On the latest Aftermath Hours, Luke and Gita are joined by Matt Leone, formerly of Polygon. This week, Leone launched Design Room, a new site to house his oral histories of video games, starting off with Shadow of the Colossus.
We also talk about the adorable city builder Town to City, because Luke and Gita simply cannot help themselves. Gita makes a brief tangent into the world of Digital Audio Players, much to Chris Person’s delight.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review and we’ll include it in our oral history of this podcast episode.
Gita Jackson: I love this sort of Rashomon thing you get when you're asking multiple sources about a specific incident. We just talked about the last issue of 52 on my podcast with Alex Jaffe, 52 Pickup, which is about this comic book that was, at the time, written by four of the top talents from DC. And we've spoken to Jeff Johns, Mark Wade and Greg Rucka. The only one we haven’t been able to talk to is Grant Morrison, which, who knows what the fuck they're doing. But we asked them all, what was the genesis of this? How did you get involved in this comic? And they all had a different, like, completely different answer.
Matt Leone: Yeah, I think that's what makes it interesting. I don't think there is always a canonical version of, like, the development story of a game. There's just how people remember it in most cases, because there's not always that much documentation of this stuff. Sometimes people want to put a spin on it to make themselves look good and have the story be more about them. And sometimes it's just that their memory is not that great, because you're talking about older things. So you may hear one version of a story and then take it back to somebody, and they may say “oh, I hadn't thought about that in a while.”
The best example I have there is, so I did a bunch of Street Fighter 2 stuff. The origin story of Street Fighter 2 is told quite differently by different people. Like, all the key people who worked on it kind of each should have their own version of that story, and they're not, like, dramatically different. And I feel like if you got them all in a room, they would probably defer to some of the other people's versions of it. But yeah, it's interesting, just like hearing each person tell it and like, again, it could be that they want it to be viewed a certain way, or it could be that they just don't remember it exactly the same way. It could also mean that, like, you know, it didn't actually happen the same way for every person, especially when you're talking about the older days with international departments. The communication was not always that good, so the people in the US office didn't always know what was going on in the Japanese office. And you look at old game magazines and all the errors you see in those and like, a lot of that is just because the US branches of these companies didn't actually know what was actually happening at the time. They were passing it on the best they could, but they didn't necessarily have what they needed to have.
Gita: I mean, even now, one of our contributors, Isaiah, writes a lot about anime, and they talk to animators that are in Japan. And even now, it's very, very difficult to get questions over to a Japanese artist, get them back in a timely manner, and then also get anything really useful at all from those answers, knowing you probably won't have a chance to ask follow ups. I see Luke nodding knowingly.
Luke Plunkett: Interviewing Japanese developers is notorious for, like, you can get half an hour with them in person, but everything goes through a translator at both ends, and then the answer that comes back is so canned that you want to challenge it, but also you're running out of time. Then that challenge is to go back through the translators again, and it's a huge challenge for games media because there's time pressure. You know, it's an upcoming game, or it's a popular anime, and you sort of want to get your story published in the next day or week or whatever. Is that something you have to worry about, Matt or it's like, you've got not unlimited time? We're all gonna die at some point, but you've got a really long time frame for a lot of this stuff. Is that as big of a concern for you? Or you can just ride it out and just wait very patiently?
Matt: It depends. I've done a lot of stuff with Japanese companies, and there's a different kind of politics behind it too. Like some companies only want one spokesperson to speak, and they don't want other people lower on the chain to kind of talk about things even years later. There was an interview I did once where someone was like, I could talk to you, but you can't quote me to my name. You have to say this stuff came from this other person, just because he was the one who was approved to speak for that game. And I wouldn't do that, but that's just, like, what they asked for. You get requests from Japanese companies to check over your transcripts, and that stuff is just commonplace over there.
I think time is something that maybe I don't have to worry about quite as much on these because I'm not necessarily getting those 30 minute windows as much because I'm doing stuff on older games where people usually have a little more time to talk. So most interviews will do longer than that and have a little more time to breathe. But there's a time element of it, and there's a cost element to it. If you're hiring interpreters, or, you know, I re-translate stuff a lot to make sure we're getting quotes right. All that costs money. The difference between doing a story where you interview 10 people who speak Japanese on a game and a story where you interview 10 people who speak English on a game [is], like, thousands of dollars’ difference.
Luke: Speaking of Japanese developers, at time of recording, we've only just learned that Tomonobu Itagaki has passed away at the relatively young age of 58. He's obviously an incredibly prominent figure in Japanese game development, especially for people of a certain age who have played the games he's most famous for. You obviously approach your pieces from a journalism standpoint. You're telling a story. But at the same time, we're starting to lose some of these voices and some of these people who were instrumental in shaping video games as we know them today. Is approaching your pieces as a piece of journalism and approaching them as a piece of history… are they one and the same? Or do you only focus on the journalism, and the history is just inconsequential? Or is that something that may have changed because you've been doing this for a long time as well? We start losing access to some of these stories, and so getting them told and written down is actually not just important for my website's metrics for this month, but is an important record for anyone who wants to study and learn about video games in the years and decades to come.
Matt: It's funny because like, the Shadow of the Colossus story I just did… I covered that game back when I worked at 1Up and I'm now doing retrospectives on games that I was around for when they first came around. This came up the other day, too: I was talking to somebody, and they were like, you know, this is preservation. And it is, because I'm talking to a lot of people and getting different accounts, and we're putting them out there in a place that we can keep out for a long time. I don't go into it thinking we're gonna lose this stuff if I don't save it. I think there's a lot of push from people to do that, and that's great in terms of saving, whether it's ROMs or interviews or whatever else like this. The idea of saving everything is really valuable, and I think that is something I am very supportive of. But that's not really something that I am conscious that I'm doing. I'm typically going into these like, okay, what is an interesting story? You know, what stories would benefit from having different people talk about them and stuff like that. You can't really separate it. It is both, whether I intend it to be or not.
