Garrett Young is a 25+ year game industry veteran who led development teams at major companies, including Microsoft, Activision, Disney, and Id Software, contributing to the creation of iconic franchises such as DOOM, Quake, and Rage. He also played a pivotal role in launching the Forza Motorsport and Project Gotham Racing franchises, along with delivering numerous other AAA titles. Today, Garrett brings his extensive expertise to lead Empty Vessel, where excitement is building for their upcoming game, Defect, which has already garnered over 1.9 million views on its YouTube trailer.
Tune in as we explore Garrett Young's remarkable career, discussing the critical role of playtesting, his insights on emerging industry trends, and reflections on the key elements that have driven the success of legendary titles.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- The Importance of Player Feedback and Team Collaboration
- Key Success Factors in building Hit AAA Franchises
- Thoughts on the future of the game industry
Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Here’s Waldo Recruiting
- Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
- Garrett Young on Linkedin
- Empty Vessel
- DEFECT
- DEFECT Official Trailer with 1.9M+ Views
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 Mintus, the founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique game recruitment firm, and this is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we talk with creatives, founders, and executives about their journey. You can expect to get a glimpse into the future of the industry.
This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting. We work in the game industry and value quality over quantity. Today I have Garrett Young with us, and we met at GDC.
Garrett Young: Yes, and I think Kelly introduced us?
Lizzie Mintus: I think I introduced you to Kelly.
Garrett Young: Or maybe you introduced me to Kelly. I knew there was a connection there.
Lizzie Mintus: Many mutual intros.
Garrett was the General Manager for Id software and helped lead teams to reboot Doom, Quake, and Rage franchises. At Microsoft, he helped launch Forza Motorsport and Project Gotham Racing franchises, the best selling racing games on Xbox. He also shipped multiple AAA games for Activision and Disney.
Garrett is now General Manager of a new studio called Empty Vessel. They just announced their first game, Defect, at Gamescom, and they received 1.9 million views on their trailer in what amount of time, Garrett?
Garrett Young: I think it was three days.
Lizzie Mintus: Okay, let's get started. The first question I'm dying to ask you, how does one, besides being really good, but how does one get 1.9 million views on their trailer in three days?
Garrett Young: A lot of things go into it. But I think we struck a chord with gamers. They like seeing something fresh and new. I think they like our art style. I think they like the doom DNA in our studio. We also have Naughty Dog and Tomb Raider and Borderlands and even though our studio is small, 14 people, right? I think they like seeing something new come out from experienced people.
And I think it was quick and had an impact, 60 seconds in and out. We'd announced the studio like six, seven, eight months ago, but this is the first time we announced the game. Also, there was a kind of industry buzz in the world, leading into Gamescom. So I think people were excited about hearing about new games, new ideas.
We also have a great marketing partner that really helped us with that trailer. The guy's named Petrel. They're awesome, they've worked on Call of Duty, they've worked on Doom, they've worked on a ton. I think League of Legends, they've worked on a ton of great stuff. So yeah, kinda all came together.
Team did an amazing job. Great push over the last six weeks to get that sorted. 1.9 million views, a ton of great feedback from gamers and comments. We're really reading through all the Reddit comments and all the comments on the YouTube video and everything else. It's pretty exciting. It's an exciting time. Now the hard work begins. Now we actually got to keep rolling and building the game.
Lizzie Mintus: No pressure though. So you announced your studio eight or nine months ago. When did you start your studio?
Garrett Young: So we started last year. Emmanuel and I got together, Emmanuel's awesome. He is the Game Director for this game, brilliant dude, character model, a tech artist, and a great visionary for this game.
He and I worked together at ID Software, it's where we met. We brought him in as part of a real influx to bring in new blood, new talent, new life into that studio when I was there as General Manager. Great experience there, and loved Emmanuel, loved working with him there. We always had kind of this common thread of passion for doing something fresh and new that was not 100 percent owned by a publisher or someone else telling us, hey, we need this game. We need it in 18 months. And so that kind of led to the spark of going this direction and forming something new.
And I'm sorry, I have some sort of cold going on. I really apologize. We've already pushed this out three times for my cold. So I'm a little bit better today than I was in the past couple of weeks.
So last year we really put this in motion, found a great lead investor in Sisu, a small VC, great games guys leading that fund. And they believed in our vision, willing to take the risk with us and joining us on this journey. And some of our other investors joined in with them. We've got 25 folks that are cheering us on from the sideline and also financially supporting us, allowing us to hire 12 of our nearest and dearest friends to the journey. And there'll be more that we had over time.
Lizzie Mintus: Congrats. And so you had your studio for a year-ish?
Garrett Young: Yeah, a year-ish. Our first employee was hired on July 31st, so a little bit over a year.
Lizzie Mintus: Okay. We're recording this in September. How did you get this far in your game in this amount of time with 14 people?
Garrett Young: This is a good question. We actually got similar feedback. We showed it not publicly, but we showed it behind closed doors to some friends and families and potential investors and publishers, et cetera, the kind of people that were excited, interested in potentially joining us in the future to go forward.
And we got a lot of that feedback, because there were some people that we showed the build back to at GDC earlier this year. And there's consistent feedback that they're really impressed with the progress that the team has made.
I don't know if I showed you the build at GDC. I can't remember. I might have shown you an early video. But I think it's about the talent.The people you hire, of course, everyone's going to say that, and it's absolutely true every single time. But also keeping a very clear and consistent vision.
Recruiting is one thing, right? You know that world extremely well, bringing the best talent in. But then if you squander their talents, squander their experiences, squander their skillset, then you're not going to make this kind of progress in the last nine months, right? Or six, seven months.
So it's about bringing in the right people. That's the recruiting part. There's the retention part, keeping them excited about the vision, making sure that they're not wasting their time, that they're not bored, that they're not seeing pivots. I mean, we've seen this and even heard about this through the industry about things that aren't necessarily public, people pivoting vision, which can happen in the early days, which is a real challenge. You waste a lot of time, waste a lot of money, and waste a lot of energy on the team.
Crunch is a big issue in our industry. Certainly has been worse in the past. I think it's getting better now, a little bit better. But one of the things that will burn morale faster than crunch will burn is if people feel like their work doesn't matter, which is different from crunch. You can work 40 hours a week. But if your work doesn't matter, your morale is going to be in the dump. And I'm not talking about just my morale or your morale, but everybody in the team's morale, right? You have to think culture is built.
Sorry, if I go off on a rant, this is the start of my Ted talk. Anyway, just kidding. But culture is built one person at a time, and you've got to really keep a finger on the pulse of your team. And that just starts with really, whether it's a near to the wall of the hallway meetings and conversations, and kind of seeing people's energy around the building, or if you're remote, like we're on zoom right now, your zoom calls, your slack channels, your Google meets calls, et cetera. Your playtests, we're doing a ton of playtesting, which was another thing to your question that contributed to us making a lot of progress.
Yes, it takes people offline from actually hands on Maya or hands on whatever tool they're working in writing code or any of our other animation tools, et cetera, modeling tools. But it's time for the game to get better. The best games are made and played. Some people say the best games are played, not made, but it's like, actually, we have to make the game before we play it. But regardless, you really smooth out all those rough edges.
The stuff that works in your brain doesn't necessarily work when you get it to the whiteboard. Stuff that looks good on a whiteboard, you got two or three people in the room, doesn't necessarily make it through a design spec. So if it gets through a design spec, then when you actually start building it, it doesn't necessarily play very well. So play tests are really critical to our success in this new team, in this new company that we have, in this new studio. Something that we really, all, pretty much every team that I've ever been a part of, we've always playtested, certainly as early as humanly possible.
At iD we were playtesting very, very early. Even when there were a lot of questions around the big picture vision, we were still playing every day, which was awesome. And so, we've taken that culture and that goal and that vision into this studio. And so that's helped us smooth out those rough edges and make gameplay a lot better, and even make visuals and art a lot better as we're getting feedback from people that are, things are too dark, or things are too bright, or this area of the map doesn't feel good from a gameplay standpoint. But the other thing that playtesting really helps when you're in a remote team, as we are a remote team, is you get to know the team. You get to know developers.
Quick sidebar, 16 players, 4 teams of 4. It's a multiplayer game. Rounds can last 5 minutes if you're really, really fast. But usually they are probably more like 15 to 25 minutes. And we can talk about the game a little bit later if you want to in a little bit more detail, the stuff that we've kind of made public already. But one game I'm playing with our tech director, the next game I'm playing with one of our character models, right?
And so we're not just, hey, let's review your work. Hey, they're looking for guidance and vision or feedback on the work. Or what are we doing? What is the goal of our next milestone? Or what's this next PRB? And you actually get to know them more as people, right? It's like, okay, you cover that front. I'm going to cover our six, you get health, right? Let's do this.
It's really kind of funny to meet them more as people, because you don't get to see them every day, other than on zoom calls. So that's a fun part and something that has contributed to us moving faster than maybe is typical for such a small team.
Lizzie Mintus: An average, I would say for sure. I want to talk more about your studio and then get into your history with Forza.
Garrett Young: No problem. You ask me a question, I'll give you a seven minute answer. How long is this?
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, don't worry. I'll cut you off. It's so hard.
Garrett Young: Self deprecation for the win.
Lizzie Mintus: Okay. So it's been a rough year for shooters. It's been a rough couple of months for shooters. The market is definitely saturated and there have been some large lops. What do you think about the shooter market right now and how do you plan to differentiate yourself?
And before you answer, obviously, Valve's game looks great and has attention and is doing well. So there are some that are doing well, but some that are expensive and failing.
Garrett Young: Yeah. I think this is true every year. The shooter space, we talk about this regularly. It's a bit of a red ocean, right? It's a very competitive space. And that's okay. It's a big genre, but also gamers know what they want and they don't have a lot of patience for pain points, in my opinion, as I kind of see the shooter market having been working on it for a while.
No one believed in us at iD when, not at iD of course we believed in ourselves, super nervous and scared about what the response was going to be at our first Doom as we rebooted it back in Doom 2016. But that was a brand new IP. I mean, yes, you could say, Oh, Doom has been around since 1992. Doom 3 was 2003 or something like I've been 10, 12, 13 years since Doom 3 came out. And that was more of a horror game. That was more Resident Evil than like Doom 1 and 2, right? So that was a new fresh look and approach to shooters. Campaign very, very strong. Well, it didn't really catch on, but the campaign was very strong.
So I think this kind of happens a lot, right? There are hits you mentioned, I'm a big believer. I think everyone is involved. Shooter's going to be amazing.
Lizzie Mintus: My friends on it. I was talking to him a few weeks ago. It was like 30 people or something.
Garrett Young: That's awesome. I think they've been working on it for a minute or two. But they're going to do great, right? Because they understand the audience really well. They understand the market. They have all the best data in the world from Counter Strike. It's awesome. I'm very confident they're going to be great. I was amazed that Overwatch, a brand new game, not from a shooter studio, but it was amazing. Everybody loved Overwatch from that launch, right?
So there are hits out there. XDefiant, I think, had a really good weekend or a few weeks, kind of fell off a little bit, but that was a good early launch, right? Pretty stable. I think, at least up through level 25 when skill based matchmaking is still in there. I think those matches were very fun. I think they were very evenly matched and well done. And then I think some people fall off after you get to level 25.
Finals was a great first person shooter last year, right? That was a huge launch. Great games, super high quality games. I it still gets played in my house all the time I need to jump in with my son when he plays he doesn't get to play games during the week But on the weekends, I will jump in and play with him every now I probably played 40 hours of that when it was out So even though I know you were leading me down the primrose path of bad shooters that have come out. I don't have any insight about that, but my bet is that that'll be re-released because that team is so strong, but there are also a lot of successes that are out there and we should be proud of successes and hope that the games are not just shooters.
This is true across the board, right? There are games that come up that aren't hits and it is unfortunate. We could probably talk for have a four hour podcast about what differentiates the games or at least we can theorize, differentiate games that come out as a hit and then the games that don't come out quite as much.
I was surprised given Sony is so huge and so strong and so good that I didn't know much about Concord before it came out. I don't know why that was. Obviously, they have a massive mega marketing machine, and I felt like I was surprised. Like, oh, this must be the beta, the first beta, or maybe an early alpha, not because of the quality or the video trailers or anything, just because I just hadn't heard anything, right? Starfield came out, was that last year? I don't know. I couldn't fall over without landing on a Starfield ad, right? A poster or a video or a trailer, concept art or whatever, right? You know, I saw Howard being interviewed somewhere.
I mean, you and me are in the industry, we tend to get all the ads on the trailers for games. I was surprised that I hadn't heard more about it before it came out. But whatever. I wish them great success in the re-release. I'm assuming it'll be maybe it'll be free to play, maybe it'll go into the PlayStation Plus. That team is just too good to not have a game editor.
Lizzie Mintus: There are a lot of talented people who have worked on it. Yeah, absolutely.
Tell me more about coming up with the idea for Defect. Did you and your team have this idea brewing for a long time? And then did you start the studio based on the idea? Did you lock yourself in a room for five days? How did you figure out what to do?
Garrett Young: So we've actually never locked ourselves in a room for five days, but we are talking about it. We will do that sometime, you know, maybe for our next game or whatever it is. It is good game development as a team sport, put it on my professional tombstone. It's a huge belief of mine.
Unfortunately we don't get to get together very often. We're an international team, three people in Australia, two devs in Europe, four in Texas, four here in the Pacific time zone. Bend, Oregon, for me, and then Emmanuel's in Tokyo.
The idea really was spurred by Emmanuel, our game director, pardon me, and then he and KP, our Design Director, Senior Design Director, and Rico, our Animation Director and Jake, our Tech and Director, had a lot of kind of like burger lunches and beer after work kind of days over the course of maybe six months and just rift a bunch of different ideas on where the game would be set where the world would be set.
We're very inspired by Judge Dredd. It's not a Judge Dredd game, but we're inspired by this post apocalyptic world where it's run by the sentient AI for hundreds of years and it has evolved into a little bit of, you could say, cops robbers. Our game is very different from a cops robbers game. A lot of tactical shooters attack and defend and then switch sides. It's not our kind of game, and it's not a hero shooter. I always like to repeat that because the hero shooters are a little bit, a lot of them out there right now. Again, God bless Concord. I think gamers are maybe tired of hero shooters. There's others too, that have been coming up.
But anyway, what really inspired by that world, and the thought of that world. And then the type of gameplay, we knew we were going to do a shooter, even though our Naughty Dog friends haven't necessarily worked on shooters, we know we're going to have the best animation in the world and really strong visuals, but we felt strong about doing a shooter. KP's background, Borderlands, and everything there was going to help us too, and of course, Manuel, me, and Dan, and others that have worked at iD. And so it kind of all came together around that.
But also, the last thing I'll say that I haven't already mentioned is wanting to do something different, okay? We're not here to build a me too game. Whether it's a hero shooter that might be kind of chasing Overwatch, or a tactical shooter that might say, Hey, look at that. Over 85 million people have Rainbow Six Siege accounts because that game's been up since 2015 and they're doing gangbusters there.
It's a great game, love that game. Let's just do that, me too, but in a judge ordered world. No, we're not here to do that. We're not interested to do that. We haven't pitched that to anybody. That's not going to excite people to join us. As game developers, we always want to do something fresh and new.
All game developers have a bit of an insecurity streak. There's always that passionate excitement of doing something new, but also like, oh shit, there is this desire for success, but fear of failure, right? And you just do a me too game and that is failure. And you don't want to do a me too game.
And so that was another part of our motivation. And we've scratched the surface a little bit about talking about that and all those things. So there'll be more to announce next year about how the game is different. But it's exciting time and being able to work on your own IP is really exciting, a little nerve wracking, but really exciting because fresh ideas come out from across the team on a weekly basis and our play tests or various meetings.
Lizzie Mintus: I've had a lot of people on my podcast that say playtesting as early as possible.
Garrett Young: Be religious about it. Be religious about it.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, and some games I think that have come out lately that are surprisingly not doing so well. Maybe they haven't tested enough.
Garrett Young: Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. They may playtest and ignore the feedback. It is what it is. Or they may have a really compressed playtesting schedule. And that they may be getting feedback on stuff they don't have time to change. If their date is locked.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that makes sense.
Garrett Young: If their data is locked and I'm not inside the building... It is what it is, nobody has a money tree out back. Even the publishers that you think are the largest in the world, they still have to hit goals. I worked at Microsoft. I was employee number 70 in the game group, and there was however many thousands of employees. Our business was still run like a business. I wasn't running the business. I was a junior right out of college, right? But We were still responsible for the P&L, even though we were like a freckle on the overall company. It was Microsoft and Windows and Office and everything else.
But we were expected to run like a business and Ed Fries came in there and really helped turn us around. But he still likes quarterly responsibility. Even though we're not getting brought up on the investor calls with Bill Gates and everybody else. So anyway, deadlines are important. And yeah, there's a whole nother podcast on how to manage a date, but still hit super high quality.
It's a challenge. People say game development is hard and that's a large umbrella statement that's super true.
Lizzie Mintus: It's a miracle. So tell me about your Microsoft days. You're employee number 70. You worked with Ed. Ed's the best. You built and led the development team to launch Forza Motorsport 1 to 2. What went into that?
Garrett Young: What went into that? Yeah, super easy.
Lizzie Mintus: What was the state of Forza when you joined?
Garrett Young: The spark at the very beginning. So I joined super happy to be trusted with responsibility to come in there and be an employee of Microsoft and contribute to the games group. I was there before we did the Xbox, right? So we did some sports games for Windows, and then there was an initiative to, hey, we're going to do a console.
That's awesome. We're great. We're super smart. We didn't know fucking what we were doing, making a console, right? I wasn't making the hardware. The team, I'm sure everybody working on it would say, Oh my gosh, we're just running crazy, right?
Microsoft's not a hardware company either. This is Microsoft hardware. Microsoft doesn't make PCs. They had a bunch of hardware challenges. And then let alone like the console market, if you get that wrong, and gamers will let you know. And gamers won't buy and gamers like the early adopters. Yes. But when you got the curve of early to mid to mass and everything else, you won't bridge that gap.
We didn't do that on Xbox One, which we now have to call Xbox Original, the original, the OG Xbox, because now there's another thing called the Xbox One, but that's another story. The controller is awesome, my favorite controller. It was too big for my hands. My hands are pretty damn big, and I'm like, oh my gosh. The Duke, we called it, the codename was the Duke.
Anyway, we did a game called Project Gotham Racing, which I don't know, maybe Gotham is one of these games over here that, I don't know, has a lot of cars in the background. But that was awesome. And I actually learned a lot of the only thing I'll kind of mention about that is I worked with a studio called Bizarre Creations. They're in Liverpool, England. They're awesome. I love them to death. While I learned at Microsoft how to make software, Bizarre really taught me how to make games. And it was a little bit like something I kind of referred to earlier, which as we were talking, This might have been before we started recording, about like, hey, just because it's an idea doesn't mean we just spec it out and then that's exactly what's going to go into the game and we're going to do it exactly on this date.
And I'm coming in here with all the spreadsheets like, okay, this is Waterfall, right? We don't do the Waterfall approach to game development anymore as far as managing projects. And I'm on the publishing side and I'm coming into Liverpool and like, hey guys, this is what we're going to do. And they're like, ah, yeah, I'm not sure it's going to work that way. And I'm like, oh, I'm going to get fired, right? I'm going to get fired. We were really date dependent because we had to be up for launch for the original Xbox.
But anyway, through that process, we're going to mark we're with Brian. We're going to all these Roger and all these studs at Bizarre. They really taught me more like playtesting was a religion there, even though they may not even have called it playtesting, right? It was just like, Hey, we got a field to build. See a touch and feel it.
One of the sayings that I think was on a wall at iD, and it wasn't ours. I don't know who to quote, but the phrase up on the wall upon one of our whiteboards was, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings. So at Microsoft's felt like sometimes we'd have about a thousand meetings. And because I was like, should we do this? Okay, let's just go check it out. And they would go build it. And then we would feel it right. And it was a racing game. They already had the physics all set up. They already had a good pipeline for the rendering pipeline and also building the cars and everything.
And I won't go into any deeper details because first of all, it's 25 freaking years ago. And who can remember that far back? Second of all, I wasn't involved in the day to day, all the decisions and everything that went into that, but they were really great at making sure that it felt good, which is looking through the player's eyes, right? Which is absolutely a religion.
It's not that we didn't have that at Microsoft, but it was just a different approach because we all were kind of trained on how you build software. And that's how I, even though I didn't work on Windows, that kind of culture came into us. And so I was so happy and so lucky to be able to get to work with a really strong team. These guys have worked on PlayStation stuff forever, which is part of the reason that we signed them.
There's lots of backstories there, but they knew how to make games and it's a much more of a feel experience than a plan everything out. And we know exactly what we're going to be doing nine months from now. It's not a baby where you have a pretty good idea of when it's going to be born. And so that was a great experience.
Anyway, so to tie back to your original question, my management from Ed and Shannon Loftus and these great, kind of the organization, we got a lot bigger than 70 employees at that point. Once we had the Xbox, I think we were like at, I don't know, 1200 employees or 1400 or something. Anyway, they liked what I'd done working with Bazaar and that we did hit the date for the Xbox. And we were, I think, the second best selling game. Halo was the best selling game. Halo was the most marketed game. We did not receive the Halo marketing budget, but Halo was also an amazing game. Great job Bungie.
But we were the second best selling game. Our execs liked what I'd done with that team. And so they gave me an opportunity to build up a brand new internal team. We originally had a bunch of different code names for it. Fortz was the, actually the code name for the game, which there's a whole nother story there. A great name and we called it Fortza. The QA guys had a wristband that said I am the T in Fortza. No T, but this sound, whatever. I love that. But anyway, we named it Forts because Formula One, everyone in F1 in Italy, the Ferrari, of course the home squad, home racing team. When the Ferrari cars would come around in F1 races, they'd all yell Fortza, Fortza Ferrari. So I learned that from one of the guys in our org, in our group and I'm like, oh my gosh, that's awesome. We're going to use this codename. Go, go, go.
It kind of gets back to what we were talking about with iD. And what we talked about with Defect is you got to hire super talented people, and then you gotta make sure your vision is clear. And so they know where to go and then they'll tell you how to get there, right? And so we made, I don't know if we made every mistake in the book, but we certainly made a lot of mistakes, but thankfully we kind of had these pillars that we were focused on, and where we might have stumbled here and there, and we did a lot of work that, we did end up having to scale back for the first version, that a lot of it made it into Forza 4, etc.- We had enough success there that obviously the franchise is still going strong, gamers really love what we were doing.
The spark literally from Ed Fries and his team was, Hey, look, the best selling game on Sony's platforms at the time, it was before GTA went crazy, right? And GTA wasn't even owned by Sony. And the Gigado wasn't as big a thing, etc. The Last Of Us had never shipped yet. The biggest best selling first party seller was Gran Turismo. That was it. That was the crown jewel. And at that time I think somebody with a biz dev or one of the planning guys brought metrics over that said Hey, look. One of every four games that sell on a Sony platform, PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2, is a racing game. One of every four.
Shooter genre, I think, took over racing games because you've got the competitive juices with players, and online play wasn't a thing back then. But you could sit in your living room and either race against AI or race against your friends, right? And Goldeneye had come out, but there hadn't been a lot of other shooters on console, right?
Everyone's like, is Halo even going to work, right? And obviously it did but we didn't know that at the time, right? So anyway, they said hey, look, we're not going to see Gran Turismo on the Xbox anytime soon. So we need something that kind of scratches that itch for gamers. Gotham was a different type of game, more of an arcade racer, probably more in the sub genre of Ridge Racer, which is a big console race. They're different games, but they're kind of having a bit of an arcade-y feel. Gotham had more, more realistic physics, but blah, blah, blah. More details, we can go into another podcast.
But Forza was more like, we give the player money fake money. We have a selection of cars. We have 700 cars. At that time we only had like 75 cars, but grew that quite a bit over time. So that was really the spark of what created the team. Turn 10. Now we actually just called our team, Team Forza. So for the first version, you can even look at the credits before it's a, we changed our name to Turn 10, which was pretty cool. That's kind of the spark.
And then there's a crap ton of detailed stories. But a lot of my good friends that we started that studio and started that team. I shouldn't call it a studio, it was really a team within Microsoft, still there to this day, right? We had to change the tech director, but the second tech director is still there. Dan Grey is still the creative director and I think he's got a different role there, but the leader of that, John Wendell's still there. One of my good buddies, a lot of good friends, Matt Collins, a lot of guys are still there. That's awesome.
Lizzie Mintus: What was Forza Almost? What are some, I always think it's funny, like, what are the top games and what could this game have been?
What are some critical decisions that you had to make that would have changed the game entirely? I think that would have made it super different from how it looks, feels today.
Garrett Young: I don't think there's anything, I know there's nothing that would've made it feel super different in my humble opinion. You ask other people, and they might say something different. Because we stuck to those tent poles, we knew it had to. And I'll kind of riff on the tent poles. We knew it had a set of visual bars. Gran Turismo was such a beautiful game. When anybody said Hey look, I just bought the PlayStation one. Check it out. They would put Gran Turismo mo into the box. Right? Because it just set such a high visual bar, right? Metal Gear was there, but it was more of Kojima's specific style of art. It wasn't like a realistic character or anything, but the cars look so sick in Gran Turismo.
So we knew a high visual bar. How to run at 60 Hertz, another huge bar, like that doesn't come for free. We were building our own engine at the same time too. Crazy but we did. At that time it was before, I mean, it was, we had to.
Lizzie Mintus: That's what you were doing. Yeah.
Garrett Young: Right. So visually physics was a great investment for us. Smart investment would not have done that differently. It had to feel like you were, if you could control a car with this without the butt G forces and everything else that everybody else has when you're actually driving a car. That had to feel really good.
I'll tell you a short story there, unless I'm boring you to tears because I could just keep talking. I could just keep rolling. The third thing I'll tell you in a second is about, we looked at Gran Turismo when we're like, okay, these guys do this amazing. Well, we have to compete. These guys are amazing. Well, we have to compete. These guys don't do these things and we're going to do these things over here.
We don't know what they're going to do in the future, but we're going to innovate in these things, which is not the same as answering questions like, Oh, would you have done something different? I don't know that we would have done anything different. I think if anything, we just would have moved faster knowing what I know now, which is dumb. Anybody could say that, right? Nobody ever wants to go back in time. I mean, maybe everybody wants to do that, but the truth is I would never want to go back in time unless I could keep my knowledge of what I have. And then go bet on a bunch of Super Bowls, but knowing we know it now, we would just move a lot faster.
But we didn't know that back then. On the physics note real quick, this is kind of a funny story I'd like to share with people and not just like recorded stuff, but like behind closed doors and we're working on stuff on an Indie game. Racing genre, shooter genre, whatever genre. Like, audio is really important, right? Everybody's always talking about pushing pixels and all the new hardware that comes out, whether it's cards from NVIDIA AMD or new consoles that are coming out. It's always about visuals, visuals, visuals.
But the player experience, actually, one of my old design friends used to say it was 50 percent audio. I don't know if it's 50%, but it's certainly a high percentage. And so here we are, month three of Forza, maybe month five, certainly the first year, month six. We knew physics would be a big deal for us. Visually going to be a big deal for us. We'd built three different cars, the goal being we built something like an entry level car. Like this is what the player is going to experience the first hour, right?
We didn't want that to be bad. And then we had a more sporty car, but still something you might see on the streets. And then we had like, mega race cars. You're gonna go off the first turn, right? It's just way too hard to handle.
And so anyway, we built these models and then this is what the game's gonna look like. We had a track that you'd never see in the real world because it was like an oval, there was an oval like a Nascar oval. And then halfway through the oval, we went into a forest, like an open road. And then we went to a city because we knew we're going to have these different types of tracks in the game. And so we just wanted to prove it like, well, would this feel like? The city streets are going to be like 90 degrees? Well, we can't race at 90 degrees if you're going 120 miles an hour, blah, blah, blah.
By the way, anybody who listened to this on the Forza team should be damn impressed. I can remember this 20 plus years later. Anyway, I digress. My core guys, of course, the core guys that were back then, they would remember too. They live it, breathe it, eat it, every single day. They're awesome.
So one of our core investments, obviously, is visuals. One of our core investments was physics, right? One of the first engineers we hired, Dave Guyrock, pretty sure he's still there, still the king. He's written probably every line of code in that physics, and that physics is also used in Horizon, the Horizon games. Don't know if they've announced that. Whatever it is. So we're working on physics. We're driving around and we're getting the handling dialed into the, in the cars and we're feeling pretty good about it.
But of course we're playing it every damn day, right? But we're bringing execs in and there's some of the execs like Blake Fisher. Awesome. Give us feedback. Hands on the controller. He's like, Yeah, I don't know. I think you got to do this with physics. We're getting a lot of random feedback. The car oversteers. The car drifts too much. The car doesn't drift enough. The car doesn't feel right.
We're just like, oh my gosh, it feels good to us. Why doesn't it feel good to someone? We put the controller in our hands. Well, we're still ramping up our team. We're still hiring. We're probably 10 people at this point, right? Maybe we're 15 people just a few weeks earlier. We had found the sound designer, right? We had to use some off the shelf libraries and everything, but we're building the audio engine and integrating with the physics engine, et cetera.
So like on a Wednesday, we got the first vehicle sounds in. There's no world sounds. We just want to get car revs. We want to get friction points of the tires on the tarmac. When you're off, I don't know if we got the dirt sound in yet, but certainly the tarmac sounds in. skid sounds and the engine revving, right?
So we're getting feedback that's not just visual. You're getting feedback that's not just visual about what the car is doing, how fast you're going. I don't know if we had wind in yet, but we had the engine revs and we had the surface tension, uh, sounds to tell you audibly when you're at that level of like, Oh, I'm about to slide off. Now I have to get off the gas, get on the break or get off both and just kind of coast to the turn a little bit and then get back onto it once I'm straightened out, right?
We put that in and we're like, Okay, good. This is a good feeling. Building the team. Like, okay, we knew this is going to be hooked up. It was coming in on Wednesday, whatever. We knew. Okay. Okay. This is awesome. It's great. Good. We got some more feedback from Blake and these other guys coming in tomorrow. Awesome. So we bring them in, we sit them down at our, at my desk, right? Okay. Come on, play the bill. There's like four of us. Five is watching. Sit down. They're like, okay. And they're running. They go around the first corner, second quarter, third corner. And they're like, you guys fixed it. You fixed the physics. I don't know what you did. Awesome. You fixed the physics. We're like, we haven't had a physics check in in two weeks. And it was just the audio, right? Effing amazing. It was awesome. And it was a huge eye opening moment for us. The team were like, Oh, we were just doing our jobs. Okay.
We learned how players experienced the game. Cause we're so close to it and we don't really know. And that is true in any game, because it was really important with testing, proving our physics on Forza and any sort of racing game.
But like when you're running around shooting and you're not hearing the gun sounds or even this is something that Cod does really well. You shoot something, whatever kind of gun, and you hit metal or you hit wood or you hit an enemy, if those don't sound different and don't pop and don't really pop in your ears.
I don't know if you ever heard of the stories about movies where the car collisions are like 10 X, what a normal car collision would sound like. Cause you have to wake up the audience and be like, Oh my gosh, this is the most amazing thing ever. Well in a shooter, you need to know, you need feedback, visual and otherwise, that you're actually hitting an enemy, hitting what you were targeting, right?
The thumps when you hit an enemy in Call of Duty are off the charts and really, really good. Ties back into what I was talking about with Forza. So, way longer story than you wanted about what made Forza successful and it's not what we would change to do differently, but one of the key things, key to our success, visuals, getting the physics right, And then we did things like vehicle damage, we did online play, which hadn't been done before, at least not in Gran Turismo.
And we did super deep car customization, really played into the car ownership. Arcade racers have car ownership, but not as much as a GT or a Forza.
History lesson on Forza Motorsports.
Lizzie Mintus: I learned a lot. And I feel like you took some lessons that you can apply.
Garrett Young: Yep. That's right.
Lizzie Mintus: Any game.
Which is what this podcast is about. What did you learn? What can you share with the world? So there you go.
And then tell me about Doom's success and what went into that? What was the secret to relaunching that and having out, having to do well?
Garrett Young: If we were in an elevator, I would tell you our success 'cause you're getting off on the fifth floor and we're on the floor too right now. Our success was all about focusing on what Doom fans would want from Doom.
Lizzie Mintus: Okay. And how did you discern that?
Garrett Young: It looks like this is your floor. No, what I mean by that is, I mean, more details. Doom had actually gone through a couple of iterations. We'll call it Doom 4. We never called it Doom 4 in public, but this was actually Doom 4, right? Doom 4 had gone through a few iterations. There was one internally that they had done that was actually pretty good, before my time.
I joined iD in late 2013. They'd done a draft of Doom that apparently hadn't been well received internally maybe a year and a half before I joined. And then they wanted to reboot it. Part of it was, I don't know a lot about it, but I've kind of heard in hindsight that it wasn't actually that bad.
But Rage 2, Quake was something we did externally. We did a big Rage 1 2011 shift. Good reviews didn't sell as well as the company, as when they were owned by a company called Zenimax Media. Bethesda didn't sell as well as Bethesda really wanted. So as the team before my time again, was working on Rage 2 and all new ideas, same engine, doing Rage using the same engine, same ai, all this kinda stuff, right? Similar ai.
It was aside for whatever reason before my time that Rage Two was not gonna go on. And so we had all these senior people, like long-term iD people who said oh, I was the director on Rage 2. Now this is no longer here, we got Doom, Bethesda wants another Doom, fans are like Doom, yeah, Doom, give us another Doom.
And so all these directors came in and said oh, you guys don't know what you're doing, we're going to take over Doom now. I'm grossly oversimplifying, but there was a large kind of a bit of a reshuffle, call it that. Call it a hullabaloo. Is this 1940? Anyway, it was just a lot of turmoil and a lot of volatility inside the studio at the time. And then they took Doom in a new direction. Call this Doom 4.2. I don't know. Doom 4 obviously hadn't shipped yet.
They were working on Doom 4. There's some videos online you can find if you Google really hard that people kind of became more of a call of Doom- that took the reboot version of Doom went much more towards the Call of Duty kind of path. And then, that was about a year. So by the end of 2012, it was kind of the big executive reveal to say, Hey, this is the direction we're going with Doom. And it didn't. It kind of fell flat.
And so then we went back to the drawing board. Then there was again, another reshuffle. Marty Stratton became the game director. Robert Duffy became the tech director. Then Carmack kind of wasn't involved. He was doing more VR stuff, et cetera. And so those two guys spearheaded a new direction, which was all focused on, what would Doom players want from Doom? Don't just chase. Don't chase trends. Call of Duty, obviously, is very successful. But really, we need to kind of set our own path with this reboot of this IP, right? And so, what it means to say, make Doom for Doom fans.
The biggest thing that would be recognizable is push forward combat. It's three words. What the hell does that mean? Everything we did from a gameplay standpont. Visually, we had our own engine. There's a lot that we were doing there and things running at 60 Hertz, running online multiplayer and everything. But we had a pretty good direction visually. Like this is doing, we are going to be in Mars. You're going to be in hell, fire in brimstone. Like we kind of knew that, right. That we weren't, we're not making Zelda here. Like, come on, we know what we're doing.
But we really pushed into this push forward combat that of course in 1992, they didn't say that they just said Oh, this is going to be really cool. This is going to be a shooter, right? There wasn't a lot or any back then. So we just said okay. That's what the spirit, the essence of what Doom was. I kind of joked that we put the left thumbstick back into shooters because so many shooters are moving the reticle, right? It's the right thumbstick moving the reticle around. And then what's Call of Duty, what's Halo, fill in the blank, run out. Well, this is all about like single player campaign, multiplayer is a little bit different from the design of maps, everything else. But single player playing against AI, you run out, you shoot, you get shot, health bar goes down, you drop back, You get into cover, you sit, you hide, you wait, your health comes back.
Okay, now I run back to the fray. We didn't have that. You run forward, you shoot, you get shot, you run back, you got 22 health, you still have 22 health. You're like, oh crap, why am I not re healing? Like a lot of people were like, what is going on? This is, shooters in the last 15 years have been healing me. Why am I not auto rehealing, right? It seems super simple, but we're like, okay, no. You don't auto heal. You will, total video gaming, you take out that enemy. He'll poop out some health or we drop health in the map. There's certain boxes. You can pull health on it, right?
But we wanted you to go forward. We wanted to be playing forward. You want more ammo, go do a glory kill on that imp ammo poop out, right? You want more, you know, whatever, right? Fill in the blank. You want to increase your shield. You have to go attack a different type of enemy or attack them in a different way. Use plasma, use whatever rockets, et cetera.
And then Hugo and Marty have doubled down on that in the subsequent Dooms, which is awesome. You want to reload? This isn't Call of Duty. No, you don't need to reload. Shoot! And then you do run out of ammo, of course. You run out of ammo, right? We had nine weapons. That's it. We didn't, you don't have them all at the beginning, right? You start with a pistol. We originally were starting with a shotgun. And again, this is one of those great ideas that can come from anywhere.
This is like a Pixar like motif, a whole cultural thing, creative value. If you read the Pixar book, I forget what it's called, Creativity Inc or something. Really good book. It's about like eight years old or something, 10 years old at this point. Anyway, but great ideas come from anywhere. And I think it was like the concept artist going, and we didn't even have a pistol. Concepts are like, hold on, I come out of the cocoon or whatever, right? I come out, I pick up a shotgun and then I blast like six imps. I don't need to change a shotgun for the rest of the game, right? Because it's a freaking shotgun. It's a Doom shotgun, right? It wasn't a double barrel, but still, it was a Doom shotgun, right?
And so, that was one of those, we were talking earlier about, Oh, games come out. It's 60 quality, and you spent a hundred million dollars on this, what the hell happened? This is one of those where we got like, Oh, we should have a pistol. The people look at the schedule, like, we don't have time to build a new gun. To tune that, to then move all the gun drops around the maps at different times to tune all of that. We're like, no, we're not carrying a gun.
And then, of course, we end up doing a gun. Hurt the schedule, but it was absolutely the right thing for the game. This is one of the harder jobs when you're in the steering cabin, driving a train down the tracks, building the tracks, or running hair on fire, chased by ninjas, whatever game development, right? Whatever game metaphor you want to use.
Anyway, we really doubled down and Bethesda was a big help in that, specifically the top one was a big help about what would Doom fans want from Doom? And push forward combat was a big part of that. And even the mechanics I described about like, you don't reload, you just shoot, right? Until the whole clip's gone and then you switch weapons, right? Or that you don't heal up when you hide. It's not a hiding game.
I got a whole story I sometimes share with developers about, like, when we first got the difficulty level in, and I'm playing through the game, it's 10 o'clock at night and I'm like, Damn, playing on the highest difficulty. We've never had difficulty as in, this is probably a year before launch. I finally got it in. I'm playing on the highest. I'm like, I cannot get past this checkpoint. There's no way. I gotta text the QA guys like, can you guys get past this? This is crazy. I think Peter tuned this too high.
And then I realized I was playing the game wrong, which is one of those like fucking light bulb above the head moments. And it's not like some stupid PR thing. You tell people like, Oh yeah, I'm playing the game. It's fucking stupid shit, right? And if we're not supposed to swear here, you should have told me earlier, I apologize.
But I was running into a firefight, you know, doing everything that you do in Doom, and I was getting wrecked, getting wrecked, getting wrecked. But I found after an hour, I'm going to get more caffeine, going to get more caffeine. I'm like, what the hell? And I literally went back to the whiteboard, Okay, well, what would that mean? What should I do here? Because what I found was I was running in, I'd shoot this guy, I'd shoot that guy, I'd glory kill this guy, put this guy into a stun state, and then they would burn me down, my health down, my shield down. And I'm like, okay, now I got this, now I got this, now I gotta run. There's still six, seven, eight of them in there, a couple more are gonna spawn in. I'm like, okay, I gotta run back.
I kite them, it's just something that you do in gaming, where you get into a tunnel with the AI chasing you down, and you're basically backing up and kiting them along the way. Helldivers, by the way, does this all the time. It's more of a running back game, where you get them all into like between rocks, get in formation, and then you just start mowing guys down, right?
Kiting guys back, it's like you're pulling a kite on the beach, right? So I would run back, I would kite guys down the hallway, and then I'm back, I'm on like five health, there's no way, if they touch me, I'm dead, right? And they're shooting fireballs at me and everything, and I run back and I'm like, okay, now just take a break. Okay, my nerves, bring the nerves down, right? Now I'm gonna go in, and there's four guys, and one of them's throwing acid and all this kind of stuff, right? And I run in, get rekt, run in, get rekt. And I'm like, okay, screw this. I'm just gonna go in and just try to freaking Doomguy this, and just roll around and just destroy dudes, and punch dudes in the face, and shotguns on the other, shotguns guys in the other face.
First try, got to the checkpoint. And I'm like, Peter Sokol, you son of a bitch. This is fucking push forward combat, and you tuned the difficulty for this one, it's like the second map. Perfectly. Dialed it in perfectly. I was like, oh my gosh, I made it through there. And I'm like sweating bullets, and I made it through the first time. I'm like, this is not a runaway game. This is a run forward game.
So anyway, it was an awesome experience. Again, this manna from heaven that you get when you're through development. Game development is very hard. It's a very hard experience. And guys on our team now, we're doing this now on Defect, that you'll get these moments where you're like, aha moments. We plan to talk about that, but actually the proof is in the pudding when you're actually putting hands in the game. And oh my God, this is the experience we want to give to cameras.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, but you're playing it too. That's so important. You're playing it. You have that feedback. You have that aha moment. You know your game because you play it. I love it.
Okay. I have one last question.
Garrett Young: We planned for like 35 and we're on the third question. I'm just kidding. It wasn't 35 questions.
Lizzie Mintus: I don't think it was 35 questions. Just the right amount.
Garrett Young: No. Like four or five.
Lizzie Mintus: I just want to point people to EmptyVessel.io.
Last question. We just went to Gamescom. We've been on the conference bandwagon. Tell me your thoughts on industry. Is it, survive till 25? What should we expect? Obviously, you've seen some ups and downs before.
Garrett Young: Well, I'm glad we've covered the first half of the podcast, and now we'll leave this question for the second half of the podcast. It's a big Let's do this since I've been talking so much. How about you tell me what your thoughts are? Obviously you and I got to see each other at Gamescom, and so you have a good finger on the pulse of the industry from all your connections, and of course you go to all these other events too.
Tell me what your thoughts are, and I'm happy to try to chime in at the end too. And also, as a sub question, tell me, how many people told you that they knew that their company was the one that you want... never mind, I'm not going to ask that.
Lizzie Mintus: That they wanted their company to be worth a billion dollars? Every entrepreneur.
Garrett Young: Your company was the only company that you wanted to ever work for. How many people would drop that ego bomb on you?
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, no, I mean, every entrepreneur is like, Hey, I'm going to get funding. This is going to go well. It's like, well, let's talk when you get funding. I know you think you will. I hope you do, but you kind of have to be that person to be an entrepreneur.
What do I think? I think interest rates will drop. I think we've had a big downturn and I think large companies are still making good profits but trying to figure out... like look at Microsoft. Look how many game studios they have right now they're doing a big reshuffle, so they think they're trying to figure out how to make that all work.
And I think that money was free for very, very cheap for a long time and people's logical thought was, Hey, I'm starting a new game studio. So I'm going to get venture backing, but a lot of the venture investors that I've had on my podcast share that that's not the right move for everybody in the way games are made doesn't always lend itself to venture. So, we'll see what happens. I think interest rates will drop and I think the election will be done.
Garrett Young: Today, I mean, what time is it? Have they dropped a quarter point yet? The meeting is today.
Lizzie Mintus: The election being over will be incredible. Whatever happens, at least it's done and there's knowledge and we can move forward. I think people are looking at outsourcing their teams. You still want to have your shiny ex-Forza, ex-Doom, ex- whatever people generally want, if you do want to get investment or prove that you've done it before. I think that's important.
But people are going to look at, if they are remote, if you are a startup, or even if you're a big company, can you have an office in Montreal? Can you have an office in Italy? Like somewhere that is cheaper. And you don't need to have your whole team in San Francisco or Seattle because the burn rate is unimaginable.
Garrett Young: Insane.
Lizzie Mintus: Unless you are Valve.
Garrett Young: Yeah I thinkI you hit on a ton of excellent points there. And yes, money was virtually free back in COVID and we came out of COVID. And gamers were spending even more money on games back then. And then the interest rates were low. Yeah.
Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, it was like the perfect storm, but I think we're going to go back to where we should have been if COVID didn't even happen. That's normal. Everyone just flipped out.
I also think companies right now think they have power, they can do whatever they want, they have candles that grow on trees, and they canceled all their extras, they canceled their perks, they canceled their diversity programs, I don't know if that matters anymore because they have the upper hand.
And candidates had the worst behavior. 2021, 2022, I gave insane offers. They had demand letters.
Garrett Young: Because they were getting crazy offers next door.
Lizzie Mintus: It's crazy, right? So, I think people hopefully learn, we'll see, but just be normal all the time. Like, just treat people well. Just don't be too greedy, it's going to blow up in your face. I hope people have learned that, but we'll see.
Garrett Young: I think we could do a whole GDC panel on this one topic and like, where's the industry right now? Cause you hit on a lot of really good points. And the point about candidates is real. You know, if you're getting a hundred thousand dollar offer and somebody else is making you a 105 or 110k, the other and the other company is making a 120k offer and they're all worth people that you trust and that you like and on IP that you like.
I tell everybody this, and Lizzie, you're the same way. Garrett, I'm the same way. Like, it ain't my dad or my mom or my boss managing my career. My wife is not responsible for my career. My kids are not responsible. It's me. I'm the one that's got to make the right decisions. And I'm not, we're not here forever, right?
So you have to make a lot of choices with a lot of variables. But one of them is, if these guys over here are going to get a crazy paycheck, then I'd be an idiot not to take it.
Lizzie Mintus: It depends.
Garrett Young: However, it depends on when they take the punch bowl away from the party. You're like, Oh, I think the music's about to stop. And that does happen when you overspend, then instead of we earn out, or even if we sell three and a half million units. Now you're like, oh, now we need to sell seven million units. Now we need to do 150 million dollars a month in revenue after year one?
That's a very high bar. It's a hard challenge. I think we're coming out of it. You mentioned Microsoft, which I can theorize on Microsoft, but the industry as a whole, I think we're coming out of it. We did a lot of layoffs in 23. We did a lot of layoffs earlier this year. The Microsoft layoffs, I think, are an anomaly, not an industry trend, I should say.
I think publishers want stuff in their portfolio. VCs, some of them made great bets, which is awesome. And some of them are super bright VCs. But money doesn't grow on trees. It's not infinite. And some VCs bets don't turn out right? And so they did lose some money. And they're either going back to the drawing board or raising a new fund or whatever. So I think there's bright times ahead.
Publishers need games. Gamers will absolutely buy sequels and play sequels, especially if they're successful. We're talking about the success of push forward combat at a Doom and what space marines two just came out in the last week. It's very inspired by Doom.
Tim Willits, Todd Holland said, they may not have been designers on the game, of course, but Matt Karch even said it, I think even a long time ago, about like, hey, we want a game in the genre that's fun, that get your heart rate going, and it's visually cool, but it's just like, it can do one thing really, really well.
One of the things we did in 2016, it was kind of one note. It's like you shoot a lot. You don't drive, you don't fly. We don't have time for all that stuff. There's not a lot of narrative. There were like six lines of narrative. Not that bad, but not virtually, right? It's one note, but that one note was so good. People really liked it.
But as I think about the industry, I do think brighter days ahead, there are new games coming out in the future, fun games for gamers and whether it's in a franchise or fresh new stuff, like we're working on Empty Vessel.
Microsoft, I mean, they bid off some big purchases, right? Whether it's buying Bethesda and certainly buying Activision. There's a whole, I don't know that everybody respects the integration challenge. You don't just buy a painting and put it on the wall and like now it all works perfectly. Integrating like you guys have HR, but we have HR. You have a marketing organization, but we have a marketing organization. And by the way, everything that you do goes through us because we're not the public company and the company record. And we have investors that have expectations on us, right? So there's a whole integration challenge.
If they can get through that within two years, after doing the Activision, $70 billion with that many people in that many studios, like more power to them. It's amazing. But they closed the Tokyo studio, which I was not happy about. And I think in their heart of hearts, if you had Phil on or Matt or these guys in their heart of hearts, maybe they wouldn't have. I know Shinji's not there anymore, but their Hi-Fi Rush was awesome last year. So a total surprise, great game, right? Like give me more Hi-Fi Rush at 20 million dollars, right? If that, 25 max to do that game. So strong on so many fronts. Like I think if they had that to do over they probably would not have closed that studio. They just had that team continue to do that game. I think thank goodness they got picked up by Kratom.
So I think there's the industry, which I do think is on the rise and going to start coming back. I think Microsoft owes a whole integration challenge, which they're working on and they're going to do great stuff. I hope they continue because I'm a firm believer, every advance, every innovation, every cool new thing that's ever been done in our industry has been done by a developer. It's probably two in all of entertainment, right? Comics and movies and books, what have you, right?
Stephen King. Still reading Stephen King. He's awesome. He's still doing great stuff, right? Steven Spielberg with movies, right? Awesome. These are creators. They're doing amazing stuff. No offense to my friends in marketing. It's not marketing that's leading the charge in entertainment. They are expanding an awesome game, movie, whatever, but they shouldn't be in there making design to create a decisions or direction for games.
I have a lot of great friends in Halo, working on Halo for the last few years since Bungie hasn't been working on it. I love those guys. Sometimes the games that come out feel a little designed by committee, which is frustrating. But when you have such an important IP, it becomes hard to allow teams to just go party in that IP.
And I will say that with Activision's faults and whatever kind of negative press that Activision has, one thing they do really well is they say, Hey, look, here's a bunch of money to a studio. Here's a bunch of money. Here is the date. We need it. Go do what you want and within reason. Historically, in their culture, they did a pretty darn good job. Again, other words aside, they did a pretty darn good job of trusting developers to use their best judgment to hit really high bars and it worked out with Call of Duty.
It didn't work out with some of the other IP, but they kind of don't take too many risky bets on other IP as a general rule of thumb. I think they're pretty committed to Call of Duty and we'll see what happens with Microsoft. I hope they continue that part.
In my experience, having worked actually literally at both companies, the Microsoft culture is way better for employees and way better for games. But Activision did do that well in that they trusted Treyarch, they trusted iDevue. They did for the most part really trust these studios to do great work on Call of Duty. I don't want to see like five years from now, Call of Duty be designed by committee and that's not to say every Call of Duty is a 95 rated game, right? The IW Call of Duties were amazing for a lot of years. Some rough waters, Treyarch was rough waters, but then they did really well with the Black Ops series. We'll see how they do in the future.
So I think it's a great time to be a gamer. I think it's a great time to be a game developer. And the last thing I'm gonna tell you is that I think we're gonna see a hell of a lot more games made under $50 million than over $200 million.
Lizzie Mintus: Yes, 100%. I would agree.
Garrett Young: They're going to be just as great. They're going to be amazing experiences. Gamers are going to love it. Gamers are going to plow time into them. Gamers are going to plow money into them. And publishers and everybody else is going to go, huh.
Lizzie Mintus: Yes, we can do that. Yeah. I'm excited for these to come out.
Garrett Young: Great seeing you. And I'm going to see you in a month. And I've already got you a little welcome to Bend gift, even though you're only going to be here for like a day. Kelly and Oxana and I chipped in and we'll welcome you. Are you bringing your husband? You're bringing your family. What are you doing? You're just coming down here to, I would say ski, but it's not really skiing time.
Lizzie Mintus: I have work. Yeah. It'll be fun. I have a conference.
Okay, we've been talking to Garrett Young, who's general manager of Empty Vessel. Garrett, where can people go to check out your trailer or contact you or work for your studio?
Garrett Young: This is great. We're not hiring at the moment, but near future, next year. The website you already talked about Emptyvessel.io. The video 1.9 million views, push us to 2 million please. We're not really focused on that.
We're focused on gatefold right now, that's our youtube channel. If you just google Empty Vessel defect YouTube. It's also on IGN. There's a bunch of other places, but our site is out, but I don't care where you watch it. Watch it wherever you want to. I hope you enjoy it. Leave us a like, a subscribe, thumbs up. That's for you. It's your podcast. Is that right?
Lizzie Mintus: I'll link it. Thank you.
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.
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