One Million Downloads in One Week: The Power of Rapid Prototyping, with Mike Mika

Jordan: 00:00

You are listening to Playmakers episode two. This is the podcast where I interview game industry, superstars, rockstars, luminary, star ish things, people who just know a lot of stuff, have done a lot of stuff, really kick some tuchus and we talk about how you can get better at what you do to succeed both in the business and creative sides of the game industry.

This week, Mike Mika, he's developed over 190 games. You've heard of plenty of them. That's coming up on Playmakers. You know Mike Mika? Or maybe you don't, but you should. He's developed a bajillion games. It's more like 196. Okay, I don't know the exact number, but it's a lot. Brands include, Street Fighter, Puzzle Fighter, Mega Man, Dark Void. Tiger Woods Golf, Mortal Combat, C-S-I-U-G-O, Death Jr., Rayman, GTA, Dr. Seuss, Spyro, Kim Possible, Spider Man, X Man, I could go on, but you get the idea. He also did #IDARB, which was downloaded over a million times in its first week. Why? Well, for one thing, it's amazing, but also, he basically developed it over Twitter in real time as a collaboration with the community, which is amazing.

In this interview, we talk about how Mike approaches game development after having done it so darn much. What has he learned? How does he do it now? Keep your ear out for how he does it. Addresses prototyping, I thought that was incredibly useful stuff. And this is episode two of the launch of this show.

If you like what we're doing, if you like learning about the creative and business aspects of game development with a focus towards working pros and what we can do to get better at what we do in our business, in our career, and in our games, please support us. You can do that by subscribing, liking, rating, reviewing, all that stuff.

And we have some links to help you do that, which you can find at Brightblack.co/playmakers. I know it's a mouthful, but that's where it is. And now it's my great pleasure to give you Mike Micah.

What's up Mike?

Mike: 02:31

How you doing?

Jordan: 02:32

I'm doing good. I'm in Phoenix doing some client work. How are you?

Mike: 02:35

Doing good. We got a lot of stuff going on. Of course, still here in the Bay Area. It's been kind of nuts. We've got a new company we're getting ready to launch as well as our other stuff going full bore. And we recently resurrected Digital Eclipse. So that's all been heating up as well.

Jordan: 02:48

Interesting. Is the Digital Eclipse stuff emulation stuff? What kind of work are you doing?

Mike: 02:52

Yeah, it's a bit of emulation. It's a bit of remastering and that kind of stuff. It's basically, like the Shout Factory / Criterion of Games kind of model. We try to find all the historical documents, concept docs, and any sort of like videos or anything that's significant in era and put historical context around the game and then try to talk about the impact of the game as well as like you play the game as it was intended and that sort of thing.

Jordan: 03:17

That's really cool. And that also kind of is an amazing integration of what you do, right? Because I know you've been doing like the game conservation stuff. That must be really satisfying. Well, I wanted to start off getting a sense of your journey sort of into games. I mean, you've been in the industry so long. You must have started really young.

Mike: 03:35

I did. I actually started writing software and selling it when I was, I think I was 13 or 14 years old when I started doing that. And I started on the Commodore 64. Which was the first computer my family and I had ever had, so it followed my first experience with an Apple II in school. And I was just blown away by it and I had to have a computer. So I remember we were at a Kmart department store and they had a computer section. I would go over there while my parents shopped and they would take forever shopping. And one time my dad was coming back, I'm like, if I could just show him that I can do something with this computer, then maybe it'll get him to get one.

So I worked really hard. They had books there and stuff on programming. So after about three or four trips to Kmart in the computer section, I got used to how you program a Commodore 64, at least in a very rudimentary way. And so I made one of my favorite games, Moon Patrol, like a really crude version. And I had it kind of running. You could play it and everything like that. And so my dad came by to grab me to leave the store. He's like, "what's going on here?" And I'm like, "well, there's a game I made." And he's like looking at it and he was all amazed. So I think it was two weeks later, we had the Commodore 64 at home and that was like heaven for me.

Jordan: 04:38

All I did was I would just go spend money playing Street Fighter.

Mike: 04:42

Well, I think that was probably my dad's motivation as well. It's like, if I can get him a computer, then he can just make those games and not have to spend so much on them.

Jordan: 04:48

And so you started making games at a really, really young age. What about professionally? When did you kind of move into it as a profession?

Mike: 04:56

Well, it's one of these things when I was growing up, it was more of a hobby for me. So when I got into college, there were two things competing for what I want to do when I grew up sort of scenario. And, the first love I had was film. I always wanted to make movies because I grew up as part of the Star Wars generation and wanting to do that sort of thing. I always thought special effects would be my forte, but computers were a lot more accessible for me. Because one, I can actually have one, I can make things on it and I couldn't go to just Hollywood because I was living in Detroit, Michigan at the time. For a long journey to get over there and it just seemed unrealistic.

lly, when I graduated, it was: 1996

ey're really expensive, like $: 4000

And so it was easy money. I'm sitting there doing these sales, I'm getting commissioned. So I would just sit there all day and just program games. And I started building a game based off one of my favorite childhood games called Yars Revenge. And so I started making that version for GameBoy Color or GameBoy at the time, then eventually GameBoy Color.

I was reading online about how you use Game Boy. Nobody had really created a homebrew game for it before. So I tried to get used to what the hardware did and how to make a game run on the actual hardware and all that stuff. So I built all this up while I was doing this job over summer. And I created Yars Revenge, and that was kind of the catapult to get me to do things more professionally.

Up to that point, I had just been selling software out of brown bags, basically, in a computer store or whatever. And now I had this game that was running on GameBoy that was a popular system at the time, and I could shop it around. So, as I was building this, someone online, in the early days of the internet here, had seen what I was doing, thought it was really cool and they gave me Howard Scott Warshaw's email address. He's the guy who created the original Yars' of Revenge for Atari. And I was really nervous. And I sent him an email going like, "sorry, I'm making your game. I hope you don't mind or whatever. I just do it for fun." And he was the warmest guy. He responded back going like, "Oh, that looks great. It looks like it's a lot of fun." He's like, where are you? And I'm like, "well, I'm over here near Detroit and everything." And he's like, "I'm going to be there next week for some convention. Let's meet up."

So he was the first game industry guy I had ever met. And he's one of the nicest guys in the world. And he looked at my game. And made all these suggestions, gave me great critiques, and he told me what he always wanted to do with the game, he suggested I try to do that, and because of that, it just kind of led to getting that game published through Telegames, originally on the Game Boy Color, and also my job at Next Generation Game Magazine, which got me over to the West Coast, finally.

Jordan: 07:55

So, was this thing, ended up not being Yars Revenge, it ended up being your own kind of product?

Mike: 08:02

Well, it actually did end up being Yars Revenge, because the company that picked it up went and got, they secured the rights. They didn't want to try to make it something different. So it was great, for me, it was like the perfect thing, because I grew up with Atari.

I couldn't imagine ever making an Atari game. I was able to actually continue doing that, and put the Atari logo in it, and all this sort of thing. So, you rarely see that happen, but in this case it worked out.

Jordan: 08:21

Right, I mean, it's hard to imagine that happening today, that's for sure.

Mike: 08:25

Yeah, you just get a cease and desist.

Jordan: 08:27

So, all right. So was that game number two, or were there a bunch of games kind of in between those two? That kind of first one on Commodore 64 and this Yars game.

Mike: 08:36

A lot. In fact, I've been going back through old floppy disks and finding tons of games. Some were, that was probably, I'd say Yars Revenge was the first published commercial game that wasn't something that was very, show up at a computer show and try to sell it sort of thing.

And so my career basically started, late 96, early 97. And I was doing that while I was working at next generation game magazine, which at the time was a very prominent video game magazine. So that was a way for me to show I had made a game for the Game Boy and I was meeting every name in the game industry, pretty much through the magazine. I was able to kind of parlay that into more additional work. And one of the guys I had met this guy, Andrew Air, who owned a company called Digital Clips, and he'd seen that I'd done some GameBoy work. And he's like, "Hey, do you think you can do more GameBoy games for me?" And he was over here in the East Bay, right across from San Francisco.

I remember we met at a double decker McDonald's and he's explaining the project, which is going to be NFL Blitz for Game Boy and I'm like, "yeah, this sounds great." And he's like, "well, how long would it take?" And I'm like three months. And he's like, "well, are you going to be able to do this while you're doing your job at the magazine?" I'm like, sure. Cause I was so naive. I'm like, "yeah, why not?" I had a friend in Michigan who would help me out. So I'm like, let's go ahead and do this. We just met, and he explained the project. We just signed that day at the double decker McDonald's for this project. And I didn't realize how much work that was going to be.

So for like the next three months, the most grueling project, probably my career occurred because I still had this day job. Then I would go home and my girlfriend at the time who lived with me, we had a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco and I would just code all night, then go to the magazine in the morning and then come back and do that over and over. And about halfway through, called up and said, "we're going to send some testers up because now it's time to start getting this test and stuff." And I'm thinking like, well, where are they going to sit? Where are they going to go? And like, we had this office in the East Bay. It was really small as well. So I didn't really know what to do. I panicked and I went to the airport to pick them up. I'm like, well, here's the thing. And so I explained it to him. I was hoping they would be cool. They're like young guys and test, like your secret safe with us. So he would just basically hang out at my apartment and coffee shops while I was working during the day. And they would test the build and then we'd get together and we'd go through stuff and all this stuff. And the other thing that made it really tough too, is I'm not a big sports guy. I watch basketball and I used to watch hockey. But I knew nothing about football. So I don't even know why I signed up a football game.

So during this whole production, I'm getting on the phone with Midway all the time. They're sitting there going like, safeties don't work. And I would sit there and I'm at the magazine working. I'd cut the phone and lean over to a buddy of mine and be like, "what's a safety?" You need to have explained it to me. And I'd go back on the phone and be like, "I think I can get that in or whatever." It was so horrible. The game turned out okay. Not great. It sold really well.

Jordan: 11:03

And did that group end up becoming one of the companies that you ended up forming in East Bay?

Mike: 11:08

Yeah. That's it. Yeah. So Andrew, who was already running digital clips, pretty much said, "Hey, you should just quit the day job thing and come on over here and partner up with me on these GameBoy games."

And that was the easiest sell ever. Because at that point after Blitz, I knew I wanted to make games and I didn't really want to be a journalist. So I left Next Generation Magazine on good terms and jumped right over and went full board into game development. And that was the beginning of the next 20 years of just making game after game after game.

And we're trying to put a gameography together and it's shocking to me because I think it's like 196 games I've had some hand in since, and that's a lot of games over the years. It's been like these Game Boy games cause they're smaller so you can get a lot done, but it was just a lot of games.

Jordan: 11:50

Well, I think now with mobile people have really seen what being able to iterate, what it allows you to do. I'm curious with 190 games, I mean, the amount of learning that you must have in that head from all those products.

Mike: 12:04

It's crazy. And that's kind of the thing that I love about making games right now is I've actually worked on everything pretty much. And I've worked on a lot of original designs. I've worked on sequels, other people's designs. I've worked on games based off of movies and books and all these things. So every genre, every kind of engine and I've written pretty much every kind of game myself. So it's like, it's just this amazing catalog I love to dip into.

And even more, most recently I did this game called #IDARB, where we have this concept of halftime games. You have this little sports game. We kind of did some indie games, but at the halftime, there's dozens of these other games you can play for about 30 seconds to a minute. And it's like a first person shooter, a racing game and all this stuff. It's just like this quick cutaway. It's basically just because I know how to make these things. I just threw them all in. It's been pretty exciting.

Jordan: 12:50

You can make your own music, right, in that game?

Mike: 12:52

Yeah, I can make my own music. I've done that because, growing up in the early days of computing, you didn't have a team, you were just like, I need music, so you'd make it, and I need sound effects, so you'd make it, and all that stuff. So it's still fun to do all that.

Jordan: 13:03

But in #IDARB, isn't there also, like, a music making.

Mike: 13:06

Oh, yeah. Okay. That's true. Yeah, absolutely. So that's the other part. I had done this hack probably three years ago now. And it was, based off Donkey Kong, my daughter and I would play Donkey Kong all the time. And I showed her Super Mario Brothers 2 and Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario Brothers 2, it would let you play as the princess. And so she really liked that, but she didn't really like Super Mario Brothers 2. She really liked Donkey Kong. So one day when we went back to Donkey Kong, she's like, "why can't I play as the girl and save Mario?" and I didn't think anything of it really right away, but then later on, it was kind of haunting me.

And I'm like, well, you know, I know how to hack games. I know how to do stuff. I should be able to just switch this out. So I started to do that one night and I was sharing it online with anybody who wanted to pay attention. And that just kind of exploded. It became this big thing because it was at the time for Gamer's Gate was just coming up. There's Trolls vs Women, and video games is kind of picking up Steam and everything. And I was oblivious to all that. And here's this little hack I did for my daughter I want to share with people. And it just kind of got caught up in all that stuff. So I put a little video on YouTube, it exploded. Like next thing I know, like Good Morning America's having me on the show. And all this crazy stuff. And it's all for this hack that I've done a million times. But in this case, it was actually really cool because it was my daughter and it was actually for a good cause and she really wanted, kind of stood for something. And also, so that was really cool. And it was awesome to see happen.

And so when I worked on #IDARB, I want to make sure that my daughter, my son, and anybody who plays this game, any color, any background, any culture, should be able to be who they are and express themselves in this game. So that was kind of like the biggest effort I ever put into a game of allowing you to be anything and make any kind of music and customize anything you want.

So you have a character creator in there to make your own characters. You can be a piece of bacon, you can be yourself, you can be whatever you want to be. And then there's a music editor to put whatever kind of music you like in there. Cause that music is you and it represents who you are when you play the game.

And we put in all the ways to build logos for your teams and build teams with your friends and all that stuff. So it was really kind of the result of that Donkey Kong hack that I put all these creative tool sets there. And also the ability for you to express yourself online, because at this point, Twitch and all these things were kind of rising. And I thought, What better way to allow you to express yourself than give you these tools, but also let you stream the game directly and have people who are watching your stream interact with you and do all this crazy stuff.

Jordan: 15:12

That's really cool, man. Well, what I consider my goal for the rest of this interview is to extract the learning of your 190 games that I can for the audience, because our audience is primarily people who are also making games or want to make games. And I'm curious to know how you think about the game making process.

Mike: 15:32

Like how I first approach it?

Jordan: 15:33

Yeah, exactly. Starting there, I mean, and then we'll move on.

Mike: 15:37

I'll give a really recent example. We work with this group who represents a lot of music artists, and they have Martin Garrix in their portfolio and Scooter Braun. And, E3 was coming up in about four or five days. And we got an email from them saying, "Hey, one of our guys that we represent created an anthem for E3 and look, they created this crazy cover art for the anthem that looks kind of like a video game. Is there anything we could do with this?"

And we're looking at the artwork and it shows him jumping on these kinds of Minecraft cubes all in pixel form and everything like that. We responded like, "yeah, we could totally do something like, when would you want it?" And they're like Monday, which was like five or four or five days away. And we're like, "Oh, this is insane." but let's, let's just say, yeah, let's do it, but let's not guarantee anything. Let's just see what happens. And so my process from that point was I was looking at that image and I'm seeing hopping and jumping all stuff. And I'm trying to put in context, what can you make in four days? Four days essentially, and deploy on any platform.

And that kind of limits you to very few things. And in my mind, I just kept coming back to games like Flappy Bird or Downwell, and all these things that are very simple, really, really simple mechanical games that focus almost entirely on one mechanic, essentially like Canabalt and these sorts of things.

So we just loaded up every machine here with those kinds of games, then spent probably about three or four hours playing all of them. And then once it was in my head, and the feel of all these games was kind of like just floating around in there, I just sat down at the computer and just started making something jump.

And I wanted that jump to feel like something I have control over, and you have things like, you look at something like Bit.Trip, Runner, or Canabalt, and the jump has a certain feel and whatever, but I wanted to capture something that even had more control than that. And to me, I've always loved the Mario jump and Sonic in particular, where the longer you hold down a button, the higher you jump and there's a little bit of nuance, you could tap it and have a slower job, that sort of thing.

And I knew that this is going to be on mobile and it's going to be on the web, that I would have to do something that wasn't going to be analog. So it had to be a button and if it had to feel analog, it would have to be something that would be like that. And so I started to implement the Mario style jump.

And because I was going to take away control of like moving left to right, because that'd be hard to do universally across all platforms and try to reduce it to one single button. I came up with the idea of letting the character basically run on his own and try to center on these platforms as he lands. So he'll move left and right and all this stuff, but you have to jump when you know you've got the momentum to do it. And so you have the hold down the button to give you the time and power for the jump, but then also make sure you're hitting your stride before you get to the edge and jump at the right time. So all these things were going to be really subtle.

Jordan: 18:09

But you didn't have that idea until after you had built the jump.

Mike: 18:12

Yeah, until after I had built the jump and seeing that he would land on these platforms and I kept feeling every step of the way, I felt like I didn't have enough control yet and I wanted to figure out how much control I can give to a single button press.

And so I just kept piling it on and piling it until it felt like it was almost going too far and I would just have everybody test it as I would do it. And probably by the end of that day, we had something that was feeling pretty good and everybody in the office was playing it. And I knew it was good because by the next morning people were coming in with their scores because we're just tracking how far people could get and people continue to play it in the morning without even being prompted to do it or anything like that.

I'm like, "okay, we hit it. We got that down." And so the next part then was to build in the variety because it's one thing to get that mechanic down or anything else, but we have to have a sense of progression and all that stuff. So I worked on making sure that the platforms I figured out what the minimal amount of movement of the platform. So the maximum amount of movement on platforms would be in that threshold. And I knew that I could stretch time towards the ramp of difficulty based off fast and how far platforms are moving up and down. And that was a fun timing puzzle that was going on. And I also realized that that was not enough.

If we're going to do that, it would get very monotonous. So one thing that platform games have and religiously as designers who love it or hate it, and that's the double jump. For me, I'm like, that would give us the variety we want. Everybody usually likes a double jump and wants a double jump. So if we can make that fun.

Jordan: 19:30

It keeps it to one button and it utilizes what you put all your work into, which was the jumping.

Mike: 19:35

Exactly. And so we threw that in and that gave us the ability to have way larger gaps between platforms. So we could actually pull a platform out and have you jump and double jump as you're anticipating things as a platform comes onto the screen and all stuff.

And that worked way better than any of us could have thought. And so that was great. So we threw that in, we came up with these quick sand things where if you jump on them, they just drop the platforms and all these kinds of like really traditional mechanics, but now in a one button game that felt very mobile and it just all kind of came together and we shipped the game four days later and it's daily active user count, it was March when it launched.

Jordan: 20:09

What game is it?

Mike: 20:10

It's called Martin Garrix oops.pizza. If you go to oops.pizza, you'll see it and you have collectibles and all this stuff. And so you can play it on the web and you can also play it on mobile. And so that was a four day production with as much QA as we could do along the way. And we shipped the game and it's still really like every day we're getting hundreds of people playing it. And it was just this weird third way game, but the mechanics in there are some that I felt like we should talk about. Cause that's how I approach things. I digest it from like a top level. What's our goal, we've got to make a game by in four days, what can we make in four days? Well, here's the mechanics that can happen in that time-jump. I know jump because I've built hundreds of platformers, so at least I know the mechanics of that. What can we do beyond what we've ever done before with just a single button?

And so the challenge was there. Cause if I didn't have that challenge, I probably wouldn't have been interested. So it was this really nice challenge, like the carrot of solving a big problem, but also relying on things that I knew. And then with a strict timeline, I love working with limitation. And that timeline was just the right nudge. I needed to like try to force myself to make something happen.

Jordan: 21:11

It almost reminds me of like an improvisational approach. The way you just sat down.

Mike: 21:17

That's my whole career because the game #IDARB I mentioned before was completely improv, it started life as a tweet in which I put an image of a red box in the center of a screen that I could control. And I asked the internet, what should I do with this stuff? And I thought, this game's going to be the biggest pile of crap. And if I just listen to everybody online, I'm going to prove that. And I'll be on a panel, I'll show people how crowd design is the worst idea ever. But the most amazing thing happened. It turned into a really fun game. I was riffing and doing improv with thousands of people online. And every time I would try to take what they were suggesting and make it work in the game. The game just got better. So it was really fun. And that kind of game jam sensibility, that sort of thing is just pretty much how I've approached every project I've ever worked on.

Jordan: 21:57

Well, one of the things I wanted to ask you was how do you-having made so many games, how do you keep it fresh for the long haul? And I think this must be part of the answer.

Mike: 22:07

It is. I like the unknown because, the more I see something that's just going to be muscle memory work or that sort of thing. I'm less interested in, I'm slower at it and I just get bored really quick. But something has to have kind of that impossible sense to it. Or that's like the challenge is really, like ripe and ready for the taking because that Martin Garrix game was like, the time was so short, but I knew we could do something. And that was a big challenge. And I could explore something on a very microscopic scale. I've never really had to do before. So that was really fun. And also deploying the game on HTML5, which I'd never done before. That was exciting because if we could get it on HTML5, we could have a larger audience and all sorts of stuff. So that's the sort of thing that really gets me to wake up in the morning and come into work because I try to find that for every project we do.

Jordan: 22:53

Well, you certainly sound excited.

Mike: 22:56

You know, you said improv and that got me really excited too, because we were just throwing that word around earlier today about how all our projects we're trying really hard to make sure we have that sensibility as we do it. Because the more we plan for stuff, which is in certain situations that makes all the sense in the world to do. We feel that the game doesn't feel risky enough or innovative enough. And when you're unsure of, and you're walking into that undiscovered country of innovation and whatever, right? Like, you don't know what you're going to do the next day based on what you're seeing. That's really exhilarating and really exciting. And that's the stuff.

Jordan: 23:29

And I think that's what's giving these games of yours, they're kind of unique style.

Mike: 23:32

I think so. Cause a lot of people, I work on games, I'll use #IDARB again, as an example. It doesn't look like much. It's just the most simple looking game. When you see a picture of it or a little bit of video, but people who play it walk away extremely happy with their experience with the game. And when we launched that game, it was this simple game we built over eight months. Launched on Xbox One, on the worst possible day to launch. We were on Super Bowl Sunday. And we're like, "okay, we're launching. Who's going to even see this or whatever." But we had 16 years of gameplay on that single day alone.

And that was mainly because of the word of mouth that kind of built up around the game. Because it doesn't sell itself. It really was people playing it and enjoying it and wanting to get other people to play it.

Jordan: 24:11

It has that kind of gonzo, wacky quality.

Mike: 24:14

Yeah, it was born from the internet, right? So everything is just like walking around on the internet and looking at anything. It's just nuts. You have Rick Astley dancing across the screen. You've got He Man and the Master's Universe in it. You've got all these things because it was such a fun, weird game to do. And it was bizarre. It made people laugh a lot that we had people calling us up saying, "Hey, how do we get in on that game too?" We didn't have to license anything. It was awesome.

Jordan: 24:35

What advice would you give? What are some of the common mistakes you see developers making that you'd like to say, "Hey, trust me, do it like this."

Mike: 24:42

It's funny because I think, especially for new developers, one of the things I've been running into a lot lately, and this was my problem too, getting into the industry and doing the stuff I was doing, the desire to take longer than you really need to make a game.

s for doing Pac Man for Atari: 2600

And I remember him saying like 18 months is more than enough time to really screw things up. And that's exactly what it was because the game was much bigger than it needed to be. The goal of the game was much smaller and when you give yourself this amount of time, especially for people who are working on a game on the side, you lose track of the time. And if you don't get really good at hitting your sprint as early as you can and getting something completed, and it may not be the best game in the world, but it probably never would have been the best game in the world. You just got to get it done and move on from that particular thing you're building because the more you ship, the more you put out there for people to enjoy, the better you get.

And a lot of people, I think, forget that they have a bunch of unfinished work lying around and the ability to finish that off and then move on, that's what separates kind of like the dupes that are coming in from the people who know what they're doing.

Jordan: 26:00

That discipline to ship it, even if it's not perfect, is a huge part of being a professional.

Mike: 26:05

It is. And you, you got to accept that critique. And right now I know it's tough. You get online and people just will hate your game because they want to. And you can't tell the difference between somebody who's playing your game seriously or somebody who's just trolling. But like, I think that's the other side is don't take any of that seriously.

Just keep making what you want to make, put it out there. You will find your audience. You'll get feedback from the right audience over time and you'll know what works and what doesn't and all stuff. And don't let stupid comments that people are making online or any of this stuff about your work affect you. In fact, try to feed off that and move forward.

Like when we put #IDARB out there, it was a lot of years and I didn't care. I just knew we had a core audience that was going to be excited about it. And thankfully it turned into a very large audience.

Jordan: 26:43

What's the name of the new company? The kind of criterion collection for games?

Mike: 26:46

Digital Eclipse. That was the original name of the company we started way back when.

Jordan: 26:51

I remember I saw that logo on many, many games.

Mike: 26:55

Yes, we put out so many classic collections and ports and stuff of classic games and for a while we didn't own that label anymore. It had gone away with one of our previous companies. And so we recently reacquired it and we've been really wanting to sink our teeth back into bringing some of these old classics back and presenting them in a way that was more like the Criterion Collection for DVD and Blu-ray or like what Shout Factory is kind of doing right now. These games deserve a lot better than just the emulators that are out there.

There's emulators online and they do a great job of recreating somewhat of the experience, but they don't try to recreate exactly how it was intended, like the artistic intent. We'll take like our first product now under the new digital eclipse. We just recently shipped a game called Mega Man Legacy Collection.

And when we approached this game. We knew there was a lot of concept art and a lot of context we could put around it and put it into the product so people can understand where it came from, what it was intended to look like, and that sort of thing. But also, every emulator out there, including the one Nintendo shipped for their NES, had inaccurate colors in their palette, the pixel aspect ratios were wrong. There's all these things that the original hardware had that is kind of like, I would say glitches of sorts. When you had a composite signal, like red would bleed a little bit more and all these things. And artists would actually develop the artwork on these composite screens and use that to their advantage.

So they would use certain color combinations to generate a third color because they're next to each other and that bleeding would create this new color, all these things. And so the art was created on these composite screens with all these imperfections. And so for us, we wanted to create a simulation of that because that's artistic, it was built on a device that did this to the image and that's what people played when they were kids.

And so we want to make sure that we could reproduce that. And that's what emulators out there right now don't really do. And so we went down that road and made sure that every color was correct. And we made sure that the aspect ratio was as accurate as it could be because Mega Man and emulators out there right now, he's kind of skinny. Reality was he isn't, he's, his aspect ratio is wider. And so we had to perfect what that would look like without giving up any of the resolution or any of these things, because pixel art is very pretty and you want to make sure you have the crispness and all this sort of stuff available to people as well.

So that was quite the challenge. And we had to throw all that in there to make this perfect kind of Mega Man collection. And again, that was a good one to launch with because everybody knew Mega Man. People remembered what it looked like and they know what emulators look like. It was really a big win for us to put that out there and get people to really subscribe to the notion of getting these perfect versions of games.

Jordan: 29:19

That's really cool. I'm looking forward to seeing what else you come out with.

Mike: 29:22

Oh, yeah, because of that, we have a lot coming down the pipe and we're basically amplifying everything we've done previously. So with Mega Man in particular, we have this museum that you can go into and you can see all the concept art.

You can actually engage the game in certain critical points from the museum. So you can see why that design exists and how it works. And you can really dive into the design of Mega Man from this museum. We're going to go even further with that for all our new projects.

Jordan: 29:48

Now, what about in terms of production process? Are there tools or techniques that you've kind of adapted or adopted over the years? Do you have a kind of methodology?

Mike: 30:00

It changes with every kind of project. And it's really hard to explain. But if you're approaching a game, it depends on what kind of game you're doing. We're looking at an original Ground up game where you're coming into it for the first time. You may not have worked in this genre before and everything like that. There's a lot of pre production you hop into there. And that's where a lot of prototypes and these sorts of things come into play.

For me, every project work on whether it's a port or if it's an original game or whatever, I demand of myself and the people I work with that we, try to get something playable and fun and within a week or two, to make sure that the mechanics and everything we have in our heads and this whole concept itself is really sound. If we can't make it fun within a week or two weeks, even if we're gonna throw it away, but based on this high concept, if we can't make that fun, we're gonna have a challenge probably for the rest of the project, no matter how long it is. A good idea is really easy to see and experience very quickly if it's really sound.

And so if after like a couple of weeks, we're still struggling, that's when we really kind of look at a project and say, I don't know if we should move forward this or, or whatever. And we do now probably more than ever kill a lot more projects than we've ever done. And especially in my career.

Jordan: 31:05

So yeah, you start off with that step. And when for you, do you transition out of pre production? What for you is like, "okay, we're on production."

Mike: 31:12

When we're working on our own or it's like that, it's either do or die after about the two to three week mark. If it's not fun, it's dead. And if we're working with a client though, that gets a lot more complicated. But we try to go into full production within the first three to four weeks.

So that includes design documentation and interesting living documents. Like we really, really push that because I think it's weird because I've done both kinds of methods where you plan everything out meticulously about what you're going to do. And every single time I've ever done that, and it's been many times, I feel the product suffered for it because we basically just built what we had on paper and we didn't really pivot in areas where we thought we could have done better had we really tried to like address the issues that they came up. So you really need to have a lot of slack on that.

So for me, you get to basically a high level design document and get all the stuff that you can start planning around as early as possible. It doesn't have to be complete, but it has to be at least comprehensive enough to be here's what the beginning, the end and the middle look like. And here's what we have to do. And here's the tools we need to build. And that sort of thing. Once that's off the ground. There's enough room and a margin in there for us to wiggle as we go, because you're going to run into situations and it's inevitable. You're going to run into situations where what you thought was going to be right, which thought was going to work is just not going to work.

And so there's a lot of baked in margin. And I tried to put in as much margin as possible into a budget to where we know like at least 25% of this budget at the minimum is going to be, not planned for yet, and we're have to plan on using that when the time comes for the things that we're gonna have to address as we go. And then the finite things. More core stuff, that's a little bit easier to plan for and that's things like tools or production pipelines and that sort of thing.

Jordan: 32:46

Well, I guess when you're working at the speed that you work, even a 25% margin, we're probably talking about a month.

Mike: 32:51

Exactly. That gives us a good, pretty much a month to do what we need to do.

Jordan: 32:55

That's amazing. Well, the results are incredible, Mike, and it's been great to take this time with you.

Mike: 33:00

Thank you. It's actually been fun to catch up with you. It's been a little while. We work together, actually. A few years ago, while you were at Ubisoft, that was a really good experience.

Jordan: 33:08

I hate to say it, but I think it was almost 10 years ago, maybe like nine.

Mike: 33:12

Was it a decade ago? Why are we so old? What's wrong with us?

Jordan: 33:15

I don't know. You more than me.

Mike: 33:17

I know. Stop it. It's true though. It sucks.

Jordan: 33:21

Not by too much. You know, I also started-it was actually my brother who had the Commodore 64. He had the tape drive and everything. I think I was so jealous, I really wanted that thing. So I think that was a big part of what got me interested in games.

Mike: 33:33

You know, it's so funny. So we're working with a really big, well known studio right now. And it's on a project that it's so bizarre. We're building a game on the Commodore 64 proper that we'll be able to load and play on a real Commodore 64 yet be distributed also on Xbox and all these other systems. It's the most bizarre thing to have it come full circle at this point where I'm dusting off what I used to know about the Commodore 64 just to make a new game.

Jordan: 33:55

You are doing so much interesting stuff.

Mike: 33:57

Interesting and weird.

Jordan: 33:59

Well, and do you guys still have the brick building over in East Bay?

Mike: 34:02

We do. Yeah. In Emeryville, we're right by Pixar and there's these wonderful red brick, big buildings that used to be like electric engine plants and stuff like that. So now it's all these creative companies all nestled away in all these corners around here. And it's really cool to walk down the street and be like, "Oh, that's that company that does all the streaming and that's the company that makes this game." And also it's really fun.

Jordan: 34:22

Well, next time I'm in your area, I'm going to give you a shout. And if you're ever down in LA, drop me a line.

Mike: 34:26

Absolutely. You know, I come down there a lot more these days. My brother's down there and I've got some clients that I've been visiting. So I'll make sure I drop you a line in the next couple of weeks here.

Jordan: 34:34

Great. Anytime, Mike. And thanks again. It was great. Great having you on the show.

Mike: 34:38

Awesome. Thanks a lot.

Jordan: 34:40

I love Mike's enthusiasm. I love that you can just tell this is a dude who is so into his work, even after doing the number of games that he's done. He is infectiously enthusiastic and excited. I learned a lot from Mike. The kind of improvisational approach to design can be very freeing if you're worried about having to know everything up front as sort of the designer, genius who writes everything down and then it gets made and it's perfect. That's not how it works, right? So, relax, improvise, this is a process, this is dynamic, real time gameplay, start putting it together, and roll with it.

Don't just find the fun, follow the fun. All the information, all the people, links, games that we talked about in this interview, you can find right on the blog post at brightblack.co/playmakers. So check it out. You can also find Mike's Twitter information and you can get in touch with me as well.

Next episode, episode three, not episode three. It is free, but it's also three. Lev Chapelsky. It's a fantastic interview about working with Hollywood, whether you want to work with the writers, voice actors, composers, whatever it is, Lev breaks it all down. That's the next episode. You can subscribe so you don't miss it. Brightblack.co/playmakers-by and for game industry pros just like you.