Just finished episode 160: Memoirs of a Game Counselor and this may be one of my favorite interviews on Retronauts. The conversation was incredibly interesting and had me grinning almost the entire time. Jake Kazdal was great!
Where as I love the east crew and find those shows to be the absolute best.
Love Bob and co too, but east is my bag.
I finished this over the weekend as well, and I agree... what a fascinating interview! I love how he was rewarded for his hard work with random opportunities like running into the guy who did the Sega Rally voiceovers and mentioning that director from Macross Plus to Mizuguchi.Just finished episode 160: Memoirs of a Game Counselor and this may be one of my favorite interviews on Retronauts. The conversation was incredibly interesting and had me grinning almost the entire time. Jake Kazdal was great!
The second most misleading 8-bit box art title presentation right after The Castlevania Adventure... I mean, Castlevania: The Adventure.Super Mario Bros 2 episode was great!
I used to refer to Mario 2 as Mario Madness due to the box.
See ya in 2028, space cowboyHey Jeremy & Bob: Are we getting an Octopath Traveler episode? It's begging for a Retronauts take.
But you did BotW! ;D
roflGlad to hear that the official Retronauts position is the correct "Lost Levels is dumb Kaizoesque garbage."
(though I still look forward to the episode where you talk about said rubbish game in more depth)
I think Jeremy needs to stop ginning him up before every episode.
But someone I know who works in the industry -- yes, I'm sorry, all of my quotes come from "someone I know who works in the industry" today, since the industry is shocked into trepidation about its future by the failure of a successful publisher's boutique franchise -- says that airing the dirty laundry helps comfort the people stuck inside this place or that.
The game was also supposed to have a Vita version, if you remember. Where did that go? Someone Else Who Works In The Industry told me that a lot of the Infinite content that was polished and then never implemented became the Burial at Sea DLC*[Update: After this article was published, level designer Shawn Elliott told people other than me that the sources' assertions about Burial at Sea were "categorically false." That is now officially the only official quote this article contains, so please remember that]. Someone Who Works In The Industry told me that thanks to Ken Levine's breadth of endless ideas and philosophy of fearlessness and un-planning, Infinite grew far, far over its budget and far, far beyond its scope.
At the time, I had no tough questions to ask, besides, maybe, "are you difficult to work for, my friend who works here isn't allowed to talk to me about you, but he said you were difficult to work for." I didn't ask that one.
Wells has the sort of feverish brightness that very good artists have, one minute restlessly eyeing the ceiling, the other talking evenly about studying historical engravings, and the influence of Irrational's historical Massachusetts location on Infinite's style and feel. At the time Gerritsen emphatically supported Levine's pleasantly rebellious-sounding attitude to traditionally-rigid internal process: that process itself "serves development -- it doesn't drive development."
"This isn't a studio that says, 'we're going to make a design doc on day one and build that'," Gerritsen told me.
The following spring, Levine was telling the media that his disinterest in traditional process meant his team just had to crunch. Around the same time, Nate Wells, who had become Naughty Dog's art director, marveled to the press about the ego-free process he enjoyed with The Last of Us' team.
That was when I started to hear a lot from People In The Industry about how people at the studio were unhappy at work. I heard from People in the Industry that turnover at Irrational was very high. More than one Person in the Industry told me that almost no-one who made original BioShock stayed on to make Infinite. At the time, a year out from shipping, Someone Who Worked There told me they believed the studio would close if Infinite didn't sell very, very well.
Someone Else Close To The Situation told me the same thing yesterday. That everyone in the studio probably knew.
I don't know any of these things "for a fact." It's just things I was told. It's just things I could readily believe, based on what else was being reported at the time. It wasn't anything I had the aptitude to do capital-J Journalism about. I don't know how to factually present, for example, the churn rate over the studio's lifetime beyond "we heard it was high." We got a no comment even just for asking how many people were employed at Irrational at the time of its closing.
Yeah it's my #1 favorite thing about Retronauts in general.Finally listened to the MGS3 episode. Does anyone else love how they'll just talk about everything surrounding the game at the time (reviews, press, leadup, etc) and it's legacy? It's kind of like a history lesson!
?
I haven't finished the episode yet, but I remember Leigh Alexander writing about Irrational, Bioshock Infinite, and rumors she had heard about the game for almost a year.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/211139/Irrational_Games_journalism_and_airing_dirty_laundry.php
Came here just to post this. Right at the very end I began to start being a bit bored but everything prior to that I was fucking hooked. His description of working at Nintendo as a counselor in the late 80s was fascinating as all hell!Just finished episode 160: Memoirs of a Game Counselor and this may be one of my favorite interviews on Retronauts. The conversation was incredibly interesting and had me grinning almost the entire time. Jake Kazdal was great!
120 minutes on King Arthur & the Knights of JusticeBetween the game counselor episode and me adding various SNES jrpgs to my SNES classic, I think that an episode on Enix's output in the west needs to be in the works. I get the Quintet stuff is probably its own show, but even outside of those titles, Enix was a more prolific publisher than Squaresoft was at the time. Its just their biggest franchise stayed in Japan (the SNES releases) and they've been paying for it since.
I'll mind my tongue.