David Fox is the Co-founder and Director of Electric Eggplant, specializing in new media and interactive design. In addition to his responsibilities at Eggplant, David decided to adapt his 2013 Rube Works: The Official Rube Goldberg Invention Game to XR. He is also a founding member of Lucasfilm Games as employee number two. During his 10-year tenure at Lucasfilm, he worked on Maniac Mansion, Zack McCracken and the Alien Mindbenders, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. David recently collaborated with Ron Gilbert’s Terrible Toy Box team on Thimbleweed Park and is the Lead Programmer of Return to Monkey Island. 

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

• David Fox discusses his tenure at Lucasfilm Games
• David reflects on how he was able to overcome imposter syndrome
• How Lucasfilm Games evolved, and the creation of groundbreaking games
• The journey: David shares his career trajectory after Lucasfilm
• David muses on the advancement of virtual reality games
• Leveraging diversity and experiences as game design inspiration
• What will it take to make VR more mainstream?

In this episode…

Virtual reality games continue to grow in popularity. However, the technology behind VR is constantly evolving. How has VR advanced, and how can it be improved upon?

Seasoned industry leader David Fox has witnessed many innovative developments in the gaming world, including virtual reality. He recollects several setbacks in creating VR, such as slow frame rates, movement lag time, and the fact that it needed to be more affordable. However, he understood that these were temporary obstacles and that game developers needed to focus on how to make VR a more memorable experience. Although there is always room for improvement, David maintains that with the advent of 3D design, participating in VR is utterly engaging due to its immersive environment. Still, David declares that VR can further its mainstream appeal by creating games that do not require bulky headsets or extensive equipment setup.

Join Lizzie Mintus on today’s episode of the Here’s Waldo Podcast, where she talks with David Fox, Co-founder and Director of Electric Eggplant, about the pioneering days of game development. David discusses his tenure at Lucasfilm Games, the advancement of virtual reality games, and what developers should consider to make VR more mainstream.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• David Fox on LinkedIn | X | Mastodon | Threads
• Electric Eggplant
• Wallace Poulter on LinkedIn

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Here’s Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in the video game industry that prioritizes quality over quantity and values transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs and provide a white-glove experience that ensures a win-win outcome.

The industry evolves. The market changes. But at Here’s Waldo Recruiting, our commitment to happy candidates and clients does not. 

We understand that searching for the best and brightest talent can be overwhelming, so let our customer-first staff of professionals do the leg work for you by heading over to hereswaldorecruiting.com.

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: I'm Lizzie Mentos, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique video game recruitment firm. This is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about what it takes to be successful. You can expect to hear valuable lessons from their journey and to get a glimpse into the future of the industry.
This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting, a boutique recruiting firm for the video game industry. We value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity. We partner with companies, creatives, and programmers to understand the why behind their needs. We provide a white glove experience that ensures a win outcome.
Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Wallace Poulter for introducing us. Wallace is an amazing connector and just knows everybody in the industry. So thank you so much.
Today we have David Fox with us. In 1982, David Fox was a founding member of Lucasfilm Games, or LucasArts. During his 10 years at Lucasfilm, he worked on Rescue on Fractalus, Labyrinth, Maniac Mansion, Zack McCracken, and the Alien Mindbenders, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Graphic Adventure. More recently, David joined Ron Gilbert's Terrible Toy box team on Thimbleweed Park and the recently released Return to Monkey Island as a lead game programmer. David currently heads up Electric Eggplant, where he's adapting his 2013 RubeWorks, the official Rube Goldberg invention game for ARVR.
Let's get started. Thanks so much for being here. So glad Wallace could connect us. I want to start, no surprise, to talk about your early days. You were employee number two when it was still Lucasfilm Games. Can you tell everybody a bit about what that was like?
David Fox: Yeah. Thank you for inviting me to be on your show. That was pretty amazing. It took me a few years to realize that I actually belonged there. I had major imposter syndrome and was sure that any day someone would find out that they made a huge mistake in hiring me because I didn't have the qualifications or something.
It was definitely a dream to work at that company ever since I saw Star Wars when it first came out in 1977. And in fact, my wife and I were thinking about moving to a place where housing was less expensive, like in Oregon. And I got really sad when I thought, if I did that, I never could work for Lucasfilm. So maybe we should just stay in Marin County where Lucasfilm is actually based, which we happen to live. And it worked out.
I had finished a book on called computer animation primer. And around that same time, a friend told me that Lucasfilm Games was starting a new group within the computer division to open up and start doing games.
And all of a sudden there was something in the company that I was qualified to be a part of. I called up the head of the computer division, which was Ed Catmull, who I actually had talked to when I was researching the state of the art and of the computer animation spectrum for the book I had just finished.
And he told me they had just hired Peter Langston to head the group and would let me know I was interested. The other coincidence was that the second half of the book was doing animation on the Atari 800 computer. Atari was the company that gave Lucasfilm a million dollars to start their new group, with the idea that they would do games for that computer.
So I had some credentials in the game, I had published a game. I was local and I was enthusiastic. The other qualification, which is really strange, was that they didn't want people who actually had a huge game design history. They didn't want people who had worked in large game companies because they wanted to reinvent how gaming games were produced. So I qualified there too. I never worked for a large company. So everything just fell into place.
I was actually, I think the second outside employee hired and the third one because one other person transferred from inside the computer division doing what he was doing over to our group. So it's still right in the beginning.
Lizzie Mintus: How did you get over your imposter syndrome or what event led you to getting over it?
David Fox: Yeah, it probably was after we actually finished the first game. I realized I could actually do it.
I was working on this game. It was probably at least six months in before I realized I was the project leader on it. We didn't have those terms yet so there was nothing established. This is actually your game. You could do what you want.
Oh, okay. So I grabbed the reins a little more than I had been maybe. And when when we finished it and it was great and it got amazing reviews, I said, okay, I can actually do this. I guess they were right in hiring me. So that was good.
Lizzie Mintus: Did you know that it was going to do well, or was that a surprise?
David Fox: No, I think we knew. We knew we had come up with a technology that no one had ever used in a game at the time. My office mate when I first joined was a guy named Lauren Carpenter, who was known in the computer graphics industry as really being the first person to do fly through mountainous terrains fractals and computer graphics.
He worked on that part of the Star Trek 2 Wrath of Khan movie that showed the genesis effect of flying through this terraformed landscape. One of the first things I asked him as an office mate was, do you think it's possible to do fractals on a Atari 800 computer? And he laughed and said, no, it wouldn't be possible.
And then I guess he took it as a challenge and said maybe there's a way. And he borrowed one of our Atari 800 computers and the manuals and learned 6502 assembly language, learned the innards of the Atari 800, and all the graphics processor stuff. And in a few days came back with a working demo of flying through a landscape.
I mean, he's brilliant. The whole computer division ended up as Pixar that Steve Jobs bought. And Lauren was their chief scientist for quite a while. Great timing, great luck and having him as an office mate. I never would have had that opportunity to ask that. So he was put on loan to our game for several months, so he could refine the code that he had written. And then we had Charlie Counter, who really took that code and added flight dynamics to it. So you could use a joystick by rounding the landscape. And I did a lot of the gameplay design and implementation. Just really good team.
When it was done, it was so far ahead of what any other computer game had looked like. There were flight simulators for Microsoft at the time, had a frame rate of like maybe three or four frames per second. And we were doing about double that on a probably less powerful computer. And it made it feel like you were flying through this landscape. It was groundbreaking.
Also, one other thing, which probably helped, there's this guy named George Lucas who worked at the company. When both my game and Ballblazer, which was the other game that we had released at the same time, it was starting up in parallel. He came by one morning to do a little play test to see what we were doing.
He sat down and played the game in my office for about 20 minutes and had some really good feedback. One of which was he wanted to see more tension and suggested that while when you landed to pick up a pilot to rescue him, maybe it was an alien in disguise who would come and start smashing on your windshield and break through your plane's window.
We thought about, can we do that? And we actually came up with a way to do it. And for a lot of people, besides the fractal landscape, that's what the games remembered for, really one of the first games with a real jump scare. Cause we convinced Atari, not to mention that it's anywhere in their advertising.
Lizzie Mintus: Oh.
David Fox: There was nothing. It was alluded to in the manual that there's something that happened to one of the pilots who was rescuing people, but we never showed any imagery of it. And the first seven levels, it never happened. So you got used to playing the game and kind of getting into automatic mode, but all of a sudden this thing happens and it like freak people out.
I still get stories of people like falling off of their chair or yelling, obviously this is like 35 to 40 years ago, but having really intense reactions when they first encountered this alien jumping up and smashing through their window. I remember the picture of the alien reaching around with his hand and grabbing my face- that never happened, but they imagined it because of the sound effects that were happening at the same time.
I have to thank George for that inspiration. So a lot of great connections there to make the game, I guess memorable.
Lizzie Mintus: What a superstar team. Okay, so you shipped your first game. You're two years in, but you were there for 10 years. Tell me about the evolution of the company because it's hard to grow and it's hard to continue success when you grow.
So how is that possible?
David Fox: Yeah, we had a really unique situation in that most startups in the game industry, for example, have limited funds, they have like hard deadlines for the games to come out in order to get the money for the next game. We were inside this company, which had plenty of money. This was 1982, right after Empire Strikes Back and right before Return of the Jedi came out.
The company had enough money to keep us going for a long time without requiring us to really carry our own weight. So we had the freedom to experiment, to be more of a research group initially and try things that maybe were risky that may or may not pay off. But they didn't have to pay off because we were getting the experience in interactive and storytelling.
For the first two games, in fact, we were feeling really intimidated that, here we are at Lucasfilm, where we're expected to do the equivalent of Star Wars on our first time out.
What they told us was, no, don't worry about it. These are throwaway games. If they work, great. If they don't, we will have learned something about the development process.
So we didn't have that much pressure initially to come up with something brilliant. We just did something we were passionate about and it worked out really well. Then the group grew to 15 people, 20 people. We eventually moved to Skywalker Ranch and we were there for four years.
Generally during that period, I was really there from 82 to 92, but during the first eight years, when I was doing games for the home, teams tended to be relatively small. Maybe three to five people was pretty typical.
Lizzie Mintus: That's so funny to think about compared to today.
David Fox: Yeah, and development cycle was nine months maybe for a game. We really had really limited storage. You really couldn't do massive games. So a lot of the time was how do you squeeze it into the storage we had, as opposed to adding all sorts of different animation assets that we couldn't afford to have on the floppy disk or a cartridge or whatever. Very different focus.
We took a unique approach where we were using first ,a minicomputer as the target, as the development system, and then having it use a serial port to download to the target machine. Or eventually send microcomputer systems, workstations to do it. So we had the money to have fairly powerful Unix based development environments, as opposed to developing directly on the target machine.
It took a while before PCs were powerful enough, like maybe the end of the eighties where those became the development environment where we could actually do that. And it would work.
Having funds to do things like that was also probably really unusual in the industry at that time. Initially we were part of the computer division, so having the sophistication of being a Unix based company with lots of mini computers and a very solid IT department and all that was already taken care of.
Even though we were a small group, the support stuff for the company was part of Lucasfilm. We didn't need to have like our own secretarial pool, our own maintenance pool, our own IT department, or any of that was all company related. So that also meant that it was, we were just part of the overall, part of the overhead,
Lizzie Mintus: yeah, the best of both worlds. You're a lean startup. It's so funny to think about that size of team making a game today. Think about how much games cost and the cycle and how often they get thrown out. It's really a whole different world.
David Fox: Very different.
Lizzie Mintus: Maybe there's something that can be learned from your days to how it is today.
David Fox: It's still possible. The biggest team I worked on was their most recent game, Return to Monkey Island. And there's probably maybe a couple dozen people on the core team, maybe another 10 people that did other work that came in and out of the project, but weren't part of the core team. But it's still relatively small compared to a triple A game with hundreds and hundreds of people on it.
Lizzie Mintus: Maybe hundreds of millions of dollars.
David Fox: Right. I've never worked on a game like that, and I don't think I'd ever want to. I don't think I'd want that kind of pressure. So I'm happy with small groups.
Lizzie Mintus: Sometimes I think that you can be a little bit more agile when you're a small group and you can follow your own rules and you don't have the constraints.
And it is interesting because you see very large corporations who are brimming with additional cash, but can't really make an effective game to save their lives. So it's interesting.
David Fox: The other huge benefit I think we had were two other ones. When I first started working on Rescue on Fractalus, I wanted it to be a Star Wars game.
And that's what I was picturing was like flying in the Star Wars universe, like an X wing or something. Within a day or two of coming up with the concept, I found out that we couldn't do anything in the Star Wars universe because all the rights to Star Wars games had been sold to other companies already.
Atari had it for the home art for the arcade market and Kenner slash Parker Brothers had it for the home market. All the games that came out were from Parker Brothers. After the initial disappointment, the positive part meant that we were forced to use our own original IP, come up with our own ideas.
Since we weren't doing anything that company really had history on, we didn't have a lot of attention put on us to, say from George, for example, to micromanage, maybe. I know later, maybe in the two thousands, when they were doing a lot of Star Wars stuff, he was definitely involved and had control over the designs. And heard stories of things that didn't go really well because of wanting certain things to happen after production had been completed on something.
So we were lucky that he left us alone. I don't think he really came in and looked at games other than that first time with the first two games. So we had a lot of creative freedom. We could develop our own internal style and ended up with a lot of humor and quirkiness that kind of became a hallmark of the games that we were doing.
We knew stuff was supposed to be PG. Other than that, and no one ever came in and say, you have to change that because it's inappropriate. We just knew. The other was that we really didn't have a marketing department for quite a while, so we didn't have marketing come in and say, we need this game to do this and we have, and here's the marketing deadline and here's the schedule.
And it was really driven by the designers and the project leaders. I associate project leaders slash designers. Usually the process would be, one of us would come up with an idea, we would write up a two or three page concept document, pass it around to the other project leaders get the thumbs up. And then we would become the project leader and assemble the team to do the game.
So it was all driven from the creative people and not from a management or marketing. They just said, we need another game and say, okay, I have an idea. It's great! That was when I started hearing or understanding how the rest of the industry worked.
I think that's why you ended up with a lot of games that maybe put lots of money in, but they really weren't driven from the inspiration of the creatives. Another plus for us to be able to come up with our own way of doing things.
Lizzie Mintus: So I'm hearing that you think that the best way to make a game or the way that you have found it to be most effective is to have the creatives run it and have less input from other people and let the creatives do their thing.
David Fox: Yeah. Clearly, there have to be some constraints, about when the game should be ready for and if you're a good project leader, you could probably stick to the time. I don't remember ever being told a budget. We weren't really given budgetary constraints during the time I was there. I'm sure that came later.
As games got more complicated and more expensive than yeah, they had to do that. That kind of happened with adventure games is we had more space for either the floppy disks got bigger, the storage medium or CD ROMs or whatever they were shipped on. Then you have a lot more space for animation and assets.
Those are really expensive and budgets went up and then you had to have more control over how long the project will last. But I was gone by then, so I didn't have to worry about that.
Lizzie Mintus: Okay, so you left and then walked me through where you went and what happened.
David Fox: The last game I worked on at LucasArts was Indiana Jones, The Last Crusade. That was really fun.
That was really the first major IP game that we worked on that was owned by Lucasfilm. Because it was based on a film, we did have a deadline that was pretty tight because we wanted to get the game done by around the same time the film came out. So we brought three project leaders together to work on it.
Three designers slash project leaders, which we had never done before. So myself, Ron Gilbert, and Noah Faustine, we're really focused on the game to get it done. We missed the deadline by maybe a month or two, but it wasn't terrible because the movie was in the theaters for really long time.
So we can still tie in with it. Then I was asked to be the director of operations for a year. By then I think we had grown from the 5 to 65 people and had never really set up any kind of a hierarchy within the company. It was very flat, so everyone reported to one person.
Lizzie Mintus: Oh, that's too many pizzas, as they say at Amazon.
David Fox: So I ended up helping to set up some kind of a hierarchy and getting heads of departments and various departments set up in that way. I was directly responsible for the programmers and the project leaders. It was not really something I wanted to do, cause I much prefer doing games than management.
But the carrot was, our general manager, Steve Arnold promised me that I could do something in the area of location based immersive entertainment once the year was up. I could set things up, hire someone to replace me, and then move on to immersive.
He kept his promise and so after a year of that, we ended up creating a new group within Lucasfilm called Rebel Arts and Technology, or RAP for short. Very small group. We had a partnership. With Hughes Simulation, which did professional flight simulators for airlines and for military.
And the idea would be to do like a flight simulator based game. I was the, in charge of the game design and the creative part of it. And Hughes was responsible for all the technical part. And we also did the design of the simulator, but the pod design would look like based on what had to go inside of it, with Hughes specifications, like how many projectors and things like that. And it was a star Wars game.
The first one we chose to do. So I actually got to do a star Wars game. Pod was about maybe 12 feet across, so two seats in it, there is a large window in front, 120 degree field of view. There were three video projectors overhead to create the imagery. it's very big and they had a mirror. So when you look out the window, you were focusing like maybe 100 feet away. So it felt like you were flying through space, really huge landscapes. We had a surround sound system and we had an Amiga computer for the heads down display, giving you like a terrain map of what you're seeing instrumentation.
It was a super fun game. It was multiplayer so there were other stations that could fight against you, playing other X Wings or TIE Fighters. And unfortunately, it was too expensive for that time for any theme parks to actually bring it in.
We were using flight simulator technology, which was way more expensive than home computers. It just never actually, it was shown at the IAPA show, which is the amusement interactive, amusement park association conference. So they showed it. And then as far as I know, it never got sold beyond that.
By then, Steve Arnold, who had got us going with our group, had left the company and there wasn't anyone inside who was passionate about immersive. So they decided to close down our group. And that's when I left when the group closed down.
By then I had the taste of what immersive entertainment could be like and going back to a 2D PC version of a game just felt like a huge setback. So I tried to do to find. Consulting gigs doing VR and immersive. It was just too early, really. So I ended up switching to like online stuff and internet for a while until the technology caught up.
Lizzie Mintus: So I see that you spoke at a virtual reality conference in 1992 and gave a talk called Virtual Reality- It's Not the Technology.
What was virtual reality then? Can you talk about what it was then and then just the advancements you've seen since then?
David Fox: Yeah, all the talk really at that time was about the tech and people fretting that it was too expensive or the frame rates were too slow. The lag time when you move your head and the picture goes like this and pops into place, interactions were super expensive.
I knew that was a temporary problem and rather than focusing on that, what can we focus on in terms of the experience and figuring that would drive the technology after some time. I didn't expect it to take 25 years before the prices came down. The technology got good enough so that it could actually be affordable for the home market, but that's what it took.
So I left that area and I think everything I said in the talk was still true, just that it took way longer than I thought for it to catch up. I started playing with VR five or six years ago when the tech came down to like in the $2000- 3000 range, including, or maybe $4000, when you include a PC with it. And then got really inspired when I went to the Facebook Connect conference in 2019, which is now called MetaConnect.
And got to try the first one, Oculus Quest.
Lizzie Mintus: Oculus. Yeah. So many names, Facebook, Meta, Oculus, Reality Labs. What is it now?
David Fox: And it's okay. Where we've now arrived. It's still not great, but I can see that the advancement from where it was before and in the fact that it's a standalone headset.
You don't have to have an expensive PC. This is the path. I had done this game that came out in 2013 called Rubeworks, which is based on Rube Goldberg's cartoons. We have a license to do a game based on Rube Goldberg's 1920s to 1930s or 40s cartoons of chain reaction machines. I wanted to make a puzzle game where you would actually have to build his machines in the game. As opposed to being like a sandbox style game, there are specific puzzles for each level that you had to solve to build the machine. A simple way to open a window or simple way to get fresh orange juice in the morning, which is typical of Hussein.
Of course, it wouldn't be simple, which is the joke. There'd be 10 or 15 objects that had to interact with each other to make the final thing happen. We got funded for the game by Unity Games, which was a short lived group within Unity where they would decide they would do publishing themselves, in addition to selling the development environment. And they pay for the development, I worked with Connie Striker and his group, his development company to do the actual development cause I didn't have my own development company. And we delivered the game. I worked with Rube Goldberg's granddaughter.
She was my co producer on it and she was great to work on with us. She said, Rube wouldn't do that way, her grandfather, if she knew him. So we could talk about straight to the source really. Game came out for mobile and desktop and it's still out. It's still sells, not huge numbers, but it's out there.
So I went to the Connect conference in 2019. And I saw this and realizing, okay, I already have a game that we have the rights to because Unity games ended up closing down after a few months and the rights reverted to us.
That we could use for a VR game. Ended up funding this and started doing it. Got pretty good, pretty far into it. Then, the Return to Monkey Island project came up as an opportunity ,and no way would I turn that down. So I jumped to do that and got to be on that team. And when that was over, when it was shipped a year ago, that's when I moved back to Rubriks.
So right now, Rubrik's VR is in a closed beta, and we'll open it up pretty soon, probably with a free first level that people can download for free and try. For me, it was mostly, I wanted to learn how to develop in VR, because I really didn't have direct experience of how to take my 2D game design experience and actually do it. And that's the best way to learn.
So I just gave a talk in the GIC conference in Poland about the process of taking a game design for a flat screen, like an iPad or a mouse based desktop, and what were the obstacles we came into when we wanted to convert it into a 3D immersive environment.
It's a great learning experience. With a thing that I didn't expect, I knew it'd be fun, but the charm of actually seeing these objects where you can actually reach in with your fingers in your hand and pick up an object and move it around and bring it up close and inspect it like this and put it back and really with your hands using hand tracking, it's just so so wonderful compared to just having it at a distance where you're using a mouse or cursor to move things around.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it's incredible.
David Fox: You can describe it and It's an emotional reaction. My wife has not been playing the game and she tried it and she picked up some of the characters. She started tearing up because it was so cute. That never happened with the flat version. She said it looks great. So there's just something emotionally different about how it happens. So that was exciting.
Lizzie Mintus: That's really exciting. What do you think about the Apple Vision Pro? Will you develop a game for it next? Can you say?
David Fox: I would love to. Once we get this one working on the Quest and get in the store, we do have plans to bring it out to all the other VR platforms. Probably steam first, just because that's the easy jump.
But as an experiment, the thing about the way we did the game, the original game, you're seeing, you're looking into a room and you could scroll around the room with your fingers or with a mouse, but you never see beyond the room.
So should we do this as immersive where you're in this big room where you're walking around?
I said, no, that doesn't feel right. It's really more of a self contained puzzle. So the idea was to use a shadow box. We have this, what looks like a walnut wooden box and inside the box, like a dollhouse is the scene. It's miniaturized, so the whole box is maybe two feet across. It's sitting on a desk in VR. Desk and the floor have nothing to do. They aren't really interactive. They're just there as props.
So the idea of turning this into a mixed reality experience seems like an obvious next step, because you could then pick up the box, walk over to your table, your desk, and put it down there. And then you move in close to the on a chair and then interacting with the objects, and then maybe put the box onto a virtual shelf, where each level would be in its own box and you pick up the next one and put it down or maybe have that done automatically, where you can actually see a shelf there on the wall with all the put up levels that you've done in the locked ones that you haven't done yet. I just lean into that part of it because it doesn't really need to be in VR.
It really is perfect for a mixed reality experience. So that's probably the next step. And that's exactly where the Apple Vision Pro lies and where its strengths are. I don't know if we'll be the first out the door there. The development prices is steep unless they provide headsets. I know you can use emulators and get pretty far with part of it with that. It's definitely on our radar and I'm super impressed.
The thing that impressed me the most was listening to the experiences of people who tried it as opposed to the people who looked at the specs of the thing and kind of poo pooed it, pricing. But the emotional response of people who actually tried it on and got to have that experience told me they've really solved a whole bunch of Issues in mixed reality.
I'm an Apple fan from way back. So I know that they could do it if they put their attention to it. Now, of course, how do you get the price down for normal people or real people to actually afford it?
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, but just like any new piece of technology that comes out, it's always so expensive at first. That's just the way that it goes. This is V1.
David Fox: Yeah. It's really interesting. They took the Tesla approach in a way, where they ended up with the super expensive high end experimental car vehicle and then brought it down to the masses.
Here's what the experience could be, if price wasn't an option or a problem, a barrier and bring it down.
Lizzie Mintus: Pricing is interesting though. An iPhone is a thousand dollars, but everybody has one. So it's just, what is the demand? I'm not saying that everybody's going to have a vision pro, but I feel like a high price point makes it a more desirable item. And it's always pricing is just fascinating.
David Fox: And when I bought my first iPhone, it wasn't a thousand dollars. It was what three or 400 maybe at the time, 500. But other phones at the time we're probably less expensive. So that, so I think Apple would trained us that if you really want this experience, here's what you get, what you have to do to pay for it. I change my phones every three to five years, so it makes sense then.
I should say to your listeners, if you are interested in participating in the beta for Rubriks, then you should definitely get in touch with me. It's going to be on App Lab. That's the name of the store that's like the secondary experimental store where apps have a chance to go through multiple iterations and mature. I guess if they shine, then they might be considered to be brought into the main store where most of the sales are done. But you have the space to have access to betas and a lot of feedback.
Lizzie Mintus: If you post on LinkedIn is my bread and butter as a recruiter, if you're doing it, you'll have a huge reach. I'm happy to help project that for all of our listeners, too.
It's fun to be able to be a part of the process of developing a game and to be able to have input as a player as to what you want to see. And I feel like that's really a theme of the next generation of games.
Yes, people are still going to make these massive titles for years and years, but there's so much UCG that can be done. And I just was at GamesBeat, which was wonderful. Shout out to the whole VentureBeat and GamesBeat community that made it possible. And I listened to a lot of talks and that was the gist of many of them.
People want to be able to create their own worlds, create their own realities, or just work alongside developers and just have early access and be able to see or open beta, what you really and what you don't like and be able to make a game your own. I feel like that's one of the more exciting themes these days in games.
David Fox: Having a lot of people try games at this stage is also really helpful because, I've long ago habituated into a certain way of interacting with it. I said, Okay, it works. No problem. And then I started hearing people. I can't get a hint from this object, or I can't pick up the object.
And I said, How could that be a problem? Do a capture of your video of doing it. And I see what they're doing, and they're doing something very different than what I do. It's not wrong what they're doing. It's just not something I had ever considered someone would do in that way.
There's a hand gesture right now to get a hint from an object. You have to keep your finger like this and pointed and touch the object to get a hint. And I saw people doing this and then doing that to get the hint. They bent their finger. It went out of the mode where it was looking for hints or they go in like this and they start turning their finger, which we assumed you had to keep your finger straight.
Otherwise we're afraid we trigger hints all the time whenever you moved your hand around the environment.
How are they picking up? Are they picking up like this? For me, this is how you point. Some people point like this, and I never considered that. Or trying to use a hand like that, or can you grab to pick up the object? So there's a lot of other ways of interacting that.
Make total sense that we have to support and be more lenient about what we accept as a gesture for it to work. And that really you can't do from two or three people doing it.
Lizzie Mintus: Right. I think that's why it's important to have different people on your team that come from different places too. Because if you all come from the same studio and you're all taught the same way, you're all going to do the same thing and have the same thought process.
Like you said about early days where you had so many people from outside of the industry, that made something really spectacular because they all just had this different approach to it. I just talked to someone who is employee 47 at Riot and just talking about the early days of Riot and they had the very same thought process too.
David Fox: Yeah, things were still in flux and we knew we could change the culture. That was something else. The culture we had was probably inherited from a larger company. So in a real startup, then the culture is going to probably come from the top. I'm sure it did for us too, but it was already established.
But that's a huge part of having a good gaming experience. Return to Monkey Island, I thought that was probably one of the best teams I worked on. Just a lot of freedom to communicate ideas, knowing that it was safe to throw out ideas, that you would be listened to. Good ideas were constantly being pulled into the game and used.
There's an example I love where the artist who did one of the rooms, which was a fish shop, had an idea for a gag of one of these little fish. Maybe every time you came in the room, it might've moved a little closer to the door and eventually it would escape. That's wonderful.
So I coded it up and I think it takes 30 times or something for you to enter the room. And every time it just moves like a few pixels and you probably don't even notice that moved the first five or six times. But it ended up being an achievement. If you actually let the fish escape, you get achievement for that. It was just fun, little hidden things that make the game feel richer when you have that kind of openness to listen to other ideas.
Lizzie Mintus: How do you think that any of our listeners could either advocate for that as employees or create that as leadership or business owners?
David Fox: Yeah. There's this tension because on the one hand, you probably want one person or maybe two people who are the, I call it, the keeper of the vision. The ones who own the design and are the voters for what goes and doesn't go into the game. If you had an idea and they didn't like it, you'd probably think that they were being stupid. If you're short sighted.
Whereas if you really if you respected the people and they said no, I don't think that i'm not going to use that, it's not a personal front. Sometimes things will go through and sometimes they wouldn't. You have to know that when you come up with an idea that it may or may not make it all the way through and that's okay. You can still do it and you would be listened to or there may be some version of that idea that makes it through that triggers something else. I
Think the worst game I ever worked on was not for LucasArts project, it was for a company I worked at for a short time. And everyone was all really confused, like who the keeper of the vision was. As a result, as a designer on a project, it was out of my hands a lot, as to what actually made it through.
It was pretty frustrating, very demoralizing and, it's not a great experience. The best games are ones where there's a creative person, but one who actually listens to feedback, as opposed to just being driven and thinking that they have it right.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, so if you're an employee, perhaps assessing and how leadership takes feedback from all levels.
David Fox: If you're looking for a job, that's definitely something that I think people should be asking. What is management
I was looking for this job. I actually went back before I got hired for it. I actually talked to someone who had some experience with the head of the company and gave me a huge warning. Said this guy at the head of the company is somebody you really have to watch out for. Having come from Lucasfilm where it was such an idyllic situation, I couldn't imagine what the person was saying could actually be true.
I didn't have that imagination to imagine terrible leadership. I learned the person was actually understating what the situation was. Those red flags should be listened to and the idea of a dream job may not be a dream job. If you find out that management is toxic, really.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, they say that you don't quit your company, you quit your boss. And I think that's really true. Nowadays, I think people really care about the values that the overall company has, much more than in the past. But your leadership is so important.
David Fox: It filters down from the top.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it does intentional or not.
David Fox: I think my example was thinking of a dysfunctional family where you look at the kids and why are they messed up and then you look at the parents and realize that they're the ones that are being dysfunctional. It just filters down to the kids and to the pets and to everyone who lives in that house.
And it's really hard to separate. You can try to put buffers in there, but you're going to have pressure against those people in the middle to do things a certain way to follow the vision of the people at the top. If that's broken, then it's going to filter down that way too.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And games is one of the most collaborative industries. And I think it's really important that all the pieces work together, but it's hard to discern that. As a recruiter, people get interviewed, but don't interview the company quite as much, especially now.
And maybe they're so happy to have a job interview. They don't want to blow it. They want the job, so they don't want to ask the hard question.
David Fox: I totally understand, especially when you're starting out or things have been tough and you haven't been able to find a job that you maybe start rationalizing that it couldn't be that bad or I'll just ignore that or I can make it better.
And the idea of trying to transform a company from the bottom or from somewhere that you're coming into it, it's probably not going to be successful. Probably be pretty difficult experience.
Lizzie Mintus: But it will build character. I worked at a very interesting company and I downloaded the app Headspace so I could do meditation in my car.
I'd listen to plinky music at work and just get through the day, by whatever means necessary. Take walks, I had a lot of different strategies, exercise on my lunch break, that kind of stuff.
But I think sometimes when you work for a bad company, not that you should seek it out by any means, or you work for a leadership that doesn't align with your values and you have this experience. At least for me owning a business, it's really shown me what I don't want and let a very clear path to that.
Jobs are like dating, right? You go on some dates, you date someone who's not really that great. It's a bad experience, but you learn what you don't want and you learn what leader you don't want to be.
So I think both in the end, take you where you need to go. Obviously avoid it if you can, but it's inevitable. You're going to have some challenging people wherever you go.
David Fox: And I think it's, having a bad experience then you become super attuned to that certain behavior that you had as a negative thing. Where if you start seeing it, you say, warning sign, red flag. I gotta steer clear of this or this is not gonna work. Looking back here, I didn't have any of those comparisons to, of what to watch out for until it happened.
Lizzie Mintus: So if you were to do it over again, you would listened to the advice of somebody said that the leader was toxic or do more due diligence.
David Fox: I would have not taken the job. I wouldn't have pursued it. Got it. I know what this is and I know how bad it can go. And I better steer clear.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. You learn and you built character just like Calvin and Hobbes says.
David Fox: Yeah. Fortunately, the next experience I had was much more loops, in terms of having a really good management at the top and people who communicated.
As a consultant though, it's a really different story because then you might be taking on a client who might be really difficult to work with.
It's a whole different situation because they're the client and you're working for them in that way and you have to maintain professionalism. I don't do that much anymore either. So I'm lucky that I don't have to do that. It could be really tough having a client where the person had a lot of ideas, but they would never would take the ideas I had. They went down their path, ignoring it and see where the end path was. Their project ended up not being as anywhere as good as it could have been.
Lizzie Mintus: But you learn throughout. I'm a consultant in a way. I work with lots of different companies. I consult with them on their recruiting process and you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. I can share what you should be doing, what you could be doing, how you could think of things and how you could approach things.
But there is a certain point where it just doesn't work and that's okay. It's just like dating, right? You go on a few dates. It was really nice to meet you. I had a great experience, but ultimately this isn't what I'm looking for. That's fine.
David Fox: If the goals don't align, then the sooner you can find that out, the faster you can move on to find a dating relationship.
Lizzie Mintus: Work is just relationship dating or getting to know people and learning to pick up on patterns. As an employee, as a consultant, as anything an employer, right? Who's a good employee? Who's a good employer, who do I wanna go on a date with? Start to see these things.
I have one final question for you. Okay. What do you think is going to be the killer app that brings VR even more mainstream?
David Fox: Rube Works.
Lizzie Mintus: Okay, that was not a setup, I promise.
David Fox: No, I don't know. There's a huge issue with VR in that a lot of people have an amazing first experience and it's a mind blowing experience.
And then the friction to actually do it again becomes too great to really keep using it. So a lot of people have VR equipment from a year ago that they just never take out anymore.
Lizzie Mintus: Perhaps, that's me. I need to, I haven't taken it out for a while.
David Fox: Yeah, because, I think part of it's because setting it up, finding a space if you need a space, or having a game which is compelling enough to drive you to do it, over and over again. There are games and things have come out that are, I think, move the whole art forward a lot, but I don't know that there's enough out there that makes you like equivalent to sitting in front of the TV and watching five different shows you really love. I don't know if there's enough that make that work, work for you.
Even though it's way better, it's still not all that comfortable to have the thing on your head. So it might not be the app, it might be continued evolution of the technology to the point where it really becomes transparent to the user to wear it.
I think Apple is in the right direction with their hand gestures,. There are no controllers. Their system is set up enough that you don't need to have a controller and have to go pick up your controller, get it charged.
Gradually removing all the friction points to make it easier to pop in and then stories that are as compelling as some of the shows I like watching on tv, you know that where I do want to go back and do it.
Truth is I'm not a huge gamer. I much prefer creating games. That's my big game is creating the games and then seeing the experience afterwards. But for people who play a lot of games, I think they have to be ever evolving and getting better and different. How many first person shooters can you play and still have it be really rewarding. Breaking out of the easy, obvious types of games to create because these have been successful before, the ones that can break the mold and try experimental stuff. Maybe some, a bunch of games should be 15 minute experiences where you just do it. And it's really inexpensive or free.
Those that move the art forward. So do I want to commit to watching 10 episodes of a series or five seasons of 10 episodes or 15 episodes of a series? Sometimes I just want to watch a one off 15 minute short on TV and not have to make the commitment of doing it.
So I think in games I'd like to see more of those.
Lizzie Mintus: That makes sense. I was chatting with a woman at GamesBeat and in her talk she said that maybe games will be like social media. People scroll and they don't want to see the same content over again. They want to see a variation of the thing that they like that's a little bit different, but they don't want to live in it forever.
They just want to have this experience that then passes them by, which is interesting too.
Okay, where can people go to learn more about you, maybe test your game?
David Fox: Probably the easiest way to reach me now is through my website, electric eggplant. com. And there's a contact button. I used to be on Twitter.
I'm pretty much not there anymore, though. So check for messages. So that's a way to reach me at David B Fox. And that's the same handle that I use I'm pretty much everywhere else. I am. Macedon blue sky. Just got a threads account, Facebook, there's just too many. It's where'd that person talk to me on?
Lizzie Mintus: Trust me. Yes.
David Fox: Yeah. But on my website, it's definitely a way to reach out to ask about play testing. And I'm happy to invite more people there.
Lizzie Mintus: Good. We've been talking to David Fox, who was employee number two at Lucasfilm Games as currently working on his own game at Electric Eggplant. You can visit his website, Electric Eggplant.
com. Thank you so much.
David Fox: Thank you very much. That was fun.
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.