🎮 Michael Fridley is the CEO and studio director of Squanch Games. He has contributed to many titles since he started in the industry 26 years ago, including The Elder Scrolls, Morrowind and Oblivion, Fallout 3, Reckoning, Call of Cthulhu, PGA Tour, NBA Live, Dragonvale, and most recently Squanch Games' hit game, High on Life-a humorous first-person shooter that quickly became the largest third-party launch on Xbox Game Pass.

Tune in to learn about the unique culture at Squanch Games, where the focus is on creating narrative comedy games that resonate with players. He also opens up about the challenges and triumphs of running a fully remote studio, his distinctive approach to leadership, and more. 

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• The distinctive culture at Squanch Games
• How humor and creativity drive their studio's success
• Overcoming challenges and fostering collaboration in a fully remote studio
• Mike’s leadership approach for smooth transitions and team integration

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Mike Fridley on LinkedIn
• Squanch Games
• High on Life Game

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique video game recruitment firm, and this is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what has gone into their success. You can expect to hear lessons from their journey and get a glimpse into the future of the industry.

This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique recruiting firm, you guessed it, for the game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a thank you to David Yee for introducing us, although I feel like we were connected in many different ways, given you're the best.

Today we have Mike Fridley with us. Mike is the CEO and studio director of Squanch Games. He has contributed to many titles since he started in the industry 26 years ago, including The Elder Scrolls, Morrowind and Oblivion, Fallout 3, Reckoning, Call of Cthulhu, PGA Tour, NBA Live, Dragonvale, and most recently Squanch Games hit game, High on Life. Let's get started. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you. 

Mike Fridley: Excited to be here. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about Squanch. 

Mike Fridley: So we're kind of outliers in the industry a little bit, as far as the types of games that we're interested in making. The majority of us are all senior folks at Squanch. We're a fully remote studio, so we don't have office work anymore. We did until the pandemic. And then once the pandemic hit, we had to work remotely. And then we found out that, shockingly, we were actually more productive and more creative than we were in person, which goes against every natural instinct I had in the industry that this would never work.

But it worked for this crazy group. So your mileage may vary at studio to studio, but ours, it happens to work. We're more focused on games that we want to play. Our executive team has over a hundred years of experience making games. We're all old and have played games our whole lives too.

Lizzie Mintus: You're wise. 

Mike Fridley: Yes. And we're not so much interested in following trends in gaming. We're not going to go after the mobile market. Not that that's a trend anymore. It's well established, but we're not going as games as a service. We're not going for microtransactions or gotcha pawn boxes or any of those, the newer elements that have been introduced into gaming over the last decade or so.

We're more interested in just about making a fun single-player experience. So that's been our focus, single-player narrative comedy games. And comedy is a bit of a reason that I think we're a bit different than most studios. Like I said, I've been, I worked at a ton of studios. The kind of the rule is always don't try to be funny, uh, in games. And everybody tells you that. I heard it from the first job I worked until the last one I worked. And it was, just, our writers aren't comedians, so we shouldn't be doing comedy. So that made sense. And, you know, I get it.

One of the times that I've worked on games that there's designers trying to inject comedy into games all the time. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. So we kind of took a novel approach to it at Squanch. Instead of hiring game writers to work on a comedy game, we hired comedy writers to work on a video game. So we taught them how to make a video game. 

We hired folks that had never written for video games, but they'd written for multiple different sitcoms. Our narrative director worked on the Eric Andre show. Like there were a bunch of folks that we've had through either contract writers or full time writers, staff writers, like Brian Weissel is on our staff. Now he's a senior staff writer. He created Hot Streets and he's also, uh, a writer on the World Crackers on Adult Swim as well. So we took the idea of like, okay, funny is the part that's missing. Let's find the people who can make funny stuff and then tell them how that can fit into a game. And we kind of designed the game around the funny narrative that plays through and it worked. 

It worked for us. We have a bunch of great voice actors that came on. And we've kind of grown relationships with them. They all love it. We had Gabourey Sidibe on our DLC for the game, and she's gonna be in future products for us as well. We kind of established that relationship with her. J.B. Smoove worked with us. There's probably a pretty big announcement coming from J.B. Smoove in the next week or so that's related to Quach that I can't talk about until they break it. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, by the time it comes out, it'll be out there. So it's okay.  

Mike Fridley: No, I'm not going to start writing this. No, I just heard everybody on the production team yelling at me at the same time in my head. 

Lizzie Mintus: And your PR people, yeah. 

Mike Fridley: Yeah, there was a moment that the devil on my shoulder almost made me run. 

Lizzie Mintus: I saw it in your eyes. Why do you think that other people don't do humor?

Mike Fridley: It's hard. You want your game to appeal to your audience. You want your game to appeal to as many people as you can. You want to have a nice size audience because at the end of the day it is a business. Especially in a game like we make, almost all of our revenue comes from initial sales. So we need good, we need a solid game. We need a game that a lot of people like, a lot of people are going to talk about., A lot of people get excited about. We think it is fun. We want to play it. Like, those are all the key ingredients. And for that to come through and not suck is incredibly hard because you're trying to make jokes in a world where there's decision trees.

So there are decision trees, there are forks in the road. We're not on rails. It is a somewhat linear game where, but you can play multiple different bounties and different orders and stuff like that. So there is some exploration to it. So what it does is it throws a big variable into all your narrative All your decision trees, it throws that variable in there that they may pick this, this time and pick this, this time and do this, this time.

So the jokes have to work no matter what you do. Sometimes that involves having five jokes for the same situation because. If they did this, then it plays that joke. And so we have to have a lot of bases covered and any of them can't stink. If any of them stink, it sticks out like a sore thumb. 

Lizzie Mintus: I like that word stink. You know, for me, I'm just thinking people are very sensitive, might be the right word today. I mean, I'm always from a business standpoint, I feel like. People are worried about saying the wrong thing often, even when they have good intentions because someone doesn't like the thing that you said, which you may or may not mean in a bad way.

So how do you balance that with humor? 

Mike Fridley: Yeah, it's definitely a tightrope to walk. We don't have zero boundaries. We don't have zero boundaries at Squash. We won't make rape jokes. We won't make child assault jokes. Stuff like that. Like, stuff that's just heinous. We would never joke about it, because there's nothing funny about it. It's not that we're afraid to talk about it. But it's just not funny, like you can really, really try to make a rape joke funny, but why bother?

 Why try to be that one person that made this horrific thing funny? So there's a line that we won't cross, but we do like running up to that line a lot because it really does, A. People like jokes. People like adolescent humor. Like every reviewer has their take on whether our humor is sophisticated or not, and it's not sophisticated. We tell some sophisticated jokes. There's some sophisticated stuff going on, but it's a lot like grammar school jokes too. There's a lot of stuff that are just site gags. Like we have a guy whose head is just two butt cheeks and he farts when he talks. There's stupid stuff in our game and we know it. 

So we'll often get that, it's not shock value, but it's more like, okay, this is a game that doesn't take itself too seriously. This is a game that doesn't try to be the, this is the moral upright brigade of gaming here. If you want to go have some fart jokes and have some silly, legitimately good humor happening in your game, go play it. That's the message there. 

And we shot a kid in the game. It wasn't really a kid. He just looked like a kid. It was a full-grown adult, but nobody knew he was a kid. We have an alien that sells weird stuff. There's all kinds of very adult themes in it. We don't shy away from adult humor. We're an M-rated game. Anything we do will be adult humor. 

Mike Fridley: We're not targeting children. Like we're not targeting the younger audience. We're targeting people like us, like Gen X, millennials, Gen Z that are like, Oh, I just want to have some fun in a game that doesn't take itself too seriously and actually has really good gameplay. And I feel like I'm compelled to come back and play. 

So it's not just jokes. It's actually a really solid shooter on top of it, which was not accidental. We spent a lot of time trying to get the nuts and bolts of boss fights. And we have multiple weapon issues that you have to sort out with alternate powers and stuff like that.

So it is quite a bit of combat design, boss design, stuff like that, that went into the game. So it feels good. And then you're like, Oh, okay. Silly humor. On top of that, it just kind of jelled and it's kind of like the summer books that you used to read when you went to the beach, where it was like, I know it's not going to be like something that I'm going to put on my bookshelf and say that impress people by reading it, but it's fun. Like it's a fun summer game. It's a fun summer read. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying just to make games that are fun. 

It doesn't have to be a statement or anything. It can just be fun. And that's what people have taken to. And that's the world it's growing. Our role is growing into multiple different mediums now. And we're doing everything we can to keep growing it. But it's a fun place to be and everybody in the studio loves working on it, so, there's that too. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that's why I'm in games, people are so passionate. So you touched on having to make a complex game. I was going to make it overnight since that's a joke. Everyone's like, Oh, this is such an overnight success. No, there's so many years and so much thought went into this, but what's so interesting for me while running a podcast is hearing about what, when, what goes into making a game, what are all of the decisions that you had to make? And I mean, your game could be totally different. So what are the major decisions or things that went wrong, however you want to phrase that in the game, and how did you end up making the decisions that you made and why? 

Mike Fridley: I understand the question and I would have a completely different answer for every project except for High on Life because High on Life was a unique project in that what we did as our first playable and kind of our concept work and our pre-production work, we landed pretty damn close to it.

And it's the only time that's ever happened to me in game development where we didn't stray way far off of our original concept. So I think the original concept, the idea behind it, the characters, the world, everything like that, we had a, you know, pretty much day one in our first playable. Then we went through and built a vertical slice as we were staffing up the team. We were a pretty small team and to start off with like 12, 15 people. And we were starting to staff up and we built our vertical slice, I think, with about 20 devs. It had, you know, kind of a representation of a bunch of the game systems. We built what we call a beautiful corner that showed off the visuals of what the game is going to look like, because it's a lot of work to get an entire level up to the visual bar.

So we just have one little spot, so we can show people like, this is what's going to look like, and here's the gameplay, we're still really early pre-production. So it became that, and then our creative leaders, Eric and Mikey, they're both very much hands-on directors. They're very much hands-on like they get in there, they understand what they want. They understand what can be done and what can't, and they will get in there and do it if nobody else can. So it's great to have folks like that on the team that can come in and not only come up with a vision for the game, but also force it into reality, cause it became kind of a, everybody comes on to the game, it's not fleshed out yet and it starts to get fleshed out.

Kind of the credo we live by, if it's not better than the original concept, then don't do it. You have to be able to pitch your idea and why it's better than what we were going to do. And if you can't, then we're not going to do it. It's just because that is going to make the best game. And a lot of times when you're in pre production, folks will write like a giant GDD, a game development doc. Whether it's on Confluence or some Wiki or have them or be just a bunch of docs, then it feels like, okay, I'm supposed to follow this. This is what I'm supposed to make.

And devs, if you let them, they will get into that habit and it's been forced on them through the industry, throughout just the way we build games in most studios, where it's just a punch list of stuff to do. Where you're like, okay, you're my senior environment artist. Here's the biome that we're going to build. Bam, bam, bam, bam. Here's all your tasks. We were a little bit different. Like we, we look at it and say like, okay, here's the theme, here's the box you have to work in. It's going to be a really vibrant outdoor jungle type. We're going to have Mercs around here, stuff like that, but we want a lot of verticality to it. Because we would do some jumping puzzles. But go make something that's cool. And then they go make something that's cool. And we look at it and we give them feedback and we don't work on paper, we work in a game. So it's, everything is in game. Everything's an iteration game. All of our directors are very fluent in Unreal.

We use Unreal for it and they're able to get in there and tell when something's off, tell when something can be better, tell when something can be improved or anything like that. So it's a lot of just hands-on caring about the game. So it's a bit different than every other project I worked on where we had clear visionaries, but the fine print, like the places in between got filled in by the team and we just hired really good people that could get in there and work undirected. 

Like I don't need feedback every hour on my work. I don't need feedback every day on my work. Like those are the kind of people and they go off and do their thing and you come back and you're excited or even sometimes surprised that they exceeded what you thought they could do.

So we've pushed that out as a culture throughout the studio. And as we brought more people on, we're up to, I think, 72 now. As we brought more people on, it's been a learning curve for every single one of them that have been senior because they come from that world where it's very much a punch list of things that you're supposed to do. Your influence on the game is limited to just your area. And you don't have a lot of creative control. Over, over anything, but at Squanch on High On Life, it was very much the opposite of where there's like your opportunity to shine. If you suck and you shit the bed, then we're not going to use it. And you're probably gonna not fit in with Squanch. But if you're good at what you do and you're good at working undirected, then you love it here. It's the Mecca for game development at that point. So we just kind of harnessed that and it just kept making it better and better.

We play it a lot. We do a lot of internal plate testing and we do a lot of external plate testing, we do a lot of feedback loops, so we're not drinking our own Kool-Aid all the time. 

Lizzie Mintus: And when do you start that? 

Mike Fridley: We started early. We just got out of pre-production on the game we're working on now. And we're already playtesting. We've already had two playtests in the last month with external people. So very much, the folks that run our playtests internally are great. They're really good proctors at getting the kind of information that we need from the designers and artists. It's a good time. Like everybody loves to see them. People play their game and I always enjoy watching designers die a little bit inside when the players do stuff completely different than they thought they were going to, which is always hilarious to me. 

I came from QA, 26 years ago so it used to be my job to break stuff. So some sick part of me always likes to aggravate designers for some reason. I don't know why. 

Lizzie Mintus: Awesome. And how do you balance what you want to do and what feels good to the team with what the audience wants? What's actually what people are actually going to buy?

I think that's always such a struggle. 

Mike Fridley: Yeah. It was kind of a big risk. Like we try to hire people that have the same sense of humor as us and the same sense of humor as we thought our target audience would have. You know, our target audience are like Rick and Morty and American dad and family guy, and those kinds of watchers that watch adult animation. We hired people that specifically love that kind of stuff. 

We even put it like, it's a joke and it will never hold up at any court, but we put a line in our employment agreement that says we're going to say adult stuff here so please don't get offended by it. Even in our hiring documentation, we talk about how it's going to, like, you have that sense of humor, like we're going to drop that. 

Lizzie Mintus: On the job page, you even get that, right? You go to your website. You're like, Oh, this is very clear. This is who these people are, which is great. But I love that. You're like, Hey, here's who I am. Here's how we are. You're really upfront. 

Mike Fridley: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a challenge for our director of people ops. I don't envy Raina in her job to try to get us to walk that line. But it very much feels like a collective sense of humor that we have at the studio. We could tell a lot during interviews too, if you're going to click with us, like we're really big on cross discipline interviewing when we bring candidates in.

So it's not just like artists interviewing artists. Like an artist interviewing a programmer is not going to know anything about the technical side of it or not much. They're not going to be able to dive into their code and do anything like that. But they do know if the guy's a dick or they do know if she doesn't have a sense of humor at all, was really uptight.

Like they know stuff like that. So that fit for us is super important. Getting the people that will get excited about it because we need them excited to go off and be able to work on directed and make the quality stuff that we want. So that's really important for us that they aren't just doing it because they need a job as a VFX artist or something like, Oh, I need a paycheck. It's like, okay, you do realize we're going to do crazy stuff. Like we're going to do infantile games. I wish I could talk about this other game that we have in incubation right now that is insane. But it's a lot of stuff to take in, if you're used to working at like... I worked at Hasbro. A child's game is very much different. Working on Transformers is very much different than working on an adult animated game. 

So that's become a super important part of our culture. I hate using the word culture cause it always sounds so corporate and dumb, but it very much is our culture, our vibe... 

Lizzie Mintus: Your ethos. 

Mike Fridley: Yes. Okay. That sounds a little pretentious. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. Just trying to find synonyms. 

Mike Fridley: I'm fine with pretentious. 

Lizzie Mintus: Well, that's not your vibe. You're more down to earth. You're more real. I like it. 

Okay. In all of your years of game development, what is your aha moment that you wish you knew sooner that you can share with our listeners? That's what it's all about. 

Mike Fridley: There's a lot of them. I think probably the best rule of thumb that I learned over the years is that every project, every studio, every dev is different. We fool ourselves a lot. I worked in QA. I worked in design. I worked as a creative director. I worked as a producer and project manager for most of my career. So I've worked in multiple different departments. 

And the one thing that holds true that I found in the multiple studios that I've worked at is that every time I think I have a plan, it always has to be changed. It always has to be adapted to the project. It has to be adapted to the people on the project. It has to be adapted to how they work. With the rare exception of stuff like High on Life, most of the time, your creativity is going to have to adapt. You're gonna have to be adaptable all the way through. 

And we kind of get in this mindset, whether you're an animator or a producer or lead engineer that the way I've always done it is the way that we should do it because that's worked. This has worked so I'm going to do it. And we're not really happy with that. We question almost every process question, almost every pipeline, could we do this better? 

Like lip sync became super important to us because it's so much talking in the game. And we want the facial expressions and everything to be there cause that's part of a joke. It's really hard. Another reason why people don't do humor is because a lot of its body language too. It's not just the words that are coming out of the character. So we have to stay flexible there and be able to adapt to all the different variables that come up in making the game. 

So I've thought that like, okay, I started my career. We did project planning by waterfall. It was like it was just a waterfall plan and we had an old MS project and you broke it out and like as soon as one day passed the whole thing had to be rebuilt because something shifted. And then we got into hand software and Jira and all the different platforms for project management. And agile and these different methodologies. And they all have great points to them and there's something to be taken from all of them, I think. And the pitfall and kind of the aha moment was that I can't just take one solution that I've used in the past that's worked and apply it to every studio and every situation that you're in. 

Like when I first started at Squanch, I know Tanya, who was the CEO at the time and one of the founders of the studio and they hired me. I came out and said, all right, I'm not going to make any decisions for two months. And they're like, really? Like I could come in and make decisions immediately. I have enough experience to do that, but I don't have the context. I don't understand the games we're working on. I don't understand the people that are working on the games. I don't understand the audience yet. And the only way you can get that, not just reading some design doc, is to work with the people for a bit, go into meetings with them, talk to them, see how they're handling this, see what do they think we should be working on? What do they think is the most high priority? Like those kinds of things, like getting all that information from the team who's been working on it already and then applying it the best way that you can see fit based on your experience. 

Okay. Narrative is much easier to do in kind of a waterfall way, where it's just, we got scripts, they're going to punch them out, we can schedule them, actors have to be scheduled, studio time has to be scheduled, it's very much a waterfall. But system design, boss design, nope. they get in there and have a full checklist and then play it, and this is horrible, we need to redo the whole thing. So we may rebuild a different arena, we may change the boss out... all that has to be agile. 

You have to be able to adapt to it. And the constraints that we put on ourselves, because that's what feels comfortable, and that's the known, I know that this is going to work, is a trap that I've fallen into before. And coming to my aha moment was like, okay, I don't have to do this anymore, we can do custom plans. We can do custom solutions for everything. And just making it made the games better. Like it made the games better. It made them better to work on. People weren't as frustrated with the process. You really just have to listen and it's never a point where you're like, okay, our workflows are stellar.

Our process is untouchable. We've made everything as perfect as we possibly can. It should work. Nope. It's going to change. You're going to have different personnel, you have different moods, you have different games. You're going to work on a different level of that game. Like whatever it is, variables change all the time. And if you get comfortable and you're not trying to improve your process and trying to improve your workloads or do retros and try to figure out what went wrong, what went well, if you're not getting that kind of information from the team, from the people that are making the game, and then for your customers, it's out there in the world. If you're not using that information to change the way you do things, you're just being really bullheaded. 

You're just like, okay, I know better than everyone. I'm going to put my head down and I've been doing this for 26 years. We're going to do it my way like that. Like, yes, you can force games through. I've been at studios that people have forced games through in that way. And it shows on the other end. You know, I worked at EA Sports for multiple years, I saw that happen every year for EA Sports games. They were very much a formulaic way of doing things that you don't break, you don't break the formula.

This is the process A to B, where this is where the bots come on, and They just churn that sucker out every year, but they have to hit a date every year. They have to hit that date. So they have to be that rigid process. And for games like ours that are kind of more free-formed and especially comedic, there's no real way to gauge whether or not how long it's going to take something to get funny.

 The first draft is never as funny as the final draft. This may land quickly or may take a long time for this joke to land or this bit to land. We got this activity to be fun, and it's going to look horrible and not be funny until it does. So we just have to be comfortable with sitting in the filth of it sucking for long enough to make it good instead of just bailing on it. Because people that are stuck in that rigid way of doing things, they'll have a review and it's not good. We need to cut it. They bail.

Mike Fridley: We're like, no, that idea is good. It's just not good yet. Like we need to get it there. And that we continue to iterate on it until it gets very stubborn about making a joke or a situation land at Squanch? 

Lizzie Mintus: Just take some time. 

Mike Fridley: We cut stuff. But I don't know how many times I've heard people say, this is my dream. I wanna do this, I wanna do that. We're very much not baby killers. Baby killers is kind of a game dev term for being able to kill your baby. Oh, I love this feature. I love this, but we're terrible at it. Like we're terrible at being baby killers. Like we will. Eventually we get to the point where we're like, okay, we got to ship this thing.

We eventually will cut some stuff loose, but man, you really have to pry it out of their hands. And it really, that just shows how much the team cares about what they're working on and they're actually passionate about whatever their contribution to the game is because they don't want to see it go, or they want to like, give me one more chance at it. It's been years since I've mandated any OT or crunch at any studio that I've been at. But I've been lucky enough to work at studios where people really cared about the game... like, okay, I can stay a few extra hours to make this good rather than, okay, it's good enough. I could check it off on my JIRA list and be done. Like that's what this all fosters. It all fosters the kind of person you want on a team. I actually care about this, not because I might get fired, but I care about it because I want it to be good. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's why games are the best. People really care a lot and they want to make a fun thing that delights so many people. 

So you started at Squanch as an EP and you moved from COO to CEO. Can you talk a little bit about your journey and learning from your different exec roles? 

Mike Fridley: Yeah. I was a franchise development director at EA and then I came over and was a VP of development at Hasbro with Backflip. And I kept getting further and further up the food chain in these bigger studios. And what happened was I just stopped connecting with the people I was working with. It became like, I see the same four people every day. You know, at EA, there were like 600 people working in the Tiburon studio. Like, I didn't know anybody's name. You could walk by people in the hall, I'd have no idea who they are, what team they worked on, what they do, anything like that. 

And, you know, when I started in the industry, that was completely different. I was part of the dev team. I was in the trenches and it was like, I got to know everybody. And it was just a much more pleasant experience to know people rather than just make decisions from some ivory tower and everybody has to deal with it.

So when Hasbro shut down our studio in Boulder, I had the opportunity to open a studio for Scopely in Boulder, but Scopely does almost all mobile games. So I didn't really want to get back into mobile games again. I wanted to move out of that. And I wanted to move into something that I felt more attached to the team.

And I knew everybody's name and I'm big on being able to facilitate, be a facilitator rather than just declaring things that need to happen. I want to facilitate them to happen. So I was like, you know, when I interviewed at Squanch, I know it's a step back. You know, that was the big question. Like, why take the step back? 

Lizzie Mintus: That's always the question. Yeah. 

Mike Fridley: Yeah. Why go to EPD when you've been at the executive level? And that was my answer. It was really like, I just like making games. I like making games with people and it started for me back in first edition DnD on my parents kitchen table, making dungeons. I just want to be part of that creative process as much as I can. I'm not a talented creator. I tried it for a bit, but I'm not that great at it, but I want to work with those people. Like creatives are crazy people and they completely think differently than I do in most areas.

Lizzie Mintus: But it's so fun. 

Mike Fridley: It's so fun.

Lizzie Mintus: In their brain and to figure out where their mind goes, it's fascinating. It's my job. It's the best. 

Mike Fridley: You know, and so I've learned a lot working with creatives over the year, different ways of thinking about things. I care about things differently now than I did before I started working with creatives all the time.

I care about certain parts of the game more now. So that part of it, I just felt like I was going in and I could have been working at an insurance company. It would have been the same thing. I'm just reviewing, viewing PNLs and budgets. And it's like this isn't why I got into making games.

It's great that I've been promoted up and that always seems to be the goal. It's like, oh, I want to be the top dog cause you get more money and you think you have more control and all that stuff. But once I got there, I was like, ah, I just hate this. Like I don't get to work on games anymore. This sucks. So eh. 

I knew Tanya and I loved Rick and Morty. So I was like, okay I'll give it a shot. And within the first year Tanya left and went to work for JJ Abrams. She's now at Microsoft on their first party team. We were like, okay, we need to find a studio director if Tanya's leaving. And I was like, all right, they kind of twisted my arm a little bit and said, will you step into it? I said, okay, I'll step into it. So I was mostly thinking about it originally is just kind of a temporary fill, but after I got in and was able to work with the executive team and our owners and was able to actually do what I wanted to do with the studio rather than just be kind of a nameless executive and I'm able to set up a bunch of stuff like even being a fully remote studio.

Like we're always on Slack. We always have our video cameras on. We have weekly show and tells and team meetings where we get together and laugh it up and yuck it up each other's stuff. We have a bunch of different social channels on Slack that we're all in. We do our version of Mystery Science Theater 3000 once a month where we all get together and watch a movie and rag on it the whole time.

I mean, you just do a bunch of stuff together where it feels like we're all awake enjoying the same stuff together. And that's the feeling I was missing. That's the feeling I was missing when I left Hasbro and came to scrunch, I was like, okay, if I can capture that and still run the studio, great. That's awesome. So that's kind of how I landed where it was. It was, somebody needed to fill that slot and I'd done it before. I'd been a temporary studio director at Big Huge Games for about a year when they got sold. So I kind of knew the operational side of it. I knew what you had to do to run a business. So it was just, I could fill in so the wheels don't fall off and we can keep making the game and we'll see how it goes. And it just became better and better and better. And I was like, okay, I'll just stay. So it's been great. 

Lizzie Mintus: You're my dream candidate. To work with people who've been doing it for a long time. This is why I recruit in games. And then eventually they're like, look. I've made my money. I've had a great career. I've been promoted. I just want to do the thing that I love so much. And when you help them find the thing that they love super fulfilling.

Mike Fridley: Yeah, it's great. I'm sure this is exactly what you're talking about. Especially if they've struggled before, if they've struggled finding a home or they've struggled finding their space or they're like...

Lizzie Mintus: they're in a really bad place. 

Mike Fridley: And you're just like, Oh man, I can totally feel you. I've been in that situation or people I know I've been in that situation. It sounds horrible. Or just like, man, that sounds just like a regular nine to five that you punch in, you're not getting any enjoyment out of your work. Like it's like a home for wayward devs in some way, it's like, Hey, come in and like, This'll be the best studio you work at, is what I try to make it for everybody that works there.

We want to be profitable. Obviously we need to keep the lights on and paying everybody and grow the brand as much as we can. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. Priority number one side of business. Yeah. 

Mike Fridley: That side of it is one thing. But what I found is if you make fun games, people will buy fun games and that kind of takes care of the economics a bit. So we had eight and a half million people play High on Life. So financially it's been a big success for us, the start of an IP. And we built it all just by making dumb stuff that we thought would be fun and having a good time doing it. That's the key, I think, to Squanch, it's just like we need to enjoy what we're doing.

And if we don't, we like to take a step back and go, why aren't we enjoying this? There's something wrong here because, especially now that we've shipped High on Life, that's what success looks like to us, is being able to, you know, kind of plug it in. It's a little chaotic and we're never really, we're always shaking the jello. We're never really satisfied with where the game is. So it always feels a little uncertain while we're making it, but it's exciting. It's like, okay, are we going to get this done? Is it going to get polished to levels? Like we're going to get the performance where it needs to be. We're always pushing it rather than playing it safe. 

So you can play it safe and ship a game with a smaller team. You hear folks like, a couple of CEOs in the big studios, are talking about how AI is going to make games so much cheaper to make now. And I just think it fundamentally undermines why games are fun. It's because gamers make games. And gamers know what's fun. They know what they enjoy. They know what their audience is going to enjoy because they are their audience. And, you know, removing that and replacing it with any kind of tech, especially AI.

We've been working in AI since I've been in the industry. So I'm familiar with AI's capabilities and it's very good at doing monotonous things. Work like a calculator would be, it's just a tool. But to think that you could replace the creativity and the special sauce, for lack of a better term, that comes with like people that are really passionate about the game they're working on and feel like they're supported by their team and they can take risks and they're not going to be left out in on a limb, if they propose something crazy... like those out of a box, like crazy ideas, like all the dumb stuff that you see in games that surprise and shock you and make you go, Oh, wow. I wasn't expecting that. That didn't come from AI. That didn't come from any procedural tech that came from some dummy, like me sitting there going, this would be funny and typing it in.

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. I was going to say I came from a creative genius. 

Mike Fridley: Or like a creative genius. Yes. Mostly a creative genius, not a dummy like me. 

Lizzie Mintus: I have one final question before I ask it. I want to point people to your website, squanchgames.com funny stuff on there, check it out. My last question, who has been your biggest mentor or mentors?

Choose a couple if you need. And what is some advice that they've given you? It's really stuck with you. 

Mike Fridley: I don't think I could narrow it down to one specific mentor that has meant a lot to me. I've taken a lot from multiple different mentors over the years. One of the members of our board, Jen McClain, was the CEO at the company that owned us when I worked at Big Huge Games in Baltimore.

And I got to know Jen there and became friendly with her and I've learned different stuff from Jen. Throughout that time working there about conflict resolution was a big thing that I learned from Jenna, I think, and how to deal with big egos, stuff like that. I learned from her. So folks like her, like, my boss at Big Huge was Carrie, Wilkinson. He taught me how to do better self evaluations. And I kind of learned how to do a self post mortem every year because of him. It's just a way that I've taken a personal look at what you've done the previous year and like actually doing it and forcing yourself to do it.

So there's been multiple little things like that, that I'm like, okay, this person has a great idea. This works for me. It's the same way that we do development. It's like, take what works, don't use what doesn't. I've been really blessed to work with a ton of really good people through all the studios that I've worked at.

And I've been able to steal multiple good ideas and just good habits and good ways of looking at things from them. So I can't really shout out one specific person, but there's been a lot of learning. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it's great. We've been talking to Mike Fridley, who is the CEO of Squanch. Mike, where can people go to work for you, know more about you, contact you, if you want to be contacted?

Mike Fridley: Yes, everything's on our website. So squanchgames.com. There's a section about us. We have a newsletter. We just released our second comic. So that's all the news is about the comics right now. We just did a bunch of comics with Titan, that are really cool. Yeah, it's all there. All our job listings are there. You can apply directly from the website. It goes through Rippling. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you so much. Thanks for your humor. 

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.