Jake Simpson (00:00)
So right, I'm here with with Mike Arkin, who's producer extraordinaire and he's been kicking around the industry for well, donkeys years, right, Mike? I mean, I'm trying to remember when I first came across you, and I it's dim and distant past. Where would that have been?

Mike Arkin (00:19)
You came to LA to talk to us about being technical director for the Zono studio, which would been probably my like two thousand three, maybe?

Jake Simpson (00:33)
Yeah, something like that. Yeah. When you were still Zono, that's right. And you were doing P PlayStation's two stuff, weren't you?

Mike Arkin (00:39)
two thousand three, yeah that would have been yeah. And you were you in were you at ritual at the door

Jake Simpson (00:42)
Yeah.

Might have been no, Raven yeah, Raven went in at two thousand one. I was interviewing during September eleventh and I was supposed to be at EA in two thousand one and then didn't happen because I couldn't get there because, you know, people were bombing things and So that was gosh, that was twenty years ago.

Mike Arkin (01:06)
You didn't get the job. No, you were off.

Jake Simpson (01:07)
No, I didn't well as

well I anyway. So God, that was a long time ago, isn't it? And then since then. So talk about let's talk about Sono. I mean, where did that come from and what was it? Tell me about it.

Mike Arkin (01:20)
W Zono actually w yeah, I didn't I didn't found Zono. The history of Zono was that there was a guy named Novak who actually has this fascinating history as a guy that was part of the like New York punk rock scene in the seventies. Wow. And he was he had helped a bunch of bands get off the ground and d produced a bunch of albums and you know, was f relatively famous in in that in that scene.

And he went to Mattel and he was like the guy that basically launched the power glove at Mattel. And that was, you know, where I met him, whatever that was, like in the like early nineties or late eighties. And he was a creative genius, basically. He started Zono as like a design consulting company. And they designed a bunch of sixteen bit games for Sega, like the original Spider Man game for Sega and one of the, I think it was like X Men.

And then they did a game called Mr. Bones, which was like relatively famous. And there was you know a handful of other stuff. And then at some point, yeah, I think around Mr. Bones, they merged with another team and became not just design consulting, but like a full development team. And 2002, I was leaving Crave. Crave had like imploded, ran out of money, and I was, you know, one of the last people out the door. I had four months severance.

And I lived right at the beach. So I walked to the beach every day and had breakfast and you know, like I kind of I vowed not to do any work ever again, or at least not until you know, not until my severance was up and I needed the money. But during that time I just started having lunch with like the most random people ever. And I hadn't seen Novak in, you know, like twenty years. So I was like, Hey, hey, you're in you're an Elliot, let's have lunch. And you know, in the middle of lunch he was like, Hey, we're

Working on this alien versus predator game for Fox and it's like a big disaster, and we you know, we could really use some help. So I was like, Yeah, yeah, I'll you know, I'll come down, check it out, you know, see what you guys are up to. And the the AVP game was awesome. It was the the A V P RTS that no one knows existed. It was a console only RTS with like these kind of weird kind of console controls. And you know, there's an aliens campaign, a predator campaign,

in a colonial marines campaign with all completely different economies and you know weapons and stuff. You know, basically like I said, I'll help you find your next project. And then in the middle of that, I said, actually, you know what, this game is like kind of not getting finished ever. So why don't you let me help you? I'll take over. I'll be the producer on this. I'll take over. I'll help you ship it, because otherwise you're never going to get to the next project.

And I said, all right, well, you know, I gotta go, there's I gotta do three things, and if I do these three things, then I want you to give me a a third of the company. And it was like settle the lawsuit that their agents had had stuck them with for not paying the agent fee, ship A VP and find new work. So I I made you know made a settlement offer to the agent, went to Fox, got money to to finish A V P and we shipped it, and then I found, you know, I found the team more work. So I ended up with with a third of the company.

And then it's just a crazy, crazy story, but you know, times were tough and it was hard to find work. When the f finances got a little sketchy, the other two partners just bailed. And each one bailed and left me their share of the company. So you know a year later, I owned the whole thing. If you're gonna own a small development studio, the best way to do it is like have someone else start it and just show up and take it.

Jake Simpson (05:02)
Well, yeah, but you were actually getting stuff done. I mean there's a reason why it happened.

Mike Arkin (05:06)
Yeah, I mean you know, and it was a really weird time, like you know, this is like whatever that was, two thousand four or so. And

Jake Simpson (05:13)
Consolidation time, wasn't it? I mean p you know, ritual went away and and people were being bought

Mike Arkin (05:19)
There was a lot of that. But the the big thing that was happening was like there was this transition, right, from PS one to PS two. Games were suddenly bigger teams and there was like higher polymodeling and things like that were happening and and advanced rendering. Cause you know, this is the time when Xbox One had, you know, programmable shaders for the first time, or it was like semi programmable shaders. So we were like fifteen, twenty people.

And then we were pitching stuff to te you know to publishers. And, you know, half the time publishers would say, you're way too small. Like we won't work with anyone that's less than thirty. You know, and then there's that kind of conundrum you run into that you don't want to have anyone on payroll that's not paid for, right? So we didn't want to be big unless we had a big project. But you can't get a big project unless you're big. So, you know, we run into a lot of that. And so we ended up doing a lot of like small, scrappy kind of work, you know, tech stuff and

you know, small ports and we did a port of Demon Stone for what were they called Stormfront? Stormfront had this multi-platform deal with Atari and the the game was basically done and they went to Atari and they said, Yeah we're done, but we didn't do the Xbox version and we're not going to. So Atari called us and said, Hey can you can you you know port this thing to Xbox? So we did a lot of, you know, small stuff like that. And it was good. I mean, you know, we shipped a bunch of stuff and and all that.

But it is a little nerve wracking, you know, 'cause you're constantly trying to find the next work for the team.

Jake Simpson (06:51)
I know that feeling, yeah. Big time. Yeah, yeah. but before that as well though, you were at a claim.

Mike Arkin (07:00)
I w I was, yeah. I was the seventh employee at a climb. Really? I mean I guess the joke is when they hired me, they're like, you're the first person here that actually knows how to play a game.

This this is a game company that's like almost at a hundred million dollars of revenue at that point. And they literally didn't have anyone that could hold the controller.

Jake Simpson (07:21)
They were all I 'cause they were making money off the ports of of the mid place stuff, the Mortal Kombat and B Jam, I remember.

Mike Arkin (07:27)
This was before that, right? So the time that at the time I joined, I think they had three games that had shipped. So this is like nineteen eighty seven. Your deal with Nintendo was you could ship five games a year. This is NES only, right? That we were years away from from Game Boy or SNES at this point. You could ship five games, and you couldn't you couldn't ship on any other platform. Right? If you shipped on any other platform you'd get a you'd get an angry phone call or or your license would get cancelled. So

Jake Simpson (07:57)
Nintendo were absolute arseholes, weren't they? I mean, you remember that the the minimum cartridge run you had to do was something like a hundred thousand or something stupid as well.

Mike Arkin (08:04)
Well, I you know, I don't think that was a f a factor really in anything because honestly, no kidding. I mean, at that point in time for like maybe the first ten or fifteen games acclaim shipped, they didn't do anything less than a million. Wow. I mean, you know, we're talking like the Rambo game, they probably they manufactured first run was like four million cartridges. You know, of course there was a risk that you'd you'd make too many 'cause cost of goods on those things was like twelve dollars.

Jake Simpson (08:25)
Count.

Mike Arkin (08:34)
So, you know, if you made an extra million, twelve million dollars sitting in a warehouse, you'd you know, you didn't want to do that. But it wasn't a problem. I mean, NES games were flying off the shelves, right? If there was and the thing is everything that claimed it in those early days had some kind of a brand name. Yeah. Yeah. Double Dragon, Total Recall, you know, Rambo. So, you know, there was it was all recognizable so grandma could buy it and you know, 'cause she knew what it was, whatever. But yeah, I mean they just

Jake Simpson (08:42)
Flying off the ship.

Yeah.

Mike Arkin (09:03)
They they were just shipping a lot of games. So what I yeah, what I was saying was yeah, the first like five or six games that a claim did was all stuff that was out in Japan already. So they would just they would go to Japan. Yeah, they they had a guy actually in Japan and he would go around, talk to all the other publishers, talk to whoever was in Japan, and he'd come back to us and say, like, yeah, here's ten games, you know, which ones do you want? And some of them had to be localized, some of them didn't even have to be localized because they just didn't have any text in them at all.

Yeah, I mean I mean I think I I probably like it wasn't until my sixth or seventh game that we were actually localizing. I think that was Rambo. This is how different things are back then.

Jake Simpson (09:45)
I mean, that that's such a weird thing that you're porting a game from Japan that's based on a massive American IP.

Mike Arkin (09:53)
Right. There was this Japanese developer called Pack In Video. They only did like American TV shows like Rambo, Knight Rider, Airwolf. You know, at some point a claim would get the licenses and go back to to Pack In and Hey, we'll we'll share this with you. But Rambo was a finished game. They came to us and said, Hey, here's this finished Rambo game. Do guys want it? We went and got the, you know, US rights. But this is like how long ago this was. They would fax me.

the English text. They had they had done like a first someone in the office pretended they spoke English. So they did a first pass. They printed it out and faxed it. And I went with like a pen and wrote on the fax corrections. You know, some misspellings, add a comma here or whatever. Some words were just completely the wrong translation. Faxed it back to them.

Jake Simpson (10:26)
Cross on it.

Mike Arkin (10:48)
And then the most amazing thing is that they could actually read this. You know, now it's like double fax. You remember faxes were like super low res. Right. I don't know if most people listening to this maybe don't even know what a fax machine is. But just Google. Just Google. And like Japan still uses fax machines for everything. It's a crazy cultural thing. So and then we went through like si because there were so many mistakes, five or six rounds of correcting this this Rambo text. It's a really text heavy game. It's like forty pages of text or something.

And yeah, that was pr that was probably the first one that we had to localize. I mean there was no yeah, they could have they could have t got a text file but they had no way to send it to us.

Jake Simpson (11:28)
Please.

Mike Arkin (11:29)
I mean they they could have put a floppy disk in FedEx and it would have it would have arrived a week later. So this was this was faster, you know. We didn't have there was I mean, there was no way to transmit it back then.

Jake Simpson (11:42)
I remember being at Midway, I think this would have been about ninety-five or something, ninety-six maybe. And I remember somebody sending me a package and give and and sending and telling me this is what the FedEx number is. And for the very first time I used the web. Not that it was the wasn't the first time I'd used the web, but I went to the FedEx website and I was able to put that tracking number in and actually see where that that package was. And I remember thinking, wow, this is the future. I can actually see exactly where this package is in the world now. And it was

Remember thinking I mean, now of course, you we all shrug our shoulders and Yeah, of course it does that. But the reality is back then this was a new thing and it was a big deal. I remember that. Yeah. All right.

Mike Arkin (12:19)
Yeah, when I

when I was I left a claim and I went to Sony, I was at Sony for about a year and a half. This is like right before the PlayStation One shipped. And they had internet access. This was the first time I'd worked anywhere that had it, but you had to request it, you know, and the IT guy had to like grant it to you. There was no NAT back then, so you actually had a I don't know what the

Correct terminology is you had an IP address that was a real world IP address, right?

Jake Simpson (12:50)
an actual IP address, not internal IP address.

Mike Arkin (12:52)
It wasn't yeah, that didn't exist. There was no NATs back then at all. So they had to give you that was the big thing, is they only had a limited number of IP addresses. And then we had to use it was like mosaic browser. I remember that, yeah. And back then there was no search engine. So you literally had to go it's so fine links. You had to type the, you know, it would be like www.was always some university, slash this guy's name, slash this thing, slash this, you know, and you'd spend, you know,

Jake Simpson (13:08)
Yeah, you were linking you.

Mike Arkin (13:20)
five minutes typing the address and yeah, there was no search engines or and you and what you'd find is some guy had a page that was like, here's a page of all the cool things on the internet, right? And you'd look and you'd bookmark that.

Jake Simpson (13:33)
Geocities came along.

Mike Arkin (13:35)
Right, right. And and and we and we had email. That was also the first time I'd emailed. Sony had had email. So I would I would email with I had two projects with Cygnosis and I would email them all the time. I think did very very recently didn't Ian Hetherington from Cygnosis pass away? Yes. So I met him one time. When I went to Sony had a had a big office. It was I guess in it wasn't Cygnosis. Cygnosis was in Liverpool.

But Sony had a big office in London somewhere in like the cool part of Lo like Soho, I think. And Phil Harrison was running that office. So when I worked at Sony, I went there to meet with Phil and he was, you know, talking about some cool thing he wanted to do on PlayStation O. And when I left, Ian and the other Cygnosis guy, whose name escapes me, got in the elevator with us. And, you know, we all said hello. And then the elevator cable snapped and the elevator fell like three floors.

And we were trapped in an elevator together for like ten, fifteen minutes.

Jake Simpson (14:38)
Wow. That's an interesting story. I haven't heard you tell me that one before that.

Mike Arkin (14:42)
yeah, it was it was me, the two Cygnosis guys, I think Connie Booth and one who I I don't remember who else I was with, some other Sony person. And we were trapped in an elevator. It was like a scene for a movie.

Jake Simpson (14:54)
I've always thought about when you get trapped in an elevator, if you're there for more than a couple of hours, where do you pee?

Mike Arkin (14:59)
I think you don't.

Jake Simpson (15:01)
But I hope you don't have diarrhea that day then.

Mike Arkin (15:04)
Are do do you have like old man bladder problems? Is that

Jake Simpson (15:07)
The older you get, the quicker you know, the quicker the need comes on, let's put it that way.

Mike Arkin (15:11)
Okay. I I would recommend not drinking anything before you get into an elevator.

Jake Simpson (15:16)
Yeah, right. Or just taking the stairs 'cause you need the exercise.

Mike Arkin (15:22)
Yeah, you definitely do. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (15:24)
You. All right. but now while you were at claim, there was one thing I remember you worked on, the ill-fated NBA jam arcade game.

Mike Arkin (15:37)
that wasn't me. Yeah, sorry. Sorry, Jake. yeah, that was that would have been after me. So the arcade stuff happened after I left. I was at Acclaim for like maybe like six years or so, and I think the last thing I was working on was Judge Dread. So SNES era and Sega C D had just shipped. I think I was working on two Sega C D games, but they weren't done when I left. So what I did at Acclaim was a lot of NES, Game Boy.

this is before like GBA or anything like that, or Game Boy Color. This was all black and white, you know. Right. Game Boy, which I I wish I still had one of those, you know, big beige Game Boy things. SNES and then Genesis and Sega C D. So it was kind of like that eight, sixteen bit era. And it claimed was, you know, they were getting smarter at the end where you'd get one license for a movie or TV show, whatever, and it would be like we'll make this game on eight different things, right?

Jake Simpson (16:12)
Original game book.

Right, yeah. At that time there were eight different platforms you could hit. Yeah.

Mike Arkin (16:40)
We had there was Game Gear, there was I think Game Gear was the only other, so it was Game Boy, Game Gear, SNES, Genesis.

Jake Simpson (16:47)
The Lynx was out at that time as well, but I think it had already died at that point. Lynx, I think it already died.

Mike Arkin (16:52)
Well yeah, and

Links had, you know, like like Jaguar there were very few publishers that were doing anything with links, so we wouldn't you know, we wouldn't have touched that.

Jake Simpson (17:01)
The interesting thing about the NBA Jam arcade game, which is ill-fated, and the reason I mention it is simply because I remember at the time at Midway when a claim got the rights to NBA Jam, Midway was extremely pissed off about that. And it it only came about as I the story was told to me that there was a lawyer who used to work for the NBA who then got hired by a claim and at some point he turned round and goes to to Greg Fishback and says, You do realise that Midway doesn't own the rights to NBA Jam.

But Mi the NBA does. This the night the name anyway, they own the name. The Midway doesn't own that name. And Greg Fisherback went, really? And spent something like ten million dollars on the licence for the name, cutting it Midway out entirely. And Midway was beyond pissed. I remember Mark Jamel being extremely angry and being really angry as well at the lawyers. The the Midway lawyers were not good because they hadn't gotten the rights to the name. And that's why the next game was called MBA Hangtime, because it had to be because it couldn't be MBA jam anymore because

I claim I've got the rights to do it, so yeah.

Mike Arkin (18:03)
Yeah, well i it's very similar to Quarterback Club. you know, claimed at this quarterback club game and that that was quarterback club was a like I don't know if it was a T V show or a segment on a T V show, but it was something that the NFL owned and so they could somebody else could, you know, could license that name. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (18:24)
Right, okay. So all right, so you've you've been around a bit. I mean, Crave and and you know, Zono. I mean Zono was how many years for you?

Mike Arkin (18:33)
I think I was at Zono for I left Crave, I think it was that two thousand two, and then I was there until two thousand six. We sold Zono to Mumbo Jumbo and then that lasted basically two years, so that was like until the end of two thousand seven. So you

Jake Simpson (18:52)
You

still there at at Zono as part of a Mumbo Jumbo group, yeah.

Mike Arkin (18:55)
Yeah.

Yeah, we we became Mumbo Jumbo LA. And originally what happened was we were pitching all kinds of work and Mumbo Jumbo came and said, We were really into this PSP. Could you make a bunch of PSP games for us? And Mumbo Jumbo was so slow and it was like, Well, we had the team and we needed the work and we were gonna have to fire everybody if we didn't find work for the team. And like three months we still didn't have a draft contract and then

They would say, okay, here's the deal. We agreed to the deal. And then like two months later, they're like, Wait, what were the deal terms again? Like, could you do this? Like, well, what about this other? Can you do this game? And they'd start saying, Could you have, you know, an extra level in the Seven Wonders game? Or like what you it was like, okay, yeah, but we got to sign the deal already. And I remember one day we're just sitting at the W, I guess it was GDC and we're sitting at the W and I said, How about if you just buy the company? Would that make this easier?

And they were like, that paperwork's much easier to do. We'll just do that. And so we came up with the terms, we shook hands on it. They we'll just send you money tomorrow. Right. They're like, We'll you know, we'll do the paperwork later. We'll just give you we'll just start paying your payroll. And so that that happened. And then we, you know, we became Mumbo Jumbo LA. And you came you came to the old office. It was like this office in Costa Mesa, crappy, crappy old, you know, fifty year old carpets and like

mold on the walls. And they said, we want you to have a brand new office. We want like we want to come to LA and have meetings in this beautiful like palatial office like I and Storm had. So I found this office space in El Segundo right next to the airport where you could like you could sit in the conference room and watch planes land. And they were like, this is great. Yeah, okay, well, let's do it. And you know, we worked with an architect, we came with these floor plans that like maximized the space and

And then they came in and said, these floor plans are horrible. Like one guy's office has a pillar in the middle of it. You know, not in the middle, but you know how some office buildings have pillars? And so one right. So one guy might have a pillar against the wall, right? Like there's window, pillar, window, but the pillar it doesn't stick out. It's like one foot, you know, like twelve inches that sticks out because it's it's covered by the wall. And they that they thought that was the most outrageous thing in the world. And I was like, Well

It maximizes the space. There's enough room to put forty people in here. And they were like, No, no, no, no, no. And we went back to work and they spent a year redoing floor plans ten times. And one day they called us and said, your office is ready. Like I was like, we're still doing that. So they they just literally just went and built it. And they but they redid everything so that no office had a pillar, which meant that the offices were like all extra big because they had to put them on they had to put the walls where the pillars were, right? Right.

And we showed up and the conference room didn't have a door. It was o it was open. It was an open conference and the reason was because of the way the hallways were. The the end the door to the conference room ended up being like if it was a square, but they cut the corner off to have a door because they had this weird crazy layout because they couldn't have any pillars. And so the first day I showed up and I was with the construction guy and I was like, where's the door? And he's like, Yeah, they didn't want doors.

And I'm like, but that's the conference room.

Jake Simpson (22:18)
Go'd be able shut a door on a conference room. That's like a root thing. I mean or something.

Mike Arkin (22:22)
No, I mean it's you said

I'm gonna be like yeah, I'm gonna go in there to discipline someone or fire someone, like, you know, I'm supposed to do that without a door. So so they spent, you know, I don't know, about a million dollars on this office space 'cause they they had this idea, they wanted it to look identical to the office, their headquarters. So the same wall color, same floor tiles and all the stuff. So they spent all this money and we were in there for about six weeks and they fired everyone and shut the studio.

Jake Simpson (22:50)
Wow. Yeah, well that's that's video game development for you, isn't it?

Mike Arkin (22:56)
Yeah. I mean, you know, the I think there was a point in my life where if I heard, you know, somebody had jobs and then that they kept getting fired from their jobs, I would think, man, that's that's what a loser. Yeah. And then, you know, after maybe being at like maybe four different places that shut down and I got laid off, you know, now I'm like, Okay, that's you're not a loser, you're just working game duel.

Jake Simpson (23:18)
Ga game development is a weird thing. y every now and again I hear of someone who says, yeah, Arias, for example. Arias is a friend of our mutual friend of ours who is an engineer at Unity and he's been there for was it sixteen years he was there?

Mike Arkin (23:33)
I don't think unity has existed for that long, but

Jake Simpson (23:36)
No, but he he's been.

Mike Arkin (23:38)
just

d failing to to you know, to recognize how long I've been doing this, but

Jake Simpson (23:42)
He anyway, the point is though that that anything over ten years in one position is a is a big deal because companies don't exist that long. I mean, you know, Dylan over at Q, I think they've been Q's now twenty years old, which is a long time. Raven, I think Raven's been around for about the same duration, a little bit more than that, I think. But most companies haven't been around that long, you know, maybe Bungie.

Mike Arkin (24:04)
Well, certainly not independently. That's true, yeah. If you're if you're in this business for more than ten years, it's fairly likely that you're gonna end up getting acquired or merged or

Jake Simpson (24:13)
Right, right. Well I'm eight I'm at eight years so far, so but we've only really expanded in the last like few years, so it's it's I don't really qualify the extra years of just me on my own, really count counting. But yeah, it's but I under yeah, I'm with you there. one job for any period of time in this industry is an unusual thing. And there is a lot of, you know a lot of game developers aren't great businessmen if you know what I'm saying.

a lot of game developers out there who are in it for the love of making games or whatever it might be, or because they want to make the next version of Counter Strike or whatever it might be. And they just do crap deals.

Mike Arkin (24:45)
Well, you know, I I like to say this all the time, but it's show business, right? And you know, unfortunately, you know, it the business is sometimes more important than the show because if you don't have money and you don't have deals, then there ain't no show. Yeah. So and it is the most, you know, unfortunate part of of being in the in the game business is that at some point you realize making the games is no longer the hard part.

Jake Simpson (25:12)
That's certainly true. Yes, I I completely concur. I think, you know, making a game these days is fifty percent of the actual product because now you've got to advertise it and you've got to, you know, get people whipped up and excited about it and you've got to do analytics and you've got

Mike Arkin (25:25)
But I I I I just mean actually getting the deal is the hard part, right? You know, finding a way to pay for this. Back w when I was at a claim and I you know, we're doing NES games, those games were like a single engineer, maybe one artist, and you know, certainly the cost was was fairly low. And we've come a long way to where, you know, your call of duties and things are four or five hundred people. You truly can't do games like that without getting a big deal in place.

Jake Simpson (25:54)
Yeah, it used to be. I mean, you know, back in the days of of George and and Trudy Realms and all the rest of it, ritual, you could start with like fifteen people, make a make a one li one level demo and get a you know, a five million dollar or a ten million dollar deal. I mean the original Call of Duty was only seven million dollars, I think. I

Mike Arkin (26:12)
Shocked it's that much. I mean, the original battlefield, I don't know if you know my battlefield story, but the original battlefield was I think maybe two million, something like that.

Jake Simpson (26:22)
Twenty fifteen, right? Wasn't it?

Mike Arkin (26:24)
the original battlefield was they were called DICE. They were in in Sweden. No, the twenty fifteen was the original that was Call of Duty, I think. Or Metal

Jake Simpson (26:34)
Honor. Medal of Honor. That's right. I'm sorry.

Mike Arkin (26:36)
No, the the the battlefield story was that I was at Crave and a buddy of mine who who was an agent, Stuka Soy came to me and said, I've got this really cool World War Two game, you should check it out. And he came and he showed me it was I think it was just a pre rendered movie of like a bunch of characters, right? Doing World War Two things, you know, shooting whatever. And it was beautifully modeled characters, you know, at the time that was a big kind of transition, right? That we were going from super

blocky polygon men to like characters that actually look like humans. You know, showed it to me and I like, this is awesome. Like, you know, let's let's look into this. And so these guys actually did another game before this. Go play this other game, which was called Codename Eagle. It was World War One. And you had biplanes, you had a a giant blimp, you know, you could like jump out of the plane, parachute, land on a car, you know, drive around. And we were playing in the office.

Like every every day at lunch for two hours. And so, you know, we went back and said, Yeah, we want to do this. Like, you know, how much do they want? And we had the deal. It got greenlit internally. We had a contract that was including PC, Xbox, SQL rights. somebody walked into my office, like, you know, contract was on my desk, like literally the final printout of the contract. Somebody walked into my office and said, Hey, we've been looking at all the money and we realized we don't have any.

So we're gonna cancel everything. We're gonna sell everything we have to to like EA and Ubisoft. Right. We had a co publishing deal with EA for PC Games and we had Ubisoft was doing all of our European distribution. So they're like, Yeah, that battlefield thing that was really nice, but we can't do it. So I had to call and say, Hey, don't sign that contract.

Jake Simpson (28:23)
So that's how it ended up at EA then.

Mike Arkin (28:25)
They went to EA the next day. They met with Tom Trosina, who said, We love this. And they he Tom said, Where are you going next? So, you know, Stu was a very good friend of mine. so he told me the story that, you know, next week. They said, We're going to Microsoft tomorrow. Tom said, Do me a favor, push Microsoft one day, stay here, and come back to the office tomorrow morning. So they're like, Okay, well, you know, EA t tells you to stick around, you stick around, I guess.

And the next morning they went into EA and EA handed them a contract.

Jake Simpson (28:58)
Wow, that doesn't happen these days.

Mike Arkin (29:01)
I mean look, I think if you have the next battlefield, maybe it's maybe it could happen. I mean Yeah, yeah, it only takes a lawyer a couple of hours to, you know, take a template and crank out a contract. So that it didn't that didn't shock me. But but that worked out really well for EA.

Jake Simpson (29:17)
Yeah, definitely. Doesn't seem to be that fast these days, that's for sure. So yeah, all right, now I remember the going back to the aliens game, I remember you had a quite an intuitive way of actually selecting units, as I recall. I'm using a console controller.

Mike Arkin (29:32)
Yeah, I think that, you know, that was like the secret sauce to that game, right? Back in those days, I think that there were like the three top genres in gaming were first person shooters, real time strategy, and I think maybe driving games. But you know, first person shooters and real time strategy were

Jake Simpson (29:51)
Yeah, the big ones, yeah, the age of empires and all that business, yeah.

Mike Arkin (29:54)
what was it called? Total Annihilation and Darkness. Yeah. Well this is, you know, even before Supreme Manda, right? So the secret sauce was like, how do we make a a console RTS? And ever and just every now and then I'd be in a meeting where someone would say, We really gotta figure out how to do a console RTS. When I was at Fox, we always talked about A VP as being a cool RTS. And I think right after I left Fox, they went to

you know, to some developers and Zono said, Hey, we have an idea how to do this. Basically the trick was you didn't move a cursor, you moved the whole camera. And the cursor was locked to the middle of the screen, which made it a little bit easier to control. And if you wanted to select a group of units, you just you pressed the A button, you held it, and a circle would expand from the middle of the screen. And when you let go, whatever was in the circle got got selected. And it was yeah, it was it was really easy, really simple. And you know, we cracked

the you know the controls for for doing an RTS on console and you know some other things like menus you know I'd use like trigger buttons and things for the menus. And so one you know one of the first things I did was I was I went and we started showing that to people and saying, hey look, we cracked it. And what had happened was right like kind of in the middle of the development of A V P the entire game industry lost interest in console RTS. It was like the exact moment that we did it, they just stopped caring.

And you know, I remember going to Activision and showing it to them and saying, like, look, you know, we could make an RTS out of I don't know, whatever Activision's big games were at the time. They were like, That's cool. When this ships, if you sell a million units, call us and come back and you know, we'll we'll sign you up for Yeah. And that was you know, I think that was kind of the typical attitude at the time, right? It was like we're interested if it's a if it's a complete known hit. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (31:33)
Yeah, I took about yeah.

We'll never say no, but we're not gonna say yes either.

Mike Arkin (31:47)
So we never did another console RTS. And then the real irony is that we had a PC version of that game running internally. And we didn't have a contract for PC, it was just for console. So I kept calling Fox and saying, Look, I've got this, yeah, I got a PC version of this. Like, you know, give me sixty thousand dollars or whatever and let me finish it. We just need to like change the menus and add an installer. The guy who was at Fox, I won't say his name.

The guy who was at Fox at the time, I remember we were sitting in a room and it wasn't Fox anymore, it was Vivendi. So Fox decided they didn't want to be in games and they gave the entire game division, well not gave, I mean they they did a deal to let the entire game division move over to Vivendi. You know, Vivendi was was growing a lot at that point. So all the employees went over and they had they had like five-year options on all the licenses for whatever they were doing, like the Simpsons and Aliens.

So the guy who was at Fox, he now was a Vivendi employee and he was like, Hey, look, for us to do a PC RTS for aliens, we own Blizzard. If we want to do a PC game, we'll just tell Blizzard to do it for us. Right. And I now honestly that's laughable. Even at the time in, you know, whatever this was, two thousand two, two thousand three, I thought that was laughable. I I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard because obviously Blizzard is not gonna do

an aliens game because they're you know they're doing their own IP. So this thing just, you know, sat there and it was it was really ironic because it would have actually been quite fun. But yeah, I mean, you know, we never did another console you know, RTS after that. Although we did a couple of PC RTS, but and then today RTS is not the big genre that it used to be like.

Jake Simpson (33:37)
Yeah, that's true. It's going it's coming back though. I mean the the Microsoft sold two and a half million copies of Age of Empires two Defensive Edition, so they're they're you know, there's people out there playing it. And Starcraft, the original Warcraft and all the rest of it. Bli Blizzard has its own, as you know, has its own department that you know, tries to exploit older IPs of that nature. So

Mike Arkin (33:58)
Yeah, I'm not sure if that's Double Two's been out for a while. Yeah. But but I'm not sure if that's been a big success for them, to be honest. Like the Warcraft 3 game was a massive disaster, and I don't know that it sold very well. Really? And yeah, I think it was like a year late and it shipped with a a lot of features missing. And I think the old school Warcraft 3 players who know the game just hated it because it wasn't it wasn't well done.

Jake Simpson (34:00)
Coming so.

I they they have massive success with all the Diablo stuff though, that's for sure. I mean Diablo three on the Switch took about a perfect platform for it, you know what I mean? Mm. I played all the way through it after Christmas.

Mike Arkin (34:37)
Yeah, I mean look, Diablo is you know, it's a game that will be fun forever, right? It's yeah, it's like that j there is like a literally the genre is just called like Diablo games. Yeah, right. You know, it's like and and it really can you think of another Dungeon Gore of that nature? Which one? Another like Diablo was a huge hit, so you'd think there'd be like twenty games like Diablo. But can you think of another one that's a that's a success?

Jake Simpson (34:54)
Now dungeon crawler, you mean?

Yeah, but the thing is though that that Blizzard just iterates, iterates, iterates until the quality shines through. And they the the thing that always makes me laugh about Blizzard though, that they have that that secret source is that other people can iterate. Ken Levine, for example, right now is iterating on a product and has been doing it for eight years and we still haven't seen anything on it. But Blizzard will iterate and iterate and they will actually get better. Their product gets better to the point where they will release it. And and when they release it, it is always, you know, they say be first or be best, and Blizzard is both in a lot of cases.

Certainly best. You know, overall.

Mike Arkin (35:35)
I think what what Blizzard does really well, I don't know if they still do it well, but what what the Diablo two and Diablo three version of Blizzard did really well is very different than what Ken Levine is doing. Right? I think Blizzard builds a game and then they iterate and iterate and iterate and polish and you know, change out individual characters. I think Ken Levine is iter looking for the game. Yeah. Yeah, you I think Blizzard's very good at finding that game.

Jake Simpson (35:55)
Or looking for the game.

Mike Arkin (36:02)
It's very funny. Once during the Zono days, there were some X Blizzard guys that came to us and said, Hey, you know, we're some X Blizzard guys. We're looking to build a game. It was Friday the thirteenth, I think. And they said, We want to build a a prototype. And their concept was that you were the victim and he the Michael Myers, I guess, was chasing you. And so the whole game was just running away from Michael Myers. And it was a

Jake Simpson (36:28)
Yeah, actually.

Mike Arkin (36:30)
It was a very strange idea, right? Because you there was no combat. It was just constantly just running aw like the whole game was running away from this guy.

Jake Simpson (36:37)
So you could do a really great subway surfer like that.

Mike Arkin (36:40)
Subway circle, right? Yeah. You can do that. Yeah, this was but this was like in a 3D environment. Yeah. And so so these guys said, We'll we're experts at this, you know, we worked at Blizzard, we'll model all the characters for you. I think that this is my first lesson in don't let other people do part of a project for you. Because then when they don't deliver, then you're you're screwed. And they didn't. And I remember sitting, you know, a month later talking to the guy who was the character modeler, and he was like, Yeah, I modeled all the characters.

But then they weren't good enough, so I threw them all away and I'm starting over. And I was like, it's an interesting approach. Like maybe we could have used that, put it switched it out, whatever. And and you know, I kind of talked to him and basically what he said was like that's how we do it at Blizzard. He's like a a character modeler will model something and then they'll just throw it away and start over like three times. Yeah. I d I like I don't think the rest of us like

Jake Simpson (37:18)
Interim, you

well you got the bicep.

Mike Arkin (37:36)
I think usually I'm paid to make a game once.

Jake Simpson (37:39)
Yeah. Yeah. I know that feeling, yes. I'm well aware of that being. So we need to talk about Fox a bit because there was a game there th or a trilogy of games there that she worked on that was very well received, as I recall. You should you should definitely talk a bit about that, about Die Hard.

Mike Arkin (37:55)
the greatest Christmas movie of all time.

Jake Simpson (37:59)
Yeah.

Mike Arkin (38:01)
Yeah, that was I mean three or four things that I've worked on like that were very, very awesome games and and great experience. you know, actually I showed up at Fox, I was at s I was at Sony and I and they were moving to Northern California, so I wanted to get out. I wanted to stay in LA. And my friend Paul, who is from Acclaim, was like one of my, you know, best kind of co worker friends at Acclaim, was ready to leave Acclaim and he was interviewing at different game companies in LA.

And remember he would call me and say, okay, I've got it narrowed down to Activision or Fox. And I remember thinking I really wanted to work at Fox because it was like the Simpsons, Die Hard, things that I knew when I worked on all the Simpsons games at at Acclaim, so I knew Simpsons really well. And Activision to me was at that time thought of as a really garbage company. Right? This is the new Activision that that was started by Bobby and Howard Marks.

was you know basically brand new company. All the producers were like CPAs or lawyers or you know, because they couldn't hire anyone from the game industry because nobody wanted to work at this like crappy new company. And all the games they did were kind of fairly crappy. So I was like, okay, yeah, you should definitely talk to Fox more. Like I I just kept telling him, I think you should go to Fox. I think that would be a good opportunity for you. Like that would definitely be better than Activision. So he took the job at Fox and then he

immediately like the first thing he did was hired me to go over there. And you know, it was like, well, they had had like a marketing guy had started some games. And one of them was was they had three different diehard games that were being developed by Probe, who later, a year or two later, became part of a claim. Right as I got there, they they were like, okay, we have these three games, but

Should we combine them into one? Like, you know, there was a bunch of conversations about that. And I think the developer was pushing to combine them into one game. So we said, yeah, let's let's look let's do it. Like and there was no effort to like put them together into a single cohesive product. It was just it was so good that it didn't matter. You it was basically, yeah, it was three different games. And you could pick which one you wanted to play and they had they each had their own levels and all that. and it was one of the

One of the most fun games I've ever worked on.

Jake Simpson (40:23)
Extremely successful, wasn't it?

Mike Arkin (40:25)
It was well funny. It was very successful in Europe. It was it was remarkably unsuccessful in the US, but Europe it was published by EA. So EA obviously knows how to do that. In the US, Fox Interactive didn't have a sales and distribution, you know, machine. They used Fox Home Video. Some Yeah, somebody said, I have an idea. It's all the same buyers, isn't it? We'll just have the home video guys go out there.

And you know, it pitched this stuff, which meant that it wasn't probably wasn't all the same buyers, which meant that like they just had awful, awful sales and distribution. And so diehard sold, you know, three, four hundred thousand units in the US and like two and a half million in Europe. Because of because of VA. But I will tell I'll tell you one funny story we had early in development. And th this was a game that like the fun was there from moment one.

Right. Like they had one level built, you could play it, and it was just fun. Right. You th you know, if I heard one, you were walking around in isometric view, shooting, and you could shoot through windows, you could, you know, you could shoot cars. I mean, it was just somebody just sat there and just they just kept adding more fun to it. Even though we had the whole game was built, and then they just kept adding fun. And we just went over budget or over schedule like a year, and that was because we just kept adding more fun.

One day we had like a press preview at the office in the UK. And they went in the day before and I was like working with the team, giving them some feedback and there was a you know, you drive a car around, Die Hard Three, you drive the car around and run people over. I think, yeah, this is before

Jake Simpson (42:08)
Grand Theft. Did I die hard, huh?

Mike Arkin (42:10)
Right, it was one it was this was PlayStation one, right? I don't know. GTA was I guess was PS two. So when you ran people over, blood splattered and everything, and I said, man, you should have the blood just cover the windshield and then the windshield wipers come out and wipe the blood away. And everybody was like, that's hysterical, right? So I went back to the hotel, went to sleep. Next morning was the press thing. I go in in the morning and they're showing me the lead programmer was a guy named Simon Pick, who was a

He had stayed at the office all night and he coated in the windshield wipers and you know did a bunch of other stuff because the guy was just he would just the longer he worked on the game, the better it got. And they showed it to me and it was this windshield filled with blood and the wipers came out, and I was horrified. And I just I was like, We are so fucked. People are gonna th there will be people picketing the Fox building like that. This is so outrageous. This is like

Back then video games were definitely thought of more as a kid's thing, right? Yeah. So I'm like, we are so fucked. And I was doing the demos, like I had, you know, 20 members of the press from like Germany and the UK and the US and you know, I don't know who they were, but and I was doing the demo and I literally said, By the way, guys, this thing just went in last night. It's a mistake. We're taking it out. It's way too violent. It's horrible. I'm so sorry. Please avert your eyes.

And every one of them was like, You're fucking nuts. This is awesome. You need to leave this in. It's the greatest thing ever. We love it. Please, please, please don't take it out. I went to the team and I was like, What do you guys think? And they're Yeah, it's leave it in, please. It's like, okay, my bad. Sorry. Like, just leave it in. It's great. I'm a genius. yeah, there were no bad reviews. I mean, the the reviews for that game were like 95, 96 across the

Jake Simpson (44:06)
have a a somewhat similar story. I remember when MK I think it was MK two, I think it was MK two happened. And I remember it was it was about eighty percent complete. And I remember Neona Castro coming down and going into Ed's office. And I because we were hanging out, my cube I didn't have an office at the time, I had a cube that was right across from Ed's office and I could hear the conversation going on. And there was one finishing move where Johnny Cage would rip the torso off of

the the opponent, you know, ripped the torso literally off the legs and the legs were just sitting and then put it all over and then he dropped torso. And in the original version of it, all the intestines fell out. Scripped it up and then you stood there and looked at it and then it was just and you had this really squelchy, nasty sound that went with it. You know, it's really quite revolting sound. And I remember Neonicastro's voice going, Yeah, yeah, I think we're gonna have to lose the entrails. I think we're gonna have to lose the entrails. And I remember

Mike Arkin (44:45)
Six.

Jake Simpson (45:04)
Everyone's sort of like, no. But but Mortal Kombat and a lot of Mortal Kombat products, there was they did that that thing that that script writers do where they know they're going to get censored by the the studio at some point. So what they do is they put heavy duty stuff in there that's designed to be caught by the censors so that they allow the other stuff that normally would be said normally the censors will go, no, we can't have that. But if you've got something really egregious in there, the censors go immediately after the egregious thing and let the other thing in.

And that's really what I think this was. I think this was designed to be the the rubber ducky as it were or whatever. Yeah. And and so the guy looks at it and goes, Yeah, kinda that.

Mike Arkin (45:40)
The rubber duck, right.

Well well, you I was at a claim and I'm not credited on it, but you know, it was a small team and so I was I was involved and and the Mortal Kombat machine was like almost inside my cube, right? I think I had my cube was literally op you know, I just sat with like twelve arcade machines formed into a square and my desk was in the middle. 'Cause we had all the Midway games. 'Cause we had this you know, we had this long term deal that we had console rights to every single Midway arcade game. you know, we play Mortal Kombat all the time.

But you we what we had to do was we had to show it to Nintendo and say, Okay, so what are we allowed to do here? Right. You know, Nintendo said you can't have red blood and I think three of the fatalities had to be removed. I think it was like the one where you pull the guy's head and spine off.

Jake Simpson (46:31)
that would have been sub zero, I think.

Mike Arkin (46:32)
Yeah, sub zero. Yeah, I think it's okay to pull a head off, but I think once the spine comes with it, you've crossed the line. So so we had to remove those. And you know, obviously this is this is a legendary, you know, situation, right? Sega said, no, sorry, leave it all in. But Sega actually what they did was you had to input a code. That's right, I remember. And they were like, Why don't you just do a code that turns the blood on? And that ended up being

Jake Simpson (46:57)
The very first thing everybody did.

Mike Arkin (46:59)
Yeah,

the very first thing everybody did, but it made it more cool. Right? It like, do you have the code? Put in the code, you know. But the SNES version was better. Right? Because the SNES had higher resolution graphics and so it was c it was sharp, it had more colors, it was it looked better, but it didn't have the blood and all the fatalities. So they sold a lot of Genesis

Jake Simpson (47:22)
The first version was done by iguana, and then the second one was done by probe, I think.

Mike Arkin (47:28)
wait hold on. No, it was it was split between two developers. So Genesis I remember SNES was sculptured. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (47:39)
Sculptured.

They

didn't do a line for line port. What they did was they wrote the game they played the game and then wrote what they thought the game was and it didn't feel at all. I remember Ed being really angry about it and he w refused to actually sign off on it.

Mike Arkin (47:53)
Actually most of the midway ports were done like that. Like I was when I worked on T two the arcade game, I actually was like angry at the team like when the game was like at alpha and and it didn't feel right and I said, Well didn't you refer to the source code or they're like, we didn't look at that. Like we just rewrote the game from scratch.

Jake Simpson (48:13)
Yeah, funny. Yeah, it wasn't those those and I know that MK two there was Ed insisted you do a line for line conversion but the MK two version of it felt a lot lo more like the arcade game remember.

Mike Arkin (48:23)
No, I I don't I'm not an engineer, I don't know this stuff, but what you know, what I know is like at that time you didn't really port anything, right? Because a SNES was all I mean. When I saw the code for like T two, I just remember I don't know what that code was. It was some kind of like macro language or something.

Jake Simpson (48:32)
Yeah, you could you have to write it. Yeah. You wrote it again.

That was TMS thirty forty thirty eight four something or other. It's it was a Texas instruments chip. It was sixteen bit and it wasn't there was no floating point. it was all pure assembly 'cause I I remember going through that code, so yeah.

Mike Arkin (48:57)
Right. But so it would have been hard to actually port it, but

Jake Simpson (49:00)
You don't you what you do is you look at the functions and you go, What is this function supposed to do? right, I'll write my own version of that function. But all the functions get all called in the same order, which gives you the same feel of the game as how it's worked how it was put together.

Mike Arkin (49:12)
Yeah. I don't know anything about all that mumbo jumbo. But but Acclaim sold a fuck ton of mortal Monte, right? So, you know, that was again, that was something Acclaim was really good at was

Jake Simpson (49:19)
Yes, they did Mortal Monday.

And the the advertising was brilliant. Yeah, the advertising, the kids in New York and all the rest of it was great. And but I remember because Ed wouldn't actually sign off on the release of Mortal Kombat. and I remember it was Mortal Monday was coming and he still hadn't signed off on it on the Friday. And he got a lawsuit from a claim personally directed at him on the Friday to force him to sign off. Because you know, Monday, all the product was made, built, it was out in the world, but nobody could buy it yet, and he was

It was being held up by his signature and he he buckled over the weekend to let let it through. I don't know why, he made frickin' millions out of that, but

Mike Arkin (50:01)
Well, you know it's his art. His art what I remember was, you know, maybe you know, back then of course it took two months to manufacture the cartridges. So it wasn't the Monday that was critical, right? It was you know, two months before that, we would send this to Nintendo and Nintendo would come back and say, Hey, there's you know, crash bugs and this thing and that thing and normally you'd wait two weeks or whatever for them to do a review. But because this was meant to be one of the biggest

you know, console of all time, Nintendo was being extremely accommodating. You know, we were uploading ROMs to them, which was unheard of at the time, right? Like we had somehow worked out two guys with a modem. They would test in like two hours or something. Wow. It got to the point where I remember the f the Super Nintendo version had a couple of crash bugs. And it wasn't like you had to do some ridiculous thing to make it happen. It just would crash after a few hours of play.

And somebody called this CEO called a CEO. I mean, this was like at the Japanese CEO level and said, We gotta ship this. Like, you know, there's millions of we're gonna make ten million of these things or whatever. And they were like, Yeah, go. It's fine. Just do it. And so, you know, a lot of acclaim games, I don't know what it was like for other companies, but there were often revisions. So you'd have, you know, Rev Zero, which was full of bugs, and then like Nintendo would say, Okay, but

You've got a month, you need to update and we'll ship a Rev One. And so Mortal Kombat I think had at least at least two revisions with you know, eventually we should still

Jake Simpson (51:40)
Interesting. I don't know that. I d that is interesting. I really didn't know that there were iterations on console games. That's

Mike Arkin (51:45)
But if you were some I don't know, Mindscape or whatever, just some smaller publisher, Nintendo would just tell you to fuck off and you know get online. But Acclaim, this is one of the things that cla you again, like Acclaim did a few things really well. They had a guy in Japan who was really well known and he wa he played golf with the head of Nintendo every week. There was bottles of whiskey exchanged and I'm sure, you know karaoke, karaoke girls.

Jake Simpson (52:10)
Okay.

Mike Arkin (52:13)
You know, whatever was the the the business lubricant at the time. And so, you know, he he could do magic. You know, he

Jake Simpson (52:21)
I think just to interrupt you for a second one second, I just wanted to sort of say for some of the listeners, particularly American listeners, that karaoke in other countries is very different from how it is in in America and England. Karaoke here is in bars and you're all to having a good time together, right? Whereas in places like Japan and China, karaoke is different in that you go to a place, it's got lots of little rooms, and you go by yourself or with with like two friends into these karaoke rooms. You bring your own bottles of whiskey with you.

And you just proceed to get absolutely frickin' hammered and sing while you're there. And what also happens is that the the place where you go provides companions for you. They're not hookers, they're companions for the evening. And they will come in, laugh at your jokes, hang out with you. And they are also extremely good singers. So they'll get up and do karaoke with you. So it's like you've your own personal serenada. And these girls will just laugh and have a good time with you. And you they get paid really, really well and you you tip the crap out of them. But karaoke

in Japan and China is much more of a business oriented thing than it is here. I just wanted to sort of insert that so that

Mike Arkin (53:24)
And it's not just it's not just karaoke. I mean, you know, Japanese business at the highest levels is a very social game. And golf, you know, and maybe it's not karaoke, but that you know, there's also hostess bars, but it but an extraordinary amount of of drinking. And and I remember when I was at Crave, we'd go, you know, three, four times a year to Japan. It was just you never slept. And you just every night there was somebody else we're going out drinking with.

Jake Simpson (53:33)
Right.

Mike Arkin (53:54)
And you just you had to drink and you had to keep drinking and you had to keep up and you know, there's a lot of it's very, what's the word? It's it's very, you know Liver destroying? No, no, it's it's but it's a fr a very friendly culture. Like it is they take it upon themselves like that this is hospitality is the word I was looking for. You know, it is it is like their social obligation under penalty of extraordinary embarrassment to make sure you are having a a very, very good time.

Jake Simpson (54:11)
Be hospit hospitality. Yeah.

I remember running into that. We had to, when I was working for Second Life, we went out to Samsung in Korea, South Korea. We went to Seoul and we went to Samsung City, which is like six scripty blocks in the middle of Samsung of Seoul, that basically is just Samsung City. And they sell all sorts of stuff in Korea that they don't sell out here. You know, they sell cars and fridges and good knows what. It but the we were warned when we were before we went that you know there is this culture of of drinking in evening, night and all the rest of it.

And so we were all like really prepared to go out there and get absolutely pissed and, you know, try and keep up and these guys are really heavy at it. We went out there and we found that these guys yeah, we did it. They took us to a hostess bar and three drinks and they were completely out of their tree. And we're all just s this the Americans me and the Americans are just standing there looking at each other, going, Wow, these guys can barely stand up. They've had like three three drinks and they can barely stand up and we're like, Yeah, well, not sure what we're supposed to do here. You know, what's the the correct thing for us to do at this time? Remember that? Anyway, look, let's

So we're going running out of time here, but I wanted to jump ahead in time because I want to talk about Big Boat, which is your current thing. That's your your company right now as Big Boat and you are an independent producer and you have teams around the world that you use. And there's there's work you've been doing for Ellen, is that right?

Mike Arkin (55:40)
well that ended last year actually.

Jake Simpson (55:42)
did it? okay. Well why don't you talk a little bit about what that

Mike Arkin (55:44)
Well, so yeah, I mean when when Mumbo Jumbo ended and then we we I moved the whole team over and we got jobs for a company called Skyworks and we worked on that for about a year and a half. And then this was during, you know, 2008, whatever the financial crisis hit. So Skyworks couldn't raise money, and then that kind of wound down. But right before that wound down, the iPhone shipped and the app store shipped a year later. And so when we ran out of money, they came to us and said, We're almost out of money.

But we want to make some iPhone games. Could you guys do that? And so we we made four iPhone games in two months. Just took all these, these are like, you know, AAA engineers who have been working on these big, big things. And we said, hey, how about you we're gonna make these tiny little games? And they all thought it was kind of cool. So we did that. And then when that ended, you know, I I took the two lead guys and I said, Hey, let's let's go do something else. Like let's, you know, let's just do something. I don't know. I don't like I don't want to get a job. Kind of put ourselves out there.

as a team that could do mobile games and we had this iPhone experience. You know, it was all work from home. We immediately did one mobile game. We did some consulting on another. The other two guys like left and got real jobs at some point. But I just kind of kept going. It wasn't easy for the first few years, but, you know, I had no desire to like have a job again. Like

Jake Simpson (57:03)
You have

Mike Arkin (57:05)
Sitting

in an office. Well yeah, but I didn't want a boss. I guess let's put it. I didn't want to deal with I mean, honestly, I didn't want to deal with like the HR stuff and like fighting with people over PTO or Crave one time they wanted me to fire someone 'cause he put a twenty nine cent stamp on an envelope and they were like, That's misuse of company property. I'm like, the guy's responsible for forty eight million dollars in revenue, let him have the twenty nine cent stamp for folks. So I just you I didn't I didn't want to deal with that kind of stuff. So

So I just kept going and I just I kept looking for work and I had a I had a handful of great contractors and I did that toy stuff. I think you got involved in one of those projects and I did Warner Brothers. I had a nice connection at Warner Brothers and they had me do a couple of really interesting like prototypes and and some other small work for them. And it just kinda kept going. And like maybe every two or three years I'd get something that was kinda like a job where I worked at Spin Master for a year or two. And that was

I was a contractor in their office, but I still had, you know, big boat things were still going on and I was billing it as big boat and but that was kinda cool. I you know, I liked that 'cause I was doing toy stuff and we literally were just like sitting in the toy company, right? Like there was barely the interactive group was like three people. So it was really interesting to see how plastic things get made in China. which is, you know, the whole multi industry. Yeah, the whole melting. And I learned about that stuff 'cause I worked on

some toys that were injected molded plastic things. And you know, it's all hand painted, which is super fascinating, like action figures and stuff. There are these these Chinese women with really small hands and they hold like five paint brushes in each hand. And they, you know, you have like this ten numbered steps you have to do, like you paint the eyebrows, you paint the chin, you paint the eyes, you paint the feet, costumes, and they just they have all these different colors in their hands.

It's amazing to me. I thought there was some robot like Tesla. Some Tesla robot that was spraying all the colors on. But no, it's just it's giant factories full of people. So yeah. So, you know, I've I've done some things like that. Ellen, I worked for Ellen for about two years. that again was like a kind of a part time thing. I was in their office two days a week and which was neat. I mean, you know, I was on the Warner lot and they have a great commissary. So I enjoyed that.

But it was fun, you know, it was like, you know, it was cool to work on the Warner lot and you know, I like wearing that L and I D around my neck and walking around the lot and stuff like that. And you know, ten percent discounted to gift shop. And I worked on a couple of really cool games. Heads Up is a game that is often in the top five on the app store. So that was, you know, really neat to work on. But, you know, there was a little bit of that, like having a boss and stuff like that. Like they almost treated me like an employee, which was kind of scary. And

And you know, it's a very young company, so everyone there was like in their twenties. then there was me, I was like a hundred. But you know, for a little bit, a lot of like wokeness and political correctness and you know, you

Jake Simpson (1:00:11)
After all the all the shit that went

Mike Arkin (1:00:13)
Wow, that was yeah, that was kind of tangential. But you know, you you, Jake, and I, very very similar age and all that. You know, you would have lasted for about three days. before you you know, I never saw Ellen, I never met Ellen, but she would have personally come down, I think, to walk you out of the office. but

Jake Simpson (1:00:32)
That as a with a badge of honour, as a badge of honour.

Mike Arkin (1:00:35)
I'm sure you would have. I'm sure you would have. But but it was a really you know, it was a fascinating place. And the people were super passionate, right? Because Ellen is this like considered to be this force of good, you know, helping people out and giving money to teachers and stuff like that. So the people were just so excited to be there. Yeah, the work conditions were unbelievable. I mean, you know, blizzard people that are on strike because you they don't get a sword every year or whatever it is they're angry about. I mean, these these are people who worked twelve months a year.

And we're not allowed to take a a day off to go to the doctor, right? Like

Jake Simpson (1:01:09)
One

of the producers hadn't taken a vacation in like four years.

Mike Arkin (1:01:11)
something. You were not allowed to leave the building during work hours, right? So you could literally I couldn't go with someone there to a meeting with the developer making our game that was 15 minutes away because she wasn't allowed to leave the building. I could because I I was a contractor. But the the rule was like, what if we need you? Wow. You know, what if there's something on the show and the show's filming today and we need you. So you couldn't leave. So that was that was what people really

kind of complained about was that kind of those kind of work conditions.

Jake Simpson (1:01:42)
Yeah, pretty heavy and intense stuff.

Mike Arkin (1:01:44)
Yeah, it was kind of nuts. So yeah, but you know, like you said, I have I have teams around the world. one of my teams just spent the last three years building a game called Oddworld Soul Storm. That's now that's now done, that's shipped. We still have one guy who's kind of keeping the lights on, like the we're doing some bug fixes and things like that. But that team's basically done. You know, that team's doing something else that's like an equally exciting right now.

Jake Simpson (1:02:11)
There's work out there now. There is work out there, isn't there? I mean I've I've been noticing that there is work out there. Yeah. It's

Mike Arkin (1:02:18)
Especially if can do NFT work. There's an enormous amount of money being raised right now for things that are crypto or NFT related.

Jake Simpson (1:02:27)
I'm thinking we should put this this podcast out there as an NFT I don't even know what the hell I'm talking about.

Mike Arkin (1:02:32)
I'm not sure, yeah, if that actually makes any sense, but we should do that anyway. We could raise ten million dollars NFT podcast. That's probably true. Yeah, that's a great idea. I you know, I think there's a there's a an entire business to be made of coming up with ridiculous ideas that sound really good to investors.

Jake Simpson (1:02:53)
Mm.

Mike Arkin (1:02:56)
Internet

connected toilet paper.

Jake Simpson (1:03:00)
So you can tweet on your toilet paper.

Mike Arkin (1:03:01)
It's the it's all I know is it's

Jake Simpson (1:03:04)
You

could read tweets on your toilet paper.

Mike Arkin (1:03:06)
Retweets on you, Philip. So like some kind of digital paper thing? Yeah. It's the internet of things. So all things should be on the internet.

Jake Simpson (1:03:15)
We should just we should just get together, we form a business and do this.

Mike Arkin (1:03:19)
But I I'll I'll do one little plug. you know, Big Boat, their our latest project is a game called Audio Clash. It's a partnership with a really cool band called The Living Tombstone. And the Living Tombstone, they make a lot of interesting music that is about video games. So basically all their favorite games like Five Nights at Freddy's and Final Fantasy. And they make these really neat songs. their music videos on YouTube are like these incredible

productions. Each one is like a different art style and it's some of them are very futuristic looking. Some of them are just like very, very cool anime. So we partnered with them. We built this game Audio Clash where you build a band and you battle online against

Jake Simpson (1:04:02)
What platform's it on?

Mike Arkin (1:04:04)
it's well right now today it's PC and we're you know, we're actually currently looking for a publishing partner to help us.

Jake Simpson (1:04:11)
So can you find it on Steam or or Epic or what?

Mike Arkin (1:04:15)
You can you can go to YouTube and you can see a trailer. And if you're a publisher, you can call me and you can have a copy today to play. So we've got right now it's like a f we're in a friends and family alpha kind of thing. And so we're and we're and I'm out there hitting the bricks looking for the money. See you remember I said before about how raising the money is the hard part. It is indeed. We wanna do a sorry.

Jake Simpson (1:04:36)
I was gonna say the I think at this point it this is a kind of a good place I think to wrap up 'cause it's been an hour. and th that's the problem with with Mike and I, whenever we talk, it it's never a ten minute conversation, is it? It's always an hour. There's always s so many stories to explore, so many things to talk about. I mean, we haven't even touched current events or anything like that. I think I might have to do another one of these with you where we do current events and talk about stuff like that. But it just it's a never ending thing where we

The two of us can talk. And then we we had a friend as well, which we should talk about a little bit as well, that used to be like that as well, Stuart Gilray, who's unfortunately passed away recently, who's a very good friend to both of us. And he is another person that I wish I could have had on this podcast 'cause he's, you know, we have that same interaction of the conversation never ends, you know what I mean?

Mike Arkin (1:05:23)
Yeah, and I think the the just in general the thing about the game industry, right? Like, you know, I've worked at some really interesting places over the years, like Sony, Fox, Acclaim, you know, acclaim when a claim was seven people. And the the longer you do this, there are just so many crazy fucking stories. And I haven't even touched on at a claim all the mischief that we used to do at CES every year. At Sony the IT guy had a gun in his office.

at Fox, the so many shenanigans working in the actual Die Hard building and all the crazy things that we did during the Die Hard game. After Fox, I went to Activision for two years and got in trouble. And there's one story I still can't tell for another five years. and there's, you know, crazy things I did working on Battle Zone. at Crave, I mean, I could tell ten podcasts worth of all the absolutely ridiculous things that went on at Crave of both criminal and sexual nature. And then, you know, and then just

Ten years of of big boat, I mean doing all the you know just the crazy things I've done just to get work and and to keep working. So yeah.

Jake Simpson (1:06:32)
We'll do another one. Okay.

God. Okay. Well I want to say thank you very much, Mike, for for spending your time with us. It's really appreciated.

Mike Arkin (1:06:44)
Yeah. Thanks, Jake.