Jake Simpson (00:00)
I start this I

speaker-1 (00:00)
Start this I

start the same question with pretty much everybody, trying to work out how long we've known each other.

Jake Simpson (00:08)
wow.

speaker-1 (00:11)
Been a while.

Jake Simpson (00:13)
We're in the odds for sure. I'm gonna say like five, six, something like that, probably.

speaker-1 (00:21)
I been. I can't I can't remember a time of not knowing you. But

Jake Simpson (00:26)
Still at Triarch and I left Trearch in six. So yeah, so it's gotta be around that time.

speaker-1 (00:35)
So Chris for for those who don't know, I mean 'cause it is this is called Unsung Heroes and so you know, you're not going to be particularly well known. I mean but Chris currently runs the interactive wing of Skydance, isn't that right?

Jake Simpson (00:51)
I am head of interactive content at Skydance Interactive, yes.

speaker-1 (00:55)
So that's yeah, Sky Dance. Movie movie people has a s has an interactive group and you know all sorts of interesting things. So Chris has had a long very career. Now, I have one story I have to tell before we get into anything. And he knows which I he's already I'm looking at him in this video and he's already rolling his eyes because he knows which one I'm going to tell. Of a GDC party many years ago. I remember which one it was distinctly. It was a GDC party that Dave Taylor had run. And Dave had done this amazing thing where he had found

on a downtown skyscraper in San Francisco, he'd found an unfinished floor of a new built skyscraper and he'd released this out, this floor out completely that night. Now Dave is many things and and he he has attention to detail, but this one thing he'd done is he'd organised I think it was Bicardi. Yeah, it was Bacardi who had sponsored this event. And so there were lots of Bicardi drinks, you know, like rum drinks. And the funny thing is is that that

in his haste to do this, and because Picardi only brought Bacardi drinks, there was actually nothing else in this thing to drink at all. There was no water, there was no beer. You you were drinking Picardi drinks or you weren't drinking nothing. That's it we did. Unfortunately for me, Bicardi is my kryptonite. It's my one particular alcohol that if I have more than two, I fall over. It the only times I've ever spent an evening drinking Picardi, I have been out of my mind, and this particular evening was no

No different. And I remember, or at least I I'm told I remember, I was found wandering the streets of San Francisco at silly o'clock in the morning on the phone to my sister in England, asking her where I was, which is brilliant. And it was Chris that found me. And somehow, and I don't still don't know how you did this, but through my ramblings, you you worked out which hotel I was staying at and got me back there. And I still don't know how you did that. But eternally grateful for the rest of my life for that.

Jake Simpson (02:48)
I will be at

It was it was a great cap to a great evening.

speaker-1 (02:55)
What a what a polite way of saying God you're a drunk, Jake. I'm not an alcoholic though, and I know I'm not an alcoholic 'cause I don't go to meetings.

Jake Simpson (03:06)
There you go.

speaker-1 (03:07)
Yeah, I am a walking HR de violation is not that.

Jake Simpson (03:10)
This is why you started your own company, right? Yes.

speaker-1 (03:13)
Yes, I am 100% unemployable by anyone else. okay, it's not about me. Let's not be making this about me. So Chris, tell me about you. How did you get into gaming? When was that and how did you do it?

Jake Simpson (03:26)
I got into gaming in ninety five. A good friend of mine, Peter Ackerman, who was my college best friend's grade school best friend, called me up and said, Hey, me and my buddy are starting a game company. Do you want to come start it? At the time I was up in the Bay Area in San Francisco, looking to get into the career that I had gone to school for, which was microbiology.

And I was working at Games of Berkeley at the time, applying to various biotech companies up in the Bay Area. I really wanted to work on, you know, genetic research and stuff like that. But he called and I was like, I have always loved games. I've always been a gamer. And I said, sure. And that was December of ninety five. And that's when I started at Trayark. And that was the first employee at Triarch and off we went.

speaker-1 (04:24)
You were a triad for a while.

Jake Simpson (04:26)
I was a track until yeah, two thousand six ish, somewhere in that range. So a little over eleven years. Started with me and Peter and Don likeness, now Kuslu in ninety five, the three of us. And when I left we were bought out by Activision, three hundred and fifty people, something like that.

speaker-1 (04:46)
Jesus. I mean I mean, so firstly, eleven years in this industry is that's a that's a lifetime, frankly. I mean, you know, with the average lifespan of a of a game developer is five years, staying in one place for eleven years is a big deal. Secondly, the other thing I was gonna say was one of the common things that I've noticed about some of the more successful game developers is nobody actually set out to be a game developer. I mean, you just talked about biology and you know, biological research and stuff like that. I was talking with Karen Avigno.

earlier on today who's Hell Jacobin, she was telling me that she had her degree is in astrophysics. You know, is everybody has I feel like I'm the odd one out. I actually went to college and did a kind of computer degree because I knew I wanted to make video games. I'm about the only person I think who ever did. And even then the the degree was utterly useless because it was just back in the eighties. It's like, you know, we were still using you know punch cards at that point. You know, I mean it was just they didn't even have C to teachers at that time. We had to learn modular T but anyway.

Jake Simpson (05:42)
But

I think when you go back that far when you're old like we are, there you know, there it was I think you were way ahead of the curve, right? I mean, there was no such thing as going to school to be a game developer or even like, this is a way that I can make money, right? You know, it was a thing that a few oddballs did in their garage, right?

speaker-1 (06:02)
Mm. Well, there was one guy. There was a guy my hero has always been a guy named Jeff Minter who ran a studio in England called Lamasoft and he did very well still does actually do very weird games that are very frenetic, very sort of y Robotronish kind of stuff. and he kind of adopted me as a very young kid. I was twelve years old and I remember she used to go, Now I look back on it, I was twelve years old and used to hang out at his house and I'm thinking, God, what was I thinking? It's like every different nightmare today. But anyway.

I'd hang out, and he had the lifestyle that I always wanted. He was independently, you know, he mustn't say independently wealthy, but he certainly wasn't worrying too much about where his next paycheck came from. He had a really nice convertible car. You know, he lived his own life, he was his own boss, and that was really attractive to me. So that's why I always wanted to make any games because I thought that's the way to go. And to a certain degree, with a lot of my friends that has been has worked out. Particularly what with this bungee deal. You know, talking with Chris Butcher, he's he's not gonna be hurting from the this deal.

Jake Simpson (07:00)
Well deserved.

speaker-1 (07:01)
Well, yeah, absolutely. I absolutely agree with you. It there's it's interesting to think there's there's certain purchases that you look at and you go, What the hell? You know, it's like the who how did someone lock into that? And then you you then you see certain purchases and you think, Christ, those people really deserve it. And I think Chris and and all the guys at Bungie absolutely deserve the success they're having right now. There's no doubt about it. Bob and John Bob Bob Berry and John Maver when they got you know sold play fab was another one of those

Yeah, absolutely. These people deserve it. And I'm really, really happy for them. It's I'm lucky and I'm blessed with friends that I'm extremely happy for when they may have success. So but yeah, anyway. Right. Okay. So there you are at TriAut. So what's the career path at TriArth? What what'd you start out doing?

Jake Simpson (07:45)
I was not a coder, was how I started out. They were both coders, both math PhDs, brilliant gentlemen. admire the hell out of both of them. I came down to be everything else, literally. I ran the business. I was a producer. We were nobody knew how to do art. So we were trying to in 1996 outsource art to groups. And so I was finding people who could.

Concept art and then another group that could somehow 3D model that art. And then we were bashing our heads against the wall for a long time. And I was just like, you know, I bet I could teach myself how to do this. So I sat down and taught myself how to 3D model. So I became the 3D artist, game designer. I I built the levels and stuff like that. Now it's not like I was a one-man operation. I contributed, you know, to the group, but you know, this was mid-90s, I think the time.

speaker-1 (08:39)
There's a lot of people wearing lots of hats. Yes, I can I can quite see that. What were you making?

Jake Simpson (08:45)
We were making Die by the Sword, which was Treyarch's er initial release. It was released in nineteen ninety eight. It was one of the first three D accelerated games at the time.

speaker-1 (08:57)
Hm. Who was fun who was funny then?

Jake Simpson (08:59)
Interplay was who we released it through.

speaker-1 (09:02)
Yeah, okay. It's funny, isn't it? You hear names like T HQ and Interplay and all the rest of it and you know, in Sierra online all the rest of it, and you think, Wow, that's that's in the past, isn't it?

Jake Simpson (09:11)
Yeah, no, it's I remember sitting down with Brian Fargo a couple of times, you know, as we're pitching the progress on it. It was originally gonna be like an arena thing and we had this whole tower ladder thing and then it was Christmas of ninety six and we had just shown the demo and not unsurprisingly it wasn't super impressive. We hadn't really found the it yet. You know, it was it was nice, but it it wasn't quite there and

I'm a huge gaming nerd. I've been pen and paper RPG player my whole life and regularly gone to conventions and stuff like that. And I don't know if you've done convention RPGs, but very often what happens at the end is there's this kind of checklist that the DM will go through after you finished and said, you did this, you did this, you did this, you missed this, you did this, right? And you get kind of this score. And that's how kind of how they rate you it to go forward, you know, in the tournaments.

And I just love that idea, the idea of telling a an adventure story. So I spent my Christmas break taking all the assets that we had put together, building the first kind of just, you know, literally squares and tunnels, like dungeon practically, and with you know, put some monsters in and did some things and then had this, you know, kind of score at the end when you finished it that just kind of rattled it off of like what you had accomplished. And

That changed the direction of the game. Became what it Yeah, I was just because, you know, we were frustrated, you know, Interplay was frustrated with kind of the the arena thing was very two dimensional. It wasn't really selling anything. And that was again, it wasn't just me. I put that together and then tons of ideas came in and stuff like that to to help kind of move it forward. There were everybody was instrumental.

Mark now, Jamie Fristrom, Don and Pete, you know, just everybody Chris Sores, Tomo Morowaki, tons tons of

speaker-1 (11:14)
All these names, wow, yeah. Do you know it's funny I just reconnected with Jamie a few days ago. I haven't spoken to him for a while. he was yeah. I have a lot of time.

Jake Simpson (11:24)
A another brilliant engineer who who you know just really has gone on to show that time and again.

speaker-1 (11:27)
Yeah.

And and Tomo's another one. Yeah. I should talk about because I'd love to have I'd love to do this actually with Tom O sometime. I'm just feel like I'm probably going to need a Tom O'Com you know an interpreter. Tomo's a an absolutely brilliant. I should talk to talk to this. He's a brilliant designer and he has this way of looking at things in a ninety degree to everyone else. He can he can see relationships that that no one else sees. He sees connections between things that no one else sees, and he has this abstract way of of expressing

those relationships. But the problem is is that half the time you're left going, What? 'Cause he explains it to you in this very succinct way for him, but at the end of it you're still left like, I don't really it's like listening to John Carmack talk if you're a non engineer. Do you know what I mean? It's like we've I remember being at one of John Carmack's lectures at Quaycom one time and I was I who was I standing but I thought it was Steve Gibson who was running that was his website, what was it called? Shaq News at the time.

And I remember him turning to me and going, I didn't understand a word of that he said, But I just feel smarter being in the room. And somehow that's with Tomo, you know, when Tomo starts talking, you just you get like fifty percent of it and there's this whole meta concepts he has that he chucks around and it's it's a really amazing thing. But yeah. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (12:48)
Fantastic. And you know, working with them day in and day out, you obviously get used to Tomo Speakstanding. And then eventually what you understand is you've got a question, right? Like when you're when you're sitting in that space where you're like, okay, I got like 30% of that. I'm gonna have to ask some questions to get the rest of it. And the great thing is is that after a while, you eventually fully understand him, even when he's just in full Tomo speak, and you know, you've gotten onto the shorthand, and it's great because you can just like go, Yeah, yeah, okay, yes.

speaker-1 (12:53)
There's a

Tom Forsythe taught me the w the world's greatest phrase for that kind of situation and it's always explain it again, only use more words.

That's perfect for topic. All right, so so you're making your first game, die by the swords, and and you're you're done. Then what? What's happening next?

Jake Simpson (13:35)
Treyarch is exploding. I think we doubled in size every year from nineteen ninety-eight through two thousand and four. you know, we were ten, then twenty, then fifty, then a hundred, then two hundred, something like that. So I moved on to spearhead our second what did we do right? No, so right afterwards we did the sequel.

To die by the sword, which ended up becoming Draconis, Cult of the Worm, which we released for the Sega Dreamcast originally. Yeah, it was we got it when it was just a card that you put in your computer, right? You know, that was the version that we had gotten. But I I loved that machine. I thought I was just really sad when Sega ended up, you know, kind of pulling their support from it fairly early and letting it go, right? Like that. Yeah.

speaker-1 (14:15)
Definitely more folks.

Thank EA for that.

Jake Simpson (14:34)
Yeah, it was I it was a real shame.

speaker-1 (14:37)
Mm. Are you doing two projects at once or are you just still doing one?

Jake Simpson (14:40)
We are doing so that's still one. Well, that's not true. We had been multiple projects from the beginning. And I I say that Die by the Sword was the first game. It was the first game that we started on. The actual first game that Triarch shipped was Nagano Olympic Hockey. Nineteen ninety-eight. Yeah, nineteen ninety s yeah, ninety-eight, which came out just a few months before Die by the Sword did. That was I think that was like two people got that, took the Wayne Gretzky hockey.

code base, reconditioned it for Olympic hockey for that year and released that for the N sixty four.

speaker-1 (15:18)
Okay, so you're you're making games and being successful with it and are you're based you're LA based at this point is

Jake Simpson (15:27)
Yeah, we've we were we've been I have a tremendously unusual career in games in that I have lived within basically a three mile, four mile area since nineteen ninety five. So for twenty seven years I have not moved essentially.

speaker-1 (15:46)
You. My wife would love to be married to you.

Jake Simpson (15:49)
I absolutely recognize that I am yep, a hundred percent. Totally get it. I feel tremendously fortunate, right? You know, I've had I now have long deep roots in the area, right? You know, which is great. And I appreciate that for sure. I'm not, I grew up in the San Diego area.

speaker-1 (15:52)
The outlier.

Are you from LA or or

Or a transplant. Okay. You know, the funny thing is when I moved from from working in LA to working in San Diego, I remember everywhere I'd go, I'd get there half an hour early because I would always give myself an hour. You know what it's like in LA, right? Anywhere you want to go, you can go to the corner shop and back, it's still an hour. I you give yourself an hour and I found myself in San Diego, you know, getting everywhere half an hour early, which was fun.

Jake Simpson (16:30)
Yeah, it's funny when if you people who grew up in San Diego will recognize this. if you'd asked me, you know, my whole life, where was the last place in the world that I wanted to live, I would have told you Los Angeles. And yeah, here I am more than two decades later. And I have to admit, some of its charms have started to rub off on me. There are things that I appreciate about LA. For sure. That's really exploded in the last, I would say, decade or so.

speaker-1 (16:53)
Well the food for stuff.

Jake Simpson (17:00)
You know, it's it's really come to the front as i I've come to appreciate it maybe is the reality. just what what an opportunity to be able I mean, within a twenty minute drive I can get, you know, food from basically half the world.

speaker-1 (17:15)
Yeah, I always appreciated that, I must admit. There's some fantastic sushi places, that's sure. Okay, anyway, getting back to the point. so, all right, so what's Trayarch's? Where where are we going next for Trach then?

Jake Simpson (17:25)
So Track starts in a an apartment in Venice. We ship the game. We move to a business park out in Fox Hills where we outgrow that space after a couple of years. Then we move to the Pacific Corporate Towers in El Segundo, where we're that's where we really get quite giant. we fill up a one ten thousand square foot floor and we're getting ready to fill out another and

that's when conversations with Activision begin and eventually we become part of Activision.

speaker-1 (18:03)
What prompted that?

Jake Simpson (18:05)
What prompted that was Spider-Man. We had done some work for them in the past. We so there's a group of people who played Tony Hawk that thought that Treyarch made Tony Hawk.

speaker-1 (18:18)
So it's never stopped that wouldn't it?

Jake Simpson (18:21)
Yes, correct. Never soft are the geniuses behind that game and they have all they do are due all credit. So we make Draconis and Crave Entertainment, which is where I met Mike Arkin, is the US publisher for that. And we're sitting around making that game for them, and we're at a board meeting with their their higher ups, and one of them says, hey, you know, we've got this opportunity to port.

Tony Hawk over to Dreamcast. Is that is that worth doing? And I was just like, yes, in a second, we will do that right now. Can we start today? Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (19:00)
I would have grabbed that both hands too. That's a smart.

Jake Simpson (19:02)
No, this was very easy. This was very early on, right? you know, it was just starting to explode. But I had I had grabbed it early and was just playing it and loved the hell out of it. and just saw, you know, the genius in it right away. So we jumped on that and we made the Dreamcast port of it. And then I think we did two. I think we did one and then two. And then we were starting on and then we made Tony Hawk for the Xbox as well, right? So there's this

Again, if you played on Dreamcast and then Xbox, you played the Treyarch versions of Pro Skater. And so there's this group of people who think that, you know, we're responsible for it. No, we ported it. Sure, we might have had some polygons and done some things here or there, but for the most part, you know, we we were riding on the coattails. So we we get Spider-Man after we had done some good stuff with Activision at that point. We get Spider Man the movie, which we were gonna originally we were looking again, they were looking at the Neversoft games.

To have us, you know, bring forward into the movie games. And we kind of started there, but then we had gone into our own attack and the movie blew up, right? Like it it suddenly they recognized that this was going to be a huge thing. And we were getting ready to, you know, it was before the movie shipped, but they just realized Activision realized that this was going to be their monster hit for the year. And they had the golden football in this independent studio's hands.

And that obviously isn't gonna last. They they they pretty quickly ended up making an you know an outreach to us and we ended up accepting. At that time, however, I was not on the I was off doing NHL hockey with Sega and virtual concepts. So I was doing NHL two K two and then NHL two K three.

speaker-1 (20:33)
Right, yeah, of course, yeah.

Okay. I remember the

E3 actually, where they were showing off Spider Man and they had all the all the the props from the actual movie as well in their booth. I remember that. I can't I can't remember what we were showing that year. I was showing something from Raven, I think. It might have been was I? Because I always went to E3 anyway, whether or not I was supposed to. And I can't remember whether I was actually showing something that year or not. Might have been a Soldier Fortune year, I'm not sure. It was a long time ago. God, it's all so blurry, isn't it?

Jake Simpson (21:24)
Like one somewhere in that range.

speaker-1 (21:26)
Yeah, well that was the one would have been my last year at Raven, 'cause I was I was out I was interviewing during nine eleven. And I almost got stuck in San Francisco, but I didn't. I I was home just before it. I was interviewing at EA at that point actually. so yeah, that would have been the last E three I think I would have a

Jake Simpson (21:45)
Yeah, so it's funny, you mentioned nine eleven. We in Spider Man we had the twin towers in there. Right. And then nine eleven happened that we were supposed to launch like three weeks later. We had to dive in and make and this was, you know, one, this you know, there wasn't digital distribution, everything was physical copies. We had to very quickly go in and remove the towers and I forget what it was that we ended up putting there, but

Yeah, had to rearrange that really quick and kind of last second, like change the manufacturing process and stuff like that. I think they had already started printing C Ds and stuff for the game at that point and they had to take a new build and yeah, take a new build and make new ones.

speaker-1 (22:26)
I remember the the com the the television or the the movie advert, the original advert, the the cheeser was the two towers with the web stuck between them. Yeah. If you remember that and then remember that we never saw that again after obviously for obvious reasons. Yeah. It's funny to see how many events in our lives sort of like revolve around or or events in the world reverberate with us. And I remember Soldier of Fortune, you know, on Soldier Fortune two or one? It might have been it might have been one.

Can't remember, but we had a demo level where you were running around Baghdad trying to shoot Saddam Hussein. Yeah and that's that was the level I was demoing when I was at the Soldier of Fortune convention and I remember we ne that never shipped because by the time we shipped that was all over anyway, you know, it's like so it was funny the number of real world events that it that reverberate throughout video games or or at least through careers anyway. Yeah, it's weird. I remember Chris Reinhardt from Human Head telling me that one of his guys was supposed to be on one the flight from Boston.

Jake Simpson (23:18)
Yeah.

speaker-1 (23:26)
And they they decided they were gonna stay an extra day. Otherwise they would have been on that flight. And it's like wow, you know very close. Very close. Okay. So now you're at Activision. How does that feel? How does that feel? Do you fit in? I mean, are you you know, are you left alone or what?

Jake Simpson (23:43)
Look, this was this was Activision at their best. Unlike other publishers at the time, they believed in the creative power of the independent studios that they had they had gathered. And really were quite hands-off for many years. Leadership changed and the attitude about that change. But you know, we were there, Neversoft was there, Infinity Ward, Z Access, Toys for Bob, right? Everybody

doing all of these Raven, you know, right? and and everybody was doing their own stuff, right? You know, this was before the kind of consolidation and of number of titles releases, you know, before Call of Duty took off and everything. And so it was, you know, it was interesting. We were working on the O2 stuff, right? You know, so we were working on the BMX bike one and what's his name? The the surfing one as well.

You know, we we're working on what else did we do? We did the Tom Cruise movie, what's the future one? minor minority report? Yeah, minority report. We did that one. Yeah, it didn't turn out great, but I think we had at one point five titles we were working on simultaneously.

speaker-1 (24:57)
That's a management nightmare, isn't it?

Jake Simpson (24:59)
Yeah. So we ended up again, I was kind of off in my own little corner because I was working for Sega and Visual Concepts on, you know, the the NHL stuff for a number of years. And so Activision and even Trec didn't really care. And Sega was and and Visual Concepts was very focused on NFL and MBA. And so their interest in the NHL stuff wasn't and it was very weird. I was

Probably about the only person in the world that actually cared about the title that we were working on, you know, besides the other people on the game. Right. and and so it was it was interesting. We were in our own little world and yeah, off the sun. It was I'll be honest, it was amazing. We had a really high functioning group. Everybody really, you know, loved what they were working on. There's something really interesting about that kind of annualized.

sports franchise. So like I had laid out with the the rest of the team this kind of five year plan of things, you know, release cadences of things that we wanted to do. And we started to get stuff in then, not done in the time. Let's push it forward. Not done in time. Push it forward. And so after three, we we kind of changed direction. Activision changed direction and decided that they didn't really want to be doing these sports things for somebody else.

Not that they were gonna do sp you know, traditional themselves, yeah, but wanted to have that development power in house, right? So we let that go and that was it always bugged me. See, 'cause I looked at NHL two K four and five and I was like, hey, there's my classics jerseys and there's my minor leagues and there's my, you know, all the things coaching that I wanted to do. Yeah, yeah. And then they all you know, coach

speaker-1 (26:25)
What are they?

Jake Simpson (26:48)
You know, the files and design docs and everything were all in there and we had already done a bunch of work, you know, kind of laying the groundwork for it. That was another thing that was impacted by nine-eleven. We did, we got blueprints for every single sports stadium that had an NHL team. Like from we had full blueprints laid out and everything. We modeled against, you know, contacted all the different cities and sports arenas and everything like that. Had full like we had this rack of

32, 36, whatever it was, stadiums just sitting there and you could, you know, break them out and go, are we getting this correct and stuff like that? You could never do that today.

speaker-1 (27:27)
That's true. Wow. Yeah, I never thought about that. Yeah, you're right. It's astonishing, isn't it? When you think about it. You think about the the unfettered freedom that we used to have in terms of of of and people would fall over themselves to give us this kind of access. I remember that with Soldier of Fortune. there were some interesting things with Soldier Fortune where the the gun manufacturers were really happy to give us specs and stuff on their weapons, but we were not allowed to use their manufacturing names for the weapons.

Because they thought they thought, well, this is glorifying guns and all the rest of it. And I'm like, well, you're selling And they in the end we had to use the the army's classifications for them. So it's an four instead of a you know an armor light. You know what I mean? It was whatever it was. I mean I remember, but yeah, it was a funny thing that but we still got all that specs. And you you know, and it and I know that some driving games get the specs for cars as well. They get a lot of information from from manufacturers for that. So all right, so you're off the side.

Visual concepts end up getting bought by two K, didn't they?

Jake Simpson (28:29)
Yeah, yeah. They

speaker-1 (28:31)
Is there in Navato up in Novato, isn't there? Correct.

Jake Simpson (28:34)
They they became part of th that's where the two K X or whatever, right? Yeah.

speaker-1 (28:39)
Yeah.

That's right. 'Cause they were in the next building from where ImageMovers Digital. When I was working for Bob Zemeckis and we were making MoCap movies, the actual map the rendering pipeline, all the rendering engineers and all the rendering, you know, artists were up in Novato in this enormous hangar building. And then the next building along was two K. And it was funny, whenever I went up to visit the two because I was based in LA, every time I went to San Francisco to visit this the the the the mothership as it were, I would

wander across to the two K group because I knew more people in the two K building than I did in the in the the dig image do this digital building. And one day they were having a barbecue and I just basically joined the end of the line. I was just did it was like, J I just joined the end of the line and help myself to barbecue which

Jake Simpson (29:25)
Talk about another brilliant group, man. That that the visual concepts, man. Those guys knew what the heck they were doing.

speaker-1 (29:30)
It

to a fine art as well, from what I've understood. It's a it's very impressive but yeah, work. All right, so that's that particular project is being shuffled away from you and you know we understand why. I know that the Activision at the time had kind of abandoned abandoned real sports to EA and to two K at that point. And so what's next?

Jake Simpson (29:52)
So I come on, let's see, Spidey Movie Two is right around the same time that I'm finishing up 2K three and figuring out if we're gonna do 2K four when that gets pulled out. I move over and start on I've been producer, senior producer, in the old weird style of it, where you're half management, half creative, right? You know, kind of head of both. And

Treyarch and Activision at the time are moving more, I think, towards an EA model where you know producer is is pure management. Manage yeah, pure management. And I was like, I don't know if I want that. So talked to Don and Peter and said, Hey, look, I'd like to give my shot at creatively leading a project. So I I moved over onto Ultimate Spider-Man as the creative director on that title. You know, we had started we got started, I think it was I would say nine months.

ish before Spider Man movie two, which was the true kind of super open world web swinging, physical web swinging. In one, it was the it was, you know, just kind of in the sky and you know, you could go anywhere you wanted to. And two is where we we started attaching to buildings and and really fans of that franchise, you know, where it really took off. So I was making Ultimate Spider Man.

on that. And that was really gonna be based off of the the comic book series, the ultimate world Marvel Universe had really kind of taken off at that time. And so really saw an opportunity there to to to move that forward. And I loved that project. That was an amazing project for sure. James

speaker-1 (31:32)
Tommy

was one of the prototypers on that, I believe. I he w I think he was he was explaining to about this is the first time you guys had done white boxing, where you just prototyped individual parts of the game, rather than trying to build a vertical slice, you were building individual parts of it and the components, so to speak. Isn't is that right?

Jake Simpson (31:50)
There was a bunch of that on both on so, you know, the Spider Mans get a little confusing at that time. But yeah, there was there was definitely a bunch of the those types of things. And, you know, we were we wanted to take it because we were doing, you know, based off the comic book, we wanted to take a slightly different tack. You know, we were assuming we were gonna skew a a little younger than the movie might and, you know, wanting to try and bring in a broader audience. So, you know, we were making tweaks to the formula that they were

You know, the perfection that they were finding on on movie two, because we wanted a different feel for the game, right? You know, there were you know, we wanted the the swinging to be l a little less pro. and in fact, actually, the advance early advancements that we had made before they had shipped ended up shipping in Spider-Man two as some of their kind of easy mode swinging stuff, right? Those were some of the kind of early tweaks that we had made.

That was another brilliant program. Tim Prop's, you know, moving that forward.

speaker-1 (32:52)
Hmm.

she needs a name. There's a name from the past. so it should it should explain a little bit to some of the listeners what we're actually talking about here. Because traditionally in in video game development, you you tend to build all of your systems combined together and you put a prototype together and it's usually called a vertical slice. And the vertical slice is supposed to be like one level with one gun, with one bad guy, all done to production level quality. So you get to see what the effects look like. You know, it's only one gun, it's only one.

one enemy, but he's got you know production level AI and he's dodging around, you're seeing what the final product is going to look like. Whereas white boxing is kind of a very different way of building something in that you build individual features. You're not trying to combine everything together. You are in the case of Spider Man, so the environments you're swinging around in are basically just big old white boxes. You're not trying to make it look pretty like a city, but you are trying to get the mechanic of Spider Man swinging around just right.

So you'll get a nice bunch of nice animations for Spidey, and you'll get this being able to direct his arms and swoop it out and all you know, that kind of stuff, snap the the wimp webs out. But you're only trying to do one thing. You're only trying to prove one thing at a time. and you can do multiple different small prototypes to prove, this bit and this bit and this bit, and then eventually you'll sort of wrap it all together in a big, bigger prototype. But you're you're basically spending time iterating on one small feature and then moving on to the next. And it's a new way of developing at that time.

Most people weren't doing that. They w they were trying to do the monolithic stuff and you were the one of the f the p the guys, your studio I remember reading about the new way that you guys were doing it, 'cause you guys were the the forefront of that kind of experimentation. wanted to sort of call that.

Jake Simpson (34:31)
It kind of it kind of it's weird. It happened by happenstance, right? You know, we just we were we were trying to figure out, you know, what we had so many moving parts and especially with the swinging for movie two, we were trying to do open world, which now is totally yeah, was you know was totally fine, but back in you know 2002, yeah, exactly, and PlayStation 2s, it was it was a huge engineering effort, right? And so

speaker-1 (34:53)
On PlayStation Two's, yeah, right.

Jake Simpson (35:00)
It was taking a huge portion of the team to we didn't have technical artists and stuff like that. So but you know, our artists were all involved in it. Our our most of our tech group was involved in it. Their designers were involved in it, right? And so there was this 80, 90% of the of the team was focused on this effort of getting that correct. And then Jamie and a few other people were like, Hey, what if we what if we

Don't just let you swing anywhere. What if we, you know, physically connect the webs? And so that was kind of out of necessity. He was off on his own doing this own other thing because you know the the main effort was was over here doing this one thing. And yeah, we so kind of out of necessity, we're like, all right, we can't connect it all together. We'll do it. We didn't even know that we were gonna do it for two. It had started in one, realized that we were not gonna have it in time for one, so we didn't ship for one.

And we definitely wanted to do it for two, but we still weren't sure. Are we gonna have this done? So it was kind of an optional feature. And then you know, Jamie and others cracked the back of that thing. Jason Baer and I want to say Crossy, I think if I'm remembering correctly, were the three kind of engineers that all brought different expertise to the problem, right? It took three different just brilliant programmers to to kind of figure out, okay, you you do this, you do this, you do this, and then

eventually, you know, became the just the thing that people still love. You know, insomniacs games these days, you know, obviously taking it to the next level with the the power and everything. But that that feeling of being Spider Man in that manner is just who doesn't

speaker-1 (36:38)
Certainly Insomniac's I think Insomniac's amazing games l owe so much to your you guys stuff that you started out with. Because there's I still think there's a lot of that feel is still there in what Insomniac's done, but it's it it sits on top of shoulders of giants, that's what they're doing right here and and you guys would certainly did that. It was amazing. All right, so Spidey, you're moving on. What what's next?

Jake Simpson (37:02)
Well, so Spidey, you know, we did a bunch of things that I really loved. I really wanted to bring that comic book feel to the game. Really wanted to have a second camera. Ooh, how exciting. And that time it was very challenging. The second render and all of those things were really challenging. We had another guy, Jim Biley, figure out the ink shader for the for the cap

speaker-1 (37:28)
The rendering, the main yeah, the rendering methods, yeah.

Jake Simpson (37:31)
to to figure out that comic book look and and cracking that. And so we bring that all together, you know, towards Spidey Two Ships and it's great. GTA is out there sometime be you know between when we started and we finish, GTA kind of goes out and explodes on the world. And you know, everybody's loving it, of course. And I'm like, why can't we do more of those things, you know, in our game? And unfortunately we can just kind of ran out of time, you know.

To implement more of those kind of almost MMO like stories, quests, and givers and these things and like not the kind of direct single path things. And so we, you know, we ended up duplicating a lot of the similar things that they had from Spidey Movie 2 and didn't get to innovate on those things as much as fine. So I'm looking at Ultimate 2 and all of my designers are moving forward those ideas and

You know, kind of once you're freed from the pressure of shipping, you can be more dangerous and make more advancements more quickly. And so we solved a lot of problems really quickly, kind of in the, you know, those two to three months after you ship and everybody's kind of decompressing and and figuring things out and feeling really excited about that. But I think

Some fatigue around, you know, that particular franchise starts to develop. Activision's not sure exactly where they want to go for it. You know, Spider-Man 3, movie 3 is is is in the works and they're not sure if they want to have two of them. You know, the game the the title does okay, not amazing. I think it was like three million units back then, which was, you know, successful. Yep. You know, successful, but not, you know, not blowing the doors off, right? Right. So

speaker-1 (39:09)
That's respectable for this.

Jake Simpson (39:17)
You know, they're unsure and that's I kind of needed a break. So with them not sure if they wanted to proceed forward, I take a I take a hiatus for about six months.

speaker-1 (39:31)
Okay.

Jake Simpson (39:32)
And then that's when I I actually end up leaving Tracker after that.

speaker-1 (39:36)
okay. So you decided you w in that six months it became clear to you that you needed there were other other challenges for you, that you were were interested in doing other things.

Jake Simpson (39:44)
Yeah, you know, I felt like I had been with this same group for a long time. I wanted to, you know, I was kind of becoming aware of the larger game development universe, wanted to get some different experiences, see what else was out there. You know, was I was I just a product of this group of people, right? You know. Right. Was I Yeah, was I was I really talented, you know, on my own or was this just

speaker-1 (40:03)
Yeah, can you stand alone? Yeah.

Jake Simpson (40:13)
So I'm at EA. I joined the Medal of Honor airborne team and they're still

speaker-1 (40:24)
Tony Barnes, was he working on that?

Jake Simpson (40:26)
He works no, he worked on the one after that. He worked on Warfighter.

speaker-1 (40:30)
Sorry, yeah.

Jake Simpson (40:32)
they were working on renderware at the time when I get there. Yeah. Well, here's the funny thing. That's so I get there in February, right? And you know, E3 is June, right? they had a a 80 plus person team working on just trying to get the demo working for renderware and failed. We had to pull out of E3 because we couldn't get it done in time. We do this huge rethink.

speaker-1 (40:36)
I'm so sorry.

Jake Simpson (41:00)
And huge props to EA for a lot even allowing it. We do a deep dive on I think six different engines at the time. We break up into all these different groups, you know, engine group and this technical thing and that technical thing. And we end up coming back and recommending that we work with Unreal. And the reason we did that was right after we pull out of E3, Matt Tonks and two other guys.

Spend one weekend, take the assets that we have, import it into Unreal and get the level that ninety people couldn't get working over the course of several months up and running and playable in Unreal by themselves in three days.

speaker-1 (41:44)
I remember that story.

Jake Simpson (41:46)
And so obviously the team is blown away. Look, you know, it's no small deal to to to recommend that level of a shift at a company like EA and and huge props to EA for considering it, right? You know, I I remember we had plenty of of C level people come down and talk and grill us and look at our recommendations and stuff like that, but they did it. They decided to make that shift. And that's I I respect the hell out of a company that large that can allow those developers.

Yeah, though that level of change for what it was. And so we ended up shifting over to Unreal and shipping the product 13 months later.

speaker-1 (42:24)
But

I mean, particularly in a situation where they've spent hundred you tens of millions of dollars on buying buying criterion to to get renderware, you in the first place. So yeah.

Jake Simpson (42:33)
And so they I think they did what one or two after Airborne on the Unreal and then they switched Frostbite, right?

speaker-1 (42:40)
Right, yeah. I remember Luke Bartlett trying to get an internal game engine off the ground at EA. This is before they bought bought Dice, and I remember sitting in the room and there was probably I don't know, I think there was about thirty of the senior engineers on all of the big projects at Redwood Shores and some from E from EALA, all in this room. And Luke goes, Right, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna build a an unreal competitive engine and we're gonna do it in nine months.

And everyone just looked at each other. And and you the thing is a Luke was clearly passionate about this, but this is also Luke's last chance at EA, if you know what I'm saying. It was his last way to be relevant at EA. And he was passionate about this. And and the thing is though, he he then listed off this whole list of things that he wanted in this engine. And I remember me being the only person in the room who actually stuck his hand up. And everyone was looking at me and I'm like, Well, why don't we just buy Unreal?

Because that everything you've just listed is already there in Unreal Why don't we just buy epic. You know, that's what I'm suggesting, which is buy epic. And Loop was monumentally offended at this. And I said, Honestly, the chances of us building an Unreal beta in nine months are less than zero. There's just I mean, yes, you've got all of this amazing talent, but the reality is that that we all have to row in the same direction. Not you know, these things are ill defined. We're going to end up recreating Unreal anyway, because that's what this this list of this list of

features you want R, so why don't we just buy that? I don't understand, but we the money, just go buy Epic, 'cause at that time, you know, Epic wasn't yeah, you could have bought Epic. And I'm like, yeah, why don't we just do that? And that was there was just silence.

Jake Simpson (44:19)
Christ w thank Christ they didn't, right?

speaker-1 (44:21)
Well well it would've been a very different world now, that's for sure.

Jake Simpson (44:25)
Absolutely. We w I don't think we would have gotten three and then four and now five, right? Well

speaker-1 (44:30)
Well we got three. I mean we three was out at the time and I think four was in production. We probably would have still gotten four, but whether or not it would have been licensed to anybody else, who knows? You know, in the same way that that as soon as Bethesda bought in, none of their technology is available to anyone else anymore. So yep. So I don't know, but it was a it was a weird moment of and of course this thing lasted like three weeks before everybody else, all the other senior engineers were looking at each other 'cause he was 'cause we were so saying at the time, well what happens to all the other games that we're all working on then?

And he's like, all of these games are going to be paused. That's why we have to do this in nine months, because that's the most I'm allowed to pause all the other games that the senior engineers said, I'm gonna pull senior engineers from every project and we're all gonna get on this. And I just remember sitting in the corner going, just I can't know. Just please no. And and I remember being the only one though, even Paul Pedriana, who God rest his soul, didn't even stick his hand up and go, Yeah, this this is bollocks. And he was the one person who could have gone away with saying that. I mean I certainly didn't, but anyway.

Yeah, they remember those days. This was just post Godfather as well, I think.

Jake Simpson (45:33)
Yeah, okay. That's that's the same r that's the right t yep, that's the right time frame. Yeah 'cause that the we got the you know, we'd brought there was something else that Godfather had there was they had tweaked it, right? There was some tweaked

speaker-1 (45:45)
They had to do a bunch of tweaks because they were getting to the point where it took like sixty seconds to open a a window because renderware used text files for all of its all of its data stuff. So every time you clicked you you would click on an object and try to get a menu of things you could do with this object and it would open up something like ten thousand different files because they're all referencing each other and they were all text, which means they had to be parsed. And that's why it took sixty seconds from clicking something to wait until it actually popped up. It was a st I mean, it was

Renderware was really good when it was used at a smaller scale for creating things like, you know, burnout. If you're trying create a massively multiplayer world with a million items in it and it did not scale. It just clearly didn't. Anyway, sorry, again, this is all about me and it should be about you. So all right. So you're EA and you're making this stuff, then why?

Jake Simpson (46:26)
Yeah.

Great time at EA. I I really did. I I know not everybody enjoys their time at EA. I learned so much. You know, as much as I there are still brilliant people that were at Track when I was there who are still there. The level of talent at EALA at the time was insane, right? You know, my technical director Mark Dockerman, the guy who yeah, you know Mark, right? Started his own company and and just brilliant. And you know, he wasn't.

speaker-1 (46:58)
I'm out.

Jake Simpson (47:04)
Randy Smith and you know, I could go on and on and on. Just brilliant people in every position, industry leaders, you know, EA at that time certainly could attract any talent they wanted. And, you know, so it was just a bone crusher's list of people. So I learned so much at that time and was definitely inspired to to do things. And we finished Airborne, we're moving on to the next one. And Peter Ackman, my boss,

Treyarch had been out of Treyarch for a while as well. I'd mentioned earlier that Trey Arc that Activision kind of had changed minds and he ended up departing for a bit. He calls me up in 07 and says, Yeah, you know, I'm thinking about starting my own thing. And I was like, I've been thinking about it too. So I go to EA and I'm like, I've got this opportunity, but I love it here. So yeah, how can we work this out? And it came down to some

speaker-1 (47:55)
Well.

Jake Simpson (48:02)
bizarre kind of inner circumstances around titles at EA where when I came in I was one level below where I should have been had I known about their the

speaker-1 (48:12)
Internal structures, yeah.

Jake Simpson (48:14)
I and so I said, look, if I had known about your internal structures, I would have demanded that I was this level and you know, I want a promotion. So why don't you just skip a level, promote me to this, right? And ultimately they were I wasn't, you know, I was like, you can pay me at the bottom that scale. I'm not worried about that. but you know, they were just like, Look, why don't we do this in six months and then do that the second one in six months? And I was like, why? And the reason I was concerned was because I wanted to be in that position because I was expecting, I was

seeing that there was going to be turnover above, right? Right. Just kind of machinations were happening. And I wanted to be in position to be considered for the next promotion. Right. And I knew that if I had waited six months to get promoted to that position, I would probably miss all of those. Right. So that ended up not working out. And I went and started the workshop. Right. seven.

speaker-1 (49:05)
I remember that. I remember that when you when I remember when you're announcing that, yes. And a lot of us looking at each other going, What what are you gonna do there? What are you what what's your plan? Yeah, wh who who's funding you? Where what are you gonna do? So what what happened? Tell us.

Jake Simpson (49:19)
We funded ourselves. We got eight people. We took money from nobody. We made a demo of Ironclad, which was this giant kind of like three story mech that you could run around and had this big wrecking ball that you could smash things in and you could get in and out of the mech. You know, it was kind of this steampunk retelling of War of the Worlds, right? You know. Cool. And it was super cool. We ended up getting that demo together.

speaker-1 (49:20)
Not the hell.

Jake Simpson (49:48)
About the end of the year, so you know, nine nine or so, ten months later, and we're shipping it around. This is right in the fall of of eight. Not sure if anybody remembers what happened in the kind of fall, winter of eight, but the entire economy exploded.

speaker-1 (50:05)
I know. I got stuck in Arizona. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (50:08)
so we're out pitching our internal funds are starting to run short, and we're out pitching like, hey, anybody wanna help fund us? Yeah, you know, so we have this brilliant demo. You know, we're talking to everybody under the sun. It's not looking good, not looking good. Early nine, we take we had it running on both PC and Xbox at the time. And I remember pick it in Rusty Bukert.

at Sony Santa Monica takes an appointment to us. We take in our little Xbox at Sony at Sony headquarters and we show this demo on Xbox. Super impressed and they ended up, you know, signing us in February of nine, which was Peter and I had decided at the beginning of February that if we hadn't found something by the end of February, we were going to shut it down. And we ended up signing the deal on February twenty second.

Six days before we were gonna shut it down.

speaker-1 (51:08)
Well, there you go. You see my birthday is is it's a special day. Well, it's not my mother died on my birthday as well, so never mind. yeah, okay. But that's great. Fantastic. So you sign a deal, off you go.

Jake Simpson (51:19)
yeah, so we're making we move the Sony move, if anybody remembers that, was yeah, and controller was just getting started at that time. and they want us to make a wand game. They have this idea for this wand dual battle. It's funny. They they hand us this this two or three page document and they they say, We want this game but anything but what's on this paper.

Right. Like they had this pitch that they didn't like. so they ended up handing that over to us to to make and we ended up making sorcery out of it. The first I remember the first move controller we got was a literally a ping pong ball with an exposed switch attached to this kind of piece of plastic. And it's like super prototype, right? Yeah. So we ended up making that game. It took longer than we wanted to.

speaker-1 (52:08)
The ultimate the the real progress I

Jake Simpson (52:17)
had some great brilliant points in time. We were, you know, we were part of the kind of move announcement show when they at Addy Three that year. But you know, the game finding the game and it got a little bit big and got a little out of trouble and took us a took us a year longer than what we wanted to. And by the time we released it was brilliant. It was great. You know, best game ever released for the move, but nobody cared about the move anymore. Right. Missed its moment.

speaker-1 (52:42)
Yeah.

Never mind, these things happen. Yep.

Jake Simpson (52:46)
So, you know, we we continue to work on kind of, you know, work for hire stuff. We we worked on gosh. Borderlands two, we did Mr. Torg's Campaign of Carnage. That was that was a piece of content that we had done with Gearbox. We worked on worked on a world of tanks competitor.

Created a bunch of PvP maps and and PvP mode for them for that. It was originally or single player. We we created the single player maps out of the multiplayer stuff that they had had. so there was kind of a you know, PvE way to play the game. Then we ended up getting together with Bethesda and doing evil within. So Jumson is is working on the game, had been working on with a while, it had been delayed, been delayed, been delayed.

know it was supposed to ship like I think the year before we got there. Well we get there and talk to them and they want to have a PS4 port because the PS4 is going to launch now in the window. And that's not, you know, we the main game isn't there. So we start working on the PS4 stuff, just you know, graphical improvements and and and plusing it up and getting it ready for the PS4. And end up, you know, that was that was a a great thing. So if you've ever seen anything from Evil Within

in media, that was our work because that was all that was all the stuff that we had done.

speaker-1 (54:12)
Prettiness of the of the PS four, the power of the PS four. Yeah, the power of the

Jake Simpson (54:15)
Yes

more, right? So, you know, look the the the game itself and the brilliance of the game, that's that's all Kojima and his team. But you know, in terms of kind of what they ended up showing for the stuff that was

speaker-1 (54:28)
The graphical horness of is you, yeah, right, okay. I understand that. I've been down that path. So it so then at some point then you're you're acquired though.

Jake Simpson (54:37)
Yeah. So, you know, we're doing we're doing great work with them. We ended up working with Microsoft on Gears of War Four. We ended up doing two of the levels for Gears of War Four. Things are kind of moving along, feeling pretty good, you know, but work for higher game, that's it's a grind, man. it it it's you know, it it wears on you. And so somewhere around October two thousand fifteen.

We get contacted by this guy, Spencer Hunt from Sky Dance. comes and says, Hey, you know, we're you know, we're thinking about starting an interactive. Would you guys have interest? And we're like, Well, we'll talk, right? So this is October. We meet with him in October, we meet once more with him in November, and then we meet with David Ellison, Jesse Siskold, the president, and Larry Wasserman, the

And I think it's just before the break, or it was just after the break. I can't remember if it was December or January. And then we ended up finalizing the buyout April that year. So five months after we met this guy for the first time, we're now part of Sky Dance.

speaker-1 (55:52)
And that gives you access now to untold licenses.

Jake Simpson (55:58)
Sure. But look, huge credit to David. And he has always supported and believed from the start that creators are what make media companies wealthy. And he came into us and he said, I don't want you guys making an IP game. I want you making your own game from the start.

speaker-1 (56:19)
here and that's an unusual attitude isn't it particularly in the in the the movie industry where everyone's like I've to control this so tightly and you know, yeah. That's an unusual thing. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (56:33)
So we did, you know, we we wanted to get into VR because felt that it was a it was a great place to compete, right? You know, especially if you're starting up a new interactive division. Yep, absolutely. And you know, end up making Archangel.

speaker-1 (56:47)
Smaller pond, big fish as it were.

Okay, well I was gonna mention that, yeah.

Jake Simpson (56:55)
Yeah. Which is, you know, it's a it's another mech game. So, you goes to our heart of of that that style of game that we like to make. You know, we we wanted to get to market quickly and so we we moved pretty quickly and and in doing so, you know, needed to keep things pretty simple because we're still kind of figuring out VR, what works in VR. You know, people who haven't worked in VR in two thousand sixteen, seventeen when we were working on the title, everybody was terrified.

of queasiness was the nausea factor of it. And and so all if you go back and look at the game, you know, everything is around making that very comfortable. And if you read reviews even, you know, there are people who still laud it as probably the most comfortable VR game they've ever made. You know, we're in a cockpit, so you've got this shroud, right? You know, that helps keep the movement down. You know, you're up high so you're not close to the ground. So the movement speed stuff doesn't affect you.

speaker-1 (57:26)
Right.

Jake Simpson (57:53)
You're controlling these two big robot arms and stuff like that, you know, kind of thing. It's a wave shooter. It was very simple, you know, but it was really to kind of get our feet wet and and and move things forward and I think it was brilliant. I loved it. It was great.

speaker-1 (58:07)
Tell a quick story in here because it's you outsourced all of your mocap to digital domain. We did. It was around the corner. I was often in the mocap facility when that was going on, when they were recording that. I remember because I was doing stuff, was I was that pre-Ready Player One? I think it was pre-Ready Player One. And we were doing some tool configuration for Ready Player One, I think. And I was there, and I remember talking to someone at point saying, What are you recording right now? it's just game, it's VR game for Sky Dance. And I'm Sky Dance,

Chris's floor, you I'm like and yeah, I was just standing in the corner watching the mocat for it. Yeah, I remember that. Gosh, small world, isn't it? This industry is so incestuous. Although the movie industry is too, it's very incestuous there.

Jake Simpson (58:44)
Yeah, isn't it crazy?

It

is very much so. Especially in an area, right? You know, in a given area.

speaker-1 (58:52)
Well

yeah. And also the the short the short development cycles for movies as well, you know, when your your principal photography is only like three or four months, everyone the team is splitting up and moving on to other projects constantly. So you're cross pollinating inside the movie industry in a in a even greater way than we do in the games industry. And it is a it's astonishing. And that's I think how the movie industry works without all of its it's like no jobs in the movie industry are ever advertised anywhere. They're never advertised because it's all word of mouth.

It's all like, you need a guy to do this. yeah, this is the guy you need to do. Somebody on your production team has worked with somebody else who's done that and it says, I'll reach out and talk to that person. That's how it works. It's all reputation and word of mouth. which I was astonished to find when I got into that. But yeah. So you're still doing stuff, but you I mean, you do do some intellectual property work now. I mean, don't you? There's a little bit.

Jake Simpson (59:43)
Absolutely. So, you know, obviously our most successful game to date, Walking Dead, Saints and Saints it is an IP and we're looking for that that good mix, right? Of of some things based off of IPs and some things not, right? Right.

speaker-1 (59:48)
Right.

So you're still making original content, you still have that mandate to make original content, which again I think is unusual. I think that's that's amazingly great. Now you personally spent a year working at at the the main headquarters of Skydance, is that right? What were you doing there?

Jake Simpson (1:00:13)
I did, yeah, absolutely.

You know, I was connecting, you know, wanted to try and get when you acquire a company, it can be very awkward and and you know, challenging. Especially look, you know, we were Sky Dance Media is a is a film, a traditional film and television traditional media company. And so they're the greater organizations understanding of how games work and stuff like that, not necessarily

speaker-1 (1:00:40)
I see. So you're spar partly an educational aspect in terms of you educating them in terms of how games are made and what the priorities are. Yeah and them educating you in how their company works, as it were.

Jake Simpson (1:00:51)
Yeah, you know, I just wanted to really get more FaceTime and and understand the organization better and it was super valuable. I've g the year before I would say my exposure was pretty limited in terms of who at the Yeah, who does what and my personal connection to people was was was different. Yeah. And and so it was really a it was a

really solid foundational year in terms of kind of really getting to understand everybody and get connected to everybody. So yeah, it was it was fantastic on that part.

speaker-1 (1:01:26)
Okay, I understand. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, I I totally get it. I'm I'm sure there's plenty of people at Activision wishing they could do the same thing with Microsoft. Or indeed Bungie for Sony and Zynga for I mean, God, it's been acquisition mad recently, hasn't it? Somebody somebody wants to throw twenty five million my way, they can buy my company. I'm I'm all right with that. I'll I'll I'll cope with that. No.

Jake Simpson (1:01:42)
Crazy, isn't it?

Look, we all have our price, right?

speaker-1 (1:01:51)
We

do, yes. That was that's a discussion for another day, isn't it? Yeah, we do. We do all have our price, but I'd just I'd still like to make something first. I still wanna get some of the products. We did one thing for one particular group that I can't talk about that hasn't been released and has has to be retooled actually. and it's I I'm kind of bra waiting for that to come out 'cause that's gonna that'll put us on the map a little bit more than we are now. But we got plenty of things in the in the pipeline right now going on anyway. But which not about me anyway.

Right, so we're about an hour and and seven minutes in. So I'm gonna I think this is probably an appropriate time to say thanks for your time. Thank you for going through your your career. It's been varied and interesting, like most people's. So much going on, so many stories, so many such impact on so many great games as well. That's the big thing. I'm I pride myself that I'm extremely rich when it comes to my friends. And you're no you know

No no slouch in that area, I'll gotta tell you. So thanks, Chris, for spending the time with us and and going through all this. It's been really educational.

Jake Simpson (1:02:56)
It's been great. I've I've had a great time. And it's always fun to hang out with you, Jake.

speaker-1 (1:03:00)
I appreciate that. It's it is interesting to look back on your own life though, 'cause sometimes you y there's stories and things you've even forgotten about your own life. You know what I mean? When you're telling it to somebody else, you suddenly look back on it and go, Christ, I did do some things, didn't I? You know what I mean? 'Cause that's not something you think about day to day, is it? The path you've come the path that you've you've trodden, you know, you don't think about that very often unless there's a reason to do so and this is one of those reasons to do so, so

Jake Simpson (1:03:24)
All

speaker-1 (1:03:26)
You're welcome. Thanks a lot.