Jake Simpson (00:00)
Lee, you know what's really interesting is when you do a Google search for Lee Perry, you are the thumbs up, that's for sure.

Lee Perry (00:07)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've I've got a a whole lot of coworkers who have been who've had called sometimes called me Scratch Perry based on Lee Scratch Perry, who is kind of the the godfather of reggae, as it were. He was actually Bob Marley's producer and kind of helped develop the sound that is reggae. So I guess that a lot.

Jake Simpson (00:29)
That's fantastic.

You don't look the part though.

Lee Perry (00:33)
No, not so much. And I got married in Jamaica and oddly enough nobody like made the you know connection there. They called me Lee Van Cleve, so they were more familiar with that.

Jake Simpson (00:41)
You are very pale and you look like you'd explode if you went out and

Lee Perry (00:43)
No, no, no.

That is.

That is true. And I've I've been living in Mexico for like almost six years now and getting a lot of sun and this is me tan, so yeah.

Jake Simpson (00:57)
So that's an interesting thing. So you're living in Mexico now, as I understood it, and correct me if I'm wrong, the original plan though was for you and your wife to experience different areas of the world and you were going to spend six months in lots of different places, is that right?

Lee Perry (01:12)
Yeah, we pretty much sold you know, ninety five percent of our stuff and our plan was to come here, spend a year, then be buck around, try another city for a year, try another

Jake Simpson (01:23)
But you yeah, so basically you got derailed by by finding the perfect place up front.

Lee Perry (01:28)
Yeah, basically. And and we travel all over the place still. I think we've s we've spent, you know, at least a week or so in man, I don't know, thirty five, forty different cities within Mexico and the whole kind of area down here or whatever and, you know, very familiar with it. But I think in terms of a place that you can live and easily access and have, you know, visitors easily and stuff, then yeah, Porta Verda is a pretty awesome place for for just as a base. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (01:57)
I I can imagine, yeah. Okay. All right. Well I'm trying to think of how long we've known each other now. it's been a few years.

Lee Perry (02:06)
Gotta

say probably two thousand era.

Jake Simpson (02:10)
Yeah, I would have been would have been the end of my time, I guess, at EA, I think, is probably when I first came across you, I think. It might have been at at one of the GDC parties or something like that, I think. Maybe. something like that. Okay. so you've had quite a varied career, you've had quite a lot of things, you've done some stuff. looking through your game list. Yeah, there's some there's some big stuff there. Some really good stuff.

Lee Perry (02:34)
This

I kinda evolved initially as you know, I'd always wanted like any romantic person getting into games. Like I I got game ideas, I'm gonna I wanna be a a game designer, but as it turns out, you know, nobody really just hires, you know, the idea guy. Obviously that's a million inside jokes there in the industry. So I kinda came at it sideways and from I was like, Okay, well I'll do art and then

you know, when I get further along I'll eventually people will value my ideas more. So I came at it w my first real love for this was kind of doing three D modeling, which I dabbled in back in, you know, nineteen ninety three, ninety four when it was still kind of this

Jake Simpson (03:19)
The indigo time, wasn't it? That's S G I Indigo.

Lee Perry (03:22)
Yeah, so I came at it from this angle of doing three D modeling where I had this this Macintosh back in, you know, the very early nineties and there was a program called Raydream Designer for it, which was kind of this early three D modeling program that was on this Mac and comparatively it was really inexpensive compared to something like, you know, three D studio, which was, you know, many, many, many thousands of dollars or whatever. This was like a two hundred dollar, you know, crap program, I guess.

but my timing was just super f super lucky in that I started doing some 3D modeling right about the same time that the the original PlayStation was about to come out. And so all these development houses were kind of like you know willing to jump through hoops to hire anyone who knew what a polygon was, basically. And so I just got super lucky. you know, it didn't even occur to me that you you could get hired to make video games.

Until I walked into this Barnes and Noble once and the very first issue of Next Generation magazine was on a shelf. And I I guess that was the same group back then as like Edge at the time, but not entirely sure. but in the back of Next Generation magazine there were like several pages of hiring ads. And I opened that up and like my

brain just exploded because I was already, you know, trying to draw and make 3D models and stuff. And it just never even occurred to me that this was a thing you could do. And so right after high school, I worked very briefly at an advertising agency making some car ads and doing like desktop publishing type graphics. And so I had access to color printers, which at the time was just kind of this stupid novelty. Nobody had a color printer back then, but I had one sitting near my desk.

And so I put together this kind of full color booklet portfolio project thing where it just showed all these 3D models I made and like my resume and it was all in this nice little color package and I I went home and like within a couple of days of seeing all these want ads, you know, this became my life, and I FedExed I wanna say thirty, thirty-two something to every every single person who had a wanting and wanted

hiring ad in the back of Next Generation. And I had eighteen interviews lined up within two days of Yeah, I mean like the next night was, you know, the first foot kind of shiny called me. And then it was just a a stream of people who were like, Yes, yes, get in or whatever. And so it was just this whirlwind overnight super lucky timing. I mean, I I don't even know what like a modern equivalent would of that would be where

Jake Simpson (05:53)
You know, the cow.

think it would be the word NFT.

Lee Perry (06:15)
Exactly. Yeah. Like if you were just the Bitcoin NFT guru when all of this happened, I guess. But yeah, so anyway, it it more than anything, it was just super super lucky timing. I benefited from that. Nobody really taught that stuff, and so by the time I got in there and was doing this for several years, there were other people who were coming out of school to learn some three D modeling and stuff, but yeah, just super fortuitous timing.

Jake Simpson (06:41)
Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of the old timers I know have that kind of story in terms of it's not always what you know, it's who you know, but in your case it is what you know, but you rolled along just that right moment, you know, inwards yeah. Yeah. So and so where I mean, talk about shiny, that's an that's an old name, isn't it? Goodness me. So where did you end up?

Lee Perry (07:01)
my first job was in Santa Monica at Black Ops Entertainment, making some again, original PlayStation games. They had just made this game Agile Warrior and so I I worked on this game called Black Dawn, which was kinda like a helicopter simulator and

Jake Simpson (07:18)
Black Dawn does sound very helicoptery, doesn't it?

Lee Perry (07:21)
Yeah, it does. It totally does. And I loved modeling like mechanical stuff. So I was just cranking out, you know, military looking stuff. I had my Janes guy next to me and making you know, Soviet tanks and anti air stuff or whatever. But I only ended up staying there for about a year or so. it wasn't a particularly good fit for me. I had this bizarre thing where about that same time Quake Quake Test came out.

And I was just super nuts for it. I was like, this is just so freaking great. And so I really wanted to work on that more than, you know, it wasn't really my jam to sit here making, you know, armored cars and stuff over and over again. so I sent some three D models and stuff that I did to id at the time. And I had this this really kind of funny interaction there where we hit it off like immediately, like, this is great, you know, and I was

essentially hired, but I needed to go in for an they just wanted to meet me in person and basically make sure I wasn't you know, I don't know, the a nut. and so I was talking with Jay Wilbur at the time and he's like, Yeah, so this was like on a Wednesday, and I was supposed to be there on a Friday. And that Thursday is the day that John Romero left. And also like Tom Hall and, you know, a couple other people and they had like this little

you know, little exodus or whatever. And so, you know, the day before I was supposed to hop on a plane to go down there, I get this call from Jay Wilburn. He's like, okay, we're gonna put this on hold for a little bit. We don't know how this is gonna affect the the company or not. So as it turned out, the the long story short, that's essentially opened up the door for where Paul Steed ended up going in. That was that was the slot that I was gonna be going in there. But it was kinda amusing in there.

I moved shortly after that because Squaresoft, I sent the same same stuff to Squaresoft, and they had an office there in LA. And I was a huge Squaresoft fan. And this was in the Final Fantasy VII years as well. And so they made me an offer to go over there. And that was much more exciting than what I was doing. So I moved over there and I moved apartments. And this wasn't the era where you could keep your phone number and stuff. So my address changed and my phone number changed. And as it turned out,

During the same time people, John Romero and those guys were trying to contact me and my old information, they just couldn't get a hold of me because I just moved right after this or whatever. So anyway, so I worked as Quareso for a year and a half as a technical artist in the R and D department during the Final Fantasy seven years, but not directly on the the that game. Can't really claim that, which is unfortunate 'cause what a great game. but then they they were gonna move.

to Hawaii and everybody was gonna go work on the Final Fantasy movie. And that just wasn't my bag. I wasn't particularly interested in working on movies. I was a I'm a game nut, wanted to work on games. And so rather than move to Hawaii, I was like, okay, here I am yet again on a a job home.

Jake Simpson (10:35)
Just have to interfere interrupt for one second. Okay, so I have to tell everybody that that you know, Lee is the only person I think I know who could make, yeah, I didn't really want to move to Hawaii a positive. I mean, it's just you know, you think about that, you think, yeah, my company was moving me to Hawaii and they probably would have paid my relocation, blah blah blah. I could have been on Hawaii. But but no, Lee is the one person I know. And and the thing about it is you make it sound

Plausible and and yeah, that was probably the correct thing. Yeah, you should probably shouldn't have gone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you shouldn't have gone to Hawaii thinking, What am I thinking? Yeah. But

Lee Perry (11:10)
sure. Yeah. I I mean I'm a I'm a game nut. I w if I wanted to work in, you know, video in, you know, graphics for movies, I could have just stayed where I was in LA and done that, you know.

Jake Simpson (11:21)
though, I I find it amazing though that how many video game developers are in fact frustrated movie makers. Have you have you I mean you got to see the the number of cutscenes and all the rest of it that people trying to stick in games that aren't necessary and it's purely because, you know, people fancy themselves as a director or or whatever. Yeah. And I think it's all down to the to the groupies personally, that's just my thinking. But yeah

Lee Perry (11:37)
Absolutely.

Well it worked out true because truly because a lot of my friends who did move there, you know, were there for six months to, you know, eight, nine months and they were just sick of it. They're like, you know, they've they got the little island fever where they're like, I can drive around this entire island in fifteen minutes and you know, and then fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. And so yeah, so that didn't work out particularly well. and then I I heard these stories about ion storms starting in Dallas.

and so I contacted them.

Jake Simpson (12:15)
Huge, huge top floor layout, right?

Lee Perry (12:16)
Yes.

Yeah, so as soon as I contacted them, they were like, you're the you're the dude we've been trying to find for a while or whatever. And so I hopped back to Dallas, which is actually where I'm originally from. So Iron Storm was you know, it's quite jeez, what does he say about Ironstorm? It w it was a roller coaster, but I was not on the the infamous Daikatana team at the time. I was an

at the time the lead artist and then later art director for Anachronox, which was this truly just beloved project for the people who who worked on it. pardon? No, that was Tom Hall.

Jake Simpson (13:00)
I

was a Tom also. of course Tom. I always get too confused for some reason. I don't know why. Tom's gonna give me grief now. Okay.

Lee Perry (13:10)
yeah, so I mean we had this just like I was there for about three and a half years and it was just like the front row of just some of the most epic video game industry drama, you know, imaginable at the time with, you know everybody taking their shots at John Romero or Daikatana and you know

Jake Simpson (13:29)
Top water explosion.

Lee Perry (13:31)
Yes, yeah, yeah. Just endless amounts of stuff. But but us on an Akronox, you we pretty much had this just amazing little family group that we all got along really well. And it was almost like it was almost like a version of just college or just entering the industry for so many new hires. I mean, we would hire people it's not like there were a lot of really experienced candidates to hire at the time, so

We hired all kinds of like young, promising people and kind of worked on training them, et cetera. And so the the group of people that worked on Anachronox are like a cross section now of fantastic content people across the industry, you know, from Blizzard and Epic and it just yeah, the the roots run really deep from the Anachronox team. So

Jake Simpson (14:22)
Do you do any reunions?

Lee Perry (14:25)
Yeah,

yeah, yeah. So every GDC, the Anachronox group, whoever's there, we get together and do a Anachronox dinner every year at GDC, which is just it feels like a family reunion every time. I mean it's like a they're you know, i you get really lucky every once in a while if you get on a project, you know, that's the right size and you feel this deep personal connection with the people you're working with.

Jake Simpson (14:49)
Making progress, you know, all all rowing in the same direction.

Lee Perry (14:52)
Yeah,

yeah and you're doing interesting stuff and brave steps and you know, there was a lot of things that went wrong with that project, but the team wasn't it. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (15:02)
Team, wasn't it?

Yeah, I mean I know what you mean. I from I have some friends at Raven that I still to this day, every year we have a a a get together in Vegas, a long weekend in Vegas, where we all come and and hang out and drink a lot of beer and and smoke cigars and have expensive meals and talk a lot of bollocks because we're really good at that. Turns out I'm really, really good at that. but yeah, it it's it is weird, like, you know, stores of being in the trenches. I mean, yes, not real trenches, obviously, but you know, for video game developers, this is as much as you're really gonna get. and I think

That feeling of connection and family, I totally understand. I've made some mistakes in my career, to be perfectly honest with you, where I went to individual studios, I went and took a job because I was looking for that feeling again. And I didn't do my technical evaluation correctly of the company and then got in there, found, yeah, the team's really fun and we can go out and have beers and, you know, and get on well and everything else. But this company's never going to ship anything.

And you know, you only realise that this is a slow dawning that happens six months in and you're like, crap, what do I do now? Yeah. To be honest, that's actually why I'm in stuck in Arizona. It's because I did this in two thousand and eight. We bought a house and then the the market imploded, you know, there's the the the bubble, the real estate bubble. I'm suddenly a hundred and fifty thousand dollars underwater on my house and I'm it's clear the company I'm working for is never gonna ship anything. And it was like a well, what do we do? 'Cause it's not like there's a lot of other gaming development in Arizona to go to.

Right. So I ended up working for Second Life for two years remotely, which was kind of an interesting thing. But anyway, it's not about me.

Lee Perry (16:38)
And definitely back then, you know, there it wasn't so much remote work, was it? You know very recent development at best, yeah.

Jake Simpson (16:48)
Yeah, that's definitely true. So, all right, an Equinox, it's out there. And at that point it looks like the writing is on the wall for Ionstorm. I mean by then the top corner thing has broken.

Lee Perry (17:03)
Yeah. Well I I had a you know something I've got something I'm not particularly proud of is that I left Ionstorm just before Anacronox shipped. And it was mostly just in the fact that we knew the company was shutting down. Everybody there knew this this is a doomed thing.

and then I had some old coworkers who I worked with back at Squaresoft who were doing a startup in LA and they wanted to wanted me out there and I, you know, hit it off with them really well. And so it was really hard at that point to turn down a promising job to stick out at a failing company when you know the moment you ship this thing, you're you're fired.

Jake Simpson (17:53)
You've got to do what's right for you. I mean it's just

Lee Perry (17:57)
So it was a tough call. And I I really, you know, in a lot of ways I regret I regret it, but I don't know. I think I think most people, if you were in that situation, you get a lot of variety of, you know, of re reactions to it. But long story short, I moved back to LA to work with some old c Squaresoft friends who were doing like a they did a racing game and sort of worked on a racing game and made tracks and stuff and this was

PlayStation 2 era, I think. but they weren't necessarily the greatest in terms of

Setting up like future projects 'cause after we made that first game it was like, crap, we everybody go home, we don't have any money kind of thing or whatever. So yeah, it was it was a one

Jake Simpson (18:48)
Fourth, you know, looking forward and all the rest of it and prepping up your next project after this one. Yeah.

Lee Perry (18:52)
Yeah, it was all hands on deck to ship this one game. And then after that it was kind of like, huh. All right, well, that didn't work out. So during that period is when I actually started doing a little bit of contract work for Epic, and that's where kind of Epic came in the picture. In that there was an artist from back at Ionstorm that I hired early on about midway through an acronaut called Chris Perna, who's just this

Fabulously, ridiculously talented artist and

Jake Simpson (19:23)
So we we hate him already then, yeah? Probably very good looking too. I hate them all. Yeah, okay.

Lee Perry (19:27)
No, Chris and I.

I mean Chris is like, you know, a huge impact on why Epic had kind of a a good run in terms of art and why Gears of War ended up looking at cell at stuff. Because he went to Epic and while he was there, he's like, Hey man, we're we're trying to do some other stuff. You know, do you want to do some contract work? And it was like, Yeah, cool, because I the company, like I said, in LA was

writing was on the wall there. So I was doing some contract work for Epic, and then we started doing some interesting stuff with making this kind of Lego-like structures where Epic at that time was kind of making levels that looked you know like you know, like Quake 2 stuff using this very low detail BSP

Kind of geometry. Everything was really simple and you know, you looked at it and you're like, yeah, this is kind of that Quake era.

Jake Simpson (20:29)
limited number of polygons that you could actually render and then there's also that that you know full screen pixel pipeline costs and you know, yeah, there was I remember that.

Lee Perry (20:39)
And so, Chris and I started working on this thing where I would make, you know, kinda modular bits of geometry that you would kinda link together to make much more detailed, dense kind of levels than what people were making at the time. And so I would make these sets of modular geometry and then Chris would like assemble them and light and then make these these scenes in a in the level editor that were just jaw dropping at the time.

Jake Simpson (21:06)
That that's sounds very similar to the way that but people put detail on on spaceship models for for you know st Star Wars and movies like that where they build the model and they but they put they've got blocks of stuff that they just deposit on it. I mean I understand now is that that Lucasfilm actually has these digitally now and does the same thing digitally. But but it sounds like you were doing that for level design early on, which is interesting. I don't think I've I don't think I've ever actually heard anybody do that before.

Lee Perry (21:33)
Yeah, nobody nobody was really doing this at the time, making like this modular separate little meshes where you duplicate wall pieces. Stamp an arch and you're gonna put these or whatever. but you know, now it's pretty standard stuff. Nobody was really doing it at the time, and it kind of rewrote what Epic was doing with their levels at the time. And so they were really interested in hiring me for a bit. and I was kind of reluctant. I I had some

I don't know. I had ideas about North Carolina where Epic was located that like I was like, I don't know if when I live there. but then the company was out eventually, like it was as we were expecting, and kinda had all these big layoffs and laid off everybody. and it was the very same week that Disney laid off like five hundred people, animators and artists and stuff at the same time. So right where I was living was

Flooded with unemployed people, just like

Jake Simpson (22:36)
With a skill set that's that's comparable.

Lee Perry (22:38)
Probably

that same time period. So I was like, okay, well I was like I'm sure I can probably find a job here, but it you know, I'm not gonna be able to like really make any kind of demands here. You know, I'm one of a

Jake Simpson (22:50)
Your

bargaining position has been somewhat weakened, yeah.

Lee Perry (22:53)
Yeah. And so, you know, I did a little more research on, you know, North Carolina and, you know, was talking to my wife about it and you know, she was super reluctant about it as well. And then you know, the real estate and stuff out there. It's like, you know, we could actually like have a house out here and like, you know, like a grown up living situation instead of, you know, this

Jake Simpson (23:15)
I again to insert, a a friend of mine actually has just moved from is just in the process of moving from Seattle to North Carolina. He's actually moved from a company that he was at in Seattle and his has he's got epic epic snatching up. But he was saying that for what he what he's paid for two acres in Seattle, he can get fifty in North Carolina. And I'm like fifty? What do you need fifty acres for? And he looks at me dead on and just goes, Well, I hate people.

Yeah, okay, fair enough. Yeah, fair enough. Anyway, yeah, but yeah, North Carolina. It's I mean it's going up in price now, but it's still way cheaper than anybody else.

Lee Perry (23:53)
Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. and so, yeah, we so we were like all right let's go ahead and and do this and so I d I left my my previous job and very easy to remember when because it was on September tenth of two thousand one. Wow. And so the next morning, unemployed is was nine eleven. And

you know, everything was just just so much. my God, what what does all this mean? You know. It's like I remember, yeah. I do remember. Yeah. And so, yeah, that was like my first day of, you know, not being employed and, you know, before moving to Epic. But l luckily that didn't in any way affect me going to Epic, because I was just terrified. I was like, my God, I don't know how this affects me, but, you know, what if the job I just you know

Jake Simpson (24:52)
It's signed off or it's not there invoice.

Lee Perry (24:53)
Yeah.

Yeah. But everything was on on Target there, so I showed up at Epic that the following week, right after nine eleven. And and that was I at that point with hopping between different companies I was very frustrated and I was kind of in this mindset that I'm not sure I want to be in this industry anymore. And I don't know necessarily

what I wanna do, maybe I wanna try and go into the publisher side or something and just mix it up because you know, every time I shipped a game, something happened, there were big layoffs, then people moved or whatever. And, you know, we were bebopping around the country, you know, every year, year and a half then or whatever. And it was it was really frustrating. And so

Jake Simpson (25:44)
I know the feeling. I I went from Chicago to Madison, Madison, San Francisco, San Francisco to here, here to LA back again. I know exactly what you mean. We are nomadic. I mean, the games industry for larger projects tends to be quite nomadic anyway. But you know, now of course we're in this, you know, remote working thing zones less so, but still, that time, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Lee Perry (26:05)
about yeah and I've and you know I've been with my my wife since we were seventeen, we're high school sweethearts and y every time this would happen it was like uprooting her and any chance she had of having you know this you know career. She was she had all of her pre dental school and psychology degree and all this stuff that she was you know gonna be you know acting on it every time. it's like nope, not

We're moving here. Nope. Now we're moving here. Nope. Now we're so I was I was actually pretty ready to get out of the industry if this epic thing did not work out. Right. but as it happened, that was the start of you know almost eleven years of working there. And you know, I just got I d I don't know. I mean super lucky. I mean, obviously you throw enough darts at some point you might hit a you know company that really takes care of their employees.

but Epic was the kind of the company that did all the the all the the promises they you know they made at the time. Yeah. Because everybody you would work for, you know, we're gonna have bonuses and blah blah blah. And like anyway, everybody's fired, go home. You know, bonuses coming up. Yeah. And but Epic you got there.

Jake Simpson (27:12)
Actually followed through one.

Yeah. Well I believe a bonus when you put it in my hand.

Lee Perry (27:28)
Yeah, yeah. So when I got to Epica, I was employee number seventeen at the office there. And, you know, everybody was making, you know, really good money on, you know, Unreal Tournament and stuff at the time. You could look around and you could see that people were being, you know, taken care of. And again, it was very much like like the Anacronox thing of like a family. I mean, everybody knew each other, we all knew each other's wives. We'd go to d you know, dinners and

Jake Simpson (27:58)
social events with each other as well as just work.

Lee Perry (28:00)
I mean, whenever somebody was, you know, we were looking to hire somebody, I mean, they would come in, we'd all go to dinner with them with, you know, our whole, you know, nobody really had kids there at the time, I guess, or whatever, but it was still like it was just one it was a big family thing. I know it's such a cliche, but man, it truly was that. so yeah, that was like the the start of this kind of magic streak.

where the stuff that I was working on then, making these kind of modular environments, kind of resulted in us tearing down a lot of stuff that we're working on at the time with old techniques and kind of reshaping how we built, you know, environments and worlds in general at the time or whatever. So it was a really interesting creative time to be doing this sort of stuff.

we were working at the time on something that was

kinda the predecessor to Gears of War, that got iterated on so many times, you know, nobody would think of it as Gears of War now because it was much more like Battlefield nineteen forty two at the time.

Jake Simpson (29:22)
Big open world thing, right. Yeah.

Lee Perry (29:24)
Vehicles and

Jake Simpson (29:26)
Just gonna interrupt you. Yeah, because it was called something else. It's called war. It was just called war. Unreal Tonight. That's right. That's right. That's right, because that was Unreal Tonight. So I'm gonna I'm gonna jump in here because I wanna tell you a story. And and this you may know this one may not, I don't know. But around that 2000, that that just after you'd started, G Epic span off a new company called Sion. Yes, Scion. and GDC that not G3 that year, Cliffe.

ping pinged me and said, I need to talk to I to talk to And I told you, okay, fair enough. Went to talk to him, sit down, talk to him. And he offered me the position of CEO of Scion. This is before Mike Caps took it on. Right. And I just the thing is though, literally that weekend I had signed the deal to buy a house in San Francisco. Because I'd moved to EA to do Sims, The Sims. And I said, I just can't do it. I can't walk away. I'm I'm elbow deep in this. I'm, you know, I'm building all these tools. They've got

30 content creators are coming along and I get in like three months and I have have my stuff done. I can't walk away from this. Plus I just bought a house. And and I remember Cliffy looking at me going, These opportunities don't come along, dude. And I'm yeah, I know, I'm sorry. I I'll you know, when Sims is I'll come talk to you. But by that time, my caps are taking it on. And now I'm looking at my caps' life and thinking, Well, that was a that was a mistake on my part, wasn't it? That was a that was a big like, yeah, I should have taken that, shouldn't I? Never mind. Instead of getting let off by EA.

But nine hundred other people bef so they didn't have to pay us a bonus. I mean it's like yeah. Yeah. Should have should have taken that gig. Anyway Yeah, I just thought I'd drop that one in there 'cause it's it's So there you are, you're working on on warfare.

Lee Perry (30:56)
Yeah, it is a lot of that.

yeah, so about that same time Microsoft is, you know, coming at us and they're very interested in, you know, they want to know what we could do that, you know, basically for the Xbox three sixty. and so we started really kind of reshaping what we were working on to fit that kind of business opportunity. And Unreal Warfare really wasn't kind of that at the time.

and so, you know, we needed something that was much more, you know, what gears ended up being.

Yeah. And Yeah. And we started reworking, you know, this was all this time period was right in sync with everybody's heads just exploding over what id was doing at the time with the new Doom normal mapping and you know, everything looking really high detail. I mean, we were doing some pretty high detailed stuff for Unreal Tournament two thousand three and two thousand four.

Jake Simpson (31:43)
Sorting as it were.

Lee Perry (32:10)
in terms of like polygon density and interesting environments and stuff. But normal maps, you know, hit where you had id and then the Chronicles of Riddick game as well and stuff. yeah, just gorgeous stuff. And we were like, okay, so we started kind of taking gears in this direction of, you know, doing normal map stuff. And that actually you know it's really interesting how many things about gears of war

came from wanting to show off art. You know, I've talked about this numerous times, but we kind of shaped the game, it informed everything about the gameplay, et cetera, in that, you know, we didn't want to be shooting tiny little guys on the horizon.

Jake Simpson (32:58)
One pixel a pixel hump, basically.

Lee Perry (33:00)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. We wanted like really big characters on screen. And so that informed, you know, c our combat distances. That informed, you know, tight cameras. Yeah, so it informed, you know, us using cover. It informed, you know, so many things about the game was just how do we show off really pretty characters in these tight little environments and make everything feel really like intimate and you know, we want big characters on screen and so forth.

So it was pretty interesting, it informed our controls, the cover system slamming in the covers you can see like your character, you know, and

Jake Simpson (33:35)
There was some great set pieces as well. I mean, I I think Halo as well. Halo was one of those ones where I mean, you know, some people will say that that maybe Half Life started the set piece environments. and certainly Halo did an extremely good job of little small cinematic set pieces. and I think that for me, Gears was always one gorgeous Vista set piece after another.

Lee Perry (34:01)
And early on, you know, I mentioned before, you know, my my my friend Chris Perna, who, you know, was one of the key artists at Epic at this time or whatever, he built most of those set pieces. I mean, we would he would take like a couple of pieces of modular stuff and he just had the knack for assembling exactly like that. You you show the scene and you're looking around and you're like, Holy holy shit, this is just this amazing Yeah. Yeah. And so he really

Jake Simpson (34:25)
It's gorgeous.

Lee Perry (34:29)
made a lot of that happen and of course we you know what our characters looked like, you know. Which now, you know, a lot of people like, they're kind of these big, thick, meaty characters or whatever. But at the time that was still you know, that was super new at the time. It's easy.

Jake Simpson (34:44)
didn't have much in the way of Warhammer floating around at that time to to compare it against the Yeah.

Lee Perry (34:48)
These big like slabs of dudes or whatever and everything was just like you know the

Jake Simpson (34:54)
There was an abundance of testosterone floating around. Kept watting off the screen as it were.

Lee Perry (34:58)
It

was, it was, yeah. And so it's something that's r you know, that it really painted like on the surface, you know, this very bro game or whatever, but it was still under it was a whole lot of interesting new gameplay at the time. That was that was mostly what I ended up doing. I was lead level designer on the first gears, and so you know, ended up trying to like work with

handful of level designers that we had at the time to make you know that kind of key to figure out how cover for example and tight combat distances and how all of that kind of affected you know how we built all of all of the world and that stuff is so buried in my head I swear when it came time to do the strategy guide for it you know my good friend Josh J actually he

He took wireframe pictures of the tops of the maps and it was dense wireframe. It just looked like a gray mash and he printed them out and then I would go over with a pen and like draw the actual wires on it just because I knew so in detail like what all of those maps were, even through this cloud, this haze of of polygons.

Jake Simpson (36:17)
I remember I was I actually ended up I at at Epic at some point, I don't even remember what I was there for, but I remember wandering around upstairs and talking to Cliff Cliffy and he showing me a top down representation of one of these and it it honestly looked like a platformer. Because of the way that you would move from from from cover to cover. It looked like you were actually, you know, one of those old school z ZX Spectrum platformers from years ago.

Lee Perry (36:36)
Yeah, yeah.

Jake Simpson (36:47)
And I was like he's saying, yeah, this is basically a platformer in a different dimension. I was like, Wow, that is, you know, that's fascinating to see how you I mean, obviously it's not cover mechanics and you've got reload mechanics and all that kind of stuff that's gone in there, but it's I remember seeing that and going, Wow, okay. Wow, you know I I'll tell you a really a funny story for me that that always makes me laugh when we talk about top down stuff just as in service. I have a friend, this is an old time game designer from England and he was working many years ago on a golf game.

And he was laying out 3D environments for the for you know for the Gulf the Gulf thing and he had a an art manager that he was working with who was, by all reports, a very unpleasant and toxic individual, a really, really nasty guy. And so what this guy did as an Easter egg was he when he was laying out all the trees in this in one particular level, the trees, if you look at it from the top down, actually spell out such and such as a

Well, it's a nice worker. This guy's name is a and it's the thing is that you never see it from the top down, so you only ever see the trees on the side. So you can't see that it's actually spelling out letters. I always thought that was a beautiful Easter egg, but never mind. Okay, yeah, it's but so yeah, gears. So I mean it looked beautiful. I mean it had it did it have HDR? Because I seem to remember it be having been one of the first products that had HDR.

Lee Perry (38:05)
No, not back then. I I seem to recall about Gears two getting a demo from I wanna say NVIDIA showing HDR for the first time. We'd seen it on like some monitors. If I I wanna say might have been Dell. I don't remember somebody had the new HDR monitors at the time, but yeah, it wasn't quite then for for one. But it was a really magic period for sure. we I mean

Jake Simpson (38:28)
Did you know? Did you know? No

doubt. Did you did you know? Because there's some I mean, like with video with movies, for example, you never really know what you've got until it's out there in the world and people are actually like playing it. and I think video games, it's kind of similar, although I mean I I remember being you know walking past all the Mortal Kombat guys and knowing that what they had was mind-blowing. I knew that, you know, we all knew that just before before it went out, we knew it was. we didn't with NBA Jam, mind.

We did with Mortal Kombat. And I wonder, did you guys know that what you have was gold? Did you know that it was what it was going to be?

Lee Perry (39:02)
The the year before we shipped that E three was just the best E three of of of for me anyway, of my career. I I don't imagine ever being able to surpass that. We had this demo set up and when people had come in to see it, it was the age of everything being in a closed in little theater and

It was just like jaws dropped every time we showed that demo. I mean, we couldn't like push journalists out of the the room fast enough with you know, follow up questions, etc. I mean it that E3, everything was just on fire and it really set off to the five of us, I guess, who kind of sat in there doing that demo. it was really clear that we had something magic at the time and we left that.

And it definitely helped drive the amount of work that we put in in the next you know, fourteen months or so, I guess, to kind of live up to the amount of hype. I mean, it every show in there, I mean, we we had things like, you know.

You walk up to a door and you don't just open the door, you can shoot the door with your shotgun and it splinters and blows out. And like every time you do that and you just see my god, everybody just erupts in there at the time. And so yeah, I think we had a really good clue by that E three that like we were working on something that could be a major hit. And Yeah, it was it was y you just don't get that very often, you know.

Jake Simpson (40:45)
No, that's what's saying, it's like knowing that what you've got is explosive, yeah, is Yeah. I I agree. I I mean there's a lot of people who delete them delude themselves into believing what they've got is explosive, but you know, not a lot of people can actually follow

Lee Perry (40:58)
from a personal career point, Gears was this massive inflection for me because I had been doing art and then about Anacronox I started building environments, but they were still basically art at the time. It was you know, because it was a role-playing game, so it was just about making pretty sets. when I hit

Epic, we didn't really have job titles when we first started working there. You know, there's 17 of us and we're just people who do things. but I spent a lot of my time building levels because I was making all these modular, you know, set pieces, etc. And so for gears, I was a lead level designer. But still in the back of my head was, you know, this 18 year old version of me who really wanted to do design stuff like

Big picture design things and like functionality of you know just how things function. and so one of the biggest things that happened with Gears of War One was we only had a couple of programmers through there was a stretch of production where there were only, geez, I want to say three, maybe four programmers full-time working on it. And then we had a whole bunch of you know artists and designers cranking on stuff or whatever, but seriously under.

undermanned in terms of programming. And so we had a lot of issues of like, you know, how do we who's doing light switches and you know, how are we spawning enemies and like the basic scripting and code that goes into making you know scenarios play out well? And we didn't want to harass programmers to, you know, make you know the the enemies spawning, etc. And so I kind of drew on

this old PlayStation One game called Carnage Heart, where you have these little mechs and you write you write the AI for these little robots that fight each other. And it was kind of this very drag and drop little node-based visual system of, you know, can I see an enemy? Yes, do I have ammo? Yes. If not, do this, etc. And I played the hell out of that game. I loved doing the logic of

you know, making something function, I was just super intimidated by anything that was just text. I look at a wall of text and code and I would just freak out. It was like this is just magic runes and sorcery to me. I don't I don't get it

Jake Simpson (43:32)
forty years

of writing code, you're absolutely right. It is magic, sorcery and ruins, and you do have to sacrifice animals on a you know on a full moon. There's no doubt about it.

Lee Perry (43:44)
Yeah.

Especially professional code, you know, where people are doing things like really optimally.

Jake Simpson (43:49)
Do not

kid yourself, most of it is not professional at all.

Lee Perry (43:52)
Yeah.

But I mean, especially if you look at something, you know, like Tim Sweeney's doing or whatever, it's just like I don't even know what you're trying to achieve with

Jake Simpson (44:01)
Do I actually Tim has I love Tim, but he has a lot to answer for with some of the some of the coding style he's envisioned. He he espouses, yeah.

Lee Perry (44:10)
It's I mean as a a random little aside, at one point I moved into an office that was Tim's old office, and on the desk there were three of these giant white paper desk mats like pads. And it looked like if somebody was doing like a fifth element sci fi movie of something and some and described to somebody, write a bunch of random stuff on this this paper. 'Cause you look at it in the sheet, wall to wall is just just

Characters just I mean like numbers and letters and symbols

Jake Simpson (44:44)
So a a paper version of the matrix.

Lee Perry (44:46)
Yeah, I mean there it yeah, totally. And there's no commenting or anything on it. And I'm like, what the hell is this? It's just a wall of text.

Jake Simpson (44:54)
You know, honestly, nothing's changed.

Lee Perry (44:57)
Yeah. And then I I flip I lift up the pad and the whole pad is full of that and the pad under it is full of that and the pad under that is full of that and I grabbed about three of my my level designer friends. I'm like, guys, you have gotta see this and we walk in and we're like What just sorcery is this? I mean there's not a word

Jake Simpson (45:16)
Sold that.

Lee Perry (45:18)
my god, yeah. Just no idea. I still don't even know what the hell like voodoo was on this page. Because it's not like there was, you know, it's here's a method for ray tracing, you know, caustics or something. It's just like just utter voodoo. so anyway, I the text scared the shit out of me. The text-based coding or whatever, but doing logic for how things function, you know, I was always a always a big fan of that. And so to

Super close friends of mine, James Golding and Ray Davis, who were both the main programmers on Gears there at the time. we got together and the three of us kind of came up with like, you know, let's make a tool where people can write code who are scared shitless of coding, and let's turn all of these designers with you know ideas into people who can make functional stuff in a game. And I was kind of the

the guinea pig for it. So it was like, okay, well let's in initially all of this was was a way to, you know, handle things like light switches and spawn an enemy. And when the player walks into this room, they touch this area, and then this wall over here explodes, and then we spawn three of these type of enemies, etc. You know, really kind of basic stuff like that. and we were able to give that to you know everybody in the the staff and

the level designers and they were just going nuts with it. So we had a really common pattern at Epic of

arguing like you know as every company's going to have about features. You know, every feature began on an email thread with heated theoretical debates about whether it's cool or not, and just it it was it was pretty hellish. I mean in terms of you know getting a feature through. Hey, what if we had a robot that did what if the redeemer, you know, actually turned into a robot who walked around instead of flying around or whatever.

And then arguments, arguments. Well, what about this? How's that gonna work, etc.? So there was this one just utterly fateful day to my entire career and life where I took the tools that we called this programming system, Kismet, and I took a level in a test, had a test level, and I grabbed a character, one of the enemy locust guys, and I scaled them up about 30%.

And I made him kind of squat and I stuck a helmet on his stomach so he looked like he had a big pot belly and I added some shoulder pads to him. And through Kismet I pitched down his his voice sounds. and I gave him this big rocket launcher thing that it was just kind of stuck to his side and if you entered in front of him there's a trigger, it launches this rocket at you and it says boom, but it's this very low boom thing.

And so in this test map, I had this fully functional creature that ended up being called the boomer. That, you know, it didn't really exist as a separate thing in code. It only existed as this kismet thing. And several people walked by my desk while I was done with it. I was like, hey, check this out. You know, Cliff, hey, come and look at this or whatever. And every single person who walked by there was like, man, this is the shit. Yes, that's awesome. That's going in. That's great. There was no debate.

there was no in theory, well, what if they do this, etcetera, or whatever? And I mean that just instantly became the first creature that we had that wasn't just a regular dude in the game with the running around with a machine gun. And there was no debate like about that.

Jake Simpson (49:07)
Yeah it you you discovered rapid pro fire prototyping with your

Lee Perry (49:12)
Exactly. Yeah. And so it was it changed everything. And so from then on, I would spend, you know, a couple of hours every day. It was like, hey, what if we had this little robot thing? You know, Cliff's got this idea for this little like drone thing that follows you around. Maybe it could revive you, maybe it could do this. And I would add like eight little functions to it in a test map. And every time the design discussions would be so much more targeted and tangible and interesting and based on

You know, I could hand the controller to somebody and be like, hey, fight this guy. He's got this like bow and arrow that shoots explosive bows from far away. And you can actually here take the controller and try it out. And people knew immediately whether this was a cool thing or not. And so half of my job for Gears of War One was doing lead level design. but a bigger and and

Probably more important part of it was prototyping.

Jake Simpson (50:13)
Yeah.

Lee Perry (50:16)
The

health system, etc. I I w I I I believe if you were to just make a list of about of all the features and creatures and stuff that went into Gears one, about seventy five percent of them came from some sort of prototype from a level designer. And most of those, I'd say of that seventy five percent, I'd say half of them were pretty much from my desk. but it was

open to other level designers as well who were making all these cool prototypes of of things at the time. and part of the benefit of this was in retrospect was the lack of dedicated programmers on the project. So everything we were making was just flying through because it wasn't really in competition with other people who were also trying to make stuff. It's just this is where features are coming from now. boss fights, etc.

And so it changed everything. It changed me from being a level designer and an art guy into an actual implementation, you know, logic gameplay guy. and when I talked to a lot of other level designers from that same time period, as soon as we released those tools with Unreal Engine three, the same thing happened to a lot of people at a lot of different studios who were able to discover that they had talents.

for actually designing the implementation of things as opposed to just you know

Jake Simpson (51:49)
Yeah. You know, just to to introduce something, we had something similar on the SIMS too. The scripting system there was called Symantics. And it's the same, it's a node-based. I remember the first time I saw Kismet and looking at it and going, Well, that's that's semantics. You know, it's pretty much the same thing, but but yours is for level design and ours were for building objects in the SIMs. but the one thing that I did discover is is when you produce a good tool that has lots of emergent behaviors or is capable of producing emergent behaviors.

It ends up getting used for an awful lot more than what you designed it for. Yeah. And then you end up with all sorts of in-game behaviours or in game features. There was a this thing on the Sims Two they made, these the object engineers made where when the Sims go to work, you ha you actually had a metagame that happened where they had tasks that got dropped on them on the left hand side of the screen. You the Sims are not even on the screen, you just got these little tasks and you have to you have to reorder them.

Lee Perry (52:20)
No doubt.

Jake Simpson (52:40)
To order them in the best order, there were dependencies on them, but you had to reorder them in the best order. And that's what actually affected your effectiveness at your your score, your work score, was basically you reordering the tasks in a correct order for them on the left hand side of the screen. When I built all those tools, I had no idea that was even possible. Yeah. I had no idea.

Lee Perry (53:00)
we had that regularly. Every time I'd make a prototype or I'd walk into James or Ray's office and be like, Hey man, can we do a thing where I can do blah? And they'd be like, What do you need that for? And I was like, just trust me, put it in and I'll show you later. And then so it was absolutely not what any of those tools were were meant for, but the side effect of having those tools were and there were a lot of fights

Not fights. A a lot of disagreements about how much of the stuff should be exposed because you could do really dangerous game breaking stuff in Bizmo Play easily, especially with performance and you know anyone who was doing, you know, bad programming essentially. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (53:43)
up with infinite loops and and all that kind of naughty stuff. Yeah I remember having the same problem

Lee Perry (53:48)
Performance killing. Yeah. But it at some point we really had to like it was like just you know, just trust people that we're gonna catch these and you know, it it really shifted everything. So after Gears of War One, that became my whole job. It was the gameplay designer for Gears Two and Three, and that was yeah, it just sh it changed everything because it was much more about implementing cool ideas, and that's

Jake Simpson (54:17)
seeing your stuff right there and then. I mean I've got to say that these kind of tools are the most powerful because you are literally playing it right there and then and you go, Right, I don't like that, pause it. Let's change a couple of these numbers in here and let's replay it. There it is. You know, it's right, instant iteration, which is the most powerful tool you can possibly have in game development, I think.

Lee Perry (54:35)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I mean without that tool and without having access to that, I mean I guess I'd probably just be a dude three D modeling still and be like, make I make stuff now or whatever. But now three D modelers are all, you know, largely you know, still into like Z brush and super high detail stuff. But I gotta tell ya, I I bounced off that hard like during our first normal mapping

stuff I would spend, you know, some of the I made some of the first models that we made normal maps for and I would spend a month on them. I would made like this little robot and you know, like, hey Lee, what'd you do today? And I'd be like, well, I made this elbow joint today or I made a hand for this guy or whatever. And it was just super laborious tedious. Yeah. And then I've never had the skill of like a

like a painter or somebody who could like really just take a stylus and like paint really cool swoopy stuff. I was always a very mechanical designer. And so this was the perfect example of like me getting into the industry and the timing of Z brush and stuff coming out were skills I didn't have and I found this other thing I could do with logic and gameplay. And so I that was my my off ramp. So yeah.

Jake Simpson (55:52)
Regression into being more than you were.

Lee Perry (55:54)
But

yeah, for sure.

Jake Simpson (55:56)
So Epic eventually it comes to an end, your time at Epic comes to an end. there was some prototyping I know you did, and then then you basically moved on and you formed bit monsters.

Lee Perry (56:07)
Yeah, well I mean we had those we were living in this this period where towards the end of Gears One, one of one of my friends, Amit Mahajan, he left Epic kind of t just right there towards the end of Gears One and we thought he was just a lunatic. We're like, Why are you leaving, man? Like we're just about to ship this thing that is just white hot, you know, awesomeness, you know, etc.

he's like, no, I want to go do this game with you know, one of my old I think it was like his college roommate or something. and then, you know, within a matter of months they turned around and made what eventually turned into Farmville. and that obviously just exploded in the industry. And you know, of course he was crazy successful from that. And then, you know, I had another close friend also, ironically, who shared the office with

I meant, Dave Burke, who made one of the very first games for well, it it really took off on the iPad, this game called Osmos. yeah, it was a fantastic game. and he made he you know, he left Epic and

Jake Simpson (57:18)
I don't know.

Cell stuff, yeah.

Lee Perry (57:26)
And he left and, you know, made this game with I'm pretty sure that w actually was his college roommate at the time or whatever. And the same thing, that game you know, it wasn't necessarily Angry Birds, but he was really successful with it and good lord, you know, it just that that game did so well and just kept them, you know, floating for just years and years and years and years and years off of you know, d decade off of

sales of that game as far as we know. and y you know, a decade later you'd still open an iPad and look at the top ten charts and you know, Osmos would be floating around in there, you know, time. And so it was this magical moment of Yeah. I mean, because the industry was changing so rapidly in the sense that towards the end of the years there the the concept of a free to play game

Jake Simpson (58:11)
Opportunity.

Lee Perry (58:23)
was really nothing. I mean it was a joke. Like what are you gonna y nobody's gonna make a free to play game. And then over the course of you know the the production of Gears Two took two years. At the start of that, free to play was a joke and at the end of that, free to play was freaking everything. You know, it was like do we even make more Gears games? Because what's the what's the point? These other games, you know, are y you can make something like, you know, a farm build and, you know, make fifty times what we've ever made on Gears, etcetera.

And so it a very romantic period of like, hey, let's go do some small stuff. And yeah, so we ended up trying that exactly. Yeah, and so we took off and made this company called Bitmonster. There were six of us. And and it was okay. I mean, but everything changed so rapidly that

Jake Simpson (59:05)
Is that

Lee Perry (59:21)
I we we never we never nailed as most people who kinda jumped on like the new bandwagon then of making small stuff or whatever. We made things that were really pretty and they were pretty successful. We did okay with them and all three games we made we made three games in two years and they were all featured by Apple and one was a really cool charity game, in fact, that Coke and it sponsored and we we made a lot of really cool stuff, but nothing that

You know, lived up to the fact that, you know, we you know, we left Epic to do this, etc. so at at some point I was like, you know what, I think I think I want to keep trying on this for a while. So that was when I kind of re envisioned my life of like, I think I just wanna go Yeah.

Jake Simpson (1:00:14)
I want to go and walk the

gang first.

Lee Perry (1:00:18)
I guess. Yeah. So, you know, I had this discussion with my wife. I was like, you know, what if we just sold everything we had and just moved to a beach in Mexico and, you know, I can just one of the cool things about, you know, doing all this gameplay stuff is that I had in theory enough personal skills to make games mostly solo at the time, you know.

Jake Simpson (1:00:42)
tools

we've got now with Unreal as it stands right now and also you know Unity as well can't be discounted. That the the cost or the barrier to entry is very, very low. Not that I'm suggesting that you need it to be viewed, but I'm just saying that and the tool set is staggering in terms of what you can do without having any dedicated engineers.

Lee Perry (1:00:59)
Yeah, exactly. So that was kinda it. She was very excited by it. She's like, Hell yeah, that's that's that's great. So let's do that. So sold pretty much everything we owned, moved here to Mexico. and I set set apart a section of my brain to get over my fear of text based programming. I was like, I don't so here's the thing is I I knew everything there was to know about Kismet because I was I was there for

you know, creating and pushing a lot of the Kismet's creation with James and Ray. But as soon as Unreal Engine three went away and Unreal Engine 4 came along, everything I knew about that particular implementation also went with it. And so I had this fear that, okay, well their next thing is called blueprints. And a lot of people use that, but you know what happens if I am utterly dependent on blueprints?

And then that goes away, you know. Yeah. And then this goes away or whatever. It's like I felt like I needed to get over text based programming fear. And so that's what I did. I actually ended up I downloaded Unity and I watched just a ton of, you know, tutorials about how to do things in C sharp and JavaScript and

Jake Simpson (1:02:18)
I wish I wish she'd talked to me first 'cause I would have told you that friends don't let friends use JavaScript.

Lee Perry (1:02:23)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. but from the time I downloaded the first videos on this, three weeks in there was a game jam. It was my first Ludem Dare and I was like, Fuck it, I'm gonna do this and so I did my very first standalone little game jam thing, you know, fully solo based on stuff I just learned over the past weeks.

And there was a whole bunch of stuff that transferred over for programming where if you knew the logic and you knew what you were trying to do, you really just had to learn, you know, a couple of things to, you know, how do I spawn a thing? How do I look at a thing? How do I move a thing? etcetera. and so that stuff really came online when I kind of figured out what are the things I used to do in Kismet and

Jake Simpson (1:03:12)
How would I do that here? Yeah.

Lee Perry (1:03:14)
Yeah. And so that pretty much changed everything. And so, you know, since then I've been I'm a super big fan of VR stuff. in fact currently I'm working on a VR game myself game now. but just because you know, I'm very interested in this kind of new frontiers of, you know, how's gameplay gonna change, etcetera? but yeah, that's pretty much where I'm at. It's making VR stuff, living on a beach and

Jake Simpson (1:03:45)
So an ideal life, really, you know. Avoiding is yeah, it sounds sounds like an ideal life. You know, I I I just have to tell this one story because this is for me is a Lee Perry story, and you're gonna cringe when I tell it, but I'm gonna tell it. I remember throwing a lot of crap your way, good natured, you know, just shit talking at your way. And I I would inject it, I'd inject it through various friends in meetings that you would have. I would remember you bought a Maserati that's

You had a Maserati. And I was giving you such shit about owning a Maserati. And it's like, you know, God, you know, how's your how's your your cook and your your maid and all the rest of it? You know, I was remembering And then and then I remember at one point we had occasion to talk and you said to me, you know, Jay, just just so you know this, you know, just before I didn't just go out and buy the Maserati, you it's like

I I actually before I did any of that stuff, I made sure that I paid off all of the loans, all of the the the outstanding debt that all of your family had before you did anything for yourself. And I remember that stopped me in my tracks, thinking, Holy crap, that was such a generous thing that you did. What a what an outstanding thing it is. And it really defined you to me as a decent, generous human being. And frankly, we don't have enough of them on this planet. And I just

have to tell that story because you're not going to tell it and I am, but this is the kind of man that Lee is. Yes, he's going to have a Maserati, but he's going to make sure that all his family's well taken care of first. And I just think that's a really humanitarian and a amazing I'd be very

Lee Perry (1:05:13)
Yeah, there was I had

a couple of people in my family who were, you know, and you know, having issues make you know, they had made similar kind of choices to things I had done with moving to California and you know it didn't work out as well. And you just acquire an amount of debt just instantly living in a place like California if it's not working out. And so I couldn't

I couldn't deal with this idea of like here I am with this really expensive car while people that I really care about are struggling, you know, to to to live. Yeah. Yeah. And so it was like that was yeah.

Jake Simpson (1:05:51)
Make ends meet.

think it's it's such a heartwarming story and we don't have enough of those in this particular not in this industry not with with a industry with people like Bobby Kotik in it so yeah I just wanted to make that pulling anyway listen it's been it's an hour and ten minutes so I'm gonna probably gonna call this up to an end but I really wanted to say thank you for for spending the time with me and talking with me. It's been always a always great to to catch up with people and you know talk about times that I've been through as well. I remember those times too and just you know you hear other stories of things you didn't already know. Some of that

Some of what you talked about with gears is fascinating stuff that I've stories I've never heard before. So anyway, thank you very much for your time.

Lee Perry (1:06:29)
Yeah, yeah, my pleasure. always fun going over that stuff and and hearing your stories as well. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (1:06:35)
Thanks, Lee.