct. You mean you've been you've been part of the golden age of adventure games back then, 80s, 90s to date. The genre filled a little more like niche, you know what I mean? Like the classic adventure games are more, well, either small studios that do free games or retro y games that that, you know, reanimate the point and click genre is is sad to see adventure games not being the top game anymore nowadays. I mean, everybody plays shooters and, you know, indie games and RPGs and stuff, but the good old adventure games, I mean, I always play the adventure games. That's all I played. I sometimes even tried Sierra games. But anyways, I'm some sometimes said that the Golden Arrows and it's like years ago. I mean, I'm hoping that there is enough interest on going there, you know, with like the mines that we just worked on recently and other ones that are really good out there, that it just never dies. You know, it just may never be like a triple A level game in terms of funding. No, no, I don't think it needs to be. I don't I think it just that's where, you know, if that's where the money is that people are going to continue to do the big for the big hitters. I personally don't like them either, so I don't play those. And are you playing any, any games at all nowadays still? I probably if I do play games, it's going to be on, on the, in VR. And I'm not playing a whole bunch right now. Most often. I mean, was just talking about this line where, I guess, blue Sky, was the idea that, when you hear if you're a game designer, for me, at least it's harder for me to get into a game. I always have my designer hat on, and I'm always looking at how I would do it differently. The game has to be really good for me to jump in completely and forget that I'm playing game. I was speculating whether it would be the same case for, say, someone who does special effects like someone from ILM. Could they actually watch a special effects movie without being critical about, you know, how they do that effect? Or I would have done it this way or, you know, can you do that without being taken out of it? And I think it's I think it's possible, but I think the game has to be really good for that to happen. And because of that, that, that I always tend to have, I mean, it's not quite as fun to play games. I mean, the immersion is probably broken all the time, right? Because you can't really dive into the story because you're like, okay, that's another maze. All right. Okay. This room has been copied and pasted or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not it's not ruined. It just it's a different level of, playing it than I probably would otherwise. And other is time. It I just don't feel like. Well, that's not true. I, I, I probably choose to spend more time watching stuff on TV in the evenings than I would on games. So if I took all those the that time and put any games, I would have the time and just maybe not the the strong inclination. For me, working on a game is much more fun than playing it usually. And you're still coding you and your wife still have. The company, right? Yeah. Well. And doesn't my wife doesn't do anything much with games at this point. She's bored doing. She's a writer, and she's, she's been illustrating and writing children's books lately and mostly writing. The last thing we got to work on together was a location based entertainment project. It was a overlay game at one of the Disney parks. Okay. Which was like, already 12 or 15 years ago. What do you think about. I mean, talking about you play games with the VR headset sometimes. What would you think? I nowadays, I think a lot of programmers are kind of worried of losing jobs. As you know, I could create probably. I mean, it does create stunning images with just the prompt. Would wouldn't I be able to program a game, let's say, like Monkey Island? I mean, just put the story in and the AI comes up with all the images and the rooms and the mazes. Maybe someday. I mean, one of my inspirations was from Scott Olson. Scott cards, Ender's. Ender's game. Have you read that book? No, I haven't. No. Well, one of the there's a cool thing in there, which is a essentially an adventure game that the main character plays, and the whole thing is an AI, and it basically creates puzzles and things in the game on the fly in order to help the character grow as a person. It kind of it knows his blind spots and what he tends not to see. So it comes up with puzzles in the in this game that would force him to look at things in a different way. And I thought that was a brilliant concept and this is off in the future. So I mean, if you're saying is that possible? I don't think so in the near term, but, you know, maybe 300 years from now, who knows? Maybe, maybe much less than that, I don't know. But so I think it is possible. I'm not I'm not really worried about losing a job to that. I would be curious to see what what it feels like. I'm sure that they won't be very good initially and then probably rapidly get much better. And I'm sure same thing will happen with filming and books and stories and all that. And, yeah, maybe you need a, authentically written by a real person, kind of a stamp on it. So you can choose whether you want to participate in those or not. And do you want to create by people? So I think it's possible. I think it will happen. I don't think in the near term it will. Yeah, yeah. Amazing times. What's David Fox doing nowadays? I mean, if you're not watching TV or doing interviews or coding, you've been traveling. Anything else you're doing which you never thought you would be doing? Yeah. Like years ago. Yeah. So do you play golf? Yeah, I don't think so. Well, traveling was something we had really just started doing a few years before that pandemic, and you'll be glad to get back into that. I mean, I, I am now speaking at a few conferences. We're we just came back from a phone trip to Italy in Portugal. That was just my wife and I, and then visiting a bunch of fans, people that we've met who we know through the games, through social media. That was really fun. And our next trip, we're going to Germany. Probably going to Bavaria, I think is the current plan in Germany. Would be glad to to invite you to some vice versa and vice versa, because the cliche is all right, it's all we eat here. And sausages of beer. We were flying out of Munich, so I'm sure we'll be there for at least a few days. Yeah, just give me a heads up. Okay. Out by, saying social media. You recently joined blue Sky. Yeah, well, I, I was a pretty habitual Twitter user and just felt, you know, devastated by the turn that that site took after, you know, that it was taking even before my Elon Musk took over. But now I just, you know, it really on there just because it's so depressing for me to see what happened. I don't I don't see most of that stuff in my own feed. But I don't want to support it, so I'm. I'll check occasionally. I haven't closed my account, so I check, you know, maybe once every day or two just to make sure I didn't miss an important message from someone. But mostly I'm on Mastodon, you know, blue sky, and and I'm enjoying both of them a lot. Even though they're pretty different, right, I think. Yeah. Blue Sky feels like. I mean, I'm not prioritizing things, but when Twitter is more like right wing and and, against everything, basically, blue Sky feels more left wing is, in a way, while Mastodon doesn't feel political at all. I think Mastodon is more like to me, you know, old or older or elderly geeks and nerds, like like. The two of us. And she it's more like, you know, the talk at the at the local library. While blue Sky, in a way, is closer to Twitter than than to Mastodon. Right? At least in my observation. I think that might be true, but I think it's also a lot on who you're who you're following. That's right. And which, you know, which feeds you. You can have a special feeds on, blue sky actually custom. You can actually customize or, or subscribe to a custom feed. So, I am not seeing a lot of political, blue sky because I'm not following a whole lot of people that are political. I'm mostly doing following game dev people. I mean, you have. Your own micro world within the, within the social platforms. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And I'm, I'm Azzedine, it's a mix. I'm on a game dev server and so and that was. Intentional because he. Yeah. But but there are people that I'm following that are very political and or, or provide information. And these are some people I might have follow before on Twitter. So I get a lot of really good information on the political situation in the U.S. from that. So for not in blue Sky, but I'm sure a lot of those people are there. They just probably aren't that active. I'm getting a pretty good mix I like. I can set it up the way I want, so I get the kind of information I want in terms of like, here's sometimes I'll post the same thing on multiple servers to see which ones. Same. Yeah. Which is which is flying or which gets the most attention on, on the, on on the service. Right. Yeah, I'm doing the same. And Twitter, for some reason, a post I do on Mastodon gets a lot of attention and really good feedback. And the relation between followers and and and reactions to my posts is just okay on Twitter. On the other hand, I post something and I get like zero reaction, even though I have like I don't know, 12 or 15 k followers over the years. I manage on Twitter in 2007 and for some reason I really I don't trust the algorithm anymore. You know, it's like randomized for some reason, sometimes very old posts get some attention and then recent ones don't. And I must add on, I can rely if I post to your time for example us time. So not during the daytime here in Germany. I would get reactions from people living in the US because it just pops up on their feet if they're following me or following the hashtag. Right. There's no algorithm. Yeah, right. I'm also experimenting with post news and spasibo as to other service, services. And, I think one thing I'm noticing, too, is that there was a lot more interaction on those two at the beginning because everyone was like, yeah, new toy. Let's try it. Yeah. And then people just kind of lost interest or aren't on as much. So I'm on post news too. And like you said, I really lost interest. I mean, I like the design is so sleek and clean and not so overloaded. But for some reason, I mean, maybe it's too, too time consuming to, to monitor like four or 5 or 6 different platforms. Now, now we have Twitter, we have blue Sky, we have Mastodon. I'm still on Instagram for family and friends. So more like a closer, network. I still am on Facebook just for old school friends people. I went to school with them to not lose contact. I tried not to. Have you heard this? One of this. One? Yeah. It's, also Jack Dorsey. Who. Who founded blue Sky. He also funds a Nostra, which is basically just another microblogging platform. And sometimes, you know, you just you just drown in options. Your people are going to hang out in the wings where they get the most response. Yeah. And and so right now Mastodon has been great for, you know, if I have a question, a technical question or me, I asked a question about my wife wanted to start trying to do digital art because she was doing a lot of watercolor, and it's just asked the question of like, for someone who's not technical, what's the best way to do? And it got huge number of responses and strong consensus to go with an iPad Pro and Procreate and really great advice, because that's what she's been using since December and loving it. And she's not technical, but she's just, you know, loving the parallels between that and doing watercolor. And I think recently I was asking something, Sam, for help on suggestions on a talk talk. She's going to be giving a def con and, you know, you know, people are. If they know the answer, they're just super supportive and want to jump in and help, which is great. That's that's kind of how I remember Twitter being a long time ago. Yeah, right. A long time ago. That was way before Trump. Yeah. Right. I mean Twitter has become pretty hostile. I think on Twitter it's like if you if you join the public discussion, which I barely do anymore on Twitter unless I, you know, I feel like getting beaten. If you join a discussion, you get so many hate comments on, on Twitter, which I never received on Mastodon. I mean I this like way more friendly. Feels like like I said, the local library and you meet friends and more, you know relaxed people and on Twitter is more like everyone is only about, you know, recent memes which I'm probably too old for, but because I don't find any of these funny. And it's like a hostile environment and blue sky is like, blue sky. Feels like there's a couple of people and maybe I'm following the wrong people, like you said. But if you've watched the main, the main stream or the what's hot feed, it's like people are posting for the purpose of posting and getting liked, you know what I mean? Which is not a mastodon. The mastodon. I think people are posting because they want to share something, or want to provide an answer to a question like you just described while on Mastodon, a while on blue Sky, people are posting for the sake of becoming famous on blue Sky. Interesting. Yeah, this. Is at least my observation. There could. Be two. I mean, I think it's like if you're if you were prospecting for gold, you want to get in there early in and yeah, claim your spot and kind of create. A. Persona. Yeah. You can be the superstar of blue Sky if you join. Yeah, yeah. The other thing I want to say, changing the subject was in terms of what I'm doing now, I'm there's a scheme. I did code rubrics, almost ten years ago that was based on Rube Goldberg cartoons. And we had a license from from his family to do to, you know, take his cartoons. And for those who don't know, Rube Goldberg, he's, like, known for wacky chain reaction machines. Okay. He's a cartoonist, American cartoonist in the 1930s to 50s or 20s to 40s, I guess is when he was most popular. And the whole thing of a chain reaction machine, I typically one that had way more steps to do something which is much simpler. So the simple way to open a window and there'd be like 20 different things that happen, like usually 1 or 2 animals involved here that react to get that final result. And I loved his cartoons as a kid. When I was, I'd seen him in the Sunday papers and when I went to do a game ten years ago, I guess 11 years ago at the time, that was the idea. So I got the license, we did a game, came out. It's still out on desktop and also for for mobile. A few years ago, I thought, okay, I, I want to do my first VR game. Maybe I can take this and adapt it. And it's already written in unity. So we already had 3D models. And so I started that project and it's working with, with a programmer since I don't program in unity. And then it kind of got sidetracked when I was working on Return to Monkey Island for two years. So we kind of resurrected that or kind of at the at the level and hoping they can come out with something this year where you could actually play the game on quest than other VR devices. So that's that was the other thing I'm spending during the day time, you know, just managing Madden and trying to get that done. But make sure to at one time make sure to play Zach McCracken again because it's it's been to, you know, to find the closure for this great interview because we started with Dick McCracken. It's such a great game. It's so much fun playing it. I mean, the sound effects, the baker throwing the bread down the window, you know, cracks on the concrete and stuff like this. I probably because I spend too much time playing those. Well, are you playing? Are you playing the Commodore 64 version. Are you playing? I started on the Commodore and afterwards I played it on, I think, Amiga and later on the PC. Yeah, okay. And now I'm playing it on a macintosh using ScummVM. So it's probably the FM town's version that you're playing right here, which came out afterwards. That was something that was adapted. So it used Redbook audio on the CD, on the CD-Rom for, for most of the music tracks. And, on the Commodore. I played the this the disc version, the five one for the big ones. You know the remote, right. Yeah. The foldables that that was the. That was how it was. That was the original. Exactly. And later on, I tried to find the old game and only found a version with enhanced graphics where the back and is living room and everything looks slightly different. Not. Not as clunky as back then. That might be the, the PC version. Possibly there's an EGA version than there is the Commodore. So the the Amiga and the. The Amiga and the T versions, which I think use the same graphics, and then the FM town's version, which is fuller. I think, I think, I wasn't too involved in any of those. I feel like maybe the FM town's version, the artists with like, the first time they got to use 256 colors. And I think they wanted to make sure to use every, every single color in every single room. oh. Talking of colors, I have one question because this one, you know, I was dealing with this one for like 20 years. If you played the games like I think it's in, Manic Mansion, but maybe also on deck. McCracken. Why would a character wear a shirt in the same color? The the wall in the room was painted in many mansion. It's so many rooms where you just see the head of one of your characters, because it's like the same color of the shirt. And I was asked myself back then, why would they do this? Because we only had a few colors on it on the Commodore. What is it? What's the color space? A colors. Oh eight only. Oh, okay. Yeah, I thought it was like 16. Not sure. I think it was really limited. Okay. I think you could. I think for the sprite characters, he might have been able to use a different color, but it might have just been from a set number of colors so you didn't really have. You can change the colors to different colors. There weren't any RGB settings I see. So you pretty much. Here's your palette. Good luck. Okay. Good excuse. Yeah. All right. David, that was really a fun talk. I hope you had some fun, too. Even though you had to answer questions you already answered, like, probably 400 times. Now it's always. It's always new to me because I. I try to think of the answer fresh. So. Okay, so you always have a different perspective on the same topic. Yeah. Yeah. I hope to bump into you once you hit Munich. And, see you on blue Sky. See you on Twitter. See you on Mastodon and everything else. And thank you so much for your time. Thank you. And have a wonderful day. It's starting. What are we up to today? Any plans? Not too much. I'm going to buy a used monitor for my Mac. All right. Good luck with that. And talk to you soon. And have a wonderful day. Thank you again. All right. Bye bye. Bye bye. Are you still there?