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 (englischsprachige) 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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DAN Welcome to a special episode of TwoGeeksOneCup 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 Fractalus, Labyrinth, Zack McCracken, Indiana Jones, The Last Crusade and, and, AND... DAN Ladies and geeks, it's David B. Fox! I'm out of breath. What an intro! I tried to make this the most epic intro ever. I hope it worked. DAVID FOX That succeeded. DAN It's such an honor to talk to you. Before we hit the record button on this podcast special episode, I thought you spent so many hours with your games and I'm not lying, probably Zack McCracken mentioned being the first at least adventure games I've ever played back then on the C64 Commodore. So it's really an honor to have you on the special episode. DAVID FOX Thank you. I start feeling my age when I hear of someone was five years old or something when they learned English from one of my games or something. DAN Yeah, I was like probably - I'm born in 78, so I was most likely like six or seven when I first played Zak McKracken back then. I think Zak McKraken actually was the first one and then Manic Mansion followed and then all the rest of Lucasfilm, of course. And you've been involved in Thimbleweed Park lately, right, and like five years ago, so lately. DAVID FOX The most recent ones, I worked on Thimbleweed Park as a scripter, kind of the equivalent of scum scripters, except we weren't using scum for those who know that. And also, most recently, on Return to Monkey Island. DAN Oh yeah, right. That was last year, right? 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 Ron and you being involved. DAVID FOX Yeah, and Dave Grossman. DAN Oh, yeah, right. All the old gang, if you want so, right? Yeah. Who had the idea to continue the game? I mean, like, how many years is Monkey Island has been like, like 15 years, maybe, or longer? I lost track. DAVID FOX Well, the first one, I think, came out in 1990, maybe, 91. I didn't actually work on that one, or any of this. This is the first I actually worked on. I was at LucasArts at that time for the first and then by the time the second one was being worked on, I was still at Lucas, but in a more of a location-based entertainment group. So I'd stop doing games for... home at that point. DAN I see. And I mean, who had the idea to continue the game like so many years afterwards? Was it Ron Gilbert or? DAVID FOX Yeah. Well, Ron was the lead. You could check his interviews and stuff. I know he was approached by Devolver and they were able to work it out. Devolvers is the publisher on this. DAN I was asking myself about the license, right? Because I thought Monkey Island would be a license of Lucasfilm or LucasArts now, or whatever they call themselves now. DAVID FOX where he called himself Disney, actually. DAN Oh, Disney. Yeah. So they worked out the license and were like, purchased the rights 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 promised 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 months ago. And probably everybody keeps asking you about the 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, but how did you end up at one of the most iconic gaming studios in the early days of home computers? DAVID FOX I think it was 80% serendipity and luck 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 was based, so check that one off. Um, 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 likely I'd actually get to fly a TIE fighter or X-wing. So the next best thing was figuring out a way to actually work at the company. And 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 Marin, called the Marin Computer Center. And it was a nonprofit. We started with 10 computers and ended up with like 40 after a while. But they're all the first microcomputers that came out. And kids would come in, we'd have members. doing some of our own games, but also review a lot of games that existed to kind of understand the whole thing. I pretty much taught myself programming at that same time. And then we taught my wife, and she taught most of the classes we were giving in programming in BASIC. And then wrote a couple of books, and one was on computer animation for beginners. Focus on the Atari computer. And around the time I finished that, Oh, it's part of the. research for the book, I went to the Lucasfilm computer division and interviewed them and got some video clips. I was able to put in my book as a flip book and stills and got to know some people there. So that was nice. And then a year after that, when I had just finished the manuscript, one of our computer center members, a guy named Gary Leo, who worked at Industrial Light and Magic, told me that they were starting a new games Screw. And had I heard about that? And I said, no. So I contacted the head of the division, who I'd already met, Ed Catmull, and got an early interview with the person they'd just hired to be the manager, Peter Langston. And my manuscript, which focused on the Atari, the fact that Atari had given Lucasfilm like a million dollars to start this group and have first right of refusal for games that we would be doing on the Atari. everything had just lined up perfectly. And the 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 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. DAN Wow, so really one of the founding members, right? DAVID FOX Yeah, so I never consider myself founding member until people start saying that, and I guess, well, I guess. DAN I mean, being among the first of three people, I'd say. DAVID FOX that counts. DAN Yeah, right, I guess. DAVID FOX 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, that was it. DAN Did you ever bump into George Lucas over there? DAVID FOX Well, I didn't actually literally bump into him, but I did meet him. That would have been very embarrassing. You know, I was like, oh, sorry. He'd fall over each other in the hallway. Mostly on the first game that I worked on, which is Rescue on Fractalus. And since that was the first two, that one and 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 a couple other times we passed each other someplace and kind of do a nod wave kind of a thing. But the only other time was when we were in preparation to do Indiana Jones The Last Crusade and we had a short meeting with him and Steven Spohberg. It was me, Noah Falstein, and Ron Gilbert. George and Steve to talk about what we could and could not do on that game in terms of matching the movie or going off out of bounds or killing off Indy during the game or whatever else. And pretty much anything we wanted to do was okay. I assume is I think the unsaid thing was as long as it felt like Indy, which we honored, of course, but that's pretty much it. church wasn't especially. I don't think he was a gamer, at least he wasn't to the point where he'd be hanging around and checking what we were doing. DAN I think he was really interested in tech all the time, right? So he was pretty much a geek in some terms. Working at a company like LucasArts, Lucasfilm Games, they changed names later, people probably imagine it 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 are forced to work a lot. How was working at Lucasfilm? Was it 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 and they're all toying around doing jokes and stuff. Or were you sometimes under pressure even? DAVID FOX Well, 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 Atari had the Star Wars license for arcade, and Parker Brothers slash Kenner had it for home use. So we would get games as they were being created, and we'd get to, quote, play test them, unquote, actually just play them, and then 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 had nothing to do with us that we got in. I can't remember if it was if 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. And the first two games we did were billed as kind of throwaway games, experimenting, seeing what we could come up with. And if they were good, we could go with them. If not, we would just chalk it up to experience. And it turned out having that mindset helped a lot because I think we all, in the beginning, were thinking, OK, we have to do something in the games industry comparable to what Star Wars was to the film industry. in terms of making a mark and quality and billions of dollars or whatever. thinking of them as throwaway games took a lot of that pressure off. Let us go ahead and let them essentially bake, work on them, polish them without a really hard production deadline. Then once we said, okay, these are going to be games, then things got more intense. We then started having deadlines we had to deal with. So, for other games, I think I remember 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 didn't have as much pressure initially to get things done on time or under whatever budget and that 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. DAN 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, uh, 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 they're, ah, let's put this in. How do I have to imagine, you know, you guys starting to code the game like, yeah, like Zach, McCracking. DAVID FOX Well, so in the case of Zach, that was my idea and probably of all the games I worked on there that were adventure games, it was probably the only one that was originally my idea because either the other ones were either something I worked on based on a movie like Labyrinth and Indiana Jones or Ron's idea which was Maniac Mansion, Ron and Gary Winnick, Maniac Mansion. DAN So you were the guy who came up with the idea to put a knack in the microwave to distract the stewardess? Yeah. That was your idea? Right. My favorite puzzle of the game. DAVID FOX Yeah. So, so I started off by, you know, got to brainstorm with this guy named David Spangler, who, who was a friend of our current general manager, Steve Arnold, about, um, who's essentially an author and a spiritualist and knew a lot about, you, know, all the different ancient alien stuff and, and, um power spots on earth and, you now, 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 raw ideas and took a couple months and to weave them into an overarching story. Then wrote up some concept documents, and then 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. DAN That should be framed on a wall in a museum, somewhere, somewhere. It was you somewhere, somewhere. DAVID FOX Yeah. And then with that, they passed it around to our group. So all the other designers in the games group had a chance to review it and give feedback. And Ron, 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 twisted it like 90 degrees. The story didn't change, but the name of the character changed from Jason to Zach McCracken, who is something we picked up out of a local phone book and the name the game. 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 that 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 could report on. And that was the glue that made everything kind of come alive and gave us a much better framework to make it funny. DAN That's right. How many times have you played Zak McKracken all the way to the end? DAVID FOX Oh, well, not for years. DAN Oh, you haven't recently even? DAVID FOX No. DAN I mean, okay, he probably... DAVID FOX I think it would be, in my mind, it'd be painful because I'd be looking at all these things I wish I could have changed. DAN It aged pretty well, I can tell you. I played these games like maybe once a year, not all the time to the end. Actually, I managed to lock myself out of the game, like a couple of months ago when I played it for the last time, or the last one, because I ran out of money. Maybe I missed something, but I sold the fork and I did all the tricks you can do 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. DAVID FOX Yeah, you could have if you had the money. But back then, when we were trying to hit this balance, we felt that our chief competitor was Sierra Online, because they were also doing graphic adventures. But they were selling 10 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 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 what. DAN I mean, this is what Lucasfilm games are famous for, right? You can't die and you usually cannot get stuck someplace. DAVID FOX Right. Well, that's. I mean, you can. DAN I mean, you could actually kill Guybrush underwater, but you really would have to mean it. DAVID FOX So back then, we didn't quite, we were partly there. We didn't have random deaths where, you know, like you'd pick up a piece of glass and cut yourself in dollars. DAN Yeah, you're dead safe early safe often, right? Yeah. DAVID FOX Yeah. But if you jump out of an airplane without a parachute, then you'd probably die, and you better save the game before you do that. But they're more, I think, announced that people would know that this is something that would be dangerous. Minyak Mansion, don't push this button and you push the button and. DAN Oh yeah, that one with the sign on top, right? Don't push it back. DAVID FOX Yeah, of course, of it. DAN If you really want to, it's a meltdown afterwards. Sorry for the spoiler. To save the game first. DAVID FOX So, back then, you were trying to get roughly 30 hours of gameplay time, and the whole idea of getting partway through a game, learning a bunch of stuff, and then 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 would be much more frustrating, and people now would not probably put up that as much, at least with an adventure game. Yeah, there were a bunch of dead ends. Most of them I think we knew about, but there were probably some others people came up with that we didn't. And obviously you had to kind of work out the order of countries you would go to to make sure that the money you had would last until you had these magic abilities to get endless funds, which opened up later in the game. DAN I mean, 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're really running out of money if you're too unconcentrated when traveling or too, you know, not caring much about the money. Yeah, that's right. DAVID FOX So you kind of had it set up a map, like, you know, I guess, I guess how Amazon drivers do it to make sure they're the most DAN Yeah, right. To be the most effective, but I like, in Zak McKracken, I like how the characters, you know, start to meet each other during the game development, you know, it's not like Manic Mansion where you have a bunch of friends trying to rescue Sandy, I think the name was Sandy, right? But in Zak My crackness like, it starts with a Z. And then you meet, I think, then you 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 girls on the Mars. So you get to learn all the characters that work together over time. And this is what I really liked about the game. It's pretty unique too. DAVID FOX Yeah, I liked the idea of switching characters that came from Maniac Mansion. But I didn't like how complex it got, because you could choose any two extra characters from a list, which just geometrically made the game more complex and difficult to debug. And I did not want that headache. So I wanted the characters to be set, but give you time to get used to doing it on your own before you can switch. and that worked really well. I think that I'm happy with that mechanic. DAN Would you be able to solve all the puzzles today or do you think you might have forgotten? DAVID FOX would have a hard time getting through the first time because I probably don't remember all of it. DAN fun video. You should record yourself playing Zak McKracken after so many years and then you get stuck and need to Google for like, you know, how do you get the, I don't know. DAVID FOX I know. I'll call up the designer for a hint. DAN Or the hotline. DAVID FOX I think the one thing that people mentioned that I probably, besides the dead ends or unexpected dead ends, would probably be the number of mazes. Some people love the mazes and some people felt that there were 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 SCUMM engine, the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion is 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 come up with hundreds of rooms if we wanted to without adding a huge amount of graphics overload because these still had a ship on a couple of floppy disks for Commodore 64. Things like the airports were all really one set of art by different logical rooms, I guess. We just would say when you enter this room, the Miami airport, then in the enter code probably turn on this sign, turn on that sign, turn on the background object. but the doors are always in the same place. DAN I think one was closed for the renovation, right? I never got why, but one airport was always closed. DAVID FOX Yeah, you couldn't go into Miami with the airport. DAN Oh yeah, Miami was under construction or something, Miami itself. DAVID FOX Right, must have been a hurricane or something. But you could go outside the airports and all the other places, but not that one. And the same thing for the mazes. Each maze was a set of unique art. But then you could make as many rooms as you wanted to that reused different elements and turned on and off objects. And so it could make it much bigger than it was. And probably that definitely extended play time. and But I think there may be one or two more than we would have used nowadays. Maybe one or too would have been enough. So sorry for all you people who ate mazes. Ha ha ha ha. DAN That's breaking news. David B. Fox says, sorry, 25 years, almost 40 years after he introduced the Maces to Zek McRex. You've been part of the golden age of adventure games back then, 80s, 90s. Today, the genre feels a little more niche. You know what I mean? The classic adventure games are more, well, either small studios that do free games or retro vibe. games that, you know, reanimate the point and click genre. Is it 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 played adventure games. That's all I played. I sometimes even tried Sierra games. But anyways, I'm sometimes sad that the golden era has ended like years ago. DAVID FOX I mean, I'm hoping that there's enough interest ongoing with the ones 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 AAA level game in terms of funding. No, I don't think it needs to be. I think it just, that's where, you know, if that's really the money is that's where people are gonna continue to do the big ones, the big shooters. I personally don't like them either. So I don' play those. DAN Are you playing any games at all nowadays still? DAVID FOX Um, I probably, if I do play games, it's going to be on, on the, in VR, um, and I'm not playing a whole bunch right now. Most often, I mean, I was just talking about this on where it was on, I guess on blue sky, um was the idea that, um once you're, if you're a game designer, for me, at least it's harder for me to get into a game. I'm always have my designer hat on and I've 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 a game. I was speculating whether that 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 how they do that effect, or I would have done it this way, or can you do that without being taken out of it? I think it's possible, but I think the good. for that to happen, and because of that hat that I always tend to have on, it's not quite as fun to play games. DAN I mean, the immersion is probably broken all the time, right? Because you can't really dive into the story because you're like, ah, okay, there's another maze. Okay, this room has been copied and it or something. DAVID FOX Yeah, it's not it's not ruined, it just it's a different level of playing it than I probably would otherwise. And the other is time. I just don't feel like I have. Well, I don't know if 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. Like if I took all those that time and put in the games, I would have the time. It just may be not the the strong inclination for me. Working on a game is much more fun than playing it, usually. DAN And you're still coding, you and your wife still have the company, right? DAVID FOX Yeah, well, Annie doesn't, my wife doesn't do anything much with games at this point. She's more doing, she's a writer and 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 an overlay game at one of the Disney parks, which was like already 15 years ago. DAN What do you think about AI? I mean, talking about you play games with the VR headset sometimes, what would you think? AI nowadays, I think a lot of programmers are kind of worried of losing jobs, as you know, AI could create probably, I mean it does create stunning images with just a prompt. Would an AI 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. DAVID FOX Maybe someday. One of my inspirations was from Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. Have you read that book? DAN No, haven't, no. DAVID FOX Well, there's a cool thing in there which is 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 knows his blind spots and what he tends not to see, so it comes up with 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 100 years from now, who knows? Maybe much less than that, I don' know. But so I think it is possible. I'm not really worried about losing a job to that. I'd be curious to see 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 the same thing will happen with film and books and stories and all that. Maybe you need a authentically written by a real person kind of a stamp on it. So you can choose whether you wanna participate in those or not and do once they're created by people. So I think it's possible. I think will happen. I don't think in the near term it will. DAN 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 years ago? Do you play golf? DAVID FOX No, I don't think so. Well, traveling was something we had really just started doing a few years before that pandemic and really glad to get back into that. I mean, I am now speaking at a few conferences where we just came back from a fun trip to Italy and 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. DAN We'll be glad to invite you to some Weisswurste and Weissbier, because the cliché is all right. It's all we eat here. DAVID FOX Yeah DAN Sausages and beer. DAVID FOX We're flying out of Munich, so I'm sure we'll be there for at least a few days. DAN Yeah, just give me a heads up. Okay. By saying social media, you recently joined Blue Sky. DAVID FOX Yeah, well, I was a pretty habitual Twitter user and just felt devastated by the turn that that site took after, that it was taking even before Elon Musk took over. But now I'm just rarely on there just because it's so depressing for me to see what happened. I don't see most of that stuff in my own feed, but I don' t want to support it. So. I'll check occasionally. I haven't closed my account, so I'll check 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 and Blue Sky. And I'm enjoying both of them a lot. DAN Even though they're pretty different, right? I think Blue Sky feels like, I mean, I'm not politicizing things, but when Twitter is more like right-wing and against everything, basically, Blue Sky feels more left-wingish in a way, while Macedon doesn't feel political at all. I think Macedon is more to meet older or elderly geeks and nerds like the two us and it feels more like the talk. at the local library, while Blue Sky in a way is closer to Twitter than to Macedon, right? At least in my observation. DAVID FOX I think that might be true. But I think it's also a lot of on who you're following. That's right. Now which feeds you can have special feeds on Blue Sky to actually custom, you can actually customize or subscribe to a custom feed. So I am not seeing a lot of political on BlueSky because I'm not following a whole lot of people that are political. I'm mostly doing following game dev people. DAN So you have your own micro world within the social platform. DAVID FOX And on Macedon, it's a mix. I'm on a game dev server. And so DAN you have the locals feed. DAVID FOX But there are people that I'm following that are very political, or provide information. And these are some same people I might have followed before on Twitter. So I get a lot of really good information on the political situation in the US from that. So far, not on Blue Sky. But I'm sure a lot those people were there. They just probably aren't that active. I'm getting a pretty good mix. I like that I can set it up the way I want, so I get the kind of information I want. In terms of like. Sometimes I'll post the same thing on multiple servers is to see which ones. Same. DAN Which is flying or which gets the most attention 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 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 15k followers over the years. I mean, I joined Twitter in 2007. For some reason, 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 on Macedon, I can rely if I post during 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. DAVID FOX Right, there is no algorithm. DAN Yeah, right. DAVID FOX I'm also experimenting with post.news and spoutable as two other 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, new toy, let's try it. And then people just kind of lost interest or aren't on as much. DAN I'm on poster news too, and like you said, I really lost interest. I mean, I like the design, it's all slick and clean and not so overloaded. Um, but for some reason, I mean maybe it's too, too time consuming to, to monitor like four or five, six different platforms. You know, now we have Twitter, we have Blue Sky, we have Macedon, I'm still on Instagram for family and friends. So more like a closer, um, network. I still am on Facebook, just for all school friends, people I went to school with to not lose contact. I tried Nostar. Have you heard this one? No. It's also Jack Dorsey who funded Bluesky. He also funds Nostr, which is basically just another microblogging platform. And sometimes, you know, you just drown in options. DAVID FOX Well, people are going to hang out on the ones where they get the most response. And so right now, Macedon's been great for, if I have a question, a technical question, or 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 to ask the question, for someone who's not technical, what's the best way to do it? 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 who 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 for help on suggestions on a talk that she's she's going to be giving. at Devcom and people are, if they know the answer, they're just super supportive and want to jump in and help, which is great. That's kind of how I remember Twitter being a long time ago. DAN Yeah, right. A long time ago. That was way before Trump. I mean, Twitter has become pretty hostile. I think on Twitter, it's like if you join a public discussion, which I barely do anymore on Twitter unless I feel like getting beaten. If you join the discussion, you get so many hate comments on Twitter which I never received on Macedon. There's like way more friendly feels like, like I said, the local library and you meet friends and more, you know, relaxed people 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, and it's like a hostile environment. And Blue Sky is like, Blue Sky feels like there's a couple of people. Maybe I'm following the wrong people, like you said, but if you've watched the main, the mainstream on 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 mustard on a mustard. And I think people are hosting because they want to share something or want to provide an answer to a question. Like you just described while on mustard on, while on, on blue sky, people are posting, for the sake of becoming famous on blue Sky. DAVID FOX Interesting, yeah. DAN This is at least my observation. DAVID FOX That could be too. I think it's like if you're prospecting for gold, you want to get in there early and claim your spot and create your persona. DAN You can be the superstar of blue sky if you join early. DAVID FOX Yeah. The other thing I wanted to say, changing the subject was in terms of what I'm doing now. There's this game I did called RubeWorks almost 10 years ago that was based on Rube Goldberg's cartoons. And we had a license from his family to take his cartoons. I mean, For those who don't know, Rube Goldberg, he's like known for... wacky chain reaction machines. He was an 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. Thanks for watching! 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 one or two animals involved that react to get the final result. And I loved his cartoons as a kid. I'd seen them in the Sunday papers. And when I wanted to do a game 10 years ago, well, I guess it was- Thanks for watching! 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 mobile. A few years ago, I thought, okay, 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 a programmer since I don't program in Unity And then it got sidetracked when I was working on Return of Monkey Island for two years. So we kind of resurrected that or kind of upped the level and hoping to come out with something this year where you could actually play the game on Quest and other VR devices. So that was the other thing I'm spending during the daytime, just managing that and trying to get that done. DAN But make sure to, at one time, make sure to play Zak McKracken again, because it's been to, you know, to find the closure for this great interview, because we started with Zak McKraken. 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. Probably because I spent too much time playing those. DAVID FOX Well, are you playing the Commodore 64 version or are you playing? DAN I started on the Commodore and afterwards I played it on, I think, Amiga and later on the PC. And now I'm playing it on a Macintosh using ScumVM. DAVID FOX So it's probably the FM towns version that you're playing. DAN Yeah, right, yeah. DAVID FOX which came out afterwards. Something was adapted. So it used Redbook audio on the CD, the CD-ROM for most of the music tracks. DAN On the Commodore I played the disk version, the big ones, the foldables. DAVID FOX That was the first, that was how it was, that was the original. DAN Exactly. And later on, I tried to find the old game and only found a version with enhanced graphics where Dak and his living room and everything looks slightly different, not as clunky as back then. DAVID FOX that might be the PC version, there was an EGA version, then there was the Amiga and the ST versions, which I think use the same graphics, and then the FM Towns version, which use a fuller. I wasn't too involved in any of those. I feel like maybe the FM Towns version of the artist's It's like the first time they got to use 256 colors and I think they wanted to make sure to use every single color in every single room. DAN 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 play the games, like I think it's in Manic Mansion, but maybe also on Dack McCracken, why would a character wear a shirt in the same color the wall in the room is painted? In Manic Mania, there'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 always ask myself back then, Why would they do this? DAVID FOX because we only had a few colors. On the commentary, what's the color space? Eight colors? DAN Oh, eight only? Oh, okay. I thought it was like 16. I'm not sure. DAVID FOX I think it was really limited. I think you could, I think for the sprite characters, you 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 couldn't change the colors to different colors. There weren't any RGB settings. I see. So you pretty much got, here's your palette. Good luck. DAN 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. DAVID FOX No, it's always new to me, because I try to think of the answer fresh, so. Ah, okay. DAN Ah, 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 on Macedon 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? DAVID FOX Not too much. I'm going to buy a used monitor for my Mac. DAN Alright, good luck with that and talk to you soon. Have a wonderful day. Thank you again DAVID FOX All right. Bye bye. Bye. Bye Are you still there?